Wednesday June 1: Ancient Soil Reading

UW grad student Julia Kelson has done groundbreaking new work in the field of climate change. Kelson is predicting the future of global warming by investigating the past, using soil to find periods in ancient earth when carbon dioxide levels were similar to now. Are we doomed? Stay tuned. Town Hall Seattle, 1119 8th Ave., 652-4255, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. All ages. 7:30 p.m.

Thursday June 2: Contagious Exchanges: Queer Writers in Conversation

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Friday June 3: Sweetbitter Reading

Stephanie Danler’s debut novel is about a young woman who moves to New York City to make it big in the restaurant world. “Eating becomes a discipline language-obsessed,” Danler writes early in Sweetbitter. “You will never simply eat food again.” It’s a novel about senses and sensation, which is to say it’s about being alive. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Saturday June 4: The Poet Is In

Seattle’s very first Civic Poet, Claudia Castro Luna, takes her charge seriously. For the last month, she’s been on a mission with the help of Seattle Public Library to teach Seattleites how to explore their neighborhoods through poetry. This afternoon, she’s hosting a reading of poems written in previous sessions. Seattle Public Library Southwest Branch, 9010 35th Ave. S.W., 684-7455, http://spl.org. Free. All ages. 3 p.m.

Sunday June 5: King of the Worlds Reading

M. Thomas Gammarino’s new book from Seattle publisher Chin Music Press is a hyperactive science fiction road trip about an actor who loses the lead role in Titanic and then travels across time and space in the throes of a “trans-dimensional midlife crisis.” After his reading, I’ll be joining Gammarino for a talk. James Cameron will be discussed. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. 3 p.m.

Alternate Sunday June 5: The Face: A Time Code Reading

Ruth Ozeki’s A Time Code is the best of three debut books in the new series The Face, in which authors write book-length essays about their own faces. (I reviewed it a few months ago.) In her outing, Ozeki stares at her own face in the mirror for hours at a time, and records her reaction. It’s a story about meditation, vanity, gender, and aging, from one of the best writers in the Northwest. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 3 p.m.

Monday June 6: Ask the Oracle

This reading series adds an air of mystery to the literary experience. Audience members ask for advice (Should I leave my boyfriend? Should I move?) and Seattle-area authors divine the answers from their own books. Tonight’s fortune-tellers include poet Jane Wong, essayist David Schmader, and novelist Bruce Holbert. Sorrento Hotel, 900 Madison St., 622-6400, http://hotelsorrento.com. Free. 21 and over. 7 p.m.

Tuesday June 7: Vaseline Buddha Reading

Jung Young Moon is a prominent experimental South Korean author who is finally debuting a translation of one of his novels in America. Vaseline Buddha is about the events surrounding the funeral of a goldfish named Kierkegaard. Moon’s publisher compares him to Kafka or Beckett, and this is an incredibly rare stateside appearance. Seattle Asian Art Museum, 1400 E. Prospect, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

There used to be two LGBT-themed bookstores on Capitol Hill alone. Now there are none. Lots of people would say that this is a sign of progress — after all, though we may not have a Beyond the Closet or a Bailey/Coy on Capitol Hill anymore, pretty much every bookstore in town now has a huge section devoted to LGBT issues. Virtually every bookstore I can think of has at least one LGBT employee, and some have many more than one. With the mainstreaming of gay culture, many would argue, why would you need a space specifically for LGBT literature?

Well, uh, because it’s important. Because books are how we learn, and because LGBT youth will feel more comfortable if they can visit a space away from the judgmental eyes of cisgender browsers where they can feel included as they learn about themselves. Because no matter what your age, sometimes it’s worthwhile to make a space where you can breathe and be yourself. Because it’s important to have a place dedicated to community and conversation.

If you’re out at a literary event and you see Seattle author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore there, you know you’ve made the right choice for the evening. Her taste is impeccable, and her politics are righteous. Now she’s finally launching a new reading series to create a much-needed space to discuss queer matters. In October, Bernstein Sycamore’s new Contagious Exchanges series will kick off at the Hugo House. It’s billed as “a monthly series featuring two dynamic writers bridging genre, style, sensibility, and all the markers of identity in queer lives.”

