Three Questions and A Quote: Novelist and Nonfiction Writer Mitchell S. Jackson

Mitchell S. Jackson, award-winning novelist, journalist, and nonfiction writer

Mitchell S. Jackson has become a force in U. S. literature and journalism, as well as an outspoken advocate for, and critic of, his hometown of Portland, Oregon. His evocations of Portland’s Black community life, in both fiction and nonfiction, have garnered national attention and numerous awards. In recent years, he has become a major figure in magazine writing, winning both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Magazine Award for his profile of Ahmaud Arbery in Runner’s World and, more recently, profiling other important Black figures and writing about vital national issues as a columnist for Esquire.

For a full bio, see below.

Mitchell S. Jackson

WNW: What aspect of the Northwest do you feel hasn’t been adequately addressed in writing yet?

MSJ: Good question. I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that question, but for me, I love writing about the Black experience in Oregon. It was something I didn’t read about growing up. I’m interested in recording the history of Black people. In revealing or reifying the value of our experiences. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling that much of the writing about Oregon reflects its demographics, which are overwhelmingly white. We need voices that aren’t represented in the area in great numbers. We need stories about groups that get pushed to the margins, silenced, forgotten. Not just Black people but any group that fits that description. I’m interested in pushing against the master narratives.

Martin Luther King Jr. mural in N. Portland, image from The Guardian

WNW: How would you characterize your approach to the Northwest in your own writing?

MSJ: At least ostensibly, my writing is narrow in scope. Mostly, I’ve written about Portland. Not Oregon at large. Not the Northwest. And to be more specific, I’ve mostly written about the Black community in Portland. That said, I believe in that microcosm I am able to write about things that are universal or at least not limited to Black people in Portland. We aren’t the only ones who’ve faced housing discrimination. Aren’t the only ones who’ve had to deal with a problem of youth violence. We aren’t the only ones whose community has been wracked by mass incarceration. We aren’t the only ones who created culture out of our oppression.

WNW: What is your favorite book about the Northwest and why do you like it?

MSJ: My favorite book about the Northwest is Fight Club. I love what Chuck [Palahniuk] does with voice. Love how he captures the anxiety of a generation, captures men’s fascination with violence. I love love love those Tyler Durden monologues. And then there’s the surprise at the end, which testifies to how well it’s plotted. That book is so good. So, so good. And the fact that he wrote that book while in Tom Spanbauer’s Portland-area workshop makes it more special to me. That book is a tie with Jesus’ Son. Among other strengths, the poetry of that book’s prose is unrivaled. I read it every year or so just to be reminded of what prose can do. That book is magic.

WNW: What is one of your favorite passages about the Northwest from your own writing?

MSJ: It’s the opening of Survival Math. It’s written as a letter to Marcus Lopius, the first Black man on record to step foot in what became the state of Oregon. Writing that essay pushed me to research more of my home state’s history, and let me tell you, it was revelatory. Something else: I can’t talk about that essay without mentioning Dr. Darrell Miller of Portland State (Go Vikings!) to whom I’m indebted for making me aware of Lopius and other important elements of Oregon’s history. In the essay, which is titled “Dear Marcus,” there’s a point at which I write about the beginning of whatever significant Black population Portland has:

“Scores of us can trace our roots in this city, the Rose City, to the 1940s, when one of our kinfolk from down South peeped a Help Wanted ad in their hometown paper, packed their life into bags and-or suitcases, and caught boxcars called the Magic Carpet Special or the Kaiser Caravan into Portland for a chance to build a new life working in one of Henry Kaiser’s shipyards. Those relatives locomoted into the City of Roses and found a hovel or shacked up with friends or relatives or in some cases slept on the pool table of a tavern and washed their private parts in a squalid bathroom. Or else moved to a slapdash development dubbed Kaiserville and renamed Vanport City. No matter the shelter they found, they could feel gratified building Liberty ships that would help the Allies beat the Nazis while clocking more dough for work than they ever did where they came from.”

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Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. Jackson’s debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications. Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, and Esquire, as well as in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. He holds the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professorship in the English Department of Arizona State University.

Book Review: We Had Our Reasons: Poems by Ricardo Ruiz

I never know where or how I’m going to come across good writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was walking through the book fair at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle when I found myself in conversation with a young man who had just published his first book of poetry, titled We Had Our Reasons. I asked him to tell me about it and liked both his subject–the lives of migrant workers–and his demeanor, so I bought a copy.

It was only when the writer, Ricardo Ruiz, had signed the book that I noticed the workers he wrote about lived in Eastern Washington. He had already told me his book was really a collaborative effort. He had interviewed workers of Mexican descent and fashioned poetry in different forms and voices from what they told him. Some were legal immigrants, some were undocumented, some had been born in the United States, and one was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.

It wasn’t until I was on the bus home and read the first few pages that I realized what a treasure his book is. In verse that has the accessibility of a Billy Collins or Mary Oliver but channels a very different world, Ruiz presents the struggles, hopes, and sometimes dangerous experiences of a group of people for whom the United States is both tentative home and too-often-tarnished dream.

