I am SO GLAD I watched  this 1:45 minute video. 

1.  What a bargain!
   
2.   As customers press the buttons to purchase, they learn just a little bit about the human faces and global realities behind “cheap.” Such as, behind cheap tee-shirts, children working 16 hour days for pennies per hour.
   
3. What happens next?....hmm, find out!
   

The header picture above is Maud Laurent of Ouanaminthe, Haiti. She is 24 years old and has been sewing pant pockets for the past five years. She says: “I had to drop out of school to make money but hope to go back some day and study computer science... Picture my smile when you see ‘Made in Haiti.’ My friends and I worked hard to make those pants.” (more on Maud's story here)


Fashion fact: one in six people around the world work in the clothing industry.

The international mega-corporations selling us our clothing literally do not know who makes the clothing—darn, shucks, that’s why they have no liability when a building collapses, killing a thousand-plus workers. (For example Rana Plaza factory, Bangladesh, 2013: over 3600 garment workers killed or injured in one incident.)

Fair Trade pioneers like Carry Somers founded Fashion Revolution to demand traceability and transparency in the production of our clothing. This is as basic as demanding an ingredient label on our food.

Fashion Revolution says, let’s ask the question: #WhoMadeMyClothes?

Want to learn more? Visit fashionrevolution.org.

Want to learn more and LAUGH? Here's John Oliver on why trendy clothes are cheaper than ever.

The Sixth Extinction has been staring me in the face for a long time. The book by that title also. 

Finally, driving to Whidbey Island to reconnect with writer friends (xo Ana Maria Spagna, Janet Buttenweiser, Deborah Nedelman, Scott Driscoll, Carla Sameth, Roz Ray, Nancy Rawles, Tess Gallagher, Carmen Bernier-Grand, Ryan Van Meter, and many many more), I popped in the audiobook of Elizabeth Kolbert’s THE SIXTH EXTINCTION  as I headed up Stevens Pass. And was transfixed for the rest of the drive.

Another big surprise: it took humans a long, long time to arrive at the concept of extinction, to imagine that any of God’s creatures could cease forever to exist. The USA is older than the first tentative suggestion of extinction by French naturalist Cuvier. 

Miles of rich fertile land is disappearing while residents watch in stunned disbelief.

Oil companies dredged canals to make operations cheaper, and the Corp of Engineers built levees to protect residents from floods. Add in wells, rising sea level, and more and you have what some are calling “one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history.” 2,000 square miles have already been wiped off the map, turned to open water in just 80 years. Within our children’s lifetime, most of the “boot” of Louisiana could disappear underwater, the state sheared off east to west just below Baton Rouge.

Is there good news? Yes. A restoration plan has been drafted to reconnect the delta with its river, which might begin to build land at the rate it’s being lost.

What’s the political and economic likelihood of the plan being implemented? Learn more in this grist.org article by Marshall, Jacobs and Shaw.

Thank you Propublica.org, grist.org, The Lens, Knapp+Lucia Photography, Bob Marshall, Al Shaw, Brian Jacobs, Della Hasselle, Ellis Lucia, Edmund D. Fountain and others for your work on this issue.

“Poets in the Park” conjures fresh air, poetry as play, and words wafting over flower beds.

 In Anderson Park, haiku blossomed on sticks, children hoola-hooped and teeter-tottered, and vendors sat at folding tables covered with poetry. Poets and enthusiasts took classes, nibbled mango and strawberries, and sat, quietly, imbibing a feast of words. Offerings included a teen stage, cowboy poets, WA State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen, and talks on “Being a Daily Poet” and on “Letting Your Muse Find You.” 

I was honored to read onstage with a fun and lively group: Carolyne Wright, Mary Hake, Leonie Mikele, Samantha Updegrave and myself represented the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts. Mary’s poems looked out through the eyes of her special-needs children; Samantha rocked and rapped her strong words; Leonie’s words fluttered, dived and took flight; and Carolyne, naturally, spoke with a touch of Eulene.

Thanks Redmond! Here’s to more such events that bring poetry outside, next to ice-cream trucks, playgrounds and drinking fountains. Here’s to demystifying poetry, and plunking it prosaically onto shady barefoot grass. Redmond, we love you, even if we’ll fight ya for that nickname. Thanks Michael Dylan Welch, thanks RASP, thanks everyone who put in time and effort to plop poetry down where it seems as natural and fun as...riding a bike.

I’m just home from an intimate bright gem of a writer’s conference—non-fiction only: The River Teeth Conference. I never imagined I could learn so much, and come to care about so many people, in just a few days. The presenters were top-notch, and writers of every level were friendly, approachable, and fascinating. 

Treat yourself to River Teeth Journal. They seek out stories by “authors who understand their responsibility to facts as well as their commitment to literary style, all the while understanding, with Tobias Wolff, that ‘memory has its own story to tell.’”

River Teeth also sponsors one of the most competitive literary nonfiction book contests in the nation, judged this year by Cheryl Strayed (Wild, Tiny Beautiful Things). The winner will receive $1,000 and publication by the UNM Press.  NILA’s brilliant and wonderful Ana Maria Spagna is a previous River Teeth finalist.

The best thing that happened for me at the conference was an erasure. I was not very conscious of some other baggage I lugged to the conference: a composite character I have met too often, who looks up from my manuscript and says: “I lose interest when I hit the sciency stuff.” At River Teeth, I found my readers—or at least reader—with incontestable credentials. He told me: “the sciency stuff is where you soar.” And I have been soaring ever since.

A huge shout-out: thank you, A Book For All Seasons (Leavenworth’s indie bookstore), and thank you, Write on the River organizers, for letting me take part in this year’s conference.

When the balsamroot sunflowers are at their peak, and mothers everywhere are getting breakfast in bed, then we know Write On the River is ‘write’ around the corner.

The 2014 line-up of presenters was outstanding, and there were so many I was sorry to miss, including Arlene Kim (What Have You Done to Our Ears To Make Us Hear Echos?) and Peter Stark (Astoria).

On the plus side, all three presenters I did catch were brilliant: Scott Driscoll (Better You Go Home), Craig English (Anvil of Navarre), and Wendy Call.

Many of you may already know Wendy Call’s Telling True Stories, pearls of wisdom from over 50 outstanding nonfiction writers. I had seen it on the bookshelf, and always passed over it, thinking, ah, yawn, there’s an “ought to.” You know, like doing sit-ups in the morning. But pas du tout, my friends, not at all! Now that I’ve actually opened it, I discover: it’s like that perfect shot of java. Zingy and to the point. A six-minute sip will leave you energized, focused, and convinced that writing actually matters.

I’m also really looking forward to diving into No Word For Welcome, Wendy’s book about small Mexican villages taking on global economic forces. Wendy says, “I have fashioned my map of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in the form of a book.” And she quotes Andrés Henestrosa: “It’s small, it fits in the palm of the hand, it doesn’t weigh heavily on the shoulders, yet it overflows the heart.”