One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International [...]]]>

One requirement of good writing is paying attention.

Whether one is journalist, novelist, or poet, the requirement to closely observe the subject at hand – be it human relationships, a political campaign, or the splendor of nature – is what makes reading worthwhile.

I admire people with the gift of paying close attention, and recently enjoyed the wisdom of an observer par excellence, Bud Anderson of the Falcon Research Group in Bow, Washington.

Bud is a neighbor who each winter offers a five-night class on the eagles, hawks, and falcons that patrol northwest Washington, where I live.

From my bedroom office window I spy bald eagles pretty regularly; one flew by just now. Some are year-around residents and others are “snowbirds” fleeing from Alaska’s winter. They dine on Skagit River salmon and migrating waterfowl in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.

Bud has turned passion into a career. He’s not a scientist on a professional academic track, but his skill in watching raptors has won him grants to travel around the world to band, radio-tag, and observe. He’s added significant understanding to our fledgling knowledge of aerial predators that migrate hundreds of miles in a single day.

He also traps over-abundant hawks at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and releases them where they won’t end life spattered against a jet. The trapping is quite humane and the birds surprisingly docile once he puts a hood over their eyes.

Viewing a Red-tailed hawk from a distance is fine, but it’s sort of like enjoying a supermodel from a quarter-mile away. To see its complex plumage, coiled muscles, gaping tongue, and brilliant eyes when in hand is an enormous privilege, reminding those of us who squat in our hives just how magnificent the outdoor world is.

Bud’s class is great fun but challenging. To make sense of bird behavior you first have to identify the bird. There are fourteen species of hawks in western Washington, male and female feathers differ (the females are also bigger, because they carry the eggs) and plumage changes again from youth to maturity. Add in the unusual, like the hawk equivalent of an albino, and we probably saw slides of sixty or so varieties that ideally we’d master.

Thank goodness there was no test. Some locals have taken the class a dozen times. So far I’ve managed to identify Red-tails and Harriers in the wild along with the usual eagles and osprey, meaning I have a long way to go.

But birding isn’t really about memorization, it’s about observation, and that is where Anderson grabbed my writerly attention with his skill.

First of all, he’s a collector of bird poetry and narrative description, and read us several works that made me envious, requiring that we shut our eyes and concentrate as the words were recited. We humans rarely look up, but he gave us a peek at an aerial world as new and complex as if we were underwater amphibians who finally crawled out onto land.

Second, he’s carved out a life by watching, something most people just don’t do. He’ll stop and spend hours observing a single hawk, watching it hunt, fight, mate and roost. In our frenetic Twitter world, he approaches the outdoors with the stately rhythm of the Downton Abbey series on Masterpiece Theater, understanding the wild through the patience required of a 19^th Century novel.

He views a bird’s life not as romantic but frantic, as edgy as working the floor of a stock exchange. The medieval dictum about life being “nasty, brutish, and short” could apply to raptors. Not only must they kill pretty savagely, hawks and falcons are constantly harassed by other birds seeking to steal their food or take over their hunting territory. We’ve learned raptors can live in the wild an astonishingly long time – up to 30 years, for eagles – but the mortality of young hawks can be as high as 90 percent.

To see this requires paying attention, and birds show us how. Raptors hunt by ceaselessly and patiently watching for prey. Bud gave us moderns the briefest of tastes by having us try to concentrate on a single spot on the blackboard for a single minute, not looking away and not thinking of something else.

Hard to do. Try it.

So a good writer has some of the attributes of a good birder, or painter, or photographer. We pay attention. We become aware of detail. When I travel to research my novels I’m searching for smells, tastes, and textures as well as sights, but it’s work to stop to do this. Our habit is to rush by.

So, new resolution: Don’t just watch hawks, become as watchful as a hawk. Paying attention leads to truth, and writing that rings true is what makes stories come alive.

The dysfunction of Congress was a reminder this Thanksgiving of how some things seem to be getting worse.

