Seattle

Tim: For decades, Seattle Washington's influence has extended far beyond the Pacific Northwest to touch almost every aspect of life, from technology to commerce to transportation, to music to everyday rituals. Prominent among the city's many offerings, literature, thanks to accomplished authors, imaginative institutions, and a citywide embrace of storytelling in multiple forms. More than appreciation, Seattle's relationship with the written, spoken, and even sung word connects to its identity. So much so UNESCO awarded the designation as a city of literature, one of only two in the United States. This honor further highlights a curious, creative, open hearted, and open-minded community, making Seattle, Washington an extraordinary spot for a lit trip.
Tim Castano: I am Tim Costano, and this is Lit Trip, where we take you on a tour through a location's literary past, present, and future. Writers, scholars, civic leaders, and fans guide us through the history, influences, traditions, and contributions that transform a place into a destination. If you enjoy stories, personalities, and escape, come lose yourself in a lit trip.
Tim: In 2017, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, named Seattle a city of literature, an international recognition of the programs, writers, and collectives that form such a bookish ecosystem. As of this recording, Seattle joins sixty two other cities on six continents, locations such as Barcelona, Jakarta, Abuja, Hobart, and Iowa City, the only other American representative. Initially founded to support the UNESCO campaign, the organization, Seattle City of Literature, continues to operate today to encourage ongoing activities and partnerships. Writer Jenny Shortridge serves on Seattle City of Literature's Board of Directors. Author of such beloved works as Love, Water, Memory, and When She Flew, Shortridge also enriched her hometown when she co-founded the group Seattle Seven Writers. Seattle City of Literature was initially founded to shepherd the city's bid to become a UNESCO City of Literature. With that campaign having succeeded, you presently exist to steward that designation. programmatically, how does the organization fulfill that mission? And how do you connect to other members in UNESCO's creative city network?
Tim Castano: So at Seattle City of Lit, our mission is to work towards UNESCO's very urgent sustainable development goals. and those 17 goals are meant to move the world toward a better and more sustainable and equitable future. And as you can imagine, there is as everyone knows these days, those are very urgent goals. We're in a lot of trouble. In the world. So because we're part of the Creative Cities Network, we use the arts and in our case literature to essentially improve the lives of our community. And even though we're one of the most highly educated cities in the US, there are communities in need here. Those who don't speak English, perhaps, or those who have been historically underserved or discriminated against. And so we aim to center those voices and provide opportunities to them. And we do that in several ways. very locally, we do that by providing some microgrants every year, several, to writers and organizations who are doing some kind of project or work that involves the international community as well. So we're connecting people across the globe through literature, through the projects that they're doing. But in partnership with those other cities of literature around the world, there are 63 of them, we provide residencies, meaning we might send a Seattle writer to Reykjavik, which we did last year. Or to other cities who are also cities of literature providing residencies, or they may provide or send their writers here to do residencies here. like during the pandemic, of course, we had to do some of those more virtually, but we're back to having hosting people here in Seattle and to sending our writers around the world. But we also participate in anthologies, like it might be queer poetry, it might be know any number of things and then workshops to try to get people the information they need to be more successful in their writing careers or other literature careers. So that's what we do in partnership with the other cities around the world. Locally we do a lot more as you know probably. We have a literary map, which is really cool We have a literary events calendar that anyone can contribute their literary event to so that everyone can hear about them. And we've even undertaken a literary community survey. So where we reached out to our community and asked them to tell us what their issues are, what's working for them, what's not working for them. So yeah, so those are kind of it's a broad overview of some of the things we do. We have a wish list of things we want to do. We want to develop an author database for Seattle so that people can find writers. when they need them or just learn more about writers and maybe an even an economic impact study. as you mentioned, Seattle City of Literature also publishes the Seattle Literary Map, which is a terrific resource that captures bookstores, landmarks, locations associated with well-known figures, among other cultural assets. Do you have any favorite sites included on the map? And what would appear on your personal literary map of Seattle? It's such a fun question. I think what I really love most on the literary map are the historical references that we have that go all the way back to our first people, which include the Dewamish people. so we have the Dawamish Cultural Center and the Dawamish story poll on that map, which I think is just really fitting for. town that is named after the Duwamish chief, Seattle. And so that kind of I think is really fun. And then we take it all the way from there to our newest updates, which includes Charlie's Queer Books. And Charlie's Queer Books now has two locations in the last year or two. And another great new bookstore called Mum's Books, which is a our first Asian American bookstore. Things that I might include would be really ephemeral and really very hard to capture, but the coffee shops around the city and the ghosts of all the coffee shops that have been around the city where so much writing has gotten done over the decades, but also so much organizing by small groups of folks trying to make the world a better place through acts of writing and reading. Those are the kinds of things that I think would be really fun to capture. I don't know how you would do it and how you would explain it, but I think when I see the movie of of literary Seattle, I see all those people. Their heads bent over their writing for so many years inside these steamy coffee shops with every, you know, with all the rain coming down outside. And that's what makes me feel kind of connected, you know, to the community. before your board service on Seattle City of Literature, you co founded Seattle Seven Writers. a nonprofit collective of authors who promoted Northwest literature and literacy. how what did you learn about your fellow Seattle writers from that initiative and how do you see its legacy alive in the city today? Well, I think what most surprising to so many of us as we kind of kept growing and growing, we started with seven writers, hence the name, who all found each other to kind of just get together and talk shop, you know, writers, Although we work in solid in s you know in solitude, we need each other. And that was a surprise to all of us how much we needed to get together and talk. and that stayed true whether we were when we were at seven writers, when we were at twenty-four, we kept growing, 56, 75. We always really felt great about getting the opportunity to come together and talk about what our I mean, our lives are. Different than other people's, right? You know, we are people who spend much of our time looking at a computer screen, living all these lives and worlds through our characters or through our nonfiction or poetry. and we never get to talk about it with anyone who gets it. So that was something that I found really valuable in the community is that we we have great we put great value in being together, even though then we need to go be alone again through our work. but also what stays with me is the incredible generosity of all these writers and authors who really wanted to come together, not to promote their work, but to support the community that supports us. And that is Seattle, and that is the Pacific Northwest in general. It's such a supportive community. So we decided that we wanted to do what we could to support literacy in our community. And that is where we aimed. Our focus and our efforts and all of the work that we did for 10 years was to try to give back to these organizations that are helping others either become readers or become better English speakers or write and find some outlets for their writing. So that's the kind of stuff that we did over and over and over again. And that all these writers who have had even the a smidgen of success. Want to turn around and extend a hand back behind them, you know, to the next writer who's trying to get over the fence, or to the next, you know, kid who's trying to become proficient in reading, having just moved here from another country, so they can be successful one day. So that was it's just if to me it was groundbreaking and eye opening to understand that about people who many people think of as either maybe snobs or too intellectual and cerebral or whatever it may be, you know, or too distanced from other people because they may have had some success. We had some really highly successful writers in our organization, as you probably have seen, Garstein being my partner and co-founder. and yet that was really what drove him as well and everybody in the organization. So and in Seattle, you know, there is a long history of people organizing to try to help each other. And the work continues even, you know, still today, obviously. There's still so much to do, and always will be. And there's a really wide and diverse range of organizations who are working with the literary community still. even more so I think. And you know, because we have a really diverse city. We have a really a a city that supports the queer community. We have a lot of organizations that are Like Langston, Seattle, doing outreach and work with African American writers. many like Seattle Escribe and La Sala and El Centro de la Rosa with the Latinx community. Seattle Seven did a lot of work with Pathwith Art, which is this great organization that reaches out to those in transition from homelessness and addiction to art and writing and doing all kinds of cool things. And books to prisoners and there's just so many I could list a lot of them, but the work is being done by a lot of different organizations. And so that's why I'm always trying to find a place where I can volunteer and help keep the work going. And right now it happens to be with Seattle City of Literature, but I've worked with kids a lot. I've worked with immigrant communities. So I'm always trying to find a way to do that, your novels, Love, Water, Memory, and Love and Biology at the center of the universe are your works most closely connected to Seattle. what about the city? Did you wish to convey to your readers? Well, as I've been kind of extolling the virtues of Seattle and its community of support for the written word and for anything creative. I I guess, you know, when I first moved to this area, I moved from dry dusty Denver, Colorado, where I'd grown up. And you come into the the place itself and it is green and lush and fecund and it's like anything is possible. Anything will continue to grow or will regrow. You can replant at any time and things are going to just become this lush environment. And it feels to me that that is true also of the community, that there's always hope and a chance of renewal or starting over again in such a place. And so I'm that's kind of what all my books are about. I'm always trying to capture that feeling of hope and starting again. I tend to write a lot about people who are on the margins or outcast in a society. And Seattle really celebrates the weird, you know, and the less commercially motivated aspects of art and life. And so it's a place I really feel at home and I try to convey that sense in the work that I do and the stories that I tell in my books. about that. And so I'm just always trying to shine a light on those things and people who need another chance. And I believe that I live in a place that always embraces that. you have said, I believe we're innate storytellers with story structure passed down through the ages and present now in much the same way it always has been. Is there something about Seattle? That nurtures this innate storytelling among so many. Well, I bet everyone has said this. I hope I imagine that rain. It is all about the rain. It is all about the darkness. It is all about the, you know, when I lived in Colorado, all you look for is to go outside. When you live in Seattle, you are inside. And I think that that has nurtured so many creative endeavors in the city and in the whole region, really. That We have to turn inward. we are encouraged to get warm and cozy and in front of a fire or with a cup of tea or coffee and let our minds do what they will. And it is just really good for a creative person to have that time and space and energy and no expectation of doing something more, you know, whatever, something that you're supposed to be doing outside or in the world, that you can just come. to this cozy place and listen to the rain pattern on the windows and tell stories. You know, for me it was everything. That's when my writing really took off. That's when I was able to really focus in on that. What does the future hold for you? Well, I you know, I have taken a lot of time off from writing and publishing, obviously to work in the community and but always writing, as you know, always writing because writers write. and I have now a a memoir that I'm going to have published in 2027. I have a good friend who is starting a small press, and that excites me so much. He is starting a press called Pickle Fork Press. And so my memoir is my first memoir, and hopefully I think my only memoir is going to be published by Pickle Fork in 2027. So far, the working title is Goddess of Our Time. And it's in a in a nutshell, it's very timely. I didn't mean for it to be timely, but all of a sudden it is. It's about being the child of a mother who suffered from postpartum psychosis. And then ongoing mental illness the rest of her life. and then getting through that, getting over it and learning to love her and myself again and in the world in a happier place. So again, it's a book about hope coming from a really dark place. but I'm really excited for it to come out.
