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 FINALISTSBOOKS FOR ADULTS

Biography/Memoir

Creative Nonfiction

Fiction

General Nonfiction

Poetry

2022 WSBA FINALISTS–BOOKS FOR YOUTH

Picture Books

Books for Young Readers

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!

A Small NW Museum’s Presentation of a Japanese American’s Life and Art Raises the Question of What Might Have Been…

Sometimes you find the most interesting and informative visions of an area like the Pacific Northwest in out-of the-way places. After reading an article in the Seattle Times, my wife and I traveled out to Edmonds, WA, the other day to view the works of Kenjiro Nomura, an amazing and quintessentially NW artist who moved to Washington state from Gifu, Japan, in 1907 when he was 11.

Within a few years, Nomura was studying with the Dutch immigrant artist Fokko Tadama, who, according to the exhibit, “taught a plein air style of painting with loose brushwork that was similar to impressionism.” Like Nomura, many of Tadama’s students were of Japanese heritage and began to be recognized for the quality of their work while still students. That is to say, a group of talented young Japanese and Japanese American artists was thriving in the Seattle area as early as the 1910s.

Portrait, 1925, Kenjiro Nomura

Throughout the 20’s and 30’s, Nomura continued to grow as an artist, painting both urban scenes and landscapes in oils and watercolors. Somewhere around 1930, he moved beyond Tadama’s impressionist style and developed a more modernist style of his own: “a personalized approach that emphasized form, color, texture, and the atmospheric light unique to this region.” When the Seattle Art Museum opened in 1933, Nomura was the first local artist to have a solo exhibition there. Soon, his work was being exhibited across the country.

Yesler Way, 1934, Kenjiro Nomura

During the depths of the Depression in 1933-34, Nomura was part of the New Deal’s Public Works of Art Project, a program meant to help struggling artists. A year later, he became part of Seattle’s progressive Group of Twelve, a collection of leading local artists from many backgrounds. In other words, he was a full and integral part of a local American art scene with a growing national reputation…

…and then came Pearl Harbor and FDR’s Executive Order 9066, ordering the incarceration of almost 120,000 Japanese Americans, 2/3 of them American citizens.

Nomura was interned, with his wife and son, at a collection camp called Harmony, where the Puyallup Fairgrounds stand today. From there, they were sent to the Minidoka Relocation Center in a wasteland in south-central Idaho, where they remained until the end of WWII. (“The first thing that impressed me was the bareness of the land,” said camp resident Shozo Kaneko in a 1943 interview. “There wasn’t a tree in sight, not even a blade of green grass. Coming from the northwest where there was a lot of green fields and forest, the sights staggered most of us who had never seen anything like that before.”)

Here’s what one of the exhibit signs says about the effect on Nomura of his time at Minidoka: “The same government who paid for his artistic services less than ten years earlier had now created a devastating personal situation that would affect the rest of his life. He and his wife and son returned to Seattle in 1945 only to have his wife commit suicide the following year.”

Barracks and Water Tower, 1943, Kenjiro Nomura
George, Fumiko & Kenjiro Nomura, circa 1945

When Nomura reluctantly resumed painting after his wife’s death, he turned to abstraction and soon his work was popular again. The height of his success came in 1955 when his paintings were part of a major exhibition of NW artists in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and a show called Eight Washington Painters at the Portland Art Museum. A year later, his work was included in an exhibition titled Pacific Coast Art that traveled to top museums around the country. But that June, at only 59 years of age, Nomura died from complications from surgery.

Harbor, 1953, Kenjiro Nomura

What I find most intriguing, saddening, and infuriating about Nomura’s story is the promise his talent, associations and success represent–a promise cut short for so many Americans and hardworking immigrants in the NW by prejudice and fear of “the other.” In the days before he was sent to Minidoka, Nomura said about his art:

“My desire in painting is to avoid the conventional art rules, so that I can be free to paint and approach Nature creatively. I have gradually and almost unconsciously been influenced by the work of early Japanese painters. Now realizing this influence, I am consciously trying to utilize those qualities that I want, such as color, line and simplicity of conception, in my own style of painting. Due to the great difference between the Western style of painting and the Japanese, the problem is a very difficult one, but I am devoting every effort to achieve this.”

What other fine integrations of East and West–what advantageous hybrids and creative leaps–did we lose when a vital population was uprooted; deprived of their homes, businesses and artistic pursuits; and sent to live in concentration camps because of a deep-seated racism in this country?

I’m grateful to Cascadia Art Museum curator David F. Martin, who put the Nomura exhibit together, not only for introducing me to some of the most moving and impressive art I’ve seen in a long time but also for telling Nomura’s story: for writing the Northwest in this too-rare and much-needed way.

Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey runs through February 20, 2022, at the Cascadia Art Museum at 190 Sunset Ave. S., #E in Edmonds, WA.

Exhibit hours are:

11 a.m.-5 p.m. Thurs.-Sun.