But on Thursday June 2nd, Bernstein Sycamore is hosting a pilot episode for Contagious Exchanges, a proof-of-concept to give audiences a Pride month preview of what to expect this fall. The first two people who’ll be joining Bernstein Sycamore in conversation are poets Tara Hardy and Anastacia Tolbert. Hardy is a self-described “working-class queer femme poet” who has served the community broadly (she was Seattle’s Poet Populist) and the LGBT community more specifically (she has read and performed with queer reading groups for her entire career). Tolbert is the Hugo House’s current writer-in-residence, and she is seemingly everywhere right now, speaking out at events for people of color and queer writers. These two poets sharing one stage should be incendiary; putting them together with a curious firebrand like Bernstein Sycamore might just result in an explosion.

But more than just a promising reading series, what Bernstein Sycamore is doing with Contagious Exchanges is claiming a space to discuss queer issues in literature. She’s taking back some of the public conversation and claiming it in the name of her cause. When the LGBT bookstores shut down, some assumed it was because the community wasn’t there to support it. Bernstein Sycamore is out to prove them wrong; Contagious Exchanges is proof that there’s more to be said, and written, and discussed about the state of queer writing in America in 2016. Make sure you’re there to listen, and to add to the conversation.

Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Science fiction has always inspired real-world technological advances. The very first employees of NASA were inspired by the rocket-ship and ray-gun festooned pulp sci-fi of the 1930s and 1940s. Most of the greatest innovators of the last 30 years have found their inspiration in sci-fi novels. Steve Jobs, creepily, recommended 1984 to new hires at Apple. Elon Musk is very public about his love of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Douglas Adams. Bill Gates grew up on science fiction and he continues to stay abreast of the new stuff: he recently nerded out over Seattle author Neal Stephenson’s most recent novel Seveneves.

In recent years, some have tried to add more intention to that connection between science fiction and science fact, with the hope of inspiring another real-world technological boom. Stephenson himself edited an anthology of willfully optimistic sci-fi titled Hieroglyph a couple years ago because he believed the popularity of dystopian fiction and its attendant trend toward cynicism was having a detrimental effect on scientific development. But it’s hard to formalize any kind of a relationship between fact and fiction; inspiration is a tricky thing to pin down, and you never know which ideas are going to take off.

Berit Anderson, a Seattle-area editor last seen at Crosscut, is trying to tie together science fiction and journalism with her brand-new website Scout.ai. Backed with a board made up of an impressive blend of lit nerds (Seattle sci-fi mainstays Greg Bear and Ramez Naam, Clarion West board member Karen G. Anderson) and public policy nerds (City of Seattle Startup Advocate David Harris, Bullitt Foundation President Denis Hayes), Scout aims to publish a deep investigation of a single facet of our future per week, in the form of journalism and a new piece of fiction.

The most recent “dispatch” from Scout imagines how self-driving cars might shape Seattle. The dispatch is made up of interviews with city planners about why they’re so woefully underprepared for self-driving cars, paired with a fiction set a decade from now, in which Mayor Russell Wilson spends dozens of hours in virtual reality trying to envision how his budget cuts might affect some of Seattle’s poorest residents. “It had taken Seattle 20 years to plan and build one light rail line from downtown Seattle to the airport,” the narrator informs us as Mayor Wilson weighs the options before him, “But it took less than five years from the introduction of electric self-driving taxi services in 2017 to completely disrupt urban and suburban transportation.”

All this talk about the Seattle of the future can get a little airy, so the sci-fi interlude works to ground the reader, to bring some heft to the conversation. A little bit of fiction paradoxically makes the theory feel real. From there, the piece — it’s just credited to “The Scout Team” — pursues some of the local implications of autonomous vehicles, including budget shortfalls, worsened gridlock, and the fact that all our current future-facing investments in transit that do not take self-driving cars into account might be “a waste.” Scout, which is currently in an invite-only beta, also provides forums where community members can participate in conversations. Last week, there were 53 posts about the potential for decentralized online currency Ethereum, including its capacity as a distributor for guaranteed basic income.

