As most of you know I was an afficianado of Seattle-based writing since before there was much of it.

So I must start this piece by saying it’s great to have a lot more of it around these days—enough for a full-length anthology book.

I should also mention that Reading Seattle: The City in Prose, like Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, refers kindly to my body of work, for which I’m grateful.

I just wish Reading Seattle‘s editors, Peter Donahue and John Trombold, had done a more intriguing curatorial job.

Donahue (author of the fine short-story collection The Cornelius Arms) and John Trombold (a sometime Seattle U. prof) compiled passages from 41 fiction and narrative-nonfiction books. You get plenty (though not all) of Seatown’s big verbiage names (Emmett Watson, Richard Hugo, Roger Sale, Tom Robbins, Rebecca Brown, Sherman Alexie, Murray Morgan, Mary McCarthy, Betty McDonald, Earl Emerson, David Guterson, J.A. Jance, Thom Jones, Matthew Stadler). You also get some up-n’-comers (Michael Byers, Charles D’Ambrosio, Natalia Rachel Singer) and some unjustly neglected past prose-pros (Archie Binns, Mary Brinker Post, Josephine Herbst).

The book’s arranged into three chapters by eras: “1930s-1980s,” “1980s-1990s,” “and 1990s-Early 2000s.” This demarcation refers to when the fiction or essay excerpts were written, not when they were set. The settings of the excerpts go back and forth in time quite a bit. The sequence of pieces within the chapters appears to be thematic; though it can be hard to tell what exactly is the theme-link from one piece to the next.

For a town that un-ironically prides itself on ironic humor, there’s almost nothing funny in Reading Seattle. The cumulative emotional effect of some of the excerpts is the same somber, solemn, hyper-reverent tone found in hackneyed nature poetry; only in prose and about a city.

The challenge in Northwest writing has always been to draw portraits instead of landscapes. To draw attention to the cast, not just to the sets. Many of the full-length works excerpted in Reading Seattle achieve that. It’s just that too many of the excerpts themselves don’t.

Too many of the excerpts read as if one was watching a compilation of film clips consisting only of shots of actors walking across landscapes and entering buildings. As soon as they start acting, the scene’s cut off.

Some examples of this: A slice of Lynda Barry’s Cruddy consisting only of the heroine’s stroll down the waterfront; a similar stroll through the I.D. from Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter; a sound bite from Jack Cady’s thriller Street pontificating on, well, streets.

Some exceptions to this pattern: Binns’ re-creation of what Chief Sealth’s famous speech might have really contained; a piece from John Okada’s No-No Boy about a Japanese American man’s less-than-welcome return home from the WWII internment; McDonald’s girlhood memory of her failure at door-to-door sales.

The book’s editors, and seven of its contributing authors, appeared in a panel discussion last week at Seattle U. The ninety-minute chat didn’t lead to any big statements. They mainly mentioned the usual stuff about Seattle having rain and clouds and hills and water and distinct neighborhoods and moderate/progressive politics and a sense of community, and about it not being New York.

Among the panel’s more interesting statements:

• Tim Egan’s claim that “there’s a noir-ish, dark quality to our writing.”
• Lydia Minatoya’s observation of Seattle as “a metaphor for America; the shining frontier, the big dreams, but also the denial of racism and the other unpleasant facts.”
• Our ol’ pal Jonathan Raban quipping that this is “both a hard community and a soft community,” and “still a town of immigrants and dreamers.”

Seattle writing, unlike Seattle tourist promotion, should feel no need to strive for the “unique.” This is a human settlement like any other, in which men and women, boys and girls, eat, sleep, work, love, play, fight, travel, talk, think, create, are born, die, and all the rest.

It’s HOW individuals, by themselves and in communities, do all these things that make for fascinating stories.

The Great Seattle Novel has yet to be written. (My own new novel sure ain’t it.) And the Great Seattle Literary Anthology has yet to be compiled.

But that’s just one more challenge for a young city built on challenges.