Aoyama decided she wanted to be a writer at fourteen. She wrote her whole life, through decades of submissions, through the long silences that publishers send back when they mean no. Her debut came at forty-seven. There’s something worth sitting with in that number. Not as a story of perseverance, exactly, but as a reminder of how much a person can carry without putting it down. Her first job was as a journalist in Sydney, in 1993 or 1994, on a working holiday. This was before the internet, before social media, before the world became so loud with itself. You get the sense that she has always been someone who notices what is quiet.

When asked why she chose linked short stories rather than a traditional structure while writing Hot Chocolate on Thursday, she said: “This novel is very mysterious to me. The first and last lines came to my mind immediately. Then I knew what I would write for the first and twelfth stories, and so I wanted to write quickly to reach the twelfth story.” Her philosophy while writing the book was that life is questions and answers, and that everything is either halfway, the start, or the end. A writer racing toward a destination she could already see, filling in the middle like a person crossing a frozen lake, moving fast because stillness is its own kind of danger.

Someone in the audience asked about the Marble Café, the warm fictional gathering place at the heart of the book, and whether it was real. It was, once. Her favorite theater production company recreated it for a stage adaptation, built to her exact specifications. And the illustration on the Japanese edition, she said, is exactly what she had in her head. There is something moving about that: a place that existed only in imagination, then on the page, then built into the physical world by people who loved it enough to try.

Aoyama doesn’t think of her writing as healing fiction, a label that gets applied to certain Japanese novels with a kind of brisk efficiency. She resisted it gently. She said instead that she thinks her readers have warm hearts. It’s a different thing entirely, not a genre, not a prescription, but a kind of trust she extends to the people who find her books.

The translator of her book The Healing Hippo of Hinode Park, Takami Nieda, was in the audience. When someone asked how Aoyama chooses her translators and how she can know whether her sentiments will survive the crossing into another language, she said she leaves it up to fate. It’s perhaps the only answer that makes sense. Language is already a kind of faith. Translation is faith twice over.

When asked about her writing routine, the hours, the location, what she does when she needs a break, she said she does Rajio Taiso calisthenics, though she replaces the traditional music with western pop. She also uses something called a stretch pole to rest her body. And then she goes back to the work. She is currently writing about ten books at once. She said she would need roughly two hundred more years to write all the ideas in her head, and so she hopes that we all live a long time.

Knausgaard has always written as if he’s trying to name the things most people avoid saying out loud: what it feels like to be in your own mind, what it costs to be honest, what it means to want a life that doesn’t flatten you. At one point he said, “Where there is loneliness, language is not. Where there is language, loneliness is not.” The idea that language is not just expression, but connection. That writing is not proof of isolation, but a way out of it.

He also spoke about the autobiographical parts of his work, and how the most painfully familiar moment for him was being completely taken down in a critique group during his creative writing program. “If you’re 18 and you think you know something or you can do something, no you can’t.” The same thing happens to the character in the book. You could feel the recognition in the room. Most writers have had some version of that experience, the moment you bring in something tender and unfinished and someone explains, efficiently, why it doesn’t work. It’s the cost of wanting to do something difficult.

Knausgaard talked about teachers and mentorship in a way that made it clear how little sentimentality he has about it. One of his teachers was Nobel Prize Winner Jon Fosse, who once looked at a poem Knausgaard had written and, line by line, told him to delete everything. Towards the end there were two or three words to keep. That was it. The kind of feedback that sounds insane until you realize it’s a form of mercy. A way of saying: stop forcing meaning. Let the thing be smaller. Let it be cleaner. Let it breathe.

When he spoke about writing, Knausgaard kept returning to scale, and to messiness. “My idea for a novel is like a forest,” he said. “If it’s like a forest I’m happy. So there’s not one or two things, there’s like 100 things going on.” Some writers build cathedrals. Some build traps. Some build machines. But a forest makes room for contradictions. You can get lost in it. You can wander through it. It has decay and new growth in the same space. It doesn’t care if the paths are linear. It just keeps living.

Knausgaard talked about all the elements of the life he wants to live: football, fishing, writing, and music. Not accomplishments. Not productivity. Not prestige. Just the steady, human things that make a person feel real. There was also a brief mention of Proust, framed through his metaphor of rooms, the way one memory opens into another, one interior space leading to the next. The whole conversation had that feeling, actually. A long hallway of doors, each one opening onto a new way of thinking about attention and time.

Near the end, Karl mentioned some of the books he loved most this past year: Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like This, and David Szalay’s Flesh, which he described as “like Hemingway only better.” People laughed. This is one of the things I love about literary events. They remind you that reading is not a solitary activity, even when it happens alone. We gather, we listen, we trade names and sentences and moments of recognition. And we go back out into the world carrying a little more language than we arrived with.

The following is a transcript of the podcast Seattle Chapters.

Dustin Harris (DH): Today’s guests are Phil Garrett and Jennifer McCord from Epicenter Press. Epicenter Press was founded in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1988. It’s a regional press specializing in publishing books about the arts, history, environment, and diverse cultures and lifestyles of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest.

Now located in Kenmore, Washington, Epicenter has published more than 500 titles covering a broad range of genres, including history, memoirs, biographies, true crime, mystery, and romance.

Phil, how did Epicenter Press get started?

Phil Garrett (PG): Well, the press was founded in Fairbanks in ‘88 to publish books on Alaska. Two writers for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, and they started publishing books slowly but surely. We still have somebody up there who works with us, who represents the press.

It was moved down [to Washington] because the logistics are much better for shipping and receiving books when you’re in the lower 49 than it is trying to ship stuff to Alaska and then ship it back to the lower 48.

DH: Phil Garrett and Jennifer McCord both bring incredibly deep experience to Epicenter Press. Small presses need publishers who can wear multiple hats, and Phil and Jennifer both fill many roles at the press. Phil has worked in publishing since 1966, first as a bookstore owner, then as a book buyer for 30 years, and now as the president of Epicenter Press.

Phil, what is your day-to-day role at the press?

PG: I come into the office every morning, open the doors, turn on the lights, and I deal with all the bills, all the payments. I do the royalties twice a year. Get the new books from UPS delivered, take the returns that come in, talk to authors, talk to vendors, talk to designers, and keep track of all the paperwork that’s involved with keeping us on track on where we are with various books in the system and whether they’re in edit, if they’re finished, if they’re with the designer. And once the designer finishes with them, they send me the files. I upload them to our vendors who produce the books. I assign the ISBN numbers, the Library of Congress numbers.

I also do some editing, some line editing, some creative editing. There are some authors that I basically have edited all their books. So I do a little bit of everything.

