Originally published for OLY ARTS by Molly Gilmore. Jonah Barrett wouldn’t be insulted if anyone said their first book was monstrous. That’s because Barrett’s short-story collection Moss Covered Claws, dropping March 18, is all about monsters. Barrett of Olympia, a filmmaker, fantasy writer, and OLY ARTS contributor, is launching the book with an online reading and talk at …
In The View from Cascade Head, Bruce Byers tells the fascinating story of Cascade Head in Oregon, and the people who have worked to protect it. Drawing from his lifelong relationship with the Oregon Coast and recent experience living and working at Cascade Head, Byers weaves together personal observations, ecological science, and the history and …
If your local booksellers seem a little more tired than usual this week, it could be because they’ve been shoveling paths to the store during the snowpocalypse, dealing with power and internet outages, and/or they’re attending a virtual conference for booksellers all around the country, which starts very early in the day for west coasters. …
On the livestreaming event celebrating the 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award Winners, an audience member asked the authors for book recommendations. Here are some of the books that came up, some literally pulled from stacks near the authors for show and tell: Entangled Life (recommended by Silvia Morena-Garcia) The Gilded Ones (recommended by Kim Johnson. …
One silver lining from no travel and minimizing in-person contact is that event access is not geographically-dependent. This year, it means that the celebration of 2021 Pacific Northwest Book Award-winning the authors and books is online and open to all registered book lovers. The event will be presented as a Zoom webinar Wednesday, February 10 …
This Is My America released at the beginning of a reckoning that’s been long overdue—the untended roots of race in America. These origins draw parallels not only to slavery and mass incarceration but to open wounds festering below the surface. My novel was born from many early lessons on race as a Black girl growing …
My brother and I made our dad’s headstone ourselves. We bought a bag of Quikrete from Home Depot. We built a form, poured the cement, and carefully pressed metal letters in as the slab cured. We kept the words simple; Loyd’s name, relevant dates, and a fragment of his favorite poem. If you love something, …
People tend to think of mushrooms as the fleshy food items found in the produce aisle, each one growing in isolation and popping up suddenly after the rains. But a mushroom is only one fragment of a fungus colony. When a mushroom pops up, it’s because the mycelium, a network of long microscopic fibers, has …
When I was fifteen, my parents returned to South Korea and left me behind with my brother in America. My mother started writing me letters in Korean, a language I could not fully understand at the time. Over a decade after she wrote me, I translated her letters into English. In one letter, she writes: …
The winners for the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association 2021 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, …
