Visiting Whidbey Island

SPU’s Camp Casey

Pretty soon, the SPU MFA will have its first post-pandemic residency at Camp Casey on Whidbey Island, which means a band of ink-stained scribblers is about to approach that blessed ground for the first time. Visiting new places can be tricky, so I thought I, who have had the good fortune to spend a good bit of time there, might offer some tips, that your joy may be complete. Here then are some things you won’t want to miss.

Madrona Supply

This cute little gift shop is right off the ferry, and I mean you’ll disembark, drive for less than one minute, and see this place on your right. Part of you will want to press on, having just made landfall; another part of you will say I’ll hit it on the way back off the island, wanting to get to Casey as quickly as possible, but you won't! This is the chance to stop and see it; on the way out, you’ll be too concerned about making the ferry time to stop in. That would be a shame because there’s some really unique local crafts here.

Looking out at Admiralty Bay

Langley

Langley is the other adorable beachfront town on Whidbey and is worth a stop. Don’t take the direct route from the ferry, but save the turn till you hit Bayview Road. That will bring you past Whidbey Doughnuts (which also makes good breakfast sandwiches) near a whole complex of buildings that are fun and worth exploring including one dedicated to Shakespeare paraphernalia. But this still isn’t Langley; we’re just on the way! The shops in the town proper keep changing, and it’ll be obvious what to see when you get there, but make sure to check out the Whale Museum and Langley Kitchen which has the best food on the island. Think colorful organic salads, high-end soups and sandwiches, and a good wine selection.

On the Road

Next you’ll probably make your way to Camp Casey, but on the way you might be tempted to stop at Whidbey Ice Cream (amazing concoctions), which is right by Rocket Taco (the best of that genre in WA), and Whidbey Distillery (award-winning blackberry liquors, etc). All of these would be profitable diversions.

Sebastian on the beach at Casey

Coupeville

This is probably a trip best left for after you’ve gotten to Casey and dropped off your things. It’s the closest town to where we’ll be staying and it features a lovely bookstore, a solid eatery Front Street Grill (weirdly-great burgers here and clam chowder) and plenty of cute gift shops. Insider tip: you may be tempted to buy memorabilia from the gift shop at the end of the pier. Do not do this. It’s cheaply-made overseas and only exists for tricking tourists. The shops along the high-street, or at the land-side of the pier are legit. One place you may miss unless you are looking for it: Red Hen Bakery. The gem of the island, for me. I love everything they do. No place to sit down, so prepare for a picnic. Bonus: the toy shop also has a great vintage-style candy selection.

Port Townsend

One of the best things about Whidbey is how easy it is to get to Port Townsend, which is my favorite place in Washington state. This is what I would do on your free day. There’s a walk-on ferry right near campus and it drops you off right in the action. Once you get there, it’s obvious where to go: beautiful shops, eateries, movie theaters, abound. Make sure to stop in at William James Booksellers, my pick for best bookshop in the state. Also, make sure your walk along Water Street takes you all the way down to the Wooden Boat Foundation where you can see restorations taking place and get a good coffee and nautical gifts besides. Those prepared to go a little further afield may wish to visit the beautiful publishing house Copper Canyon Press, nearby.

Wild deer at the barracks

On the Way Out

Lastly, those who have time and the transport option may wish to drive off the island rather than ferry back if only to stop by Deception Pass. The state park is immense and beautiful, with a nice display from the Conservation Corps, but even just stopping roadside and walking across the bridge is worth it. Hang onto your hat!

I hope you all enjoy your time at Casey, but make sure to enjoy the journey as well. See you soon!

A Few from England

This summer it was my joy and duty to take undergraduates around England under the auspices of the C.S. Lewis Global Seminar through SPU. We spent about 5 days in Oxford, 5 in London, and 5 in Cambridge, seeing the relevant bits and reading through fiction and essays. Along the way, we learned from Kim Gilnett, long of The Kilns, Lewis’ home, Michael Ward, author of Planet Narnia, among others, Adrian Wood, sexton of Lewis’ parish Holy Trinity, Aidan Mackay, chair of the G.K. Chesterton society, and from the good people at the Gillian Lynne Theater’s production of The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The students were game, conversations rich, and sites as rewarding as they could be. A blessed time, in short. I brought my camera this time, so I could share with you some of the highlights.

