In Spokane, the streets are carved through basalt fields, leaving jagged black lava rock walls sprouting grasses. Arrowleaf balsamroot flowers burst from pine duff covered hills like the very embodiment of sunshine. At Drumheller Springs, hot pink, waxy bitterroot petals seem to bloom straight from the rock bed. Spokane Falls froths vertiginous at the edge of downtown. Outside of town lie hiking trails and natural areas, and spots on the river beaches to stake out with lawn chairs in the summer. There is a good brewery or tap house within walking distance, no matter where you live.
I’ve spent the last few days researching for a project that takes place in Spokane. I love Spokane at least as much as I love Olympia. Olympia gave me everything I needed to grow up, but Olympia never picked up what I was throwing down. Olympia cares about music, to put it mildly, I mean, where else in the world are you going to see Mirah and Lori Goldstein play outdoors for free on a summer afternoon at a brewery? The music I saw performed in Spokane was 99% bad (I admit my intake was only incidental, I was never seeking live music, just catching whatever was outdoors for free at breweries). But Olympia’s literary scene is minimal. And Spokane fucking SHOWS UP for literature! It has a literary scene. I’m not a musician. I’m a writer.
I rarely write fiction about Spokane, with the notable exception of “Avoid the Darkness,” the story I wrote celebrating The Falls for The Spokesman Review. My fiction usually takes place in what, in eastern Washington, we call “The West Side”. In western Washington, we call eastern Washington eastern Washington. “The East Side” refers to the suburbs east of Seattle.
From my statement of intent in an MFA application.
My work offers accounts of imagined queer and trans relationships, lives lived outside of a chrononormative timeline, set throughout the middle to late 20th and early 21st centuries, mostly along the I-5 corridor between Bellingham, Washington, and Eugene, Oregon. This thoroughfare is a naturally occurring geographical depression with a long history of transporting people, goods, and ideas along trade routes between Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley. Pre-dating European settlement, the corridor offered a more open space for movement than the surrounding densely forested areas due to controlled burning by Indigenous inhabitants. This route became Highway 99 in the 1920s, and then Interstate 5 in the 1950s. Growing up in Olympia, Washington at the turn of the century, my larger queer community contained people moving to and from all these cities: Bellingham, Seattle, Tacoma, Olympia, Portland, Eugene. I wish to honor the tensions, overlap, and cross-pollinations between the working class and labor-oriented roots of these cities and the cultural contributions of area colleges and universities. Queer milieus are traditional sites of the same tensions, and they take on a unique flavor in the once-isolated Northwest region of tall trees, long rainy winters, and miasmic rock n’ roll and punk music.
Recently, I was looking through some photos of Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s, and I was struck by this thing I love about western Washington, the way people adapt to living in this rainy place, either by wearing water resistant gear or just agreeing to be wet all the time. When I first visited Northampton last spring, I was struck by how everyone seemed relaxed here, although the west coast is known for its ~*chill vibez*~. Pondering for a few days, I realized it’s because no one is trying to do anything differently out here. Everyone is doing exactly what all the generations before them have done. No one is reinventing the wheel. Reinventing the wheel – pressing on other ways to live, or learning to live for the first time if the generations you came from couldn’t show you, building and maintaining a music or literary scene, adapting to constant rain, keeping your city kind of gross (Spokane’s unofficial motto) – is kind of stressful. But what do you do, if you’re not learning how to live?
What am I doing in New England? No offense to those who feel at home in New England, I love and respect you. But I don’t know what to do with myself here.
Kaden has applied for at least a dozen academic jobs this season, and done at least a half dozen interviews. For a minute we thought we might be stationed in a remote part of Utah, or a high-elevation college town in western Colorado. I read this fabulous little work of autofiction, Car Camping by Mark Sundeen, where the narrator drives aimlessly through the west, stopping here and there to work and do drugs, and I felt – I feel – strongly that I need to be living in the west, even if it’s remote Utah, or high-elevation Colorado.
The other day I drove into Brattleboro Vermont, 45 minutes from Northampton. Vermont has nothing I need, I thought, and drove back to Massachusetts. I think, I don’t want anything. I think, that’s supposed to be a…I don’t know, something spiritual. I think Devendra Banhart’s lyric, “And I'm done with ever wanting anything,” and I know he’s a little bit glib when he sings that, and I know it’s ridiculous that the only way we have (as North Americans?) to think about not-wanting is that it is desirable to not-want. Years ago, someone wrote on Livejournal about there being nothing less sexy than a New England winter. They meant, layers of long underwear and unshaven legs, which, I LOVE long underwear and body hair, so I didn’t think it would be a problem. But the unsexiness of a New England winter seems to run deeper. Not-wanting means being out of touch with all forms of desire. Maybe it has nothing to do with my spiritual life (which I am either out of touch with or have integrated to the point that it doesn’t feel separate, haha), maybe it’s seasonal-regional. I thought in this time of writing work, I’d be a flaneur, a regular at coffee shops, finding open mics and writing groups and shit. I thought I’d go visit my parents in Texas for several weeks. Instead I’ve isolated, indulging in my work. I think, it’s OK. It’s what I’m supposed to be doing right now. How else do you get writing work done?
I read someone’s note on Substack recently (I don’t remember who, there’s so much), saying they were almost done with their final novel draft, and looking forward to resuming their life. Maybe it’s not spiritual, maybe it’s not seasonal-regional, maybe this is what it looks and feels like to be consumed by a creative project. That’s the only thing I ever wanted. I remember watching Zodiac for the first time and thinking, where Gyllenhaal’s character is so obsessed with his project that Sevigny’s character has to take the kids away and tell him to get his shit together, was the absolute highest aspiration. To be that involved with your work! I myself wrote recently, the world waits for you.
What I want, is to move back to Spokane.