Yesterday, I reported that The Stranger is running a "contest" to choose a writer to serve as the Bumbershoot Correspondent for their Bumbershoot guide and website. Though the writer will win a collection of branded merchandise from contest partners, including a camera, film, and records, the position is unpaid. Just last week, Stranger publisher Tim Keck posted that the publication is "profitable" and has "been growing financially for years." If that's true, why isn't The Stranger paying a writer for their work?

The Vera Project, an all-ages nonprofit that champions youth engagement in the arts, responded to writer Lindsay Hood's questions about the lack of payment:

2/2have to acknowledge the industry is hard to break into & many of our ppl are looking for opportunities like this 2 get a foot in the door

— The Vera Project (@veraproject) July 19, 2017

I want to be perfectly clear before I go any further: The Vera Project is a fantastic organization. I always donate to them for Give Big, and I have friends who work for and volunteer for the organization. They are an unalloyed good for Seattle, and they deserve your time and money. If we were talking about an unpaid volunteer position for the Vera Project, that would be a different discussion altogether. But we're not talking about that: we're talking about an unpaid position for The Stranger, which is a for-profit business.

This argument doesn't make sense. Okay, so the position is "meant for new writers w/o enough experience to get a paid gig," and "many of our ppl are looking for opportunities like this 2 get a foot in the door." You know what's really incentivizing for young workers? A paycheck in exchange for work.

Look: I get that young writers take more time than seasoned professionals to guide and edit. There's an investment there on behalf of The Stranger. But that's a standard business cost; most businesses have to train and recruit new workers. If there's a good reason why a profitable alternative weekly should be an exception to this standard, I have yet to hear it.

And the fact is that the Bumbershoot Correspondent's writing, once it's published on the site, will still make money for The Stranger. Ads will still appear next to the Correspondent's writing and photographs, and those advertisers will likely not pay lower rates because the writer has less experience than other writers on the site. The Stranger will collect the same payment.

Since we first posted on the issue yesterday, people have made the argument that since The Stranger will be choosing a young writer for the Bumbershoot Correspondent, that writer will likely not expect to be paid. This argument, likewise, is nonsense. The contest is not open to writers under the age of 18. I don't know about you, but when I was 18, I needed money. You can't eat a swag bag. Landlords won't take refurbished Polaroid cameras in lieu of rent checks. In America, we tend to agree that labor should be compensated.

Does this position amount to an unpaid internship? (The Stranger eliminated its unpaid internship program several years ago.) It's unclear whether the contest winner will be an employee of The Stranger or not. In her email to me yesterday, Stranger account executive Diana Katz said the contest winner would be "working" and doing "work" for The Stranger. The Washington State Department of Labor & Industries Unpaid Internship Cheat Sheet (PDF) has this to say about the difference between unpaid internships and employees:

It seems likely to me that the Correspondent would "displace regular employees" — The Stranger typically requires multiple staffers and freelancers to cover Bumbershoot. And it also seems likely that The Stranger would gain "immediate advantage from the activities of the [Correspondent]," in the form of pageviews. At the very least, it seems as though the relationship between the contest winner and The Stranger is a nebulous one.

Look. We can spin wheels on this forever. But in the end, this just comes down to decency. Thanks to Keck's post last week, we understand that The Stranger is making money. This means that management has simply made the decision not to compensate a young worker for their time and effort. And that's wrong.

Matt Driscoll at the News Tribune says that a new 11-acre park on a peninsula in Tacoma is super-close to being named after Dune author (and Tacoma native) Frank Herbert. Tacoma is now taking suggestions to name the park. Driscoll writes:

According to Metro Parks spokesman Michael Thompson, 173 submissions were received over the weekend — and some variation of a name honoring Herbert was “the most common.” (There was at least one vote each for Parky McParkface and Breaky McWaterface.)

The park looks like it'll be gorgeous:

If you're a Tacoma resident, you can suggest a name for the park on Metro Parks Tacoma's website through August 4th.

A considerable portion of Seattle’s comic book talent is in San Diego this week at the corporate pop cultural orgy known as San Diego Comic Con. It makes sense to take stock of comic culture at this time of year, because it’s the closest thing to a High Holy Days in the nerd calendar year. Look anywhere on the internet right now and you’ll probably find an equal share of breathless odes to SDCC and vicious takedowns of everything having to do with the crass commercialism of nerd culture.

The thing is, I do enough whining about corporate comics in this space. And so for Comic Con, I thought I’d point out seven comics series that I’m genuinely excited to read every month. Prepare for niceness:

• Ms. Marvel is the best comic that Marvel publishes. It’s consistently great — a deeply personal celebration of the superhero myth.

• Paper Girls from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang evokes a wide array of sci-fi source material — Stranger Things, Lost, Steven Spielberg and Stephen King — while still feeling completely original. It’s a time travel comic that has seemingly been planned down to the last detail, an adventure comic that places character at the forefront of the story, and a touching story about growing old while combating nostalgia.

