□ "We Came to Explore the Moon and Discovered the Earth." □□ Two evenings that cracked something open, Earth Day reflections, and Indie Bookstore Day is just around the corner. □
Terry Tempest Williams joined us for a special evening presentation of her new book The Glorians.
Apparently I like to wear this shirt (unplanned...see below) when I am around TTW!
Dear friends,
This letter has been a long time coming — not for lack of things to say, but because the world has been moving so fast that I couldn't find the stillness to say them. You know what I mean. The news cycle has been relentless in a way that makes it genuinely hard to know where to put your attention, or your grief, or your outrage. And yet, right in the middle of all of that — in the very weeks when closing down felt like the only reasonable response — something in me cracked open instead.
It came, as it often does here, through books and the people who write them, and through the particular kind of community that forms when people who love the written word choose to show up together in the same room. Two author events, barely a week apart. Two women whose work insists on paying attention — both of them doing, from their own corners of the world, exactly what this moment seems to require.
The first was April 2nd, when we had the honor of hosting Anna Odessa Linzer for the launch of her new memoir Writing Home. This event carried particular weight for me because of the family connections between us — Annie's son Eli and my younger brother Joey grew up together, best friends since their time at Suquamish Elementary School, and longtime collaborators in art and mischiefmaking. Tragically, Joey passed away twelve years ago this May.
When Annie told me he had a place in this book, I knew it was coming. What I wasn't prepared for was seeing his name in print — not just once, but woven throughout the pages. There is something about seeing your deceased younger brother's name on a page — held there with tenderness by someone who loved him too — that both breaks something within you open and, inevitably, sets another wave of grief in motion.
Writing Home is a vulnerable book — an honest account of loss and betrayal and the grief that doesn't resolve so much as it changes shape. I read it on my morning dog walks throughout early March, book in one hand, leash in the other, and it came to me the way birdsong does at the turn of winter into spring: unexpected, clarifying, exactly what you didn't know you needed. Once inside it, the experience is something else — moss-laden, slow, patient, attentive to the exact texture of the ground beneath your feet in these haunted places we call home. Annie writes:
"I know that there is no past tense of grief. Only this dance through the seasons."
This is precisely where I have been living — in that dance — leading up to that event and in the weeks that have followed. Looking at what remains hidden within the permafrost of my own soul, the healing that is being asked of me, that I asked of myself when I made the choice to return home here to this haunted landscape and rocky shores of the Salish Sea. Reading Annie’s memoir and then hearing her read from it in person brought tears to my eyes and to many who gathered with us that night. Annie is the author of nine books — most recently the poetry collection Season Unleashed (Empty Bowl Press) — and her novel Ghost Dancing received an American Book Award. She founded the first land trust in Washington State, and swims year-round in Dabob Bay. She is, in other words, someone who means it when she writes about belonging to a place and I cannot recommend Writing Home more highly.
Then, barely a week later, I had the distinct privilege of welcoming one of my greatest literary mentors, Terry Tempest Williams, to Port Townsend.
The seed was planted last April — my very first Indie Bookstore Day — when Terry and her husband Brooke visited the shop on tour for his book Encountering Dragonfly. We hit it off immediately. She mentioned a new book coming out this spring called The Glorians: Visitations From the Holy Ordinary and asked whether I might be interested in hosting her. Nearly 25 years earlier, as a young undergrad in Environmental Education, I had been assigned to read her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place in a nature
writing class, and her exploration of grief and what it means to belong intimately to a landscape captured in that book had never left me. And here I was, barely six months into my new life as a bookstore owner, something so auspicious and full-circle already in motion. Of course I said yes — and then half-expected her to forget the conversation entirely. But that fall her publicist reached out to say that Terry had specifically requested Port Townsend and Imprint Bookshop to be among the stops on her upcoming PNW book tour.
I knew from the start this event needed to be bigger than what the walls of our little bookshop could hold. So I reached out to Ric Brewer, Community Relations and Events Manager at Jefferson Land Trust, who came on board immediately and offered invaluable logistical and moral support throughout. Tickets sold out in under two weeks and a waitlist quickly grew. When we all finally gathered at Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on April 10th, there was barely an empty seat. The evening opened with a beautiful blessing from Loni Greninger, Vice Chair and Culture Director of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe; Richard Tucker, Executive Director of Jefferson Land Trust, reminded us that land trusts and independent bookshops are, at their root, doing the same thing: holding ground; Aimée Ringle brought us into our hearts with an original song that mirrored the sacredness of Harvard’s Divinity Tree which Terry writes at length about in The Glorians.
And then Terry and her conversation partner — PT native Anna Brady — took the stage, and what unfolded between them was something close to transcendent – the kind of conversation that almost makes you forget you're in a room with other people, that leaves you quieter and more awake at the same time.
(Aimée Ringle performs a song for Terry) (Photos courtesy of Ric Brewer.)
The entire program was recorded by QUUF's sound team (thank you Christina) and is available to view on YouTube in two parts: •Part One
•Part Two
As I watched from the sidelines of the fellowship hall, I noticed that people were both laughing and crying at nearly the same time — myself included. And as I took this all in, I felt something I can only describe as quiet astonishment — that this was something we had made happen together, as a community, for this moment.
What Terry does in The Glorians — and what she did in that room — is invite us to slow down enough to notice what is passing before, around, and through us, in the smallest and most obscure of places. She asks us to stay open to what arrives — beauty, grief, wonder, birdsong — precisely when the world keeps giving us reasons to close down.
And this, I think, is what both of these evenings were asking of me, and of all of us.