His book is divided into sections that represent the different parts of the migrant worker experience: The Arrival, The Fields, Deportation, and Joining One Gang or Another. An introduction of sorts shares the book’s title, We Had Our Reasons, and the book ends with a final section called Collaborative Poets, in which Ruiz tells us about the lives of the people he interviewed, as well as his own, and includes fragments of his interviews with them.

Here’s a poem from the Arrival section called “Silent Crossing, Sleeping to the Other Side,” in the voice of a mother thinking about her young son:

you slept for two days
over-drugged by the coyote

I gathered all the sounds
you should have made

placing them inside the leather bag
upon my shoulder

when my steps strained
I opened the satchel and listened

                                   each night

I held your sounds
and know your future's here

And here’s one from the Deportation section titled “Can’t Trust Them”:

My dad traveled to Detroit in 1924
To answer this nation's call:
Leaving Monterrey, Mexico to work on
The railroad. His labor was needed
Until it wasn't. Forced out, fired
Because his job was given to
A white man in 1930. Repatriated

Again, the US came calling Mexican men.
To help the war fight, he returned.
He knew the job, he knew the railroad.
The war ended, yet he wasn't allowed to go home:
Locked up in Union Gap for answering
The call. Interned with 150 others
For being brown.

He walked home to Mexico,
his one true home,
Vowing never to return.
I told my dad I'm going north.
He sipped on his café con leche.
He didn't stop me;
He closed his eyes y me dio la bendición,

With the warning,
Don't ever trust America.

Other poems talk about being taped into a sleeping bag and stored for transport “like a gray balloon…where the trucker kept the chains,” or a mother serving “foil burritos still warm in the dented green Thermos” out in the fields “on our own Bring-Your-Kids-to-Work Day.” One poem ends with these simple words:

In court, a judge filled in the form:

NAME:       PATTY (LAST NAME HERE)

STATUS:   Immediate Deportation

AGE:           9

What Ruiz has given us is a portrait of an entire community that is generally overlooked and, if noticed, depersonalized or demonized. Yet here, in evocative writing, are the yearnings, the family connections, and the terribly hard work–in apple orchards, blueberry fields, potato factories–of people who dream and make mistakes, who love and live in fear of those who have power over them, merely because of their skin color.

We Had Our Reasons is published by the little-known Pulley Press, an imprint of Clyde Hill Publishing in Seattle and Washington, D. C. Buy this book (at only $18) and let it open your eyes and your heart to the hard but meaningful lives of the people in it. In doing so, you’ll expand your vision of what America is and at the same time help a promising young poet.

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Ricardo Ruiz is a multi-dimensional writer of poetry and prose. The son of potato factory workers, Ricardo hails from Othello, Washington. His work draws from his experience as a first-generation Mexican-American, and from his military service. Ricardo holds an Associate Degree in Business and Accounting from Big Bend Community College, where he was recognized as Student of the Year in both Business and Economics, and English Composition. He also holds a Bachelor of Art in Creative Writing from the University of Washington. While in the military, Ricardo earned the rank of Staff Sergeant while serving on four deployments, two to Afghanistan. He is passionate about elevating marginalized voices from rural communities and takes pride in being a conduit for cultural connection.

Note: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I will earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining WritingtheNorthwest.com.

March 27, 2023March 27, 2023

The Northwest’s 1st Black Theater Company–and the Fascinating Story of the Woman Who Started it

Recently, I came across a fascinating but little-known book that should be read by anyone interested in race relations, theater, or Red Scare accusations in the Pacific Northwest. Titled Fists Upon a Star: A Memoir of Love, Theatre, and Escape from McCarthyism, it tells the story of Florence B. James and her husband Burton James, who were pioneers and innovators in Seattle theater, including assembling the first all-Black company in the NW.

Although Florence James completed the book (with help from Canadian actress Jean Freeman) before her death in 1988, it wasn’t published until 25 years later. And when it was, it received little notice in the Northwest or in the U. S. in general, probably because its author was long dead and its publisher was the University of Regina Press in Canada, the country James fled to after being persecuted for the theater she dared to put on an American stage.

Florence and Burton started out in New York City but moved to Seattle in 1923 to take teaching jobs at Cornish College, the celebrated arts school that was still in its first decade then. Not content to be teachers only, they wanted to stage the kinds of cutting-edge and socially relevant plays they were most interested in. But when they tried to mount a production of Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Cornish board of directors refused to sanction “a supposedly ‘immoral’ play.”

Local theater leaders came to their defense but the board wouldn’t budge, so the Jameses resigned and started a company of their own, the Seattle Repertory Playhouse. When one of their defenders, Glenn Hughes, took over the University of Washington drama department, he hired them to teach there, and soon they were drawing increasingly larger audiences to an aging brick building near campus they’d converted into a theater.

Every part of the Jameses’ story is fascinating, including the accusations brought against them in 1948 of being communists, when they were forced to appear before Washington State’s newly formed Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (a forerunner of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s circus at the federal level). But the part I find most fascinating is their establishment of Seattle’s Negro Repertory Company in 1935.

As Florence tells the story, the Seattle Repertory Playhouse was flying high when, in 1932, in its fifth season, patrons who had purchased season tickets in earlier years sent notes saying they couldn’t afford them anymore. With the Depression hitting the Northwest hard, it looked as if their once-thriving venture would have to fold.

