Below is a summary of a small selection of David Ek’s writings. The content of this portfolio frequently changes, so please routinely check back for updates and new material.
Pedro’s Pickles and the American Dream [fiction]
Available in both paperback and eBook at Amazon: <click here>
Eric Hoffer Book Award-nominated. Part social commentary and part immigrant tale, but wholly an entertaining and enjoyable read.
When Pedro arrives in Rose, a small town in West Texas, he believes he has found the land of opportunity. Instead, he plants the seeds for his future in a harsh country where discrimination and lies are the means of survival. Pedro faces adversity with the naïve kindness that marks a good heart. Determined to attain the American dream, Pedro works hard and plays by all the rules, but his trusting nature is no match for the citizens of Rose.
Pedro’s story is where hope, trust, deceit, and character entwine. Through a narrative based on the future, the question that prevails is: Could there be more to Pedro than the tale told by a downtrodden camarero looking for a little hope and inspiration?
Lizard People: Death Valley Underground [fiction]
Available in both paperback and eBook at Amazon: <click here>
A mystery novel lying within the borderlands between American Gothic, ancient cosmic forces, government conspiracies, and off-centered antisocial misfits struggling to survive in a brutal desert wilderness.
Sid Emerson goes missing while trying to determine what mysterious cosmic force lies within Death Valley’s wilderness—a force that draws in such an odd mixture of eccentrics, societal outcasts, alien conspiracies, and those seeking hidden truths to ancient earth mysteries.
Sid’s niece hires local desert rat Paddy Darwin to find her uncle. However, she soon discovers that strange things happen when the lost search for the lost, especially within a harsh alien landscape filled with clandestine “patriots” chasing shapeshifting alien Lizard People, a media-seeking crackpot who believes his dead-body-detecting machine can locate additional victims of the Charles Manson murders, and an overworked sheriff who continuously recovers withered and desiccated bodies from Death Valley’s enchanting yet brutal landscape. The journey forces Paddy to face his troubled past in ways that provide a few lizardly twists and turns of their own.
Nowhere Bound: A Spud’s Reflections on Climbing and Caving—and Other Useless Toils [nonfiction] 
Available in both paperback and eBook at Amazon: <click here>
A tribute to the joy, misery, beauty, obsession, and spiritual calling that lies within the heart of those who seek wild places—whether in the mountains, canyons, caves, or the dark recesses of the mind and spirit. While some souls are outward bound, and a few are downward bound, most gravitate to the wild corners of the highly relatable earthly nowhere bound.
“David Ek’s personal interrelated stories provide a humorous window into the anxiety and doubt we have all experienced while participating in our own extreme sports activities. In each chapter, Ek ponders his past adventures with a variety of characters who shared his passion while climbing mountains throughout the United States and exploring caves of unknown depth and reach. Useless endeavors…or, as he looks back in time, were they? “
—John Roskelley author, photographer, and legendary mountaineer.
Into the Void, and We Shall Follow
“Into the Void, and We Shall Follow” blends literary non-fiction stories of quirky characters, people with deep convictions, and a chaser of dreams, in a manner that captures the people’s sentiment and mindset and landscapes living along the fringe of the American West.
This essay appeared in the spring/summer 2021 (vol. 37(2):90-97) edition of Weber: The Contemporary West. Weber, is “an international, peer-reviewed journal spotlighting personal narrative, commentary, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that speaks to the environment and culture of the American West and beyond.”
This narrative nonfiction story centered on the eccentric characters surrounding the Lizard People legend. I could not allow this intriguing tale, with so much potential, to lie after only one nonfiction short story. It cried out for elaboration, expansion, and full-length novelization. Lizard People: Death Valley Underground, above, is the entertaining result.
Ice Remembered
The earth’s mighty glaciers and polar ice caps continue to shrink and disappear. “Ice Remembered” is a literary short-story non-fiction ode to this ice and what it may mean to us if we lose the important and fascinating world of ice.
This piece first appeared in the winter 2018-2019 edition (#43) of Canary-a Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis but is also available by clicking the title shown above.