DSC00865When I opened this week’s Sunday Seattle Times, the first thing I saw was a big color ad for commemorative Super Bowl 48 bookends. Fully sculpted, cold-cast bronze, showing “Seahawks players in action!” Not available in stores! And only $49.99, payable in two easy installments!

I looked up “cold-cast bronze” so you won’t have to. It means the sculpture is made from a resin mixed with powdered bronze, which gives it a surface, quote, “similar to traditionally cast bronze, at a fraction of the cost.” Just FYI.

But what struck me about the ad was this: why bookends? In what way do books relate to football? Why not just make a Seahawks Super Bowl cold-cast bronze statue to place on the coffee table in front of the flat-screen TV, so you can see it every time you fire up ESPN?

Maybe the Bradford Exchange Collectibles people heard about one of Seattle’s other claims to fame, which is that we are one of the most literate cities in the country. The second, after Washington DC, for the fourth year in a row. The Central Connecticut State University study tracks six factors: number of bookstores, educational attainment, Internet resources, library resources, periodical publishing resources, and newspaper circulation.

Or maybe the cold-cast bronze makers got wind of Seattle author Ryan Boudinot’s campaign to get the United Nations to declare Seattle an official UNESCO City of Literature. A part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities program, such a designation would not only acknowledge what we all know—Seattleites love books—but help us share that news with the world. And doesn’t “UNESCO City of Literature” sound much cooler than second most literate city?

Which brings me to an event happening this week, in downtown Seattle. It’s what you might call the Super Bowl of literary conferences. Known as AWP for short, the 2014 conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs will bring some twelve thousand people and 650 exhibitors—literary magazines, small and mid-sized presses, MFA programs, writer’s retreats, organizations, booksellers—to the Washington State Convention Center. So if you’re walking downtown and you see people with big convention badges, they could be poets or novelists or professors or publishers. You might see some of our local authors—Tess Gallagher, Sherman Alexie, David Guterson. Or legendary writers from further afield: Ursula K. LeGuin, Annie Proulx, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds. I could go on. At great length. But I’ve got to save a little mojo, because I plan on attending as much of AWP as I can. There are 550 events to choose from, and that doesn’t even count the off-site readings, at bookstores, bars, museums and theatres all over town.

So. Seattle. Order those Super Bowl bookends—or hey, build or sculpt your own—and then go out and buy some books to put between them. Or start writing a book. Or take a writing class, or go to a reading.

Many of the AWP off-site readings are open to the public. I’m taking part in one of them myself, Thursday night at the Frye Art Museum. I love that I live in a city where this is possible. Not too many of us get to actually play NFL football. But we can all be on Seattle’s UNESCO-worthy team of literature-lovers.

Calendar Notes: I’ll be reading from my memoir, Her Beautiful Brain (forthcoming this fall from She Writes Press) as part of Witnessing Dementia, an AWP off-site event at Seattle’s Frye Art Museum at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 27. Also on the program: Tess Gallagher, Holly Hughes and Esther Helfgott. On March 16 at 3pm, in celebration of the publication of an anthology called Into the Storm: Journeys with Alzheimer’s (edited by Collin Tong), I’ll be reading along with some of the other authors at Elliott Bay Bookstore.

 

Radio lovers: you can hear the Restless Nest commentaries every Tuesday at 7:45 a.m. on KBCS, streaming online at kbcs.fm and on the air at 91.3 in the Seattle area.  Podcasts available.

Here’s nest artist Kim Groff-Harrington’s website.