DH: Jennifer McCord has worked in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. She has been associated with the Pacific Northwest Writers Association for 18 years, and has spoken at Romance Writers of America. She has worked with both Hollywood and major publishers. She is the executive editor and associate publisher of Epicenter Press.

Jennifer, what is your day-to-day role at the press?

Jennifer McCord (JM): I have a home office that I use. So I do most of my editing at my home office. And I also manage the submissions. Phil gets the submissions and he sends them over to me, and we figure out, is this something that we want to follow up with or read? And to figure out, is this something we want to pursue, we ask for 50 pages and a synopsis and a queried letter and a bio. And if we’re interested, we ask for the full manuscript to read the full manuscript, and then we offer a contract.

We have a submission meeting once a month with our contact in Alaska. And figure out, is this something that we want to purchase, or what do we want to do with a book? Can we do it? And what’s the timeline? Then I work with concept editing the book. I talk on the phone with authors; I email back and forth or meet with them if they’re in town. We have line editors that do the line editing part. Then we get the book together, and we have graphic designers that design the interior and the cover. We work with a couple of graphic designers. And then the book gets out for publication.

And then I also work with sub rights. We have a sub rights agent in New York City, who handles audio and European rights or other rights.

I also work with a company up in Canada that’s part of HarperCollins, called Harlequin. They have a worldwide mystery program that publishes books that have been published before. And they publish them in a different size. And they are mail order, mailing books to readers all the time. So they do this mystery program. And the books are available on their website, but they aren’t available to bookstores. So it isn’t competitive for us with the trade paperbacks. And it also gives the writers and us another audience.

DH: Okay, help us paint a picture of your headquarters. Where is Epicenter Press located?

PG: We’ve been here for quite some time. And it’s somewhat cheaper here. We’re right across the library.

JM: And right by the post office, too.

PG: And two coffee shops.

DH: It’s incredible to consider the range of genres published by Epicenter Press. Let’s just touch on a few examples here. The Press has a strong history of publishing important works about Native American culture.

JM: We have a book, Two Old Women, that is set in Alaska, and they’re trying to get film rights together.

PG: We have sold the film rights. We’re waiting to get the actual movie made. It was one of the earlier books in the press’s history, and in all the editions, we’ve sold over 2 million copies.

It’s been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, French, Italian.

JM: Maybe German.

PG: There’s a small Eastern European country that did theatrical rights for it. They produced a play. The option has been renewed, and they’re looking for financing at this point to get the full feature film made, which will be interesting.

DH: And a recent release is Scenery of the Crime by Frank “Fraver” Verlizzo, a retro Broadway mystery.

PG: We published a book in June called Scenery of the Crime, which one of our agents sent to us, and I liked it. It’s historical fiction set on Broadway in the ‘70s. And the author is a designer of Broadway show posters.

And so we published the book, and then all of a sudden, I’m sent this review from the Broadway Reporter. We don’t know how they got it, but we got huge exposure in the theater world by this book. If you like Broadway and you like mysteries, and you like the ‘70s, they’re great reads.

I also reprinted Emmett Watson’s book Once Upon a Time in Seattle, which was columns he did in the paper about historical vignettes of the Northwest, which are really kind of interesting. We’ve published a number of Northwest writers whose books, either their publishers went out of business, and so we resurrected them, or had been out of print, and they’ve come back.

Janet Smith, all her books were out of print, and it was mentioned in the Seattle Times by one of the reviewers that it was too bad, her books are out of print. So I called her just out of the clear blue, and she was excited that we’d want to do it, and they’re all set in the Northwest. They’re all mysteries. Curt Colbert, Martha Crites, and Rachel Bukey; we brought their books back after their publishers went out of business.

DH: In the broader context of publishing with large houses and corporate publishers, what role do you think regional presses like Epicenter Press play in terms of culture, history, and giving voice to regional stories?

PG: This one, The Last Ride in the Bumblebee Jacket by Spencer Kope, is what small presses can do. This author has four books by a major New York publisher, but this one wasn’t in the genre he does for them, and they wouldn’t publish it. We had worked with his agent before, and so she sent it to us, and asked us if we’d be interested. I read it, and it’s a great Northwest story, set in Bellingham.

DH: How about you, Jennifer?

JM: As a bookseller, I always wanted to have stories that were in the Northwest, so people understood what the West was like. Having been back and forth as a kid, West Coast, East Coast, the misconceptions of people have of the East versus the people who have misconceptions of the West. Think of William O. Douglas, Go East Young Man. Just to have people have that experience and understand how the landscape is different is really important. And so I thought any way that we could build that would be really helpful.

DH: Is there a particular theme, a gap or a kind of story from the Pacific Northwest that you’re especially hoping Epicenter Press can help bring to light?

JM: Just to build a voice of the Northwest, because we always had the Southern writer. And now it would be great to have the Pacific Northwest writer’s voice. And what is that? And how to define that has been interesting. And I’m not sure if I know.

DH: What are the themes you see in modern Pacific Northwest writing?

JM: Quite a bit about the environment and the landscape. And also probably all the different historical background of how cities were built. We have a book that’s by Karen Treiger titled Standing on the Crack. And it’s about the five Jewish families that essentially started a lot in the city.

PG: The other thing, we do a number of Native Americans, mostly Alaska Natives. Sivulliq: Ancestor is a novel by Lily H. Tuzroyluke. We’ve sold French rights, and they’re flying her over for a big festival in France in the spring.

Another title is Ten Feet Tall and Bulletproof, which is about Native American mushers who did the Iditarod. That was put together by a school district in Fairbanks. They sent us all the short stories, and we put it all together for them.

DH: From your vantage point, what’s the state of publishing focused on the Pacific Northwest today? Are there emerging trends, untold stories, or readership demands that you’re seeing?

JM: The Northwest was particularly well-known at one time for true crime, because of Ann Rule and Ted Bundy and all the serial killers that we had in the Northwest. And also the issue of the right wing that was over in Idaho and in Montana, you know, the bomber in Montana, that kind of thing. So we had that kind of storyline going for a while. I think that’s less now, don’t you think, Phil? Although we have true crime in Alaska.

PG: Yeah, true crime in Alaska sells well.

JM: Yeah, we’re going to publish a book called More Forgotten Murders. I think what I see happening, what I see coming through is a lot about environment issues and how that’s affecting people.

PG: I think local stuff, local history with a certain interest level, mysteries that are set in local places, and local authors who actually know where the mysteries are and what the landscape is like.

JM: The landscape, the environment, the food, the culture. The Last Ride in the Bumblebee Jacket has to do with Northwest art, too.

DH: How do you connect with readers, libraries and community institutions in Seattle and Washington State to promote these regional books?