I know you are paying attention to the state of things. You are the kind of people who don't look away even when the going gets brutal, and the going has been brutal. The grief is real. The outrage is appropriate. And it is an almost incomprehensible irony that the week a social media post brought the world briefly to the edge of its breath, the Artemis II mission splashed down to Earth — on April 10th, the very day we gathered at QUUF — having sent back images of the far side of the moon not seen since the Apollo era, over fifty years ago. Like those originals from the late 1960s, these new photographs showed us again just how singular and fragile and lit-from-within this home of ours truly is.
(Earthset, as captured aboard the Orion spacecraf during the Artemis II mission. Courtesy of Nasa.)
William Anders, the astronaut who took that original Earthrise photograph, later said: "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth." That image is now credited with inspiring the first Earth Day, held in April 1970. Fifty-six years later, on Earth Day 2026, it feels worth asking: what the Artemis images might let loose in us — if we let them?
(Earthrise captured aboard the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 by astronaut Willam Anders. Courtesy of Nasa.)
I don't have a clean answer. What I do have is the feeling these two evenings left me with — that the bar has been raised, not just for what we might offer this community through the bookshop, but for how I want to show up in my own life, in this hauntingly beautiful place I get to call home, in this particularly challenging moment in history. Both events left me sitting with the question of what I owe this work, and what this work might yet become.
I am also just grateful — deeply, stubbornly grateful — that I get to run a bookshop where questions like these can be asked out loud in a room full of people who care about the asking.
Thank you for being those people.
With love from 820 Water Street,
John
UPCOMING EVENTS
This Saturday, April 25th, is Indie Bookstore Day — the day set aside each year to celebrate the vital role local bookshops play in our communities, and the authors and readers who make them possible.
We hope you'll come spend part of your day with us. Local authors will be on hand serving as guest booksellers, Tara will be offering tarot readings from the Banned Book Deck from 12–4 pm, and the team from Roll For Your Life will be running RPG demos from 1–3 pm. Throughout the day you can also try your hand at our bookshop scavenger hunt and add your voice to our community mural.
And don't leave without picking up a passport for our first ever Salish Sea Book Voyage — a week-long adventure visiting indie bookstores across the north Olympic Peninsula and Whidbey Island. Collect stamps at each store, complete your passport, and submit it for prizes. It's a collaboration we're proud to be part of, designed to encourage bookstore discovery in our region and unite readers around a common goal.
“Laura E. Garrard’s poems (Paddling the Sweet Spot Between Life and Death) are courageous compass-settings for navigating a place of balance and bodily, emotional and spiritual contending. She is fighting a life threatening cancer in language both nuanced and frontal. “Living is precious / The trick is / Not wanting it too much / Not calling death closer.” I finished the book feeling greatly uplifted. Its cargo is a true teaching of how to live daily on the shifting edge of our own mortality and that of those we love.” —Tess Gallagher
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“Linda B. Myer’s poems in Load-Bearing Walls are a testimony to aging: her deteriorating body, friends suffering from dementia and cancer, and the ache of mourning those lost to her. With irony, wit, and an open heart, she invites us to accompany her on this rocky journey.” —Alice Derry
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“The language of Carolyne Wright’s poems is as rich, diverse, and bursting with life as the natural world of the coastal Northwest she calls home; but her home is the world, much of which she has traveled. Her poems engage that larger world and the lives of its citizens, their history, turmoil, and jeopardy. Hers is a poetry both of celebration and of sober courage.” —David Axelrod
SAVE THE DATE: Thursday, May 14 5:30-7:00 pm
There may be no better moment than this one to hear what the next generation has to say.
Eleventh and twelfth grade students at OCEAN School read George Orwell's 1984, studying how dystopian fiction has long served as one of literature's sharpest tools for naming what's going wrong in the world. Then they turned the lens on their own moment — writing original dystopian stories that take on the societal pressures and contradictions they are living through right now. The result is "Dystopia," a zine collecting their work, and we are honored to host these young authors as they read selections from their stories here at Imprint.
Come listen. They have things worth hearing.
A peek at what's on my nightstand...
As Earth Day approaches, I want to share the three books that are catching my attention at the moment. Incidentally, these titles together just so happen to capture something of what I am reaching toward in this newsletter — the feeling of awe for our planet and its neighbors, the urgency of what we stand to lose, and a path toward becoming better stewards of it.
From Maria Popova's Marginalian Editions comes a gorgeous reissue of celebrated poet, essayist, and naturalist Diane Ackerman’s debut a whimsical and wonderful ode to our solar system, planet to planet, blending science and imagination, astronomy and cosmology, as well as fantasy, satire, myth, confession, and bawdiness galore. Originally published in 1973, The Planets is a lyrical, wonder-struck meditation on our solar system that asks us to see the Earth the way the astronauts did: as something almost unbearably precious against the vastness surrounding it.
I've had this one on my TBR shelf for years now and meant to read it long before the movie came out. But now that I am in it I can see why so many people have made a point to recommend it to me. The science feels real while still digestible for those of us who are not well-versed in astrophysics. And somehow, in the middle of all that hard science, this is a uniquely human story. If you need a reminder of the preciousness of life on Earth, Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary will give you one in the most propulsive way possible — a novel about one person, alone in space, trying to save the planet he can no longer see but cannot stop loving.
The title alone has been calling to me since it arrived on our shelves. It starts with a simple but clarifying observation: the crises we face — climate change, pandemic, ecological collapse — move across the planet without regard for national borders, while the institutions we've built to manage them are stubbornly, dangerously local. That mismatch, the authors argue, is the crisis beneath all the other crises — and Children of a Modest Star doesn't stop at diagnosis, proposing instead an entirely new architecture for governing ourselves designed not just for our survival but for the flourishing of the multi-species ecosystems we depend on.
