Thanks for this. As someone who was also a wannabe writer in Seattle at the same time—attended SPU from 08-11, and remember the Cafe Racer shooting pretty well, although I never went there until one of its reopened iterations—it’s interesting to revisit that almost religious aversion in that town at that time to the idea of actually valuing a writer like Joyce. So many arguments with my friends in my apartment in Lower Queen Anne.
Reading this was like looking at a snapshot from my own college days in some ways—I was on a trip when the SPU shooting happened the next year, but it happened in a building I took tons of classes in, and the surreality of the experience was hard to shake. Anyhow: thanks for writing, and posting this. Merry Christmas, sir.
Thanks so much @Nathan Knapp! It’s really good to have some confirmation of what Seattle was like back then. That almost religious aversion was definitely more than just genre-specific thing. I had similar but even less productive conversations at the Richard Hugo House. Reading the classics (any kind of classics) was profoundly out of style, much more so than it is today. I think at least part of that attitude stemmed from the chatty, pop-culture inflected blog writing that was popular in the city (Dan Savage, Lindy West, et cetera). A lot of that moment gets rolled up into generic conversations about “woke” culture now, but at that time it seemed pretty fresh.
Thanks for this. As someone who was also a wannabe writer in Seattle at the same time—attended SPU from 08-11, and remember the Cafe Racer shooting pretty well, although I never went there until one of its reopened iterations—it’s interesting to revisit that almost religious aversion in that town at that time to the idea of actually valuing a writer like Joyce. So many arguments with my friends in my apartment in Lower Queen Anne.
Reading this was like looking at a snapshot from my own college days in some ways—I was on a trip when the SPU shooting happened the next year, but it happened in a building I took tons of classes in, and the surreality of the experience was hard to shake. Anyhow: thanks for writing, and posting this. Merry Christmas, sir.
Thanks so much @Nathan Knapp! It’s really good to have some confirmation of what Seattle was like back then. That almost religious aversion was definitely more than just genre-specific thing. I had similar but even less productive conversations at the Richard Hugo House. Reading the classics (any kind of classics) was profoundly out of style, much more so than it is today. I think at least part of that attitude stemmed from the chatty, pop-culture inflected blog writing that was popular in the city (Dan Savage, Lindy West, et cetera). A lot of that moment gets rolled up into generic conversations about “woke” culture now, but at that time it seemed pretty fresh.