As far as I understand literature to have a purpose, it is meant to reflect back to us our fullest selves, to speak truth to power, and to be a site for greater individual and communal reimagining.
These essays represent a vision for our city that channels the best hopes of its artists, who were asked for their opinions prior to the pandemic, and whose wisdom should be considered as we revitalize our city’s neighborhoods and cultural institutions in the wake of COVID-19.z
Because Seattle, more than any of the other place I have lived, has a more robust literary community, I have been able to see aspects of myself in organizations like Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute and Northwest African American Museum. I have planted myself, grown and opened up spaces for others to grow and flourish in organizations like Hugo House and Jack Straw.
What it means to me, to be here in this city, is to be where creativity is so cared for instead of being sown and grown and harvested until the fields go dry.
But here so often it feels like the middle-class imagination has conquered everything, and even if this doesn’t include my dreams it means I rarely feel connected to something larger than loss.
We are walking on Lushootseed words, like the early grass, like the rattle of the camas flower dried in the wind. We walk on a city that was and is and will be. Any city that comes through fire has its own holiness. Any city that walks on water carries cathedrals inside.
Nature is not an abstraction in this City of Literature. It’s elemental to who we are—the quirks, the passions, the aspirations. It defines us and our literary imagination.