JM: Author Karen Treiger has done some library events. And she used the Seattle Public Library for the history of her family. Some of our authors have appeared at various writers’ conferences like the Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference and Write on the Sound. Curt Colbert was on the board at one time. And often they have a panel, and some of our authors appear on a panel.

DH: Do you partner with any local bookstores?

JM: We did some events with the University Bookstore.

DH: Right, I saw some events there with Nick DiMartino!

PG: Well, he worked there for 50 years. We’ve published three of his books. We have another three we’re going to do. He’s an interesting writer, interesting guy.

JM: There is a radio show down in Tacoma, the Donna Seebo Show, and she often interviews our authors on the radio. She reads the books, and she does about an hour interview with an author, which is nice for the authors, because they feel like she actually does the work. She reads and she asks good questions.

DH: Just like every other industry, technology has changed the publishing landscape in recent years. What publishing trends have you noticed in the past decade?

PG: Things have changed radically in the last 10 years. We have the advent of e-books, and then there’s the advent of audio, which had been around, but all of a sudden has been a big deal. And then with COVID, all the ways people bought books and found out about books has changed.

The independent bookstores for a great deal have pulled in and no longer order direct from anybody but the Big Five and the Big Five distributors. It all goes through Ingram, the biggest wholesaler in the world. And so we have to use Ingram a lot. They sell all our books internationally.

Ingram sends me a report every day. I’ve become addicted to it to see where our books have sold. You know, we sell regularly in Australia, regularly in India and the UK. Canada not so much at the moment because of the boycott. Occasionally we’ll sell a book in the Netherlands or Sweden or Germany. And it’s just fascinating to see what they buy.

JM: We’ve sold in the United Emirates too.

So the other part is technology has really changed publishing, but it’s also changed how you can market. Because everybody has a website or everybody goes on Facebook or whatever to get information.

And so when we both first started, there were what, three TV stations in Seattle, maybe four, five. A lot of radio stations. If you got an author on that, the author got a lot of attention. Nowadays, there’s all the streaming that goes on. I don’t know how many channels you have at home to watch on streaming. But getting an author on a show may or may not do sales.

PG: The other huge tidal change has been self-publishing. There were always vanity presses where you could spend a lot of money and somebody would print a bunch of books for you and you’d end up with a bunch of books in your garage. With the advent of print-on-demand and people like Amazon, now anybody can publish a book. The last numbers I saw earlier in the year was there were two million books published in the US last year. 500,000 of them were traditional publishers. The other million and a half were self-published. So you have a lot more competition for that book you put out.

20 years ago, Ingram had maybe a half a million books on their title days. I think the last time they put out the numbers, it was 14 million. So we’re a small drop in a huge pond, and to get any press or reviews or mention is much more difficult than what it used to be.

JM: The other part is authors can just do an ebook of their work. So, we have that part of the self-publishing thing.

PG: And you never know when you publish a book what’s going to happen. And I’ve been doing this for a lot of years, and there’s always something new.

DH: And finally, what would you like to tell Seattle readers about regional presses like Epicenter Press? Why should Seattle readers pay attention to local presses?

PG: Well, I think, you know, if they’re going to go into a bookstore, they should look beyond the Big Five publishers and look at independent publishers. They have a tendency to have voices that aren’t heard from the Big Five. And a lot of times, they may have to ask for it, because it won’t be readily visible in a bookstore.

Local authors, you know, it helps the economy. Local presses help the economy. So I think it’s important to support small presses, small businesses, bookstores. Yeah, you can get it on Amazon tomorrow, but, you know, you don’t have the same ambiance as going in to a bookstore and being surrounded by books.

PG: I think if you have an interest in anything, you can find it in a book.

What I remember most clearly is walking into Town Hall Seattle on Saturday morning and feeling that warm, anticipatory hum that only literary festivals seem to conjure. People carrying tote bags full of books, scanning programs, greeting friends they only ever seem to meet at events like these. A temporary community forming and reforming in real time.

Blueprints: How Mathematics Shapes Creativity

The first session that pulled me fully into the festival’s rhythm was Marcus du Sautoy in conversation with Sanjoy K. Roy. du Satoy spoke about symmetry, pattern, chaos, and the strange places where math begins to merge with art. At one point he suggested that creativity itself has a structure, a hidden geometry that guides our leaps of imagination more than we admit.

I remember looking around the room. People were actually smiling. It is not often you see an audience grin while someone describes group theory.

What stayed with me was the generosity of the conversation. Du Sautoy did not treat mathematics as an elite language; he treated it as a shared inheritance. Creativity, he said, is not a lightning strike. It is an architecture. And the satisfaction, for him, is in discovering the scaffolding behind the masterpiece.

The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

Later that afternoon I found myself in an even larger room that was full to the gills with an eager audience waiting for Kiran Desai’s conversation with Kimberly A. C. Wilson. There’s nothing like seeing a room so eager to enter the fictional world of someone else’s creation. They discussed her new work The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and the long silences between books, the griefs that accumulate, the strange isolation of writing across continents.

Listening to her, I kept thinking about how some writers seem to confess the interior weather systems of their lives rather than just tell stories. Desai seemed to open a window into something fragile and unguarded, and the room eagerly took in every word.

The Srivani Jade Ensemble

Somewhere between the heavier conversations, I ended up in a session I hadn’t originally circled: the Srivani Jade Ensemble. I walked in expecting music. What I got instead was structure, lineage, and emotional history braided together.

They performed Khayal and Thumri pieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but what lingered was the architecture of the music itself. The raga unfolding like a spiral; the rhythm cycles looping and resolving with the precision of equations; the way improvisation grew from predetermined patterns the way vines grow from trellises. You could feel the mathematical foundations in every phrase.

The Golden Road

William Dalrymple’s session, introduced by Sital Kalantry, was a change of register again. Dalrymple has a storyteller’s charisma: restless, expansive, delighted by the vastness of the world. He traced the long arc of the Indian Ocean world, a network of trade and ideas and restless movement that undermines the tidy narratives of nation-states. It was a history built on exchange, not borders.

There was something grounding about it. After a day of interiority and abstraction, Dalrymple offered scale. A reminder that literature does not rise from nowhere; it rises from centuries of travel, collision, and reinvention. The room felt larger when he finished.

A Dangerous Idea: The History of Free Speech

The final session that has stayed with me was Fara Dabhoiwala in conversation with Dalrymple again. Dabhoiwala described free speech as a historical project rather than a given. He traced how the freedom to speak was shaped, constrained, expanded, and weaponized over centuries. He spoke with a calm intensity that made the topic feel strangely intimate, as if we were all responsible for holding up our small corner of this fragile, hard-won idea.

