What happened to silence?
With more than 80% of Americans living in metropolitan areas (and only 2% living as I do in towns of fewer than 25,000 people), nobody knows what real silence is anymore. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Population/ Writing historical fiction requires that you project yourself into that long ago past. As the modern world hurtles headlong into the future, this becomes more and more difficult. Trying to find spaces where it’s possible to get a sense of that historic time is getting harder by the day. Like light pollution, noise pollution is everywhere. This winter in the Olympic National Forest and on the Quinnault Indian Reservation, my husband and I experienced the silence of the natural world, though it is presently threatened by the air routes over it into Sea-Tac airport south of Seattle. In Eastern Oregon, the silence can be complete–and loud–to the point of ringing Read more…
A Twilight Interlude
Forks, Washington is the setting for Stephanie Meyer’s Twlight series. While I’m not a Twlight ‘fan’, I appreciate it any time an author sparks a reading frenzy as she has. And today, we drove through Forks (on the way to somewhere else, but we decided we had to stop). We went to the visitor center and chatted with the proprieters who reported that 73,000 people passed through their doors in 2010. We were the only ones today. Forks is a town of 3000 people. The visitor center employee, who was very nice and knowledgable, said that 95% percent of the citizens of Forks were supportive of their role in the Twilight series and had embraced the tourists and the experience. (She has a bumper sticker which says ‘Team Jacob’. He has my vote too 🙂 Her parting comment was how Read more…
^