Tim: Among the criteria considered for a city of literature, the quality of writers associated with locale must meet a certain level of excellence. Seattle easily clears this hurdle with Octavia Butler, Higiomo Oluo, Timothy Egan, Richard Hugo, among many others. Further enhancing the city's reputation is acclaimed contemporary author, Lori Frankel. Through such titles as This Is How It Always Is and Enormous Wings, Frankel explores big themes, crafts unforgettable characters, and captivates millions of devoted readers. your publisher has described you as a go to writer in Seattle. Do
Laurie: Hmm.
Tim: you think there exists a distinct profile of a Seattle author, or do you believe the city's openness to so many different voices stands as a defining feature?
Laurie: B. I think B, that's what I think. th the a wide, wide variety of voices. What I will say is that my publisher, like most publishers, is 3,000 miles away from Seattle. almost all of publishing is in New York. And as far as New York is concerned, there's not a whole lot that's like west of New Jersey. And we are really, really far away. I think that what is interesting as far as publishing in Seattle goes is that Seattle is you know, is clearly a world class city. you know, it's it's very urban, it's it's very coastal, all all of those things, but it is really, really, really far away from the hub of publishing, which means for what I think Seattle writers have in common mostly is being three thousand miles away from their agents and their editors and their and their publishing machines and And sometimes that distance doesn't matter, but sometimes it does. And I think of late, you know, in recent years, we think that distance matters less and less because, we can just hop on a Zoom. We, you know, and of course, you know, we've had email for generations at this point, but it's just not quite the same as being there. and so we also, I think Seattle shares a lot of things with the other coast, which is, you know, it's very wet. We we have a lot of ocean, we have a lot of Green, But and we're very progressive, but we're also very far away. And so I th so that I think is what unites unites Seattle writers, I think. but otherwise I think it's B. We are we are a progressive and diverse people and that's a a good thing, I think. A really good thing.
Tim: you engage often with the city's literary community, from the Seattle Public Library to the Elliott Bay Book Company to Hugo House and several other institutions. has your relationship with these cultural assets influenced your writing?
Laurie: Yes and no. I am s I mean, Seattle is a gr so we have so many independent bookstores, we have so many wonderful library branches, we have such an active and engaged literary community, both on the writer's side and on the reader's side. and I'm so so grateful for that and so happy to engage with it, a sort of aside from my writing. That is I you know, I'm I've spent a lot of time writing, but not as much time as I spend reading. I am I am deep down and and first and last, I think, a reader. And so it is very wonderful to be in a community that values books. And that was always true. I mean, it was one of the things that that drew me to Seattle in the first place, one of the first things that drew me to Seattle from the East Coast in the first place, at which point I was not writing. professionally or really even creatively. I was I was mostly doing academic writing at that point. But the readers and and just their their number and enthusiasm was unlike any place I'd I'd ever been in this country, certainly. And and and that that was the first thing that that drew me in. And and so as a writer It's very, very gratifying and I'm very, very grateful to have to be surrounded by people who who get it and value it. and I and I don't think I could it would have, you know, necessarily occurred to me to to do it without them. But I will say that it's not so much that that influences my writing as I don't know, buoys it, cushions it, gives it a a home. a home for it, and a sense that that it's a good use of my time. And I am I am always happy when I am when I am in in fr in standing in front of people to feel like I am talking to kindred spirits, but I think I'm even happier when I'm sitting in the audience because it is really a remarkable thing to be a reader among readers. And and that I think is true everywhere in this city.
Tim: are there any places you visit in the city, to clear your head, find inspiration or lose yourself in your work?
Laurie: Yeah, when I'm working, I'm usually working at my desk. especially anymore. I I have I need quiet for my for my brain to do to do the things it's supposed to do. Seattle is an incredible place to walk. It's a really good city for walking around. It's very civilized in this way, I think. I live Maybe two miles from downtown. I am definitely in the heart of the city, but I we have sidewalks, we have parks everywhere. So if you don't mind getting rained on and you get used to it, it's a really wonderful city to walk around. It is, among other things, blooming all year round. So, you know, on the East Coast, everything gets kind of brown for large swaths of the year in the summer because it's so dry, in the winter because it's dead and it just doesn't happen in Seattle. Everything is blooming all the time, everything is green. all the time and it makes it a really wonderful place and we have parks everywhere. There are no neighborhoods that don't have just drop dead gorgeous parks. I can walk to half a dozen world class parks. and then if I'm willing to drive five minutes, you know, then I get a dozen more with you know hiking trails through old growth forests and I find all of it to be both inspirational in kind of a literal way like I remember how to write, how to, you know, how to do setting, how to how to think not just what things look like, but also, you know, what they smell like, what they feel like, like that kind of thing. But also just in a kind of head clearing sort of a way where you get up from your desk and you go out into the world and and it's beautiful rather than being, I think, overwhelming or, you know, unpleasant. the Seattle has a lot of outdoor. And the was the water that falls from the sky, but also we've got we've got lakes, we've got sounds, we've got bays, and so you can get to the beach within, you know, moments really. and that means that there's water everywhere. And that also is something there's something very grounding and revitalizing, I think about that.
Tim: Your agent, Molly Friedrich, has said of you, Lori is making good trouble. so do you know you will make good trouble when you develop an idea or do you aim to tell the story and see what unfolds?
Laurie: Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so I just published my sixth novel. So at this point I'm starting to suspect. I certainly didn't go into it with that intention. And I don't know, in the first few several, I it was surprising. I mean, i i she's put it very kindly and I and I appreciate that, and you have also put it very kindly, but there's an extent to which what it is is I keep pissing people off. And and I and I used to be very, very apologetic about it because I don't want to piss people off. I'm nice. I want everyone to feel to feel happy. But the truth is there's a there's a lot of there's a lot to be pissed off about and not talking about it is less and less on the table, I guess as far as I'm concerned. so yeah, I it has started to become c more obvious to me earlier along in the project, I guess, that that this thing that I am writing and that I think of as just being, you know, character exploration is actually gonna piss people off. And that, you know, I have these you know, to my mind, the moral of my stories is always wider ranges of normal, make the world a better place for everyone. And it's hard for me to see that that is controversial. but in the particular, apparently it is. So and then lots of people feel that they would like to social media me about their displeasure or send emails about, you know, the ways in which I've pissed them off. And I find that I've in the beginning I felt that very hurtful and and so Molly's spin on this has been, you know, that's that's the work. So until there stop being things that make me feel enraged, I guess I'll keep you know, making making this trouble. And it doesn't seem like it's gonna happen anytime soon.
Tim: the theme of family is at the heart of your writing. in fact, your twenty twenty four novel is titled Family Family. you also once said, I'm a member of a weird family, but all families are weird, and that's what makes them not weird at all. So is there any is there something about Seattle that has allowed you to explore the subject of family so meaningfully? and would you ever characterize the city as a big weird family?
Laurie: that's really lovely. I love that. I love that idea. I you know, in fact, I I I don't know because I I haven't lived in enough of them, and there are some ways in which Seattle is the only real city in which I have if in which I have lived. I I w lived in Baltimore for a few years and I I guess I would also call that a city. But simply to say, I think what I might argue is that cities are are big weird families. There's an extent to which That is true of cities in general. I will say that one of the things, another very early thing that I loved about Seattle at the beginning, what drew me out here, maybe first and keeps me here, still, is that it is it is very progressive. It is it is genuinely it is genuinely a progressive place that welcomes lots of different kinds of people and diversity at of lots of different kinds, like a diversity of diversity. that that Seattle is is weird and has people who are weird and you know, or who are outside of of whatever norm and are embraced and celebrated for that. And and that is definitely it is not unique to Seattle, but it is it is one of the things that Seattle does better than most places I would say. And I am very, very grateful, not not only for myself, but mostly and especially, you know, for my kid. it's a it is a good place to be doing to be doing family. And you know, I think that you know we talk a lot these days about found family and chosen family. And Seattle does that especially well as well. I think because there are lots of people who grew up here But there are also lots and lots of people who move who move here along the way. And so there are lots of I'm not the only one whose parents live three thousand miles away. And and you know, and so I think we also are very good at at treating friends like family out here.
Tim: you set your first novel, The Atlas of Love in Seattle, and the book came out not long after you first moved to the city. Has your sense of Seattle changed in the intervening years? and would you locate any future stories in the city?
Laurie: I mean my sense of the city has definitely changed because as you say, I was new to the city. I was looking at it through through tourist eyes, really. I had I I I had just arrived. but Seattle has also changed a lot in those years. What is it like 15 years? and so and so both of those things have changed have changed significantly. You know, in some ways I think it's easier to write about places when you're new there because you you see and you notice everything that that that comes to be invisible when you live someplace and are and are used to it. And two, I was getting to know it. So I was I was going everywhere and and trying everything and and now I'm set in my ways and I go back and forth to my kids' school and that's what I do. and so there are so yeah, I think everything everything would be different. I will Absolutely set future books in Seattle. I'm sure I will. I Seattle's very atmospheric. It's a good place to write. It's a good place to write about. It is there's much to describe. I think the rain lends itself well to well, both to writing, you know, to to the act of writing, to sitting your butt in a chair and keeping it there. But but also to it lends itself to description. it it l it lends itself to atmosphere and mood. So yeah, for sure I will use it. But also then sometimes the books have to move for s for different reasons. So my my latest book, which is called Enormous Wings, was originally set in Seattle and then owing to plot and theme reasons, it had to move to Texas. And and so that is the other thing I think that that happens all the time is you you s at least I do, I sort of pick somewhere and it might as well be Seattle because I'm here and that cuts down on the research, but then it but then they wander, they go where they will, and and s and you and you have no choice but to follow. So yes, Ang, yes.
Tim: in The Atlas of Love, you write about being a firm believer in knowing people by knowing what they read, holding their favorite words in your mouth, running curious fingers along the spines of their books. What might one come to know about you based on what you are reading at the moment?