• Giant Days is a perfect sitcom of a book, about a group of young women trying to navigate the adult world. It’s funny, but not in a way that sacrifices the dignity of its characters. It’s sweet, but not cloyingly so. Giant Days is about as likable as a comic can be.

• The Black Monday Murders imagines a world where money is power. Okay, but like magical power. It’s a murder mystery set in a world where America's wealthiest families have amassed dark magic along with their wealth, creating a metaphor for income inequality that is perhaps more vivid than any I’ve ever read.

• The new comic by underrated novelist Victor LaValle, Destroyer, is a fresh take on the Frankenstein story that addresses race and police violence in a meaningful way. It’s the second-newest comic on the list, but it looks to be a work that will add to LaValle’s shelf full of novels that use genre to investigate the black experience in America.

• I just wrote about the first issue of Calexit last week, but I’ve thought a lot about this book in the past seven days. It’s not often that a single issue of a comic lives in my head like this.

• Kill or Be Killed is the closest thing to Taxi Driver I’ve read in comics form. It takes vigilante justice to its logical conclusion in a story narrated by a damaged man who murders people he believes to be criminals.

  

And here’s a bonus comic: yesterday I picked up the first issue of Generation Gone, an Image series written by Ales Kot and illustrated by André Lima Araújo. It’s very promising. The story is about three young hackers who are preparing to steal an obscene amount of money from an obscene too-big-to-fail bank. The class struggle is real: “These children are millennials,” someone exclaims in the middle of the issue. “Men like you have taken their future away from them. They are getting ready to steal it back.”

Araújo draws a diverse cast with expressive faces and he lays out the action through a wide variety of perspectives. It’s a kind of realism that draws you in and lulls you into complacency. Just when you think this is a book about normal people in normal rooms doing fairly straightforward computer-y things, the twist kicks in and you understand that Araújo has a wider range than you first expected: he’s a rare horror artist whose work is genuinely scary.

This first issue of Generation Gone is all set-up. It’ll make for a compelling first chapter in the inevitable collected volume, but readers of the first issue might be annoyed that just when the book gets started, it ends. Still, if you give it a chance you'll find a well-written and superbly illustrated high-concept first issue of a series — one that could well wind up on your list of favorite monthly comics.

• Don't forget that the deadline to apply for a table at this year's Short Run Comix & Arts Festival is July 31st. The organizers this year are eager to include the literary arts, so even if you're "just" a writer and not an artist or cartoonist, you should consider applying.

• This is a pretty big get: the King County Library System Foundation announced yesterday that basketball great and all-around awesome human Kareem Abdul-Jabbar will be the headliner at their 2018 Literary Lions fundraising dinner. This year's headliner, for comparison's sake, was Daniel Handler. Handler gave a spectacular speech and he's definitely a high-profile author, but Abdul-Jabbar is a household name. Expect tickets to go very fast for this one. The Literary Lions dinner will take place in Bellevue on Saturday, March 10th of next year. We'll let you know when tickets go on sale.

• At the Seattle Times, SPL librarian David Wright wrote a great profile of local publisher Pharos Editions, which has brought some essential Northwest literary classics back from the dead.

• While we're talking about local reviews, Seattle Mystery Bookshop bookseller Fran published a good review of Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Walkaway.

• Tara Marie at the Polygon has written a good meditation on white cisgender privilege in the comics industry, using Howard Chaykin's atrocious Divided States of Hysteria as the launching pad for the piece. (I read the first issue of the series and decided to ignore it; Chaykin has a long history, with his best work decades behind him, and he's now become nothing more than an aggrieved-white-dude comics troll like Frank Miller. I'm happy to not give Chaykin the attention, but I'm glad that writers like Marie are around to explain what it all means to general audiences.)

• The new Jane Austen pound notes have a quote from Pride and Prejudice — "I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!” — that was...how shall we say...not quite delivered earnestly in the novel:

As many Janeites were quick to point out, that quote wasn’t sincere. Caroline Bingley, the haughty gentlewoman who competes with Elizabeth Bennet for Mr. Darcy’s attentions, makes this announcement in hopes of impressing him. “How much sooner one tires of anything than a book!” Miss Bingley adds. Shortly after saying so, already bored by a quick dip into a book, she throws it aside and tries another gambit to grab his attention. In short, Austen wrote the line as a satirical comment on how we perform certain admirable qualities to win approval.

• I don't really believe in guilty-pleasure reading. Every book has some value, even if it proves that value through negative means. But people like interactive lists on the internet, so maybe you might enjoy this checklist of "Books You'll Never Brag About Having Read." Don't listen to the headline; feel free to brag if you want to. Try to beat my score:

• I prefer to leave the writing prompts to Martin, since he does them so well on this site every Saturday, but this tweet is too good a writing prompt to ignore:

WHAT DID THE STORY SAY????? pic.twitter.com/FjTcE9GM1S

— mark mcbride (@mccv) July 17, 2017

• After you've watched Wonder Woman for the 16th time this fall, you might want to take a break by watching the biopic about the creator of Wonder Woman, titled Professor Marston & the Wonder Women. The trailer was just released yesterday:

Wednesday July 19th: TUF Zine Release Party

TUF is “a female/nonbinary/trans collective centered on electronic music and art,” and they like to make beautiful things. They’re celebrating the release of their second anthology zine with a big party in the best pizza place on Capitol Hill and a dance party at Dino’s brand-new basement music venue, with readings and visual art.
Dino’s Tomato Pie, 1524 E Olive Way, 403-1742, http://www.tuf-seattle.com. Free/$13. All ages. 6 p.m.

