In January of 2025, about a month before One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This was set to be published in North America, I received an email from my editor. He said he was worried: we’d gotten no confirmed major media at that point. By this he meant national radio, morning TV, that …
Before I was an author I was, briefly, a bookseller. The summer between finishing graduate school and getting my first teaching job, I worked a Spokane’s gorgeous downtown bookstore, Auntie’s. The story I want to tell is about something that happened on my first day. I had just been trained on how to answer the …
I grew up in a house where creativity lived in the walls. Cartoons taped along cabinets, carved rocks on display, a small unicorn painting near the coffee cups, and a 4-foot plaster cast of illustrated ducks hung on our dining room wall. As a child, I didn’t realize how these surroundings shaped my memories. They …
I am an unrepentant regional chauvinist. I believe in my heart that those of us lucky enough to call the Pacific Northwest home live in one of the best places on the planet. Perhaps because I was raised in the region—at the base of the foothills of təqʷubəʔ (aka Mount Rainier)—I have always had a …
Like most writers and cartoonists I spend an excessive amount of time in my head. I’m sensitive and self-critical. I love people, but people also make me anxious. In conversation I have to choose my words very carefully, and therefore, I rarely feel like I have anything clever to say in the moment. My voice …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s 2026 Pacific Northwest Book Awards have been announced. The Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association (PNBA) is a non-profit association of independent bookstores from five Northwest states: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska. Since 1965, the annual Book Awards have recognized such luminary figures in Northwest literature as Ivan Doig, Ursula …
Maybe I was meant to live and write in Portland, Oregon. But first I had to get London out of my system. In 2014, I retired from the University of Hawaii and moved to London. I’ve lived in the city before, short-term, but this time, I settle in for two years. My agenda: to reinvent …
Phinney Books‘ annual Holiday Bookfest, featuring two dozen local authors signing their books at the Phinney Neighborhood Center in Seattle, will be held Saturday, November 22, 2025 from 2:00- 4:00 pm. Follow the Holiday Bookfest on Facebook and Instagram for updates and reminders. Authors include: Lauren Appelbaum, Jessixa Bagley, Bonny Becker, Martha Brockenbrough, Kira …
Oregon author Gabriel Urza, author of The Silver State, was published on lithub.com. When Telling Your Own Story Gets in the Way of Processing Trauma AUTHOR EVENT with Waucoma Books in Hood River, OR Local author Gabriel Urza in conversation with Sierra Crane Murdoch Thursday, Nov. 6th, 6pm at the Hood River Library In Silver State, …
I grew up in the shadow of mountains, along the mucky edges of the Nisqually River Delta on the outskirts of Olympia. On a rare clear day, you could see the Olympics to the West. Mount Rainier towered to the East. Our rambler abutted a tract of undeveloped forest land near Luhr Beach. Expansive, wild, …