Road Trip 2020

The Slow Road

Down the Coast in Corona-tide

“Home drive. High beams shearing the bromegrass,
blackcaps, brambles by the roadside;
red stems siphon frozen ground
grown soft, a bruise beneath the smooth suede
winter peach that rolls across
the dashboard.”

— Richard Kenney, "Driving Sleeping People"

Cliff-side, OR

AFTER ALL THE STAYING INDOORS THAT EVERYONE’S DONE we just had to get out. Our family had quarantined with the best of them, but our two highly-energetic children were exploding in the house, and we thought, if we’re just awaiting the apocalypse anyway, we might as well do it poolside. By driving to Arizona, we encountered many fewer people than we would have in the course of our normal routines here in the middle of a big city. There, people stay inside in summer anyway, moving from pool, to grill, to television, which seemed better than cursing and muttering that all the shops in Seattle were closed, and the parks, and libraries. Our Lucca had been waiting all year to swim in her grandparent’s pool, so with nothing on the schedules, we set out.

I used to make the WA > AZ drive a lot as a kid, when my family lived in Lake Stevens and my grandmother in Scottsdale, but then, we balled through as quickly as we could on the I-5; my only memories of those trips were the orange groves in AZ that signaled we were close and the funny place names on the map I consulted: Yelm, Eureka, Blythe. Our kids are too little to stay strapped in to a seat all day, so we took it slow and opted for the more scenic road.

The children playing, Cannon Beach, OR

We stopped at the capital in Olympia to stretch, but the first days’ goal was to make Astoria for dinner and then Seaside for sleep. The former I’d never seen, but was eager to after having read a history of the city a while back. I love every bit of Washington, but my does Oregon have us beat when it comes to beaches. I was not at all expecting such light, such shapes, such arrangements of space.

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We did touristy things: like paying to see concrete dinosaurs from the 1950’s, but also playing on the sand dunes, hiking in the redwoods, but those things are draws for a reason; they give us the world afresh. They give us ourselves in our proper size.

We arrived in Arizona a little exhausted after 5 days on the road, but we were full of rich encounters that made things seem, if not normal, at least worth the effort. Plus, it was nice to get my camera out again, as I also have recently pulled out again my guitar after so long with so little use. If I was impressed with the natural beauty of the West as always, I was this time struck over and again at the ingenuity required to let us see it: the bridges, roadways, and all of the other invisible, or often-taken-for-granted, infrastructure, accomplishments so great they seem, to me anyway, almost as magnificent as the terrain through which they pass.

Canyon near Navajo Bridge, AZ

Mockingbird NYC Takeaways

This spring, I was invited to the Mockingbird NYC conference to read poems from my book, Phases. The lineup of speakers was impressive and I was looking forward to reconnecting with my old friend Alan Jacobs, who was headlining. Plus, my friend Jimmy had just moved from London to Manhattan to start this church. I couldn't miss it, so I flew across the country and met some of the finest folks around, while eating well and learning deeply.  

There's a lot that I'll remember from the event--the energy in Manhattan is always electrifying, if a bit overwhelming at times-- but here's some takeaways, for those who couldn't make it. 

1. they recorded my poetry reading. This was a well-attended but intimate affair, featuring lots of questions from the audience. You can listen to the whole thing here.

2. Timothy Blackmon, the chaplain at Wheaton College is a force of nature: incredibly informed and eloquent. He talked to us about a Dutch theologian named Kohlbrugge and how "the flesh fondly dreams of progress." How true.

3. Actually, I was impressed right from the start with the opening lecture from RJ Heijman, who was trying to address modern divisiveness. He noted how strange it is that we insist now not only on being right, but on being 100% right, an admittedly high standard, and how one reason we seek out enemies is because it creates an easy unity (the holy/the in-group/the woke). This is what we really want: to be on the right team.