Thursday July 20th: Arabella and the Battle of Venus Reading

The sequel to Portland author David Levine’s swashbuckling adventure novel Arabella of Mars sails through space to the “swampy” planet of Venus. It also features a wedding, bribery, and a space war. If you’re looking for a fun summer sci-fi series to read, this is the one for you. University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Friday July 21st: Thinks Out Loud Reading

Seattle author Martin Perlman’s debut novel is about a group of bloggers who travel the world having adventures involving shipwreck and princesses and some light time travel. The book is written in the form of the main characters’ blogs. What’s the blog equivalent of an epistolary novel? A bloggiad? University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., 634-3400, http://www2.bookstore.washington.edu/. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Saturday, July 22nd: Queer Geek Board Gaming

Capitol Hill’s biggest nerd emporium welcomes all to a free afternoon of “GLBTQ-flavored gaming and socializing.” Available games include DC superhero and Adventure Time-themed games, Relic Runners, and Small World, though you’re invited to bring your own game to share. Meet some new people in a safe and welcoming environment. Phoenix Comics & Games, 113 Broadway E, 328-4552, http://phoenixseattle.com. Free. All ages. 1 p.m.

Sunday July 23rd: Waterways Reading

Seattle is a city that has repeatedly changed its own geography, from building Pioneer Square out of mud flats to the Denny Regrade. Local historians Jennifer Ott and David B. Williams discuss their new book, which follows the history of the Lake Washington Ship Canal and examines its impact on the Seattle Public Library, 1000 4th Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. Free. All ages. 3 p.m.

Monday July 24th: African-American Writers’ Alliance

The African-American Writers' Alliance (AAWA) is a Seattle-area writing collective. What this means is they put new and published authors together in forums and provide opportunities like published anthologies for members to show off their writing. Another way the AAWA honors its members is by hosting readings like this one. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Tuesday July 25th: Forget It Reading

See our Event of the Week column for more details. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

“Ever wanted to write for The Stranger? Now’s your chance,” chirps the copy on an ad shared by the Vera Project on Twitter yesterday afternoon. It continues:

The Stranger is partnering up with Bumbershoot and The Vera Project to bring you an exclusive opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at Bumbershoot! Calling all budding journalists for: The Stranger’s Official Bumbershoot Correspondent Contest 2017.

As you can see above, the ad features The Stranger’s official logo and a Stranger email address for contestants to contact. It promises that “an associate editor at The Stranger will select the best entry and the lucky winner will receive” an array of prizes including a refurbished Polaroid camera, film for the camera, and a prize pack from Freakout Records. Perhaps more importantly, the winner’s “photo gallery and experience reviews” will be “featured in The Official Stranger’s Bumbershoot Guide and thestranger.com.”

I have an email out to The Stranger to confirm, but the ad doesn’t mention any compensation besides the aforementioned prizes. If this position is unpaid, it marks a departure for editorial content in The Stranger. When I worked at the paper — I started there as an intern and freelancer in 2005, went full-time in 2008, and resigned in 2015 — Bumbershoot coverage was provided by salaried staffers and paid freelancers. If The Stranger is now enticing a “lucky winner” to provide free Bumbershoot-related content in exchange for an armload of swag, that represents a significant shift in the paper’s arts coverage.

Could you imagine a distribution firm throwing a contest to select one “lucky” person to work as an accountant during tax season, with the “winner” to be paid in free donuts? Or a convenience store offering to pay a temporary cashier in coupons and branded merch? Then why would it possibly be okay for a newspaper to do this with writers?

Here’s the thing: writers deserve to be paid, and not just paid in amorphous “exposure.” When an organization like The Stranger — a publication which publisher Tim Keck assured readers as recently as last week is “profitable” and has “been growing financially for years” — reduces its arts coverage to a contest for some eager young dupe to win, it devalues the rest of the paper’s arts coverage. Seattle’s vibrant arts community deserves the attention (and, yes, the criticism) of professional, paid writers, and The Stranger — a newspaper which made its name on intelligent, opinionated arts criticism — should prioritize its arts writing as more than just an add-on to a swag pack.

But there’s more than just the question of payment. The ad promises that the Official Stranger Correspondent at Bumbershoot 2017 will “Join the Bumbershoot Marketing Team with [sic] telling the Bumbershoot story with an insider’s perspective.” Though the ad claims to appeal to “budding journalists,” it sounds more like a co-branded marketing opportunity.