Dalrymple, characteristically, kept widening the lens, placing Dabhoiwala’s arguments inside global patterns of power and rebellion. Together they made a compelling pair: one excavating the details, the other pulling back to see the contour of the whole.

Where the conversation landed was on vigilance. Free speech is not a gift. It is a structure that requires constant maintenance, like a bridge suspended over restless water.

What I Carried Home

Looking back, the festival did something subtle but important: it kept returning to the idea of structure. Mathematical structure. Emotional structure. Musical structure. Historical structure. Systems behind the stories we tell about ourselves.

Even the most intimate sessions felt shaped by forces larger than the speakers: diaspora, colonialism, migration, fracture, memory. And woven through all of it was a quieter question: how do we keep talking to each other in a world that keeps inventing ways to come apart?

I left JLF Seattle with the feeling that the city had been briefly turned into a listening chamber. Rooms filled with people who had chosen to sit still long enough to let someone else’s ideas reach them. Endurance of a gentler kind.

Walking out of Town Hall on the last day, the light already turning, I thought of the Srivani Jade Ensemble again. The way their music held both structure and improvisation; both discipline and release. Maybe literary festivals work the same way. A loose raga of conversations, looping back, resolving, interrupting, revealing.

For a few days in September, it felt like we were part of that pattern. And I’m still listening for its echo.

Dustin Harris: Today’s guest is Spencer Ruchti. Spencer is the author events manager for Third Place Books and the co-founder of the Cercador Prize for Literature in Translation. He started as a bookseller in 2017, where he helped curate the author series of the Harvard Bookstore. Welcome, Spencer.

Spencer Ruchti: Thank you, Dustin. I am so happy to be here.

DH: So, we’re going to talk more about the Cercador Prize in a minute. But first, I’d love to start with your day-to-day life in the literary world in Seattle. You wear a lot of hats. What do you do as a bookseller, and what does your work look like within the larger Seattle literary community?

SR: So, I’ve been a bookseller on and off, mostly on, for about eight years now. This is my going on fifth year at Third Place Books as their author events manager. We have, as author events series go for bookstores, we have a fairly large one. We host about 300 events a year across three different bookstore locations.

So, there’s also the added difficulty of having three different venues to fill on any given weeknight. And so, most of my job is an email job, which surprises a lot of people because a lot of books selling and book retail is on the floor, talking to customers, interfacing with customers. I do most of my customer interfacing during live events themselves.

We have also kind of a unique presence in Seattle in that our flagship store in Lake Forest Park can seat up to 800 people. So here where I’m sitting in the Third Place Commons, we have just dozens and dozens of tables and chairs. If you’ve been up here, you’ve probably been here for book clubs or maybe a study group or maybe a knitting club. There’s a ukulele circle that meets here every Monday. And so then in addition to all of these kind of community-driven events, we have author events most often about five times a week on weekdays. One of the issues with being an author events manager and booking the events is that I’m constantly booking things that I’m interested in. And so then I end up filling my own weeknights, but it keeps me entertained, certainly.

DH: What led you to Seattle initially, and what do you think makes Seattle’s book selling community special?

SR: My grandparents lived out in Edmonds, Washington near Seattle. I grew up in Southeast Idaho. We didn’t really have a bookstore there. So whenever I came to Seattle, that’s where I would visit my bookstores, one of which was actually Third Place Books. There are photos of me playing out in the Third Place Commons around the age of eight or nine or so. We made frequent visits to the Troll, and to Green Lake, and downtown Seattle to Pike Place Market.

One of the really incredible things about Seattle’s bookselling community, having worked in other communities and participated in their communities of booksellers, is that Seattle has an enormous wealth of bookstores in the metro area. You know, new bookstores, used bookstores. People are really loyal to their neighborhood bookstores. One of the best bookstores in Seattle is Phinney Books, run by Tom Nissley. They don’t run an author event series, and yet they are just so good at what they do from a curational standpoint that authors still flock to them. If you’re an author who’s visiting Seattle and you want to visit the best of the best, one of your stops is Tom Nissley’s store.

DH: You mentioned that a lot of your work is email work, but you get to connect with readers as well. So what’s your favorite part of connecting readers with books?

SR: One of my favorite parts about connecting readers with books is that a good reader, when they enter the bookstore, won’t always leave with the book that they think they’re going to leave with. Booksellers are very good at helping customers find what they want, but I think a great bookseller can help a customer find what they’re not expecting to find.

DH: I love that. Is there a particular interaction with a customer or a hand-sell moment that’s stuck with you?

SR: Yeah. You know what? I have a great story from like just last week. There’s this woman who is a regular customer at our flagship store here in Lake Forest Park. And I never met her before, but about a month ago, I got a text from a friend who is a manager at a bookstore in upstate New York. So very far away from here. And he said, this woman named Wendy just came into the store. She’s in town for a knitting trade show, like a big trade show that happens in upstate New York. And she said, I live in Lake Forest Park, Washington, and I live right next to Third Place Books.

And of course, he said, I know someone who works at Third Place Books. His name is Spencer. And she said, Spencer doesn’t know it, but we’re part of the same book club because I read all of his staff picks and take them from the shelf.

DH: Let’s talk about the Cercador Prize. Can you tell us a bit about what the prize is and what inspired you to start it?

SR: The Cercador Prize is a bookseller run and juried prize for literature in translation. It is the only prize of its kind in the United States. Every jury member submits two of their favorite titles in translation to a finalist list at the end of September. And then jury members read all ten books on that list and come up with a unanimous winner. And then the prize goes directly to the translator of the winning title.

DH: How did you start a new literary prize from scratch?

SR: My dear friend Justin Walls and I started the Cercador Prize in 2023. We had become friends right before the pandemic started. I was living in Portland and he was a bookseller at Powell’s, at their Beaverton location. And I met Justin because I walked into Powell’s, like the second day that I had moved to Portland. I had just moved there from Boston, and I was looking for a very particular book by Carmen Boullosa called Texas: The Great Theft. And I was talking to a bookseller at the information desk and asking them about this book. And she told me they didn’t have it. And suddenly, this guy appears right behind her and turns around and says, I’m sorry, were you asking about Carmen Boullosa?

And we had this whole conversation, even though they didn’t have the book. I didn’t walk out with anything that day, but I did make a friend, and his name is Justin. And we’re both very interested and committed to literature in translation, and a lot of the publishers that support that vital and interesting work.

So in 2023, we decided we wanted to start a prize, and it turns out if you just start something, if you just commit to it, you can make it happen. The idea behind the prize was, we wanted to draw this relationship between the labor of translators and the labor of booksellers who were kind of similarly undervalued as culture makers and tastemakers in their communities.