Laurie: Well, I'll tell you, what I'm I'm reading at the moment is seven different books. So that's that's what you would come to know about me is that I I am reading I am reading all the time. I am reading voluminously and variously and overlappingly. I I'm always listening I'm usually only listening to one at a time, but I am reading with my eyeballs d in general half a dozen. And they tend to be things like books that I'm blurbing for other people that haven't come out yet. And then you know, some s like often I'm reading contemporary fiction because I'm writing contemporary fiction. And so I'm, you know, plugged into that. But then also I'm pulling stuff off of my I think I'm up to ten bookshelves around the house where that I haven't gotten to or I don't remember. And then I've got a few that I'm reading for research. and they're usually I mean I'm always reading a novel. I'm never not reading a novel. And I'm usually reading three or four, but then often I have another something that is nonfiction that I'm that I'm dabbling in for whatever reason. you know, either research or because something has come up and you know, or it's I've been led to it by something else that I was reading. That's what you that's that's what you can tell about me. I am I am reading many things all of the time. I'm always I am I am almost always writing a book, but I am definitely always reading several.
Tim: As mentioned, Seattle City of Literature produces a map that features such landmarks as the Blue Moon Tavern, Frequented by the likes of Theodore Redke and David Wagoner, along with sites linked to John Okada, Beverly Cleary, and Ruben Sierra, as well as others. Of course, the map includes Seattle's many outstanding independent bookstores, a collection any town would envy. For booksellers, readers, and writers, Elliott Bay Book Company has anchored itself as a Seattle literary fixture since 1973. Owner Tracy Taylor has worked at Elliott Bay for over thirty years.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: you served as general manager of Elliott Bay Book Company for over thirty years before becoming the owner. During your tenure What have you observed about the evolution of the store and the growth of Seattle's literary scene? And how do their separate but related paths intersect?
Tracy Taylor: I would say I first started at Elliott Pay Book Company in nineteen ninety, and there was a lot of growth in the independent book industry, but there was also a lot of growth in the book industry itself, in within chain stores and the rise of Amazon, which is in our hometown of Seattle. And so bookstores were doing very well. we had a very robust event series at that time that was started by our head buyer, Rick Simmonson, back in the 70s. And there were not a ton of new independent bookstores in Seattle at that time. Since then, I think that we now have maybe 36 in the area. that are generally new bookstores. and we've seen that growth happen a lot in the last five years as well with a lot of niche bookstores. So along with the growth of independent bookstores in and around Seattle and the Northwest, Author events, literary events around town have increased tenfold. Every bookstore is doing events with authors local or national or even international authors. And it sort of feeds on itself in the city that we've become this UNESCO city of literature, so to speak. but a place where almost any night of the week you could find some sort of literary event, if not two or three, happening somewhere in the city. And that's a big change that I've seen over time. it's ebbed and flowed as have independent bookstores in the nineties, a a few of them closed and we had some pretty hard times, all of us, until after the recession in two thousand and eight, I would say.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: perhaps more so than anywhere in the nation, Elliott Bay finds itself squarely amidst the tension between independent bookstores and online commerce as you sit under two miles from Amazon's headquarters. does this proximity enter into how you approach your mission and does this geography heighten your kinship with your fellow independent bookstores around the country?
Tracy Taylor: That's a really complex question and I have probably a long answer for that. But you know, we there is tension with Amazon, I think less now than there used to be, but of course they started as an online bookstore. and And we're very aggressive in terms of discounting, and we really took a big hit. We being independent bookstores, we at Elliott Bay took a big hit when they opened, and people were enamored with this idea of buying cheap books online. And then ebooks came out, and there was a fascination with that. And I think over the years, things have sort of settled into our, I would say our customers buy books from Amazon online, but they really make an effort to buy books from us first. and it's sort of settled itself out. We've hosted, we the city of Seattle has hosted the American booksellers Winter Institute twice. in the last twenty years. And both times it's been really interesting to see booksellers from other parts of the country come here and see Amazon and see the Amazon workers going to work down in Lake Union. and see the Amazon spheres and realize, you know, how much Amazon has a presence in our town. And I think they see it often as the, you know, the big evil, whereas, you know, we we work side by side with them. We mail books to people at the Amazon offices sometimes. That always surprises me when we get an order to mail a book to someone who works at Amazon. But it happens and a lot of our customers work at Amazon. So it's a it's a different relationship than I think you might see when you talk to a bookseller in another part of the country that doesn't have that big presence nearby. I think we've made peace with the fact that they are in our city and they contribute to the economy of the city in ways that have been helpful too. Not that I wanna give them a great big shout out. but we we have we at Elliot Bay have found a peaceful existence.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: Elia Bay maintains a strong relationship with the city, along with the writers and readers who live there. Are there any moments that best capture for you the community's appreciation for what you mean to Seattle?
Tracy Taylor: Again, that's a little what I talked about that I think we saw it when when we had to close for COVID and we were not you know we we were not an efficient online presence prior to that. It was something that we offered, but we didn't invest a lot or you know, we just we weren't very facile at doing that. And we realized that was the only way people could purchase books from us. and so very quickly our management team, the few people, the owner, our head buyer and a few managers, figured out how to change our online presence and and sell books faster to people because they wanted to support us. That's really what it was. It was the community wanted to make sure we didn't go out of business. And so they ordered books online from us in droves. and the messages that they sent with those orders were so personal and meaningful. And sitting in this giant store that's twenty-two thousand square feet with five of us working away doing online orders, nothing any of us really ever wanted to do, reading those notes made us cry. We would share them at the end of the day with one another before we left. But people told stories about proposals in here or meeting, you know, their their match or a book that they'd discovered or a book that somebody recommended to them on staff. It just it really drove it home the number of orders that came in, the messages that came with those orders. I I'm still getting emotional and it's years later what this store meant to the community of Seattle.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: Elliott Bay remains impressively active with respect to public offerings with events held seemingly every day. you host several book groups, including the Global Issues Book Group and the Speculations Book Group, among others. how do these book groups come together and what occurs when they gather?
Tracy Taylor: So the book groups were originally started by our booksellers on staff who wanted to host a book group. Customers would ask if we had book groups or if there were book groups they could join. And so originally we had a couple of staff people who wanted to do the global issues and the speculations. we've done different ones over the years. and so they chose the book and it's open to whoever wanted to show up that month so you're not committing to having to read a book every month. You can just read the book and show up and they're open to the public. They're less hosted by the staff now and really just kind of run by the people who show up regularly. There have been people who've been coming for 15, 20 years to both of those book clubs. And then the books are chosen for the next month by the group that is there that month. months. and it really has a life of its own at this point. it's kind of it's fun and amazing to see what they pick.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: Elliott Bay deserves credit for opening Seattle up to the wider publishing world. And you have noted just earlier how Rick Simmonson single handedly made the argument in the nineteen seventies regarding the city's literary merit. And then inter in the intervening years, Elliott Bay has built just an incredible history. Salman Rushdie delivered his first post fatwa public reading at an event you organized in nineteen ninety six and you had mentioned before about Raymond Carver and he gave his final reading at the store. while Amy Tan gave her first reading. what does it mean to you to steward such an important legacy? And what does an audience member experience during an Elliott Bay reading?
Tracy Taylor: we're grateful that we've been able to host such a wide variety and an amazing array of events. And you know that that comes from the authors who are willing to come and read their work. obviously it helps them sell their work too, but as you said, it's often a lonely kind of experience to write. And sometimes it's really hard for authors to get up and speak in front of a group, especially about their book, you're putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. but What it does is connect people with an author that they might not have known about, that they may discover our staff or who host the readings on a regular basis are always discovering these new authors that they're really excited about, and then they sell their book and talk about it after they come and do an event. So in that way it has a life of its own. For the customers who come to our events, they're generally at seven o'clock. They're at a regular time. They happen in our events room. And you can come and explore and meet a new author. It might be a poetry reading. It could be, well, he's outgrown us, but David Sederis used to try to do his events in our in our event space because he was very loyal. to us we had him when he was first out with his first book. but you might discover a David Sidaris when you're here. you aren't required to buy a book. we hope that you do after the event and you can get it signed. Sometimes for depending on the book, it can be a really personal experience for somebody who comes. You know, they've they're meeting an author for the first time that they've read all their books and they're really excited to have a chance to meet. and so it's different for every single person who comes to the event.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: do you have a dream author you would like to have a peer at Elliott Bay?
Tracy Taylor: we've had this author, but we would love to have him come back again and it's Haruki Murakami. We Have so many readers who discover his books and come back for all of them and live in his world, and he's an amazing person. He writes across not just fiction, right? His nonfiction is amazing too. and he doesn't travel much from Japan. I think one of his translators lives here in the Northwest. But we would love to have him come back to Elliott Bay. And I don't remember what year he was here, but it was in the mid nineties.
Lit Trip: Shin Yu Pai II: what do the upcoming years hold for Elliott Bay and for Seattle?
Tracy Taylor: with with my business owner hat on, which is sort of a new hat and not a managerial hat, I am always kind of wondering what that future brings. you know, we s we seem to just continue growing. there's new bookstores all the time. And so I hope that continues. I hope that this renaissance of independent bookstores continues. I hope they're populated everywhere. We do know that we have passionate customers and people are buying books and that there's new readers coming on. They're reading romance, they're reading science fiction in numbers that we've never seen before. And that is really hopeful for me because if you're reading if you're reading, you're gonna start reading other things. You're gonna branch out. People read fiction and then they switch to non fiction. So I really feel like there's people are reading the physical book and I have a lot of hope for that.
Tim: A search through Elliott Bay's stacks for titles with ties to Seattle would uncover a multitude of voices, and in so doing, reveal one of its greatest assets: diversity. Throughout its history, Seattle has benefited from authors of various backgrounds, Native American, Asian American, African American, among several others. One of the city's most remarkable voices belongs to poet Xin Yi Pai, who served as Civic Poet of Seattle and received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America for Poetic Genius. Author of over thirteen books, Chinyi also wrote, hosted, and produced the podcast Ten Thousand Things, which examined the Asian American experience.