“We were out of oil and the electricity had been cut off for nonpayment of bills,” Florence writes. They burned odd bits of wood for heat, made a deal with power company, and “went on rehearsing, paying something here and something there” when they could. Through “a series of timely miracles,” as one of their players wrote in the company log, they were able to hold out until, in early 1935, they learned that one of the Roosevelt administration’s newly created agencies, the Works Progress Administration, had a program called the Federal Theatre Project, intended to employ out-of-work artists.

“When we discovered that this was not to be a ‘pork barrel’ for Broadway and Hollywood,” Florence writes, “we prepared a brief for what we decided to call a Negro Repertory Company.” When their project was accepted, their first production was of a play called Noah, translated from French.

A scene from the NRC’s 1936 production of *Stevedore* by Paul Peters and Sklar, image from the University of Washington’s “Negro Repertory Theatre” webpage

“We used Black music and introduced Black dancing to express the jubilation of Noah and his family when the flood recedes,” Florence writes. “Reviewers expressed amazement at the talent of people ‘taken from the scrap-heap of unemployment.'” She goes on to quote a reviewer from the Seattle Star who wrote: “This all-Negro cast put on a performance so rich, so full of promise, it was tragic in its implications. Tragic because these people who have so much to contribute have so long been wasted.”

For too brief a time, Black theater flourished on a Seattle stage in the depths of hard times, with all-Black shows playing to full houses night after night. The cast members were all amateurs, drawn mostly from Seattle’s First African Methodist Church, their talent, as the Star reviewer wrote, too long wasted.

When the group discovered that there were few good plays for Black actors, they began writing their own, but it was their production of a 2,000-year-old play, Lysistrata, that brought them the most attention. Called “indecent and bawdy,” their version of Aristophanes’ comedy was closed down “in the interest of the Federal Theatre Project.” The Negro Repertory Company continued to exist until Federal Theatre Project funding ended in 1939, but by then the Jameses had moved on.

Advertising poster for the NRC’s 1937 production, image from Historylink.org

Once the members of the Negro Repertory Company had gained production skills, Florence tells us, they began to help with White productions. “They came over willingly, joyfully, and everybody worked together. Whites taking orders from Black stage managers and technicians. Blacks working amicably with Whites–no Black power, no White power, no tensions, no frictions anywhere, just people joined in the effort of doing a job and doing it well.

“The experience of discovering talents among people who had been doing dull, mundane jobs was a constant source of joy to us. To see the colossal waste of such human resources, the most valuable assets to any country, and to realize what could have been accomplished and what this accomplishment could have meant was staggering.”

Decades passed before Seattle audiences saw a revival of Black theater. But just this year, the city’s ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) premiered a play by Seattle playwright Reginald André Jackson that explores the neglected history of Black theater. Titled History of Theatre: About, By, For, and Near, the show’s protagonist, a playwright seeking to write a new play about the history of Black theater, goes back in time and asks the members of the Negro Repertory Company for help.

~ ~ ~

(Click here to read Sarah Guthu’s excellent summary of the Negro Repertory Company’s history on the University of Washington’s “The Great Depression in Washington State” website. It includes illustrated histories of the group’s Lysistrata and two other productions. And click here to read Guthu’s equally fine writing about the Jameses and their Seattle Repertory Playhouse, from which some of the facts in this post are drawn.)

America’s Midnight in the Pacific Northwest

Adam Hochschild is not known for writing light books, nor is he known for writing about the Pacific Northwest. His best-known book is probably King Leopold’s Ghost (1998), an unrelenting exploration of the brutality, exploitation and outright slavery Belgian overlords used to extract rubber from what was then called the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

That’s about as far from Washington, Oregon and Idaho as you can get.

But Hochschild’s new book, American Midnight, is set in the United States, in the years 1917-1921, when America’s entry into World War I set off some of the most brutal and repressive government and vigilante actions in this country’s history. And it contains numerous examples of courage and hope, many from the Northwest.

President Woodrow Wilson, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Subtitling his book “The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis,” Hochschild explores the ways Woodrow Wilson’s administration and the country’s reactionary elements used the war to go after anyone who didn’t support their jingoist enterprise or the corporate entities and plutocrats who made money off it.

The resulting terror–aimed at Socialists, labor leaders, peace advocates, conscientious objectors, and, most brutally, African Americans–brought democracy to its knees. But a number of brave advocates for the common people resisted the violent coercion, often at the cost of their livelihoods, their health and even their lives.

Any Northwesterner who believes in progressive politics–including the advancement of worker rights, a woman’s right to control of her own body, fair taxation, alleviation of poverty, and even the basic right of freedom from arbitrary search and seizure–will find plenty in Hochschild’s book to feel proud of.

Marie Equi, MD, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

There’s Marie Equi, for example, a Portland physician and suffragist, who was in a same-sex relationship at a time when that was far more dangerous than it is today. A brash woman with a fiery temper, Equi “ignored the law that outlawed distributing birth control devices and information, and defied both the government and the American Medical Association by performing abortions,” treating poor women for free.

Once, to avoid arrest for speaking out against the war, Equi “borrowed the crampons of a telephone company lineman, and used them to climb high up a pole. From there, she unfurled a banner reading DOWN WITH THE IMPERIALIST WAR.”

