Event of the Week: The Lines That Make Us Reading at Elliott Bay Book Company

A couple years ago, I interviewed Seattle bus driver Nathan Vass about his memoir blog, The View from Nathan's Bus. Now, thanks to the good people at new Northwest publisher Tome Press, Vass has published a beautiful collection of essays about his experiences as a bus driver in Seattle, The Lines That Make Us. (In the interest of full disclosure: I wrote the essay that serves as the introduction for the book, but no money or any compensation changed hands for the essay.)

Much of Lines is about Vass's experience driving the 7 route, which for decades has had a reputation as Seattle's worst bus line. That reputation comes because the 7 runs straight through the most ethnically diverse part of town — lily-white Seattleites have for decades feared south Seattle and its black neighborhoods. (It's been that way for as long as white people have lived here; in the early 1900s, Rainier Valley was known as Garlic Gulch because that's where the new and universally loathed Italian immigrants lived.)

I've been reading Vass's blog for years; it's a great look inside the life of a Seattle bus driver. But when the essays are collected like this, all those stories accrue into more than just one bus driver's experience: it's a portrait of Seattle at street level.

Vass sees the Seattle that has been forgotten in the glamor of the Amazon boom: homeless people, poor people, young people, people suffering from mental and physical ailments. He writes an appreciation of Aurora Avenue, perhaps the last great swath of Seattle to escape serious redevelopment. He sees slivers of the lives of the people on his bus. He gets to know some more intimately by seeing them day after day. He sees others at their most vulnerable moments.

Tomorrow night, Vass will be in conversation with Tome Press publisher Tom Eykemans at Elliott Bay Book Company. Vass is a thoughtful and well-read individual; this conversation should definitely be worth your time. This is a quintessentially Seattle event — the kind of storyteller with the kind of stories that people are always lamenting never happen here anymore.

These stories are still here in Seattle: poor people, forgotten people, quiet people. It's just that somehow, along the way, we stopped listening for them.

Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Ave, 624-6600, http://elliottbaybook.com, 7 pm, free.