Heads-up: Four of our contributors, Chuck Wolfe, Laura Lucas, Peter Mountford, and Kate Lebo, are making headlines with new book releases, awards, and published essays.
While you’re waiting for the Ghosts of Seattle Past anthology (to be published April 11!), check out Chuck Wolfe’s Seeing the Better City, coming out in February from Island Press. His new book focuses on the sights, sounds and experiences of a place as tools for crafting a better urban environment. With clear prose, vibrant photographs, and an eye towards policymaking, Wolfe opens readers to new urban horizons.
Already, other contributors are finding awards on their horizons. Laura Lucas was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her Dead Housekeeping piece “Nine Kinds of Ice Cream.” You might have read her essay “Madame K’s Pizza” in our beta anthology or seen her read during our Irish Wake for Lost Seattle Places back in March. Meanwhile, Peter Mountford received the Gar LaSalle Storyteller Award. Congratulations Peter! The Gar LaSalle is an unrestricted award of $10,000, given to a Washington State fiction writer whose work demonstrates excellence in storytelling.
And an excellent storyteller Peter is—his essay “Ye Olde Canterbury,” which will be featured in our final anthology, was recently published in Seattle Weekly. Describing the painful growth spurts that afflicted both him and the city, Peter recounts how time and gentrification forced him and his friends to grow up and apart. Kate Lebo also narrates growth in “Twenty-Three Pieces of the Sunset Bowl,” now published on the Rumpus. Here, she studies growing in Ballard from a different angle: What happens to a growth spurt when the recession hits? What does it mean to belong to a place that can’t legally, financially, belong to you?
Congratulations to all our contributor friends on the important work and well-deserved recognition.
Guest blogger: Monalice Choi