Writers who only appear rarely in our pages, but must be tagged as “writer”
By JONAH BARRETT Driving to a dark park to spend 30 minutes watching Fourth of July fireworks from the dewy grass is so 2018. Also, there are bugs — gross. Why not turn the outing into an entire festival? For 19 years, the Tumwater Downtown Association has put on the Artesian Festival at Tumwater Valley …
By JONAH BARRETT Growing up LGBTQ+ can be a challenge. Queer youth face a number of difficulties, like developing straight crushes, teachers using the wrong pronouns, even not being accepted by their families. It’s a tough journey, but it isn’t all gloom and doom. Two major nonprofit organizations are helping LGBTQ+ youth get a leg …
By NOAH SHACHAR Some movies win Academy Awards, are nearly forgotten and hardly spoken about again. Some movies are simply boring, while others are entertaining or insightful. But a few movies ignite themselves in a blazing pyre to emerge as a phoenix from smoldering ashes ever livelier, more passionate and mesmerizingly intriguing — growing and …
By Billy Thomas The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, one of Olympia’s premier performing arts spaces since 1985, has announced their recipient of the Anacker Scholarship for the Arts. The scholarship is provided each year to a graduating high school senior from Thurston County who plans to study and pursue a career in the …
By JONAH BARRETT Intersectionality is not a new word — it was first coined by black, feminist scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989 to describe how discussions of feminism and racism often left out black women — but it’s recently made its way into the mainstream vernacular. At least that’s true in queer spaces, especially …
By NOAH SHACHAR A film takes a village. The Olympia Film Collective (OFC) gathers that village and provides resources to catalyze its talents. OFC’s produced dozens of short films since its establishment in 2012, and one of its production venues is the OFC Studio. We spoke with Brendon Thompson, a member of the studio committee, …
By MELINDA MINTON Art Beat Olympia is working to bring art-education equity to Olympia schools. Because art is essential for all students, this program offers a high-quality arts-learning format that teaches sequential skills and techniques, develops students’ 21st-century skills and is culturally responsive. Art Beat’s protocol includes training teachers to integrate arts with other subjects, …
By Melinda Minton Rumors, a local wine bar, has expanded and moved from Fourth Avenue into an airy space on Washington Street in the heart of downtown Olympia. Rumors offers curated selections for every type of palate—old world, domestics and imports from the finest variety of wineries around. Rumors is all about wine and the …
By Billy Thomas As the weather continues to warm up, and the sun — that’s that bright thing in the sky, for those of us who have forgotten, due to its infrequent presence — begins to shine brighter, the promise of a long weekend is a reprieve from the slog. For readers who are looking …
Celebrated band Los Lobos (Spanish for “The Wolves”) is coming to Olympia for a concert that’s sure to sell out.