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 …
I am really honored to have been selected as a winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award. In reading the moving essays by the other winners about what it is like to be a writer in the Pacific Northwest, I cannot help but return—as I always return, so many times in a day that it …
Idaho is the best novel I have read in years. It follows more than fifty years in the lives of Jenny, who performs a terrible act early in the book, and the family she leaves behind. The prose is truly insightful, with metaphors that leap off of the page– memory scatters like “dozens of blackbirds, …
Should you pull into the back lot behind BookPeople of Moscow (Moscow, ID), there’s no question as to where you should enter the shop, thanks to a new paint job. “We are so stoked about this mural that we commissioned for the back of our store, that was finished just today. It faces the big …
I grew up in the mountains of central Idaho, near the Frank Church Wilderness of No Return. My parents could probably be classified as being part of the back to the land movement. Soon after my older sister was born, they moved from a suburb of Denver to Idaho and bought a piece of land …
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson grew up in Sandpoint, Idaho—nowhere near the “Midwest upbringing” alluded to in this Huffington Post intro. (Not only did the article’s author ignore the Northwest, but jumped the Mountain West as well!) Any NW fan of Robinson knows that the fictitious town of Fingerbone from her debut novel, Housekeeping, closely resembles Sandpoint, on …
Editor’s Note: We first published this post about Iconoclast Books last spring. We got to drop in on Iconoclast Books (Ketchum, Idaho) and its dynamic owner Sarah Hedrick on a road trip last week. Hedrick is about as welcoming a bookstore hostess as you could imagine (What’s that you’re drinking, Tully’s? Throw that out. How …
