Articles

Don’t miss the extraordinary exhibition “Power of the Presses” at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art until June 8. A selection from the Cynthia Sears collection of 3,500 artists’ books (one of the largest in the country) curated by Catherine Alice Michaelis, it features 33 printmaking methods. But it also emphasizes a wide range of content from environmental to political. The role of the press in building community is the main theme. As the curator explained, she chose works that “shared a voice of community or personal, intimate expression — in a way that gathers community. The press as a tool for sharing voice. Pieces had to be personal in some way. I also looked for an example of every printmaking method that was in the glossary.”

Surprisingly, in the center of the gallery, we see an offset printing press. Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. was there the day I went, printing posters for anyone that stopped by. Behind him a wall of broadsides by a range of artists featured such direct statements as “Stop Voter Suppression,” “Peace,” “Breathe,” “I ain’t afraid to live in a world of trans people I am afraid to live in a world without them,” and “Without Song Each Day Would Be A Century.”

Mare Blocker, a pioneering role model for the artists’ books community, created an “altar/throne” made of books. When I was there she sat in that throne reading excerpts from her stories and from “My Beloved Community Dictionary.” Her focus, as described by the curator, is “how creativity can lead to self-discovery and the healing power that printing offers.”

The multiple prints on one wall engage community through Partners in Print. Collectively called “Words of Courage,” some of these were selected from poems written at Seattle Children’s Hospital through the Seattle Children’s Poet in Residence program. For example, an eleven-year-old patient titled her poem “Cured.” In the last verse she says, “I hope to close the door on being bald and self-conscious. I hope to open the door to having soft hazel curls hiding my ears and neck.”

The pages in Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.’s poem book “Riddle ma riddle as I suppose: riddles from the Sea Islands of South Carolina” unfold one by one in different directions, ultimately forming large squares. The artist told me the riddles are based on local secrets and lore so we can’t answer them.

Shana Agid’s letterpress print book features text pointing at various places in Manhattan with the provocative title “Call a Wrecking Ball to Make a Window.” The map plots the intersections of Agid’s own history with that of the famous activist/artist/writer David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992. Agid is making sure that queer voices persist in the face of ongoing threats.

Another approach to the book is Ben Blount’s “Africans in America: A Short History.” The book features many blank pages and then we come to a date in which something significant happened for African Americans. The book is open to 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed “prohibiting discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origins.”

Delita Martin uses multiple techniques to create “This Side of Night,” a huge book with lavish images and text: “My black woman body created a world under the moon…where black birds gather, their bodies shimmer a blue black, wings moving to the ancient rhythms of time, over and over, all at once around me, their bodies weight, stretched long on this side of night.”

Martin is both magical and vividly present on these large pages.

Another sizable book that uses multiple techniques is by Robbin Ami Silverberg and Kim Berman, “RE—A Tale of Two Cities,” the cities being New York and Johannesburg, with text like “reclaim, retrieve, recover, reuse, recycle…”

“Ten Years in Uzbekistan,” originally designed by Alexander Rodchenko, was discovered in an archive. David King, a historian of Russian photography, found it with the faces blacked out as people fell out of favor. David King and Ken Campbell re-presented the book with letterpress printed over half-tone photographs. The result is a haunting way to honor these people, whose names and biographies remain present in the text.

The pioneering role of Cynthia Sears in collecting artists’ books, combined with the diverse selection by curator Catherine Alice Michaelis, highlights the museum’s inclusive approach to acquisition, and its openness to a wide range of printing techniques, subject matters, and formats, from simple broadsides to books that unfold. This exhibit is an exciting revelation of the democratic and community-building power of print.

Susan Noyes Platt
Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website, www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

“Power of the Presses” is on view through June 8 at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, located at 550 Winslow Way East, on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Museum is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For further information, visit www.biartmuseum.org.

Art generates a particular kind of alchemy. Artists wrangle ideas and materials into a gesture, object, or image that transcends language to make sense of an unruly world. Viewers, the people who witness or experience art, expand this transformative act when they add their points of view, amplifying or challenging the artist’s meaning. Art is conveyed both through and to us.

It seems fitting that at this moment, when little makes sense in our wobbling and punch-drunk world, an antidote is offered in the work of Holly Ballard Martz. Her show, “Past Perfect Future Tense,” runs through May 17, 2025 at Greg Kucera Gallery in Pioneer Square.

