Decibel Magazine Tour 2014: Showbox Market Seattle

The lineup for this year’s Decibel Magazine Tour was something like fantasy football for metalheads: Carcass, Black Dahlia Murder, Gorguts, and Noisem, passing through Seattle at my favorite venue, The Showbox at the Market, on a Saturday night. I expected a concert that people would talk about for years afterwards.

Blue Lagoon

Joseph Boyden says in Through Black Spruce

Fucking stories. Twisted things that come out no matter how we want them.

Regular readers of this blog know that if a picture is worth a thousand words, I’ll take a thousand words. With less than two weeks left until Iceland Writers Retreat, I wanted to tell some stories about getting ready for that trip. But this week I am sick, and all my drafts keep getting twisted. So until the NyQuil wears off, I will leave you with a picture of the Blue Lagoon in Iceland. Right now, with my nose blocked and my head foggy, I can’t imagine anything better than soaking in its geothermally heated mineral waters.

 

Book Report: Rin Tin Tin

In preparation for Iceland Writers Retreat, I am reading books by each of the featured authors. I placed holds on everything I could find at the library. Most of the books came all at once, but a few still haven’t come in. While I’m waiting, Susan Orlean’s latest book, Rin Tin Tin, was next in the pile.

State of Darkness at Pacific NW Ballet

I reviewed Pacific Northwest Ballet’s 2014 Director’s Choice program on Monday.

I could say so much more about “State of Darkness” … this piece set off bottle rockets in my brain and it will probably take a while to make sense from all the patterns.

My mind has been churning on this dance since I saw it last week, and although I have yet to make sense of all the patterns, I need to say much more about it.

Fluid Dynamics at PNB’s 2014 Director’s Choice

In one episode of the Curious George cartoon, the man in the yellow hat says, “Magnetism is my favorite invisible force!” My family loved that line and we’ve found a surprising number of opportunities to use it in real life. At the 2014 Director’s Choice program last weekend, Pacific Northwest Ballet made a convincing argument for some of the others – and I’m not talking about gravity.

First Impressions and Take Home Lessons: AWP Conference

As a testament to how overwhelming AWP can be, I forgot to take pictures all 3 days. This is my book fair haul.

I wasn’t going to attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs 2014 conference. AWP is rooted, as the name implies, in academic programs and has a literary focus that is only tangential to the technical and journalistic writing I usually do. But I want more “creative” in my nonfiction. Some thirteen thousand people from all over the U.S. traveled to Seattle for the event; I didn’t even have to change my morning commute (same bus, three stops early). It seemed like the universe was handing me an opportunity. So with little more preparation than a warning about people in pointy shoes, I signed up for three days of literary frenzy.

Book Report: The Weirdness

If the importance of book cover design was ever in question, the art for Jeremy P. Bushnell’s debut novel, The Weirdness, should put all doubt to rest.

February 2014: Statistically Speaking

I don’t know much about VIDA – no, I don’t mean “life,” although I’ve got plenty to learn there, too. I mean VIDA, the organization that formed in 2009 to create more space for women in the literary dialogue. Having just attended the 2014 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (more on that to come), I can confidently say that the representation of women in the community of people who identify themselves as writers is proportionate to the general population. But every year, VIDA undertakes a painstaking manual survey of literary publications and book reviews (think Audubon here) that quantifies women’s bylines, and the number of books written by women that get reviewed. The results are highly illuminating.

People of the Book: Report

In preparation for Iceland Writers Retreat, I am reading books by each of the featured authors. It feels a little weird to review authors who are about to become my teachers, but it’s easier to read critically when I know I have to report on it afterwards. I had already read Geraldine Brooks’ Year of Wonders; I enjoyed it as a reader, and as a writer I enjoyed trying to understand her choices: writing about survival instead of adventure, building an overtly feminist story within a culture that was anything but. My library holds on the remaining authors hadn’t come in yet, so I started her People of the Book.  By the second page, her Sam Spade of a protagonist had grabbed me by the throat, and she didn’t let go until days after I finished reading.