A book, handed with knowledge and genuine enthusiasm from one person to another can have thoroughly unforeseen consequences. Here’s a clear example… Early one afternoon a woman spent a deliciously long time, an hour at least, pondering books in the store. She sat with a variety of books stacked next to her on the bench …
In our bookstore, micro would be the appropriate way to refer to the size of the staff. Staff, such a wonderful word, both a stick to aid walking and those who work at keeping an operation functioning. Since at Open Books there are only two of us, each capable of doing every task required, each …
Kathleen Flenniken was recently named Poet Laureate of Washington State. A native of the state, she grew up the daughter of a chemist who worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She went on to earn two degrees in civil engineering and herself worked eight years as an engineer and hydrologist, three of those years at …
Say you own a small shop of some sort and you’re a baseball fan and your team’s game is on the radio and your star pitcher is throwing a perfect game through six innings and it’s an afternoon game so the shop is open. Small means you have no employees and you pride yourself on …
It surprises me how many of our customers in the store talk fondly about their e-readers, some even producing them so that I might see how wonderful they are. My somewhat theatrical revulsion and thorough unwillingness to touch the critters surprises them. And there we stand, looking at each other across quite a divide. It …
“Who’s your favorite poet?” she asked almost as soon as she entered the bookstore, and I could feel my grimace forming. I hope I stifled it before she noticed. Please understand, I don’t mean to be critical of the several folks each year who ask that question. In fact, I think I understand the impulse …
Welcome to the revamped NWBookLovers.org! As you take a look around the new site, you’ll see that it feels more like a traditional blog than the old version and that we’ve got a bunch of new voices—all while hanging on to the best of the old site: the Face Outs, the author interviews and essays, …
Christopher Howell is a stalwart figure in Northwest poetry and publishing. A professor at Eastern Washington University, where he was a senior editor at EWU Press, he runs Lynx House Press, a small independent publisher. His tenth collection of poetry, Gaze, was published early in 2012 by Milkweed Editions. Meeting Chris Howell, one finds him …
Carl Adamshick, a poet in Portland, won the prestigous Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for his first book, Curses and Wishes, which was published earlier this year. His poems are spare, quietly intense, and quite moving, perhaps in part because they lack bombast. In a way his work resembles Raymond Carver’s …
Christine Deavel’s first book, Woodnote, has just been published by Bear Star Press and has won the 2011 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize. Author Rebecca Brown calls Deavel “a kind of Midwest nature mystic whose words call us to see what we see clearly and then to call the things we see by their true names.” …