DH: Next up, we’re going to get the inside scoop on the Seattle literary scene. I’m going to ask Spencer a few questions about what it’s like to be a reader, and a bookseller, and a literary prize founder in Seattle.

Spencer, you mentioned that Third Place Books has three locations. I feel like there are different vibes going on at each of the bookstores. Can you talk about what the differences are between the three?

SR: The Third Place Books flagship store in Lake Forest Park is by far our biggest store. And what that means is that anytime we have an event where we’re expecting over 100 people or so, we direct them to this store. We do a lot of our more commercial stuff here at our Lake Forest Park store.

Our Ravenna neighborhood store is our smallest store, but our most centrally located. We can fit about 50 people there plus 20 standing room. And it’s definitely our most literary store. We’ll put a lot of debut authors here. We put our poetry there often. When authors end up winning the National Book Award or something like that, and we have hosted them previously in the year at Third Place Books, it’s usually our Ravenna store that they’re going to. And we have a lot of college professors who live in the Ravenna neighborhood, and a lot of students as well. So there’s an active intellectual community there, so literary work tends to do better.

Then our Seward Park store, which is down in our southernmost location. We can seat about 80 people there. It caters to a lot of local folks because that’s the only bookstore that really serves that part of Seattle down south until you hit another city line. It’s a really fun community space. A lot of grassroots events get to take place at that store. This year, for whatever reason, we’ve been hosting a lot of music-adjacent events. So like Peter Ames Carlin, he wrote a biography about REM and then another biography about Bruce Springsteen.

There’s Chuck’s Hop Shop next door to the Seward Park store, so it’s a great place to go and just hang out and read. I get to ride my bike down the Burke-Gilman Trail down Lake Washington. I can go to the store, take out my book, have a drink at Chuck’s, and then ride back up, and that’s a perfect Sunday for me.

DH: Do you have any other suggestions for bookish activities around town?

SR: Yeah, absolutely. People should make use of the Seattle Public Library’s Seattle Room. It’s on the top floor of the Central Branch of the Seattle Public Library. One of my favorite things to do is to go down a rabbit hole of interest, and you can email the curators and the archivists that work in the Seattle Room at the Seattle Public Library, and they will help you out. They’ll bring you like things that you didn’t even think about that you might be interested in, old books pertaining to a certain subject. You can spend a whole afternoon there, and it’s just a delight.

DH: That about wraps things up for today. Thanks for joining us, Spencer.

SR: Yeah, thank you so much, Dustin. And I have to shoehorn this in. I am just so appreciative of your continued involvement in the Seattle literary community. The reason you and I know each other is because you attend so many events, not even my own events at Third Place Books, but just I see you at events around the community. And, you know, the best thing you can do to participate is just show up.

DH: That’s what we’re trying to do here at Seattle Chapters is build the literary community. Thanks everyone for tuning in.

DH: Today on Seattle Chapters, I’ll be interviewing Wendy Kendall. Wendy Kendall’s passion for purses and mystery led to the intriguing In Purse-Suit Mysteries published by the Wildrose Press and Harlequin. Cat Out of the Bag introduces Catherine Watson, a purse designer who must sleuth the murderer at her fashion gala. The prequel, Purse-Stachio Makes a Splash, delves into a chilling cold case.

Finalist for Best Suspense at Killer Nashville, Snow Kiss Cookies to Die For creates a tangle of mystery and love. Wendy enjoys investigating Pacific Northwest life and leaving a trail of clues as blogger, podcaster, speaker, and syndicated columnist. Wendy’s new book, Don’t Shoot the Messenger Bag, will be available for pre-order on December 10th and comes out on February 18th, 2026.

Welcome, Wendy.

WK: It is so nice of you to invite me to podcast with you. I love podcasting.

DH: Let’s talk about all of these jobs in your bio. What do you do outside of writing books? And in particular, what do you do within the greater Seattle area community?

WK: I enjoy writers and the incredible creative journey that we are all taking. I’m just delighted to develop friendships, support their efforts, and foster our writing community as much as I can.

Teaching, from what I’ve learned about the craft and about the business, is a sheer delight for me. And I like to do that with whatever opportunities there are, including at writing conferences and at Hugo House in Seattle, and just with different writing groups that have formed locally.

DH: You write book reviews as well, right?

WK: Book reviews are very helpful for authors to give them visibility. I have two columns that run in My Edmunds News. One of my columns is for children’s books, and it’s titled Kids Are Booking It. The other is for adult books, Recommended Reads. People learn so very much from reading, and I believe the most important thing that they learn is empathy. And that’s something that I believe makes the world a much better place.

I’m a big supporter of the local Pacific Northwest Writers Association, the PNWA, where I learned so much over the years. Big shout out especially to Pam Binder, who heads the organization and is the best teacher. She was instrumental in my finishing my first book and getting it published. And at PNWA, they also put on a dynamic and engaging annual conference in Seattle that includes agents and editors that attendees can pitch to, which is an amazing opportunity. And it was at one of the panels at that conference years ago that I learned about podcasting and I got super excited about it. And I thought that by interviewing authors, I would learn so much “about how to write my first book.

And I was right.

DH: Let’s talk a little bit about how you and I met. We met during a mystery writing class on writing mystery book series at Hugo House in Seattle. And it was the most useful class on writing mysteries that I’d ever attended. I really put a lot of the pieces together as I was in class, which was wonderful. So thank you for that.

WK: That’s so nice of you. Thank you. It was such a fun class.

DH: For those who aren’t familiar with Hugo House, it’s a Seattle area organization that’s been around for decades at this point. And they have classes every single quarter on writing a memoir, writing fiction, writing poetry, doing research, really any kind of writing that you would like to get engaged in. And so I’m curious, how did you get involved with Hugo House?

WK: What a great organization. I just heard about them, you know, online. I went to a couple of their sort of extracurricular activities. They have a lot of events scheduled throughout the years. And so I just went to a couple of them and I started chatting with some of the staff along with the attendees at the events. And I thought, oh, it would be fun to pitch a class to teach and just kind of see where that goes. And it’s been wonderful. I love teaching at Hugo House.

DH: And it’s a non-profit, it’s very affordable. So anyone in Seattle should definitely look that up. It’s located in Capitol Hill.

Okay, let’s go ahead and skip talking about Don’t Shoot the Messenger Bag Now, because I really want to hear about this. Can you give us a teaser for what your new book is about?

WK: Oh yes, I love this new book, it’s so fun. Don’t Shoot the Messenger Bag. It’s the perfect accessory to murder. I love doing taglines, they’re so fun. Katherine Watson, my amateur sleuth, is a purse designer. In this book she has this romantic New Year’s Eve with police officer Jason Holmes. And it ends with a police alert. Katherine’s son has found his college professor dead.