Political ads. Air travel. Traffic. Road repair. The weather. (Climate change scientists are predicting more extremes.) The stock market. (More volatile.)  Musicals. (Rodgers & Hammerstein, come back!) The Academy Awards. Hiking trails. (In disrepair.) Manners.

As usual, America is falling behind. In earlier times it was to the Russians. Then the Japanese. Then the Europeans. Now it’s the Chinese. And don’t expect a reprieve. We have a chattering class of professional worriers who are well paid to keep our anxiety levels high.

For most of my life our schools have also been failing (Sputnik, etc.), our bodies flabby (JFK worried about this), our Christmases too commercial, our greed unchecked, our national debt rampant (we had to debate this in high school in the 1960s), our minds a muddle (from Gilligan’s Island to the Kardashians), our lives a sweatshop, our psyches angst-ridden, and our tastes barbaric.

Maybe it’s true. Intellectuals have been forecasting our fall at least since Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” in 1918.

But history cuts both ways. In Ethan Gage’s day at the beginning of the 19th Century, the invention of mass conscription made [...]]]>

The dysfunction of Congress was a reminder this Thanksgiving of how some things seem to be getting worse.

Political ads. Air travel. Traffic. Road repair. The weather. (Climate change scientists are predicting more extremes.) The stock market. (More volatile.)  Musicals. (Rodgers & Hammerstein, come back!) The Academy Awards. Hiking trails. (In disrepair.) Manners.

As usual, America is falling behind. In earlier times it was to the Russians. Then the Japanese. Then the Europeans. Now it’s the Chinese. And don’t expect a reprieve. We have a chattering class of professional worriers who are well paid to keep our anxiety levels high.

For most of my life our schools have also been failing (Sputnik, etc.), our bodies flabby (JFK worried about this), our Christmases too commercial, our greed unchecked, our national debt rampant (we had to debate this in high school in the 1960s), our minds a muddle (from Gilligan’s Island to the Kardashians), our lives a sweatshop, our psyches angst-ridden, and our tastes barbaric.

Maybe it’s true. Intellectuals have been forecasting our fall at least since Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” in 1918.

But history cuts both ways. In Ethan Gage’s day at the beginning of the 19^th Century, the invention of mass conscription made warfare vast and horrific. But it was also a time textile mills made clothes affordable, paper manufacturing efficiencies began to elevate literacy, city engineers introduced sanitation, and canned food improved diets.

Similarly, we could also say that today politicians are better-scrutinized, air travel is cheap, houses better built against storms, more people have investments, Broadway shows are likelier to tour, movies are more plentiful, trails more numerous, and the use of pepper spray in Walmart is at least unusual enough to make the news.

What’s gotten better?

Coffee. Yes, pricey, but more interesting, too.

Cars. Safer, more comfortable, more efficient, longer lasting.

Energy efficiency.

Electronics at all levels. Computers that once filled a warehouse now fit in our pocket, and the software usually works. (I don’t miss my 20-pound Kaypro “portable,” a wonder in its day.)

Food. Pretentious sometimes, but varied, fresh, from more cultures.

Wine. Too many good ones to choose from.

Citizen involvement. Way more civic groups on every conceivable issue.

Tolerance. Despite the “holier-than-thou, my-way-or-the-highway” cliques, the world is much smaller and more integrated in every way. It’s much harder to stereotype.

Literacy. From email to book clubs, people use the written word.

The environment. We still might trash the planet, but we’ve cleaned up, too.

Science. Hundreds of new planets, far-out physics, miracle vaccines, gee-whiz crops, and robots that trundle on Mars.

Smiles. It’s the rare middle class kid who hasn’t been ratcheted into straight teeth.

Smoking. I don’t get why anyone still does this, but at least they do it away from me.

Comfortable clothing, sensible shoes.

Less ironing.

On-line shopping.

