Reading Local Seattle

Rick Bass is back from his Yaak Valley, Montana home with his newest book, The Wild Marsh: Four Seasons at Home in Montana (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). "Classic in form, the journal of a year in an old loved place, The Wild Marsh is a lovingly wrought chronicle from a writerly soul that has found its spot in the world: the one-of-a-kind Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana. Sure-footed in his approach, whether the topic is a forest fire in his front yard or the excitement of the first tiny, cheerful glacier lilies in spring, Rick Bass is a stirring companion on the trail that leads west from the Walden Pond of Henry David Thoreau and the Sand County of Aldo Leopold." - Ivan Doig.

A highly regarded landscape architect who maintains home and work places in both New York and the Columbia River Gorge, Bibi Gaston has made a moving memoir out of her grandmother's diaries. That grandmother, Rosamond Pinchot, was, in her short life, part of a prominent family, and prominent in her own right as an actress and sportswoman. The Loveliest Woman in America: A Tragic Actress, Her Lost Diaries, and Her Granddaughter's Search for Home (HarperPerennial) is Bibi Gaston's evocative chronicle of this all. "The Loveliest Woman in America is a story for all women who strive and struggle to lead meaningful and purposeful lives. In moving prose, the author weaves her grandmother Rosamond Pinchot's deep connection to nature with that of her own. That connection becomes the constantly redeeming thread, weaving its ways through the generations of a remarkable, passionate family whose legacy of service to the landscape and the environment are the DNA of today's conservation efforts." - Sara Cedar Miller.

"Writing Your Life: Memoirists at Work." Whether you've secretly wanted to write a memoir, or have questions for those who have written theirs, consider spending part of this Sunday afternoon as part of a lively discussion. To celebrate the new memoir anthology, Memoirs in the Light of Day (Lamberson-Corona Press), six contributors discuss the art and practice of making memoir. Writing teacher and acclaimed author Brenda Peterson—whose own new memoir, I Want to Be Left Behind, is due out later this year—moderates.