Orrin H. Pilkey ’57 and Rob Young
Island Press, 2009
The island nations of Tuvalu and the Maldives, the Inupiat Eskimo village of Shishmaref, and Soldado Island off the Colombian coast might be tough to find on a geography quiz. But all of these locations foretell a future of oceans overwhelming coastlines. In each of these remote places, residents are either moving or preparing to move to higher ground before their homes get swallowed by the … » More …
Carcrashlander (Cory Gray, Brian Wright ’02, Alexis Gideon, Cliff Hayes, and Jessica Wright ’02)
Jealous Butcher Records, 2008
Nestled in the generally indescribable genre of indie music, Carcrashlander challenges the listener by continuing to venture into experimental music. In their most recent album, Mountains On Our Backs, the group combines basal vocals and keyboards with wildly discordant guitar riffs and deep percussion.
The band began as a project by vocalist Cory Gray. With the addition of drummer Brian … » More …
Kirk Werner ’85
Johnson Books, 2007, 2009
Flyfishing— a sport and an art practiced for centuries—fascinates me with its smooth casts and rhythm, but I had never connected flyfishing with kids. At least not until Olive the Woolly Bugger, a cartoon “streamer” fly starring in a series of three books that introduce flyfishing to children.
Playing off goofy fly names—like zonker, yellow sally, and gold-ribbed hare’s ear—author and angler Kirk Werner (’85 Comm.) creates a … » More …
Bob Scarfo, an associate professor with Washington State University’s Interdisciplinary Design Institute, and his landscape architecture students explore the benefits of re-introducing passenger rail between Spokane and the Pullman/Moscow area in response to shifting global trends, particularly associated with energy, water and climate change.
Presentations shown during the poster session of the symposium are accessed through links on the map below. (Click on a station to reveal a document [PDF].)
Additional presentations: Spokane Multimodal, RR crossings (PDFs)
The heroine of Love’s Secrets puts on perfume, goes to a barbecue, and meets Rod: caramel skin, wavy hair, muscles, and commitment issues.
The author of Love’s Secrets can never do two of those three things. Exposure to perfume or barbecue smoke could kill Yolandé McVey ’07, who suffers from severe asthma and allergies. “I’m so allergic to everything that when I was given an allergy test, I went into shock,” she said. “They had to call an ambulance to take me to a hospital.”
McVey began to lose ground in her lifelong battle with respiratory problems in 1997. She had just moved to … » More …
As a graduate student at Washington State University in the late 1960s, Noël Riley Fitch found her calling in an issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. A two-page story about Sylvia Beach and her little bookshop called Shakespeare and Company in Paris in the 1920s sparked her interest.
Her professor, John Elwood, encouraged her to pursue Beach as a subject for her master’s thesis. Elwood had long had a love for French café society. When he was in the armed services in World War II, he met writer and critic Gertrude Stein in Paris. He loved that period of literary history, says Riley Fitch.
She … » More …
Florence Wager bought a set of golf clubs when she wrapped up her career in arts and education.
“I had this preconceived notion about retirement,” says Wager, 81, who earned a bachelor’s degrees at WSU in speech in 1950 and education in 1954 and spent most of her career boosting the San Francisco Symphony. “I thought you played golf, played bridge, went to tea parties.”
Then, after moving back to her native Vancouver in 1990, she volunteered for the Chinook Trail Association. Then she volunteered for the YWCA. Then the parks and recreation department. Then the Fort Vancouver Regional Library District. She joined boards … » More …
I’ve been a teacher all my life, and I think I might as well be a teacher after I’m dead,” Grover Krantz told the Smithsonian’s anthropology collections manager David Hunt as they negotiated Krantz’s proposed donation of his skeleton to the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. As a physical anthropologist specializing in hominoid evolution, Krantz gleaned his understanding and ideas by studying the bones of apes and humans. Following his death, his own bones would become available for study.
Odds were, however, that his bones would remain in a drawer, alongside the bones of his three Irish wolfhounds, which he had already donated, waiting for whatever … » More …
Displaced by the salmon and eclipsed by the oyster, the clam is perhaps the forgotten star of the Puget Sound. But once it was the main seafood symbol of the region. Even before restaurateur Ivar Haglund made his “Acres of Clams” restaurant a Seattle landmark, the clam’s status was lodged on the shores of Northwest Native American lore. In fact it had a role in the origin of man. According to Haida tradition, Raven discovered a large clamshell on the beach and looked inside to find dozens of little people. Lonely for someone to play with and trick, he coaxed them out of the shell … » More …