I still miss repair shops, banks that had architectural grandeur, the mindless simplicity of Ma Bell with its phones sturdy enough to drive nails with, and comedy that was witty instead of vulgar.

But they had plenty of vulgar comedies in Ethan Gage’s day, too.

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

-       That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our [...]]]>

Besides providing pleasure, storytelling justifies itself by occasionally providing truth, or at least insight. But what if we don’t know what’s real?

The thought occurred while reading physicist Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos. It’s one of many popular cosmology books about the origin and nature of the universe I’ve read over the years by scientists such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Frank Tipler, Michio Kaku, Roger Penrose, and so on.

I read numerous titles not because I understand this stuff but because I don’t. Each scientist brings their own set of analogies to help visualize peculiarities hard to verbalize outside the language of mathematics.

Greene is better than most at doing this, but the reality described sometimes sounds as fanciful as medieval monks debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. We take these guys seriously because oddball ideas like relativity and quantum mechanics, proposed in leaps of genius, have subsequently been confirmed by experiment. So new bizarre ideas might eventually be confirmed too.

Consider a few of the impossible things before breakfast these physicists and astronomers ask us to believe:

-       That we can’t detect up to 96 percent of the matter and energy in our universe, and that we have little idea what it consists of.

-       That the universe isn’t expanding because galaxies are flying away from each other through space. It’s space itself that is expanding, taking galaxies with it. “Expanding through what?” is like asking a clam to imagine a cloud.

-       That our universe started as a particle far smaller than an atom weighing twenty pounds (no, I don’t get how they figured that) and that existence picked up the rest of its weight, or mass, by “robbing gravity.”

-       That empty outer space is in fact crowded with fields and subatomic particles we’ve yet to detect; an emptiness that is crammed.

-       That there are not four dimensions – three spatial and one time – but ten. The others are just too small to see. Oops, make that 11. Or, for another theory, 26.

-       That there is a parallel universe a millimeter away from our own, or that our universe is a mere hologram of a more real one, or that there are an almost infinite number of universes with new ones popping up like popcorn, or that even after estimating there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, containing hundreds of billions of stars, we “see” only a tiny part of our own cosmos.

Whew.

Science fiction writers deal with this madness by simply mining it, as I did for my own novel Blood of the Reich, which climaxes at the CERN supercollider near Geneva. I spend a lot of time in the early 19^th Century with Ethan Gage, but enjoy a good dose of mental whiplash by trying to absorb ideas from the 21^st., While I’m still marching with Napoleon, I’m prospecting these nuggets again for a different kind of time-travel story, which may or may not work.

Most other people do just fine ignoring this stuff, since the Wonderland scientists are describing is mostly too big, too small, or too distant for everyday observation. Maybe our explorations will lead to vast new manipulations of nature like nuclear energy, but in the meantime they don’t fill up your gas tank or get you a girlfriend.

Literature and theology, however, have arguably failed to come to grasp with what existence is really like. Books and religion tend to emphasize the inner life more than the outer one, and the personal more than the cosmic. But if the meaning of life was hard to explain two thousand years ago, when the world was presumed flat and at the center of the universe, how much more so when we begin to grasp just how incredibly brief, small, and illusory life really is? We can’t even really grasp what is is, let alone make theological sense of it.

I’ve tried to refine in my head our literary raison d’etre using the insights that have come from microscope, telescope, supercollider and equation, without much progress. I’m not just as hapless as a philosophizing freshman in a dormitory, I’m a mole at an astronomy lecture.

Is science’s frontier so way out that it’s really becoming irrelevant to human understanding of ourselves? Will outer space ultimately provide insights into inner space that revolutionize writing, and will a 24^th Century Shakespeare plumb the soul and spirit with an understanding of outer space we’re just beginning to comprehend? Or are physicists leading us down a rathole of misunderstanding generated only by theoretical calculations on a whiteboard?

I do think these theories are incredibly cool. And that their radical overthrow of our understanding of reality is almost never, ever, mentioned on the evening news…or literature. What does the new physics say about us?

