A Blog of Seattle Arts & Lectures
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director I bet each one of you in this room remembers the first time that you fell in love with Lindy West’s writing. Mine was her Guardian essay about her wedding—“My wedding was perfect—and I was fat as hell the whole time.” I can’t even remember how I found it […]
A photo of a girl Rosy cheeked and round Hangs on a wall in my house Arms spread wide and welcoming The perfect picture of childhood Of tire swings And clam bakes And playing pretend She worries about birds and cats and worms Sits on her porch swing Listens to her dad play guitar Savoring […]
By Rebecca Hoogs, SAL Associate Director Twenty-five years ago, I jumped into a pool in Switzerland and when I got out of the pool, I went about my business, i.e. my life for a while—maybe a half hour?—before I realized everything was blurry. I’d jumped in with my glasses on and when I went back, […]
Extinguish larynx, strung down neck & plucked from voice box, pulling out a sharp snap; I holler to the kingbird out of loneliness. Feathered body & beak yellowed with age, sleek wings broken in by many winters, his dead eyes, refusing to acknowledge. Measurements of clawed feet, the push of the scalpel into his full […]
New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicolas Kristof grew up on a cherry farm in rural Yamhill, Oregon, and it’s there that he and Sheryl WuDunn, his wife and co-writer, return in their latest reporting. In part, their book is about the lives of some of the children with whom Kristof grew up, about a quarter […]
By Ruth Dickey, SAL Executive Director A few years ago, everyone I knew began telling me about a book they absolutely adored and that I simply must read. But when I learned the book was about a Count who spends 30 years in a hotel in Moscow, I was first skeptical, and then outright resistant. […]
By Laura Gamache, WITS Writer-in-Residence Judith Roche grew up in Detroit, Michigan, but she almost didn’t. Her poem, “Drowning in Lake Michigan,” begins: “My first memory looks up to sunlight through water.” I heard her read it a few years back at an It’s About Time reading at the Ballard Public Library. It is the […]
It’s a mite hard to believe on nights like this that, somewhere, I have friends who aren’t dream-deep and snug in their beds, asleep, but may be dozing off in lecture with pens stuttering on notes; air conditioners humming furious against the peak afternoon heat. Harder still to believe, that while they scribble and we […]
We are so grateful for the many volunteers who make our world go round at the SAL headquarters. Bianca Glinskas is one such volunteer, and not only does she help out in the office—she also writes for our blog! Check out her recent pieces on poet Mary Ruefle here and here. To see what’s inspired […]
This year, Claudia Castro Luna—the 2018-2020 Washington State Poet Laureate and Designer in Residence at the School of Visual Concepts—received an exciting fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Her project? To create community through poetry along the length of the Columbia River. Over a period of several months, Claudia was inspired to write “One […]