I have been gathering all sorts of documentation to show how working people brought electricity to the Northwest, and then have kept it running.
IBEW #77, the local union that represents many of these workers (since  1897), hired me to write a book about their history. I have, and what a history it is.

Northwest Folklife Festival
SUNDAY, May 26, 5-6 PM
Narrative Stage at SIFF Cinema

http://2013northwestfolklifefestival.sched.org/

A series of readings, verbal riffs, and pronouncements held at Vintage Vine (in Roslyn, WA), where beer, wine, and conversation mix it up.

Come on down and hear for yourself. Start time is always 7:30 PM.

The 2012-2013 series is just getting its sea legs:

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Saturday, February 2, 2012

More details on the Oyez Roslyn! website.

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To offer $upport, or to get on the playlist:

info (at) elliebelew (dot) com

Hanford reach, winter 2004.

I am currently writing a novel, As Though There Were No Tomorrow, based on the life of a woman scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project.
Much of this novel is centered around her time at Hanford (Washington), as fuel for the world’s first atomic bomb is created.

My novel braids together upon this one landscape, known now as the Hanford Reach, stories we consider historical, juxtaposing this rational way of thinking about our past with knowledge that is more elusive: what we could know, if we paid better attention.

Who better to make this journey than a woman who helped create the Atom Bomb?

Where better to consider our relations within and interconnection with the natural world than in a sacred place, now flooded, a toxic waste preserve that because of its very toxicity in now wild and rich shrubbe steppe?

Zama Vanessa Helder, “Coulee Looking West,” c. 1940, watercolor (Collection of the Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture, Spokane, WA)

I gave a reading in Seattle in December, 2011, at the 266th meeting of Its’s About Time.
My co-readers wwere be Pat Hurshell, Bruce Taylor, and Leisha McIntyre.

I read excerpts from my novel in progress, As Though There Were No Tomorrow, and a couple of short prose pieces from a series I add to erratically. With luck I will soon get a sampling up on this site.

I presented a reading and lecture at the Seattle University School of Theology’s 2011 Search for Meaning Book Festival

Everyday Stories That Matter: Witnessing the Sacred in the Mundane was the title I used as an umbrella for a mixture of my fiction and non-fiction. Each selection portrayed a situation of deep humanity: a cacophony of what we fear and love, what scars us, and what drives us to continue.

A prequel novel to Run Plant Fly.

Joined at the hip is two so close they function as one, bound together through thick and thin. Joined at the throat is to be bound by song, and also implies we may have a knife in one hand and each other’s throat in the other.

Because song is not just the do-re-mi for the choir director– it is all our utterances– cheers and jeers, laughter and hissing and muttering, our mumbling repeats of what echoes within. One head nodding before the other’s lips have finished, a bit of question, part of an answer, call-and-response and our voices build together, not always glad. Joined at the Throat is about intimacy, both violent and loving. A sample coming soon to this very location…

An excerpt, “Crosscut,” was selected as Finalist in the 2009 Oregon Quarterly’s Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.

Literary laureate: Doris Lessing and fellow novelist Ben Okri at the Wallace Collection gallery
31.01.08 London Evening Standard

Ben Okri, Stars of the New Curfew
I got Okri’s name from an interview with another writer, who cited this collection of Okri’s for its successful blend of very harsh reality with indigenous religious perspectives. These stories are an almost hallucinogenic portrayal of modern Lagos, writing that portrays the horrible and the desperate with absurd beauty, as the supernatural interacts with the urban.

Phillip Roth, The Plot Against America
I must admit I have not been much of a Roth fan before this novel. Perhaps this is because my first exposure (ha) was Portnoy’s Complaint at age thirteen. Let’s just say it didn’t speak to me at the time. The Plot Against America has U.S. voters electing Lindberg over FDR. Freedom of the press does not follow. It is not unlike some of Ishmael Reed’s perspectives on political power and racism as they mix with the American Dream-cum-Nightmare. Capital City by Mari Sandoz also comes to mind as a novel about the appeals of fascism in an era that includes progressives.

Patrick D. Smith, A Land Remembered
A florid Floridian historical novel. Smith’s style reminds me a bit of Robert Heinlein as he moves through the rise and fall of a dynasty. Are you surprised the empire involves cattle, citrus, and real estate, or that the original Floridians (Seminoles) fare poorly? Now I know at least one etymology for “cracker.” Clue: it has to do with whips. This interview with Smith has background photos worth watching.

a scene from When We Were Kings

When We Were Kings (1996, Leon Gast, director) is a documentary about the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle” between heavyweight champion George Forman and previous champ Mohammed Ali. I am not a boxing fan, but I was mesmerized and inspired as I watched the two US fighters, their entourage, and all the promotion and entertainment (B.B. King, James Brown, and Don King among others) that packed up and went to Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). The humanity of individual experience: Ali thinking out loud about the huge cultural difference between living in an almost entirely black country and what he has experienced as an African-American in the United States; the Zairians’ joy in seeing the charismatic Ali; the global politics and economics that brings the fight to the same Kinshasa stadium Dictator-President Mobutu used to for executions and torture until the floors ran red with blood.

Charles Brunett, film maker

I can’t remember now how I came across a reference to director Charles Burnett, but I have been watching everything I can find that he has had a part in. First I watched To Sleep with Anger (1990) in which Danny Glover shows up on the doorstep of a couple he vaguely knows from the small southern town they all grew up in. The older couple lives in a solid working-class black neighborhood of LA. They let Glover move in for an indefinite visit. Glover is Evil, far more complex than “evil incarnate” because his very nature is evil. As he explains to someone who challenges him, he is just being who and what he is, which means everything and everyone goes bad when he is present. Next up was Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), a consideration and enactment of various interpretations of Nat Turner, from William Styron’s to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s to that of the lawyer who interviewed Turner in jail before his hanging. My latest Burnett film is Warming By the Devil’s Fire (2003), a fictionalized tribute to numerous blues masters. It mixes live footage with a moody narrative about a young boy at the crossroads between the life and music of conservative Christian Gospel and the blues.

(I have some new picks to add, and will do so shortly.)

I stumbled across Advice from the Happy Hippopotamus (2005) by Cloud Cult after hearing them do a Seattle studio version of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Pretty introverted lyrics, lots of mixed in electric and mechanical and digital sound, which is hard to sing by oneself in the bathtub. For a chilling and amusing example of how sound can be digitally edited to create a virtual voice, listen to Prez George saying things I don’t believe Prez George has ever said, in “State of the Union” on Aurora Borealis.

Duke Ellington’s recently released Piano in the Foreground is a sampling of the Duke’s brilliant musical reach. He fluidly blends all manner of riffs and traditions, including stride piano, minimalist chords, and the blues, to name a few. In one piece his piano is orchestral, in the next pure and private solo keyboard. What a master.