The Seattle 7, an energetic “service club” of Seattle-area authors who raise money for literacy, recently raised $10,000 through a day-long instructional program. I was one of several authors giving brief tips, mine on plotting. For what it’s worth, here’s some things aspiring writers might find useful:

I turned sixty a few days ago (same September 29 birthday as Admiral Horatio Nelson) and found myself neither as wise nor as wizened as I would have predicted when I was thirty.

To my surprise, the Big 6-0 is no big deal. Sure, physically I’ve slowed, though I actually have felt better the past few months than in years due to improvement in my rheumatoid arthritis and the drugs for it. Mentally, my consciousness feels little different than it did when I was in my 20s; once you hit adulthood your sense of self doesn’t change much.

Age is a state of mind. Sixty is the new fifty, partly because we live longer and partly because Social Security and Medicare are receding like rainbows as a result. When I quit teaching in June people congratulated me on my “retirement,” and I thought, ‘Are you kidding? I hope/fear to be in harness at my keyboard at 80, still trying to peck out a living.’

I regard myself as a fortunate hard worker, a blue-collar kid with modest expectations blessed with a surprisingly interesting life – with the best and worst developments in it often disturbingly contingent on good and bad luck. I think [...]]]>

I turned sixty a few days ago (same September 29 birthday as Admiral Horatio Nelson) and found myself neither as wise nor as wizened as I would have predicted when I was thirty.

To my surprise, the Big 6-0 is no big deal. Sure, physically I’ve slowed, though I actually have felt better the past few months than in years due to improvement in my rheumatoid arthritis and the drugs for it. Mentally, my consciousness feels little different than it did when I was in my 20s; once you hit adulthood your sense of self doesn’t change much.

Age is a state of mind. Sixty is the new fifty, partly because we live longer and partly because Social Security and Medicare are receding like rainbows as a result. When I quit teaching in June people congratulated me on my “retirement,” and I thought, ‘Are you kidding? I hope/fear to be in harness at my keyboard at 80, still trying to peck out a living.’

I regard myself as a fortunate hard worker, a blue-collar kid with modest expectations blessed with a surprisingly interesting life – with the best and worst developments in it often disturbingly contingent on good and bad luck. I think it was Lennon who said life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

I’m not one for birthday bashes, but this one was unusual because I spent the day before in meetings with book editors in Manhattan. Didn’t expect that when I was thirty, either. Books were what other, mysterious, people wrote.

I also didn’t expect book editors to be nice. In New York. Really.

The birthday itself was spent partly on an airplane flying back to Seattle, our takeoff delayed by lightning. (Nice of God to recognize my significance with a thunderstorm.) One sign of wisdom was an upgrade to business class, and another was the deliberate choice of some memorable celebratory events.

Birthday eve I saw a New York play in which atheist Sigmund Freud faced off with believer C.S. Lewis, which tickled my sense of mortality. The longer you live, the shorter life seems.

Birthday morning was a visit to the opulent art museum in the New York mansion of steel and coke magnate Henry Clay Frick. The sumptuous home was finished in the autumn on 1914, just as soldiers were settling into the trenches of World War I, and you could argue civilization has gone downhill ever since. The confident taste seems an age away from a Donald Trump.

And yet post-birthday was a visit to the Kurt Cobain and Nirvana exhibit at Seattle’s Experience Music Project, and you realize how art takes many forms and has been democratized since Frick’s day, when a timber town kid could become a rock star or a painting contractor’s son (me) could write books.

What seems important after the first six decades?

Family and friends, first. Great wife, great kids. And remember guys, “Happy wife, happy life.” Good relationships are hard work.

Got a lot of cool birthday greetings through Facebook. Another thing I didn’t expect at thirty.