There are also the leaders of the Seattle General Strike, which, in 1919 shut down an entire city for the first time in American history, but did so in an orderly way that avoided bloodshed and undue hardship for most citizens.

And there’s the International Workers of the World labor union, which was particularly strong in the Northwest. The Wobblies, as they were called, were singled out again and again for the harshest treatment. The union suffered destruction of its property, arrest of its members, and sometimes death at the hands of those who thought it a haven for foreign-controlled socialism (including members of the American Legion).

At a time when almost 15% of Americans were foreign-born, much of harshest treatment was meted out to immigrants, who had flooded into the Northwest in those days to work in the timber, mining, and fishing industries.

To be fair, the Northwest had its share of villains too. One of the worst, in Hochschild’s estimation, was a Congressman from the coastal timber country in Washington State named Albert Johnson, who sat on the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization and was vicious in his denunciation and harassment of immigrants.

Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson in 1919, the year of the Seattle General Strike, image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Another was Ole Hanson, Seattle’s mayor at the time of the General Strike, who blamed not only the strike but everything he thought wrong with America on Socialist and Communists. Hanson went on lucrative speaking tours around the country, spewing his hatred to all who would listen, and even ran for President with anti-immigrant and anti-socialism as his platform.

According to Hochschild, vociferous denunciation of the Seattle strikers as advocates for the “anarchy of Russia” and enemies of law and order “launched Hanson as perhaps the first member of an occupation that would prove lucrative for other twentieth-century Americans: professional anti-Communist.”

American Midnight is primarily about a country in a life-or-death crisis, its democracy threatened by warmongering, government oppression, hunger for profits, vigilante “justice,” white supremacy, and a misguided defense of some supposed American Way of Life.

Sprinkled throughout it, however, you’ll find ample evidence of a previously neglected part of the country coming into its own and lending its voice, for better or worse, to the national conversation: the Pacific Northwest.

Three Questions and a Quote: Novelist and Screenwriter Jon Raymond

Northwest author and screenwriter Jon Raymond

After a brief break over the holidays, Writing the Northwest is back, and I’m pleased to start the new year with a new feature and one of my favorite Northwest writers, Jon Raymond. Raymond is the author of an award-winning story collection, an essay collection, and four novels, including Denial (2022), a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award in Fiction. He has also coauthored several films, including the HBO mini-series “Mildred Pierce” and the remarkable “First Cow.” Most of his work is set in the Northwest. See below for a full bio and links to his books and films.

Three Questions and a Quote is a new, occasional feature focused on the thoughts and work of prominent Northwest writers.

Jon Raymond

WNW: What aspect of the Northwest do you feel hasn’t been adequately addressed in writing (or film) yet?

Aerial shot of Hanford’s 100-D Area along the Columbia River (Image courtesy of Hanford.gov)

JR: Well, I don’t entirely want to let this one out of the bag because I hope someday to get there myself, but I think the life of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is something worth addressing in fiction. The people and culture of Richland, Washington—the scene of American’s Cold War plutonium production—could be turned into a gigantic story of secrecy, intrigue, little league baseball, PTA politics, etc., etc. I have some ideas, though the atomic science part is very intimidating. In general, the high plains desert of the NW is pretty under-imagined.

WNW: How would you characterize your approach to the Northwest in your own writing?

JR: I’ve always thought of my approach, if you could call it that, as a kind of earth art. I’ve mentally roved around the region and tried to divine what kind of stories would be appropriate to different landscapes. It’s partly a geological thing, but also socio-historical. What kind of story turns the scene of Ashland inside out? What kind of story could only happen in La Grande? I’ve really been guided by this dowsing method to the point where I’ve started to exhaust the main reservoirs, I think.

WNW: What is your favorite book (or film) about the Northwest and why do you like it?

Atop Seattle’s Space Needle (scene from *Parallax View*, directed by Alan J. Pakula and starring Warren Beaty)

JR: I’ve heard Charlie D’Ambrosio call Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion the Odyssey of Northwest fiction, and I’d totally agree with that. Charlie’s books aren’t too shabby, either. I also love The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, which captures a very different but also very Northwestern mood. “Mala Noche,” the film by Gus Van Sant, based on the story by Walt Curtis, is pure poetry. And then, as far as catching the subtleties of Northwestern light, I’d put the “Parallax View,” shot by the great Gordon Willis, way up top.

WNW: What is one of your favorite passages about the Northwest from your own writing?

I don’t think I could answer that. None come to mind, anyway. There might be some passages early in The Half-Life, my first book, that name certain impressions that’ve stuck with me. I sometimes feel myself repeating them and I have to find other ways to get the feelings across.

Photo by Eberhard Grossgasteiger, courtesy of Pexels.com

(Since Jon has demurred here, let me offer a brief passage from one of his Northwest-set novels, Rain Dragon, to give you a sense of his sharp and lovely prose: “Off in the distance, a fir-covered ridge was resolving into view, mist caught in the black trees like torn cotton. The fog kept thinning. In the still-dark basin of a valley, a river of headlights became visible. The highway.”

