My husband was only ten years old when The Beatles set fire to America on the weekly Ed Sullivan Show. In the winter of 1964, on an otherwise normal Sunday night, he sat on the couch with his parents in front of their hulking console TV and watched as John, Paul, George and Ringo…
Okay, it isn’t a real museum—not in the modern sense of the word. No curators, no lecture halls, no yellow school buses unloading hordes of fourth-graders out on the sidewalk. Marsh’s Free Museum, located on the Washington coast, owes more to P.T. Barnum than it does to Charles Darwin, though the two-headed calf and the…
I’m not supposed to admit this, but there was a moment during my visit to the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument—as the trail petered out unexpectedly in an eerie blue landscape of columns and spires, where nothing but scattered tufts of grass and the wide gray morning sky overhead looked even slightly familiar—when I…
The lines aren’t all entirely straight and the stitches aren’t always even, but there’s no mistaking Windsor Castle rising above the treetops or the royal coat of arms down below, beneath the slightly imperfect slogan that appears to read GODSAVE THE KING. Back in 1936 someone spent days—perhaps even weeks—memorializing with a needle a moment…
Originally posted May 2014 There is delicious irony in the fact of Billy Frank, Jr., lying in state this past weekend literally within a stone’s throw of the first American pioneers to settle on Puget Sound. For five hours on Saturday, friends and admirers of the most famous—and arguably most beloved—American Indian elder in the…
A brew pub, a historic house, trouble with the local American Indian community, and unexpected attention from the biggest country music star ever to come out of Nashville. It’s going to be a tough summer for Bess in the free-thinking, left-leaning, soy-eating, fish-loving town of Port Heron.
Emily Larch’s world is rocked twice—first, when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor, and again when she accidentally unleashes the ghost of radical patriot Thomas Paine inside the Governor’s Mansion. As the first lady soon discovers, an 18th-century firebrand hiding out in the attic of the state’s most public residence is a pretty hard secret to keep.
Every town tells a story.
“Ahhh,” sighed my friend Dana, with more than a touch of envy. “You know that you’ve landed my dream job.” Dana and I are both writers. Most of the time it’s rewarding work, but sometimes..
Writing for outdoor installations is different from writing online or for print. The trick lies in finding ways to combine historical facts with surroundings so readers can grasp what happened at the site where they’re viewing the text. The challenge comes in keeping things short. The payoff comes in imagining that visitors may be reading…