Ticket prices are:

Adults: $10
Seniors: $7
Youth (0-18): Free
Students: Free

To learn more about the exhibit, go to the Cascade Art Museum’s website.

For an in-depth look at Nomura’s life and art, consider purchasing art historian Barbara Johns’ Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist, available for $39.95 on the CAM site.

Guest Post: “Oregon, My Oregon” Exhibit at Portland’s Central Library Gives Expansive View of How Writers, Artists, and Others Have Depicted the State Throughout Its History

by Jim Carmin (John Wilson Special Collections Librarian, Multnomah County Library, Portland, OR, jimc@multcolib.org)

Mr. Otis painting, image courtesy of Jim Carmin

When, in October, I was asked, at the last minute, to install an exhibition at the Central Library, my eyes closed and my mind raced as I wondered how I’d approach this new challenge. Then, when I opened my eyes, I saw a Mr. Otis painting sitting atop a shelf in the special collections and it all came together.

It’s not surprising that our collection represents much of what Oregon has been and is, as our library is only five years younger than the state itself. Built by the generosity of this community, past and present, our special collections holdings reflect the economic and social history, the art, the writing, and the natural history of our great state.

  • “Oregon, My Oregon” from the John Wilson Special Collections
  • November 13, 2021 – January 24, 2022
  • 10-6 M, W-Sat., 10-5 Sun., 12-8 T
  • Collins Gallery, 3rd Floor
  • Central Library, Multnomah County Library
  • 801 SW 10th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 

On view in the new exhibition are large maps of Portland neighborhoods, including Sellwood and Mt. Tabor Heights, produced just before the turn of the 20th century to induce home buyers to move to these “most desirable” new neighborhoods. Another case features a plan of Vanport, Oregon’s second most populous city in the 1940s, built quickly to house shipyard workers during World War II. Also on exhibit are photographs of the aftermath of the terrible flood that destroyed Vanport in 1948, displacing thousands, including Black workers who were suddenly homeless in Portland; there is also the only copy of a report written to determine why the calamity occurred.

Oregon has a harsh history of treating its people of color poorly and stark evidence of that is on exhibit, including the original 1849 Oregon Territory Statute excluding Black people from moving into or living in the state. In the same case is Masks Off! Confessions of an Imperial Klansman from 1925, exposing Oregon politicians’ affinity with this terrible hate group. Oregon’s Indigenous people also suffered mightily. On display is a map showing ancestral locations of various tribes in, ironically, an 1875 publication meant to encourage white settlement in the state, as well as photographs of the Indian Training School in Forest Grove from the early 1880s showing young men and women, calling them “new recruits” despite being forcefully brought here.

There are numerous 19th-photographs of Portland including a well-known three-panel large panorama by Carleton Watkins from 1867 given to library by Matthew Deady; there are also several new acquisitions purchased (with funds from The Library Foundation) during the current pandemic, including a two-part photo from 1884 of Portland school children that shows the rare presence of three Black children; and a spectacular photo album containing almost 300 images around the turn of the 20th century, open to a two-page spread of Portland firehouses and firefighters.

A small number of Oregon’s many writers are represented here, including Ken Kesey (his seminal Oregon novel Sometimes a Great Notion; and an original drawing by former Oregonian editorial cartoonist Jack Ohman of Kesey’s obituary); Elizabeth Woody (her first book of poems and an early manuscript of a short story, with corrections); Beverly Cleary (born in McMinnville; Henry Huggins is here along with a map of his northeast Portland neighborhood); Ursula K. LeGuin (a signed broadside of a poem written for Oregon’s Calyx Journal, one of the first journals ever that celebrated women writers and artists); Edwin Markham (Oregon’s first Poet Laureate most well known for “The Man with the Hoe” from 1898); Kim Stafford (a broadside he wrote for former Governor John Kitzhaber and a poem he wrote in Spirit Land, a fine press book with beautiful color lino prints by Oregon artist Peggy Prentice of Eugene); and Barry Lopez, represented here with his provocative essay Apologia about his empathy to roadkill while driving from Oregon to Indiana, and a moving printed plan of his McKenzie River property showing where the late National Book Award winner found cougar tracks, and where he planted trees–all the more poignant now after most of this land was devastated by a wildfire in 2020, just a few months before he died on Christmas day.

drawing of Barry Lopez property, image courtesy of Jim Carmin

Other prominent Oregonians appearing in the exhibition include the aforementioned Mr. Otis (and coincidentally, Stewart Holbrook); Laverne Krause; George Flanders; Henry W. Corbett; John Wilson; Paulann Petersen; David Sohappy, Sr.; and George Johanson. Natural Oregon is here too with unusual views of Mr. Hood glaciers; of early Oregon logging camps; and 33 reels of three-dimensional mushrooms, along with the Viewmaster device in which to see them. And of course there’s more, including our newly revised state song, “Oregon, My Oregon,” so take a look and let me know if you have any questions or comments.