Upon entry to the gallery, one is virtually surrounded by punching bags suspended in mid-air and cocooned inside coverings of antique quilts. Navigating around the torso-sized bags reveals texts on each side; with the deft wordplay that Martz is known for, the texts explore the tension that women face between unwanted attention and the equally-undesirable devaluation and invisibility that comes with age. In “(Dis)missed,” the word appears on one side, broken into a vertical stack three letters wide and three lines high. On the other side, the letters “XX” allude to the chromosome pair associated with the female gender, but also to total obliteration. Martz extends this tension through her wall-mounted quilt pieces, where misogynist and ageist labels appear. The artist reclaims these slurs using encrusted seed beads stitched to the damaged and visibly-stained fabric; “hag,” “CRONE,” and “Witch” are fastidiously camouflaged to match the quaint calico patterns of the quilt squares.

Framing the perimeter of the gallery are sinuous and glittering wall pieces displayed in a variety of clusters; some are fully exposed and some are enclosed in bespoke frames and vitrines. Allusions to the transience of life weave through each piece. Certain pieces taken from the body, such as the solitary gray braid of “Faded Glory.” Mounted on an oval frame—like Victorian-era hairwork meant to preserve the memory of a loved one—the braid hangs from under a lead tire weight. The hair succumbs to and illustrates gravity, a force echoed in the artist’s other works that point to the slow and inevitable fall to earth.

In this world where bodily autonomy is threatened in the same measure that commonly-held notions of unattainable and generic beauty are proffered, Martz’s work celebrates and accepts alternatives. Her pieces, smartly constructed both in form and concept, transform what might otherwise be unwelcome or discarded into glittering and enduring truths.

Another kind of magic is at work in the densely-populated new paintings of Anthony White. His pieces travel in time, moving fluidly back to the lush still lifes of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age, recalling sensuously rendered images full of symbols and coded visual language. In that era, overblown flowers, candles, and skulls were coded depictions of human mortality, while luxury trade goods such as porcelain, silk, and tea cataloged the emergent wealth of early-stage capitalism.

White deploys these conventions of abundance and symbolism as well, but even with recognizable historical references, his works are undeniably contemporary. He paints not with pigment suspended in oil, but with thin strands of melted, richly-colored plastic called polylactic acid (PLA), a product commonly used for 3D model drawing. As a result, his finely rendered images emerge out of an exquisite web of tiny raised lines, shimmering textured surfaces on panel.

His subject matter is front-loaded chaos, a world within a world of superabundance, an image-saturated field of media, communication, pleasure, and status suggesting a shelf is stacked to an improbable density. In the center of the image, we see a luxury-brand gift basket containing candy and bottles of tawny liquid, a small sculpture of bronze-colored clasped hands, a computer-mounted camera eye for video calls, a digital clock, a half-eaten sandwich, and a “real” hand reaching in from the right and holding a disk with a fish rendered in Coast Salish formline style. And wait, there’s more: a spray of stickers, logos, glimpses of words and icons appearing and receding in apparently strategic locations. Are they interruptions from the virtual world in what is rendered as an almost tangibly real space, or are they pointing us to find deeper meaning?

White’s work layers reference upon reference, from everyday items to the largest cultural narratives. The density within the picture plane invites all kinds of looking, and all kinds of finding. Engaging this work is like pulling a Tarot card: the dense jumbled imagery presents a world open to myriad interpretations, and the magic emerges when we pick one and respond.

Kristin Tollefson
Kristin L. Tollefson is an artist and educator based in Tacoma, Washington.

Greg Kucera Gallery presents Holly Ballard Martz’s exhibit “Past Perfect Future Tense” through May 17. Anthony White’s exhibit runs from May 22-June 28 with a reception Thursday, June 5, 6-8 p.m. and a public artist talk on Saturday, June 7 at 12 p.m. Located at located at 212 - 3rd Avenue South in Seattle, Washington, the gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. For information, visit www.gregkucera.com.

The Heron Rookery

There’s a rookery on Bainbridge island that is hardly a secret, but I’m not going to say where it is. I like to imagine there are still hidden places where birds can nest without our interference.    

It’s amazing how many people have never heard of a rookery, or don’t know the meaning of the word. I didn’t know before I moved here, and my sister thought I was talking about a kitchen appliance. But once I stood beneath one, it was like giving myself up to a breathtaking privilege—such an incredible feeling.

So when I heard the heron rookery is for sale, I felt nothing but fear for the herons. My god, can’t we leave anything alone? I thought about all the promises that could, and likely would, be made between the owners and buyers and agents to allay the conservationists, only to be broken later.

I wondered. I asked around. I waited.    

I tried not to think of what could happen. But I was worried. Because I know, of course. I know, construction could win out.

I also know that I am such a hypocrite.