Tim Castano: what first brought you to Seattle and what have you received as an artist that has convinced you to continue your career in the city? I first came to Seattle in the year 2007 when I was exploring the idea of getting a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington. Before that, I'd lived in a lot of different literary communities, including Boston, Boulder, Colorado, Chicago, and Dallas. And I felt really charmed by Seattle when I came out here to Sit in on classes and to do some literary readings and to get to know the local literary community. When I first came, I was welcomed by a well-known poet in this region named Carol Levin, who often opened her home to itinerant visiting poets and artists and dancers. And I felt like she really gave me a very wonderful introduction to the arts community in Seattle. Not just in terms of like poets and writers, but also her broader community, which included people who were practicing Bhutto and running a Dallas Studies Institute. And she herself was a supernumerary in the Seattle opera. And so I think that this friendship for me really kind of opened the doors to seeing the kinds of communities and collaborations and crossovers that were possible. In a place like Seattle. And I ended up not completing my PhD program. I dropped out after a year. It didn't feel like the right discipline for me, but I ended up getting a second master's in museum studies and then moved away in 2009 and took a couple of jobs in the Austin and Little Rock, Arkansas area in roles that included being a curator and running a family foundation. And after a couple of years of living away from Seattle in what I felt like was Deep South, I wanted to start a family and felt like the most hospitable place where I could imagine having a mixed race family was back in Seattle. And talked to my partner and we decided to move back in twenty twelve and have been here since. you created the podcast Ten Thousand Things, examining the Asian experience in America, which you have described as infinite, vast, and unfathomable. Is there anything about Seattle that offered you the space to explore this topic so deeply? Yeah, so the Asian American community here in Seattle is incomparable to what I grew up with in Southern California. Like I grew up in this inland empire town called Riverside, where there were very few Asian Americans at the time when I was growing up. my brother and I were the only Asians that I knew of until probably I was in about the sixth grade or so. And so coming to a place like Seattle, there was a really different experience of the Asian American community in terms of the visibility of Asian Americans and their role in helping to establish Seattle and the nature of the thriving communities that have established themselves here. as immigrant populations and second generation and onwards. And so for me, I think plugging into a community here that was deeply rooted in social justice and activism were really big draws for me in terms of focusing a story series about Asian Americans on that aspect of Seattle culture and community. And While I was at the University of Washington, I had the opportunity to work with a person named Ron Chu, who had been the editor-in-chief of a community newspaper with a very activist bent that came out of the Asian American district or international district here in Seattle. And he was also I think the third or fourth director of the Wing Luke Asian Museum, which is a Smithsonian affiliate and a national park site, but is a community-based museum that reflects the Asian American diasporic and immigrant experience across cultures. And so having an incredible resource like that with the collections full of objects and a museum that programmed by Engaging its community through community advisory groups and conversations and including them in the messaging and creation of exhibitions. I think what I saw through being somebody involved with the museum was this ability to bring storytelling and stories into the space of museum exhibitions and displays. And so that really was an early influence and inspiration for me in terms of thinking about how that kind of storytelling could be translated to audio stories or for radio that could likewise take that approach of talking about Asian Americans through their objects and artifacts that have endured throughout history. you have served as the Seattle Civic Poet. did that role alter your appreciation of the city in any way? similarly, did you Did your tenure influence your own voice moving forward? So during my time as civic poet, which is much like a poet laureate role in any other city or state, part of my work was really about finding ways to platform community voices through my work and my relationship to the public radio station, as well as my relationship to various community spaces. And so One of the first things that I did was to curate for public radio 30 days of Seattle poetry, basically. And we did like a digital website as well as like four broadcast segments related to local individual poets. And so I learned through that process, you know, the discovery yeah, through that process I discovered individuals and voices whose work I was less familiar with. And that was really exciting to me. And then the following year, in the second year of my appointment, I did an open call to the community in which I invited people to send me poems related to place, placemaking, thriving communities, and I received all kinds of poems from People who I'd never met or encountered at poetry readings or read their work, and people who hadn't perhaps published or you know gone to MFA programs. And I think what became clear to me was that there are so many diverse voices in the city. And the having the opportunity to read and engage with that work was really exciting to me. to just be able to platform some of it. So in that second year, what I did was basically after going through the open call. I distilled it down to I think it was about five poets or authors. And then I partnered with a visual designer to basically interpret and create visual installations of those poets from those poetries from community writers and to install them around the city in various spaces, like at the Seattle Public Library, or also in spaces like the Bureau of Fearless Ideas. which was like this community space related to creative writing and youth and just different spaces around the city that that kind of centered around different neighborhoods and and the sort of cultural vibrancy of each of these areas. As of this recording, you have offered 13 books. Could you point to certain works where you identify traces of the city, perhaps, perhaps in ways not necessarily noticeable to your readers? So a couple of my more recent poetry collections, like No Neutral and Verga, spend time looking at various places and sites and experiences that I've had in Seattle. Like in No Neutral, I write about this incredible labyrinth that's outside the Museum of pop culture in Seattle at our Seattle Center where the Space Needle campus is and Yeah, other places that have been significant to me. I think in Verga I write about places like the Danny Wu Community Garden in the Chinatown International District. And so place pops up in various places throughout the book. I think also there is a poem in No Neutral that's related to the disappearance of cherry trees or secure trees in the Pike Place Market area that were cut down by the city. And so there are these little breadcrumbs of my experiences in the city, sort of throughout many of my books. I would say that my early book, Adamantine, from 2010 with White Pine Press, that was also a book that was about my first two years of living in Seattle and subsequently moving away. And so it was kind of like so many things that I appreciated at that time. about the ways in which my anthropology program was opening up my senses or my sensibilities around how I thought about power and place and people. And there was a palpable shift, I will say, in my poetry around that time where previously I'd written a lot about like arts and spirituality, visual art. And I think there began to be a shift in Seattle where people actually began appearing in my poems more. And I think that's kind of been a thread throughout. And I think that that is the influence of the community that has really fed and nurtured my work. I think the character of Seattle is also present in my haiku comics book Less Desolate, which talks about life during the pandemic and raising a kid during that period of time. And lots of long runs or walks in my neighborhood in North Seattle and just kind of like the the the feelings of you know, a a city kind of like, you know, emptied of life during that time. Which Seattle writers, either from the past or working today, would you recommend to readers who might wish to gain a sense of the city's diverse literary identity? This seems like a simple question, but I I've struggled with it maybe a little bit because I feel like, you know, curating a reading list for a stranger is so specific to one's own literary sensibility. And there are waves of writers that come into fashion and then, you know, are displaced by a new generation of writers. But the one writer that I did want to single out is a poet named Kun Wun. Who passed away on August 13th, so just a few weeks ago. And he was in his 70s and he had a struggle with pancreatic cancer that ended up taking his life. And Kuhn was a very interesting figure here in Seattle. So he immigrated from China when he was in his teens and ended up living in Aberdeen, which is the same city where Kurt Cobain was born, I believe. And later he would move to San Francisco and eventually kind of ended up back here in the Seattle region. But for much of his class much for much of his life, he was very working class and grew up working in his family's restaurants. And later in his adulthood, he ended up living in SROs in the Chinatown International District and struggling a lot with his mental health. And so Kaya Press were early publishers of his work. I think his first book was called The Truth in Rented Rooms and Water Chasing Water was a book that he wrote maybe about 10 years ago or so. But the brilliance of his poems were very much about an uncommon perspective that we don't usually see or read about from the immigrants' perspective and of a person suffering from mental illness and living on the real fringes of poverty in these SROs. And so he has many, many poems about that experience of isolation and loneliness living in this neighborhood while trying to survive. And I think the kind of disconnection that he felt with much of community while he struggled alone in many cases and so kun Ended up going on to establish Goldfish Press, which was his own independent sort of publishing project. And through that project, he would publish dozens and dozens of local writers and give them an opportunity to break through and to have their work circulate in the world. And I had a chance to interview him for KUW Public Radio a few years ago, before his cancer diagnosis. And Had actually met him because I was invited by the international examiner to review his book, Water Chasing Water. And so as I think about him crossing over to the other side, I just want to honor his work and his importance in a Seattle community so that he is not forgotten. you. You are a celebrated visual artist as well. in Seattle, how do writers and visual expressions interact to strengthen one another? I think that because there are, you know, people who are interested in interdisciplinary arts and hybridity, like for instance, there's an MFA program at Uta Baffle, which is north of Seattle. There are programs and communities that are already kind of interested in this intersection of like written and visual. And so yeah, as an example of it too, I think I can talk about that. For instance, right now I have an art exhibition of work up at the Vestibule Gallery in Ballard, in which I show my work alongside two other textile artists and One of the women in the show, Gabby Nerino, who is a friend and a colleague who comes from Buenos Aires, Argentina originally, she weaves language into her work and has this really provocative piece, for instance, that's about what happens when you don't have the NY over the N in Spanish, you know, when you when you're just working with English exclusively, and what happens to language when you lose that p specific diacritical marker, right? So Like what happens is you lose words like suineo, which means dream, or you lose a word carinho, which means tenderness. And so I think there are thinkers and artists across disciplines who are are working with language at language at its edges in different ways. I certainly have a practice that has incorporated these two different strands of my interests that. I do feel like I see that quite a bit too in shows that have been at the Henry Art Gallery, at the University of Washington, or at the Fly Museum here in Seattle as well. There are many exhibitions that have been mounted related to work created by writers like Jane Wong or Quentin Baker, who also work in visual mediums or textual displays that are very visual. And those are really exciting things to see in big institutions that are, you know, predominantly known for showing visual art, but do venture into this area of of looking at how language can inform creativity. You have referred to the Buddhist tenet of impermanence, the notion nothing stays the same. might this apply to Seattle's literary theme both in the present and in the future? I I mean it it applies to everything all the time. I I think the other way I would say it is everything changes always. so in terms of the Seattle literary scene, you know, I got here in 2007 and and felt like I was very connected to the literary scenes and even involved for many years producing events and lectures and literary programming. but I I think that What we see in in many cities often is kind of like a turnover of the energy and like new young people coming in to create new literary series or to take over existing presses or to launch their own imprints. And hopefully, you know, the thread of the past is present in what continues. if if we are attentive to what has been here and who have been here before us. But I think that this idea of like changing city, it's it's always happening. And I have many friends that kind of lament the nineties and you know what Seattle was here, which I didn't actually know because I didn't live here yet at this time. But but I I feel like I have seen many waves of change here in Seattle by way of who is leading the cultural institutions and who do you see Teaching in institutions and producing events and the the tastes of the time and the trends inevitably change and all that we can really focus on is our own kind of inwards creative practice.
Tim: If you ask a person about Seattle's cultural achievements beyond literature, you likely will hear about the legendary music scene. No surprise then how the city's artists have discovered transformative ways to bring the two media together. The Bushwick Book Club has merged Seattle's dual enthusiasm for music and literature by gathering musicians to interpret individual publications through original songs. Noted singer, songwriter, and musician Wes Woodell is the Bushwick Book Club's associate director. Could you please describe the Bushwick Book Club to an audience unfamiliar with the concept?
