When I was fifteen, my parents returned to South Korea and left me behind with my brother in America. My mother started writing me letters in Korean, a language I could not fully understand at the time. Over a decade after she wrote me, I translated her letters into English. In one letter, she writes: …
How the world has changed since January, when the 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Award winners were announced and authors, bookstores, and publishers were making happy plans for celebratory events. Green Bean Books jumped at the chance to host the award presentation event for Dylan Meconis and Queen of the Sea. The original idea was to …
In 2008 I quit an all-consuming sales position in Missoula and tried to move with my husband to Lake Pend Oreille in the slim Idaho panhandle, where we hoped to rededicate ourselves to our writing. Mother nature had other plans for us, blanketing the Inland Northwest with record-breaking snowfall and rendering our little cabin in …
Like many children who suffer from an abundance of imagination and a shortfall of social skills, I was always on the lookout for a door into a more magical world. Narnia, Middle Earth, Starfleet, Sherwood Forest– I wasn’t picky. Anywhere with spaceships, swordfights, or telepathic dragons would do. Reality stubbornly refused to provide me with …
The first time I saw a collection that took my breath away, it was on a small island in the San Juans, on the mantel of a fireplace at a friend’s mom’s house. It was an assortment of rocks that had been gathered and gifted over many years. There were different sizes, colors, and textures …
One of the many wonderful things about winning this award is being officially reminded that I now belong to the Pacific Northwest. It has been five years since we moved to Portland, my wife’s hometown, and my extended family spent the first several years worrying that I wouldn’t be happy here. I grew up in …
Winter evenings by the wood stove present just the right opportunity for revisiting a classic book. And for anyone who studies and writes about natural history, as I do, few titles are more foundational than Walden by Henry David Thoreau. It’s the sort of text that gets quoted more than read, however, and I couldn’t recall …
Washington Black is a novel about a boy of precarious visibilities: he is all too visible to those who would demean his humanity; he is all too invisible to those who might recognize his gifts and value his very real potential to make great contributions to the world. Born an eleven-year old field slave in …
