Book Reviews & News – Writing the Northwest

April 5, 2023April 2, 2023

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

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

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!

August 22, 2022August 24, 2022

Book Review: Exploring the Unknowable in Peter Rock’s PASSERSTHROUGH

Most bankable fiction writers—those whose books become bestsellers and sometimes movies—rely on conventional storytelling and character development to affect their readers. But there are other, often-more-intriguing authors who rely more on mood or mystery or simply fine writing. They may not reach a wide audience, but they’re adept at subverting our expectations, fracturing our vision, and helping us see life in a new way.

Portland writer Peter Rock has had plenty of writing success—his 2009 novel My Abandonment, about a girl who lives off the grid with her father in an urban forest, was made into a major motion picture (“Leave No Trace”) and subsequently became a bestseller—but in his latest work, in particular, he has tended to be the second kind of author.

In his last two novels—2019’s The Night Swimmers and this year’s Passersthrough (both published by Soho Press)—Rock has used a spare, allusive style to focus closely on a small number of characters in a limited situation while suggesting that there is more going on around them than they or the reader can know, some of it possibly supernatural.

This approach can create a feeling of disorientation, a sense that you’re not understanding something important to the story. But if you release your mind from the need to be certain of everything at every moment, the mood and mystery can take over, allowing you to immerse yourself in Rock’s precise and often beautiful evocations of places, experiences, and sensations.

Even more than The Night Swimmers, set mostly in Wisconsin, Passersthrough, with its often-wild Northwest locales, explores the things we can’t know no matter how much we try, as well as our continued desire to uncover them.

The book begins with what seems at first to be a conventional story: An older man, Ben, and his estranged daughter, Helen, are trying to reconnect. Ben lives in Portland and Helen in California, so she has installed a device in his home that gives her a transcription of anything he says into it, and she speaks to him, in turn, by fax or phone or during the occasional visit.

Their “conversation,” mediated mostly by technology, centers primarily on what did or didn’t happen 25 years ago, when Helen was 11 and Ben sometimes took her into the woods. At some point something traumatic resulted. What it was isn’t entirely clear—to the reader or even the characters.

About all Ben and Helen agree on is that he had her walk blindfolded into the woods, left her overnight in a lean-to, and somehow lost track of her. A week later, she emerged far from where he last saw her. The only specific details we’re given are those of the girl’s rescue, which come courtesy of an old newspaper article Rock inserts into the text. Whatever happened, it caused his estrangement from his daughter to begin.

The rest of Passersthrough is, in many ways, an elaboration on this situation, but nothing is even this plain again. While walking near his house one day, Ben is attacked by a dog and befriended by the dog’s owner, a woman named Melissa who—along with her brother, Cisco—inserts herself into his life. It’s never quite clear whether they’re grifters or sincerely interested in helping him or maybe just the passersthrough of the book’s title.

As the story continues, it becomes less and less certain what perspective we’re seeing things from, and even what reality is. Rock sets several later scenes in the alluring but forbidding landscape around Mt. Hood, presenting it as a shadowy place of beauty, mystery, and danger.

The lean-to reappears, as does a lake from the older story that seems to move around. They’re joined by two children who died in a fire and the mother of a fawn Melissa has killed and carved up. When Ben, who has remained mostly passive throughout the book, makes an act of will near the end, the remaining fragments of story disintegrate further, becoming a series of incantatory images and feelings.

Does it all add up? Rock seems less interested in tying things together than giving us shards we can try to assemble ourselves…or maybe just leave as they are: signs of the possibilities around us and in us, as well as the unknowability of so much in life. Especially other people.

Passersthrough

Peter Rock

Soho Press

2022

$26 (hardcover)

Order here: Writing the Northwest Bookshop.org page

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

August 4, 2022August 21, 2022

Book Review: A “Coast Salish Punk” Tells Her Own Story

There are many reasons white narratives have long shaped our understanding of Native history and even contemporary Native lives. One, of course, is the lack of pre-contact writings by Indigenous people. Another is the suppression of Native voices during the white conquest of the two American continents. A third is the presumptuousness of even sympathetic white writers—from James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans, 1826) to Margaret Craven (I Heard the Owl Call My Name, 1967)—in depicting Native life while featuring white protagonists.

A fourth, less-obvious reason is the concentration of a white-dominated publishing industry in the Northeastern part of the United States, where few of the country’s 7 million Indigenous people live.

One result of the U. S. government’s early cruelty toward pre-existing populations, including the vile Indian Removal Act of 1830, was a concentration of Native people west of the Mississippi, where the writers among them had fewer chances to hobnob and network with editors and agents.