How closely will the “contest winner” work with the Bumbershoot Marketing Team? If Bumbershoot has some control over the direction of the pieces, will the published work be clearly marked as sponsored content? Will The Stranger’s “partnering up” with the Vera Project and Bumbershoot to provide this coverage be clearly disclosed in the Bumbershoot guide and in coverage on the site? If not, how can we trust The Stranger’s Bumbershoot arts coverage to be anything more than a glorified advertisement? Where does the line between editorial content and advertising content begin and end?

Back in 2014, Keck famously told the Capitol Hill Seattle blog that “Loud, brash opinions are a dime a dozen.” Many Stranger staffers at the time took that quote as a sign that Keck was moving the paper away from its fiercely independent arts coverage and toward something less opinionated and more advertiser-friendly. If The Stranger is in fact enlisting free labor to cover the city’s largest arts festival, and if that coverage is closely coordinated with the festival’s marketing team, it looks like our worst fears have been vindicated.

I sent an email to the address in the above advertisement asking if the paper will pay the Bumbershoot Correspondent, and asking them to clarify the position’s relationship with Bumbershoot’s marketing team. They haven’t gotten back to me. If they do respond, I’ll let you know.

UPDATE 11:14 AM: Just got an email back from Diana Katz, an Account Executive at The Stranger Here it is, in its entirety:

Hi Paul,

Thanks for reaching out. Happy to help clarify as best as possible -

1. The position is unpaid. The winner receives a high value swag bag (valued at over $1,700) along with promotion of the winner’s work on TheStranger.com.

2. The winner will be working independently at the festival in regards to conducting interviews, taking press photos, etc. The Stranger team and the Bumbershoot Marketing team will be assisting the winner with an introduction to music artists to conduct this work as well as providing an access pass to go behind-the-scenes at the festival. Any write-ups/editorial reviews by the correspondent winner will be reviewed by a Stranger Associate Writer before this work is published on TheStranger.com. This work will be presented on our site’s page along with the winner’s full name and title as Stranger’s official Bumbershoot Correspondent 2017.

Best,

Diana

Every so often in Seattle, a writer pops into the popular consciousness. You’ll find them everywhere at once: in every Seattle-centric magazine, newspaper, and website that covers the literary scene. (Yes, and there aren’t so many of those these days, but that’s a complaint for another time.)

When these kinds of writers appear — a Robert Lashley, say, or a Sarah Galvin, to use two recent-ish examples — it must be easy for aspiring authors to fall prey to jealousy. You toil at the open mics and publishing for free in the hand-printed literary magazines, and then all of a sudden there’s the it-lit figure of the moment staring out at you from free boxes around the city. This doesn’t happen very often, and it probably feels as though they’re taking up some of the spotlight that by rights ought to belong to you.

In my experience, though, these overnight success stories happen because the writers in question work. Their. Asses. Off. They read everywhere, they write all the time, and they put in the hours to gain the respect they deserve. Case in point? Anastacia-Reneé, the poet who has received glowing profiles in a number of local publications including a fantastic City Arts cover story by Galvin that’s on the stands right now.

The reason Anastacia-Reneé is getting so much attention is that she’s publishing three books of poetry with three different publishers this summer: (v.), Forget It, and Answer(Me). This confluence of publication dates wasn’t just handed to her on a platter; the truth is that Anastacia-Reneé is relentless. She reads all over town and advocates for other writers. She experiments in plays and visual art and non-fiction. Until recently, she was the Poet-in-Residence at the Hugo House, making her expertise available to aspiring authors with regular office hours and special appointments.

Anastacia-Reneé’s restlessness shows up on the page, too. She has written under a number of different aliases over the years, and her work investigates the question of identity — race, sexuality, community — in nearly every poem. She is fragmented, and she is mighty, and she is a force of nature. She’s exactly the kind of writer we need to see posted on every corner of the city right now.

To celebrate the second release of her busy summer, Forget It from Santa Cruz publisher Black Radish, Anastacia-Reneé will be joined on Tuesday the 25th at Elliott Bay Book Company by three stellar Seattle-area authors: poet Jane Wong, memoirist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, and poet-slash-civil-rights-attorney Shankar Narayan. She’s not only generous with the spotlight, but Anastacia-Reneé is perfectly willing to give time and exposure to other authors who complement her work. Other writers would balk at giving three dynamos some of her stagetime. Anastacia-Reneé knows that every stage is big enough to share.

Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Ever since Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy first wooed me into reading adult fiction, I’ve always had a soft spot for the mixture of sci-fi and comedy. So the none-too-serious title of Becky Chambers’s first novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, caught my attention from the shelves at University Book Store. And the cover blurb by Ancillary Justice author Ann Leckie — it just reads “Great fun!” — promised exactly what I was looking for in a sci-fi novel.

