About

Welcome to Taking Bearings and the website for Adam M. Sowards!

I started this weekly newsletter – shared by email and posted online – in August 2022 and have published every week since. I am a historian by training, a writer by practice, and a Pacific Northwesterner by luck.

I taught college history for a quarter of a century before retiring from that career. Now, embedded in the Skagit Valley of Western Washington, I work as a freelance writer, an occasional editor, and a high school track coach.

Themes

Taking Bearings has evolved since I started it, but its consistent themes are place, history, and writing, or as I've come to think of it: nature, time, and stories.

I follow my curiosity (and am open to suggestions) in these essays, learning and exploring as I move through the world trying to understand it more deeply.

The name comes from navigation. When you are out and don't know your location, you take a bearing. But taking bearings is not only limited to figuring out our physical location. We can take bearings to figure out our temporal location – that is, our place in time.

Taking Bearings explores time with the conviction that we live richer and better lives – and create a more meaningful world – when we consider how the past produced the present in the places where we live. 

Support

If you sign up, you will receive a weekly essay from me on such topics. You can look through the growing back catalog on this website, too. Almost everything I write is free and available to everyone; however, I occasionally add a few things just for people who pay for a subscription. I have added a few tiers to allow various levels of support for my writing. Subscriptions help make my work possible. You can also leave a tip as a one-time contribution.

I am grateful for all readers and any support you offer. Thank you!

Other Writing

I write for places other than my newsletter. Readers will find links to my other writing as it appears. Being connected here is the best way to keep up with what I

Big and small projects are coming my way. Sign up to stay updated.

Elsewhere on this website, my other publications are gathered or linked. This is a work in progress; thank you for your patience as I bring together all of them. I plan to make it easy for you to find the books, articles, essays, and stories I have produced over the past three decades.