The backwards map
Published April 05, 2017, at 11:01am
Your eyes might resist the idea of reading Ted Powers's poems in the normal way. That's perfectly okay. These poems reveal themselves to you by turning inside out.
Literary Event of the Week: Reading Through It at Third Place Books Seward Park
Regular readers of this column know that on the first Wednesday of every month, the Seattle Review of Books and the Seattle Weekly host a book club called Reading Through It at Third Place Books Seward Park. The response has been incredibly strong — anywhere between 60 and 100 attendees every month — because books are the perfect response to the historical moment.
It just makes sense that in a time when too many voters are low-information or low-empathy, we should turn to books for help. Books are still the best way to impart large quantities of information, and they are better at inspiring empathy in humans than any other art form. Even when we let ourselves down, books are there for us. More than that, books will save us. They will inform and educate and inspire us, in ways that magazine articles or listicles or television shows simply cannot.
Our president does not read. He prefers his memos to be a single page, with lots of images and graphs. It is not clear if he’s actually read a book as an adult — including his own bestseller, which was famously written by a man who now hates him. He is the first modern American president who seems, at best, bored by the idea of books and, at worst, actively anti-book. There’s a kind of pleasurable symmetry in this thought of books coming to our rescue.
This Wednesday, April 5th, at 7 pm, I hope you’ll join us at Third Place Books Seward Park for the discussion of this month’s book, What We Do Now: Standing Up for Your Values in Trump’s America. While most books take years from initial pitch to publication date, Now was published by indie New York press Melville House in a matter of weeks. Inspired by Trump’s election and published just in time for Trump’s inauguration, Now thrums with a vitality and an immediacy that most books lack.
Unlike most of the Reading Through It choices so far, Now is fairly unfocused. The book is divided up into thematic sections: Racial Justice, Immigration, Women’s Rights, Climate Change, etc. Many of the essays are repurposed from other publications and speeches, but placed together they gain a strength and renewed purpose.
Now collects various perspectives and experiences in between two covers. Some of my favorite essays are direct calls to action, like Brittany Packnett’s encomium “White People: What Is Your Plan for the Trump Presidency?” or Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur’s “How to Make Blue States Blue Again.” George Lakoff examines the way Trump communicates, and George Saunders provides a more impressionistic overview of the political situation.
The conversation at this month’s Reading Through It is sure to be varied and untethered from any single topic. That’s okay. (Those wanting to focus on a particular subject are invited to the May 3rd edition of the club, where we’ll be reading The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt.) These are confusing times, and every day brings with it three or four issues that demand our attention and our action. We’ll get through it by communicating and listening and, yeah, by reading.
Comics in conversation
I've attended a lot of author events that have been billed as the author appearing "in conversation with" an interviewer. But those events are never actually conversations; they're just interviews. I've never actually attended an event that felt like a real conversation until last night, when Seattle author G. Willow Wilson shared the stage with Vancouver cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks at Elliott Bay Book Company. Hicks was in town to celebrate the debut of the second book in the Nameless City trilogy, The Stone Heart (read my review of the two books here,) but she and Wilson didn't restrain their conversation to the newest book. Instead, they ranged to every topic within reach.
Things were most fun when the authors dug deep into the craft of comics. Wilson opened by asking if writing the "Empire Strikes Back" part of a trilogy was a chore, since the middle book by definition contains no authoritative beginning or end. Hicks replied that writing The Stone Heart was "actually more fun." She wrote the script for The Stone Heart in just eleven days, while the third book in the trilogy, by comparison, took two months to write.
From there, their focus wandered to all aspects of the comic industry. Wilson lamented the fact that artists on monthly books often "get injured." Modern comics require such a high level of craft from its artists — fine detail, compelling figure work, clever page design — that most artists fall prey to "carpal tunnel, back issues, and spinal injuries." Hicks agreed, saying that while she mostly draws book-length comics, the one time she worked on a monthly limited series, "it was only four months and I nearly died."
The two honestly and openly discussed multiculturalism in comics. Hicks pointed out that in The Stone Heart, she made every effort to draw a multicultural, diverse city, but she said that colorist Jordie Bellaire was an "unsung hero" in creating the texture of the city in the book. A good colorist can reveal the diversity of your cast, Hicks said, in a way that no artist can convey in black and white. Wilson talked about the challenges of resolving conflicts in Ms. Marvel: "because it has a Muslim protagonist, I didn't really want her hitting people too often," or else the character would become a representative of the racist western "violent Muslim" stereotype.
