Writer's Northwest Handbook: The Market Guide to the Pacific Northwest ed. by Linny Stovall and Dennis Stovall (review)

Book Reviews109 provide judiciously quoted springboards for Scott's elegantly urbane explications . His nuanced qualifications and fondness for exact words—native, foreign , and technical—seem at times affected or ultra-fastidious, but they do, in fact, stave off distortions and the vulgar utility of baggy terms like "pantheism ," "primitivism," "animism," and "mysticism." The author's method of bookmaking here results in inevitable redundancy of the "(as noted elsewhere )" variety, but only a grubbing reviewer would feel compelled to read a gatherum like this straight through. Indeed, any reader truly touched by the poetry of the moderns and by the prose of this interpreter might well want to rush outdoors from time to time and shout with Walter Savage Landor: "Good God, the violets!" (105). MARTIN BUCCO Colorado State University LINNY STOVALL and DENNIS STOVALL, eds. Writer's Northwest Handbook: The Market Guide to the Pacific Northwest. 5th ed. Hillsboro, Oregon: Blue Heron Publishing, Inc., 1993. 226 p. Worthwestern writers fall into lots of categories. But they are all members of a not-so-secret society, the Audience Shoppers Society. Some may gather under the luminous stenographer's moon. Some may gather under the striking calligrapher's moon, a fine moon as thin as a stroke from a single hair, assembling in such sundry places as Fish Trap, Grimes Creek, Hellgate, Coos Head, En'Owkin, or Kitsap to take notes, to test their aesthetics and charm, and to learn the secret ways of the great Audience Catchers Society—the best sellers, the famous. But significantly, the Audience Shoppers Society is an oxymoronic society ofindividuals who seldom camp together, whose paths cross in ways unrecognizable to the bands of Newtonians among whom they live and work. They are held together by invisible quanta—night energy, dreams. Writing is like dreaming, it's done alone. (And if I may mix my metaphors), it's like the light of the moon, a reflection from another, deeper source. Writers write from private realities—peerless, each with her or his own medicine bundle: a favorite pencil, a pad of Richard Hugo's recommended green paper, a suitable handbook. For writers in the Northwest and for those who seek readers in the Northwest, the Writer's Northwest Handbook should be read and placed among their magical paraphernalia. It is, of course, reminiscent of other handbooks, such as the Writer's Market and Magazine Writer's Nonfiction Guidelines. It smacks of these magazines, too: Writer's Digest, and Poets & Writers. But the Writer's Northwest Handbook is more. It is an introduction to the literary life in the Northwest. From reading it, and it is eminently readable, writers (land developers too) can acquire more than names and addresses. 110Rocky Mountain Review They can accumulate a sense of what it is to be a Northwestern writer. For this, there is much encouragement throughout the book. And they can assess , even assay, the issues that motive Northwestern readers. In "Section I: Voices and Visions," Benjamin Hoff, William Kittredge, and Gloria Bird share literary experiences and theories. There are testimonials by others, too, who relate dreams-come-true or becoming-true. However, what could be wretched reading, isn't. The interviewers and writers reach for the issues that please and distress them—issues that are detonated by scrutiny. Consider David James Duncan's "Toxins in the Mother Tongue: Toward the Clean-up of a Poisoned Spiritual Lexicon": "Every time we abandon a word or concept we once valued due to disgust with the way it's been abused, we are granting victory to its abusers and losing, for ourselves, its positive as well as negative potential." Writers are what they write as they reflect the energies of experience. To do this requires more than English E or Politically Correct Language; it requires an integrated lexicon. "Section I" is wholesome victuals for writers shopping for an audience. It feeds and motivates the muse, and perhaps the Philistine as well. The Philistine, however, is better fed by "Section II: Writing Tips." "Writing Tips" is twenty-five pages of how-to and how-not-to. There are several audience-sensitive essays from which the shopper can glean and intuit do's and don'ts...