Anderson is a warm, enthusiastic woman who has always been in the forecasting business. Her family has produced Future in Review, a newsletter read by titans of industry, since 1995, so she grew up with her head in the future. Once she knew she wanted to start her own media company, she started talking with people in her network only to discover “a real hunger for more conversation about what these technologies mean.” With a staff of four full-time employees, Anderson oversaw a successful Kickstarter campaign that ended up with her as the Editor in Chief and CEO of a hybrid sci-fi-news-community.

“Ironically, I wasn’t a sci-fi fan until a few years ago,” Anderson admits. “I’d been put off by science fiction in the way that I think a lot of women are turned off by science fiction,” thinking that it’s all about “giant phallic rockets running into each other.” But when her book club read Dune, she understood the power of what sci-fi could be: “it’s about politics, and resource scarcity and religious beliefs,” she says, along with “really powerful women characters.” She’s been hooked ever since.

At $12 a month, Scout costs more than many media outlets, but curiosity is running high; “we have several hundred people on our wait list” to join, Anderson says. She thinks the community—a blend of sci-fi nerds, very smart people out on the sci-fi edge of real-world technology, and optimistic policy wonks—will create its own value. For the moment, it’s working. Anderson calls it a “holy shit kind of moment,” wondering at the “power magnet” she’s created. From where she sits, Scout’s future is bright.

Sponsor Paul Mullin has your Father's Day gift covered. His book The Starting Gate is part memoir, part life-manual, and all entertainment. You can read a full chapter, that will guide you through a graduate-level course of how to drink in bars, on our sponsor page.

Of course you can buy it online, but Paul wants to be sure you know you can also pick up the book locally Third Place Books, Elliott Bay Book Company, and Phinney Books. Support local bookstores, and local authors, and get that father in your life something great to read on the big day.

Thanks to sponsors like Mullin, and readers like you, we sold out this season of our sponsorships. We couldn't be more thrilled. If you'd like to be notified when we release the next block, sign up for our low-volume sponsors' mailing list.

In 2013, I won The Stranger’s Genius Award in literature, which came as a wondrous gift that linked me to the place I lived and wrote in for fourteen years (by then.) Part of the responsibility of winning a Genius Award is to vote in future Genius competitions. This year’s nominees include local poetry publisher Wave Books. I want to explain why I will probably not vote for them.

It all started few years ago. A new poetry publishing house editor came to town. Mr. Joshua Beckman arrived in Seattle as part of the announcement of the creation of Wave Books. Most Seattle poets rejoiced and started imagining their long-awaited books published by the city’s new publishing house.

Over the years Mr. Beckman and I would develop a friendship. I found (and still find) him not to be only a terrific poet, but also someone who inhabits and believes in poetry with all his being — a trait that I find admirable and beautiful.

Wave Books is a publisher from Seattle, but they aren’t a Seattle publisher.

By 2012, and with only one book under my belt, Wave Books approached me to translate a book of Egyptian poets for them. The working relationship with the editor (Mr. Beckman himself) became really uncomfortable in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time. Mr. Beckman made me feel as if they were doing me a favor by publishing this book they invited me to do for them. Feelings are subjective, but this one is based on at least two factual incidents and hindsight analysis.

First, the editor, Mr. Beckman, after agreeing on getting five to seven poems per poet, asked me to translate more than that for each poet so he could have a chance to choose between the poems — a request that felt disrespectful of my labor and my time. The second incident happened when one of the support staff of Wave was talking to me over beer at the Elysian about how when Wave gave a book contract to a poet they run for it and are grateful. It was clear: if you are not well known, and Wave agrees to work with you, then they are doing you a favor, and you need to act accordingly.

This project collapsed after months of work. The book, The Tahrir of Poems, found a more suitable editor in Amber Nelson from Alice Blue Review, who actually treated the Egyptian poets with the love and respect they deserved. They were poets from her generation, after all, so publishing the book was an act of communion between the same generation of poets across two languages and countries.

