Every month, Olivia Waite pulls back the covers, revealing the very best in new, and classic, romance. We're extending a hand to you. Won't you take it? You can also peruse the Kissing Books historical archive.

People will tell you romance is anti-feminist. Others will tell you that romance is definitely, strongly feminist. The weird part is: thanks to the genre’s vast and complicated history, both are sort of right. Paradoxes: such fun.

Academic studies of romance during feminism’s second wave argued that the genre upheld the patriarchy by providing glossy ideals of heterosexual marriage to keep the ladies in line. Fictional happy endings were a panacea, a way of soothing the symptoms without actually curing the disease. This theory would seem to explain the existence of wilder, crueler heroes who are often out-and-out rapists: it is generally taken as given that these were more common in early genre romances like The Flame and the Flower, but the culturally inescapable specter of Christian Grey suggests that time here is a flat and sexually aggressive circle. I’ve definitely read books published in the last few years that seem to take great delight in building up the hero’s strength while tearing down the heroine at every turn, and pretending that this was all kinds of feminist and empowering. These anti-heroes are tamed by love – more or less – or else their heroines learn the virtues of resilience and capitulation to forces larger than themselves. The happily ever after here is that the heroine is permitted to survive.

I loathe reading it, but I can’t pretend those books aren’t part of the genre.

Even foundational romances with strong feminist subtexts can be read in less than revolutionary ways. Pride and Prejudice, genre romance’s ur-mother, is clear on the fundamental helplessness of women’s position in the Regency aristocracy but stops short of fomenting outright rebellion; Elizabeth does not overturn the laws of entailment that prevent her and her sisters from inheriting — she only succeeds in winning the Least Worst Dude so her financial future is assured. It is a personal success but not a regime change.

And then there are the other romances, the subversive, outspoken, definitively feminist ones, which author Courtney Milan recently pointed out have just as lengthy a history within the genre. Persuasion, with its adamant defense of women’s fidelity and rejection of male-penned opinions to the contrary. Romance serials in black-owned American newspapers in the 1920s, resisting the oppressive weight of Jim Crow laws and redlining. (Beverly Jenkins once gave a great RWA keynote about the history of black American romance and guess what? You can watch right here.) Queer romance in all its particular flavors, each with its particular history that sometimes leans into and other times away from mainstream New York-published romance. These books have a long lineage — but it is true that they are often harder to find, suppressed or neglected for reasons that you can guess at but which are far too depressing to list here. I believe these stories have been and are always being written; whether or not they’ve been published in significant numbers is the crux of the matter.

In fact, the more types of romance I read, the more it becomes clear that romance has multiple histories rather than one great shared trunk of origin — historical romance has developed in ways very different from the contemporary, to give one broad example, and this only gets more complicated when you start cross-sectioning for variations in race and class and sexuality and geographic background. Romances depend on either reinforcing or playing against cultural norms of courtship etiquette, so when you move from North America to Niger to the Philippines the novels you find show a lot of variation. Which is great! I love seeing how flexible the genre is, how many millions of ways there are to interpret the One Rule (“a happy ending”). Sometimes I get twitterpated thinking about the great subgenres that haven’t even been invented yet. The future is just full of amazing books!

Ultimately, I am less interested in answering the question Is romance feminist? than I am in asking which romances are feminist, and in what ways, and then wondering where I can get my hands on a copy. The short question is a trap, a bad-faith debate that pretends it can magically produce an Approved Authoritative Opinion On What All These Ladies Are Up To. In short, it’s lazy. The second question, though, requires you to engage with a book on its own terms, and bring your personal thoughts and feelings to bear, and then ask about systems of access (is it available in audio book or with text-to-speech? Are there geographic restrictions on the sale? Was this self-published because some Big Five editor told the author they already had “one of those books” on their list this year?) I’ll leap to defend the genre from slander (as we’ve seen) but my main subject is and always will be the specifics of the text. What does this book do well, what does it reinvent, what does it offer and what does it take away?

This month’s books are all about confronting history, both capital-H-History and our characters’ personal pasts. Sometimes the past is a problem. Other times, it’s only our view of the past that needs to change.

Recent Romances:

Her Hometown Girl by Lorelei Brown (Riptide Publishing: contemporary f/f):

This is a gorgeous heartbreaker of a book. Cai is a tattoo artist in a California coastal town: long dark hair, tall and edgy, plenty of ink. Adorable, curly-haired, fragile Tansy shows up in her shop in a wedding dress – she’s just caught her fiancée banging the caterer’s (male) assistant, has called off the wedding, and is getting an impulsive lace garter tattooed around her upper calf. The two can’t help but fall into bed – they’re both so needy in different ways, even if they know they’re both struggling to heal – and the sex is playfully kinky and absolutely luscious. That said, much of this book deals with the aftermath of Tansy’s prior relationship, which was intensely abusive, and I will make it clear there’s an on-page rape early in the book. Normally this would send me running for the hills; here, it’s that rare case where the assault is absolutely vital to the story. It makes clear that Tansy’s ex-fiancée was worse than just your stock romance Evil Ex. It makes her struggles to assert herself again so much more meaningful. It really raises the stakes for the kink, since Cai doesn’t know the full extent of what Tansy is struggling with until much later (though she’s figured out the emotional abuse long before). This is a book that knows love doesn’t fix trauma, but recognizes that love is necessary for healing. My only complaint is that the final resolution felt a bit rushed – I’d have liked to have seen more of Cai’s thoughts at the end.

She leans forward another bit and takes a lock of my hair between her fingers. I hate that’s I can’t feel it. I want nerves in my hair so I don’t miss any bit of this woman.

Hamilton’s Battalion by Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan, and Alyssa Cole (self-published: historical m/f, m/m, and f/f)

There are times when superlatives fail and leave only the swear words to carry the point, so believe me when I tell you: this book is so fucking good. I lost count of the times I laughed; I lost count of the times I cried. I went in with the highest possible expectations and I was still completely poleaxed by how vivid the characters were, how brightly the dialogue sparkled, how every page had a line that sliced right through the heart and made me catch my breath. Three of the strongest voices in historical romance poured heart and soul into these stories and it damn well shows.

But it fed my brain as well as my heart, so here are some less sweary thoughts. Every smash hit sparks a flurry of related material, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is no exception. In addition to all the official secondary material and fan-created works, there are already multiple novels now out depicting Eliza and Alexander’s romance. It’s hard not to feel these inevitably white retellings seriously miss the point: they mistake the subject of the play for the message. Hamilton’s Battalion is a true counterpoint, because like the musical it uses the past not as a changeless artifact, but as a means of reimagining our present and future. These romances are a fierce act of unerasing—Jewish history, queer history, black American history are front and center—and the book does its best to banish the toxic dread that’s kept so many of us frozen in the endless months of this year.

"Andromeda was impulsive, but not wasteful, and something in the way the woman had looked at her screamed loneliness, which was the ultimate waste."