Hicks and Wilson asked each other questions on subjects ranging from what it's like to meet your cartooning idols to why Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation is the perfect crush for a 13 year-old girl who's "terrified of men." They gushed over each others' work as fans and recommended comics for each other to read.
Hicks talked a little bit about an upcoming project: her very first prose young adult novel, which will be published in February of 2018. Ironically, her first non-comics work is still "all about comics," Hicks laughed. It's about the grandchildren of two sparring golden age comics creators. The teens fall in love, and their relationship exhumes several generations' worth of bitterness. Wilson asked Hicks for the title of the book. Hicks laughed.
"It's called Comics Will Break Your Heart," she said.
"Truer words have never been spoken," Wilson replied.
Finding his voice
Published April 04, 2017, at 12:30pm
Robert Lashley is an incredible performing poet — one of the finest in the region. His latest book identifies him as one of the best on the page, in addition to one of the best on the stage.
One of a kind
Published April 04, 2017, at 11:23am
A new erasure series from Mount Analogue Press will be posted at Open Books for the month of April. They are unlike any other books in the world — literally.
Listening to My Bones
When the doctor holds my upper arm in his two hands,
he bows his head and listens as if he were waiting to hear
the song of a rare endemic bird no one has seen for centuries.
I start to speak, but he shakes his head, does not loosen his grip
on my arm, turns his fingers around the curve
of my skin and listens again.
I am afraid to clear my throat. My toes stay still.
He must hear my heart where it beats
but he is listening to the sound of bones
the way NASA turns its telescopes far over our heads on Mauna Kea
and hears the universe move.Rain falls so hard on the roof, I think it might break through.
Imagine all those luminous drops that had been the backbone
of a cloud shattered and lying above the orthopedic surgeon’s head and mine. Soon a puddle, then a trickle into the Wailuku River.
This will mend well, he says, shows me two x-rays.
In the waiting room is a large salt water tank. A zebra moray eel
folds in one corner its brown and white stripes.
I think how it must have no bones at all
or bones so light this eel can wind
around its heaven all night when everyone has left
and dream the dream of breaking into the world.
Every year, the Hugo Awards announcement arrives with some dumb intercenine politics. Every year a small number of alt-right self-publishers try to game the ballot. Every year, they lose the awards. Every year, people call for the Hugos to change the way nominees are chosen. Every year the Hugos don't really change a thing.
This year, there are fewer of the alt-right on the nominee slate, but they're still there. Let's not let those jackasses obscure the fact that some great books are on this list, including Charlie Jane Anders's terrific debut novel All the Birds in the Sky. Especially noteworthy is the comics category, which features comics written by Seattle writer G. Willow Wilson, Ta-Nahisi Coates, Brian K Vaughan (who's competing against himself with the latest collections of Saga and Paper Girls,) and Marjorie Liu.
Still, the Hugo Awards have to fix themselves sometime. Maybe next year?
From mythology to the modern world
Sponsor Eric Andrews-Katz's newly released novel Tartarus is a great romp through time, mythology, epic battles, and gay romance. Two siblings, descendants of Olympus, are dragged into ancient battles they didn't know they were responsible for.
It's a bold, entertaining work with an engaging story that bridges the old and the very new. We've got a full chapter on our Sponsor's page for you to read, and find yourself gripped by this story.
Sponsors like Eric Andrews-Katz 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. We're booked until May, but have some dates through July open for you to pick the best time. Take a glance at our sponsorship information page for dates and details.
Dreaming beyond fiction and nonfiction
Published April 03, 2017, at 12:01pm
This Wednesday, Wendy C. Ortiz debuts her latest book in Seattle. It's a memoir of dreams. But wait — aren't dreams fiction? Or is a dream memoir maybe the truest memoir of all?
On diversity and superheroes
Over the weekend, some comments made at a sales conference by Marvel Comics's Senior VP of Sales, David Gabriel, set the internet on fire. Gabriel was referring to a recent sales slump for Marvel books, and he seemed to place the entire blame for the slump on Marvel's attempts at diversity:
What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity. They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not. I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales.
We saw the sales of any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up against. That was difficult for us because we had a lot of fresh, new, exciting ideas that we were trying to get out and nothing new really worked.