Second, a sense of contribution, that you’re part of the solution instead of part of the problem. I guesstimate I’ve churned out maybe 4 million published words to date, and hope at least some have educated, entertained, or incited. I’ve realized, however, that problems aren’t solved, they’re worked on. As a society we take two steps forward, one step back, pause for breath, and pick the same fight all over again.

Third, experiences. Work as a journalist and author has given the opportunity to meet an astonishing number of interesting people in fascinating places. If only I could figure out what it means. Suggested epitaph: “What was that all about?”

Bringing up the rear is stuff. I like nice stuff as much as anybody, but it tends to break or go obsolete or get boring in ways people don’t. At this point in life, the stuff I really want to acquire is a sense of security (kind of a lost cause in 2011) and time, meaning the freedom to do what you want to do when you want to do it. That’s more about choice than piling up toys.

I think people are better, and the future brighter, than you’d guess from media coverage. We’ve made a lot of progress in my lifetime in civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and a sense of stewardship toward the planet. I also think we have a long ways to go. Take that greed thing…

So I’m afraid I’m going to need another six decades to fully straighten everything out.

Hope the guy who sent the lightning is listening.

On Saturday, September 17, I was flattered to be one of five individuals and one organization honored as a 2011 “environmental hero” by Resources for Sustainable Communities in Bellingham, WA.

As I pointed out when accepting the award, I take em where I can get em, but I’m not much of a hero. I’ve written about the environment as a journalist and author for decades, but that was writing about real heroes, not me. I’ve contributed to local environmental books, made speeches, and served on boards. But I know hundreds of people who “walk the talk” better than I do.

I drove our Prius to the ceremony, but that’s my wife’s car. I usually pilot our small SUV, a RAV4.

My fellow heroes, who are real ones, are tireless volunteer Marie Hitchman, energy conservation leader John Davies, environmental educator Robyn de Pre, the late activist Gerald Larson, and the Bellingham Food Bank.

Still, it’s an opportunity to comment on an abiding interest. The keynote speaker was Denis Hayes of Seattle’s Bullitt Foundation, the first national coordinator of Earth Day way back in 1970. He made two good points. First, we’re in deep doo-doo – world population is seven times what it was in Napoleon’s [...]]]>

On Saturday, September 17, I was flattered to be one of five individuals and one organization honored as a 2011 “environmental hero” by Resources for Sustainable Communities in Bellingham, WA.

As I pointed out when accepting the award, I take em where I can get em, but I’m not much of a hero. I’ve written about the environment as a journalist and author for decades, but that was writing about real heroes, not me. I’ve contributed to local environmental books, made speeches, and served on boards. But I know hundreds of people who “walk the talk” better than I do.

I drove our Prius to the ceremony, but that’s my wife’s car. I usually pilot our small SUV, a RAV4.

My fellow heroes, who are real ones, are tireless volunteer Marie Hitchman, energy conservation leader John Davies, environmental educator Robyn de Pre, the late activist Gerald Larson, and the Bellingham Food Bank.

Still, it’s an opportunity to comment on an abiding interest. The keynote speaker was Denis Hayes of Seattle’s Bullitt Foundation, the first national coordinator of Earth Day way back in 1970. He made two good points. First, we’re in deep doo-doo – world population is seven times what it was in Napoleon’s day, the UN just upped its estimates of expected population growth, climate change is rattling the weather, and the national conversation is one of denying science and resisting regulation.

Second, Denis and I both see hope. One reason is that despair isn’t much of a rallying cry, and pessimism is not a strategy. Not only can things improve, they have to, or we’re screwed.

Another is that a lot of good is happening along with bad. The Bullitt Foundation itself is building a state-of-the-art zero consumption headquarters illustrating the technological innovation that’s coming in fits and starts to the world. (Today’s news story irony: Chinese protesting the pollution from a solar panel plant!)

Another example is Resources itself, a remarkable story. It started in Bellingham in the early 1980s. When the city wouldn’t consider curbside recycling a group of neighbors started their own and brought it into the schools until the city took it over in 1989.