The experience left a bad taste in my mouth for a while, but over my poetry career I would work with editors like Matvei Yankelevich, Daniel Owen, Aaron McCullough, Karla Kelsey, Susan Schultz, Amber Nelson, Lindsey Boldt, Stephen Motika, Kazim Ali, Pam Brown, and Chris Dusterhoff, who, instead of making me feel like they were giving me something, inverted the dynamics and surrounded me with beautiful generosity, while shaping my poems and translations and giving me more insights into them. For them I am very grateful. These editors actually gave me something.

During the period I was working with Wave on the book that later became The Tahrir of Poems, Mr. Charles Wright, the owner of Wave Books, had a poetry party in his house to celebrate Wave’s release of Timothy Donnelley’s book The Cloud Corporation. There was valet parking and actual people serving you drinks — it was so lovely and felt genuinely generous. Except for probably two other poets of color, everybody there was white, which was something I am pretty used to by now and didn’t feel much about as long as we were scattered in the house. But when the reading started, two things happened: first all the poets came to the living room, and I just felt so alienated; it was clear that Wave’s community of poets were fundamentally white, and my heart started sinking. I am okay in all the other facets of my life being a minority — say, in the corporate world — but not in poetry. Poetry is the space I get empowerment from.

The second thing that happened this evening was that Mr. Wright, to signal the beginning of the reading, sat on the very special chair in the living room facing the poet, with the attendee poets scattered around and sitting and standing in a circle all around. I didn’t need a Foucauldian analysis of power to know that this was the moment where Mr. Wright claimed his court and we were accessories in the room. Again, this was jarring, as being a poet never meant to me that I would be an accessory in some man’s fantasy or illusions about himself as an old-style benefactor of the arts.

Taking my cue from the predominantly white reading, I started digging into Wave Books’ publishing record. (The Tahrir of Poems project was over then and I tried to understand what was going on.) There were very few poets of color published by Wave then (this was 2013, I think). I talked to Mr. Beckman about how I wanted to send Wave a letter about how they are very bad in their record of publishing poets of color, to which Mr. Beckman told me that it will be better to send them a list of poets of color that they should publish. This is a trope that typically makes folks of color feel even more frustrated — to ask them to do your own labor for you.

I decided then to take this private dialogue between Mr. Beckman and myself to a wider public debate, and wrote a very straightforward, polite Facebook post about being disappointed at Wave Books’ record – then – of publishing mostly white poets. This is when Mr. Matthew Zapruder, one of Wave Books’ editors, and a Facebook friend, decided to participate in the debate by unfriending me.

This was utterly difficult and confusing. Later, when my friend Noel Black introduced to me the concept of “white fragility,” I was able to better understand some of the behaviors I am describing here. Mr. Beckman also got very mad at me, which made me sad as he is someone I still had a reasonable level of appreciation for.

My post’s argument was simple: you have been in business for many years, you haven’t published many poets of color by then (less than 10% at that point.) Why? It seems that my post spurred some dialog in Wave and they started more actively publishing poets of color. A friend of mine told me later, “you gave them a gift.”

There was progress going on here.

This year, Wave published Hardly War, a magnificent book by Don Mee Choi, a Seattle-based poet of color. This is a book that is stirring debate and being read widely, and an example of what opening the door for minority poets can do.

Sans a lost friendship, so far this is an okay story with mostly a happy ending.

But here, and with the Genius Award nomination, I have another problem with Wave Books and representation. Except for Don Mee Choi’s marvelous book, Wave hasn’t published other Seattle poets since they came to town almost ten years ago.

Wave Books is a publisher from Seattle, but they aren’t a Seattle publisher. Here is what I mean by that: they don’t participate in all the different poetry communities in Seattle, from the slam to the many different reading series in town. They don’t publish the first books from local poets. They don’t allocate at least half their publishing budget to Seattle just to be worthy of being here, and to counter the domination of New York and San Francisco in the poetry publishing world Wave Books editors could learn a lot from studying the publishing record and patterns of Tinfish press, a Hawaii-based publishing house run on a shoestring budget by Susan Schultz. Tinfish press is very inclusive and diverse poetry publishing house while remaining true to its geographic region.

Wave Books have done a marvelous job course-correcting on their lack of publishing poets of color, which deserves recognition. I hope they can do the same regarding publishing local Seattle poets. Only then I would believe that they are truly a Seattle institute that is worthy of being a Seattle Genius.

