Journalist Lori Tobias arrived on the Oregon Coast in 2000. After freelancing from Newport for several years, she signed on to the Oregonian as a stringer covering the coast from Florence to Astoria; later she would be hired as a staff writer responsible for the entirety of Oregon’s coast—one person for more than three hundred miles. This meant long hours, being called out for storms in the middle of the night (and in dangerous conditions), driving hundreds of miles in a day if stories called for it.

The Oregon Coast is a rugged, beautiful region. Separated from the state’s population centers by the Coast Range, it is a land of small towns reliant primarily on fishing and tourism, known for its dramatic landscapes and dramatic storms. Many of the stories Tobias covered were tragedies: car crashes, falls, drownings, capsizings. And those are just the accidents; Tobias covered plenty of violent crimes as well. But her stories also include more lighthearted moments, including her own experiences learning to live on and cover the coast. Tobias’s story is as much her own as it is the coast’s; she takes the reader through familiar beats of life (regular trips back east as her parents age), the decline of journalism in the twenty-first century, and the unexpected (and not entirely glamorous) experiences of a working reporter—such as a bout of vertigo after rappelling from a helicopter onto a ship. Ultimately, Tobias tells a compelling story of a region that many visit but few truly know.

Lori Tobias is a veteran journalist who freelances for local and national outlets, including the New York Times, Seattle Times, Denver Post, and 1859 Magazine.Storm Beat is her first book of nonfiction; her novel, Wander won the 2017 Nancy Pearl Book Award for Best Book of Fiction from the Pacific Northwest Writers Association.