Wes Weddell: Certainly. the Bushwick Book Club Seattle is sort of at its core a concert series. we produce monthly live music events of original music inspired by books. We've done this since 2010. Each evening is ten or so performers booked in advance, different from month to month, who read that month's book and love it, hate it, indifferent to it. They find their way in and they write their own brand new original piece inspired by it. we borrowed the name from Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, where a group of people kind of started with a version of this idea. We've grown into our own 501c3 nonprofit, we which includes an education arm now where we go into classrooms and library spaces and work with young people on storytelling and inspiration. but original music inspired by literature is sort of the fundamental premise of everything we do.
Tim: How do you select the books and are the authors ever involved in the composition process?
Wes Weddell: we select the books by committee these days. we in in the early years, executive director and founder Jeff Larson kind of was a committee of one, but as we've grown from a more guerrilla enterprise to a for real arts organization with real nonprofit status, we actually have a couple of subcommittees involved. We have a subcommittee of booksellers, people in that world who like report to us about What people are coming into stores enthusiastic about. We welcome suggestions from our audience and from our performers. and these days we're trying to hit a number of of metrics, check a bunch of boxes to make the programming interesting, to make it vibrant, and to grow so we try to do a mix of classic and contemporary, local and national and international, across genres, across author demographics. We have gotten real good at making pie charts in Google Sheets and sort of entering in seasons and and and seeing how they look. and at the end we kind of go, does does this feel right? and we also need to make sure that we're it's it's one thing to announce a title, it's another thing to program a show that makes sense. If we did you know, a night of James Baldwin and all the performers looked like me, that would be a miss. And so you know, there's a lot of there's a lot of growing involved in it. we get vibrant audiences a lot of times when the When the title is familiar and well known, but we don't want to limit ourselves to only certain narrow understandings of of Poplet or things like that. once a year we do an evening of original music inspired by local authors. We call it Ink Aloud, and the authors are in attendance for that one. they do readings as well. sometimes people hear the word local and they get that that that feels like a sort of qualifier or something other than sort of professional, but Seattle's a world class arts and literature city. And, you know, our our local author shows are some of the most vibrant arts evenings that we're gonna have all year. And it's really wonderful to be in a room with an author watching someone sing a song inspired by their work in real time. we don't we haven't we haven't heard any of the songs before before they're up on stage. which is which is part of the magic. I mean this is why live matters. Yeah, s and we've done a number of different author collaborations. So most of our events don't involve the authors, but many of them do.
Tim: w what are the books on your wish list you would like to feature?
Wes Weddell: we would like to feature all of those perfect books that result in incredibly interesting new musical art that pe bring people out to the shows. as we were about sit on the evening of our seventeenth season here, we've been able to do a number of books that felt like wish list books over the years. I know our executive director for years really wanted to do Dune, and we got to do that a few a few s seasons ago. And and our seasons have been themed the last several years, which has been kind of fun. So we did one all animal connected a year of all animal connected titles, all color connected titles and themes. This year, we did all band books for one. This coming year is gonna be it's don't tell me the odds, a season where the impossible meets unstoppable. so you know, that's kind of a fun heading to put books under, but also broadly interpreted.
Tim: So the Bushwick Book Club provides programming for young people focused on songwriting and critical thinking. What are the short term and long term benefits you have witnessed among those who have participated?
Wes Weddell: I I used to do more of the teaching for our education program and I've I've I've rotated myself out some just so that we can grow our roster of teaching artists. from you know, get get people with with backgrounds different from mine in there and just grow the number of voices. the program's called Style Songwriting Through Youth Literature Education, because everything in educ education must be an acronym. and we you know, we we felt like we had to participate in that. when when young people feel safe really telling their stories, it's it's really wonderful space to to witness and to share. and that can look like different things. It can look like the honors student who's really focused on doing it right, who suddenly realizes that there isn't right and there and and this is a little This isn't about getting a good grade. This is this is about being vulnerable. And it can also look like the student who maybe has struggled in reading and writing school environments, who realizes that that we're we're there to hear what they have to say, even if it makes us uncomfortable. that's certainly a sh a short term benefit to to to share that space to be able to provide it to to offer that to young person and long term to hope that they're able to carry that other places and to to plant seeds that interacting with art is is welcome and part of the conversation that these these texts these these products that people put in front of you are are still part of the conversation and that your experience interfacing with them is just as valid as as anyone else in the room and anyone else sort of over time. and that we want to hear what you have to say about it.
Tim: The Bushwick Book Club represents one of the most vivid examples of creative interaction between music and literature. Seattle houses vibrant offerings, theatrical, visual, musical, among several others. Do you find that the city's different art forms influence one another? And do you view this as a particular strength Seattle possesses?
Wes Weddell: I think that the different scenes and segments definitely influence one another and there's a lot of cross pollination, cross participation. I I do see it as a strength. I I can't compare it to other cities too well just because I know I've gone all in on this one. and so I don't I just I don't know the ins and outs of other cities, particular scenes, but there are some really creative things that happen in Seattle that bring together different artists from from different different mediums from different backgrounds, different practices. and I think about the 1448 theater festival that pulled together musicians and playwrights and actors and visual artists and have them create a new work in 48 hours. this has been going on for years. You know, that's a really I think that's a really strong example of of scenes coming together. and as Seattle has changed as it's gotten harder for a lot of working artists to live here some of it has changed. A lot of people lament that twenty years ago, you know, you could have a car and an apartment and a part-time job and enough time to also be in a play or do other things and that it that's not quite the same now. but people people find a way to be creative. and I also I feel like it's an important part of our work to continue to find people who are being creative in ways that aren't as familiar to us or aren't as much of the the scenes that we in leadership of this organization or sort of a lot of our our longtime regulators come from.
Tim: You are a folk musician, and congratulations on the recent release of the work, the hope, the promise. Folk music and literature enjoy a deep, longstanding relationship, essentially bound along the same DNA helix. Do any of your songs bear the direct influence of specific writers? for example, I've read your track, Inches, draws inspiration from Jim Bowton's Ball Four.
Wes Weddell: the short answer there is yes. I was part of the first Bushwick Book Club Seattle show in October of 2010 on 101010. That was original music inspired by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. and I immediately thought this thing is making people excited in songwrit about songwriting in a way that that not a lot of other things are doing. Songwriting is the thing I care about the most. And I continue to feel that way. It's why I I've gotten as deeply involved as I am. in those early years, I participated in a lot of the shows. There were there were more repeat performers than there are currently, just because now we have we've grown and we have more people who are interested and we want to give a lot of voices, get a lot of voices on that stage. but s over the years since twenty ten, I've I've written more than sixty-five songs inspired by books. four Bushwicks, some of them for mainstage performances, some of them for one-off sort of in-classroom kind of things where those songs will probably never see the light of day again. but I have recorded, I think I have recorded 24 of them on some of my albums. so the the the the work the hope that promised the record that's new this year Has 11 tracks. Eight of those are book inspired. So you mentioned Inches, the baseball song inspired by Jim Baton's book, but seven of the others are as well. and some of them I think when you when you hear what it is, it's a little more apparent. Some of them I use the inspired by premise to really go somewhere that maybe doesn't seem as connected. and I think that's a great part of the process. But I as much as I love the idea that The muses is just out there and I'll write it wherever it takes me. External deadlines matter. and I hear this over and over again from the artists who who perform at our shows, and there have been over four hundred of them since twenty ten. that, you know, they they thank us and they say this I I've got a song that I'm gonna keep using and and it wouldn't have existed if I hadn't said yes to this show. And I feel that way about a lot of this output as well. that that said, I I get so into the weeds on the on the craft and process. That I am constantly inspired by other songwriters. I'm I'm constantly listening. and, you know, if if if you tell someone you're an attorney or you're a a computer programmer, they have some idea of how much school you might have gone to. If I tell someone I'm a songwriter, they have no idea what I did or didn't do to sort of train and prepare for this life. but I think it's true that I spend as many waking hours during the day thinking about turn of phrase and imagery and metaphor. and and and y editing for clarity as an attorney thinks about law or a programmer thinks about code. that's probably not in existence a whole lot of people listening wish on themselves, but it's the one I've I've chosen.
Tim: Travel underpins much of your work, going back to my Northwest home. have your experiences beyond Seattle colored how you see the city?
Wes Weddell: Certainly. Yeah, my Northwest Home was a project I did I was in college and I had fifteen credits, independent study, and then a fellowship on top of it to travel around Washington State gathering stories and writing songs about the stories I found. I was nineteen when I did the project, I was twenty when I made the recording. and I happened to be out that was the spring of two thousand one and I was So that was 60 years to the month once we got into May from when Woody Guthrie had wrote his 26 songs for the Bonifault Power Administration, promoting public power. And you know, that's that's an important piece of of Woody lore. the Woody the Woody Guthrie comparisons were a little overwhelming at the time. I was happy for the Inc., you know, now I sort of feel like Woody lived at the time Woody lived and I'm I'm in the time I am. I it's a little complicated sometimes 'cause I don't I don't travel as much as I used to for music. And I there are a lot of things I I really like about being really committed to my home community here in Seattle. I I grew up in in eastern Washington State, kinda same state, different world, different climate, different everything, just sort of pace, pace of life, politics. but So I keep my I my w one foot on either side of the state. that that that's that's important to me. But I try, even though I operate very locally and really focused on local events and local communities, it's important to me to have global awareness of of what's going on in art, public affairs, et cetera. You know, I so I pay a lot of attention to what's happening in the songwriter world at the festivals I'm not going to anymore. just because it it it feels it feels important. I don't I don't want to lose that. I don't I don't wanna exist in any more of a bubble than can already happen in a town like Seattle, which is isolated geographically and it is a political oasis for a lot of people. And and that that's you know, that's that can be a different thing. to a difficult thing to to pull off and there's no there's no scorecard there's there's no way to know that I'm doing it but it's important to me to to to keep that in mind. so the things the things I hear from from artists and and creatives and and thinkers all over do influence what I do even though a lot of my work is applied really locally to to community here. and yeah, and also as a as a as a writer, I like the challenge of broad accessibility, even without being sort of I I like to offer a listener a l a number of points of connection without I get you know, but you have to be specific enough that it doesn't feel contrived. I think I I like that challenge. and You know, sometimes the very local references are kind of fun in that the more specific you are, the more universal it becomes kind of way. And sometimes it's helpful to know a little bit more about the world outside of where you are to to influence your vocabulary.