Long Way doesn’t seem to be interested in breaking any new ground. It’s playing with familiar tropes: a spaceship staffed by misfits and outcasts bumbles into the middle of an interstellar conflict. And that’s okay: Chambers is a deft enough storyteller that she knows when to get out of the way and let the characters lead. Much of the book consists of the reader getting to know and enjoy the crew of the Wayfarer. By the time the central plot is in action, you likely won’t care too much about the stakes — you’ll just be eager to spend more time with these aliens and space-sailors.

That said, some of the tropes in this book hew a little too close to archetypes. Some of these characters — one in particular — feel lifted directly from other space travel stories. Specifically, there’s a character in Long Way who feels hijacked out of Joss Whedon’s cowboy space opera Firefly. At first, it’s a similarity, but after a while it feels too close to be comfortable.

Ultimately, Long Way doesn’t go far enough to distance itself from those who have gone before. Archetypes and tropes are fine to use as shorthand in genre fiction, but you have to do something with those tropes — upturn them, deepen them, blend them together in interesting ways — or else your story just feels like a cover of a cover of a cover, leaving the reader to wonder where they’ve heard this song before. I breezed through Long Way, but I don’t know if I’m going to be back for the just-released sequel unless I’m assured that Chambers finally takes her crew somewhere new for a change.

We just released our Sept 2017 - January 2018 sponorship openings, and they've sold faster then ever. Of that block, only three two dates remain available, in November and December. Thank you, sponsors!

But we still have a few dates left this Summer — one next week, and also a few in August. We've just marked those down, so if you're looking for a sponsorship deal, head over to our booking page and snap up the date you'd like before someone else does.

Your sponsorship gets you in front of Seattle's most passionate readers, and your money goes to hire the writers and keep the site running. It's a virtuous cycle, and we couldn't do it without you. Come on board, and be part of the team that keeps our community growing.

Seattle is alive with great readings and lectures, and this week's sponsor is a standout. Each year Seattle Arts & Lectures presents one of the most carefully curated programs in the city, bringing in big-name speakers and showcasing up-and-comers across a wide range of genres and themes. It's the kind of mix only a long-running series with a loyal audience can pull off.

SAL is celebrating three decades — no small achievement for an arts organization, even in a city like this one — and their 2017–2018 season lineup reflects that spirit of celebration. Single-event tickets go on sale on July 24; grab a subscription this week or be first in line on Monday, before headliners like Colson Whitehead and Viet Thanh Nguyen sell out.

Sponsors like Seattle Arts & Lectures make the Seattle Review of Books possible. Did you know you could sponsor us, as well? Get your stories, or novel, or event in front of our passionate audience. Take a glance at our sponsorship information page for dates and details.

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Jul 15, 2017 at 11:30am PDT

The last few times I’ve gone into Barnes & Noble stores, I’ve come away depressed. The shelves are sparse more often than not, and the lack of customers means the store is overcome with an eerie silence. The only thing more depressing than an empty bookstore is an empty chain bookstore, with its weirdly atonal corporate signage and full bins of untouched fidget spinners.

On Saturday morning, during a short visit to Bellevue, I stopped in the downtown Bellevue Barnes & Noble for the first time. I was expecting the same depressing atmosphere I’ve found in all the other Barnes & Nobles lately. Instead, I happened upon what might be the best Barnes & Noble in the nation. The building, with its high wooden beams and large stage back in the children’s section, is enormous, but the shelves were well-stocked.

Better still, the staff was on their A-game. I saw booksellers greeting a few customers by name. The shelves were alphabetized and sections were generally cared for. Usually when a bookstore hits a period of decline, the first sacrifice is the alphabet; low-morale employees don’t have time to fix their sections, which makes books impossible to find, which drives customers away. I saw none of that here. It felt like a real bookstore, which is more than I can say for every other Barnes & Noble I've been in over the last year.

Back in the late 1990s, independent booksellers hated chain bookstores with a passion that sometimes scared friends and family. Now, though, the bookselling business has changed. I’ve talked with more than a few booksellers who hope Barnes & Noble manages to figure out a way to succeed, in part because if the chain fails many cities in the United States will not have a single bookstore. Those failing Barnes & Noble stores I visited could learn a lot from the downtown Bellevue store: good customer service and well-tended sections go a long way.

But not even a half-mile away, in the Bellevue Square Mall, a large mural promises that an Amazon Books store is opening in the autumn. The mural displays snippets of Amazon’s cheerful data-forward information, including a list of “Bellevue’s Most-Wished-For Fiction of All Time.” My eyes went straight to number six on the list: Atlas Shrugged. At that moment, it occurred to me how much Ayn Rand would love the America of 2017. So many people forced to fend for themselves, so many public figures fighting on behalf of corporate interest, such little empathy and understanding. She’d probably have to pinch herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming.

We’ve reached a point when Barnes & Noble, once the mighty Goliath that crushed so many foes, is now the David. I am rooting for them to survive the onslaught of Amazon Books. If they do survive, it will be on the strength of their staff, not through any corporate ingenuity or clever discounting scheme. In the end, it always has to do with people.