So when Katherine finds out about that later, and her son is put under police surveillance, Katherine’s determined that she must clear her son’s name. Then a woman’s body is discovered. Who’s going to be next?

Can Katherine solve this mystery? Will she be alive for the Valentine’s Gala at her Purse Museum with the opening of the 1960s exhibit that she created with Moonjava Or has Katherine reached the end of the line?

DH: Oh, I love that. That’s so good. So you wrote the first book in this series, Cat Out of the Bag, because of your love for fashion. How does your new book expand on your interest in fashion? Have your tastes changed at all since the first book?

WK: Oh, I still love purses. All kinds of purses, bags, carry-ons. It’s strange, but I love them. There’s so many styles. There’s challenges with each book to incorporate the fashion and the functionality, and of course, the clues to the mystery.

But I love all those challenges. And my purse designer, Katherine Watson, loved purses since she was a little girl because it was a fun thing that she shared with her grandmothers. So there’s a lot of emotion around it. And then along with her business, she has this purse museum. And that was actually based on research that I did. There’s actually two purse museums in the world.

And one of them is in Little Rock, Arkansas. It’s called ESSE Purse Museum. And so I went there and I learned all about it from the creator of the museum who’s an absolutely amazing woman. And I interviewed all of her staff as well at length. And the key to the museum is not just the fashions, but it tells the history of women through the decades, using their purses to reflect what they needed in their lives at those times, and also their personalities. And since my visit, I donated a few items of my own collection to display there.

DH: So I’m curious, you have this sort of mystery sub-series within Bayside. Have you plotted out any more novels in this series? What’s the hardest part of plotting ahead with the next book whenever you’re writing the current book?

WK: Oh yes, definitely. In the new year, I’m gonna be writing the next direct in the series. And then I have a working title for this next one, but I’m not ready to share it yet. I’m very excited about it. And as usual, the ending to the book before it holds the hint to what’s coming next. I love doing that and I love plotting. All the parts of the writing journey are great. Some of them I had to learn to love.

I find that it’s very important in a mystery to plot for the protagonist, of course, but actually just as important to create a plot for the antagonist. Because the antagonist actually thinks the story is their story. And they have their own plot. And actually, they drive much of the full story. So when I plot, I actually create plots for both points of view.

DH: Next up, we’re going to get the inside scoop on the Seattle literary scene. Wendy, I’m going to ask you a few questions about what it’s like to be a reader and a writer here in Seattle. So first up, have you ever attended a writing class in Seattle?

WK: Yes, absolutely. I’ve attended classes at Hugo HOuse. Also at PNWA; I actually attended a full three semesters at PNWA that Pam Binder taught and it was fantastic. And then I’ve also taken classes associated with a couple of conferences that I’d like to recommend.

One is Write on the Sound and that’s in Edmunds. And it’s an excellent conference and it’s very much classes that are focused on the craft of writing. And then also Write in the Harbor, which is associated with Tacoma City College. There’s a lot going on with classes at Tacoma City College.

DH: Great news for those folks in the South Sound. Next question: Who is your favorite Seattle writer?

WK: There are so many great writers in Seattle, but there is one other that really stands out for me, and that is Kevin O’Brien. When I read his books, they are so fantastic. And when I read his books, I actually have to get up and make sure that all the doors are locked at my house, because it’s that scary.

DH: What is your favorite Seattle area bookstore or bookstores, if the answer is plural?

WK: I love going to events at Third Place Books. Those are great. Edmunds Bookshop is a wonderful store, and so often people will read my column that recommends a book, and they’ll go to the Edmunds Bookshop, and they will make sure, if they don’t have the book, that they order it for them. So they’re really great with their customers. And I do have to say, though, that my absolute favorite is a little bit north of Seattle. It’s up near Bellingham in Fairhaven, and the name of the bookstore is Village Books, and they are absolutely fantastic. They have wonderful author events, and so many books, and coffee shops. It’s a great store.

DH: Yeah, every good bookstore needs a coffee shop.

WK: I agree.

DH: That about wraps things up for today. Thanks, Wendy Kendall, for joining us. And make sure you check out Wendy’s new book, Don’t Shoot the Messenger Bag, available for pre-order on December 10th, and available for purchase on February 18th, 2026.

Boggs was interviewed by the poet Quenton Baker, who brings a quiet intensity to the stage. He is an interviewer who listens as fiercely as he speaks. Together, they created an atmosphere that felt less like a literary event and more like an intimate gathering, a conversation happening on several layers at once. Baldwin has that effect on people: his work invites confession. His life, even more so.

What struck me first was how physical Boggs’s research journey was. Twenty years following Baldwin’s footsteps, to Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, Istanbul, the American South, the South of France. He retraced relationships that shaped not only Baldwin’s heart but his art as well. At one point Boggs mentioned a residency where he stayed in the same cabin Baldwin once used. Baldwin, small and slight, could sit normally on the toilet. Boggs, taller, broader, had to sit sideways. The room laughed, but there was tenderness in it too. A reminder that writing lives in bodies and in spaces.

And that is the core of this book: not just the romantic relationships people love to mythologize, but a whole ecosystem of love: familial, artistic, communal, erotic, collaborative. Baldwin and Beauford Delaney. Baldwin and Lucien Happersberger. Baldwin and his artistic collaborators Engin Cezzar and Yoran Cazac. Baldwin and Toni Morrison, who edited him with care and ferocity. Love not as an anecdote but as an engine. Love as the material conditions of making art.

During his research, Nichola Boggs had to ask himself why he thought Baldwin kept falling in love with men who were, frankly, not good for him. The answer he came up with was that Baldwin was in love with his art. And his art required him to fall in and out of love, to feel everything too much, over and over again. Maybe he chased heartbreak not because he didn’t know better, but because he needed those fractures to keep writing toward the truth. Some writers bleed on purpose so the work can live.

Boggs quoted Baldwin at one point, and this quote has been bouncing around my head ever since:

“Talent is insignificant… Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.”

Endurance. The nerve to keep going. Twenty years of research. Fifty years of Baldwin’s voice ringing through our most urgent conversations. A lifetime of loving imperfect people and turning that ache into literature that reshaped the world.

When the event ended, people lingered, reluctant to leave. There was a sense that something private had unfolded publicly—a door opened briefly into the life of a man who seemed to burn brighter than the times he lived through. I left thinking about how seldom we talk about the labor of love behind every book we cherish.