Tim: The Bushwick Book Club stands as one of several entities dedicated to promoting and celebrating the Emerald City's literary scene. Others include Hugo House, Folio, the Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas, and Seattle Arts and Lectures. As the city's preeminent convening platform, Seattle Arts and Lectures hosts the most recognized names from across the literary world, while also delivering educational content for local youth. Rebecca Hoogs is the Executive Director of Seattle Arts and Lectures. Seattle Arts and Lectures lives within the city's larger literary ecosystem. As in any healthy ecosystem, interdependencies enable each member to thrive. How does Seattle Arts and Lectures give to and benefit from your various partners, whether bookstores, writers, the library, or other cultural institutions?
Rebecca: Yeah, it's such a good question. because I think we think about the ecosystem as being everything and that working in and with community is is the only way forward. when I was thinking about this question, I was reminded of the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who said through unity, survival and all flourishing is mutual. I was also thinking of the work of Merlin Sheldrake, who appeared on our stage a year or two ago, and he wrote in his book Entangled Life. there have never been individuals. We are all lichens, which I love. I love so much. And both of these authors who have appeared in our stages in recent years, I think get at the heart of what we're trying to do at Seattle Arts and Lectures, with bookstores and community partners and libraries and public schools and writers and other literary organizations and even restaurants and bars. You know, there's this whole kind of like web and of ecosystem of community partners and businesses and people who sort of make make the whole engine of a city and a community thrive. And we're sort of all dependent on each other. And whether you are going out in person or whether you are at home, sort of engaging and engaging in this community is w what makes the the act of showing up more more satisfying and more enriching. And I think it's what what you give in, what you give to this act, you you get more out of it. And it's a long, it's a long term process. You know, it doesn't you don't get something back immediately. I mean these relationships, it is relational and these relationships take years to form, you have to show up at the work the of a partner organization, for example. you have to show up for their work as they show up for your work. you have to show up for the work of writers like Laurie Frankel or Bob D'Agoni. you have to you know, you have to show up for your partners as they all show up for you. And it does, it does take years. And I know I've been at Seattle Arsenal Lectures for for 22 years now. And it does it is so satisfying. And I think that's one of the real benefits of staying with an organization for a really long time is seeing how that flourishing does happen in the seeds that you plant, seeds that I planted 10 years ago. are coming to fruition now. It's really, you know, it's really exciting to see that. And we work with all of these partners in in you know slightly different ways in ways that are appropriate for those particular partners. Like bookstores, for example, are, you know, huge partners of us and that are we we're really interdependent with our local independent bookstore community. We work with all of our bookstores to be booksellers at our events and a huge number of our events come with books. built in with the tickets, which which benefits the author, which benefits the bookstore, and hopefully benefits the reader because it puts more books in the hands of the readers and gets people reading books that maybe they wouldn't have read otherwise. So there is a sort of mutual flourishing that hopefully hopefully helps everybody. so that's just, you know, one one little example, but you know, it is this this vast vast web that we're all working together on. And I want to shout out the work of the literary programs team at Seattle Arts and Lectures who does such careful, thoughtful relational work to work with like over 60 community partners in our in our community and 20 independent bookstores and numerous restaurants and bars and our arts education team who works with 40 public schools, we're working with this sort of this vast network of people in our community that sort of form this form this web.
Tim: You have described the process by which Seattle Arts and Lectures develops its programmatic slate as complex, as you aim to offer entertainment, education, solace, connection, and community. When envisioning the calendar, to what extent do you shape the agenda versus allowing themes to come to you from external sources, or or is it a little bit of both?
Rebecca: it's definitely both. It never ends up as we start out. We start out in January with like, okay, what if our season looked like this? And we start off with a kind of a dream list and we always have people from previous seasons that we're carrying forward, you know, sort of our dream list. but you know, it that's okay. it's always it's a collaboration with chance and the universe and of course the publishers and the publishing cycle. but we do start by asking ourselves what's in the zeitgeist? What Might people need from us a year from now? What's going to be happening a year from now? What what do we know will be happening a year from now? We never know what will not be happening a year from now. And what did people enjoy most from the past season? What really resonated? What were and what were they wanting to see more of? What were the gaps in the past season that we want to try to fill going forward? we want to think about what notes do we want to hit in the season going forward? I do think about it as sort of like playing different notes. not wanting to hit the same note twice. and then we want to think about like we want to be try attracting different kinds of readers. We do about 25 events a year. my goal, Tim, is that you can look at our season and that you can build your own four-part pass. I want every I want lots of different kinds of readers to look at our season and see that there is something there for them. So we're thinking really broadly about genre, we're thinking really broadly about fiction and nonfiction. We're thinking really broadly across the spectrum from education to entertainment. and then we ask everybody what they're reading and we then we see what books are coming along from the publishers in New York and beyond. And we're collaborating with the universe to make it come together. So it's a really exciting process. It takes us about six months to get the season together.
Tim: Seattle Arts and Lectures acts as an entry point for authors from around the nation and the globe. What do you hear from those individuals regarding their impressions of the city's literary scene?
Rebecca: my gosh, I think that they wish that they had more time here. Because you know that most of our authors are here for such a short amount of time because you know either they're on book tour or they have flown in just for this event and that they're they're not here long enough. and they all they all wish that they had more time here. but what we do hear is that they are deeply impressed by our audiences and they're deeply impressed by our readers and our reading culture. which they all say is unlike any other around the nation. And so they, you know, they walk out onto our stages at Town Hall or at Benaroyal Hall I think literature is is elevated here in the way you know, to the scale of opera or the symphony. In in the way that it is not in other places. And and that people here are hungry for a lecture, not just a conversation. which our audience really loves it when an author is willing to kind of go deep and give a lecture. And that is different, I think. And authors are often surprised by that, that they're like, really? Like you're you know, your audience really wants the lecture. And I Yeah, they do. They're they're really hungry for in your ideas and they really want to go deep and they're gonna sit with it for forty five minutes and they're not gonna be uncomfortable and you know, they're they're interested. They're they are they're hungry for real ideas and the intellect and the life of the mind and they're they're able to sit with that. And so that that surprises them too. And I think it's a sign of you know, just how great this audience is and and how you know how well read people are here. And so that is a thing that people are surprised about and really impressed about this audience here.
Tim: In your teaching at the University of Washington, you introduced your students to the work What the Ice Gets by Seattle poet Melinda Muller. What other writers, either past or present, might you recommend to readers?
Rebecca: Well, first of all, I'm really impressed that you you dug deep some somehow, and
Tim: Yeah.
Rebecca: I don't I don't know where you found that, but yes, I I did teach that book many times and I still recommend it. It's a really wonderful book of poetry. so in in the last year or so, I have read and really enjoyed a couple books by Seattle authors that I wanted to recommend. I really enjoyed Supersonic by Thomas Kohnstam. it's a very Seattle book, though it never mentions Seattle by name. It tells the story of a Seattle-like city over the several centuries since the city's founding, and of a Boeing-like company, though it never mentions Boeing by name, and of the way cities rise and fall, and of the way the people do too, and of what stays the same and what does not. And it's a very moving book and a very funny book in many ways. And I think no matter where you're from. it's about booms and busts in cities and and about history. And I think I think it's a great book and so I'd recommend Supersonic. I also really, really enjoyed The Laughter by Sonora Jaw. it's a it's a book set on a campus, much like Seattle University. It's a very kind of a dark academia book. It's a twisty book. It's a turny book. It's kind of a Who Done It. It's a campus novel in the age of identity politics. I read it a year or two ago and I just I keep I keep it's a book I keep thinking about. It's very smart, darkly funny. You do not know who you're rooting for. It's a little disturbing. It's it's a great book. I I recommend that. That's The Laughter by Sonora Ja. and I also want to shout out Lexi LaFleur-Brown. I got to hang out with her earlier this year. She wrote a hockey romance called Shoot Your Shot. her second book, Evening the Score, came out recently too. and it was really fun to talk about Lexi. she is a hockey player herself and she is married to a former pro hockey player who is now he does the announcing for the Kraken. He does the broadcasting for the Kraken. And so she's talked about her life. She's got to talk about her life, you know, being a hockey player, being married to a pro hockey player, and then her path, like sort of becoming a hockey romance writer. and I think ro romance can often stay in really kind of narrow lanes. And I really appreciate the way that Lexi diversifies her narratives and incorporates LGBTQIA characters and BIPOC characters. so yeah, those are the three books that I Recommend by Seattle authors.
Tim: You are a poet, and you once said, I'm a better person when I'm writing more because I'm paying attention. I'm attuned to the world. Has your work with Seattle Arts and Lectures further attuned you to the world and influenced your own writing?
Rebecca: So Sal has broadened my reading world and thus my world in a million ways. When I came to Sal, I came as a poet and academic. And I was mostly reading poetry and criticism. And as executive director, which I've been ED now for five years, I feel a responsibility to read something by every author that we are presenting. And we read we present mostly fiction and prose. We d we do present some poetry. so I read, I try to read every author's latest book. Because that's usually what they're talking about. And so our season is thus like a syllabus that I've had a hand in creating. So I really I spend most of my year really reading deeply the authors that we are presenting. And so over the past five years, Sal has intentionally been really expanding our curatorial rubric to bring authors who write romance and mystery and thriller and horror, as well as literary fiction and nonfiction. And so my reading has really expanded too. And the way I look at the world has expanded as a result. And I'll say, has it made me a better writer? I'll say n not yet, because I'm not trying to write horror or mystery or thriller or et cetera. but mostly because I've been a busier person at work with my with my job and also because I have a thirteen year old kiddo at home. but and so I'm just I'm I'm a busy person, but I really believe wholeheartedly in the benefits of reading broadly and diversely diversely and I'm really grateful for the ways that Sal has expanded my reading horizons and introduced me to new authors and genres. And I yeah, I believe yeah, I just believe wholeheartedly in the project of thinking thinking big and and reading big. and I when I come back to write and read poetry, which I do and I do with my with my writing group. whom I still meet with every couple of weeks. you know, I'm bringing all of that and everything that I learn at Sal and learn through all the authors. and I'm bringing all that perspective to to my writing. So, you know, d does it have a direct influence? Yeah, who knows? But it it's all in there. It's all in there.
Tim: In self storage, you write, it's unreal the way I keep returning to places like this one, distant from where I live. You grew up in Massachusetts and attended college in Maine. Do you feel those lines could apply to your relationship with Seattle?