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Jul 15, 2017 at 1:38pm PDT

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that's your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

Real Men Might Get Made Fun Of

Lindy West isn’t a social justice warrior, she’s a social justice apocalypse. Unsurprisingly, she’s already taking heat for her new weekly column in the New York Times — the Internet’s creepiest denizens have very little sense of irony. Keep publishing petty insults in Reddit forums with unprintable names, trolls; Lindy’s in the NYT.

What we could really use, my guys, is some loud, unequivocal backup. And not just in public, when the tide of opinion has already turned and a little “woke”-ness might benefit you — but in private, when it can hurt.

One of my podcasting friends told me that he does stick up for women in challenging situations, like testosterone-soaked comedy green rooms, for instance, but complained, “I get mocked for it!”

Yes, I know you do. Welcome.

A disappearing pile of sand

In the wake of the debate over David Wallace-Wells’ New York magazine piece, which describes a catastrophically uninhabitable planet within a matter of decades, revisit this quiet, lyrical essay from last month’s Oxford American. It’s a telescope-to-microscope shift: Wallace-Wells imagines a worst-case outcome on a global scale; Molly McArdle brings it back to the coast of North Carolina and a family with generations of investment in, almost literally, a castle built on sand.

These days — as the weather everywhere grows steadily stranger, storms stronger, seas higher — I worry about the Outer Banks, surrounded by water and just barely above the waves. What does it mean to be from, and of, one of the most vulnerable places on Earth? The Midgetts felt like a key. Six years after I first took note of them, I started the nine-hour drive down the coast to find what I could unlock with it.

A blueprint for coexistence with artificial intelligence

Is it utopian or dystopian to posit a world in which humanity’s unique value proposition — against a growing force of AI workers — is providing a compassionate interface while machines do the real thinking? AI researcher Kai-Fu Lee’s experience with lymphoma gave him a new perspective on his life’s work.

The answer I propose would never have come to me when I was myself somewhat of an automaton, living to work rather than the other way around. It was only my cancer diagnosis, and the sudden realization of what my own stupidity had made me miss, that led me to my suggestion. Our coexistence with artificial intelligence hinges on combining what is humanly unattainable—the hugely scaled narrow AI intelligence that will only get better at any given domain—with what we humans can uniquely offer to one another. And that is love. What makes us human is that we can love.

Seattle Writing Prompts are intended to spark ideas for your writing, based on locations and stories of Seattle. Write something inspired by a prompt? Send it to us! We're looking to publish writing sparked by prompts.

Also, how are we doing? Are writing prompts useful to you? Could we be doing better? Reach out if you have ideas or feedback. We'd love to hear.

We interrupt this writing prompts to call your attention to:

We're running a short story contest based on Seattle Writing Prompts, judged by Matt Ruff! Come and join the party, we can't wait to read your stories.

My god. It's true. We're ruined.

I first heard the news on the Fox Business Network. I know, comrades, I know I'm not allowed to watch such agitprop without proper dispensation from the thought-police station in my government-issued apartment block, but I hope none of you will report me. For I have heard the news, and the news must be shared!

Kennedy — no, not that one. Or that one. No, not that one either — remember Kennedy from MTV? Where mass media co-opted the idea of "alternative" to sell flannel, shampoo, and carefully packaged toothless "dissent"? Yes, that Kennedy — she has a show on Fox where apparently they let her speak freely of anything her heart desires, and this time her heart desired to return, at least in spirit, to her once-home, Seattle.

And hearing her sneering patter, her fist-clenching truth via the megaphone of her pure, uninfected, uninfluenced, and completely neutral broadcasting partner, brought me around to seeing just how fucked we are.

FACT: Kennedy has found out we increased the minimum wage to $15, and she is pissed. She sees right through our ruse of pretending to help poor people just to punish important business leaders. She has quoted an "ideologically diverse" study from the University of Washington (Hah! You and I both know we purged our city of ideological diversity on the same ballot we voted for the monorail!) that shows that low-wage workers are getting fewer hours under the new business-killing regime. And we're not even at $15 an hour yet! I'm sure there is no article that anyone has written that can dismantle the conservative framing of a higher wage for workers being actually negative for them.

FACT: The pinko-commie-redists on the city counsel enacted an income tax for Seattle richie-riches, and, as Kennedy wisely points out, Bill Gates doesn't live in Seattle, therefore this is a terrible idea! I'm confused how I'm supposed to feel about his support of a state income tax a few years ago. Does that mean he has to move to a tax-haven state? Is a state tax okay but a city one bad? And, since she's a constitutional scholar, she pointed out it's not even legal, so nobody should ever try to do such a thing to her. Who doesn't live in Seattle. And will never pay the tax. But oh my god how much she wants the rich people of Seattle to not move to Bellevue. She is so worried about us losing our tax base that she thinks we shouldn't tax it.

