Heading to Get Lit?
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It's almost time for Spokane's annual literary festival, Get Lit, and if you're heading over, be sure to see Lynda Mapes, author of Breaking Ground, on April 17 at Auntie's Bookstore at 2 p.m.
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Literary Voices
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The University of Washington Libraries are hosting their annual fundraiser, Literary Voices, on April 24 at 6 p.m. at the UW Club.
UW Press authors attending this wonderful event include Nicolette Bromberg (author of Picturing the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition), Ellen Dissanayake (author of What is Art For?, Homo Aestheticus, and Art and Intimacy), Lesley Hazelton (contributor to Looking Together), and Coll Thrush (author of Native Seattle).
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Coming up in May
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Ruben Trejo
by Ben Mitchell, with essays by John Keeble and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto
See the exhibition corresponding to the book at the Museum of Arts & Culture in Spokane starting May 1.
You can also join Ben Mitchell and John Keeble at Auntie's Bookstore on May 6 at 7 p.m.
Dreamless and Possible: Poems News and Selected
by Christopher Howell
Christopher Howell, author of Light's Ladder, is back with a new collection of poems that also draw on his previous collections.
Join Christopher at events throughout the Pacific Northwest:
Friday, May 7 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Books, Seattle
Sunday, May 16 at 4 p.m. at Powell's on Hawthorne, Portland
Wednesday, May 19 at 7 p.m. at Village Books, Bellingham
Friday, May 21 at 7 p.m. at Auntie's Books, Spokane
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Greetings!
 Spring has officially sprung! And with it, we are happy to sponsor a number of great readings with a diverse range of authors. And don't forget -- our friends at Elliott Bay will be in their new location on Capitol Hill as soon as possible after their move on March 31. We hear the shop will be just as fantastic as the Pioneer Square location, so stop by and check it out -- they definitely be open by April 14! All the best,
Rachael
remann@u.washington.edu
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Joann Green Byrd
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Calamity: The Heppner Flood of 1903
June 14, 1903, was a typical, hot Sunday in Heppner, a small farm town
in northeastern Oregon. People went to church, ate dinner, and relaxed
with family and friends. But late that afternoon, calamity struck when a
violent thunderstorm brought heavy rain and hail to the mountains and
bare hills south of town. When the fierce downpour reached Heppner,
people gathered their children and hurried inside. Most everyone closed
their doors and windows against the racket.
Within
an hour, one of every five people in the prosperous town of 1,300 would
lose their lives as the floodwaters pulled apart and carried away nearly
everything in their path. In Calamity, Joann Green Byrd, a native of
eastern Oregon, carefully documents this poignant story, illustrating
that even the smallest acts have consequences -- good or bad.
Joann
Green Byrd is a retired journalist who has worked for a number of
newspapers, including the East Oregonian in Pendleton, Oregon, and the
Washington Post.
Join Joann on
Thursday, April 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Bowman Memorial Museum, Prineville, OR
Friday, April 2 at 6:30 p.m. at Paulina Springs Books, Sisters, OR
Saturday, April 3 at 6:30 p.m. at Paulina Springs Books, Redmond, OR
Wednesday, April 7 at 7 p.m. at Hood River County Library with Waucoma Bookstore, Hood River, OR
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Frances McCue and Mary Randlett
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The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs: Revisiting the Northwest Towns of Richard Hugo
Richard Hugo visited places and wrote about them. He wrote about towns:
White Center and La Push in Washington; Wallace and Cataldo in Idaho;
Milltown, Philipsburg, and Butte in Montana. Often his visits lasted
little more than an afternoon, and his knowledge of the towns was
confined to what he heard in bars and diners. From these snippets, he
crafted poems. His attention to the actual places could be scant, but
Hugo's poems resonate more deeply than travelogues or feature stories;
they capture the torque between temperament and terrain that is so
vital in any consideration of place. The poems bring alive some hidden
aspect to each town and play off the traditional myths that an
easterner might have of the West: that it is a place of restoration and
healing, a spa where people from the East come to recover from
ailments; that it is a place to reinvent oneself, a region of wide
open, unpolluted country still to settle. Hugo steers us, as readers,
to eye level. How we settle into and take on qualities of the tracts of
earth that we occupy -- this is Hugo's inquiry.
Part travelogue,
part memoir, part literary scholarship, The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs traces the journey of Frances McCue and photographer Mary
Randlett to the towns that inspired many of Richard Hugo's poems.