Editor's note: For the sake of transparency, it should be noted that Seattle Review of Books co-founder Paul Constant worked for The Stranger from 2008 to 2015, during which time he oversaw the selection of Genius Award candidates in literature, including Zaher.

It's Memorial Day weekend in Seattle, which means it's perfect movie-watching weather! I hope you'll come to SIFF's Shoreline outpost tomorrow at 3 pm to watch a secreening of Author: The JT LeRoy Story. I'll be interviewing director Jeff Feuerzeig after the film. The Vulture's Bilge Ebiri reviewed the movie when it debuted at Sundance, calling it...

...a maze of identity: A girl who dreams of herself as a boy who dreams of himself as a girl, played by a girl pretending to be a boy, all overseen by the girl herself, playing another, different girl.

There's so much ground to cover here: authorship, the responsibility of novelists, identity, gender, authenticity, and more. Tickets are available at SIFF; I hope you'll join us.

Title Fight

Tony Tulathimutte in the Paris Review on who gets to name a novel.

The history of writers fighting for their book titles is extensive and bloody; so powerful is the publisher’s veto that not even Toni Morrison, fresh off her Nobel win, got to keep her preferred title for Paradise, which was War. (For her most recent book, God Help the Child, she favored The Wrath of Children.) Who knows why George Orwell’s editor thought Nineteen Eighty-Four was more commercially viable than The Last Man in Europe, or why the industry’s gerund fetish turned Helen Simpson’s Hey Yeah Right Get a Life into the insipid Getting a Life? Commercial interests even beyond the publishing house can get involved, as in the famous case of DeLillo’s White Noise, which was to be Panasonic until the corporation’s lawyers intervened.

Frog and Toad and the Self

Bert Clere takes a look at Arnold Lobel, and his beloved books of the two friends who are so very different. We have spent a lot of time with Frog and Toad in our house.

Lobel’s Frog and Toad series, published in four volumes containing five stories each during the 1970s, remains his most popular and enduring work. Frog and Toad, two very different characters, make something of an odd couple. Their friendship demonstrates the many ups and downs of human attachment, touching on deep truths about life, philosophy, and human nature in the process. But it isn’t all about relationships with others: In the series, and in his lesser-known 1975 book Owl at Home, Lobel offers a conception of the self that still resonates decades later. Throughout his books, he reminds readers that they are individuals, and that they shouldn’t be afraid of being themselves.

The fall of Salon.com

Kelsey Sutton and Peter Sterne with a long piece looking into what's happening with the overtly sensational and more-liberal-than-thou Salon.com at the moment (it ain't good).

Over the last several months, POLITICO has interviewed more than two dozen current and former Salon employees and reviewed years of Salon’s SEC filings. On Monday, after POLITICO had made several unsuccessful attempts to interview Salon CEO Cindy Jeffers, the company dropped a bombshell: Jeffers was leaving the company effective immediately in what was described as an “abrupt departure.”

13, right now

Jessica Contrera spent some time with a 13 year-old to see what the modern life of a brand new teenager is like, phone in hand, reactions poised, hearts and likes accumulating.

She slides into the car, and even before she buckles her seat belt, her phone is alight in her hands. A 13-year-old girl after a day of eighth grade.

She says hello. Her au pair asks, “Ready to go?”

She doesn’t respond, her thumb on Instagram. A Barbara Walters meme is on the screen. She scrolls, and another meme appears. Then another meme, and she closes the app. She opens BuzzFeed. There’s a story about Florida Gov. Rick Scott, which she scrolls past to get to a story about Janet Jackson, then “28 Things You’ll Understand If You’re Both British and American.” She closes it. She opens Instagram. She opens the NBA app. She shuts the screen off. She turns it back on. She opens Spotify. Opens Fitbit. She has 7,427 steps. Opens Instagram again. Opens Snapchat. She watches a sparkly rainbow flow from her friend’s mouth. She watches a YouTube star make pouty faces at the camera. She watches a tutorial on nail art. She feels the bump of the driveway and looks up. They’re home. Twelve minutes have passed.