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Jon Raymond is the author of the novels The Half-Life, Rain Dragon, Freebird, and Denial, and the story collection Livability, winner of the Oregon Book Award. He also published a collection of essays called The Community: Writings About Art In and Around Portland, 1997 – 2016. His screenwriting credits include Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves, First Cow, and Showing Up, as well as the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. He was the editor of Plazm Magazine, associate and contributing editor at Tin House magazine, and served on the Board of Directors at Literary Arts. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, the writer Emily Chenoweth, and their kids, Eliza and Josephine.

Set in Seattle: John Okada’s NO-NO BOY a Must-Read on the Agonies of American Immigration and Assimilation

by Michael N. McGregor

When Americans talk about immigration, they tend to have one of two groups in mind: either the crowds of Latin American refugees massing along our southern border today or the waves of Europeans who swept into the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Almost entirely forgotten are the Asian immigrants who settled mostly along the West Coast at roughly the same time Europeans were flooding in. Among them, the Chinese suffered the worst early experiences, subjected as they were to humiliations and killings and legislated exclusion from the country. But it was the Japanese, both foreign- and domestic-born, who, in 1942, at the direction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became the only Americans (other than enslaved Blacks) ever rounded up and incarcerated solely because of their ethnicity.

The basic story of Executive Order 9066–by which people of Japanese ancestry (whether American citizens or not) were deprived of their civil rights and forced to leave their homes, businesses, and farms to live in internment camps in desolate areas–is well-known today. Children often learn about it in school. What isn’t generally known or taught, however, is the devastating effect the internment experience and its aftermath had on the minds and lives of those forced to endure it.

Barracks and Water Tower (Minidoka internment camp), Kenjiro Nomura, Tacoma Art Museum

I’ve written about that dark period myself, both here and elsewhere, but my observations were those of an historian, my understanding that of an outsider–until this past month when I finally read a book I’d intended to read for years: John Okada’s No-No Boy.

Before I discuss the book’s content, let me state clearly that No-No Boy is not just a great book about the experiences of Japanese Americans; it’s a great book, period. Not only is it beautifully written, it’s also unflinchingly honest and fair and heartbreaking.

Published in 1957, No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro, a young Japanese American man returning to his hometown of Seattle in 1946. Instead of returning from the war like others in the city’s Japanese community, he is returning from two years in prison, where he was sent for answering ‘no’ to two questions every young man of Japanese descent was asked: Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States? Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the country? (His answers are the no-no of the book’s title.)

The first thing that happens to Ichiro when he reaches Seattle is a former acquaintance who did serve in the military spits on him. Worse is yet to come as he faces accusations of treason and betrayal as well as the doubts, regrets, and shame in his own mind.

While Ichiro is always central, part of what makes the book so good and devastating (as well as pertinent to discussions about immigrants today) is how well and fairly Okada renders not only Ichiro’s psychological state but those of everyone he encounters–from immigrants like his mother who remain devoted to Japan to the whites who have little idea what someone like Ichiro is going through.

Some in the book are kind and some are cruel, but no one is reduced to a type or a category. All have their reasons for all acting and speaking the way they do. And Okada gives them all their due, even those who seem most awful.

Okada wasn’t afraid to interrogate his own culture as well as the larger white culture around it, or to drill down into the various sicknesses and cruelties at the family and interpersonal levels.

Rendered in a voice that’s both distinctive and perfectly in tune with its time and characters, Okada’s willingness to look unflinchingly at how people truly think and treat each other makes No-No Boy one of those rare books—like Stoner or Revolutionary Road—that seem to hold the raw and bloody heart of life in their hands.

Here, for example, is Ichiro thinking about his younger brother, Taro, who detests him for not serving in the military and plans to enter the post-war army himself:

Taro, my brother who is not my brother, you are no better than I. You are only more fortunate that the war years found you too young to carry a gun. You are fortunate like the thousands of others who, for various reasons of age and poor health and money and influence, did not happen to be called to serve in the army, for their answers might have been the same as mine. And you are fortunate because the weakness which was mine made the same weakness in you the strength to turn your back on Ma and Pa and make it so frighteningly urgent for you to get into uniform to prove you are not a part of me. I was born not soon enough or not late enough and for that I have been punished. It is not just, but it is true. I am not one of those who wait for the ship from Japan with baggage ready, yet the hundreds who do are freer and happier and fuller than I. I am not to blame but you blame me and for that I hate you and I will hate you more when you go into the army and come out and walk the streets of America as if you owned them always and forever.

Laid out in this book, in sometimes agonizing, sometimes breathtaking clarity, is the immigrant experience: the awful decisions and compromises and consequences America demands of those who seek only to be accepted, fully and respectfully, as fellow citizens.

John Okada in 1957, the year No-No Boy was published. Image from the University of Washington Magazine.

A few links:

John Okada’s personal story is as agonizing as that of the main character in his only novel. You can read about his difficult life and what became of his second book in “The Legacy of No-No Boy” by Vince Schleitwiler, published in the December 2019 issue of University of Washington Magazine.

“‘No-No Boy’ went from unknown book to classic thanks to UW Press and Asian American writers. Now, it’s at the center of a controversy,” The Seattle Times, June 13, 2019

Densho, a website whose mission is to “preserve and share history of the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans to promote equity and justice today.”