Take the Lead by Alexis Daria (SMP Swerve: contemporary m/f)

Repeat readers will have noticed by now that I love a good high-concept contemporary, and it’s hard to get more high-concept than "lumberjack reality star goes on dancing reality show, falls for pro dancer partner." Fans of The Cutting Edge will want to check out this book for the same hot-spark/long-fuse, opposites-attract, stellar-bickering, manly-man-finds-feminine-art-form-is-actually-super-demanding-and-rewarding kind of catnip. Both Stone and Gina are dealing with some serious family baggage, in addition to the pressures of fame and performance and all the messiness of show business. I was rolling right along, eating up the narrative tension between real and scripted drama, when these words from our hero brought me to a screeching halt: “In the split second that followed, Stone decided not to tell her.” Imagine biting into a huge chocolate chip cookie and finding out those chunks are actually black licorice: the bitter flavor colors everything that follows after. This is a known problem in romance: everyone’s standards for dumpworthy fuck-ups are different, so occasionally you run into a story where no amount of groveling can redeem a character emotionally for you as a reader. (Groveling in romance is very much a technical term.) Gina is a beautifully sympathetic heroine who deserves to have all her dreams come true and I am still just livid that Stone jeopardized that to save himself from being emotionally inconvenienced. Jerk. Though he does do a really gratifying grovel. Whatever. I don’t care. (She said, hitting pre-order on book two.)

Then Gina smiled, and the tension eased. Sometimes he thought her smile was the only real thing in his world.

Stars in Their Eyes by Pema Donyo (Crimson Romance: historical m/f)

Romances set in Lost Generation Paris are hopefully growing less rare, because it’s a severely underused setting for glittery, bittersweet, rain-drenched love stories. This swift and slender read is a second-chance romance between an aspiring novelist and a Chinese-American silent-film actress, very light on the sex and heavy on the anguished pining. The prose has the kind of straightforward clarity I usually associate with inspirational or young adult romances—but every now and again those plain sentences resolve into a metaphor so lovely you find yourself breathless: Their breaths fogged together, emitting human smoke into the night air. My god, you could just die. We see more of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas than we do of Iris’ family back in LA—though Alice’s cameo is pitch-perfect, and I vastly appreciate the way the hero is in awe of Gertrude as a literary genius and a mentor. It’s not a flawless book; there are a few too many petulant dialogues for my taste, and the plot is a bit simple. But ever since I finished it, I have been unable to stop thinking about rain on the Seine, and a lamplight shining, while a Louis Armstrong song plays in the background. If you have access to a windowseat and a stiff cocktail in a jazz club sometime this winter, this book will match both to perfection.

Iris swung their arms together as they walked, casting a “V” shadow against the sidewalk that reminded him of a bird in flight.

This month’s Medieval Scottish Heroine Made of Pure Honed Steel:

Ransom by Julie Garwood (Pocket Books: Scottish historical m/f)

Julie Garwood was writing scrappy northern girls watching their father get betrayed and beheaded long before George R. R. Martin made the big time. Like Arya Stark, Ransom’s heroine Gillian is profoundly scarred and transformed by having witnessed the brutal slaughter of her family and the wreck of her ancestral home; unlike Arya, Gillian does not close herself off emotionally as a result of the trauma. She may not be an assassin but she is loyal, compassionate, thoughtful, and, oh yes, a stone-cold badass. Completely unafraid of physical pain. Oh, these stab wounds on my arm? The ones that are inflamed and infected? They might slow us down on our cross-country escape, so please do cauterize them with Burny Medieval Mystery Potion, and then we’ll be on our way. Yes, do hold down my arm for the treatment, that’s very helpful, thank you. Pardon me while I go scream a little outside to relieve my feelings, and then we can mount right up and head home. While all the big, tough, musclehead Highland warriors stare at her in awe and fear. At one point the villain strikes her in the face, knocking her to the stone floor; Gillian looks up at him, smiles, and the villain has a panic attack from pure existential terror. She isn’t at all superhuman—she suffers fear and impatience and self-doubt and exhaustion—but beneath all that curling hair is a stubborn streak of pure evil that’s a delight to behold. All the best Garwood heroines are a little evil (my favorite, petite violet-eyed Jamie from The Bride, once punches a horse in the face when it tries to bite her) but Gillian is terrifying enough to fit in any grimdark medieval-set fantasy you could name. Especially since Romancelandia’s Scotland is only slightly less of a made-up world than Westeros—less eager to torture its heroines, of course, but still violent, grimy, and rife with betrayal.

Hesitantly, she placed her hand in his and looked up at him. Embarrassed to see that he was still glowering at her, she smiled sweetly and whispered, “If you do not stop glaring at me, I swear I will kick you soundly. Then you will have something to frown about.”

Upcoming conventions and conferences

Read with Pride Northwest, November 4:

Fans of LGBTQ romance (ahem! points at self) will be thrilled to know there’s a full free day of events planned at the Central Library. Attending authors include James Brock, Austin Chant, Christine Danse, Seattle Review of Books’ own Nisi Shawl, and Rebekah Weatherspoon. The event opens with a two-hour block for NaNoWriMo writing, then splits into panels for sharing book recommendations, craft tips, and a panel on writing queer romance as a political act in troubled times. There’s also a book fair on the fourth floor, and you can bet I’ll be heading straight there with a full month’s book budget in my eager little hands.

Full disclosure: the press screening for Thor: Ragnarok ended in a modest kind of film-reviewing disaster: the audio for the movie cut out about five minutes before the end of the film due to an automation problem with the digital print. And then the theater staff couldn't go back and show us the conclusion of the film again because the film studios have locked down their digital prints with copyright-control software. Before digital projection, this wouldn't have happened. Before movie theater automation, this wouldn't have happened. But even if it had happened before digital projection, the projectionist would have just been able to show us the final reel of the film. So through a comedy of errors inspired by automation and overly obsessive protection of copyright, I didn't technically watch the end of Thor: Ragnarok. In any case, this review is going to be spoiler-free as possible.

Thor: Ragnarok is clearly the best Thor movie Marvel Comics has made. That's not an achievement; the other two Thor movies were pretty bad, and they seem to be deteriorating in watchability at a remarkable clip as the years pass. But Ragnarok is better than "just" the best Thor movie. While it's not a great movie, it definitely contains many pieces of great movies in it.

The first thing Ragnarok does right: it basically throws out the character of Thor as we know him in the Marvel movies. By taking advantage of star Chris Hemsworth's remarkable comedic skills for the first time, director Taika Waititi's Thor is much funnier and more colliquial than we've ever seen. (Much of the dialogue in the film is clearly improvised; a random IMDB trivia bit randomly entered by some random person puts the amount of improvised dialogue at 80 percent, and that feels right to me.) The movie is a comedy first, and an adventure film second.

The second thing Ragnarok does right: it lets the cast run wild. Tessa Thompson, as a rogue Asgardian warrior, is a welcome addition to the Marvel films. Jeff Goldblum is wildly funny as an alien overlord. Cate Blanchett doesn't have much to do as primary villain Hela, but she vamps and camps with exactly the right droll sensibility. Idris Elba and Karl Urban and Anthony Hopkins also don't have much to do, but they don't feel as perfunctory as great supporting actors have in past Thor films, either. Waititi voices a giant rock man from space who is one of the best comic relief characters the Marvel movies have yet produced.

