On the Scene in Seattle

The New Yorker visits my hometown of Seattle and tries to find its literary scene.

From the piece...

Five years ago, I moved to Seattle from New York. In that time, I’ve come to understand why Seattle is considered such a literary city: the bookstores (big and indie), Hugo House (events and classes), the rain. I used to partake of the offerings quite regularly, but now that I have two kids, I’ve become something of a shut-in. So last week, when the Book Bench, curious what the literary scene in my new city looked like, asked me to attend an author reading and cocktail party hosted by Debut Lit (an event series with the laudable goal of helping new writers gain wider exposure, in this case, Alexi Zentner and his haunting début novel, “Touch”), I decided it was time to cast off my washable house attire and put on something a little more dry-clean-only. I was stepping out—into the rain and onto the scene.

Except that Seattle doesn’t really have a literary scene, per se. No, what Seattle has is more like a community, one in which the Elliot Bay Book Company, where the event was held, is a venerable icon (albeit a recently relocated icon). For the reading, we gathered downstairs in a cold space with spindly legged wooden chairs perched closely together atop a concrete floor (seat-shifters beware: any movement whatsoever produced a squeaking, screeching, tooth-achingly horrible noise). Thankfully, however, the setting was nowhere near as bleak as one from that night’s reading: a frozen river; a hole in the ice; a father; a daughter; a son.