A recent New York Times article about a 100-year friendship between a Japanese American family and a Native American tribe in Washington’s Yakima Valley

November 29, 2022December 7, 2022

Northwest Indigenous Artist Sky Hopinka Receives 2022 MacArthur “Genius Grant”

Sky Hopinka, Artist and Filmmaker, 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

by Michael N. McGregor

A few weeks ago, I received an email from one of my old colleagues at Portland State University telling me a former student, Sky Hopinka, had been awarded a 2022 MacArthur “Genius Grant.” When I looked him up, I was pleased to see that his art is centered in the experience of indigenous people, including some from the Northwest.

Hopinka not only earned his BA from PSU but was born in Ferndale, Washington. And while his work in film, photography, and poetry is wide-ranging, several of his videos focus on Northwest indigenous life.

His first feature-length film, “maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore” (2020), for example, is set entirely in the Northwest world of its two indigenous protagonists.

An image from “*maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore*“

Here’s a brief description from a New York Times review by Beatrice Loayza:

The documentary, anchored in the Chinookan origin-of-death myth (a dialogue between a wolf and a coyote about the afterlife), separately follows two young parents — pregnant Sahme and Jordan Mercier, both friends of Hopinka’s — as they grapple with questions of legacy and identity.

Subtitles switch between English and Chinook jargon, yet the oral component (including Hopinka’s narration) occasionally fades into the backdrop with sound design that amplifies the crackling of a fire, the bubbling and thrashing of the ocean and waterfalls.

The natural world, with its never-ending tides and its cycles of life and death, provides a framework for the preservation of Indigenous culture, resilient despite its new forms and manifestations.

In reviewer Glenn Heath Jr. ‘s good (free) review for the Film Stage website, he calls “maɬni ” an “elegiac and at times mesmerizing feature debut.” His review gives a good description of the film’s content, including the ways Hopinka challenges traditional white use of ethnographic documentary to “exoticize non-Western communities.”

You can watch the entire film at The Criterion Collection, which offers a free 14-day trial.

For a shorter look at Hopinka’s vision of the Northwest, try “Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary,” a 13-minute video available for free on his website.

Here’s how he describes this shorter work: “Images and representations of two structures in the Portland Metropolitan Area that have direct and complicated connections to the Chinookan people who inhabit(ed) the land are woven with audio tapes of one of the last speakers of chinuk wawa, the Chinookan creole, chinuk wawa.”

According to the bio on his website, Hopinka is from the Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians, but during his days in Portland he both studied and taught chinuk wawa (Chinook jargon).

Hopinka’s work has appeared at numerous festivals, including Sundance, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the New York Film Festival. It has also been part of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, the 2018 FRONT Triennial, and Prospect.5 in 2021. It will be exciting to see what his MacArthur Fellowship allows him to do next.

In a conversation with Theo Anthony published in Filmmaker Magazine, he said this about his work:

“[E]mpathy is something I think a lot about. It’s also the relationship, as Adam Khalil put it, between knowledge and information around indigenous cultures. What does it mean to know something, and what does it mean to have facts about something or a culture or a community? And as I try to not explain things, I’m hoping that through context or the things that are nearby, an audience will be able to understand how I feel about them, or place themselves in a certain empathetic space where they may not know what’s going on, but they know how to feel about it.”

How a Fashion Trend Led to an Eastern Oregon Bloodbath–and How It Was Stopped

Photograph courtesy of the Audubon Society.

Few people other than outdoorsy Oregonians and avid birders had ever heard of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon before Ammon Bundy and his gang of armed militants occupied it for six weeks in the early days of 2016. Some feared at the time that the occupation would lead to bloodshed in a pristine environment.

What they didn’t know was that the refuge had already been the site of a massive bloodbath a hundred years before.

From the late 19th C through the early years of the 20th C, one of history’s most dismaying fashion trends was the wearing of feathers and even entire birds on women’s hats. According to historian Douglas Brinkley, at the height of this trend more than five million birds were being slaughtered each year in the name of fashion.

Images from the Pacific Standard website.

During just two walks down the streets of Manhattan in 1866, ornithologist Frank Chapman spied the feathers of at least 40 kinds of birds on hundreds of hats, including Grebes, Virginia Rails, California Quail, Pileated Woodpeckers, Bobolinks, Scarlet Tanagers, Meadowlarks and Cedar Waxwings.

More popular than all of these, however, were the feathers of Herons and Swans and especially the Great and Snowy Egrets, all of which could be found in the remote wetlands in and around what would one day become the Malheur refuge. The slaughter there was well under way when two of Oregon’s earliest environmentalist, William L. Finley and Hermany T. Bohlman, began to catalogue it and work to end it.

According to author Carey Myles, who writes about Finley and Bohlman in a chapter called “The Plume Defenders” in a new book about Oregon birding (A History of Oregon Ornithology, Oregon State University Press, 2022), the pair first arrived in the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake area in the summer of 1905, tasked by the National Association of Audubon Societies with “documenting species though notes and photographs, and determining conditions for birds.”

Flocks of birds, Malheur Lake, photograph by William L. Finley, 1908. Courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society.

