Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Rainey, an award-winning reporter with the Los Angeles Times, spoke with hometown hero Timothy Egan in March of 2019 about the importance of investigative journalism and the path forward for media in this political era.

These veteran journalists discuss how investigative reporting has changed over time, and what audiences expect and demand from the media today. They share challenges that reporters face when reporting from the field. “We allowed ourselves to become mysterious; as a result, people saw us as elites in an ivory tower,” Dean Baquet says.

Jim Rainey agrees, adding, “When we go out now, it's not just what we write. It's how we conduct ourselves. How empathetic we are. And so—I think, correctly—we have a lot to prove.”

These reflections set the tone for a lively conversation about transparency, credibility, and truth. With wit and honesty, they shine a spotlight on what the media can and should do better in an era of disinformation. They look to the future of newspapers: from print journalism (here to stay, they insist) and paid content, to podcasts and interactive digital storytelling. They also discuss ways in which journalists—young and old—mentor each other today.

In this talk, recorded in March of 2010, former U. S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove shared poems from her then-new book, Sonata Mulattica. This collection tells the story of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. Previously just a footnote in Beethoven’s biography, Bridgetower—who was a Black violinist—had a sonata dedicated to him, and then, after a falling out over a girl, found that same sonata renamed. In this groundbreaking book, Dove tells Bridgetower’s story and restores one piece of lost history of African Americans in classical music.

Without Dove to revive his story, Bridgetower may have been lost to time. Dove once noted, “There’s always been a special place in my work for people who drop out of history.” In this reading, which feels like an intimate fireside chat, she brings George Polgreen Bridgetower to life for an audience in whose minds he lives still. Let’s rekindle his spirit once again, and hear what Dove’s writings—and Bridgetower’s life and music—continue to tell us today.

At the start of this reading, which includes poems in English and Polish, Zagajewski says, “As long as you write new poems, you are alive. It’s the only proof of this.” Zagajewski died this March, but his poems remain with us—proof he was alive and lives still. In a poetic twist of fate, the date of Zagajewski’s passing was the same as the evening he read at Seattle Arts & Lectures—exactly nineteen years earlier.

This reading by Adam Zagajewski, recorded in March 2001, was postponed from its original date by the forces of Mother Nature. On February 28, 2001, the Nisqually Earthquake struck. In wry form, Zagajewski banters about the interplay between reality and poetry, life and art. He notes thematic links between his book Tremor, his poem Lava, and the shaking earth that brought daily life in the Pacific Northwest to a halt.

The pre-eminent Polish poet of his generation, Zagajewski’s early work was political in nature. He sought to illuminate conditions in western Poland post-World War II: “the bitter bread of urgency and contemporaneity.” With insight and imagination, Zagajewski’s poems depict the surreal experience of daily life in a totalitarian state following the Soviet takeover of his hometown, Lvov, in present-day Ukraine.

This talk by celebrated novelist Wallace Stegner, recorded in 1990, is really a master class on the intermingling of life and art. With equal measures of charm and critique, Stegner questions the very nature of storytelling: is it method, perspective, experience, or technique? The writers he admires aren’t carpenters working from blueprints, he says, but sculptors in search of “the mystery implicit in the stone.”

The questions Stegner raises in this lecture—about fact and fiction, life and art, craft and vision—are ones we continue to explore today.

"I live in a space between," Imbolo Mbue says in this talk. "It is the immigrant's burden to live with a body in one place, and the heart in another."

In this episode, recorded on June 7, 2019, at Town Hall Seattle, Imbolo Mbue describes how her in-between began in Cameroon, where she was born, and continued in New York, where she traveled to attend college. She stayed, attended Business School, got a job in New York City and then in 2008, she lost her job in the Great Recession. She saw during this time the great economic stratification of New York and the seed for her book, "Behold The Dreamers," was born. The book went on to be a New York Times bestseller and an Oprah book club pick.

The book asks the questions we all inherently struggle with. What is happiness? And what makes a good life? Why would we be willing to do or to give up for ourselves, for family, for love, and for dreams?

Maxine Kumin, whom we lost in 2014, once said that, quote, “The garden has to be attended every day, just as the horses have to be tended to. Not just every day, but morning, noon and night. Writing, I think, exerts the same kind of discipline. I think of myself as a Jewish Calvinist. You know: salvation through grace, grace through good works and working is good, just that simple.”

In this episode, recorded in April of 2005, we hear poems from across Maxine Kumin’s impressive body of work, including her collection Jack and Other New Poems. Acclaimed for her meticulous observation and her mastery of traditional forms, Kumin’s poetry draws comparisons to Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton, her longtime friend and collaborator. But her voice defies easy comparisons.

Often reflecting the dailiness of life and death on her New Hampshire horse farm, her powers lay in the unsentimental way she translated personal experience into resonant verse. “The paradoxical freedom of working in form…” as she says in this reading, is that it “gives you permission to say the hard truths.”

As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019 Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for us. In a riveting talk based upon her book, “Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger,” Chemaly puts female anger into its societal context, revealing it as a tool of transformation, an untapped resource for change.

Soraya Chemaly is the Executive Director of The Representation Project. An award-winning author and activist, she writes and speaks frequently on topics related to gender norms, inclusivity, social justice, free speech, sexualized violence, and technology. In this illuminating talk and Q&A with journalist Carole Carmichael, Chemaly details the very real ways that women are taught from an early age to control and suppress their anger rather than harness it for change—and the way that this socialization is harmful to women and men, and especially to people of color.

When Barry Lopez died at the age of 75 this past December, we knew we had lost one of the greats. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brought a depth of erudition to the text by immersing himself in his surroundings, deftly integrating his environmental and humanitarian concerns. In his nonfiction, he examined the relationship between human culture and physical landscape. In his fiction, he addressed issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity.

This new episode of SAL/on air was recorded in April of 2010. In it, Barry Lopez speaks about the anthology Home Ground, which Lopez edited along with his wife, Debra Gwartney. The anthology brought together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters.

Eleven years later, those lands and waters are still under attack, in increasing need of our attention. “Our issue with the land around us,” he says, “is how to rekindle an informing conversation back and forth. And if we hope to develop policies that ensure our children will have a chance at a full life, alive, shaped as much by imagination as by need, we need to listen to what the land around us says.”

“Every generation has to reiterate, rewrite what those genres are and what they mean in the vocabulary of the moment. So the elegy is not a set genre, it's not a set form. We each have to re-write that thing when we write. That's our job, in a way.”—Rick Barot

On May 15, 2020, Rick Barot—the award-winning author of Chord, Want, and The Darker Fall—joined us for a virtual poetry reading in the midst of the pandemic. His latest book of poems, The Galleons (2020), was long-listed for this year’s National Book Award and, in honor of that, we’re pleased to present it to you now.

His reading is introduced by SAL Associate Director Rebecca Hoogs, and then a conversation follows moderated by poet Jane Wong, the author of Overpour from Action Books, and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, forthcoming from Alice James Books.

Have you ever had a slice of cake that had been soaked in a sort of syrup? Maybe rose-syrup? Maybe lemon? Dense and rich at the same time—soaked in joy—it’s almost not cake anymore. Every one of Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poems, read at SAL’s May 2018 Poetry Series reading, was like that for us. Dense and light at the same time. Sweet and yet weighty.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of a book of nature essays, World of Wonders, recently named a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in non-fiction, and four award-winning poetry collections, most recently, Oceanic from Copper Canyon Press. After her reading from Oceanic, a conversation followed between Aimee and Pacific Northwest poet Jane Wong, author of Overpour and the forthcoming How to Not Be Afraid of Everything.