The third thing Ragnarok does right: it doesn't spend much time building on the Thor mythology that we've seen in past films. Instead, it finds the elements that work in the best Thor comics and smashes them together into something new. The design is straight out of Jack Kirby's sketchbook, making this maybe the best-looking Marvel movie as a result. Like the best Thor comics, the film spends a lot of time in outer space being as weird as possible. And every visual that's not ripped from Jack Kirby is instead cribbed from Walt Simonson's visually distinctive run on the character. Fans of the Simonson books might not enjoy the flippant way the film deals with his comics at times, but that's a silly argument to make; his books are still out there for fans to enjoy, and the movie will likely push more readers to Simonson's work.

But beyond the comedy and the visual flair and the fine performances and the excellent score from Mark Mothersbaugh (this is one of the only Marvel soundtracks worth noting,) you've got a fairly standard comic book movie. The villain has an army of disposable CGI soldiers. There's an entirely pointless superhero cameo. And I'm unsure how much of it makes sense to anyone who hasn't seen every previous Marvel movie.

But holy shit: a terrific sense of humor and a beautiful comic-book-y aesthetic and a vibrant spirit of behind-the-scenes fun can go a really long way. This is the most fun I've had at a Marvel movie since — oh, the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Portland cartoonist Anders Nilsen is a special guest at the Short Run Comix & Arts Festival at Seattle Center this weekend. You might know Nilsen from his Peanuts-meets-Tolstoy epic bird comic Big Questions, or his heart-rending memoir of grief and loss, Don't Go Where I Can't Follow. But at Short Run, he's debuting his latest ambitious project: the first issue of a projected series called Tongues.

Nilsen describes Tongues as "loosely based on a trilogy by the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, of which two plays are lost and only dimly reconstructed by historians." This first issue is loaded with references to the Prometheus myth, but projected through a fractured lens of American military action in the Middle East, and with a talking bird and a monkey thrown in for good measure.

Tongues is the most beautiful thing Nilsen has ever made. The pages are colored in rich pastels that absorb your attention. The overturned and ruined military vehicles in these stories aren't left out to rot in a garish yellow comic-book wasteland; these deserts are pink and shimmering, with whipped-cream mountains looming off on the horizon.

The illustration in Tongues surpasses just about everything that Nilsen has ever done before. His characters are finely wrought, but they feel secondary in the narrative to the oddly shaped geometric panels and the dreamy backgrounds. We're more invested in what a lippy crow has to say ("The humans are an object of fascination to me, too," he says to a Prometheus figure) than almost every human in the book.

The stories in Tongues are short, but they do resonate with the throbbing weirdness of myth. The obvious Prometheus allusions are one thing — it's hard to see a bird eating the entrails of a still-living man and not recall the Prometheus myth — but these pages of finely wrought military SUVs overturned in the desert recall the devastation of the Iliad. The ruins of the US Army look not unlike the battered Coliseum of Rome. In those broken cars, a monkey argues with a human over a dwindling supply of rations. In this context, it's a clash of the titans.

Nilsen's great skill is finding the depth and the adventure in any subject, no matter how small. With Tongues, he's re-envisioning his place in the cartooning firmament. His sense of scale has changed; whereas before Nilsen obsessed over tiny interactions, he's now ready to create some myths of his own.

• In the midst of all the exciting City of Literature news yesterday, this piece of news didn't get the attention it deserves: David Lasky and Mairead Case have been selected to create a fictionalized graphic novel about the beautiful old Georgetown Steam Plant. (We told you about the open call for Seattle cartoonists five months ago.) Case and Lasky will be blogging about the experience of creating the graphic novel on the new site Steam Plant Graphic Novel: The Blog! Bookmark that site, now; it should be an interesting look into the research and process of two of Seattle's finest cartooning talents.

• If the blog is interesting enough, I hope someone adapts it into a theatrical experience called "Steam Plant Graphic Novel: The Blog!: The Musical!"

• Also in the midst of yesterday's UNESCO hullabaloo — UNESCOBALOO? — Martin McClellan wrote a piece on this site announcing an amazing new literary award for women poets over the age of 65. The prize, sponsored by Poetry Northwest, honors the life and legacy of brilliant Seattle poet Jane Swift.

• Congressperson Pramila Jayapal is now choosing monthly book club picks at Third Place Books! Her first selection is Claudia Rankine's excellent Citizen, which I reviewed back in January after we discussed it for the Reading Through It Book Club. This is a great way for an elected official to stay in touch with her district.

• SRoB tipper Levi points out the news that the movie rights to un-prolific Seattle cartoonist Nate Simpson's comic Nonplayer has been bought by Legendary Entertainment. The first issue of Nonplayer came out in 2011, and the second issue came out in 2015. Just because the movie rights have sold don't mean an actual movie will be made, but the odds are pretty good that a movie version will come out before the fourth issue of Nonplayer hits the stands.

• And SRoB tipper Doug wants you to see this tribute to literary maestro Harry Mathews, who passed away in January of this year:

Several summers ago, an architect contacted me to ask whether I could help with a curious discovery. In the backyard of an almost-hundred-year-old house in Seattle’s Chinatown–International District, hidden under overgrown shrubbery, workers uncovered a yellowish-tan oblong stone. Carved on one side, in English, was “Shinjiro Honda/Died Sept. 3, 1942/Age 65”; on the other was Kanji script that translated to “September 3, 1942/This is the grave of the deceased Shinjiro Honda/Lived 65 years/Shizuoka prefecture, Hamamatsu city.”

Under Washington State law, burial sites are protected from disturbance. The owner of the land needed an archaeologist to evaluate whether the stone did, in fact, mark a burial, so they were at a work stoppage. I was intrigued, and glad to help.

When people ask me “What’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found?”, they usually picture archaeologists dusting off a precious relic or piecing together pottery sherds. The truth is that the coolest things found in my profession are stories: rumrunners on Vashon Island, a Finnish professional wrestler who started a cranberry farm in Grays Harbor County, a White River Valley woman who ran a farm solo from the 1930s through the 1990s. The mystery of a hidden gravestone in the International District.

My archival research began with the details etched on the stone: a name, a date of death, and an age at death. Early records are imperfect; sometimes you need to gather up details and sort them out as you go, seeing what fits and where you are missing pieces of the puzzle. This time I found quite a bit of information right away.

Born in 1877, Shinjiro Honda immigrated to the United States in 1905, just two years before the United States began to slowly close its borders to immigrants like him. Historical records indicated that Honda lived in Tacoma, Yakima, Wapato, and Seattle and worked as a cook, in a hotel, and possibly as a farm laborer. He married a Japanese woman, though I had difficulty confirming her name. Their daughter, Teresa Yoshi Honda, was born in Yakima in 1923. Further research about Shinjiro Honda — listings in city directories, census records, draft records, passenger manifests — revealed the typical details of an immigrant life: mangled spellings of non-English names, frequent changes of address, return trips to his homeland.