And in 1993, Carl Weimer and remodeling contractor Carl Odom started the Re Store, which takes old windows, doors, fixtures, and lumber, and resells them instead of sending them to landfills. The Bellingham store was followed by one in Seattle, an example of sustainability that could inspire a nation.

All this has evolved into an organization, now overseen by Bob Ferris, that does everything from watch-dogging the cleanliness of Bellingham Bay to protesting a proposed port terminal to ship Wyoming coal to China, after railroading it through every major city in western Washington – an idea I consider one of the dumbest I’ve heard in a long time. (Our governor, a former director of the state Department of Ecology, supports it. Yikes!)

My biggest hope comes from working (until recently) with college students on a quarterly environmental magazine called The Planet. The kids I met were smart, inspiring, committed, and serious. Judging from them, the future is in good shape.

As a writer, I lead a somewhat schizophrenic life. Though some of my novels have an environmental influence here and there, they are primarily historical adventures that draw readers from all over the political spectrum. Many of my fiction readers would have no interest in my non-fiction environmental writing, and vice versa. And rightly so.

But I feel blessed to do both. My life has been immeasurably enriched by going to beautiful places and meeting dedicated people while writing about the environment. I also like to think about stuff other than pollution and greenhouse gases at times, be it Nazis or Napoleon Bonaparte. Some people relax with football; I gravitate towards history, science, and fiction. My novels provide terrific balance, and what I learn doing them improves my environmental writing, and vice versa.

I hope to give voice to environmental ideas for a long time to come; right now I’m a gadfly protesting a proposed water bottling plant in my own city of Anacortes.

But what’s really exciting is when someone reads something I’ve written and runs with it. There are so many heroes! If you’re curious about Resources for Sustainable Communities, the website is: http://www.re-sources.org/home.

On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, my family did our best to celebrate.

It was my mother’s 72nd birthday and she’d just moved near us after the death of my stepfather in Arizona. So we went to a restaurant as planned, and sat there in surreal, gloomy isolation, the only customers in the place.

She’s 82 today. We took her out to dinner again, but you can bet it was on Friday the 9th this year.

That first birthday bash wasn’t the only miscalculation I made. I initially believed Colin Powell’s pitch on weapons of mass destruction and supported the most boneheaded war in American history.

Oops. I forgot that “the first casualty in war is truth.” (See the initial reports on Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc.)

It’s been a rough decade or, I’d guesstimate, a rough 13 years. There was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment fiasco, the dot.com collapse, the Bush-Gore election imbroglio, 9-11 and its economic aftershock, two wars, the housing bubble and bank collapse, ineffectual tax cuts, disastrous deficit spending, Hurricane Katrina, a blitz of blizzard-tornado-drought-flood this year (accompanied by climate change denial, of course), and completely dysfunctional politics.

There was even an East Coast earthquake, for crying out loud. And a [...]]]>

On the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, my family did our best to celebrate.

It was my mother’s 72^nd birthday and she’d just moved near us after the death of my stepfather in Arizona. So we went to a restaurant as planned, and sat there in surreal, gloomy isolation, the only customers in the place.

She’s 82 today. We took her out to dinner again, but you can bet it was on Friday the 9^th this year.

That first birthday bash wasn’t the only miscalculation I made. I initially believed Colin Powell’s pitch on weapons of mass destruction and supported the most boneheaded war in American history.

Oops. I forgot that “the first casualty in war is truth.” (See the initial reports on Jessica Lynch, Pat Tillman, etc.)

It’s been a rough decade or, I’d guesstimate, a rough 13 years. There was the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and impeachment fiasco, the dot.com collapse, the Bush-Gore election imbroglio, 9-11 and its economic aftershock, two wars, the housing bubble and bank collapse, ineffectual tax cuts, disastrous deficit spending, Hurricane Katrina, a blitz of blizzard-tornado-drought-flood this year (accompanied by climate change denial, of course), and completely dysfunctional politics.