Every week, the Seattle Review of Books backs a Kickstarter, and writes up why we picked that particular project. Read more about the project here. Suggest a project by writing to kickstarter at this domain, or by using our contact form.

What's the project this week?

New Poets Project. We've put $20 in as a non-reward backer

Who is the Creator?

Copper Canyon Press.

What do they have to say about the project?

Join Camille Rankine and Ocean Vuong to help Copper Canyon Press publish debut collections by extraordinary new poets.

What caught your eye?

Three simple words: Copper Canyon Press. I mean, how could we not get behind this project immediately? We love how Copper Canyon Press has been experimenting with Kickstarter — maybe you backed their project to publish the lost Neruda poems? — which is partly promotional, but partly market-testing. Poetry books are labors of love, and nobody builds skyscrapers based on the profits publishing them.

In this case, using two recently published poets, Camille Rankine and Ocean Vuong, to act as ambassadors to a fund that will publish other new poets is a great idea.

Why should I back it?

For every poem that you've read and been floored by, for every poet who is a household name — the Eileen Myles, and Heather McHughs, and Elizbeth Bishops, and on and on — there is an unknown poet who has yet to have their work printed. Perhaps one of the poets you help support here will be one that creates a timeless work. They could be the one that pens the poem that grabs your spine and holds on for months and years. Here, in this small Kickstarter campaign, is a world of possibility depending on you, but without you, it won't happen.

Plus: poetry books and letterpress broadsides for rewards? Done!

How's the project doing?

They're 42% funded currently, with about $8500 of their $20,000 goal. It's looking good!

Do they have a video?

Kickstarter Fund Stats

• Projects backed: 21
• Funds pledged: $420
• Funds collected: $360
• Unsuccessful pledges: 0
• Fund balance: $620

We just heard from Seattle7Writers, and they're sorry to report the Bookish Brunch had to be cancelled.

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Bookish Brunch is cancelled. Thank you for your support of Seattle7Writers; we look forward to seeing you at another event soon!

Big thanks to Seattle7Writers for their sponsorship this week. Be sure to keep in touch with them, maybe pop your name onto their mailing list, so you know when the next event is coming up.

On Thursday, June 2nd, Seattle City of Literature, with support from Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights, will present the first of three free workshops on racial equity in the literary arts. This is important stuff; you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who argues that literature is anywhere near parity in its representation. In fact, we saw some high-profile incidents last year — the Seattle literature anthology, the ridiculous white dude who pretended to be a different race and then pretended it was a political statement — that reminded us of exactly how far we have to go.

Stesha Brandon, the interim executive director of Seattle City of Literature, helped organize the workshop. “What we’re hearing is that people know there’s a problem and they don’t know what to do about it,” she says. “We’re hoping this will be one step toward addressing the issue.”

Brandon interviewed a number of prospective facilitators, but she settled on Dr. Caprice Hollins because Hollins “understood the challenges of working with a group as diffuse as the literary community, as well as the challenges of crafting a workshop that will meet different individuals and different organizations where they are on the continuum of race and social justice.” Hollins oversaw the creation and the implementation of the Department of Equity & Race Relations for Seattle Public Schools, and she has over two decades of experience working on racial equity issues.

This will be the first of three workshops that are open to anyone who participates in the Seattle-area literary community: writers, booksellers, publishers, editors, readers. The subjects of the next two workshops could potentially change, depending on how this first one goes, but they are tentatively scheduled to be about the power of stereotypes and understanding privilege.

The first workshop will take place between 1:30 and 5 pm on Thursday the 2nd. If you would like to attend, please send an email to rsvp@seattlecityoflit.org by May 31st. If you’re unable to attend next week but would like to be alerted about future workshops, Brandon urges you to send an email, too.

Seattle loves to have conversations about the conversations that Seattle should have. This is an opportunity to finally be in the room and have a real conversation about a real problem in the community. Frankly, when it comes to matters of race and representation, literature should be held to a higher standard than other disciplines, because literature is, at its core, about empathy. If those of us in the literary arts can’t empathize with each other, there’s not much hope that anyone else will be able to do it. We must do better, so that we can lead the way for everyone else.