By 1930, Shinjiro was widowed (his wife died, likely of tuberculosis, in 1927), and Teresa was boarding at Maryknoll Mission, a Catholic school on Capitol Hill serving mainly Japanese and Filipino students. He worked for many years as a cook for a wealthy family in The Highlands, an exclusive gated community in North Seattle. Teresa graduated from Yakima High School in 1941, while living with family friends who owned the Horse Shoe Pool Room & Restaurant in Yakima’s Japantown.

Shinjiro and Teresa were among those incarcerated during Japanese internment. They were living in Seattle when Executive Order 9066 was issued by Roosevelt in 1942; Teresa was in her freshman year at the University of Washington (you can find her in the 1942 yearbook). They were sent to the Portland Assembly Center — the site of the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Pavilion — and then on to Heart Mountain Relocation Center near Powell, Wyoming, with other Yakima-area residents.

I spoke to Heart Mountain Interpretive Center archivist Nicole Blechendyn, who graciously delved into the center's records to gather more about Shinjiro and Teresa.

Throughout his incarceration, Shinjiro was very ill with esophageal cancer. War Relocation Authority records show that he was in the hospital the entirety of his time at the Portland Assembly Center and was hospitalized in Seattle and Yakima before his incarceration. I suspect that his wealthy employer was helping him get medical care while Shinjiro was in Seattle, or at least he had greater access to Nikkei doctors ("Nikkei" is an encompassing term for Japanese immigrants and their descendants). The assembly centers were only temporary and solely provided infirmary-level care, so he likely would have been sent to a local hospital in Portland, and separated from Teresa, who was accommodated with the general population — in repurposed livestock pens.

Shinjiro reportedly died two days after arriving at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. The hospital there was likely under-supplied and under-staffed. He was buried in the Heart Mountain cemetery, the second person to die at the newly established camp. At the end of the war, his remains were exhumed and cremated in accordance with Buddhist tradition. His ashes were sent to his daughter in Washington, DC.

“Shinjiro Honda” is a rather common Japanese name, and even with birth and death dates, I hadn't been able to identify a connection between Shinjiro and the house where the stone was found. City directories showed he never lived in the house; maybe his ashes were not, in fact, buried in the backyard, as the Kanji inscription implied? According to the daughter of the former owners, no, it was not a burial site. Her family purchased the house several years after the end of Japanese incarceration, almost a decade after Mr. Honda’s death. In an email to the architect, she described the stone as simply a memorial marker for her father’s poetry teacher.

The detail that Mr. Honda was the former landowner’s poetry teacher gave me another search parameter. This somewhat routine project took a remarkable turn: I learned from a publication by Teruko Kumei, an authority on Japanese migration, that Shinjiro Honda was a leading figure in Japanese-immigrant senryu poetry circles, writing under the pen name “Kaho.”

Senryu (pronounced sennd-YU) is a Japanese poetry style that follows a 17-syllable structure. In Japanese, the poem is often one line or one sentence; in transcription to English, it is often phrased in three lines of 5-7-5 syllables. Senryu is wry and witty; it is more about the human experience than the better-known haiku, a form that traditionally recalls nature.

As practiced by Japanese immigrants, senryu was akin to today’s poetry slam: poets dueled with the spoken word, and the audience, often fellow poets, chose a winner. It was an important type of oral history, with many senryu assuming the status of proverbs. For the Issei (first-generation immigrant), senryu provided an outlet to express intense homesickness, worries about Nisei (second-generation immigrant) assimilation, reactions to discrimination, honor in work, and ethnic pride:

Lovely kimono,
I’ve never worn you, and yet
Still air you every summer. (Shoko)

Chopstick customs go
Right with me, throughout my life
In this knife-fork land (Yukiko)

Pioneers! That means
Those who sowed, and left reaping
To sons and grandsons. (Toshiko)

In a few poems by Kaho (Shinjiro) Honda himself, I could see the details I uncovered in my research. For example, this one, written when his daughter was ten:

My dear, put this money
into the pot of the Salvation Army.
Remember the spirit of the holiday. (Kaho)

And this one, written as he faced raising his daughter alone:

Nisei children
Turn parents
Into strayed children. (Kaho)

Senryu is not seen as a high form of poetry in Japanese culture, but for Nikkei throughout Washington, it became an important cultural expression of their ethnic and immigrant identity.

In 1910 or 1912, Shinjiro Honda became the leader of a senryu group in Yakima, the first such society in North America. After his wife's death in 1927, Honda spent over a year in Japan (perhaps to take her cremated remains to her family); when he returned to Seattle, he focused his attention on poetry. In 1929, Honda and Shotei (a pen name) Yoshida co-founded the Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai (Senryu Society of North America) in Seattle. Gosenkai meant the group had no judge; instead, those gathered ranked the poems.

The Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai met weekly up to the time Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 disrupted their lives. The group’s selected poems were published in the senryu section of the Hokubei Jiji Shimbun (North American Times) and later in other newspapers. Shinjiro Honda's efforts to legitimize immigrant senryu were ongoing and significant. According to Dr. Kumei:

As the senryu became popular, Honda sought recognition from authorities in Japan. Leading members of the society started contributing their senryu poems to the Senryu Kiyari Ginsha, one of the leading senryu reading societies in Tokyo. They regularly ranked high enough to obtain full membership and the Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai was recognized as the first branch society of the Kiyari Ginsha in the United States. Yakima Heigen Nihonjin-shi (History of the Japanese People in the Yakima Valley) expressed proudly that their immigrant senryu poets were recognized as equal or superior to senryu poets in Japan.

Honda was the editor of Hokubei Senryu, published in 1935 by Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai; a copy of this 320-page book is held at University of Washington Libraries. It is the first volume of senryu published in the United States. This volume commemorates the fiftieth meeting of Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai — this represents roughly eight meetings per year. The group held an exhibition in Seattle in 1938, organized by Honda.

If I could take a moment to put this in perspective: Shinjiro Honda, a widowed father employed as a live-in cook for a wealthy family in North Seattle, most likely worked six days a week. Yet his achievements would be significant for a full-time writer today: holding weekly meetings of Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai (which I can only assume were in Japantown, an eleven-mile journey from his residence), corresponding extensively with newspapers in the United States and Japan, editing a volume of poetry for publication, and organizing a conference — all while writing his own poetry and teaching numerous students.

Hokubei Senryu Gosenkai is still is active, a tangible legacy. The group is now based in Tacoma, with a membership made up of Japanese-speaking women who arrived here after World War II and married American citizens.

As much as I'd uncovered, I still had a landowner waiting eagerly to resume renovations of their home. Although we concluded that the final resting place of Shinjiro Honda is unidentified, the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation recorded the stone as a cemetery based on the Kanji inscription. The landowner agreed to keep the stone in place with no further disturbance, and the stone was returned to its original location under our supervision. That wrapped up the project.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Shinjiro and Teresa. Some of the insights I gained — into their lives, and into the immigrant experience — cracked me wide open. For example, I found a list in governmental records of what Teresa took with her when she left Heart Mountain Relocation Center in 1943 to attend university in Ohio (many young adult Nisei were allowed to leave internment camps to take employment or attend school outside the “exclusion zone”). Among those items were her father’s subscriptions of the North American Times and his Japanese poetry magazines. When Shinjiro and Teresa entered the camp, they were allowed just two suitcases each; poetry was so important to Shinjiro that he prioritized it over household items when packing for incarceration.

