Photo of Chris Dusterhoff by Abbi Rodes/Simply Photography
Have you ever noticed how author bios in small lit magazines are usually better than their work? At least I always go right for the bios. When I find the work lacking blood and spit [metaphorically], I go back to the bio to reassure myself that they are a real person that is doing the best they can. Anyway, I have decided to dispense with the bio and use this, my first article, as a sort of meet-and-greet. I hope Briggsy doesn’t mind. I also hope Matt doesn’t mind me calling him Briggsy.
I was likely asked to contribute to Reading Local Seattle because I work in a used bookstore here in the city and because I publish poetry chapbooks under the name Spankstra Press. I have been doing both since about 2000. I am originally from Baltimore Maryland. This is only relevant as it shaded my opinion of the literary arts. It also informed my view of Baltimore and likely the whole East Coast as areas inhabited by a crusty literati more interested in ego than art. That caused me to get the hell out of Baltimore and move to Seattle WA. Read the rest of this entry »
Turn on.
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.
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