FACT: Gun violence is up in the city. Police say that increased gang violence is to blame, but don't listen to local "experts," listen to Kennedy, who clearly lays out her unimpeachable chain of factual events that made this happen: a $25 fee on guns sold in the city. Yes, that fee went into effect in 2016, which is the year that this one is so bad compared to, but, you know, some of these things take a while to really show their effects. It's good that Kennedy doesn't want us to have people who use guns pay for the damage they do with those guns, because she's for personal responsibility and also unintended consequences that never happen to point out that she's an ideologically driven fool.

No! She's a deep mind. A satirist of such high order that the problem is you can't understand her. Your grandpa understands her — just ask him. You can trust her because she donates her entire paycheck from her television show on Fox Business to the Cato Institute (I need to fact check that, so don't quote me). But anyway, I'm sure she's not another convenient conservative mouthpiece whose paycheck just happens to reinforce their narrow world view.

It got to me thinking about what a terrible place we live in, and how we need to come to grips with it. What better way than by some writing prompts.

Today's prompts

1. They were at the door, clawing. She didn't know how long the lock would hold. She was doing what they wanted, those monsters. She was writing their paychecks. But didn't they understand? No business could afford $5,000 an hour as a wage. The checks were going to bounce. She was going to have to close the business her father built with his immigrant fingers, after coming here with nothing. The business that had put two hundred orphans through college thanks to their charitable program. Now she would have nothing to pass along to her own children. The wood gave, and there they were, coming through the door, pushing each other aside, chanting: "pay us what you owe us!" And in the front — no! it couldn't be! — was her son. Right next to her city council member.

2. "We call it gun sanity," said the police chief. "Police won't carry guns anymore since they're outlawed by unconstitutional, but heavily enforced, local ordinances." The reporters were stunned. "But what if criminals try to shoot at your police officers?" one spat. "How can they enforce the law?" The police chief leaned into the microphone. "We have also done away with the laws."

3. "Seattle Freeze! Come out to play!" the voice echoed down the block. Their rival gang, the Montlake Nirvanas, walked past the deserted guard stations of Broadmoor. Dressed in flannel and ripped jeans, with Ace Frehly face makeup, the Montlake Nirvanas were the fastest-growing gang in Seattle. All the Seattle Freeze wanted was to hold their ground. It wasn't their fault their millionaire parents moved away, abandoning them to the streets. All they had was Broadmoor, and they were gonna hold it. The massive speakers they lined the roads with amplified the needle drop by 300 watts. It was Bobby Sherman: The bluest skies you've ever seen are in Seattle, he sang as the Seattle Freeze appeared on the roofs of the houses surrounding the Montlake Nirvanas. Each one of them holding a bat.

4. I was at the council meeting where it all happened. They voted, 9-0, to suspend all city government activity, and hand power over to the communist party. Immediately, I was held at illegally obtained gunpoint and asked to show my hands. And because I had a soft job — covering the city council for a local blog funded by a multi-national corporation with ties to coal interests — I was cast as educated class and put to work in the strawberry fields outside the city. Forced into manual labor to support the revolution.

5. The billboard was a riff on the classic Seattle "Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights?" Given that there was no electricity in the city anymore, they had to replace the "turn out the lights" part with "blow out the candles." But great industries had risen here in the city. Industries of craft. Sometimes, if you had a good enough song, you could sing for a scarf. A night of entertainment for a meal and a place to sleep. And this young musician named Kurt might have, in another age, made millions of dollars and influenced culture. But today, all he cared about was finding someone who would trade him something good to eat for a few tunes. And his grumbling belly insisted that he find them right quick.

• The Institute of American Indian Arts just announced the recipient of their very first Sherman Alexie Scholarship. Alexie himself selected the winner:

Jamie Natonabah (Diné) will receive $7,500 per semester for four semesters, for a total of $30,000, $24,000 of which will be applied to tuition. The remaining $6,000 will help pay for her travel, lodging, books, and meals during the five residencies in Santa Fe. Jamie is an IAIA Alumnae. Jamie is from Fort Defiance, Arizona. For twenty-eight years she has embraced her love of writing which has evolved into a thirst for personal truth created largely through poetry. She won first place in the New Mexico Slam Poetry Competition (online). Also, for two consecutive years, Jamie participated in performances of her poetry through funding from the Witter Bynner Foundation. Her work has been published in Red Ink: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities as well as the IAIA Literary Anthologies Bone Light and Fourth World Rising among others. Jamie is now living in Santa Fe with her partner Paul and daughter Anastasia Moriarty.

• Town Hall's Executive Director, Weir Harmon, published a thank-you to the community for contributing to Town Hall's renovation compaign. He also promises that you'll find Town Hall programming "in venues scattered in neighborhoods across Seattle" until Town Hall reopens in fall of 2018. He shares more about the program, which is cleverly titled Inside/Out:

Many events will be programmed in consultation with Neighborhood Steering Committees; some will be co-created by audience members, in collaboration with Artists and Scholars in Community. If we do this right, Inside/Out will create lasting mechanisms to bring grassroots ideas and community-sourced solutions into broad public consideration—and we’ll welcome a whole new slate of exciting voices back to our renovated home. We’ll share more about Inside/Out over the coming months, and I hope you will join us for this transformative year.

