The Arbutus/Madrone Files: Reading the Pacific Northwest
(NeWest Press, May 2002; Oregon State University Press, September 2002).
"The whole
business of names was awkward."
--Audrey Thomas, Intertidal Life
This is a book about writing and reading. About some of the writing
attached to the region called the Pacific Northwest. About my own readings
of that writing. I hope my title will suggest some of my aspirations
for the book, and a sense of its form and limitations. The slash separating
and joining arbutus and madrone figures the artificial/real border which
contributes to the region’s doubleness and mystery. It allows for
either/or, and for a both which is a uniquely interdependent
fusion. Dividing my reading notes into files implies collecting
rather than systematic linear argument: stories and words and discoveries
clustered according to some shifting set of associations.
