Spokane is the key.  And if you ask me “the key to what?”, I’d have to say the key to the metaphysical fun park!   It’s like the entire Lilic City, the hometown of Bing Crosby and Gonzaga basketball, is nothing more and nothing less than the glossy sign at the entrance to North America’s grand spiritual conundrum.   You are here!  (See the arrow!  Or, could that be a question mark?)   Why are you here?

Why I happen to be here over twenty-five years after leaving has nothing to do with church.   It corresponds a little bit with this calling I felt to start another new church, known as Latah Valley.  But the ultimate reason comes into view when that commercialized ecclesial wrapper has been peeled back… revealing what the Celts refer to as a thin place in the world.

Consider the odds.  What are the spiritual hot spots of the world?   The top-ten locales for communing with one’s deity of choice, or for congregating with the hoypoloi of doctrinal sensibility and decorum?  Rome?  Jerusalem?  Tibet?  Mecca?   You see, as the last of these designations suggest, each so-called axis mundi has been overrun with familiarity.  Spokane is familiar.   Yet, not in the same way.   Spokane is familiar like the brick wall in Diagon-Alley in the Harry Potter series.   Spokane is familiar by way of the same metaphorical thinking that eventually made Mecca, Saudi Arabia into the mecca of every genre of culture on earth.   Spokane is the nirvana-nexus into the new world without the Grunge-movement of Nirvana and Kurt Cobaine.  Spokane is on the cusp of major, authentically enfleshed revelation, something akin to Joseph Smith before Mormonism went big (and even before Smith himself went big with his declarations concerning bigamy).
Read more »

Thanks Wikipedia for the photo

On any given day I can be convinced to bemoan one of a million things about living in Spokane that drives me bonkers. Driving for example is both a game of chicken and a trial of patience (we all have different and dangerous opinions on what it means to yield). But I also appreciate living in Spokane, more than I often admit and when one day I leave this sprawling, woody metropolis, I already know three big reasons I am thankful I came to school here:

1. Surviving Winter – I cannot stress enough the amount of mental toughness it takes to endure a winter in the Pacific Northwest. People who were born here or have lived here for years take for granted that there are places where it doesn’t snow in April. There was a moment in November, right around Thanksgiving, when a bad spell of weather hit and I can’t even remember the amount of Spokanites who loved telling me that “This was just the beginning.” And while most of my fellow classmates left Spokane for Winter break, I was here pulling my hair out and gnashing my teeth as blanket after blanket of snow covered my neighborhood, Brownes Addition. And yet, there were moments in the pre dawn hours as I cleaned off my car to go to work, sweating in my five or six layers, as the rest of Brownes was quiet of screaming meth heads, that I had the most treasured moments I’ve had thus far. Us poets tend to be a bit maudlin and often suffer from mental strain and yet I think surviving a Spokane winter is like Marine bootcamp for writers.  Even if I can’t do actual push-ups, I can do mental push-ups. Read more »

Every Wednesday in Spokane, local writer Mark Anderson hosts an all-ages open mic, known as Broken Mic (curiously titled, since the microphone works just fine, but no matter). 96% of what is read aloud is poetry, and in fact, host Mark Anderson calls the event Poetry Broken Mic when he goes through the introductory song-and-dance before welcoming the first reader to the stage. I write essays and not poems, though – ergo, I read essays at Broken Mic (typically essays that my thesis adviser has dismissed as too underdeveloped and sophomoric for my thesis). I read at Broken Mic every week because I like to practice reading aloud in front of an audience I like to have my writing applauded. (Oh, relax – writing is rarely a gratifying experience at the desk, and it’s nice to have some positive reinforcement, even if the audience is just being polite.) A few weeks ago, during the intermission of the two and-a-half hour long event, young and hot and up-and-coming local slam poet, Tim Johnson, came up to me and said something like, “Sam, your shit’s hilarious, but it’s never about anything whatsoever.”  I responded by saying, “Huh-huh – yeah dude, that’s how I roll,” or something boneheaded like that, but he did have a point – I hardly ever, at live readings, read anything that comes around in the end, or “accesses the heart of the human condition,” or whatever pithy clause I’m sick of hearing. The truth is, I rarely know what I’m writing about in essays, anyway, until like the third or fourth draft, and once I make that discovery, it’s usually depressing and full of sentences that work on the page but sound ho-hum when spoken aloud, and who wants to go to readings to be bored and depressed? What I’m trying to get around to is this: essays or short stories at readings need to be kept short and light, and don’t necessarily need to take the audience members somewhere new and unexpected in the same way print writing does.

Read more »

the other day i was in a little dive of a place in spokane.  after being ignored for a couple few minutes (on my third round) while the owner/bartender chatted up a friend, i still tipped a buck when she eventually got around to serving me a $1 pint of pabst.  later, after ordering my fourth round, i pulled out my phone to scan nyt headlines (because though i can’t ever seem to keep up with everything happening in the world, i still like to try), and the owner told me no phones were allowed at the bar.  i hesitated in putting it away, and the owner said: “seriously.”  i wasn’t holding up the transaction in any way, there was no one else waiting for service, and given my earlier patience, this move seemed dickish to me for the sake of being dickish.  and that’s when i realized that spokane is actually kind of a punk town. Read more »

It gets heated in poetry workshop...over swans.

The title of this post is a line from a poem I wrote in my junior year of high school. My family had just moved from New Jersey to North Carolina and I was channeling my unrest through poetry. The following line of the poem, reveals the teen angst, “…my life is a rainforest.”  Now years later and thousands of miles from sweet, sunny Carolina, with snow falling outside my window, I can’t help but wonder why change is so hard to handle.

This quarter in my poetry workshop, our professor assigned Mary Oliver’s  collection of poetry, Swan for class discussion. I didn’t have strong feelings about the poems in any way but I was surprised by the passion some of my classmates were feeling in response to Oliver’s latest work. Many of them had grown up reading  Oliver and thought Swan was a huge departure. They argued over whether or not Oliver was knowingly writing against the RULES OF POETRY.  These rules, which are so embedded in our learned consciousness, were thrown around in the discussion like nursery rhymes: Read more »

So the stakes are coming up, and within a couple of days the Lilac City will be a dust-colored speck in the rearview. But before I leave Spokane to return to the birthplace of Letterman and Vonnegut, it’s time to reflect the only way I know how: in list form.

Top 5 foods I’ll miss

1. Irish Nachos at The Globe
A pile of thick waffle fries covered in cheese, bacon, and sour cream will shut your heart right down, but you will not care.

2. Maytag Blue Fries at Zola
More fries? Sounds right to me. But these are crispier and smothered in a ridiculous blue cheese sauce. I never said it was the top 5 healthiest foods.

3. Biscuits and Gravy at Frank’s Diner
Case in point. I’ve had biscuits and gravy in a lot of breakfast places, but this is the only place in Spokane I will still order them.

4. Curry Fried Rice at Thai Bamboo
I could swear that what makes this so good is the curry, but Rachel insists the pineapple is its secret weapon, so I will defer.

5. Orange Watermelon from the South Perry Farmers’ Market
I only ate it a couple of times, and I still think about it way too much.

Read more »