Because I live in a condo development—a controversial one—that rose to command four acres directly north of the ferry terminal, where people used to walk so that the horse chestnut trees could nurture them though long wet winters and lend shade in summer. I don’t remember how the subject of my address came up in T&C one day, but a woman with gorgeous grey hair waved a hand at me and turned away leaving me dejected among the bulk food bins. Even now, when I tell certain people where I live, I can see it in their eyes: that my home is the first housing project that changed the character of the island for good. Never mind the new round-abouts that made my friend Grace say, “We all need something to roll our eyes at.”      

I took another walk to the rookery. I stood underneath taking in the sound of wingbeats and scraping toes, the elaborate nests built to shelter against windstorms and rain and eagles and ospreys and rodent predators. I watched two herons aim harsh squawks at each other. This went on for a while.

When I finally find the nerve, I call the real estate agent who listed the rookery property. She hasn’t called back, but even before I know what she’ll say, I know what she’ll say: It’s private land with a view of the harbor. It will eventually sell. If not this year, then next.

I know this world will always be plundered apart and rejoined together, but I am always stunned by how fast the plunder and how slow the rejoin. I can’t bear to think what the herons will do if their trees are felled to make room for another luxury home. If I do let myself think about it, I see stunned versions of herons frantically searching for a new stand of trees.

All I can think to say is that maybe there is something good about this terrible feeling—that it’s never bad to remember what really matters.  

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I am so happy to say that since writing this piece, I have received the most wonderful news—the Bainbridge Island Land Trust received enough donations to save the heron rookery!

Mary Lou Sanelli

Mary Lou Sanelli’s latest title is In So Many Words. She works as a writer, speaker, and master dance teacher. For more information visit www.marylousanelli.com.

   In memory of Clemens Starck, 1937-2024

Who can say the old way’s dead and gone,
these days when who says anything for sure?
Feet dangling out the boxcar’s toothless maw
here sit a couple throwbacks drinking in the view,
snaking through the Siskiyous this balmy afternoon.
 
Both have beards, and both have scraggly hair.
In the air there is a touch of spring. One with
his Red Sox ballcap screwed down tight could be
the ghost of Clem Starck on a ramble,
heading east and south, a free ride caught
to look for work, really a footloose excuse,
a lark and nothing more. But here they sit,
their boots laced up, their knapsacks full of apples,
socks, potatoes, and a couple cans of beans.
One tells the other Siskiyou is Chinook slang
for a bob-tailed horse. We know who that must be.
On this four percent grade the engine labors,
and along for the ride climbing slow they take
a while to pass. As they are turned about to go
into the dark again they think to wave at us.


Paul Hunter

Paul Hunter is a Seattle poet who has won the Washington State Book Award for his farming poems, and is currently working on a series of contemporary cowboy novels that wrestle with how we might savor nature more fully and accommodate ourselves to climate change. The first cowhand book won a Will Rogers Medallion. His last book was Untaming the Valley, and the next to appear soon in 2025 is Desert Crossing.  

What goes up does not always come down. Especially if it’s Ginny Ruffner. If you think that maxim sounds slightly off, like it’s been reversed, reimagined, and turned upside down, you would be correct. But that’s what Ginny Ruffner did to whatever so-called obstacles she encountered. She was naturally buoyant. She modified, reimagined, and transformed everything to suit her purpose.  Like death, for instance.

The first time death came for her, in the form of an oncoming car, she turned it upside down, shook it until its pockets rained stars, and walked—admittedly, with a cane and a limp — away from a two-month coma, alive and well, and better than ever. That was in December of 1991. Against all odds, she stayed alive and thrived for another incredibly productive 34 years until she passed away a few weeks ago, quietly, quickly, gracefully, and on her own terms, in the home and studio that was one of her most astonishing works of art.

You would struggle to find evidence of that epic struggle with death in her work. It might be lurking in the twisted and tortured metal forms of her large glass and stainless-steel sculptures that are both beautiful and menacing. But her optimism is always there too, although it’s not the least bit sentimental or cloying. Optimism was simply her assumption about the nature of the world as she saw it. She insisted that beauty was always there, waiting for those who had the wit and courage to lure it out and wrestle with it. And of course she’s right about that. What kind of fool would question the assumptions of someone who has bested death?

Plenty of things made her angry — complacency, mediocrity, banality — but nothing seemed to frighten Ginny. She worried about mundane things like getting to the airport on time, but never about the big terrifying things like what her next act would be. She had second, third, fourth, and many more acts, constantly surprising everyone by taking up a new medium once she had conquered the previous one, moving from painting to glass, mixed-media sculpture, collage, pixels, and augmented reality. As far as anyone who knew her knew, she worked most of the day, every day, never stopping, and always thinking about her next move.