Returning forty years after Hugo visited these places, and bringing
with her a deep knowledge of Hugo and her own poetic sensibility, McCue
maps Hugo's poems back onto the places that triggered them. Together
with twenty-three poems by Hugo, McCue's essays and Randlett's
photographs offer a fresh view of Hugo's Northwest.
Frances
McCue is a writer and poet living in Seattle, where she is
writer-in-residence at the University of Washington's Undergraduate
Honors Program. She was the founding director of Richard Hugo House
from 1996 to 2006. McCue is the author of The Stenographer's Breakfast,
winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Mary Randlett is
a Northwest photographer noted for her portraits of artists and
writers. Mary Randlett Landscapes celebrates her photographs of the
natural world.
To look inside the project, see their book trailer.
Join Frances and Mary on
Sunday, April 4 at 2 p.m. at Seattle Public Library with Elliott Bay BooksFriday, April 30 at 5 p.m. at BookPeople, Moscow, IDMonday, May 3 at noon at Choteau Library, Choteau, MTFriday, May 7 at 5:30 p.m. at Fact and Fiction, Missoula, MT |
Richard Baum
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 China Watcher
This audacious and illuminating memoir by Richard Baum, a senior China
scholar and sometime policy advisor, reflects on forty years of
learning about and interacting with the People's Republic of China,
from the height of Maoism during the author's UC Berkeley student days
in the volatile 1960s through globalization. Anecdotes from Baum's
professional life illustrate the alternately peculiar, frustrating,
fascinating, and risky activity of China watching -- the process by
which outsiders gather and decipher official and unofficial information
to figure out what's really going on behind China's veil of political
secrecy and propaganda. Baum writes entertainingly, telling his
narrative with witty stories about people, places, and eras.
Richard Baum is
distinguished professor of political science at UCLA and director
emeritus of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies. His publications
include China in Ferment;
Prelude to Revolution; Reform and Reaction in Post-Mao China; and Burying Mao. He is the presenter of the Great Courses video lecture series
"The Fall and Rise of China," published by the Teaching Company.
Join Richard on
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Lorraine McConaghy
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 Warship under Sail: The USS Decatur in the Pacific West
Ordered to join the Pacific Squadron in 1854, the sloop of war Decatur
sailed from Norfolk, Virginia, through the Strait of Magellan to
Valparaiso, Honolulu, and Puget Sound, then on to San Francisco,
Panama, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, while serving in the Pacific until
1859, the eve of the Civil War. Warship
under Sail focuses on four episodes in the Decatur's Pacific Squadron
mission: the harrowing journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean
through the Strait of Magellan; a Seattle war story that contested
American treaties and settlements; participation with other squadron
ships on a U.S. State Department mission to Nicaragua; and more than a
year spent anchored off Panama as a hospital ship.
Lorraine McConaghy is the historian at the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle.
Join Lorraine on
Saturday, April 10 at 2 p.m. at Naval Undersea Museum, Keyport, WA
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Linda Chalker-Scott |
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The Informed Gardener Blooms Again
The Informed Gardener Blooms Again picks up where The Informed Gardener left off, using scientific literature to debunk a new set of common
gardening myths. Once again, Linda Chalker-Scott investigates the
science behind each myth, reminding us that urban and suburban
landscapes are ecosystems requiring their own particular set of
management practices. The Informed Gardener Blooms Again provides
answers to questions such as: - Does using drought-tolerant plants reduce water consumption?
- Is it more effective to spray fertilizers on the leaves of trees and shrubs than to apply it to the soil?
- Will cedar wood chips kill landscape plants?
- Should I use ladybugs in my garden as a form of pest control?
- Does aerobically brewed compost tea suppress disease?
Linda Chalker-Scott is an urban horticulturist and
associate professor at Puyallup Research and Extension Center,
Washington State University. She is the author of The Informed
Gardener, winner of the Best Book Prize from the Garden Writers
Association. She is the editor and co-author of Sustainable Landscapes
and Gardens, the Washington State editor of MasterGardener magazine,
and author of the online column "Horticultural Myths." She has a new
blog at gardenprofessors.com.
See a book trailer about The Informed Gardener here.
Join Linda on
Tuesday, April 13 at 7 p.m. at Village Books
Wednesday, April 14 at 7 p.m. at Ravenna Third Place Books
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Marsha Weisiger
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 Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of
the history of Navajo (Din�) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of
livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of
thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious
attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid
landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there.
Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood
for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the
animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands.
Environmental historian
Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of
the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos,
and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral
accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in
Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she
demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native
American and environmental history.
Marsha L. Weisiger is associate professor of history at New Mexico State University.
Join Marsha on
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