And it’s important to note that these sorts of workshops are exactly why an organization like Seattle City of Literature is so necessary; we have such a bustling, always-moving scene here that it’s important for someone to have oversight over the whole community and to keep an eye on what we need. Thanks to City of Lit and to Brandon for fulfilling their charge and bringing something meaningful to the community that wasn’t here before.

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

I received the worst rejection slip from a literary magazine in the mail the other day. It was a form letter with check boxes, and at the top it said "NOT ANOTHER…" and then there were a series of options for the editor to check off: "…poem about alcohol," "…short story about horses," that sort of thing. My checked box said "…memoir about mothers and daughters."

Cienna, I'm more than a little annoyed about this. There's a lot more to my piece than my mom's death, and I think the response is a little bit condescending and, yes, sexist. My friends mostly say I should be happy I got a response at all, but that snotty little checkmark haunts my dreams. Should I blog about this rejection letter experience, or would I just look like a bitter freelancer?

Luann, Rainier Valley

Dear Luann,

I’m sorry, that is both disappointing and unnecessarily catty. Anyone worth their salt — or the salt of your tears — should have the decency to be both honest and kind in their rejection. Like this:

Dear madam,

Thank you for your submission. Your piece was raw and moving, and I encourage you to continue submitting to other publications. Unfortunately, it doesn’t fit with the tone of our magazine so we have to pass. You see, we are a literary magazine and thus we have a high bar to uphold in terms of both quality and content for our reader. From the feedback we receive, we know our reader is sophisticated, she enjoys sleepy short stories about the middle class in which nothing more startling happens than a blink. She is also a deep thinker who hates poetry and horses, and who happens to resent her own mother, which is why your story simply won’t suit (unless your mother’s death could be rewritten as more of a comedy?).

You may have noticed that literary magazines are experiencing something of an ecdysis, like when a snake sheds its skin only to reveal a dead snake underneath. Imagine a carpet of dying, molting snakes. In the literary world, we call this a “niche market.” In this niche market it pays to pander to our loyal audience of reader, and right now we’re niched so tight we can hear each other’s dying heartbeats. To mix a few metaphors, we are niched to the hilt. To Hell and back. I’m sure you understand we must keep our reader happy. Keep writing!

Fondly,
XXXXXXXXXX

P.S. Change your gender and maybe we’ll talk!

I hope that letter helps put things in perspective. And yes, when in doubt you should always blog about your feelings. The internet is a carpetbag of freaks and wonder; someone is bound to find your insights helpful. Where else could I find a support group of fellow spider lovers struggling to discipline their out-of-control teens AND sweet discounts on Spanx?

Kisses!

Cienna

Each week, Christine Marie Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

For my thirtieth portrait for Portrait Gallery, I picked Seattle's own Lindy West. She has been everywhere lately: we reviewed her book, and Paul did this amazing interview with her. She was at Town Hall last night, but if you missed it, you can still catch her tonight at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park before she's off to events around the country and in the UK.

"This is the weirdest thing that ever happened to me," Lindy West said from the stage at Town Hall last night after being welcomed by a beyond sold-out room — 1200 people — with thunderous applause. West began by talking a little about the writing of her memoir, Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman. "A book, FYI, is eighty thousand words," she told the room. "That's a lot of words." And it took months to write, many of which she spent "in a bat-haunted cabin in Maine."

West said she was proud of Shrill, that she finds the book to be "very, very vulnerable and very personal," and also "full of butts and periods." What she wanted in the book, she said, was to represent a woman's life as literature, "the way men's lives are presented." She said she's read plenty of "day-to-day experiences of men in literature, and it's been great," but women should be afforded that same kind of representation. Later in the evening, she added that a lot of men online seem to be very upset about the idea of women wanting to be represented, that they argue the fight for representation was pointless. "If representation doesn't matter," West responded, "why won't you fucking let go of it?"

After West read the first chapter of Shrill, the question and answer session mostly involved people seeking advice. How do we convince men to read the stories of women? West replied that everyone should "raise your young baby sons to read books about girls." What's the best way to fight back against trolls? West said she used to believe that it was important to "talk back on Twitter," but lately she's been feeling less inclined to enagage with them. She added, "I'm really into the trend of [sites with] no comments sections."

