Reading Local Seattle

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Reading Local: Seattle is the second, I hope, of many literary efforts recording, promoting, and listening to the efforts of locally produced lit. There are similar efforts occurring in other cities, such as Chicago’s New City Lit.

It seems like either a really good time or a really bad time to start an effort like this. For one thing, this is the twilight of print media, for the most part. (Maybe it is even the twilight of all print media?) Seattle not only lost the daily, The Seattle PI, but the book coverage in the Seattle Times has decreased. The Stranger has kept a book reviewer, Paul Constant, who has been very active both in the paper and on The Stranger Blog, but the Seattle Weekly doesn’t really publish much about books anymore aside from the event listings. Furthermore, independent bookstores continue to close their doors. In the last ten years Seattle has lost some great bookstores such as the urban bookstore M. Coy, which used to be on the ground floor in the downtown office building where The Raven Chronicles had a desk in the late 1990s. (They couldn’t really afford an office.) The store contained an idiosyncratic selection of new releases, and an even better collection of paperback lit. They also carried a few of the local lit mags. They managed to survive the incoming rush of mega-bookstores such as Borders (just down the block) and Barnes and Noble (about five blocks away). They even survived the rise of Amazon. They were a small, precise shop that offered good coffee and music. It was great to get coffee there, read submitted manuscripts, and feel like the city and books and writers who wanted to get published were all connected by print, postage, and coffee cups.

Even bookstores as iconic as the Elliott Bay Book Company seeemed to struggle. Elliott bay mixes the First Avenue/Skid Row funk of Left Bank Books (what the late historian Murray Morgan called Doc Maynard’s Seattle) with the sometimes business-minded pretensions of Arthur Denney’s Seattle. The UW’s Theodore Roethke thought poets should be admired and respected like businessmen. Morgan pointed out the conflict of these two worldviews in Seattle’s at-odds city grids that abut at Yesler. Elliott Bay, however, seems to be doing better.

Even so, the old bookish culture of book reviewers at daily papers, who had the limits of their subject drawn for them by the trade magazines such as Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, and conversely the public libraries and neighborhood bookstores who made their selections from these sources remains, but increasingly they seem like the remains of another era. They belong alongside neighborhood businesses such as hardware stores, butchers, and bakeries. These businesses exist more as gesture than as the site where the action happens.

It is nearly inconceivable to me now that I would visit a bookstore, any bookstore at all, and that they would stock the books I actually want. I do find books in Seattle bookstores, but not often anymore. I’ve walked into the UW Bookstore several times in the last year and bought books such as the Rose Metal Press collection of chapbooks, A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness or Nisi Shawl great collection of stories Filter House. Open Books, inevitably, has books whose physical presence – the paper, the ink, the boards – require handling, holding, owning. Jesse Minkert’s book Shortness of Breath & Other Symptoms, produced in Paul Hunter’s Fremont basement is an example of a locally written, published, and sold books. I’m sure Open Books is the place to find it.

So I can conceive of it, but by and large the majority of the books I’ve bought in the last couple of years have been on the Web. In fact the majority of book-related activity occurs through e-mail, and now increasingly through FaceBook, Twitter, Blogs, Web Forums, and so on. I try to buy books when I can at Powell’s, but still get them at Amazon when no one else carries the titles.

It is the rise of Amazon, paradoxically, both a Seattle bookstore and a bookstore that belongs to another kind of civic space, the Web. And the Web itself is moving on, evolving more rapidly than Amazon can adapt. Whatever last spring’s fiasco with de-listing GTLB books — that it happened at all, that it required a massive twitter storm for Amazon to acknowledge it, and that they have yet (I think) to own up to their responsibility as booksellers to remain as transparent as possible about what happened — shows that Amazon, itself, maybe a place where the action happens right now but gradually the action is moving, continuing to diffuse itself from any center, location, catalog, or warehouse locked in one place, or store, or even Books-in-Print.

The ecosystems of books has changed from the publisher, book reviewer, bookstore, and book buyer. And no single thing is replacing it. And no one actually knows what is going on right this minute much less what is going to happen next year or ten years from now.

This makes a Web-site focused on local lit production seem that much more quixotic, I guess.

I read at a small press fair in Portland this last spring, and was grateful for the coverage of the event and curious about the other events in Portland that Gabe Barber posted on his Reading Local: Portland site. Gabe seemed aware of the fact that things are in a transitional state, that somehow whatever happens is going to involve what they call social media, that is Web tools that allow for the instantaneous sharing of information.  And he had built a site with a specificity of mission that matched my own interest: books written by people who live near me.

Conversely, these new Web tools also allow for the collection and display of information in a startling original ways. There is for instance, at LibraryThing, a dynamic map of literary events. This is possible because of social media, and it is tools like this, sites like LibraryThing and GoodReads, that have or will alter the way we discover books.

Just as things become diffuse through the Internet, paradoxically the values of proximity, locality, and sharing a physical space become more important. While we can (and do) interact with events globally, at the same time, local events are easier to organize, promote, attend, and record because of this technology.

I hope to explore some of the tensions between the local and global (the particular and the universal) on this site while also providing coverage of locally produced books, local lit events, writers, and reading series.

I have also managed to sucker some great writers into contributing. Our editor and contributor, Roger Weaver, is a copyeditor, writer, and bookseller.  Amy Schrader will be reviewing poetry. She has an MFA from the University of Washington and for a time worked with Cranky, a great local magazine. Chris Dusterhoff is a local bookseller, publisher, writer, and producer of lit events. And John Olson, a local poet and novelist, will contribute the occasional essay; currently he is defending and celebrating the physicality of books and habits engendered by sitting quickly and reading a long, difficult text.

I expect the site will start slowly. We are offering events listings. My eventual aim is to have an ongoing calendar (and record) of all the book-related events from Bellingham to Olympia. We will also read a lot of books and talk to a lot of writers, publishers, and events organizers.

If you are an events producer, please add me to your list. If you are a writer who is interested in reviewing books or writing profiles of publishers, writers, bookstores, magazines, let me know. I can be reached at [matt(dot)briggs(at)gmail(dot)com].

Author: Matt Briggs

Matt Briggs is the author of five books, including Shoot the Buffalo, a novel published by Clear Cut Press and winner of a 2006 American Book Award. His second novel, The Strong Man, will be released on March 1st 2010. Recent work has appeared in Spork, First Intensity, Seattle Magazine, and The Clackamas Literary Review.

Matt Briggs has written 78 articles for us.