This is dumb. While it's true that Marvel has been diversifying their line lately, it's important to note that at least half the new "diverse" characters were written by the same middle-aged white men who have been writing Marvel Comics for the last 15 years or so. It's also important to note that Marvel didn't actively try to create a larger, more diverse audience for their comics: they continued marketing and selling to the same crowd of middle-aged men who've been buying their comics the whole time.
But you don't need me to dissemble Gabriel's moronic statements. Seattle writer G. Willow Wilson, who writes Ms. Marvel for Marvel Comics, has published a blog post on the subject. Ms. Marvel is one of Marvel Comics' only breakout new characters of the past decade. Wilson has helped create a diversity success story in exactly the way you should: by bringing more people into the tent. Here's a piece of the post:
2. I will tell you exactly why Ms Marvel works: it didn’t set out to be Ms Marvel. We were originally going to pitch it as a 10 issue limited series. I had a 3 issue exit strategy because I assumed we were going to get canned. There was no “diversity initiative” anywhere–getting that thing made at all was a struggle. It was a given that any character without AT LEAST a 20-year history would tank. Everybody, myself included, assumed this series was going to work out the same way.
3. That freed us–by “us” I mean the whole creative team–to tell exactly the story we wanted to tell. We had nothing to lose, nothing to overcome but low expectations. That gave us room to break a lot of rules.
But you should read the whole thing. Wilson, by the way, will be interviewing cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks onstage at the Elliott Bay Book Company tomorrow night at 7 pm. (Hicks is the author of the excellent Nameless City trilogy, which I reviewed last week.) That reading is free.
For Colleen Louise Barry, Mount Analogue is the future of books
Colleen Louise Barry publishes weird and wonderful books under the name Mount Analogue. It’s not just the name of her press so much as a pseudonym; the names “Mount Analogue” and “Colleen Louise Barry” are basically synonymous, the way “Nine Inch Nails” and “Trent Reznor” can be swapped out interchangeably.
Her books have a small print run and, externally, a minimalistic aesthetic. (Barry cites low-impact press Publication Studio as an inspiration for Mount Analogue’s look.) But open those covers and you’re likely to see something you’ve never seen before. Mount Analogue has published political pamphlets and weirdo poetry and hand-crafted erasures and books that are entirely made out of screen captures from episodes of The Bachelor with the closed-captioning left on. For the rest of this week, we’re going to review one Mount Analogue title per day, in order to give you a sense of the scope of her output.
In person, Barry exudes positivity: she smiles a lot, she wears clothing fashioned from bright and interesting fabrics, and she demonstrates enthusiasm for everything from comics to physics to booksellers to television shows. She’s curious and confident and full of energy and all those other qualities you want to see in a relatively new publisher.
So when we meet at Ada’s Technical Books one afternoon, I decide to open with the hardest question in the arsenal: Why, in the year 2017, would anyone want to be a publisher?
“When I graduated from college in 2010, I moved straight to New York and started working in publishing at Random House,” Barry explains. “We would have these grand meetings every week with all the publishers of each imprint,” she says, “and I happened to work for the mass-market trade paperback imprint: George Martin and Danielle Steele and all these people. We had this money-focused idea about books.”
Barry says every meeting hinged on defending books from some invisible attacker, with questions like: "How are we going to strategize, how are we going to survive ebooks? How are we going to survive Amazon?" Everyone focused on “the nostalgic value of books and the idea of the physicality of books,” but at the same time they were publishing books that were “produced so cheaply and so quickly and so cookie-cutter.” The stuff she was doing at her day job didn’t reflect her own “really personal relationship with books and with reading.” Barry recalls thinking to herself again and again at those meetings: "Well, y'all aren't the future of books."
“These small publishers and these communities that gather around the ideas in books and the way that books populate their lives physically as objects — that's the future,” she says. The future of books is “smaller” and more personal. “So I left Random House and went to grad school at UMass Amherst and did my MFA in poetry. My parents freaked out about that,” she admits.
Barry abruptly cut one future short and embraced another “partly because I wanted to not just be constantly worried about what was dying, but to really be a part of what I felt was the pulse and what was alive — which was communities, thoughtful production, thoughtful cross-genre, ways that books become other things, can become worlds.”