There was even an East Coast earthquake, for crying out loud. And a truly disastrous one in Japan.

Why did Bush and the Republicans insist on tax cuts amid a second war? Why did Obama and the Democrats spend their energy on health reform when millions were going unemployed? Why can neither party begin the more pressing things needing doing: revision of a ridiculously unfair tax code, restoring solvency and confidence in Social Security and Medicare, repairing our own infrastructure instead of those overseas like Afghanistan, and making us more competitive by improving schools?

As a journalist I know we in the media are obsessed with anniversaries, the gloomier the better: Pearl Harbor was the previous favorite. I’ve read with interest much of the 9/11 coverage, including an issue of the New Yorker depressing enough to promote suicide. The editorial meetings must have been festooned in black crepe.

Most retrospectives have been a litany of a decade of mistakes, reminding me of the Spanish Empire’s squandering of its New World gold and silver on pointless adventures instead of investment at home.

We’re in such desperate need for a reset that maybe my family’s abortive birthday fest ten years ago wasn’t entirely wrongheaded. We’re stuck in a malaise that reminds me of the late 1970s, with no Gipper in sight.

Personally, I’ve had a pretty good decade. Since 9/11 I’ve had the fortune to publish nine books and contribute to several more, teach and advise a student magazine at the college level, welcome four grandchildren to the world, write journalism, and travel widely, including to Israel, Jordan, and Egypt for book research.

I haven’t felt very terrorized. Most Muslims are amazingly friendly and generous, I learned. But Israeli airport security has an intelligence that puts our dumb, surly, TSA approach to shame.

I’ve had the advantage of living 3,000 miles from the twin towers. My book agent in 2001 was one of countless New Yorkers truly traumatized in a way I couldn’t really comprehend. That Manhattan stress disorder continues to influence coverage today.

It’s great to learn from mistakes, but I wish our anniversaries could occasionally be a little more upbeat. Here’s some I bet you can’t guess: October 19, April 9, May 8, September 2, August 18, July 2.

They are, in order, the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown, effectively winning the American Revolution, the surrender of Lee to Grant, ending the worst war in American history, ratification in Berlin of the Nazi surrender, signing of the Japanese surrender ending World War II, ratification of the 19^th Amendment giving women the vote, signing of the Civil Rights Act.

But that’s not how Americans remember.

Nov. 11, Veteran’s Day? End of World War I. Most of my college students didn’t know the holiday had any connection to a good day in history.

My mother’s birthday will always feel a little sad, I’m afraid, because of the brutal national tragedy. But I also hope we can mourn, declare victory, and move on from 9/11 to fix our own country.

Is Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore the bookstore of the future?

Certainly owner Barbara Peters is one of the industry’s most innovative thinkers in our Brave New Scary World of e-books, Internet competitors like Amazon, superstore chains like Barnes & Noble, and speculation about whether the printed book will survive at all.

Poisoned Pen (www.poisonedpen.com) is a smart-looking independent bookstore with wood floors and brick walls in a suburb of Phoenix, and has carved a niche since 1989 by offering an expert selection of thrillers and mysteries. I appeared there recently with another author, Max Collins (“Road to Perdition,” etc.) and his collaborator on mystery “cozies” with an antique theme, his wife Barbara.

Afterward the other Barbara, Ms. Peters, explained how she’s adapting to tumult in the industry.

First is strong Internet promotion with a sophisticated bookstore website (regularly updated) and webcasts of author presentations. http://poisonedfiction.blogspot.com/p/webcasts.html is the webcast page. There’s an electronic newsletter, links to book clubs, online sales, and more.

Second is the regular hosting of author events that have made Poisoned Pen a regular stop for nationally-known mystery and thriller writers. She’s turned out a thousand people for those at the top of the field. Barbara builds on this with [...]]]>

Is Scottsdale’s Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore the bookstore of the future?

