MY TURN: Packing some Alaska art and philosophy for a Swiss writing retreat

Published 5:30 am Thursday, July 16, 2026

The first week of July I called Juneau artist Bill Spear’s order phone number. Josh answered. He’s a real person—helpful, good sense of humor. I suspect he’s much younger than I (a statistically good bet) but he listened patiently as I waxed nostalgic about talking to a human. Then he took my order for 10 Bill Spear “Write Hard Die Free Pins.”

I bought one of these pins years ago. I put it on a black baseball cap that has a red, embroidered “NO FEAR” tag. I got the cap when I worked in the Anchorage District Attorney’s Office. I kept it in my office for kids who had to testify to wear while I was preparing them, if they wanted. Many did. Since those days, the hat with Bill’s pin has gotten me through many a writer’s block or just lack of “butt in the chair” discipline.

I was leaving the week after I placed my order for a writing retreat in the Swiss Alps. If that sounds entitled, it is—to the extent of my race and hard-working blue-collar parents who ensured I graduated from a state university debt free. After that, my own labor has me able to go on the retreat with no apology. It occurred to me it would be cool to take Bill’s pins to share with the other retreat participants and the facilitator.

When I received my emailed invoice from Kristie, I said I’d like to know what inspired this pin so I could provide the back story at the retreat.

I soon received a response from Bill Spear himself. It reminded me of Will Rogers—self-deprecating, insightful, humorous.

Many years ago, Bill was in New York City with an artist buddy, S. Clay Wilson, attending the opening of another artist friend, Stewart Hitch. Bill “admonish[ed]” me “to not do a lot of deep research,” which ensured I’d google the men. Friends tell you a lot about a person. Wilson was known in the ‘60s and ‘70s underground “comix” movement—a countercultural response to mainstream censorship. Hitch was a SoHo abstract artist with a streetwise, rock n’ roll sensibility. I’m betting Bill fit right in.

At the art opening, Wilson wore a Hells Angels’s t-shirt with a skull and cross bones and “Ride Hard Die Free” slogan. Bill decided to make a pin version. It “was a hit and fit in with what was then a rather off beat drift I was taking for a commercial enterprise, and it was just in bounds enough to be okay with buyers.” Bill would go on to do a couple of variations.

One was during an early budget crisis from declining oil prices. As Bill described, “some serious cutting had to be done with the predictable howls of the dispossessed. I did a skull with a green accountants visor … with the tag line ‘Free Rides Die Hard.’” Timeless and, as Bill’s website observes, “Back by popular demand.” The “Write Hard Die Free” version arose when Bill and Howard Weaver both came up with the phrase independently.

For newcomers and the young, Howard was a working-class kid from Muldoon who became editor of the Anchorage Daily News, guided it to Pulitzer Prizes, and was named in a 1999 statewide poll one of the 40 Alaskans who most influenced the state in its first 40 years. Bill’s pin began as a commission for Howard.

Bill opined that his and Howard’s phrase is “Now of course rather pedestrian and anachronistic.” I disagree. Instead, like “Free Rides Die Hard,” it’s vintage. We have never needed hard, free writing more than now. It may just save us from Will Rogers’ timeless observation, “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so.”

Along with Bill’s art, I’m packing some Alaskan philosophy for my Swiss retreat: Howard’s passion and ferocity for writing and Bill’s “Cowboy Philosopher,” self-deprecating, keen observation with an “offbeat drift.” I expect both will serve me well—there and back.

Val Van Brocklin was a state and federal prosecutor in Alaska with a subsequent career as a national trainer and writer. She now writes about what she wants to, when she wants to.