All of which is a great answer, of course, but it doesn’t get to the nut of the question: why publishing? Why not just writing? “I like having conversations about things — not necessarily conversations like sitting across from a table with someone and talking.” To her, publication is a process of conversation. She points to one of Mount Analogue’s books, Ted Powers’ Manners. “If, for example, Ted has this collection of poems and this collection of collages, I want to put them together and then I want to risograph them and publish them that way, because when you put them all together like that, that makes something totally new.”
The act of publishing, Barry says, does deal in “other peoples’ art, and it is so important and meaningful to me to give a platform to that. But also I feel that it's my art, too. It's really collaboration, I think.”
So far, Mount Analogue has been built on small local grants from organizations like the Office of Arts and Culture. Barry says when she publishes a title, they start with “about 200 books a print run, with the idea that we will do second runs in the future,” although she does leave open the option of completely changing the books between print runs, in an effort to make the mass production of books “meaningful, rather than just reprinting things.”
Mount Analogue is home to a number of projects including a quarterly series called Conversations with Women, which Barry describes as “basically an excuse for me to make art with a lot of really incredible people who identify as female in my life and beyond.” The first conversation is a “wild hybrid of fiction, tarot, comics, and field guides to birds. We put them all together in this deck of cards” into a “re-arrange-able short story.” The next conversation will be titled Fumetti for the Mothership. (Fumetti is an Italian word for comics made from photos instead of drawing.)
Barry doesn’t retain any snobbish distinctions between poetry or comics. To her, it’s all art. “I love comics, I draw comics, I think comics are maybe my window into our books and how I first encountered art in a serial book form, which is pretty important for me.” That’s one way that the city has “inspired” her work as a publisher: “there are so many great publishers and artists of comics in Seattle that it was really exciting when I first got here.”
But that raises another question: why did Barry move to Seattle after graduating from UMass? Why not, say, Brooklyn? Her answer for that is pretty straightforward: “money was a big factor.” But isn’t Seattle expensive, too? Why not Portland or Olympia? Barry says “the community here is really vibrant and a huge reason why what I do is even possible at all.”
When she was publishing her first books, she immediately found a number of people who were eager to work with her to bring her exact vision to life. She published with Saigon Printing on Beacon Hill and Phil’s Custom Bindery in Georgetown, and both were eager to work with her schedule and establish payment plans. The Factory offered to host her launch party for free. “Every single part of [the publication process] is so beautiful and unique,” Barry says. “I don't know if it would be possible in other cities to do something like that.”
This summer, Barry is collaborating with curator Molly Mac on a show called “Listen” at Georgetown gallery Equinox. “The show is audio work, essentially — audio and film and lots of ideas about listening, essentially, and what it means to listen.” She’s working on a companion book for the show, which she describes as “a strange art object.” And then in the fall, she’s publishing a book titled Clean Rooms, Low Rates, which is a collaboration featuring stories about hotel rooms written by a novelist named Jeff Parker and a photos of hotel rooms by a British photographer named Brendan Barry.
In the long run, Barry dreams of opening up a space for Mount Analogue somewhere in the city, something as freeform and inventive as the books she publishes. She describes a space to buy zines and small-press books, a performance space, a gallery, and an area for people to just come and talk about art, “a place where everything can coincide and collide into each other.” That’s about as good a definition for the Mount Analogue experience as any.
The Sunday Post for April 2, 2017
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.
Letter From a Drowned Canyon
Lake Powell, Lake Mead — we created these outsized watering holes by replacing natural wonders like Glen Canyon with human wonders like the Glen Canyon Dam. Now America’s manmade lakes are going dry. Rebecca Solnit (with Edward Abbey looking closely over her shoulder) asks what might reappear as the desert reclaims itself.
When the Sierra Club pronounced Glen Canyon dead in 1963, the organization’s leaders expected it to stay dead under Lake Powell. But this old world is re-emerging, and its fate is being debated again. The future we foresee is often not the one we get, and Lake Powell is shriveling, thanks to more water consumption and less water supply than anyone anticipated. Beneath it lies not just canyons but spires, crests, labyrinths of sandstone, Anasazi ruins, petroglyphs, and burial sites, an intricate complexity hidden by water, depth lost in surface.
Fleeing Boko Haram, Thousands Cling to a Road to Nowhere
Dionne Searcey and photographer Adam Ferguson bring National Route 1 — the desert highway outside Diffa, Niger, where thousands have gathered to take shelter from the Boko Haram — vividly to life. Cheers to The New York Times for continuing its impressive experiments with digital, and especially for bending the medium to the story, rather than the other way around.