Certainly owner Barbara Peters is one of the industry’s most innovative thinkers in our Brave New Scary World of e-books, Internet competitors like Amazon, superstore chains like Barnes & Noble, and speculation about whether the printed book will survive at all.

Poisoned Pen (www.poisonedpen.com) is a smart-looking independent bookstore with wood floors and brick walls in a suburb of Phoenix, and has carved a niche since 1989 by offering an expert selection of thrillers and mysteries. I appeared there recently with another author, Max Collins (“Road to Perdition,” etc.) and his collaborator on mystery “cozies” with an antique theme, his wife Barbara.

Afterward the other Barbara, Ms. Peters, explained how she’s adapting to tumult in the industry.

First is strong Internet promotion with a sophisticated bookstore website (regularly updated) and webcasts of author presentations. http://poisonedfiction.blogspot.com/p/webcasts.html is the webcast page. There’s an electronic newsletter, links to book clubs, online sales, and more.

Second is the regular hosting of author events that have made Poisoned Pen a regular stop for nationally-known mystery and thriller writers. She’s turned out a thousand people for those at the top of the field. Barbara builds on this with extensive networking at writing conferences and partners with Lesa Holstein at Glendale’s Velma Teague Library to “share” visiting authors.

Third is creation with her husband Robert Rosenwald of Poisoned Pen Press, putting the couple in the publishing business and letting them sell e-books of their own titles. Bob is the boss of the Press, Barbara of the bookstore, and they market both paper and electronic copies.

Fourth is development of global sales of autographed books. I signed many more copies of “Blood of the Reich” than will be sold over the counter at Poisoned Pen, but the couple have developed an extensive network buyers and collectors from around the world who order autographed copies. Most of Barbara’s sales are from the backroom, not the front.

At the same time the store has reduced its shelved inventory because it’s expensive to stock books and e-readers are cutting into paper sales. The physical store has become a doorway to events, book clubs, and Internet community as well as a place to buy good ol’ paper books.

It’s not a get-rich strategy but it is proving to be a survival scheme in a tumultuous industry that saw Borders recently declare bankruptcy. All authors have a stake in survival of bookstores, and so anything that works is something to cheer.

In my area of Northwest Washington State, we’ve had the usual worrisome trend of bookstores disappearing and not being replaced. Those thriving make a strong connection to their community, like Poisoned Pen.

Village Books in Bellingham (www.villagebooks.com) has become an anchor in what has literally been a 40-year-long revival of the Fairhaven neighborhood (I wrote about early efforts as a young reporter back in 1974) and survives with a coffee bar upstairs, restaurant adjacent, Hallmark-like paper company next door, and more than 200 annual events. Owners Chuck and Dee Robinson are some of the brightest, hardest-working entrepreneurs I know.

Watermark Books (http://watermarkbookcompany.blogspot.com) in my own town of Anacortes stays intelligently small and cozy, with owner Patti Pattee offering a particularly smart selection of general books and a we-aim-to-please ordering service. They host events in the store and library.

Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, a Seattle suburb, (www.thirdplacebooks.com) has worked with developer Ron Sher to make itself a “third place” gathering center (after home and work) with food court, author visits, and a big selection of new and used books..

And so on.

Not all the industry news is grim. The e-reader may be broadening overall readership while lowering costs; if it gets more people to read everyone ultimately benefits. Through Amazon, I’ve been able to republish three of my early novels, Ice Reich, Getting Back, and Dark Winter, at a deliberate introductory price of $2.99 to invite readers to my work, and appreciate the chance for resurrection. Sales grow every month.

Amazon employment – a new kind of “bookstore employee” – has helped drive a real estate renaissance in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle.

Many of us will continue to buy paper books for their convenience and feel.

But bookstores and publishers struggle with overhead costs, and the hunt is on for business strategies that make sense in an e-reader world. What reading will look like in ten years is anyone’s guess, but smart businesswomen like Peters are showing a way.