Having traveled on horseback from Ashland, Oregon, “carrying camping equipment, three cameras and 700 glass plates,” they created a blind with a large umbrella and a surrounding ring of green canvas and focused first on photographing American White Pelicans. In the hot, cramped interior, the two took turns bent over a large camera, photographing for up to eight hours a day before moving on to other species.

As Myles writes:

It wasn’t until spring and summer of 1908 that Finley and Bohlman were able to complete their inspection of Oregon’s interior wetlands by visiting Malheur Lake and the surrounding marshes. They were overwhelmed by the richness of birdlife they found there, but also dismayed to find that such remote marshes had been significantly impacted by market hunting…

They discovered a Western Grebe nesting ground shortly after plume hunters had been through. Finley and Bohlman were enraged to find the bodies of dead birds with just the soft breast feathers removed. Still, they kept the goal of using photographs to argue for conservation in mind. Finding a dead grebe in the water next to two downy, hungry chicks sitting in their nest, they took multiple photographs, taking care over the composition.

Their photographs, with the bird’s blood colored red, were used as lantern slides for Audubon Society lectures about the evils of the plume trade. According to the Friends of Malheur website, “their photographs and testimony caught the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt,” who eventually signed an executive order designating 80,000 acres around Mud, Harney and Malheur Lakes “as a preserve and breeding ground for native birds”–one of 51 bird reserves Roosevelt established during his presidency.

A local family with their harvest of swans. Image from the Friends of Malheur website.

Ten years later, in 1918, the United States and Canada enacted the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which made it illegal to “pursue, hunt, take, capture, kill, or sell” any of the birds on a list of 1,100 species. The list covers almost every bird in North America (with limited exceptions for hunting and non-native species). To this day, it is against the law to even possess anything connected to these birds, including their feathers, eggs and nests.

Today, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge is a rare and beautiful wetlands area teeming with birds of all kinds. For a list of species and information on what you’ll see there in different seasons, click here. And for directions on how to visit, click here.

Image from the Portland Community College website.

A few more links:

A History of Oregon Ornithology: From Territorial Days to the Rise of Birding, edited by Alan L. Contreras, Vjera E. Thompson, and Nolan M. Clements, with a link for ordering from Oregon State University Press (2022, $34.95)

Refuge history page on the Friends of Malheur website

Oregon History Project page about the Finley photograph shown above, with suggestions for further reading

“The Migratory Bird Treaty Act, Explained,”on the Audubon Society’s website

National Resources Defense Council webpage on recent threats to the Migratory Bird Treaty Act

“Plume Trade,” the gory details about the slaughtering of birds and how it was stopped

“Hats Off to Women Who Saved the Birds,” a fascinating article by PBS on how women, who were being blamed for the slaughter, took the initiative to end it

October 4, 2022October 4, 2022

Portland the Spinster

A three-week road trip through parts of the Midwest and Canada (including Chatham, Ontario, where the subject of my next biography–J. D. Ross–grew up) has kept me from posting anything for a while. But I’m back in the Northwest now and I just came across a May 19, 1917, article published in the national magazine Collier’s Weekly, entitled “Portland the Spinster.”

Intrigued? Me too. I always enjoy seeing how outsiders view the Northwest. This particular piece was written by a Californian named Wilbur Hall, who seems to have done little beyond this kind of magazine writing.

Hall begins with a wide-angle view of the lush Willamette Valley and its nearby mountains before zeroing on the people of Portland who, he says, “speak aggrievedly and as children disappointed when the peaks are veiled with clouds.” Having established a condescending tone, he quickly moves on to his main point: that Portland is like a reclusive, persnickety and somewhat risable woman–in his parlance, a “spinster.”

Hall attributes the city’s spinster-ness to the continued, conservative control of the FFPs–the First Families of Portland, or, as he calls them again and again, “the Corbetts and the Failings and the Ladds and the Lewises and the Flanderses and the Hoyts and their kind.”

Waiting on the “approving nod of these families” he writes, are “questions of municipal harbor bonds, a mayor’s election, the Drama League, the repainting of the church, women’s smoking, the length of bathing costumes, and the absence of length in street skirts, prohibition, the location of the First National Bank, the conduct of our war against the I. W. W., pure-milk campaigns, the tango, the movie, the treatment to be accorded anarchists, strangers, holy men, fakers, new doctrines, new art, new thought, new life.”

According to Hall, the rest of Portland’s population “is built from two quite different classes, yet with many characteristics in common that would combine to give any community a flavor of provincialism.”

The first to arrive, he writes, were “powerful, slow, industrious, gentle, lovable people from the north of Europe–Swedes and Danes and Norwegians–drawn into this country of timber by the irresistible force of traditional vocation.”

The second were “families threatened by the maelstrom of the early days of the Rebellion–border-State folk without sympathy to attach them to the heroic flags of the South or conviction to carry them into the zealous ranks of the North. They were neither cowards nor shirkers, probably–just silent, unimaginative, unconcerned agriculturalists, for whom moving was cheaper and easier and safer than fighting or standing between those who fought.”

In sum, the city was composed of fusty overlords and slow, unimaginative sheep.

Yet in Hall’s time, Portland had a very different reputation in some circles. It was known as the birth place of the Oregon System, which put political power in the hands of the people. How did he account for that?

