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Interloper
new fiction at Cascadia Magazine by Matt Briggs
“I’m not asking for help.”
“You need to move your car.”
“I have a right to be here as much as you.”
“I pay a mortgage for this land,” Mr. Hough said.
Now online at Cascadia Magazine, read Matt Brigg’s short story “Interloper.” A man living in a run-down gold Honda Accord arrives outside the house of Maureen Hough, a teenager who lives in a Seattle suburb near Pacific Highway South. After the man’s car fails to start, a slow-burning conflict develops between the homeless “interloper” and Maureen’s father, a blue-collar worker. It’s a vignette increasingly familiar in Seattle as skyrocketing housing costs are forcing more people on to the streets.
Accompanying Matt’s story is a photograph by Alex Garland, who’s done extensive work documenting the city’s homeless crisis for Real Change, a Seattle newspaper sold by homeless vendors. Matt lives in Des Moines, WA, in a neighborhood not unlike the Houghs’.
Read the full story online this weekend by clicking this link. And to learn more about the 2,000+ people who sleep in their vehicles across Seattle each night, read Will Sweger’s feature “When Home is a Parking Spot,” also online at Cascadia Magazine.
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Cascadia Magazine original:
Fighting for Peace Valley
In a feature now online at Cascadia Magazine, meet the local residents of Peace River Valley in northeast British Columbia who are fighting construction of the $10 billion Site C dam. Farmers, horse breeders, and members of the Saulteau and West Moberly First Nations have come together to oppose a hydro project that has thrown their lives into uncertainty and could severely impact the ecology of this gorgeous region.
“If we get kicked out, where would we move to that’s more beautiful than this?”
Read the article, now online at Cascadia Magazine, here.
Ailing orca known as J50 likely dead
Following the death of an orca calf that galvanized the world’s attention on the plight of the southern resident pod, scientists with NOAA conceded that another ailing orca, J50, has likely died, although researchers continued to search for her. There’s more at the Washington Post, where biologists are quoted as saying, “this is what extinction looks like.” In other Cascadia wildlife news, the effort to relocate non-native mountain goats via helicopter from Washington’s Olympic National Park west to the Cascades has begun.
Vancouver housing is VERY expensive
The Vancouver Sun has a detailed analysis of housing costs in metro Vancouver in relation to income, and the news is bleak: if you make the median income or lower, there’s literally no neighborhood you can afford a buy a home in, and apartments are generally out of reach too. The founding editor of The Tyee looks as his publication’s coverage of the crisis over 10 years and asks its leaders: what have you been doing? Meanwhile the Seattle Times finds that Seattle’s median family income is now at $120,000. And the Tacoma city council has passed a series of tenant protections to make it harder to raise rent and evict tenants.
A conflict over salmon & tribal rights along the Columbia
Willamette Week reports on a simmering conflict between several tribes and the state of Oregon over fishing rights at Willamette Falls on the Columbia River. The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde want to establish a fishing platform, but other tribes, including the Warm Springs and Umatilla, are concerned the move will give the Grande Ronde leverage for other claims, including construction of casinos.
The moral case for Washington’s proposed carbon fee
Climate scientist Sarah Myhre, writing for Scientific American, makes the case that legislative changes like Washington’s carbon fee initiative on the ballot in November are more effective in fighting climate change than calling for individuals to change their behavior. The Seattle Globalist looks at how that initiative, I-1631, was created by involving input from more social and racial justice groups than previous measures. And Crosscut profiles the religious organizations backing the Washington carbon fee campaign.
Fewer arrests, more assistance for drug offenders
Lilly Fowler, writing for Crosscut, reports on the expansion of King county’s LEAD program, which shifts emphasis on drug users and prostitutes from arrests to help with health care, housing, and job training. Another strategy for harm reduction is supervised injection sites, and a recent feature at Cascadia Magazine covered how these sites save lives.
A dialogue between photographers and incarcerated artists
Over at Oregon Arts Watch, Hannah Kraffcik has a great feature on the Answers Without Words project at the Columbia River Correction Institution in Oregon. Created by Portland State University grad student Anke Schüttler, the project involves artists asking prisoners questions about their daily life, and the answers are created using staged photographs inside the prison. You should head over Oregon Arts Watch and see the amazing images they’ve created.
Thoughts on climate, human rights & a poem by Shankar Narayan
Over at her blog, Washington state poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna shares thoughts on the recent dire news concerning wildfires, immigration, and climate change — and in conclusion includes a new poem by Seattle’s Shankar Narayan entitled “The Times Asks Poets to Describe the Haze Over Seattle”:
“No one asked me, but I would have said this apocalypse/
looks like home.” Read the full essay and poem here.
“Miller Cane,” a serialized novel by Samuel Ligon
Not that I need another example that Spokane is super-rad right now, but this is very cool: the city’s independent newspaper, the Inlander, is publishing, in weekly installments, a complete, new novel entitled Miller Cane by local writer Samuel Lignon. It’s a darkly funny story of “a fraudulent historian who makes his living conning the victims of mass shootings who returns home to save the young daughter of the woman he loves.” The series continues into early 2019… start reading it here.
That’s today’s selection of news, arts, and great writing from across the Cascadia bioregion. Have a great weekend! –Andrew Engelson
Photo credit: Vancouver houses by Wikimedia Commons user kennethaw88 CC BY-SA 4.0