4. Jamin Warren is a gaming guy, so I, whose interest in and experience of video gaming peaked at Super Mario Bros. 3 lacked some background for his talk, but it was so informative still; really, the talk all week that I keep thinking about the most. He talked about "Man-the-Player" or homo ludens, as an essential construction. Every human society has had games, the "magic circle that turns a park into a field wherein all the normal rules of life are suspended (viz. normally, you don't get to tackle anyone). That was interesting enough, and reminded me of G.K. Chesterton's attempt to isolate the unique-to-mankind in The Everlasting Man, but then Warren connected the game-theory to religious ritual. Bread which is normal bread becomes something extra, something different in this space because of these rules/words. He said that one of the attractions of gaming is that they are worlds wherein the consequences make sense. If you press A, X happens; in life, oddly, sometimes you eat healthy and still get a stroke. All this reminded me of poetry. There, we're using words--those pedestrian tools--but in a different way; there, the normal rules are suspended and new games are possible. Really, anything is, so long as the rules established for the game/poem are consistent. Anyway, it was meaty stuff and I'm looking forward to returning to these thoughts.

5. Speaking of expanding my horizons, I attended a talk by Alyssa Wilkinson, the film critic. Those who know me know that I see about one film per year, believing the genre to be bankrupt. So I wasn't there to hear her talk about movies, but rather about the nature of criticism, which she writes at a pretty high level. She made the case that we should see movies in theaters because the screen dwarfs you, which is a necessary and useful humbling, and so you can see it with people who are having the same, but different experiences.

6. Chad Bird then gave a sermon that was so powerfully poetic that I forgot to take notes. In fact, I forgot to breathe for much of it.

7. Daniel Emery Price brought the brimstone. I like my preachers with brass knuckles and Price brought them out--though in service of broad grace--with tattoos to match. He convicted us about separatism, making the argument that we're surrounded with sinners, even in church, as a sign of grace; "lest you start believing you aren't one of them." I loved his talk and he was thoroughly decent in conversation afterward.

8. Jacobs' talk was great (you can read the notes for it on his blog) and he and I had an enlivening and productive talk at lunch following the conference.

9. This book, from which these ladies hilariously read.

If there will be a Mockingbird conference near you, or near and airport that's near you, I heartily recommend seeking these people out. To say it was edifying doesn't begin to capture it. 

Oh yes, and I took some pictures:

Places: Versailles

As with nearly every other spot on the ever expanding tourist map, Versailles is a place no longer to be beheld, still less to be awed by, or disgusted by–depending on the strength go one’s constitution, and the romance attached to her sense of history–but a place to be captured, recorded, digitized, and filed: less under the heading I was here, than under veni vidi, vici. 

It is not a matter of course, though perhaps it is not surprising to hear the Versailles defies such capture, if not by its opulence, which can be rendered through a pictorial study of it’s minutiae, but by its sheer size.  Even 1300 frames of similarly-proportioned gilt chambers do not convey the monstrosity, the monotony even, of winding through its miles of royal residence. Still, ten million visitors every year try, and if the mob on the day of my visit is indicative, 95% do not remove their eyes from the viewfinders of their handheld recording devices.  

Versailles is an interesting place because for all its attempts at intimidation–it was a state headquarters designed in large part to reign in rogue nobles–it is surprisingly un-monumental.  For all its marble and gold, it is surprisingly homey; cute even.  Given all this, Bernard Venet is a pretty smart choice as this year’s artist-in-residence to display on the grounds.  Unlike the Jeff Koons exhibit last year, which was, as always, an awful, tacky, and wierd-ly perfect sprinkling of the proverbial confettii (life is a cabaret!), Venet’s work seeks first to understand and then to participant in that enormity.  

Aesthetic intimidation isn’t much a tactic the modern mind is overwhelmed by anymore…seeing the Sun-king on a gold horse at the entry of the gates feels kind of royal, but not exactly impressive, still less god-like, or sublime.  Venet has gone about his project in a smart way then, by re-interpreting the scale of Versailles in standards that still provoke: if 1300 rooms in a row doesn’t make the jaw drop, 1300 tons of unfinished steel still can.  A rusted arch large enough to cradle a suburban house says something about scale that was once conveyed by two enclosed stories in stone.  In the age of the discount skyscraper, no one thinks “wow!” when confronted with the spectacle of a three story building, no matter how much gold tops the fence without, but set in the lens of Venet’s concentric arches, piled up in corners of the gardens like Valhallan horseshoes, one shivers with the original excess thinking at once, all that weight, all that waste, what’s the point and wow, which is what you’re supposed to have been saying all along.