Articles

When I set out to write a memoir about my parents sixteen years ago, one of the things that stymied me was early feedback from my peers that the content was “too unbearable” to read about.

I’m on Facebook. Some of my friends are posting their fury, as artists and radicals, about something that’s just happened: A few art students have complained to college administrators about their professor.

Though author Ella Rhoads Higginson (1862?-1940) is little known today, over a century ago she was the most influential Pacific Northwest literary writer in the United States.

May 11, 1935

Dear Mr. Powers,

I love the twin states of the Northwest next to God and my country; and if either should cease to claim me as one of her writers, my heart would be broken.

A poet sang to a star,
Ay, sang out his soul—to die;
But ever the crimson heart
Of the star beat in the sky.

I write a sonnet? But a sonnet, dear,
May be the breaking of an Easter morn;
Or a low wind among the ripening corn
When russet silk tops each green-golden ear;

Ah me! I know how large and cool and white
The moon lies on the brow of Sehome Hill,
And how the firs stand shadowy and still,
Etched on that luminous background this soft night;

When soft and deep in Sweden’s skies
Moons burn like golden fire,
And the nightingale thrills all the wood
With exquisite desire,

The little hollows in the pavements shine
With the soft, hesitating April rain,
That sifts across the city, gray and fine,
And on the huddling, spent waves of the main,—
Where the wild, silver seabirds wheel and scream.

Would I were in Alaska this fair night!
Sailing that noble sweep of sapphire sea
Where for a thousand miles continuously
The snow-pearl mountains shimmer, lustrous, white,
Or burn to opals in the northern light.