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Cascadia Magazine original: Three-Minute Zone
Valerie Trueblood is an award-winning author based in Seattle, and Cascadia Magazine is proud to publish a new piece of flash-fiction by Valerie: “Three-Minute Zone”
It’s a brief vignette, seen from the perspective of a narrator waiting to pick up someone outside a Seattle hospital:
“If you’re at the county hospital parked in the three-minute pull-out by that new clinic building, and the employee you’re picking up doesn’t come out, you see an opera. Verismo.”
Read the full story online this weekend here.
If you’re interested in helping Cascadia Magazine publish great writing like this, please visit our donate page. And if you’re already a supporting reader, thank you!
WA looks to boost spending to tackle homelessness
Crosscut examines various plans before the Washington legislature to increase the Housing Trust Fund by up to $200 million in order to build more affordable housing for the more than 22,000 homeless people in the state. “The leading cause of homelessness is the lack of affordable homes,” says one advocate. Meanwhile, Ricochet looks at BC’s vacant property tax and exposes opponents’ misleading statements. Real Change reports on the successful completion of the Liberty Bank affordable housing complex in Seattle’s central district. And if you think “Seattle is dying” because crime is at record levels, Gene Balk at the Seattle Times has some context for you: it isn’t.
BC’s NDP failing to make progress on environment
The Globe and Mail has a detailed and damning look at the left-of-center NDP’s environmental record in British Columbia–and it’s not much better than the previous governmetnt, with logging continuing unchecked, mining and natural gas projects getting the green light, and approval for the controversial Site C dam. Meanwhile, BC Greens leader Andrew Weaver called the NDP’s proposed tax credits for LNG projects a “generational sellout.”
Rates of depression, suicide increasing among WA teens
The Inlander reports on a new study finding that rates of both depression and suicidal thoughts are on the rise among Washington teens, nearly doubling in less than ten years. In related news, a new youth jail in Seattle put out a call for artists to decorate the kids’ prison, and some are wondering whether the $500,000 could be better spent on arts education programs for at-risk youth. If that’s got you down, here’s some actual good news for kids: the BC government announced it’s putting free menstrual products in all public schools. Yay!
US may OK Makah tribe ceremonial hunt of gray whales
According to the Seattle Times, the US federal government may allow the Makah tribe in the northwest corner of Washington state to hunt a small number of gray whales for subsistence and ceremonial purposes. The last legal whale hunt by the tribe was in 1999 and mired in controversy. The Makah are the only tribe in the US with treaty guarantees of whale hunting.
Two photo exhibits in Vancouver explore Indigenous resilience
The Georgia Straight reviews two shows of Indigenous photography in Vancouver’s Capture Photography Festival: Kali Spitzer’s amazing portraits of contemporary First Nations people using the old tintype 19th century process; and Alana Paterson’s images of Squamish Nation female basketball players.
Matt Kracht on why he wrote a book about hating birds
Over at Powells Books Blog, Seattle author Matt Kracht offers up 12 reasons he wrote and illustrated the tongue-in-cheek Field Guide to Dumb Birds of North America: “That time you were trying to sleep in on a Saturday, but a woodpecker mistook your metal rain gutter for a tree, for like an hour. Is this bird for real? It can’t be that difficult to distinguish between thin aluminum and a rotted tree trunk.”
That’s this evening’s rather late edition of Cascadia Daily, your smorgasbord of news, arts, and culture from across the bioregion known as Cascadia. And one correction note: I’d like to personally apologize to the entire population of Idaho for somehow sending out a newsletter with a headline referring to that state’s name without the first three letters. Why the typos of late seem to rather be rather embarrassing is beyond me, but we’re working hard to catch them and I’m sure an intern could teach me a thing or two… –Andrew Engelson