• RJ Casey at the Comics Journal interviews Kimberley Motley, a lawyer who is trying to help Fantagraphics cartoonist Matt Furie save his creation, Pepe the Frog, from hate symbol status:

You can’t really control how Pepe has been used on the internet in the past, especially since he’s been turned into this meme. Dealing with the internet is difficult because there are so many users all around the world. Pepe has taken on a life of his own. However, what should not happen is people profiting off Pepe and the intellectual property of Matt Furie. That’s a big concern. I couldn’t make a tuna fish sandwich at home and stick a McDonald’s logo on it and sell it to people. The McDonald’s corporation would come after me. This is Matt’s creation and people don’t have a right to take his intellectual property and then themselves profit off of it without his permission.

• For KUOW, Elizabeth Austen introduces listeners to Seattle-area poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, with a pair of extra poems published as an online extra.

• It was published in May, but I only just came across Bill Gates's summer reading list. Have you ever found yourself standing in a bookstore and wondering, "what would Bill Gates read?" Wonder no more:

• Last week, On the Media interviewed a few sci-fi authors about dystopian fiction for a dystopian world, and it's a very thoughtful episode. I especially love that host Brooke Gladstone asks each of the authors if they agree with Jill Lepore's recent observation that "Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission."

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,

Have you ever gone into a Christian Science Reading Room? They really creep me out for some unknown reason, and I want to know what happens in them, but I’m too much of a coward to investigate on my own. I take my kids to church on Easter and Christmas but I’m not a super-religious person. I’m worried they’ll be able to smell the lack of dogma on me when I walk in the door.

So what happens in them? Do people read about Christ and science? Is it like Scientology, or more like one of those youth church groups that meets in the church basement and talks about our pal Jesus over plastic cups of orange soda? Am I wrong to be creeped out?

Alan, Laurelhurst

Dear Alan,

You're free to be creeped out by whatever you want, even bookstores. For instance, I'm creeped out by Toast Masters and cats who think they're smarter than me. Because you asked so nicely, I visited a Christian Science Reading Room and can report that, like nondenominational reading rooms, they are overly quiet and smell like books, not dogma. A kind woman asked if she could help me, I said "NO" overly loudly, she flinched, I smiled... it was a pretty standard exchange between me and a stranger.

In one corner of the store marked "CHILDREN," there was a table with a sign that read "Reserve Yours for a Party Today!" So I said to the nice flinching woman, "Ah, so this is where I rent children who know how to party," and she replied, "No, no, we do not rent children here."

And that is the flavor of fun you're missing at the Christian Science Reading Room.

Kisses,

Cienna

Bonus Question!

Dear Cienna,

Can we admit that adult coloring books were a dumb fad? Now that the craze has died down we can be honest about this, can’t we?

Smitty, Rainier Beach

Dear Smitty,

Yes. And since we're now in the market for a new dumb fad, I propose genetically engineering 194-lb house spiders so I get to be little spoon for once.

Kisses,

Cienna

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

Tuesday July 18th: Battle Hill Bolero Reading

Every summer, the awesome Seattle writing organization Clarion West brings sci-fi writers to town for a summer reading series. The latest reading features Daniel José Older, whose most recent series of music-themed novels involves a battle between the living and the half-dead on the streets of New York City.
Seattle Public Library, 1000 4th Ave., 386-4636, spl.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Sherman Alexie just posted an open letter to his Facebook page announcing the cancellation of most of the upcoming speaking engagements for his new memoir, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me.

Love is a memoir about a tumultuous year in Alexie's life — one in which his mother passed away and Alexie underwent brain surgery to remove a benign tumor. The book was published on a fairly fast schedule, which means Alexie was still deep in the process of grieving and recovering from the events described in the book. The book tour for Love, Alexie writes, was a "retraumatizing" experience.

You should read the whole letter, which is a poetic and confessional document that feels like an addendum to the memoir. But here's the part of the announcement with the information that's relevant to most of his readers:

Because of the short notice, I'll still perform at my gigs in San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco this month. But I am cancelling all of my events in August and I will be cancelling many, but not all, of my events for the rest of the year. Dear readers and booksellers and friends and family, I am sorry to disappoint you. I am sorry that I will not be traveling to your cities to tell you my stories in person.

But I will be writing.

Alexie continues with a promise to his readers: "when I am strong enough, I will return to the road. I will return to the memoir."

Writing and reading from a memoir can be cathartic for an author, but it is also an act of emotional labor. For a reader and a performer like Alexie, who throws his whole self into every performance, it must have been a grueling experience to relive the worst and most despairing parts of his awful year over and over again in front of audiences.

Above and beyond all else that he does — a novelist, a filmmaker, a screenwriter, a children's book author — Alexie is a poet. This means that the need to tear out his heart and show it to a room full of strangers is part of his DNA. We're sure he can't wait to get back to it, but we're so grateful that he's taking the time to make sure that he's healthy. We wish Alexie the best and we can't wait to see him when he goes out on the road again.