Becca Rose Hall’s project for the 2024 Jack Straw Writers Program is a family epic novel set in the Pacific Northwest, homing in on the town of Home, Washington, an anarchist colony founded in 1896 on the Kitsap Peninsula. The novel switches between a homesteader living  in Home and her great granddaughter, who in the present day inherits a piece of land there as well as a written document from her great grandmother. In her conversation with curator Nisi Shawl, they discuss why she writes about the Pacific Northwest, breaking down the idea of a utopia within the context of colonialism, and the threads between the revolutionary past and the revolutionary present. “There’s so many things that happened in the early 20th century . . . that directly kind of caused what’s happening now. . . . It’s just like a lot of things they just kind of ricochet off each other through time. . . . So you have to look back and look at long threads of kind of cause and effect.”

Music by EarthtoneSkytone, produced in part through the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.

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