And maybe that’s the real message of Baldwin: A Love Story: that art doesn’t emerge from loneliness but from connection. From the friends who kept Baldwin alive, the lovers who broke him open, the mentors who lifted him, and the communities that carried him. Love, in all its unruly forms, is the archive.

DH: Today on Seattle Chapters we’ll be interviewing author Tanya Grant. Tanya writes propulsive, twisty thrillers featuring morally gray characters, along with heartfelt romances about smart, strong women. Don’t ask her to pick a favorite genre. That’s like asking her to choose a favorite child! She loves the em dash, the Oxford comma, and the smell of libraries and bookstores. Tanya’s new book Made You Look will come out on Tuesday, November 18th. Welcome, Tanya!

TG: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

DH: Okay, Tanya, to kick things off, can you give us a teaser for what your new book, Made You Look, is about?

TG: Made You Look is a thriller about a group of influencers who go on a sponsored retreat at a remote retreat in the Catskills. The trip gets off to a rocky start when one of the group drops this bombshell secret, but then an unexpected snowstorm traps them together, cutting them off from the internet and their followers. So there’s no cell service, no Wi-Fi, and no way out, and then a killer strikes.

As secrets, lies, and scandals are forced to the surface, the friends just can’t help but suspect that the killer is among them and that the killing has only just begun. But of course, where there’s danger, there’s also juicy, draw-dropping content to create.

DH: Yes, I love that so much. We love the drama.

TG: Absolutely.

DH: So in this book, the characters are on a retreat at Reverie, where they are being paid as influencers to stay at the Reverie resort and share their experience on social media. However, as things start to go wrong at Reverie, it becomes clear that there are some pros and also some major cons to being an influencer. How did you think about the job going into this book?

TG: So I want to first say that being an influencer or content creator is so much hard work. There’s so much that goes into making it to the top of your field in this profession. And the more you grow, the more the pressures on you only increase.

And that felt like such a rich jumping off point for the story. A lot of it deals with the cost of ambition and how success can influence some of these group dynamics. When I was brainstorming for the story, I really wanted to have the characters be influencers because it also felt like a fun way to play with a thriller reader.

On social media, it’s really common for things to appear one way on the surface, but hide a very different reality behind the scenes. And that’s a lot like how thrillers operate. I also included these social media chapters where the reader gets to take the point of view of the audience so they can kind of start teasing apart those gaps between what the characters are showing the world and what’s really happening. And sometimes when these characters are trying to pretend everything’s perfect, it leads to lost opportunities to get help when they still have time.

DH: One of the other topics that you talk about is these characters aren’t only influencers, but in order to be successful, they have to be creators, and they call themselves content creators. What do you think are the differences between influencers and content creators?

TG: I will start by saying, I think there’s a lot of overlap. Both are really skilled at creating this engaging content. I think a lot of times we might think of an influencer as using their influence to promote a brand’s products or services to their audience, where they’re kind of centered in that experience.

Content creators might be doing some creative storytelling, and they could also be developing assets for a brand that again, are not centered on themselves. So it’s sort of like how Lucy, the photographer in Made You Look, takes images for the retreat, and some of them feature the other characters. But there’s plenty that she’s taking just for that brand to deliver so that the brand can use them separately.

I think either way, you really need to know your audience and how to create this content that’s going to connect with them.

DH: The characters in this book aren’t exactly friends with each other. They all orbit around Queen Bee Sydney Kent. Each of them is either vying for her friendship, her business, her affection, or some combination of these. Why did you build this sense of isolation into each of the characters? Why not have them all be buddy-buddy?

TG: It’s funny because the first seed of an idea for Made You Look came from the concept of a work retreat. And in many ways, the story is about the tension of being colleagues with your friends. What does it do to a relationship when you’re working for a friend or possibly competing with them?

And what happens if your ambition doesn’t line up with someone else’s, but you’re supposed to collaborate and show up looking happy? It can definitely cause a lot of problems. And I thought it was important for the characters to have this distance between them because it complicates the plot in a lot of fun ways.

For example, it means that the characters might be more likely to try to save face instead of admitting that they’re scared. They may be more likely to split up or be suspicious of each other’s motives. And I think there’s just a lot of personal and professional jealousy among them, which causes insecurity where they don’t necessarily trust each other. If they were closer, I think there would be far fewer secrets to hide.

DH: Yes, I see that, especially with Caitlin. How did you choose which characters you were going to make the point of view characters?

TG: I think for me, Lucy’s character came first. The moment where she is talking about how she’s already had a near death experience, I thought was really fun to put into a thriller. And as I was going, I ended up adding Caitlin not too late into the process.

I thought Caitlin was a really fun character to explore because she is really representing that ambitious side. And that puts her sort of in contrast to Lucy. And at the same time, because everybody revolves around Sydney, I didn’t want Sydney to be a point of view character.

I thought having the other women be there as well as the social media snippets where you get to see what Sydney is telling the world, versus again, what’s actually happening. I thought that was a really fun way to put everyone in contrast with each other.

DH: I will say Caitlin was my favorite character.

TG: I love Caitlin.

DH: Next up, we’re going to get the inside scoop on the Seattle literary scene. Tanya, I’m going to ask you a few questions about what it’s like to be a reader and a writer here in Seattle.

First, do you go to book events in Seattle?

TG: Yes. I think Seattle has such a fun literary scene. I love attending book events whenever I can. For example, there’s a mobile bookstore called Lost the Plot Books that’s opening soon, and they’ve been hosting book swaps all over the area, which is so much fun. It’s a way to go and show up and just meet other readers. And I also love going to author events and signings, including ones at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, which they have such a fabulous group of authors coming through. And there’s always something on the calendar. They have events most days of the year, which I think is incredible.”

DH: You’re a writer living in Seattle. Do you have a critique group here?

TG: I do. Almost 10 years ago, I was fortunate enough to discover that my neighbor, Jennifer Skogen, was a book person. And in addition to being a really great friend, she’s this fabulous short story and fantasy writer, author of the Haunting of Grey Hills YA series.

And she connected me with a broader group of local critique partners. So it’s a group of myself and six other women. And we meet about every six weeks to share pages. And it’s just so much fun to go through this writing and publishing process with them. And really, again, talking about community, share those wins and share those joys together. And the hard times too, right?

Publishing and writing is not always easy. And to have people who have your back, it’s just one of the best things.

DH: That about wraps things up for today. Thanks Tanya Grant for joining us. And make sure you check out Tanya’s new book Made You Look, coming out on November 18th.