Rebecca: So I wrote that poem and that line in Rome, where I taught often on for 10 years through the University of Washington. I taught a study abroad program. And I was reflecting on the strangeness of teaching, of teaching that program and the way that I, you know, had to k keep returning to the same sites over and over again at different ages, and how my previous selves were kind of layered. under the present tense and how I was thinking about the memories of being at like Hadrian's Villa, for example, six times. that is always happening no matter where you are. it was it felt really present for me in this that study abroad context. I think it's more prominent when you travel in a sense. I moved to Seattle in 1999. Get my MFA in creative writing at the University of Washington. And so I've now spent like more of my life here than I have spent anywhere else. and I've spent enough time here now that I've remembered distant eras of previous lives layered under this one, like a palimcest or a geological layer. I remember buildings and restaurants that I used to go to, and I passed street corners and remember things that happened there. I remember the Greek restaurant that is now a condo. I think. The longer you are lucky to live, these griefs and memories kind of layer up. the rest of that line says, distant from where I live and yet where I live. And I think part of the point of that line was that I live in memory. I live in the return to memory. and I think I don't know, I think we all do, or maybe if you are a nostalgic poet like I do, or if you're poetically or nostalgically inclined like I am, one often lives in memory. so I think I think it does apply more and more to my relationship with Seattle. as I as I get older, thinking about the the the lines that connect us to our former selves or former places that we that we have been. So, you know, it's an accrual of places and more importantly, I think selves. That's really what it's about.
Tim: In looking ahead, what does the future hold for Seattle Arts and Lectures as well as for you?
Rebecca: Hmm my crystal let me get my crystal ball out.
Tim: Ha ha ha.
Rebecca: well we've just launched a strategic vision that we hope we will bring to life over the next three to five years. And we have two big bets in the strategic vision. One is to make our writers in the schools program free for all 40 schools over the next 40 over the next few years. this year, 20 schools in the program are receiving the program completely for free, and those are schools with That are have the least amount of arts access access. So they are receiving wits and no charge to them. So we are well on our way to making the program free for all 40 schools. So that's really exciting. And the other big bet is that we are exploring bringing a major book festival back to Seattle. There have been book festivals over the years in Seattle, and they like like the boom and bust. they have they have risen and they have fallen. And so we feel that Seattle deserves a major book. festival. And so we feel that we we can help make it happen in community and with community. So this is the year, this is our RD year. We are exploring all the things. We are considering venues and model and we are looking for funding and we are talking with partners. We are hoping to next year officially announce a date, a venue and a sponsor. Next year is our 40th anniversary so that would be really exciting to announce it next year. And then we are hoping to host the first festival in twenty twenty nine the following year. So we have a three-year plan to announce to get to a book festival. to do all this, we are working on building capacity. We've been growing the staff. when I took the organization on the budget was two and a half million with 12 staff and today the budget is five million with 19 staff. So we've been growing and we'll have to grow more to do all these big things to make the big dreams come true. So we've been looking at an office move and also some adding some more folks to our team. So we've we've been growing. what's coming for me? That's a good question. I'm slowly putting the finishing touches on a new a new book, a new manuscript. it's called The C Box. a manuscript that has been kind of long in the works behind the scenes as I've been busy busy at work and also busy raising raising a kiddo. So I've been writing poems really really, I mean, quite quite often, writing poems, but I haven't been working too hard on getting them out there into the world for the last thirteen years. But amassing hundreds and hundreds of poems and so finally putting the putting them together into a book, which I did last summer at a residency at Hedgebrook. so I have a book together and I'm editing it now and hopefully it'll come out sometime next year. So that's what I'm working on. So beyond that Who knows, but those are my those are my plans.
Tim: For authors, Seattle presents itself as an inviting place to write, as well as an intriguing place about which to write, due to its history, vibrancy, and mystery. An individual who has tapped into these elements and sold over twelve million books is Robert D'Agoni, a New York Times and number one Amazon best selling writer. Dagoni has set his Tracy Crosswhite series in the city, while his 2024 novel, A Killing on the Hill, takes on the crime of the century in Depression-era Seattle. you have shared your professional story and your transition from practicing attorney to full time writer. How important is Seattle in your personal journey toward becoming the author you are today?
Robert Dugoni: y you know, very, very important for n for a number of reasons. When I was in the Bay Area and I was practicing law, I thought to myself, Well, you know, I'll I'll write a book in my spare time. And I, you know, you don't realize that you really don't have a lot of spare time. If you're trying to practice law and you're trying to practice law well, it's just it's a full it's it's a reason they call it a profession, not a job. It's It's full time commitment. It's it's not nine to five. It's it was usually seven to seven. And you know, the thought of of being able to write a book was just, you know, it's just not just not possible for me. I was also doing theater and some other things down there in the Bay Area, so it just was not gonna work. And I I knew that if I really wanted to pursue writing, which was what I had studied in school and wrote for the LA Times and I all my life this is what I wanted to do. That I was gonna have to somehow find a way to to stop practicing law. And the only real way to do that was to move to Seattle for because my wife's grandmother had a house that she wasn't using. She had remarried and she had kept the family home, and so this place was vacant. And so I said to big we called her Big Mama, even though she was very little, I said, you know, she wouldn't accept rent. So I said, let me, let me at least help. fix it up because I I knew construction. Let me help fix it up. And so that was s sort of the deal. And that was here in Seattle over in the Mont Lake district. you know, about ten, fifteen minutes from downtown. And I got an an office in Pioneer Square. So I was right in the heart of, you know, all of the all the stuff in Seattle, the tourist stuff and everything else. And and so I really got an opportunity to to give my riding a shot, to give it a chance, to to complete, you know, product. Yeah, I like to tell people all the time that, you know, I'm a widget salesman. I mean I'm no different than anybody else that's selling a product. But I didn't have product and that's what I needed. And Seattle gave me that opportunity to to create my product.
Tim: has your training as an attorney influenced your writing style and habits?
Robert Dugoni: Yeah, very much. the first thing that practicing law taught me was how to put my butt in a chair and go to work. You know, this idea of you know, I go down to the coffee shop and I write for an hour and a half and then I go n that's not me. I come down to this office and I put my butt in the chair and I you know, I'm here at, you know, six, seven o'clock in the morning and usually get a workout in and but I'm here, you know, seven, eight hours a day, either writing or editing. You know, there was a time when I was putting out three books a year, during COVID and other things, you know, two to three books a year and I still put out at least two, sometimes more, if I pick up a s a s kind of a special project that I wanna do. And the law taught me it, you know, how to work. and I think it's something that's been lost on a lot of generations or the most recent generation and that's not necessarily their fault. you know, when COVID hit and the work from home thing fad came into being, I just It just created a lot of I think bad habits for for a lot of young people. and so I I I I I I definitely learned how to work. The other thing is I learned how to I learned how to juggle multiple things. There's a word for that, Tim. I can't remember what the word is.
Tim: Yeah.
Robert Dugoni: But but you know, y if you think of
Tim: Yeah.
Robert Dugoni: it, let me know. But I learned to do multiple things at the same time and so you know, I I I learned how to keep track of multiple characters in the same book and what they're doing and how they're doing it. I don't outline. I I I simply listen to the story being told to me and I and I transcribe it. And I call my I call my first draft the four hundred page outline 'cause I gotta see what I have. and that law taught me the ability to do that because multitasking. That's the word I'm looking for. Because you you you know, you you s you go into the law to the a legal practice and you sit down and you you decide I'm okay, I'm gonna write that motion first thing this morning. And then the phone rings and somebody's arguing with you, and then you gotta get a motion done and then you gotta send in you a a letter out, and then you gotta do the and then pretty soon you it's four o'clock and you haven't written that motion, which was the first thing on the on your checkoff list. So, you know, I think I think law had a really valuable place in in my life in my writing career. people say, Well, do you wish you started writing you when you were twenty? You know, instead of going to law school. My answer is no, because what do you write when you're twenty? I mean, what do you know when you're twenty? So I think it was important for me to get out in the real world and and have a you know, a real job and and and and and do all the things and have all the training and meet all the characters you meet in the legal profession. you know, I it that was I think that was important.
Tim: if you were leading a tour, for your readers, say around the streets walked by Tracy Crossway, where might you guide them?
Robert Dugoni: You know, Seattle is a really interesting town. It's not very big. I you know, I someone once I forget what it is, but say it's like thirteen or fourteen blocks, the the down really downtown area of Seattle. a at least when I was there. You know, things have changed a lot with COVID and and all those things. But when I was down there writing, you know, Pioneer Square is it was a grittier place than it is now, but it also was a you know just a really interesting place. You know, you have all the restaurants and you have the pawn shops and you have just a whole different type of thing. It's it's all brick buildings, brick and stone buildings because the Great Fire in the eighteen nineties burned all of the all of the wood buildings. it's built on landfill because after the fire they brought in landfill and they and so you you have this really sort of interesting areas. The ferry terminals all go out of Pioneer Square. And so, you know, for people that aren't used to that, you know, you come up and you look out at the at Elliott Bay and the waters isn't in the summertime are just it's God's country. It's crystal clear blue waters and you have these ferries you can drive onto and take them over to the islands that are all out there. And on the other end of the city you have the Pike Place Market. And that's, you know, sort of the world famous place and it's there's some What people don't realize is there's some great restaurants up there as well, in addition to just the market where they throw the fish and they have all the vegetables and the flowers and all those things. So, you know, I think that's what tra that's where Tracy works, that's where she she's in. You know, her the office, the the Justice Department building is right there on on Fifth Avenue and she's right right in the heart of it, as is the courthouse. So you know, that's sort of her her world. And back in the day when you can do this. You know, I used to I used to go in and I would spend time with with a female homicide detective, especially if she was working the graveyard shift or the late shift, the watch they called it, because it was an opportunity for me to kinda see the world that she lived in and and and be a part of it and and understand, you know, what it means to be a a police officer. And ironically, it's a lot like being a lawyer. ninety five percent of your day is boring, but that five percent can be really, really interesting.
Tim: your 2024 book, A Killing on the Hill takes place in Seattle in 1933. did your historical research for that work enhance your appreciation for the city?
Robert Dugoni: it not only enhanced my appreciation, it it literally it it literally educated me on Seattle, what Seattle truly is and how it how it came into being and why it is the way it is today. I never knew back in nineteen thirty three that they had something in in place and it was c it was called I I'm all sudden I'm just drawing a blanket went in and out of my head. But But what they had was in the state of Washington, all the vices were illegal. you know, you couldn't have card rooms, you couldn't have pinball machines, you couldn't have gambling, you couldn't have prostitution, and then when prohibition hit hit, you couldn't have alcohol. Tolerance policy. In King County, they had something called the tolerance policy. And the tolerance policy was the King County government said we are going to tolerate card rooms vice you know, prostitution, all those things because we can license them. And if we license them, we can keep a handle on them. And if we can keep a handle on them, we're gonna keep the Chicago mafia, Al Capone and all those guys out of Seattle. Well, in reality, as you can imagine, if they can license them, what does it mean? It means they can charge people. And so they were making a lot of money off of selling these licenses to have a card room, which Could only bet one dollar. That was the maximum bet. Well, that didn't work. You know, you so you had all these all these licenses that was bringing in all this money. And all of that always leads to corruption and graft. And so the the biggest bootlegger during the depression in all of Seattle was a lieutenant on the police force. And the joke was that he commanded more officers as a bootlegger than he did as a lieutenant on the police force.