Construction stopped two years ago after attacks by Boko Haram spiked. [The road's] intended destination — oil fields near the border with Chad — is far away, about 80 miles beyond the choppy lip where the pavement suddenly cuts off, like an interrupted thought.
The Chinese are gone. Now, desperation spans the horizon instead: tens of thousands of ragged huts made from millet stalks, scraps of fabric, torn flour bags and sheets of tarp. From the air, they look like scattered piles of hay.
Many have been living here for more than two years.
Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman review — nice dramatic narratives, but where’s the nihilism?
Neil Gaiman reads in Seattle tonight, to a sold-out house. Here’s Ursula Le Guin with a charmingly curmudgeonly critique of Gaiman’s new and already beloved retelling of the Norse myths.
Gaiman plays down the extreme strangeness of some of the material and defuses its bleakness by a degree of self-satire. There is a good deal of humour in the stories, the kind most children like — seeing a braggart take a pratfall, watching the cunning little fellow outwit the big dumb bully. Gaiman handles this splendidly. Yet I wonder if he tries too hard to tame something intractably feral, to domesticate a troll.
Ethics and paying rent
Mike Monteiro, the acerbic conscience of the design industry, is perpetually pissed off, but that doesn’t make him wrong. On the role design plays in shaping history and the slippery self-deception of “creating change from the inside”:
I get that you like making things. But making things at the expense of someone else’s freedom is fucked. Not putting what you’re designing through an ethical test is not only just lazy, it’s dangerous. Feigning ignorance that ethics is not part of your job as a designer is no longer valid. Knowing that it’s part of the job and ignoring it is criminal.
Seattle Writing Prompts: The mystery Coke machine
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.
Look, let's just state it right out: there may be haunted pop machines in the world, but this ain't one of them. No, instead there is some very real person who stocks this machine, and has for years. Why? Probably because people keep buying sodas. Then one day, a dust devil of mystery poofs up around the machine — legends grown in a cloud of pot smoke and a desire to make the world more magical than pedesterian — and now whoever that restocker is has practically become the Seattle version of the masked man who leaves flowers and cognac on Poe's grave.
That machine was always kind of weird. Have you noticed that most pop machines (and, I use the term advisably, since we score high on the regional soda v. pop issue) are inside? Or, if not inside, at least under shelter. Rare is the machine just left to the elements, sitting on the street like a discarded fridge. That somebody plugged in. And stocked. That you keep buying food from.
It's also been a fixture of Capitol Hill for many, many years. I can't remember a time it hasn't been there, and I've lived in Seattle since 1987. Have I ever used it? Not that I can recall, but, although I'm sure the product is just fine and safe to drink, it always felt a bit out-of-place to me. I like a little more provenance with my drinks.
I love to think of the people who use it, though. Who use it, or might want a quick drink and happen to have three quarters jangling around in their pockets. How many bought sodas there and then walked up Broadway to Bailey/Coy? How many stopped off on their way home from concerts, or before grabbing a burger at Dick's, or before meeting their dealer?
So many stories, and we only have time to prompt five of them:
Today's prompts
The batcavers — The black lipstick felt weird, but the spiked hair and leather pants felt great. When he almost broke his ankle on those fucking platforms, he stopped and leaned against the Coke machine to fix a strap. "We're going to be late, Gerald" she said to him, taking an aggrevated drag on a clove. "Fuck off, Miranda," he said, and then looking up at the machine. "And give me some quarters." She rolled her eyes in disgust. "You're so fucking pedestrian," but she started digging through her purse, and her black-painted long nails came out with three shiny quarters.
The serum — At first, the professor thought about putting the serum in the water supply. But then, if everybody changed overnight, surely an outcry would raise, they'd figure it out, the way everybody would cluster around certain resevoirs. So he came up with the idea of a soda machine selling cheap pop. He'd make money, and the pattern of infection would be much more random and hard to trace. Less broad, yes, but much more interesting. Much more nefarious. Now then, where to place this machine....
The lovers — "Do you have a Coca-Cola?" his date asked, laying next to him in bed, their skin glistening with sweat. "There's a machine on the street, downstairs." That caused a laugh. "Do I look like I'm gonna go down to the street for a pop?" A shrug. "Maybe. Maybe I'll dare you to do it naked. I'll give you my keys and you run down their naked and get us a couple of cans of Coke, and maybe then I'll feel recovered enough to do you again when you get back." His date laughed. But then, stopping, said, "You're serious, aren't you?" He smiled. "I don't know. I guess it depends if you're brave enough. Are you?"