That burial stone revealed a man who worked tirelessly to preserve the voices of people seldom included in the history books: poor immigrants enduring separation from family and homeland, suffering discrimination, facing harsh anti-immigrant laws, braving the impact of assimilation on them and their children.

The stone in the International District is not the only commemoration of Shinjiro Honda. Farmers found another, with inscriptions solely in Kanji, in a field near Powell, Wyoming, several years ago. The dark gray column is inscribed with Honda's name, the name of the poetry club that placed it, and an unattributed short poem that is too weathered to translate. It now stands near the Heart Mountain Interpretive Center. A third memorial, I learned, is located in the Lakeview Cemetery in Seattle. This stone, a professionally carved polished pink and black granite, is inscribed in Kanji with a poem by Shinjiro himself — a fitting last word:

To live! That is good . . .
But to die, released from care —
Is that not good too?

Photo credit: Environmental Science Associates.

This is a big goddamned day in Seattle history, and so for posterity I want to make sure Seattle City of Literature's announcement is in the public record.

(Seattle—Oct. 31, 2017) The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced it designated Seattle as a City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network. Seattle joins an international network of 116 member cities from 54 countries that promote socio-economic and cultural tourism in the developed and developing world through creative industries.

The bid to join the Creative Cities Network was led by Seattle City of Literature, a non-profit whose aim is to foster public and private literary partnerships in the city and abroad to promote a robust creative economy.

Seattle is the top city in the United States for arts organizations per capita, and our nonprofit arts landscape is the fourth largest in the USA. The 325 nonprofit arts organizations in the greater Seattle area generated more than $207 million in revenues in 2012, according to the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture’s Creative Vitality Index (CVI) report, which tracks economic health and development in arts and culture. Employment in arts and culture in the Seattle metro area increased by more than 6 percent from 2010 to 2012, and as of 2012, nearly 31,000 people—or 3.5 percent of the population—worked in the sector.

Over the last five years, of their $10 million annual budget, the Office of Arts and Culture has dedicated an average of more than $230,000 in funding to literary and storytelling programs and artists—meaning they have invested more than $1.2 million in literature in the last five years. Additionally, according to data provided by 4Culture, the King County cultural funding arm, the county has granted more than $2.5 million to literary programs and individual writers in the last five years, from historic renovation funds to individual artist grants.

“Seattle has a wonderfully rich literary history beginning with the storytelling tradition of Native Americans in this region,” said Bob Redmond, Board President of Seattle City of Literature. “We found widespread support in the community for this successful effort. We look forward to working with partners in the arts community to participate in this global network.”

The non-profit worked with the City of Seattle to establish a Civic Poet program. Claudia Castro Luna, Seattle's first Civic Poet, served as an ambassador for Seattle’s rich literary landscape and represents the city’s diverse cultural community. In addition, Seattle City of Literature has collaborated on events with Hugo House and Elliott Bay Bookstore, and arranged for artist exchanges between Seattle, New Zealand and Iceland. This month, Seattle City of Literature hosted the second half of its Indigenous Writers Exchange with Nic Low of the Ngāi Tahu tribe of New Zealand. Last year, Elissa Washuta of the Cowlitz Tribe traveled to Christchurch for a similar exchange.

Seattle’s literary resources include thriving independent bookstores, public libraries, literary arts nonprofits and writing programs that serve diverse communities, publishers and small presses, professional organizations, readers, and writers. Seattle City of Literature aims to foster a culture where local writers can stay on the West Coast and be supported by local publishing amenities.

The board and stakeholders who generously gave their time and resources to develop the bid to join the Creative Cities Network includes writers, readers, editors, publishers, teachers, and non-profit leaders.

Seattle joins a group of 20 outstanding UNESCO City of Literature members including Iowa City (the first US city to gain recognition); as well as Edinburgh Scotland, Krakow, Poland; Baghdad, Iraq; Dublin, Ireland; Montevideo, Uruguay; and others.

For more information about Seattle City of Literature and future programming, visit: http://seattlecityoflit.org

For more information about the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, visit: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/creativity/creative-cities-network/

We just got maybe the most welcome press release in the history of press releases. It begins, "The United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) announced it designated Seattle as a City of Literature in the Creative Cities Network." As a City of Literature, Seattle joins more than 20 other cities around the world in the network, including Baghdad, Dublin, Reykjavík, Prague, and Montevideo.

This is the culmination of a years-long process; the bid for Seattle as a City of Literature began in 2013 and it has seen wholesale staffing changes, survived four different mayors, and the US's withdrawal from UNESCO in the intervening years. (I wrote earlier this month that this last development "effectively stall[ed]" our bid; I've rarely been more relieved to be wrong.)

Through the whole process, Seattle City of Literature has been promoting the bid. I just got off the phone with City of Literature Board President Bob Redmond to discuss UNESCO's announcement. Redmond, who just learned that the bid was successful "about an hour ago," sounds like he's still processing the news.

Why should Seattleites care that we're now a UNESCO-recognized City of Literature? What does this mean for the city? “We all know that Seattle is a world-class city," Redmond explains, "but this underlines it in a new way — especially for people who care about the arts, or books, or words. It matters to everybody here that the world is looking at Seattle as a cultural leader. That should make us feel good."

How does Redmond feel about this? "I feel a mixture of justification and joy," he says. "I feel justification because I don’t think that the mission of UNESCO and this organization could be more relevant than it is right now: to build understanding through the literary arts."

In the world of 2017, Redmond says, "we can see how fraught and disturbing things can get when the battle lines are drawn. I have a great faith in the arts as the way that people can imagine something different." He says the designation is "just extremely timely."

"And then I feel happy," Redmond says, "because so many people have put hundreds of hours of effort into this over the years that it feels really earned. Finally, I’d say Seattle is such a deserving city." He says our tradition of literature extends "all the way back to the oral traditions of the indigenous peoples here," and "to be recognized for this is a tremendous honor."

So what's next for Seattle now that we're officially a City of Literature? "We just wrapped up our Indigenous Writers Exchange" at Lit Crawl this year, Redmond says, "and what’s next is our programs for 2018. Also, we have to do a lot of communicating with all the other cities in the network and catch up with the lay of the land in the Creative Cities Network."

This is where the real joyous work begins. Seattle is now officially a member of a continuum of international cities, and we will be invited to participate in cultural exchange programs with other cities in the network. I expect to see collaboration with other UNESCO cities begin in earnest very soon.

So what can readers of the Seattle Review of Books do to help? Redmond explains, "we are looking for additional board members" of the Seattle City of Literature organization. The current board, he says, "was put together to get to this point and we are looking for the next group of leaders to lead the organization" onto the international stage. (Interested parties can contact Seattle City of Literature through their website.) The city of Seattle has officially, finally, been recognized as a leader in world literature. Now it's time to show the world why we deserve the designation.

Poetry Northwest is announcing a new prize, in honor of poet Joan Swift, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 90.