Tim: Mm-hmm.
Robert Dugoni: Because They were the guys that were running the the you know the the dry squad. And so he he knew, you know, who when when they were coming, what they were doing and everything. So Seattle has had this long history of corruption and graft that really didn't go away until the late nineteen sixties, early nineteen seventies, which makes it an incredibly interesting place. White Earp. came to Seattle at the tr turn of the century and opened a gambling house. He closed it one month later because he wouldn't pay the police any money. And so they ran him out of town. Because if they didn't, all the other gambling houses were gonna say, we're not doing that. So you had this this history of sort of under the table dealings that all the people engaged in. And in a killing on the hill, it was called the trial of the century. Because it exposed it all. Because what happened is on a on a morning I think it was in June, a June morning, maybe june thirteenth if I'm remembering correctly, in nineteen thirty three, two shots ring out in a in a ha house, a mansion up on pil what what what they call profanity hill, and when the police arrive, right, what they what they come to see is is it's a it's like a speakeasy. It's a place for the wealthy to go after hours. They put on their jewels and their tuxedos. This is the middle of the depression. Their furs. And they go into this these these supper clubs. And and people are starving out on the street and on the on the tables are half eaten are half eaten steaks and potatoes and half eaten pies and you know, s dozens of cigarette butts and alcohol on the counter and by the way, there's a dead body laying over there. So they couldn't ignore it any longer. And and the newspapers who were in on the tolerance policy, because the owners of the of the newspapers were wealthy. They were part of the upper elite. They kind of decided, well, we can't hide it anymore, so let's make money off of it. So they dubbed it the trial of the century, and it basically they put on this parade of witnesses to try to get this guy off on self defense, and those witnesses were gamblers and prostitutes and And all of a sudden this this dark underbelly of the city came to light. And it was it was just fascinating to read about and to and to see and to know that my wife's grandfather was one of the attorneys in that trial, which is how I got the story. Right? Because he kept he kept a scrap he kept multiple scrapbooks in his in his basement of of the house that we moved into. in when we first moved to Seattle and I I found them one day and I'm like, what the hell is this stuff? And it was just fascinating. It was a really fascinating that was it was I love that book because I loved the research.
Tim: you are a celebrated member of Seattle's broader literary community. what does that community give you as an author, not only at the point of publication, but also throughout your creative process?
Robert Dugoni: So somebody once said that there's there's more New York Times bestsellers in Seattle than any other state and they wanted to know if there was something in the water. the s the the sarcastic answer to that is maybe not sarcasm is not is not the right word, but the tongue in cheek is the winters up here are not easy. it gets it gets around October it starts to get dark around four thirty. you know, in the afternoon and it at eight o'clock in the morning. It's it's still dark out, you know. And so what else are what else do we writers have to do but sit down and write books? and so there are a lot there are a lot of authors up here. Kristen Hanna's up here, Susan Wiggs is up here. just a just a a a a lot. So the writing community is pretty robust. And when I was trying to get out of law and break into the writing community I had a very good family friend. His name is Michael Collipy. He's probably the preeminent portrait photographer in the world today. He has taken the portraits of like seven presidents and four popes and his picture of Mother Teresa hangs in the Vatican. He's a a very established guy. And I was, you know, th there was a point in time Mike and I grew up together. And there was a point in time when Mike was at IBM and he was trying to break out. And you know, he basically he told me, he said, y you need to immerse yourself in the community in which you want to become involved. And so I immersed myself in the Seattle writing community. And I I I joined the board of the Pacific Northwest Riders Association and I just started going to a lot of conferences and and making putting myself out there. And so you know w when you do that you you learn things that you've y you never knew. Like I didn't know there was a book on on how to write an outline or, you know, how to r the craft and so I sh I I learned all these great books, you know, Saul Stein's book on writing and Christopher Vog Vogler's book, The Writer's Journey, and it was like, Wow, I you know, this is how you plot a novel. This is how stories are told and have been told for thousands of years. And the minute I the minute I did that, the minute I I learned those things, suddenly my my book started getting picked up by agents, by publishers and And I s I was on my way. So the connection here is is was very important to my writing career and and what I what I have done in in in my career. many of my books are set in Seattle and I set them in Seattle because I like to write about places that I can go to and see and experience and be a part of. I just did it recently where I have I went to a Renaissance fair. And I don't know if you've ever been to a Renaissance fair, but it is it is
Tim: I I I have.
Robert Dugoni: it is a very, very interesting place and and I mean that i with appreciation. it is, you know, it's incredibly I mean the people are in costume and these are elaborate costumes and it's you know, it's treated very seriously. So, it's important for me to be a part of that and to see it. To not just see what the people are wearing, but to experience them and You know, what I ex I I experience sometimes is people are incredibly kind. There was a big difference when I moved from San Francisco to Seattle. That's probably the best way to say it. When I went to San Francisco, I'd go into the grocery store and they'd be like, check, check, check, check, check, check. Okay, you owe this much, get out. When I go to Seattle, when we first move to Seattle, I go into the grocery store and my my groceries are not moving on the conveyor belt. And I'm I look up at the teller and she goes, Hi, how are you? And I'm like I'm fine.
Tim: Yeah.
Robert Dugoni: And we get outside and I look at my wife and I'm like, you know, what the hell is that? She goes, Bob, she's just being friendly, you know. It's a it's a little bit slower paced. It's y people have a little bit more time and patience and tolerance and a lot of those things.
Tim: Are there passages in your books, such as in Damage Control, that might best capture your sense of Seattle's identity?
Robert Dugoni: You know, I don't know. I I really I don't know. I I would say that from an outsider's perspective, and I think I have mentioned this in a number of my books, Seattle is a Seattle was a small town because it wanted to be a small town. And for many, many years it it could remain a small town because it always told everybody how bad the weather was. And so, you know, people did not want to go there because they did not want to live in the rain. And that's what that that was the word on the street, right? Is and and so it was a small city and they didn't want big city problems. But then, you know, as we all know, things have changed a lot in the last twenty years. We've had a lot of immigration from l large company large countries with large population, from Asia, which includes India, but you know, India in particular and China and And Seattle is not im immune from that immigration. We've had a a lot of immigration in into the into the country. And so we've we have experienced big city problems and and I don't mean necessarily crime, that's not what I'm saying. Housing prices have gone up because there was a s s smaller supply than the demand. And so then they had to build more houses, and so Seattle began to expand to accommodate this large population. traffic. I used to be able to get from from my my house in Kirkland, Washington to downtown Seattle in about 13 to 14 minutes. Park my car and and go to my office. Now the commute, which I don't do, is about you know 45 minutes, depending on what time of day that you go. And so they had to build light rail. Well, to build light rail they you need fine funds and you and so all those things have caught up to Seattle, but Seattle hasn't caught up to all those things. The light rail system is just getting going and is just becoming prevalent and people are just now starting to get to understand, wow, I can take the the light rail all the way to the downtown to go to a Mariners baseball game and not pay seventy dollars for parking. You know? and so that I think more than anything is is Seattle's identity. Is it's it's a reluctant big city. it it does not want to be a big city. It wants to be that smaller that smaller city that had less less big city problems.
Tim: an expansion of the first question, would you be the writer you are now if you live somewhere other than in the Seattle area?
Robert Dugoni: Well, I don't know that I ever would have gotten the opportunity. I mean the opp the living in Seattle provided me with just a a a lot of blessings. You know, I was I was living in a house rent rent free. You know, I was I was doing things to fix up the house and all that. But you know, how many people in their life ever get to say that? You know, that I I could live someplace where I didn't have to necessarily have a an income. my wife, is a lawyer by background and inc incredibly bright and has done very well for herself. And so I had a spouse that was able to support us while I was on this journey. And it's not an easy journey. You know, I think that's the thing that the misnomer about writing a novel. Somebody goes, I'll just sit down and write a novel and I'll make a lot of money. You know, I th I think I sat down to write The Jury Master, which is the first novel I had published, not not the first book. I had The Sinai Canary, which was a true story. But I think I started writing The journey master in like 1998 and after 48 rejection letters and I can't tell you how many drafts, 1920 drafts, I finally found Chris Bogler's book on the writer's journey and learned how to tell a story and went back and wrote. I think that book got published in something like 2006, 2007. So, you know, it was a it was almost a decade long journey to get to just even get my books published and to get to a place where I could say I am I am a writer and that's what I do for a living. didn't really happen until two thousand and twelve with the publication of my sister's grave, which went viral and then I had I had the ability, the financial ability to say, okay, I can do this full time. I don't have to w practice law part time, I don't have to do any of that stuff anymore. so it's not for the faint of heart. It really isn't. It's it's it's a lot like baseball. you know, it's a it's a professional failure and you have to get used to that failure. during the covet years I picked up golf. w which is another profession of failure
Tim: Ha ha ha.
Robert Dugoni: and learning. and you have to you have to say to yourself, you know, I I can accept somebody saying, No, this book is not right for me. I don't want it and not get your feelings hurt and just keep persevering. I used to give a talk where I talked about the six Ps and I don't even remember what they are, but it was perseverance, patience, perspective, prayer and something else, which is all these things that that you need to to get through those difficult years. in all my travels and all the authors I know and and I I think I've known I known I've met all the all the really big names that were when I was in the eighties and today there's only one person I've ever met that said to me, you know, yeah, no, I was published within the first year and I I've been doing this ever since. Well he's an exception. He's not the rule. And he happened to just be in a in the right place at the right time and and those things are are don't necessarily happen all the time. So so being being in Seattle afforded me opportunities that I never would have gotten in the Bay Area. And and those opportunities, you know, gave me the chance to to use the talent that God gave me and others for others to appreciate it. And I've been really blessed now that that I can write full time.
Tim: Seattle, Washington, a warm, welcoming, generous, and transformational literary site, one deserving of its title as a city of literature, and one deserving of a lit trip.