by Christina Butcher for OLY ARTS Each month, Olympia poets, authors and literary enthusiasts gather for an evening of poetry and camaraderie. It’s a chance to let their guard down and simply enjoy the spoken word. Seldom do featured readers have much in common with each other in the way of theme, style or poetic …
by Christian Carvajal for OLY ARTS To read Sarah Vowell’s bestselling nonfiction works or hear her frequent appearances on public radio is to experience our history through the eyes of, in her own words, a “partly cloudy patriot.” Her most recent book, Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, is a quirky biography of a French …
Olympia bookseller Andrea Y. Griffith of Browsers Bookshop provided readers of OLY ARTS with her book recommendations for Pacific Northwest authors for our winter 2017 edition. THE HIDDEN LIVES OF OWLS Leigh Calvez Bird books are huge in Olympia, and Seattle-area author Calvez recently held a jam-packed reading at the Olympia Library. A beautiful book …
by Molly Gilmore for OLY ARTS In “Playback Theatre,” the action on stage comes, not from books or scripts, but from the minds of audience members who are invited to tell their stories and see them come to life on stage. But at a Playback performance Feb. 10, books and personal stories will share the …
by Molly Gilmore for OLY ARTS Lacey Loves to Read aims to get kids fired up about literature. This Thursday, the program will introduce them to theater, too, with a free performance by Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre. The acclaimed theater will bring its adaptation of Seattle author Matt de la Peña’s Newbery-winning Last Stop on …
Anna Badkhen writes about people in extremis, exposing the world’s iniquities by honoring the lives these iniquities most affect. Her investigation into what it means to live in the Global South has yielded five books of lyrical nonfiction, most recently Walking With Abel: Journeys With the Nomads of the African Savannah, a book about transience …
by Molly Gilmore for OLY ARTS Could Border Songs be on its way to becoming a TV show by acclaimed Canadian screenwriter Graeme Manson, the man behind the award-winning BBC series Orphan Black? It’s taken the first step. Last week, Olympia novelist Jim Lynch announced that Manson purchased an option for TV and movie rights …
by Christian Carvajal for OLY ARTS Political activist Kris Hermes is the author of a new nonfiction book entitled Crashing the Party: Legacies and Lessons From the RNC 2000. He’ll be at Orca Books on Saturday, June 25, at 3 p.m. for a reading and signing from his insightful new work. Michael Ratner, president emeritus …
Olympia author Ned Hayes has published multiple novels. His most recent novel, The Eagle Tree, is his first published with a major publisher: Little A, in New York City. The Eagle Tree is an Olympia-focused novel. All the action takes place in Olympia, and scenes in the novel include experiences from LBA Woods, Procession of the Species, …