Sunset on Puget Sound, Edward Curtis, courtesy of Northwestern University Libraries, Digital Collections

Fortunately, the development of the internet, the assertion of marginalized voices in recent years, and a rising awareness of the need to expand and diversify the American literary conversation have led to more Native authors being published today than ever before. And the writing they’re publishing is less concerned with elder wisdom or lamentations for the devastation wrought by white conquest than sharp-eyed critique of contemporary life.

While elder wisdom and lamentations still inform this new work, the writing is wider-ranging and harder-hitting, bolder and yet subtler, more engaged with the broader culture while retaining a personal connection to the histories and customs of particular tribes and regions.

A prime example is Red Paint, a memoir by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, whose subtitle—The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk—tells you right away it isn’t a conventional narrative. Although LaPointe has spent her life on her ancestors’ traditional lands, she has lived most of it within the American cities and cultures laid on top of them. In fact, at times her story becomes a Schliemann-like excavation of artifacts from the many historical periods in her native Northwest.

LaPointe isn’t interested in being a representative Indian, however, or even an interpreter or defender for her ancestors. Although, in places, she explores the lives and struggles of those who came before her, she mostly tells her own story—one that includes sexual and substance abuse, homelessness and rootlessness, betrayal and loss, but also hopefulness, friendship, love, and underground music.

LaPointe’s referents are as likely to be the Twin Peaks TV show or the punk group Bikini Kill as the healers of her mother’s Lushootseed tribe or the Chinook ancestor who survived her people’s destruction by marrying a white man. She isn’t seeking a return to some mythic past but rather a home, a permanence, a self-definition that seems to have eluded not only her but her people.

After finding the reservation trailer she lived in as a child in ruins, for example, she muses on what a permanent home for someone like her might be. “Reservations should not have been a permanent home,” she writes. “Like trailers, like campgrounds, like prisons or hospitals, they felt temporary, like some place you go between places. I realized I wasn’t sure what permanence looked like, because we weren’t meant to survive. My family, my tribe, my ancestors, we were something temporary to the settlers, something that would eventually go away.”

Later in the book, after visiting an even older abode, she realizes she’s sick of trying to fit a white world’s expectations of what a Native American woman should be:

“I was tired of being brave. I would rather be something else. Carefree? An aging millennial. Someone who enjoys listening to the Cranberries and Cyndi Lauper on road trips down the coast. Call me a writer. Call me a riot grrrl. Call me Coast Salish or poet. Call me a girl who loves Nick Cave, and night swimming, and ramen, and old Bikini Kill records. I no longer wish to be called resilient. Call me reckless, impatient, and emotional. Even Indigenous. Call me anything other than survivor. I am so many more things than brave.”

In the end, Red Paint is mainly what any good memoir should be: an exploration of the self—how it’s built from intention, experience, malice, carelessness, heritage, family, love, and belief, as well as the accidents that impact each of us as we navigate our broken world.

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Pine Pollen and Canopy Tears: Keen Observations of a Northwest Forest by an Iowa Essayist

Sometimes the sharpest observations of a place come from individuals who don’t reside there—people who visit not as tourists but as temporary observers, seeking understanding rather than snapshots.

Think of Alexis de Tocqueville, the Frenchman who toured America for nine months in 1831 and produced Democracy in America, a two-volume collection of his observations that is still one of the best depictions of the young country in the early 19^th century.

Essayist Tom Montgomery Fate’s birthplace and touchstone for interactions with a new world isn’t France but rather Iowa, a flat land full of cornfields where the highest point has an elevation of only 1,670 feet. Yet when Fate was invited to spend two weeks at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest near Oregon’s Cascade Range in 2017—“to write and walk, and meet a few scientists—hydrologists, botanists, biologists”—he brought with him the same essential tools de Tocqueville traveled with: a keen eye, a discerning mind, and a facility with words.

Image from the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest website

In the essay Fate wrote about the experience, “Travel that Takes You Home” (which is included in his new collection of essays about places he has visited around the world, The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries, Ice Cube Press, 2022), he delineates in precise language and telling detail not only the important research Andrews scientists are doing on things like the evergreen canopy’s protection of ground-level plants from the extremes of climate change, but also the ways in which exposure to a Northwest forest might affect our understanding of what it means to be human.

Here, for example, is Fate’s description of pausing by a creek on a rainy day:

Now I’m sitting on a flat rock in the hard rain listening to the creek. This is my job: to sit in the rain and listen. Were it a deeper stream without rocks or deadfalls or much current, and full of sediment, it would be quiet and still (and more Midwestern). Lookout Creek is crazy fast from three days of rain, and full of rocks and boulders and deadfalls, and so it has a lot to say. Over time, the gurgling water will tumble and dissolve rock, and rot logs and leaves and carry them downstream, along with trout and pine pollen and needles and cones, and bits of moss and lichen. Over time it will reshape its bed and banks and habitat, physically describing its character and history in this forest. Over time it will reflect and respond to climate change and other challenges posed by human beings. Over time, as with all streams and rivers, it will measure and reveal both our culpability and response ability as a species. Over time it will measure who we are.

