Living in the Time of Drought(s)

With the 8th hottest winter on record since 1895, the Washington State Department of Ecology declared a state-wide drought this week. Though there are limited exceptions for Seattle, Tacoma, and Everett metro areas, thoughtful consideration of your household’s water consumption can only help our local water ecologies. Below are some resources to help you consider how you can reduce your water usage, conserve rainfall, and create water-conscious gardens.

If you live in the Seattle area, Seattle Public Utilities and Saving Water Partnership have a good starting guide for what you can do in your home, from getting a rebate to replace older, less water efficient toilets to free gardening classes for planting drought-resistant gardens. Laura Allen, cofounder of Greywater Action, offers even more ideas in her book The Water-wise Home. Though some projects may seem daunting, clear instructions provide solid guidance for those just beginning as well as those ready to fully revolutionize how water is used in their home.

Found in the Stacks: Subversive Stitches

I recently completed my first ever cross-stitch: a bookmark with a Stephen King quote surrounded by moths and floral elements. It was a stunning red thread design on black cloth. I was immediately ready to take on a new project and headed into the book stacks at Central Library for inspiration.

I scanned the shelves until a book called The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine by Rozsika Parker caught my eye. Culturally, needlework—which encompasses everything from embroidery to cross-stitch to crewel—has been considered “women’s work,” a “craft” (as opposed to “Art”) and limited to the “domestic” sphere of place. Parker explores that history and traces how needlecraft was used to both define femininity and likewise be defined as a feminine craft. Widely respected as a seminal history of predominantly European needlecraft (Parker was a British art historian & critic), The Subversive Stitch was originally published in 1984 during cultural backlash to the second wave feminism of the 1970s. It was reprinted in 2010 with a new introduction from the author that addresses the shifting, yet again, of cultural consideration of needlecraft. Parker died that same year, but not before witnessing the emergence of the craftivism movement of the early 2000s and the launch of the London Craftivist Collective in 2009.

The lightening rod moment of change for my relationship with needlecraft came near the beginning of the #MeToo movement, when I witnessed a simple cross-stitch project go viral. Created by Shannon Downey of @badasscrosstitch in 2016 as a response to audio of the President Elect bragging about being able to grab women wherever he wanted, American culture at large was seemingly caught off-guard by the rage evident in a craft that was culturally still relegated to the realm of sweet grandmas in rocking chairs. Once again, needlecrafts catapulted to the forefront of a major social movement (according to Parker, embroidery played a major role in the Suffragist movement on both continents as well as in the Russian Revolution). It was being used and more importantly seen as an outlet for women’s anger and rage, giving rise to popular books of patterns that feature very un-grandma-like sentiments in traditionally floral, feminine arrangements, such as Super Subversive Cross-Stitch: 50 Fresh as F*ck Designs and Maybe Swearing Will Help. There are also several explicitly feminist pattern books, like Feminist Cross-stitch and Feminist Icon Cross-stitch. This, I thought, is my kind of cross-stitch.

Cozy Fantasy for the Long Dark

As we settle in and prepare for the Long Dark in Seattle, grab a mug of your favorite tea, your coziest blanket, and cuddle up with these low stakes, high comfort fantasy reads.

Regional author and audio book narrator extraordinaire Travis Baldree made an unexpected splash in the fantasy market with his first novel Legends & Lattes, but he recently gifted readers more time with Viv the bookish orc mercenary in the follow-up prequel Bookshops & Bonedust. Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea offers another take on the warrior who just wants to hang up her sword and drink tea in peace. Reyna and Kianthe’s adventures continue in A Pirate’s Life For Tea.

Lest the cozy fantasy genre be in danger of taking itself too seriously already, Morgan Stang’s The Bookshop and the Barbarian takes delightful pot-shots at the genre’s conventions for a sweet, low-key story about a barbarian warrior who finds an unexpected home in a bookshop.

In the Deep Dark Woods

Growing up with the woods at my back in Central Oregon, forests have always been closest to the sublime for me. Forests hold beauty, magic, mystery, and little bit of terror – there is nothing quite so eerie as the silence of the woods on a snowy winter’s day. Since moving to Seattle, with its incredible forested areas that run right to the water’s edge, my awe has only increased. Let these tales of the deep dark woods fill you with delight, awe, and maybe some terror this spooky season.

Sometimes, the scariest thing in the woods is your past. The Children of Red Peak by Craig Dilouie and A History of Wild Places by Shea Ernshaw both explore memory and trauma of adult characters who grew up in cults and must now reckon with both their memory of the past as well as the monsters hidden in plain view. In Bad Cree, Jessica Johns’ deeply moving meditation on the horror of grief, a young Cree woman must return home to Alberta to ask for her estranged family’s help when her dreams start mixing with reality in terrifying ways.

Sometimes, however, the scariest thing in the woods is you. Not for the faint of heart, The Laws of the Skies by Gregoire Courtois reads in part like an update to the Lord of the Flies, but with much more murderous intent. Set in Colonial New England, Laird Hunt’s In The House In the Dark of the Woods explores a woman stuck between the rock of domineering Puritanism and a hard place of being taken in by terrifying witches after getting lost in the woods.

Murder: What’s Age Got to Do With It?

The beginning of autumn always makes me want to curl up with a good book and a steaming mug of tea and nothing is cozier to me than a cozy mystery. With protagonists ranging from “your average 30 something whose life has been upended and must return home” to (usually) “single women who inherit mysterious old houses or bookstores,” the tropes found in cozies are numerous and predictable – it’s what makes them cozy! This season however, I’m going to take my chances with some not-so-nice-but-still-compelling, murderous elderly ladies and septuagenarians with a passion for solving crime. Here’s some recent releases that will find good company next to Miss Marple on my TBR pile this cozy season.

If you loved the movie Red, Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn is for you. After giving 40 years of their lives to a secret organization of assassins called The Museum, four women are sent packing on a luxury trip to mark their well-deserved retirement. But when one of their own starts targeting them, they’ll show the Museum exactly what it means to be old-school.

Best-selling South Korean author Gu Byeong-Mo made her English language debut in The Old Woman With The Knife, which is about Hornclaw, a highly competent 65-year-old assassin hoping to cash out and retire. However, she makes the mistake of getting too close to a doctor and his family after a chance encounter. In her line of work, there’s always consequences for such connections and this time her very life is at stake.