"The Joan Swift Memorial Prize is the brainchild of Esther Altshul Helfgott, longtime curator of the It's About Time reading series in Ballard," said Poetry Northwest executive editor Kevin Craft (Helfgott was also our Poet in Residence for September this year). "When Joan died earlier this year, we first heard the sad news from Esther. At the time we had been planning for an interview feature with Joan, who had recently published a few new poems in Poetry Northwest. The poems that Joan published in the summer 2016 issue, including 'Sometimes a Lake' and 'Moth,' represent a milestone for the magazine.

"Joan Swift was among the first poets ever published in Poetry Northwest, in the fall of 1959. In publishing Swift, and others like her, founding editor Carolyn Kizer made clear her commitment to emerging poets of the region, women writers most especially."

In the last issue Craft worked on, in 2016, he published new poems by Swift, 57 years after her initial debut. "The poems are lively, full-voiced, wry with experience. Publishing them was a joy in itself, marking the full achievement of Joan's life. It also signaled the continuity of our root commitment to women writers of the region."

The prize will focus on women poets living and writing in the Pacific Northwest — that includes western Montana, Northern California, BC, and Alaska as well as Washington, Oregon, and Idaho — over the age of 65. The winning poet will receive $500, publication in Poetry Northwest, and a reading in the It's About Time series. The deadline is January 15, 2018, with publication for summer 2018. There is no fee to enter. More information on how to apply can be found on the Poetry Northwest website.

Craft, who will judge the competition, says "We wanted to call attention to an active group of writers that may find it more challenging to get the attention of editors elsewhere in the publishing world."

We're so glad to see such an important voice honored in such an appropriate way. Help us spread the word!

The Seattle Review of Books is listed as a sponsor of the prize on the Poetry Northwest website. We donated Swift's payment when we ran her poetry in celebration of her life to Poetry Northwest, but have no connection to the prize, beyond our excitement.

Sponsor Entre Ríos Books is back to invite you to the launch celebration for a new book by San Francisco master Aaron Shurin — Flowers & Sky: Two Talks. Hosted at Open Books, the event features a reading by Shurin and a special guest, Alex Vigue, a Washington native whose debut chapbook is forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press.

Entre Ríos has an excerpt from Shurin’s book and more information about the authors and the event on our sponsor page. Check it out, then save room on your calendar for this Friday, November 3rd — it promises to be a great night. Many thanks to Entre Ríos Books for supporting the site and promoting the work of both writers!

Sponsors like Entre Ríos Books make the Seattle Review of Books possible. Did you know you could sponsor us, as well? If you have a book, event, or opportunity you’d like to get in front of our readers, reach out and let us know. We’d be happy to reserve a spot for you, even before our next block of dates goes public.

Monday, October 30: Leonardo Da Vinci Reading

Walter Isaacson has made a career out of writing about geniuses. He’s written books about Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Benjamin Franklin. His latest book is a biography of one of history’s most important geniuses: Leonardo Da Vinci. How does one man paint several of the most recognizable paintings of all time, make world-changing discoveries in anatomy and biology, and craft a flying machine in just one lifetime? Broadway Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com . $43. All ages. 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, October 31: Booktoberfest: Halloween Horror Hour

Seattle’s librarians are fucking awesome. They sing karaoke. They kick your ass at trivia. They recommend books and help you locate some obscure title you saw one time five years ago in Bora Bora and the only thing you know for sure is that the dust jacket was blue. And they also read you scary stories on Halloween when they could surely be at a party somewhere canoodling with someone dressed up as Sexy Regret. Go get scared by a library professional. They went to school for this. Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 pm.

Wednesday, November 1st: Reading Through It Book Club

The joint book club from the Seattle Review of Books and the Seattle Weekly continues with this month’s selection, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson. The book was originally published as an editorial in 2014, so this is not some hastily slapped-together post-Trump book (looking at you, Noam Chomsky). Even if you didn’t buy your copy of the book at Third Place Books, you’re welcome to come for what should be a really enlightening discussion. Plus, you can bring drinks from the bar into the book club! Third Place Books Seward Park, 5041 Wilson Ave S, 474-2200, http://thirdplacebooks.com. Free. All ages. 7 p.m.

Thursday, November 2nd: The Obama Inheritance Reading

The Obama Inheritance is a new anthology of 15 stories which promises to transform noir into an “over-the-top, transcendental psychedelic thriller ride of pulpy goodness.” Every story in the book treats a far-right Republican conspiracy theory about Barack Obama as though it is true. Seattle sci-fi genius (and Seattle Review of Books columnist) Nisi Shawl will read from her contribution to the book. Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, 525-2347 http://thirdplacebooks.com, 7 pm, free.

Friday, November 3rd: Short Run Marathon Art Show & Pre-Festival Party

This weekend is all about the Short Run Comix and Art show, and tonight is the pre-funk. Short Run all-stars including Emil Ferris, Leela Corman, Julia Wertz, Jordan Crane, Gemma Correll, Tom Hart, nishat akhtar, Rebecca Artemisa, and Anders Nilsen will talk and cavort over refreshments. Several of the artists will share presentations of their work, too. Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, 925 E. Pike St., 658-0110, http://fantagraphics.com/flog/bookstore, 6 pm, free.

Saturday, November 4th: Short Run

See our Event of the Week column for more details.

Sunday, November 5th: Two Short Run Events

This afternoon, Short Run cartoonists Nicole J. Georges and Julia Wertz will talk about their latest books with Seattle cartoonist ET Russian at the Seattle Public Library. Then, at night you should attend the launch party for free local cartooning newspaper Thick As Thieves, which will be taking place in the Mount Analogue space in the Pioneer Square art space X Y Z Gallery. Seattle Public Library, 1000 4th Ave., 386-4636, http://spl.org, 2 pm, free.

X Y Z Gallery, 300 S Washington St, http://www.mount-analogue.com/, 6 pm, free.

Every year, the Short Run Comix & Arts Festival gets a little larger. This year's happening at Seattle Center on Saturday, November 4th from 11 am to 6 pm, is way bigger than last year's mammoth show.

And this isn't some size queen trip: the additions are all high-quality affairs. The main floor of Short Run will be essentially the same: 270 exhibitors spread across the floor of Fisher Pavillion. These are cartoonists and publishers and poets and zine-makers and other graphic artists from around the country and the world, here in town to sell you something beautiful.

After the end of the APRIL Festival this year, Short Run made a point of reaching out to literary talents, to give them more of a voice at their show. One whole row of the show is now devoted to a "Lit Alley" of independent literary talents and presses. Authors Willie Fitzgerald, Emmett Montgomery, and Stacey Levine will also write short stories on the spot based on Twitter posts in something called the Reverse Tweet Translator.

And there's more, too: What's a convention with some panels? Across Seattle Center at the Vera Project, Short Run is throwing a days' worth of panel programming, including "an active participatory performance by Sean Christensen, Fern Wiley, Maura Campbell-Balkits, Vivian Hua, Eileen Chavez & Daria Tessler;" a conversation with cartoonists Emil Ferris (author of the brilliant My Favorite Thing is Monsters) and Leela Corman moderated by me; a discussion on comics journalism with Jesús Cossio, Joe Sacco, and Seattle's own Sarah Glidden; and a spotlight on Bitch Planet author Kelly Sue DeConnick.

