Writing the Northwest
Archives
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Persistence and Adaptation: Asian American Identity and News in the Pacific Northwest
Read more: Persistence and Adaptation: Asian American Identity and News in the Pacific NorthwestThe awful rise in attacks on Asian Americans in recent months has reminded me how horribly Chinese immigrants were treated in the Pacific Northwest in the latter half of the 19th century, as well as how difficult it has been through the years for local Asian Americans to be heard…
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The Fancydancing Voice of Sherman Alexie
Read more: The Fancydancing Voice of Sherman AlexieWhen I was in the MFA program at Columbia University in the mid-1990s, a poetry professor assigned a book called The Business of Fancydancing (Hanging Loose Press, 1992) by a writer from my home state I’d never heard of: Sherman Alexie. When I turned the book over, the black-and-white on…
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The Powell’s List of 40 Books Set in the Pacific Northwest
Read more: The Powell’s List of 40 Books Set in the Pacific Northwest(You can purchase most of the books below through the Writing the Northwest portal at Bookshop.org.) One of my goals for this site is to introduce readers to writing set in the Northwest that hasn’t reached a large audience, especially works by writers other than white men. To that end,…
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Out of the Woods: Book Review of rough house by Tina Ontiveros
Read more: Out of the Woods: Book Review of rough house by Tina OntiverosAt 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…
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When the River Ran Wild!–Excavating the Memories, Customs and Ways of the Mid-Columbia Tribes
Read more: When the River Ran Wild!–Excavating the Memories, Customs and Ways of the Mid-Columbia TribesEarlier this week, the winners of the 2022 Oregon Book Awards were announced. While the awards honor books by Oregon writers rather than books specifically about Oregon, a fair number of the award finalists are usually set in the state or explore some aspect of it. Soon, I’ll be posting…
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Northwest “Cowboys and Indians” Partnering to Protect the Environment
Read more: Northwest “Cowboys and Indians” Partnering to Protect the EnvironmentI spent some time away last week catching up on reading I’d missed, including Naomi Klein’s provocative exploration of the link between globalization and climate change, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014). You can read about the arguments and evidence Klein presents in this important…
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Stories with Trees in Them: Norman Maclean and the Real Northwest
Read more: Stories with Trees in Them: Norman Maclean and the Real NorthwestA lot of my writing on this site so far has been focused on Washington and Oregon as the core states in what we call the Pacific Northwest, but the writer most associated with Northwest writing is probably a Montanan–Norman Maclean–in part because Maclean’s two books, A River Runs Through…
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Feeling Wild and Lyrical: Jack Kerouac Spends a Night in Seattle
Read more: Feeling Wild and Lyrical: Jack Kerouac Spends a Night in SeattleIn the summer of 1956, at the suggestion of Oregon-born poet Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac hitchhiked up the Pacific coast to Washington State to live in solitude as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the Mount Baker National Forest. He was hoping to detox from alcohol, women, drugs, and…
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How One Man Made Seattle by Selling It to the World
Read more: How One Man Made Seattle by Selling It to the WorldIt may be hard for Seattleites to swallow but their city didn’t count for much in anyone’s eyes but its own until the end of the 19th century. That’s when the city’s Chamber of Commerce hired a man named Erastus Brainerd to promote it–and the advertising campaign he concocted and…
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