Boo Davis and her upcoming book, 'Dare to Be Square Quilting,' are profiled.
A Weekly photographer who was shooting on the public sidewalk outside a FBI building was confronted with a security guard and four federal agents when he was taking pictures for the paper's cover story this week. "It became pretty stressful -- they weren't interfering with the shoot by blocking us, but they kept asking us questions and at a certain point I said 'Well, I feel pretty intimidated, I think we're done here,'" Steven Miller says.
The Society of Professional Journalists' Pacific Northwest Excellence in Journalism competition, unlike many others, features its own alt-weekly division, which pits publications from Washington, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho and Montana against each other. This year, the Pacific Northwest Inlander led the pack with 13 total awards -- six of which were first-place finishes. Five of the Willamette Week's nine total awards were in first place, and Seattle Weekly won 13 total awards and three firsts. The Missoula Independent won five awards, with two first-place wins. The Eugene Weekly won five awards and the Portland Mercury won one.
Seattle Weekly columnist and former Guns N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan says he has landed a book deal with Touchstone, a division of Simon and Schuster, who will publish the book in Fall 2011. "I want to thank the readers of my column for really pushing me to write this book," he writes. "The Weekly staff have also been invaluable to me -- certain editors here have made a big difference as far as what they expect from me. That too makes for a better product." He explains that the book won't be a "GN'R tell-all" or a typical rock 'n' roll book. "There are a lot of those at this point," McKagan writes. "Sure, I will touch on all of that, as it is part of my story, but only just a part of it."
A Sensitive Liberal's Guide to Life: How To Banter With Your Barista, Hug Mindfully, And Relate To Friends Who Choose Kids Over Dogs is being published this week by Gotham Books. The book is a collection of the Weekly's "Ask an Uptight Seattleite" columns, where the aforementioned Uptight Seattleite, as Gotham's press materials put it, "delights his loyal readers each week with snide insight on everything from fashion ('Can I pull off a Rasta beret?') to ear-bud etiquette."
Jason Sheehan's Cooking Dirty has been named one of TIME's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2009. "It's a paradox of the post-Bourdain era: chef memoirs are trendy, but none of the chefs writing them have the freakish combination of cooking and writing talent that made Anthony Bourdain a star," Lev Grossman writes. "But Jason Sheehan comes damn close, and he gives the genre his own distinctive seasoning." Sheehan recently made the move from Westword to the Seattle Weekly.
A 46-year-old man who was charged with 11 arsons this week "appears to be a fan of alternative weeklies," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports. According to court documents and police reports, Kevin Todd Swalwell has used both The Stranger and Seattle Weekly to help start fires in the Greenwood neighborhood.
The Seattle Fire Department says someone set a Weekly news box ablaze on Monday night; the case has now been turned over to the Seattle Police Department's Arson squad, who will conduct a criminal investigation. The Weekly notes that the fire occurred in a "notorious section" of town plagued by drugs and prostitution that the paper described "in cringe-inducing detail" in a September cover story. Since the story came out, a number of arrests have been made to crack down, and some folks are apparently pissed. "That said ... setting one of our distribution boxes on fire," the Weekly's Vernal Coleman writes, "is so not a constructive way of airing grievances."
The Association of Food Journalists last week named the winners of its 2009 Awards Competition at a banquet in New Orleans. Seattle Weekly's Jonathan Kauffman won first place for Best Newspaper Restaurant Criticism and Creative Loafing (Atlanta)'s Besha Rodell took home first for Best Newspaper Food Feature. (Riverfront Times' Kristen Hinman took third in that category.) Kauffman's victory marks the fourth year in a row that a Village Voice Media paper has won the Best Newspaper Restaurant Criticism category.