Over time. That’s two words. Not “overtime.” Not hours or numbers, but a river of light and darkness, of heat and cold. Over time, things change. Some change is dramatic—what ecologists call “a disturbance”—like the rotting 400-year-old Douglas-fir that fell across the creek 30 years ago during a flood. The crashing tree ripped a wide gash in the canopy, prompting slower, less dramatic change below: a thick stand of Alder trees sprung up on the gravel bar amid the flood of new light. When the Doug-fir fell, its bole and branches obstructed and partly dammed the creek, forming a deep pool—where, over time, native trout came to live, and to wait and watch for midges and flies to light on the water.

Waiting and watching. Over time. To stand by a river and go. That rainy day I lingered by the water all afternoon, scrambling around on the slippery rocks like the child I once was—completely lost in the moment—and hoping to see something: a bird, or a snake, or a beetle, or a frog, or anyone who might re-member me, and remind me how I belong.

What might be a common environment to a native Northwesterner, Fate sees as new and full of unique character. He observes not only the pine but the pine pollen, not only the fallen log but the tear it rips in the canopy.

Fate’s new collection is full of such trenchant observations of places like the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Nicaragua, the Philippines, and, yes, Iowa. It’s also full of deeper contemplations of our connections not only to place but also to family, faith, nature, and vulnerable populations.

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To read an earlier, online version of Fate’s Northwest essay, visit the About Place Journal website.

To attend a virtual event at which Fate will read from and discuss his new book, sign up here. You can read more about the event here. It takes place at 5 p.m. PDT on Wednesday, July 20, and registration is required.

To purchase Fate’s book, simply click here or ask your local bookstore to order The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries by Tom Montgomery Fate.

For more on Fate and his other books and essays, go to his website, TomFate.com.

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Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of five other books of creative nonfiction, including Cabin Fever, a nature memoir (Beacon Press), and Steady and Trembling, a spiritual memoir (Chalice Press). A regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, his essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Orion, The Iowa Review, Christian Century, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, and many others. Dozens of his essays have also aired on NPR, PRI and Chicago Public Radio.

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The Long Way Home: Detours and Discoveries

Tom Montgomery Fate

Ice Cube Press

2022

$19.99

May 6, 2022May 6, 2022

Out of the Woods: Book Review of rough house by Tina Ontiveros

At the heart of rough house—Tina Ontiveros’s difficult yet moving memoir about growing up poor in the damp forests of the Pacific Northwest and, when her family breaks apart, the brown dryness of The Dalles, Oregon—stand two people and a question.

One of the two is Ontiveros’s childhood self, revealed not only through her adult memories but also the stories her parents tell about her earliest years, some true, some exaggerated or made up altogether. The true stories come from her mother, the made-up ones from her father, Loyd, the second and more ambiguous of the book’s two main characters.

Loyd is an itinerant logger from a family of loggers at a time when Northwest logging is in decline. He drags his family from place to place, lodging them in various trailers and other inadequate shelters. Although he works hard, he falls off the wagon repeatedly, insists on controlling those around him, and strikes with his fists when he feels someone has crossed him, including the mother of his children. Loyd is the kind of person who squanders his life and drives away others, never able to stay on track for very long.

As Ontiveros writes at the end of her first chapter—a chapter in which we witness her father’s brutal way of teaching her to ride a bike—Loyd “left nothing much physical behind him on this earth. No poetry or paintings, no endowments or discoveries to share with humankind…Mostly his existence was primal flashes of intensity in different places, always a sense of adventure and danger. There was a sort of balance to his living, creativity and destruction in equal measure. Always harm. Always love.”

Image by Karen Arnold, publicdomainpictures.net

In many ways, Loyd is simply the product of the world he lives in, a world in which timber barons and corporations use and misuse a fungible and ultimately disposable cadre of rootless men to extract the riches of Northwest forests for personal gain. Like many men who make their living with their bodies, he tends to respond to the world in physical ways, particularly those that cause Ontiveros’s mother to leave him: “drinking, drugging, cheating, and hitting.”

But behind those physical responses lie deeper emotions often perverted by the way these men have grown up and lived and, as the last two words of the quote above suggest, those emotions can be expressed in positive ways, too. Which leads us to both the question at the book’s core—Why does Loyd’s daughter not only return to him again and again but choose to write a book about him?—as well as a possible answer.