The slot machine — It's been said that every 10,000 cans or so, the spirit appears. Some might say genie, but that's got a certain set of expectations. No, this spirit is more subtle. It does grant wishes, but you don't have to ask for them specifically. You just need to wish them, and so this is why people tell you to think good thoughts: if you put your coins in the machine, and pop open the drink, and take a sip of the cold soda, the first three things you wish for are coming true. You better hope they're not the kind of wishes that will haunt you.
The stocker — There's a story behind the machine and how it started. There's a story behind the couple who keep it stocked. The story has many elements, but the three most important are: a bet on a horse, an airplane that almost crashed because of a watch, and running into an old friend on a very cold night.
Help Wanted: Save funding for Hugo House, submit to a worthy new comics anthology, and contribute your Spanish-speaking skills to an exciting new play
- Hugo House published an important call to action on their Facebook page:
More vital arts funding is in jeopardy here in Washington State and we need your help. Hugo House was recommended for a grant of over $1M through Washington State's Building for the Arts program. We recently learned that the Senate capital budget did not include funding for all of the groups recommended for support—Hugo House was right below the cutoff line. This funding is critical toward securing our new home.
Full funding in the House capital budget is now even more critical.
Please call your State legislators to add your voice in support of FULL FUNDING for Building for the Arts. A script is provided [on Hugo House's Facebook page], and your own words are just as important.
- Grab Back Comics is an amazing new website collecting comics about sexual assault and consent. The site's founder and editor, Erma Blood, is looking for submissions for an upcoming print anthology. You can find all the information about how to submit on their site, but here's the basic pitch:
Your story matters!! Through May 21, 2017, Grab Back Comics is accepting submissions of original comics on the topics of sexual assault, harassment, rape culture, or advocacy. Submissions will be posted on the Grab Back Comics website and included in a printed anthology that will be presented at the Comics & Medicine conference in Seattle in mid June. I will also mail each contributor 3 free copies of the printed comic.
Addendum: we'll have much more to say about Grab Back Comics soon. It's a really great project that's worth your time and, if you're a creator, it's also worth your energy.
Poet and Seattle Atlas Obscura branch head Shin Yu Pai has a request for two Spanish-speaking women volunteers:
My dear friend Rupert Reyes, who is a tremendous playwright and director from Austin, will be visiting Seattle during the week of April 23. Rupert founded the legendary Teatro Vivo, a tour de force in bilingual theater. I am working on setting up a table reading of one of Rupert's new works in progress and we are in need of 2 readers for a 1.5-hour play. The characters are in their 20s, but the readers do not need to reflect this casting. We need 2 female readers who are fairly proficient in Spanish. No prep necessary - this will be a cold reading. We hope to organize an event for the evening of Monday, April 24. Email shinyu.pai@atlasobscura.com if interested.
The Help Desk: Is there publishing after death?
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,
What do you think about posthumously releasing books that authors didn’t want us to see? On the one hand, you get unnecessary books like Nabokov’s The Original of Laura, and on the other, there’s Kafka’s entire oeuvre. I’m torn.
Shelton, Winslow
Dear Shelton,
Speaking as a living human being (I DARE YOU TO PROVE OTHERWISE), I enjoy writing because of its control – my mouth often doesn't convey meaning nearly as well as my human fingers do. I believe many writers feel this way about their work; at it's best, it's the truest expression of their ideas and intentions. Anything less than its best is a work in progress.
So yes, I find it problematic that someone else would take that control away and publish a writer's work without consent – or worse, against their express wishes, as was the case with much of Kafka's work and Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, which I refuse to read because in addition to resentful uterus syndrome and arachnofealty, I've been diagnosed with a deferential corpse complex.
That said, I don't believe in any afterlife, so the part of me that's dead inside doesn't really give a fuck whether they're published or not, and I don't believe Lee or Kafka care at this point either.
Kisses,
Cienna
Portrait Gallery: Faith Erin Hicks
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 April 4th: The Stone Heart Reading
Vancouver cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks celebrates the second book in her comic book fantasy trilogy for young readers, The Stone Heart, with a Seattle audience. Tonight, she’ll be interviewed onstage by Seattle writer G. Willow Wilson, who is possibly best known as the creator of breakout superhero sensation Ms. Marvel.
Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.
The APRIL Festival farewell tour continues: I talked with Capitol Hill Seattle's Tim Kukes about why this Saturday's APRIL Festival is so important, and why it's important to not get too sad about the fact that APRIL is going away. Go read the whole thing.
King County Library System director Gary Wasdin has resigned
The King County Library System dropped a press release yesterday when nobody was looking. Here's the relevant passage:
Gary Wasdin, director of the King County Library System (KCLS) since January 2015, has resigned.
“KCLS is committed to providing a welcoming environment for all of its users,” said Jim Wigfall, KCLS Board President. “When it came to our attention that Mr. Wasdin violated KCLS’ code of conduct, the Board took immediate action. Mr. Wasdin has chosen to resign his position effective immediately, and the Board fully agrees with this decision.”
That is a lot to take in.
When Wasdin moved to KCLS from Omaha in early 2015, he gave an interview to Library Journal about the job. It's a pretty straightforward, gushy interview — Wasdin says taking the new job at KCLS "is like winning the professional lottery" — that doesn't shed any light on the present situation.
If you're a librarian or other KCLS staffer and you'd like to talk about the library, please get in touch with the Seattle Review of Books. I'm proud to say that we have a good record of listening to librarian issues and sharing them with the public. Send me an email: paul@seattlereviewofbooks.com.
No one owns a city
Published March 30, 2017, at 10:01am
Next Tuesday, Faith Erin Hicks debuts the second book in her impressive Nameless City trilogy at Elliott Bay Book Company. Her books draw you in with their easy kinetic energy, and they keep you impressed with their nuanced political intrigue.
Your Week in Readings: The best literary events from March 29th - April 4th
Wednesday March 29th: The State of Arts Criticism in Seattle
Doug McLennan, the founder of Arts Journal, talks with a panel of local critics including theater critic Misha Berson, the Seattle Times’s Brendan Kiley, former Seattle Weekly editor David Brewster, and, uh, me. We’ll be discussing why art criticism is being cut from local papers and why it’s currently in the hands of mostly middle aged white people. Folio: The Seattle Athenaem, 324 Marion St., 402-4612, http://folioseattle.org. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Alternate Wednesday March 29th: Burning Bright Reading
Thriller author Nick Petrie continues his series starring “damaged war veteran Peter Ash.” Petrie lives in Milwaukee, but he is a graduate of the University of Washington MFA fiction program, making this reading something of a homecoming. “Peter Ash” is a pretty great name for a thriller star — right up there with “Remo Williams” or “Lincoln Rhyme.” Third Place Books Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE, 366-3333, http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Thursday March 30th: Up South Launch Party
Robert Lashley is one of the most powerful poets in the region. If you haven’t seen him read, you owe it to yourself to attend this debut for his second collection of poems: when the man reads, you have to pay attention. And when you pay attention, you’re rewarded with something new and beautiful. Jack Straw Gallery, 4261 Roosevelt Way N.E., 634-0919, http://jackstraw.org . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Friday March 31st: Kimberly Burwick and Kevin Goodan
Under the guidance of new owner Billie Swift, Open Books has really accelerated their reading series schedule, bringing both locally known and unknown poets to their stage. It would be a mistake to call Burwick and Goodan “unknown,” though. Burwick is an eastern Washingtonian and Goodan is from Montana, and they’re both widely read. Open Books, 2414 N. 45th St., 633-0811, http://openpoetrybooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.Saturday April 1st: APRIL
See our event of the week column for more details. Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St., 322-7030, http://hugohouse.org. Free. All ages. Noon.
Sunday April 2nd: Punk Rock Prose
Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, which shares space with a record store, hosts a rare prose-book event. A trio of authors who did time as punk rockers in Seattle — Danny Bland, Tom Hansen, and Jonathan Evison — welcome author Brian Jabas Smith, who’ll read from his new short story collection Spent Saints & Other Stories.Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, 925 E. Pike St., 658-0110, http://fantagraphics.com/flog/bookstore. Free. All ages. 3 p.m.
Monday April 3rd: The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley Reading
Fiction author Hannah Tinti’s new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, is partially based on Whidbey Island. It in part references the Hercules myth. Tinti will be joined by Seattle novelist Laurie Frankel, whose This Is How It Always Is has been one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of my year so far. Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, elliottbaybook.com . Free. All ages. 7 p.m.