Hugo-centric Lit Crawl Seattle 2021 keeps a celebratory torch burning

‘Most people got to know me over the last four years and have one impression of me as this ardent partisan. Prior to Trump, most of the criticism I got was for working too much across the aisle, and I don’t consider myself a partisan.’

Dan Savage celebrates and reflects as Savage Love turns 30

‘Every building is a philosophy in a way. I see all buildings as attempts to try to figure out and express what it means to dwell as a human being on Earth.’

‘The land knows you, even when you are lost.’

‘What do we owe in death? What do we owe to our parents?’

‘A Little Book of Self-Care for Those Who Grieve began as notes scratched out over many midnights; thoughts formed as I lay sleepless, or in the aftermath of painful dreams.’

‘The agents say they’ll put themselves between a bullet and the president. They’ll take a bullet for the president. Well, they felt like more and more they were just dodging a bullet.’

‘If people hear something that’s false, and they’re immediately told it’s false, then they will remember it in some sense or in some part of their mind as true for the long-term. That’s insidious!’

As a teen, Chinese American author Anna Qu was forced by her mother to work in their family's garment factory in Queens, New York. At home she was the family’s maid, and faced punishment for doing things like schoolwork. Qu contacted Child Protective Services to report her mother, but due to bureaucratic bumbling she was left her to fend for herself. Now as an adult, Qu reckons with life, family, and not so easy answers to past trauma in her memoir.