“I lived in a small body then,” Ontiveros writes at the end of chapter three, “and when Loyd knelt down and talked to me, to show me the miracle of an unbroken sand dollar or a newly forming inlet, he looked like a man at prayer. What I mean to say is that he made me feel like I deserved to take up space. From his moments of careful attention, I learned to expect some small amount of worship from the world. From his violence, desperate apologies, and absences, I would discover that the same sparkling fires that fueled his creativity could burn out of control, leaving a landscape stripped of life. Loyd would hurt and fail me in a hundred ways, but first he taught me to wonder, gave me love without condition, and moments where I felt holy.”

Ontiveros’s mother’s love for Loyd reaches a breaking point when he holds a gun to their adolescent son’s head. And Ontiveros reaches a similar point when he violates her trust in an especially vile manner. The violation and its aftermath are, in many ways, the book’s high point. After smoldering for half of the book’s 188-page length, Ontiveros’s writing suddenly catches fire as she finally faces the kind of man her father is. Out of that fire comes a deeper question: Can you continue to love a man who does a thing like that?

But something else is born in that fire too: The stronger woman Ontiveros will become, a woman who is not only able to see her father—and her mother—with clear eyes, but also to stand on her own, with her own strength; forge a life for herself out of tools her parents have inadvertently given her; and find a way to not only love but embrace the people she came from.

In the end, of course, the story doesn’t belong to Loyd, it belongs to his daughter, who has the choice to tell it in her own way. Although it is often a brutal story, it is told with love. And it is that love that allows Ontiveros to not only rise above the violence, misogyny, and suspicion often endemic to the world she came from, but also bring some acceptance to that world, helping us to understand it.

Contrary to popular belief, you can sometimes tell a lot about a book by its title. In addition to the double meaning of physical fun and difficult circumstances, it’s significant that rough house is printed in lower case. Ontiveros is shining a light on minor characters whose stories, though filled with poverty and violence, are worth telling—and worth reading—for what they reveal about the hardships many Americans face, as well as how those Americans—especially women, like Ontiveros—find a way forward despite the odds.

rough house

by Tina Ontiveros

Oregon State University Press

2020

$18.95

Buy your copy here.

Two other compelling books about Northwest women finding their way forward out of poverty, violence, and isolation (both set in Idaho):

Educated by Tara Westover (Random House, 2018)–National Book Critics Circle Award finalist–“Beautiful and propulsive . . . Despite the singularity of [Westover’s] childhood, the questions her book poses are universal: How much of ourselves should we give to those we love? And how much must we betray them to grow up?”—Vogue

In the Wilderness by Kim Barnes (Doubleday, 1996)–Pulitzer Prize finalist–“In the Wilderness is the story of this poet’s journey toward adulthood, set against an interior landscape every bit as awesome, as wondrous, and as fraught with hidden peril as the great Idaho forest itself.”–Amazon.com

December 10, 2021December 13, 2021

2022 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History

I learned this week that I’ve been awarded the 2022 Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Senior Research Fellowship in Pacific Northwest History…which means, I guess, that my position as the curator of this website is a bit more legitimate now.

The Oregon Historical Society gives out two Sterling fellowships each year, one to a graduate student and one to a senior researcher. The award funds research in the OHS archives, with each recipient in residence at the archives for four weeks at some point during the award year. (I haven’t learned yet who this year’s graduate student recipient is.)

I’ll be using my archive time for research related to a new biography and preparation for writing an article or two for the Oregon Historical Quarterly.

According to the OHS website, the fellowships are funded “through an endowment, made possible by the family of Donald J. Sterling, Jr., to encourage original, scholarly, interpretive research in the Oregon Historical Society Research Library.

The catalog description for the Donald J. Sterling, Jr., Papers at OHS gives this brief bio:

“Donald J. Sterling, Jr. (1927-2000) was the last editor of the Oregon Journal, serving from 1972 to 1992. He attended Princeton University and worked as a reporter for the Denver Post from 1948 to 1952. He joined the Oregon Journal when his father, Donald J. Sterling, retired, and in the early 1980s he helped to consolidate the newspaper with its former rival, the Oregonian. He was active in civic organizations including the City Club of Portland, the Housing Authority of Portland, and the Oregon Historical Society.”

Receiving this award and learning about Donald J. Sterling, Jr., has me thinking about the importance of newspapers in writing about the Northwest or any other place. As the saying goes, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history.” For historians and biographers, newspapers are a vital primary source of information. But what happens when, as with the Oregon Journal, newspapers consolidate or simply disappear? Can we trust a single paper in a major market like Portland or Seattle to give us the kind of accurate and non-biased information good history and biography rely on?

I’ll explore these questions and related ones in my next post.

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