When it rains, it pours. I’ve signed another contract, this one for a book on solitude to be published by Monkfish Publishing in the spring of 2025. The title is still TBD but the subtitle will be: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life.
The book is centered on my experiences during a month of total solitude on Patmos when I was 27 years old. It was after that month, while I was still on the island, that I met Robert Lax. The rest of the book will feature my later experiences of solitude, some on Patmos, some elsewhere.
The book’s last section will be about a return to Patmos I have planned for next month, during the same time period I was there the first time. I’m going to see how an older man’s experience of solitude today differs from that of a younger man at a time when absolute solitude was less difficult to achieve.
The Hall of Mirrors in Bavarian King Ludwig II’s Herrenchiemsee Palace, where one of the book’s key scenes takes place.
I’m excited to announce that I’ve signed a contract with Korza Books to publish my first novel in the fall of 2024. A press release will be coming in January.
The book follows guide Joe Newhouse, whose marriage and business are failing, as he leads one last tour from Munich to Venice shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Traveling through the heart of Romantic Europe, Joe sorts the stories and mysteries of clients who don’t seem to want to be there while weighing–and acting on–his own desires.
“The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I don’t know if I’m alone in seeing beauty in these dying hostas beside such vivid ivy. All I know is the older I get, the more beauty I see at times and in places I don’t expect it.
I’m thrilled to feature novelist and Pulitzer-Prize-winning nonfiction writer Mitchell S. Jackson in the newest WritingtheNorthwest.com post. Mitchell is one of the most exciting writers to come out of the NW in recent years.
Read his answers to “Three Questions and a Quote” here.
I just posted a review on WritingtheNorthwest.com of a unique book by a promising young poet named Ricardo Ruiz. The poems in it come out of interviews with migrant workers in Eastern Washington.
Together with brief bios of the interviewees, the poems present a full and sympathetic look at this hopeful but struggling and tragically neglected community.
Here’s how the post begins:
I never know where or how I’m going to come across good writing about the Pacific Northwest. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was walking through the book fair at the Associated Writers and Writing Programs conference in Seattle when I found myself in conversation with a young man who had just published his first book of poetry, titled We Had Our Reasons. I asked him to tell me about it and liked both his subject–the lives of migrant workers–and his demeanor, so I bought a copy.
It was only when the writer, Ricardo Ruiz, had signed the book that I noticed the workers he wrote about lived in Eastern Washington. He had already told me his book was really a collaborative effort. He had interviewed workers of Mexican descent and fashioned poetry in different forms and voices from what they told him. Some were legal immigrants, some were undocumented, some had been born in the United States, and one was an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
It wasn’t until I was on the bus home and read the first few pages that I realized what a treasure his book is. In verse that has the accessibility of a Billy Collins or Mary Oliver but channels a very different world, Ruiz presents the struggles, hopes, and sometimes dangerous experiences of a group of people for whom the United States is both tentative home and too-often-tarnished dream.
Note: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I will earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintainingthis website.
My new post on WritingtheNorthwest.com looks at the many Pacific Northwest connections in Adam Hochschild’s fascinating and sobering new book about America during and after World War I, AMERICAN MIDNIGHT.
Among the Northwest people you’ll read about are the feisty, progressive Portland doctor Marie Equi, the organizers of the 1919 Seattle General Strike, and the brave members of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies) labor union.
You’ll also read about less savory characters like the immigrant-hating Washington State congressman Albert Johnson and Seattle mayor Ole Hanson, who may have been the first politician to make a career out of being avowedly anti-Communist.
Note: I am an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you purchase a book through a click on this website, I will earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining this website.
After a brief break over the holidays, WritingtheNorthwest.com is back, and I’m pleased to start the new year with a new feature, Three Questions and a Quote, and one of my favorite Northwest writers, Jon Raymond.
Raymond is the author of an award-winning story collection, an essay collection, and four novels, including Denial(2022), a finalist for this year’s Oregon Book Award in Fiction. He has also coauthored several films, including the HBO mini-series “Mildred Pierce” and the remarkable “First Cow.” Most of his work is set in the Northwest.
Three Questions and a Quoteis a new, occasional feature focused on the thoughts and work of prominent Northwest writers.
You can access the entry on Raymond here, including his thoughts on Northwest writing and links to his writings and films (plus other goodies).
“Say you have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time’s soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?”
My latest post on WritingtheNorthwest.com is about John Okada’s NO-NO-BOY, the most beautiful and devastating novel I’ve read about the American immigrant experience.
The book’s focus is the difficult return to Seattle of a young Japanese American man who went to prison rather than serve in the US military during WWII: the hostilities he faces, the kindnesses he can’t bear, and his own feelings of guilt and shame.
Click below to read my thoughts on this amazing and eye-opening book.
Sky Hopinka, Artist and Filmmaker, 2022 MacArthur Fellow, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Head over to WritingtheNorthwest.com to read about (and watch!) the fascinating video work of Indigenous artist Sky Hopinka, who was raised in Ferndale, WA, and went to school at Portland State University.
Hopinka is one of this year’s MacArthur fellowship winners. His evocations of Indigenous culture in the Northwest subvert traditional views with fresh and sometimes disorienting approaches.
