Inside a rented house on bluff in Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, I’m one of four women on a DIY writer’s retreat. A wall of tall windows shows a blue scene: a bend in the Mississippi River, cloud cover, deciduous trees, buzzards tilting just beyond our overlook. Inside, having run or walked or stretched to clear our …
Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this. But every time I write a book, it’s only at the very end that I find out what it was actually about. Somehow, I’m surprised every single time this happens. I write middle-grade narrative nonfiction, which may seem like it’s straightforward. My books all stem from questions I have or …
Now, more than ever, we seek community. We need opportunities to bring us together, to bring us into nature, to explore with curiosity the many ways we are connected to place, and to connect with those places and beings. That was part of the initial ethos of this anthology. We wanted to celebrate the diversity, …
Like D.B. Cooper, poet-logger Wobblies, potlatches, and the geoduck, The Golden Spruce is the kind of story Cascadia produces best: mystical, misty, mystifying, and just a little bit larger than life. A great read, engaging without pandering or condescension, this story is part whodunit, part song-of-place, and part sorrowful cautionary parable. A must for all …
In the early ’80s I lived near the Frog Rock on Bainbridge Island. It was cheaper to live on the island and ride the ferry than to live in Seattle. On rare days, when I had a little money, I would treat myself to bookstore visits to Eagle Harbor Book Co. in Winslow and Elliott …
Since I have longed for many years to be farmer-grower, and I am also a fan of Wendell Berry’s writing, I really enjoyed Jessica Gigot’s memoir. I was inspired after hearing her read at the store earlier this year and I gained a lot of insights about the reality of small farming. Longing to farm is …
HE HADN’T PREPARED me for the house, for how wildly inappropriate a dwelling it was for a man who was in a wheel-chair. Stacked like a tea-tray of sandwiches on a sopping wet hill in Queen Anne, it climbed higgledy-piggledy into a thicket of conifers, and somewhere, up there, among the shaggy, dripping green, was …
From 2018-2019 Iris Graville served as the first writer-in-residence aboard the Washington State Ferries, spending a couple days a week writing on the route that travels between Lopez, Orcas, Shaw, and San Juan islands. The subtitle for her book Writer in a Life Vest: Essays from the Salish Sea is quite literal, as much of the book …
From Portland’s Annie Bloom’s Books: Books from Local Authors Want another way to shop local this holiday season? Pick up one (or more!) of these wonderful 2022 books from Portland authors. Lost Restaurants of Portland, Oregon (Paperback) by Theresa Griffin Kennedy A full menu of unforgettable events and historical milestones. Delve into the Rose City’s …
I am always up for a novel in letters (84, Charing Cross Road, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Meet Me at the Museum). I like the challenge of piecing together a picture of each character through the way the letter writers describe the landscape of their lives. This novel has the added …
