Reading Local Seattle

This weekend, Book Fest!

At this weekend’s Seattle Book Fest, the focus is on locally produced lit. The festival will include more than a hundred local writers and more than fifty local businesses. Although it is possible to catch many of the writers at various venues during the year, having all of these writers, presses, magazines, and nonprofits in one place at one time makes this an event that can not be missed for anyone interested in the books being written in and around Seattle-and you will likely discover many new voices.

Jut a handful of the well known local writers include Garth Stein (The Art of Running in the Rain), Stephanie Kallos (Sing Them Home), William Dietrich (The Dakota Cipher), Randy Su Coburn (Owl Island), and Pet Dexter (Paris Trout). The list of writers who may not be well known (yet) but will be include the likes of Jonathan Evison (All About Lulu), Ryan Boudinot (The Littlest Hitler), Margot Kahn (Horses That Buck), and Midge Raymond (Forgetting English). And there are dozens of local writers who have been steadily producing great books, writers such as Jerome Gold, Ron Darkon, Sibyl James, and Peter Pereira.

There will be lot of fiction and nonfiction writers, but the poetry program also happens to be strong and includes big names in local poetry such as Sam Hammill, Judith Roche, and Paul Hunter, but also a number of experimental poets who are also great performers of their work (such as John Olson, Paul Nelson, Sarah Mangold, and Larry Laurence). If your taste is lyric poetry your bases are covered. If your taste is not lyric poetry your bases are covered.

For the full schedule, check the Seattle Book Fest Web site.

William J. Kiesel

I few months ago I heard word about a mysterious bibliophilic event entitled the Esoteric Book Conference. Alas, the Great Recession has reduced my book buying budget considerably–I won’t be attending any book fairs, let alone an “esoteric” one. But recently I discovered that the conference was being organized by William J. Kiesel, publisher at Ouroboros Press.

I met William by frequenting his place of employment for many years, Magus Books, where he greeted questions about unusual, hard-to-find tomes with a slightly bemused smile behind a tiny trimmed beard or an arched eyebrow above old wire-rimmed glasses. For a few years in Pioneer Square he ran a well-stocked used occult bookstore. I would often visit just to see books I couldn’t see anywhere else and to have my questions about arcane and even taboo subjects answered by an intelligent, rational, and amicable fellow wearing a black fez. Nowadays Mr. Kiesel has moved on to tackle a tiny corner of the publishing world. As a service to Reading Local readers he kindly agreed to answer not only some questions about the upcoming conference (and the culture behind it) but also about some of  the ideas and terms (taken from the conference website) that might be unfamiliar to the uninitiated outsider who is curious about this seldom explored area.

Interview on the next page.

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