When asked about how she came to share some of the most personal parts of Shrill, West was clear about the fact that she still has boundaries. And she wanted young writers to know that it's okay to have boundaries of their own. "There is a writing culture that encourages, especially, young women to sell their deepest traumas for fifty dollars and I would encourage them to not do that." Almost as soon as West said that, she said she regretted saying it, because she didn't want to tell young writers what to do. If they wanted to share their story, that's fine, she said, but if they felt alarm bells going off as they turned their memories into writing, they should pay attention to the internal warning. "You don't have to give everything away to be a good writer, or even a good confessional writer," West said.

A lot of the questions had to do with her writing process. West's answers were decidedly not practiced, which seemed to make them more meaningful for the crowd. She said she still pores through Shrill wondering, "was that the best sentence I've ever written or the worst sentence anyone has ever written?" She also said that it took a long time to acknowledge that "me in my underwear at five AM eating Swedish fish and crying" was a natural part of the writing process. But once she accepted that, things got a lot easier. Her words seemed to encourage the aspiring authors who came to see her, and they all offered words of praise before their questions — "I read the book and I fucking loved it," someone said. It was the kind of hometown crowd reading that every author should hope for: a giant, loving room full of people who came not out of obligation, but out of love. That crowd left with the sense that West loved them back. Readings don't get any more meaningful than that.

UPDATE: Well, that was fast. We're sold out! If you're interested in a spot in our upcoming group of days, drop us a line on our contact page, or mail us at sponsorships @ our domain.

When we launched the Seattle Review of Books, we knew our sponsorship model was risky. It required training our readers that advertising doesn't have to be horrible, despite pretty much everything else you find on the internet.

But our sponsorship model is working. It allows us to pay for the reviews, poems, and things like memorials for writers we love, and reporting from special events you see here, and allows us to work on upcoming special projects you're going to love. This is all due to our sponsors, and due to our readers checking each sponsor out, and giving them a fair shake.

We're about to release our next block of openings, for August to January, and before we do that, we'd love to clear the last four slots we have remaining in June and July.

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Find out more on our Sponsorship page, and view the open dates here. First come first served, and once they're gone, they're gone.

A month ago, I referred to the first issue of Heartthrob as “a very promising ghost story/heist comic.” At the time I was giving it a cursory mention as one of a fleet of new heist-themed comics. Now that the second issue of Heartthrob is out in comic shops, I can tell you that it doesn’t deserve to be shoved off into laundry list of trends. This is already shaping up to be a terrific comic book.

Heartthrob is the story of Callie, a quiet young woman with a heart defect who doesn’t feel like the protagonist of her own life. She gets a heart transplant, and she suddenly starts taking risks. Soon enough, she learns the reason for the change in her behavior: the heart in her chest belonged to a career criminal named Mercer. Mercer now appears as a ghost to Callie, and the two of them fall in love. They become a Bonnie and Clyde-style love affair, two souls wrapped in a single body. Or is Callie just losing her mind a little bit?

The second issue of Heartthrob finds Callie and Mercer engaging in a torrid cross-country love affair as he instructs her how to become a criminal. The page where he teaches her skills like pick-pocketing and explosives is laid out like a board game, and though it’s a cute-enough transition, the layout unfortunately doesn’t seem to serve any purpose. It’s a needlessly ostentatious, attention-grabbing moment in a book that ordinarily revels in its own confidence.

Robert Wilson IV’s art is right on the fine line between alternative and mainstream. Sometimes his characters resemble Dan Clowes drawings, and other times they look more like your standard attractive crime comic characters. His lines are thick and his shading is heavy, but a lot of nuance comes through on his characters’ faces. And he seems to revel in the book’s late-70s setting, with all its enormous cars and the polyester clothes that look so fine in Nick Filardi’s burnt-orange color palette. Visually, the book could not be more welcoming.

And Christopher Sebela’s script matches the art with its clarity and its appeal. Heartthrob is an unashamed love story, a straightforward account of a woman finding her voice, and a story of two people taking on the world. It’s a goddamned pleasure from the first page to the last.