SAL/ON

A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures

Category: Literary Arts Series

Following In Her Own Footprints: Alison Bechdel’s Circles of Creativity

By Amelia Peacock, SAL Community Engagement Coordinator In one of A. A. Milne’s most iconic stories featuring everyone’s favorite “bear of very little brain,” Pooh and his best friend Piglet spot what they think are Heffalump tracks in the snow on one of their many walks in the woods. They begin tracking this mysterious, elusive […]

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Introductions: Ta-Nehisi Coates

On October 29, SAL Executive Director Ruth Dickey introduced Ta-Nehisi Coates to the resounding applause of a sold-out crowd at McCaw Hall, for SAL’s 2015/16 Literary Arts Series. I first met Ta-Nehisi Coates 20 years ago, when we were two of the youngest members of WriterCorps, in Washington DC. WriterCorps placed writers in traditionally underserved communities […]

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How Will the Greatest African Superhero Handle Race in America? An Essay on Ta-Nehisi Coates

By Aaron Counts, WITS Writer-in-Residence This essay was first published on October 26, 2015 on LitHub, on the occasion of SAL’s program featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates in the 2015/16 Literary Arts Series. It was written by WITS Writer-in-Residence Aaron Counts. From the opening sentence of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s acclaimed memoir, Between the World and Me, we know his chief […]

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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Playlist

By, Erin Langner, WITS Program Associate My favorite playlists tell stories. As someone who spent hours of my middle school days in the mid-1990s waiting for the songs I requested to hit the radio airwaves so I could capture them on a mixtape, I appreciate the ease of the digital playlist. Some miss that moment […]

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“Light,” by WITS Student Jaeden Caldwell

Light My mind is like a light bulb getting switched on and off. When I get turned on my mind explodes with ideas, all filling my brain with different things to do, write, play. It is a magical thing, a feeling that can’t be compared with any other, my thoughts lighting up as if there […]

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Myself in Translation: An Essay on Alison Bechdel

By Corinne Manning, WITS Writer-in-Residence This essay was first published on October 19, 2015 on LitHub, on the occasion of SAL’s program featuring Alison Bechdel in the 2015/16 Literary Arts Series, written by WITS Writer-in-Residence Corinne Manning. This is my memory, though it’s technically unconfirmed: my mom had seen this flag that she liked, non denominational, […]

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Introductions: Elizabeth Gilbert

On October 5 at Benaroya Hall, SAL Executive Director Ruth Dickey introduced and interviewed Elizabeth Gilbert, the first author in SAL’s 2015/16 Literary Arts Series. In Elizabeth Gilbert’s first novel, Stern Men, she writes of lobstermen off the coast of Maine, and about how what we pursue affects us. She writes, “Dairy farming makes men […]

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