I got into the hospitality industry because I was struck by the power of food to bring people together and its ability to offer an immediate window to the qualities human cultures share with each other. There’s no faster and better way to get to understand a person than to break bread with them. Eventually, …
In The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, my main character, Dorothy, is a poet who describes herself as someone who breaks her own heart for a living. As a novelist, that’s how I’ve always felt. Actually, scratch that. The always part is the heartache that’s been there for as long as I can remember, and …
When I was still small enough to sit on my great grandmother’s lap I wasn’t afraid of anything. I remember trips out to the Olympic Peninsula where my siblings and I slept in tents or beneath the stars. The murmur of adults speaking against the last embers of a fire and the crawl of the …
This fall, I taught an online writing course meant to help poets put together and prepare their first poetry collections for publication. Though I’d designed the course to be about the practicalities of structuring, formatting, and submitting their manuscripts, by the third class meeting, our conversations had diverged to the role of surprise in poetry. …
My mother sat in the very last row of chairs in the author event space at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon, the day my memoir, Ma and Me, was officially released. She smiled with pride as her gaze skipped across the room, surely taking in the improbability of the moment: her daughter, a …
I keep a spreadsheet that lists every book I’ve read since 2010. It’s the most consistent and representative record of my life that I have—a life spent reading. I can look back and see that I spent the summer of 2015 reading or rereading Jane Austen novels, and the summer of 2016, all of Sarah …
Grace Campbell of Olympia and Laura Stanfill of Portland met at Mineral School in Mineral, Washington, during a 2018 parent residency week. Grace Campbell is the Fiction Editor at 5×5 Literary Magazine. Her roots are in flash/microfiction, where she has been published in journals like Brevity, Hobart, Joyland, and Midway. Her work has been featured …
From Forest Avenue Press publisher, Laura Stanfill: We’re nearing the end of Dispatches from Anarres panels and conversations. Thanks to all our amazing authors and editor Susan DeFreitas. I have learned so much from each event–and we have two more coming up! […]Friday, March 4, on OPB’s Think Out Loud, tune in to hear Susan, …
From Secret Garden Books in Seattle: Suzanne’s Author Spot: Anthony Doerr It was nearly ten years ago now, but my memory of reading for the first time ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE (Scribner, $18) is still clear. At the time, it was the pinnacle in a WWII reading binge I’d been on since LIFE …
Just look at that lovely award plaque! This is the award being delivered to author/ illustrator Julie Morstad for her 2022 Pacific Northwest Book Award-winning picture book, Time Is a Flower. Every year, winners receive a 3-D mock bookshelf featuring their own book face-out and the other winners’ spines. These awards are lovingly crafted, commissioned …