Yes, Portland did hold the reins of power in the state, he allowed, and it was difficult to “square the [city’s] tendency toward reaction with the fact of progressivism.” But he had an answer for it:

“It happened that they had in their midst able leaders, ahead of their times. It happened also that there was a group of strong and consistent radicals among them–men of unusual ability, of high standing in the community, and of pronouncedly revolutionary schools. My notion is that the hidebound conservatives who dominate Portland when they exert themselves were caught napping in those early days when the direct-legislation triplets–initiative, referendum, and recall–were brought forth for the first time. Woman suffrage, prohibition, protective and regulatory measures of State socialization, came in in a rush. Before the conservatives woke up, Oregon was committed to an out-and-out progressive program. And now no one, not even the conservatives themselves, would be willing to go back to the older system.”

Image from the Oregon Secretary of State website.

In other words, Portland’s conservative FFPs were lazy and hoodwinked but simply said, “Oh, well” when they found themselves in a new system.

There is much to smile at in Hall’s depiction of a city he wants to dismiss as being unworthy of comparison to his own Los Angeles. But at least he comes close to getting Portland’s rain right:

“As nearly as I can get at it, Portland doesn’t have so much real rain–not in inches; it just seems to have. As I understand it, Portland’s rains are scattered more or less evenly through the year, sunshine and downpour being doled out in climactic layers. I was assured by Portlanders, not only that no one minds the rain, but that they don’t have a really wet rain.”

September 13, 2022September 14, 2022

More Than a Dozen Books About the Pacific Northwest Are Finalists for Today’s Washington State Book Awards

When the winners of the 2022 Washington State Book Awards are announced today, books set in or focused on the Pacific Northwest are sure to be among the winners.

The awards–given out by the Washington Center for the Book (an affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book, administered by the Washington State Library)–are intended only to honor “outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2021,” whatever their subject matter. But, of course, many Washington authors choose to write about this fascinating and beautiful part of the world.

This year’s list of finalists includes more than a dozen books that touch in some way on the Northwest. (My count is based on what I could determine by reading each book’s description, so there may be more.)

While the awards are “based on the strength of the publication’s literary merit, lasting importance and overall quality,” the judges all come from Washington, so having your book set in the Northwest can’t hurt, right?

Here’s a list of the Northwest-related finalists, some of which I’ll be reviewing on the WNW site in the coming weeks (just click on the title for a description):

2022 WSBA FINALISTS–BOOKS FOR ADULTS

Biography/Memoir

“Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism” by Elsa Sjunneson, of Seattle (S&S/Simon Element)
“Crossing the River: Seven Stories That Saved My Life” by Carol Smith, of Seattle (Harry N. Abrams)
“The Other Mothers: Two Women’s Journey to Find the Family That Was Always Theirs” by Jennifer Berney, of Olympia (Sourcebooks)

Creative Nonfiction

“We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration” written by Frank Abe of Seattle and Tamiko Nimura of Tacoma; artwork by Ross Ishikawa of Seattle and Matt Sasaki of Edmonds (Chin Music Press)
“White Magic: Essays” by Elissa Washuta, enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe (Tin House Books)

Fiction

“The Ex Talk” by Rachel Lynn Solomon, of Seattle (Berkley)
“Legends of the North Cascades” by Jonathan Evison, of Bainbridge Island (Algonquin Books)
“What Comes After” by JoAnne Tompkins, of Port Townsend (Riverhead Books)

General Nonfiction

“Coming Home to Nez Perce Country: The Niim̕ipuu Campaign to Repatriate Their Exploited Heritage” by Trevor James Bond, of Pullman (Washington State University Press)
“Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II” by Daniel James Brown, of Redmond (Viking)
“Fear No Man: Don James, the ’91 Huskies, and the Seven-year Quest for A National Football Championship” by Mike Gastineau, of Whidbey Island (University of Washington Press)

“Murder at the Mission: A Frontier Killing, Its Legacy of Lies, and the Taking of the American West” by Blaine Harden, of Seattle (Penguin Books)
“Orca: Shared Waters, Shared Home” written by Lynda Mapes, of Seattle (Braided River and The Seattle Times)
“Skid Road: on the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City” by Josephine Ensign, of Seattle (Johns Hopkins University Press)

Poetry

“Broken by Water: Salish Sea Years” by Gary Thompson, of Friday Harbor, San Juan County (Turning Point)
“Stray Birds” by Andrew Robin, of Lopez Island, San Juan County (Kelson Books)

2022 WSBA FINALISTS–BOOKS FOR YOUTH

Picture Books

“1, 2, 3 Salish Sea: A Pacific Northwest Counting Book” written and illustrated by Nikki McClure, of Olympia (Little Bigfoot)

Books for Young Readers

“Mighty Inside” by Sundee Frazier, of Renton (Levine Querido)
“Orca Rescue: The True Story of an Orphaned Orca Named Springer” written by Donna Sandstrom, of Seattle; illustrated by Sarah Burwash (Kids Can Press)

For a full list of this year’s finalists and more about this year’s awards, including judges, click here.

Sept. 14 Postscript: Here’s the list of the winners, along with links for ordering them: Edmonds Bookshop.

Congratulations to all of these fine writers, both finalists and award winners!