Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Spring 2026

Andrea Vogt

Winter 2007

The Cougar wears Prada

FLORENCE, ITALY—She’d perused the vintage vendors on London’s Portobello Road and seen the Chanel logo stamped onto the most prestigious silk in the world in Como, Italy.

By her first morning in Florence, with its supple leather, luxury textiles, and elegant, well-heeled locals, Katy Daly’s fingers were getting restless.

“I really need a needle, thread, and some fabric right now,” said Daly, of Kent, Washington. By afternoon, she was winding through the narrow cobblestone alleys in the shadow of Giotto’s bell tower with a small scrap of paper on which she had penciled the word merceria in hopes of finding an Italian haberdashery shop with … » More …

Winter 2008

L’Américain en Provence

A story about an expatriate—and about his wine. Provence is a world away from Bellevue, where Denis Gayte '97 grew up. And French winemaking is another world away from the public relations career he abandoned. So there he was, with his French heritage and a newly minted "young French winemaker" degree—but still referred to (and always affectionately) as l'Américain. » More ...

Writing Pauline: Wisdom from a Long Life

Gail Stearns’s biography, Writing Pauline: Wisdom from a Long Life, is the story of an ordinary eastern Washington woman who came to some extraordinary conclusions in the twilight of a long and often frustrated life. Stearns, director of the Common Ministry and an adjunct faculty member in Women’s Studies and the Honors College at Washington State University, wrote the biography based on notes, journals, and oral interviews with Spokane native Pauline Thompson, an educator, nurse, veteran, and activist who died in 2000 at age 95. Stearns notes in Chapter One that “one cannot understand Pauline without acknowledging paradox.” Paradox is a constant theme throughout Pauline’s … » More …

Conference Brings Plateau Tribes and WSU a Few Steps Closer

To get here, most elders at Washington State University’s conference honoring the Plateau Tribes had to pass by places defined now only by what they used to be.

From Oregon and Washington, they drove along the Columbia, past dams where once abundant fish runs sustained them as “salmon people.”

From Idaho and Montana, they passed land that belonged to no one, by root-digging prairies and camas fields now gated and signed, “no trespassing.”

“As I traveled up here, I pointed out things along the river to my son,” said Wilfred Jim, a 67-year-old enrolled Yakama who lives in Warm Springs, Oregon . . . this … » More …

Sherman Alexie: “It’s all good”

It may look the same today, but as Sherman Alexie walked down the aisle of the Kenworthy Theater in Moscow, Idaho, he realized his last memory of the place was, well, a little bit hazy.

“I was just recalling with a friend of mine who I went to school at Wazzu with that this is the first time I’ve been in this theater sober,” Alexie said, glancing around the old theater at the Palouse premier of his second movie, The Business of Fancydancing, last September. “And I’ve been sober a long time.”

Eleven years, actually, he says with pride, urging other young tribal members in … » More …