Short Run's high-profile special guests will be running a few programs, too. Julia Wertz, author of the comics memoir Drinking at the Movies and the urban sketchbook Tenements, Towers, & Trash, will be teaching a class. So will minicomics legend Tom Hart. Cartoonist Anders Nilson has created a participatory coloring-book garden for the show. And as always, the Short Run Bake Sale will be shilling high-quality brownies to fill your belly after you walk around Seattle Center all morning long.

There's much more, including programming before and after the big day. You can consult our Your Week in Readings column for more details or just look it up on Short Run's own site. And check back here for more over the coming week. Every day here on the Seattle Review of Books we'll be running interviews with Short Run exhibitors and reviews of books that will be debuting at Short Run. No matter what your interests, you'll find something at Short Run that feels like it was made just for you.

Each week, the Sunday Post highlights a few articles good for slow consumption over a cup of coffee (or tea, if that’s your pleasure). Settle in for a while; we saved you a seat. You can also look through the archives.

On Being Driven

Kristen Millares Young read this essay at Lit Crawl to a packed room held silent by the story: an ill-met drive on a small island in the Bahamas; a trade of threats; a tangle of considerations involving sex, race, money, and history. Her voice — conversational, warm, relentless — comes through as clearly on the page. A rich and difficult and exceptional piece.

I worried about going to jail on this island, where he would know everyone watching over me inside. Worried even about stepping into the building to make a report. And what would I have said? That we had a dangerous conversation. That he left bruises on my mind.

That I cursed him. That I cursed him, and he believed it. That I cursed his family, threatened to rain down destruction on their black bodies, invoked centuries of white oppression, and he believed me because he lived that truth.

That I would do it again, and again, and again, just as he hoped to do me.

'No Fatties': When Healthcare Hurts

If you’re still not sure (after reading Shrill, after reading Hunger, after reading the plethora of voices that are speaking on this issue) that fat shaming is a moral and social wrong that urgently needs addressing, read this, by Carey Purcell. Purcell dissects how systemic bias in our medical system makes weight discrimination literally life-threatening, from MRI machines designed for the slender, to doctors who misdiagnose and mistreat disease because they can’t look past their prejudice. When we turn to the medical system, we are at our most vulnerable, and most in need of generous and compassionate care. But the medical system is failing some of us and failing badly.

The need for hospital equipment that can accommodate fat people has grown, and imaging devices are now available. This equipment is not available everywhere, however, and sometimes patients are referred to their local zoos. When Wann called the San Francisco Zoo’s medical department to ask about accessing its technology, the person on the phone sighed and said, "I wish people would stop saying that," referring to requests to use the department’s CT and MRI scanners. While vet schools and zoos have larger-capacity devices, they can’t allow human subjects, and scanning humans in machines intended for animal subjects is banned by formal policies in most facilities. "That’s really beyond their certification," explained Wann. They’re not licensed as an institution to practice medicine on people. Their entire institutional certification is being put on the line because our human medical system refuses to accommodate people above a certain size. It draws an arbitrary line and says, ‘Go beyond this line, and they’re monsters.’"

Nazism: what it is, why we fight it, and how

You know how some stories are scarier when told in a calm, dispassionate voice? For Halloween, here’s one by Yonatan Zunger. Zunger reminds us that “Nazi” is more than a slur; that Nazis are not just bad but really, really bad; and that there’s a tipping point after which being a Nazi is normal, a point the US is approaching and may have passed. The good news is he’s a “thumbs up” on punching Nazis — with caveats, and as long as we apply other counter-measures too. There’s also a fun opportunity to consider which segment of the 10–80–10 rule you would like to be in …

Before we talk about what you do about Nazis, there’s a very important thing to remember: The 10–80–10 rule. In pretty much any society, 10% of people (give or take about 5%) are going to be heroes, no matter what: people with strong moral compasses, unwilling to be swayed from that. Another 10% (give or take 5%) are going to be villains, no matter what: they will engage in villainy and violence for the sheer fun of it. But the large majority of the population  —  the 80% in the middle  —  is neither. Instead, they will set their norms of what is acceptable by watching people around them.

‘Tiny House Hunters’ and the shrinking American dream

If you follow Roxane Gay on Twitter, you already know she’s fond of House Hunters, reality TV in which couples search for a new home on the air, armed with budgets as improbable as their expectations. Spinoff Tiny House Hunters takes Gay to a new level of sort-of-affectionate disbelief, as well as to some thoughts the Tiny American Dream.

As the reality of tiny living sets in, the hunters often lament how tiny a tiny home actually is. Or they are in complete denial and exclaim that there is just so much space. In one episode of Tiny House Hunters a man sat in the "bathtub" in the tiny bathroom. He looked ridiculous, his knees practically in his mouth as he contorted himself into the improbable space. He, the realtor, and his friend, who were all viewing the property, were nonplussed, as if the goings on were perfectly normal. And there I was, shouting at the television, "What is wrong with you people?"

This Taco Chain Isn't Really About The Tacos

And now, at last: Mexi-Fries®. I almost can’t write this up without walking a mere block (envy me) to the nearest Taco Time. However, if you thought we were steering away from serious social issues, don’t get your hopes up. David Landsel is writing an elegy for a local favorite at threat from — you guessed it — the rapid growth and change in our region. Jeff Bezos, you’ve finally gone too far.

Taco Time was originally an Oregon thing — it started up in Eugene, back in the 1960's. Over time, the Western Washington stores spun off into a company called Taco Time Northwest. These appear to have been the smart guys in the bunch, because the years have not been kind to the original Taco Time. The Taco Time you need to know about is the one with the shops up and down the I-5 corridor, many of them in the Seattle region. This is the Taco Time, even if they don't say so in front of their cool friends, that holds a special place in the hearts of many Washingtonians. If not for the food, then rather as a piece of nostalgia for a Northwest that's slowly going away, as money pours in, new people arrive, and tastes and trends evolve.

Seattle Writing Prompts are intended to spark ideas for your writing, based on locations and stories of Seattle. Write something inspired by a prompt? Send it to us! We're looking to publish writing sparked by prompts.

Also, how are we doing? Are writing prompts useful to you? Could we be doing better? Reach out if you have ideas or feedback. We'd love to hear.

You're just walking down the street surrounded by green trees one day, and the next everything is shades of red and yellow. Walking around the neighborhoods of Seattle becomes a walk through spilled paints, and as the low sun hits the high branches, fire explodes above your head.

It's best near sunrise, I think, when the gray has parted for a morning, and there's a light, crisp breeze rustling the leaves. Maybe you're looking at your phone, worrying over a detail in your life that seems inescapable, and then that uncoordinated sound of leaves being pushed around, and you look up into the iridescence of fall.

And then, they're on the ground. You're walking over them, through them. They get weighted down and waterlogged after a day's rain. Those light and delightful leaves above, become slick and sodden, a sign of the cycle of life, on a tree's scale.