Recently I went to see Mona Awad at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park with three friends from my writing critique group. It felt almost too perfect, given that her new book We Love You, Bunny is set among MFA creative writing students. There was a sense of anticipation in the room, like we were attending something both bustling and slightly uncanny: who were all these people and where are they during most book events? Reading communities show up in the evening, after long days of adulting, to listen to someone talk about art and hope and longing. Maybe that’s what I love most about these events: the quiet sense of solidarity among people who care so much about something. It felt right to arrive with my small writing cohort, each of us carrying our own baggage, our own creative dreams, and feeling that intense desire to watch and learn and create.

Even considering author Mona Awad’s popularity online, I was impressed to see the level of dedication she received from her readers. One woman in the audience had sewn herself a Warren University sweatshirt, the university hosting the fictional MFA program from the novel. Others arrived an hour early just to get a seat on the front row. The room buzzed with anticipation before the event began. And I was reminded of something that has become increasingly undeniable: BookTok has changed the publishing landscape. There is a new generation of readers on this platform that is drawn to stories that are strange, darkly funny, and deeply emotional. And this night they showed up in force.

When Mona entered, tall and glamorous as a movie star, her readers cheered. Her answers were warm and thoughtful, and she seemed to be the kind of writer who is genuinely delighted to be connecting with readers. Horror writers are the nicest people. I’m not sure why this is, though maybe it’s because they exorcise their shadows on the page. Mona talked about why she returned to this world, explaining that in Bunny, the Bunnies did not have their own voices. She wanted to tell their side of the story. The idea felt elegant and a little unsettling. What happens when the characters you once treated as symbols or scenery demand to speak for themselves? What happens when the chorus steps forward?

According to Awad, “There’s something innately fascist about a group, even if they’re being sweet to each other. Because the self gets absorbed in the group. And that can be a beautiful thing. But that can also be a cult-like thing…in a group, there’s going to be a leader, there’s going to be a hierarchy of power that develops. There’s a lot of room for darkness in a group, no matter how sweet they are to each other.”

But still, friendship and community are important, she argues. “Especially post-pandemic, we get lost in our own heads, and it becomes about sharing just our stuff, and sometimes we forget to show up and listen and be there for friends, and be on the receiving end for their stuff and make sure it’s a mutual thing that you’re constantly sharing together.” I couldn’t have said it better myself, Mona.

When the event ended, I left thinking about how community holds us, even when the stories we tell turn dark or strange. Writing can be solitary work, but nights like this remind me that it doesn’t have to be lonely. A good critique group, a crowded bookstore, a room full of people who understand the lure of the uncanny. These are small acts of resistance against isolation. When stories take us into uncomfortable places, we can come back to each other afterward, still talking, still curious, even closer than when we started. Maybe that is the point. Maybe the real magic is not in the monsters we invent, but in the people who dare to stay and listen.

I was tired the evening of this talk. The sort of tired where I didn’t know if I would be able to make it past the couch to the front door of my apartment. But I had been looking forward to hearing Oliver Burkeman for months, so I went anyway. I half-expected a small, devoted audience for what I assumed was an obscure British philosophical self-help writer. Instead, the room was full. Packed, in fact. It turns out I was not the only one feeling a little overextended, a little uncertain about how to manage the pace of my life. It felt like we had all arrived with the same question tucked somewhere in our bags: how do we live without feeling like we are always falling behind?

Burkeman’s breakout book was Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a surprise bestseller that turned the language of productivity on its head by arguing that our problem isn’t efficiency but denial. His new book, Meditations for Mortals, continues that project in a more reflective, almost devotional way. The ideas build on one another: imperfectionism as a daily practice, the “done list” as a way to see what actually matters, and the invitation to live reality-based lives rather than waiting for perfect circumstances. The theme that runs through all of it is humility: a reminder that time is not a problem to solve, but the medium in which we live.

Some of Burkeman’s ideas landed squarely for me, especially his notion of reality-based living. The idea that life is not a waiting room for when the conditions are perfect, but something already in motion, feels both bracing and right. Other concepts, like imperfectionism, are harder to swallow. I don’t particularly want to embrace my limits. I want to stretch them, test them, live as fully as possible inside them. But I do see the wisdom in learning to work with what I have instead of against it. Maybe the goal isn’t to surrender to limitation, but to collaborate with it. To shape a life that’s both aware of its boundaries and determined to make something beautiful within them.

I have a one-year-old, which means I am almost always tired and almost always certain that I am not doing enough. So in some ways, the talk was a little depressing. I am never going to have time to do all of the things I want to do. The reality of limitations does not feel liberating to me. It feels like loss. I understand the argument that accepting our finitude allows us to relax, since no one ever gets to everything anyway. But I am not quite there. What did feel reassuring, though, was the reminder that where I place my energy matters. If most of it is going into my kid right now, that is not a failure of ambition. That is the work. Humans have short lives, but our children carry our histories, our values, and the shape of our attention into the future. There is something quietly enduring about that. I am not sure Burkeman convinced me to embrace the limits of my hours, but after the talk he did offer me one piece of advice that landed perfectly. Kid got you beat? Get some sleep.

My first post is, appropriately enough, about The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud. Yes, there were plenty of middle schoolers clutching gel pens and Raina’s Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels. But what stood out to me was that the event was offering something larger: an invitation to play. It suggested that creativity does not require permission or mastery. It affirmed that thinkers, doodlers, and curious makers of any age can create something meaningful, even if they are just beginning. In a culture that trains us to be consumers first and creators only if we can justify it with prestige or output, this message felt quietly radical. A room full of young artists learning that they are allowed to make things.

During the event, the mononymous Raina mentioned that The Cartoonists Club was partly inspired by Scott McCloud’s 1993 book Understanding Comics, a foundational work for anyone interested in the craft of sequential storytelling. She talked about adapting some of its ideas into her own approachable style, making them accessible to young artists who are just beginning to explore narrative. The conversation then shifted into an enthusiastic and good-natured debate about whether Raina’s dog or Scott’s cat was cuter. The audience cheered like this was the climactic scene of a blockbuster film. It was a reminder that the work lands because these creators understand both the theory and the joy. They know that sometimes the most effective way to invite someone into an art form is simply to say, this can be fun.

And that sense of fun is not separate from the seriousness of the medium. Graphic novels are not just an entry point to reading, they are literature in their own right. They use image and narrative in a way that is deliberate, sophisticated, and emotionally resonant. Sales reflect this shift. Graphic novels in the United States and Canada have doubled in the past five years, reaching roughly thirty-five million volumes annually. And if this is a new branch of literature, I am glad we have more to choose from than Batman and Spider-Man alone. How fortunate that the Baby-Sitters Club girls are also here, solving friendship dilemmas and ordinary heartbreaks with humor and heart. If we are raising a generation who believes they have the right to create and to see themselves reflected in art, that is a future worth supporting.

- Seattle Chapters