We like to talk about how humans follow cycles, how the seasons affect us. You could argue, even, that modernity is a way to escape the resonant call of nature. Keeping time, making light when we want it, shelter that we heat or cool to our comfort. But one look at a tree in fall will center you back in the natural world. Other parts of the world are affected by the turning of the world, and its travel around the sun. Not just us, but everywhere around us.

Not a bad reminder on a cool Fall morning, when you can just start seeing your breath, and the trees are as bright and beautiful as you've ever seen them.

Today's prompts

1. If you jog around the top of Queen Anne ever day, you'll see the same faces. She used to rate them, on a scale of 0-10, how happy they looked doing what they were doing. Zero meant miserable. Ten meant ecstatic. A nod or smile or acknowledgment raised a score by at least two, but considering all of that, even, the aggregate score rarely raised above three. These people were depressed. And one thing you could do for depressed people was make them laugh. She got her idea for the first costume after jogging past a red and gold tree.

2. It was a dare. Baby boy mouse had to climb a tree, pick a single leaf, and hold on to it for at least two hours. If he did so, and the leaf stayed on the tree and didn't fall, his big brothers (all twelve of them) promised they would give him back his bottle cap. If he didn't, they were going to throw the bottle cap down the drain, to watch it race like a boat with the sewer current. There was nothing Baby boy Mouse liked more than that bottle cap. Not even his fear of heights could stop him. So, with his brothers egging him on, he started the climb up the trunk of the tree. A breeze rustled the leaves. His heart caught in his throat, as a rain of leaves fell down all around them.

3. The leaves made the street so slick, then even traveling slow, Charlene couldn't help but slide into the back of the black SUV when it slammed on its brakes. A tall man in a long coat emerged, aviator sunglasses on. He looked first at the back of the SUV for damage (there was none) before coming to her window. "Ma'am, are you okay?" he asked, and then leaning down, and getting a look at her, his mouth fell open. "Hey, wait a minute! Aren't you...?" Charlene nodded. The man, giving her an index finger indicating she should wait, jogged to the back door of the SUV. "Boss, you're never gonna believe who just hit us." The door slowly opened, and a leg emerged.

4. They had chased her down, two bigger boys. Pushed her until she fell, and then stuffed sopping, cold wet leaves down her shirt, while she cried and begged them to stop. Only a dad walking down the street with a little toddler scared them off. He stopped and bent down, "are you okay?" he asked. She couldn't stop crying, and now she was shivering and miserable. "Can I help you, please?" she nodded. He pulled leaves out, and she helped him until they were gone, and then he gave her a coat to put around her shoulders. "Let's go find your parents," he said. "That's just it," she said. "Those boys were being mean to me because I don't have any parents."

5. Nobody knew what to do. The woman wouldn't budge. She sat on a folding chair, a sketchbook in her hands, and she was drawing all the trees that surrounded the playfield. But they were supposed to have soccer practice, and she was on the half-way line. Coach had already talked to her once, but she said she'd move when she was done. One of the dads — a lawyer — couldn't get her to budge. One of the moms tried, too, but had no luck. They were going to call the cops soon, when a few of the girls, all suited up but not able to play, walked over, and before you knew it, all of them were drawing trees as well.

Over on our Instagram page, we’re posting a weekly installation from Clare Johnson’s Post-it Note Project, a long running daily project. Here’s her wrap-up and statement from September’s posts.

October's Theme: Fancy Dress

When I lived in the UK, wearing costumes was called fancy dress. Fancy dress parties, Halloween in general, seemed to mostly be a thing with university students. Looking at post-its from my life back in Seattle, I notice a lot more fancy dress—costumes, but also weddings, where other people are truly wearing fancy dresses. Both versions are things I love witnessing—endlessly fascinating, creative, strange—but pretty much never long to do myself. I am the most perfectly fervent appreciator of drag and burlesque, and the worst person to invite to a costume party. I am the adolescent hiding in the remotest part of the bowels of the Langston Hughes theater minutes before my 8th grade play, hoping the director couldn’t find me to force me into makeup. These post-its from October 2015 run through fancy dress moments, from watching a music video (seriously, songs in 3/4 or 6/8 time just slay me, who cares if the video itself is basically a faux-BDSM ad for a stupid sex-negative movie) through to attending a Halloween party in New York (costumes do lend themselves to some amazing conversation). In between I’ve jotted down something someone said about a wedding, which still makes me laugh, but I can’t remember now who said it, or what we were actually talking about. On 10/18/15 I was in Walla Walla, about to head home after my first out-of-town reading. I grabbed one perfect swim in the motel pool, surrounded by rainy morning fields out of fogged-up dirty windows, and three floppy-haired kids splashing around. One boy’s fancy mermaid tail suddenly became visible through the chlorine; it made him so, so happy.

10.1.15 — What is my thing with waltzes?⠀ ⠀⠀ #PostItArt by @clare.e.johnson #ClareJohnsonPostItProject

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Oct 6, 2017 at 2:16pm PDT

10.11.15 — I want to secretly be the officiant at her wedding. ⠀ ⠀ #PostItArt by @clare.e.johnson #ClareJohnsonPostItProject

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Oct 13, 2017 at 12:15pm PDT

10.18.15 — When I suddenly realized that kid had a mermaid tail!⠀ ⠀ #PostItArt by @clare.e.johnson #ClareJohnsonPostItProject

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Oct 20, 2017 at 2:09pm PDT

10.30.15 — I wasn't looking for the light saber. I just happened to fall upon it.⠀ ⠀ #PostItArt by @clare.e.johnson #ClareJohnsonPostItProject

A post shared by The Seattle Review of Books (@seattlereviewof) on Oct 27, 2017 at 12:01pm PDT

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Cienna is off this week; please enjoy this Help Desk column from August of 2015.

Dear Cienna,

Can you just tell me, once and for all, if Stephen King is a good writer or not?

Dan, Belltown

Dear Dan,

My grandmother, a lovely woman named Roberta, used to ask me a question very similar to the one you pose. “Judy,” she’d say, because she loved to call both me and my mother, Evil Katy, by another woman’s name, “Judy, is that the phone?”

Roberta would ask this question at the doctor’s office, when a dog barked, during a moment of silence at a dear friend’s funeral — there was no inopportune time, in her opinion, to ask if there was a phone ringing somewhere.

Usually I could not hear a phone ringing but despite the silence I would often answer “Yes!” because I’m generally a positive person who prefers to speak in declarative affirmations (“The moon absolutely looks like a smug lesbian tonight,” or “Yes! I have forgotten your name again”).

On those occasions, Roberta heaved her 83-year-old frame out of her brocade recliner, pendulous breasts swinging like the excited wag of a dog’s tail as she shuffled into the kitchen to fondle the phone.

“God bless it, Judy, that wasn’t the phone,” she'd then shout because she was deaf, not stupid. Nevertheless, she would return with a treat for me, like a string cheese or warm soda, because I was her favorite living granddaughter (sorry Good Katy, RIP Suzanne).

To answer your question: Stephen King is a good writer about as often as the phone is ringing.

Hearts and butterflies,

Cienna