She once told me she didn’t understand writer’s block. How could you not know what to do next, she wondered. How could your art paralyze you? A couple of months later, when she was hopelessly stuck in the middle of an essay she  was writing for a catalogue of one of her shows, she called me and said, “Okay, I get it.”

I laughed, delighted and vindicated. The mighty Ginny had struck out. My malicious glee was short-lived. She called again the next day and said, “I’ve figured it out. I’m going to write a crappy first draft and you’re going to edit it.”

“Okay, Gin. You win again.”

Ginny was interested in a wide swath of subjects that included mathematics, philosophy, botany, genetics, normal science, weird science, space exploration, and world-building. She worked with an impressive array of eminent thinkers and inventors who became friends and enthusiastic collaborators in her quest to unleash beauty on an unsuspecting world. Her work was and is important. Although she’s gone, it is still here in museums, public spaces, and prestigious private collections. But she left behind many friends, followers, and fans here in Seattle, and all over the world, who have been gathering informally for the past weeks to remember and celebrate her as a person as well as a public figure. Her passing left a deep hole in the lives of everyone who was close to her and anyone who loved her art.

So, the story of death and Ginny Ruffner has ended in a tie. She would have laughed at that idea. She laughed at everything. She found it especially funny whenever anyone described her as a glass artist, because it made her sound like she was made of glass. But Ginny wasn’t made of glass. She was made of steel.

To find out more about Ginny, her work and her life, watch the excellent feature-length documentary about her, A Not So Still Life. It was directed by filmmaker Karen Stanton and produced by David Skinner and his company, ShadowCatcher Entertainment, who have generously made the film available for streaming online at https://player.vimeo.com/video/1002140337?h=0d9b3177db. For a comprehensive look at her work, visit www.ginnyruffner.com which was created in collaboration with her friend and colleague, Michael Hilliard.

Kathleen Cain

Kathleen Cain was a journalist and a creative director at the legendary Heckler Associates for many years before starting her own communications consulting firm. Find her writings at www.postalley.org.

A small immersive exhibit of Alfredo Arreguín at Whatcom Museum offers us a chance to meditatively enter into his luscious canvases. “The Exquisite Veil” refers to Alfredo Arreguín’s repeated use of masks from Pre-Columbian culture and folk art. The masks can appear in the foreground, or as a frieze filling the background.

In many paintings he inserts animals and birds in the jungle, as well as the faces of familiar icons.

An early work, Mexicans in Exile, sets the theme of entering his paintings: here the jungle becomes a proscenium curtain that opens to a view of lake and mountains. 

Arreguín alternates between flat surfaces and opening up the center as in—most dramatically—The House of Peace. A tiger lies on a patterned floor looking straight at us. He is not exactly inviting us to move past him, but we move our view beyond his space anyway, beyond a simple fence to the background of land, sea, and birds.

Many of these works, even as they include depth, as in Rialto, can also be read as a series of horizontal planes. This beach is familiar as the public beach on the Olympic Peninsula. In the painting, the lovely succession of land, sea mist, and starry sky with birds flying across gives a feeling of joyful freedom.

Similar in composition is Kodiak II, referencing Alaska, except that here we have a large bull moose in the foreground, and formline design on the glaciers in the background as a tribute to Native artists.

Six of the paintings in the exhibit are the gift of Arreguín’s estate, including the three described earlier. Another is Los Monos de Peru, a depiction of five monkeys hanging from trees in different positions, with some sky behind them. La Familia, is a stupendous all-over painting of masks that align up and down and which also create a continuous pattern.

Twilight, a stunning work of salmon leaping through Hokusai-like waves with a huge moon above, creates a rhythmic panorama. This piece epitomizes the second major theme of Arreguín’s work, a celebration of the Northwest cultures of salmon and orca, sea, beach, and sky.

The additional works include Zapata, a portrait of the Mexican revolutionary hero embedded almost entirely in an abstract red pattern. But most intriguing for studying the various ways that Arreguín works are the three portraits of Frida Kahlo. El Collar has a simple repeated pattern, so that her profile is clearly seen. She appears to have a snake around her shoulders for a necklace.

In La Feria, Kahlo’s face emerges from blues leaves that seem to be holding her; beneath, unusually, Arreguín breaks his pattern to include several faces of skeletons, as well as what appear to be ordinary people attending the fair. 

Untitled (Frida with a blue butterfly mask), almost entirely hides the subject’s face behind a blue butterfly mask. The jungle filled with birds, flowers, and insects surrounds her and almost envelopes her.

Many are familiar with Arreguín’s dramatic life story: as an illegitimate child, he was passed from one relative to another, but eventually ended up at art school in Mexico City. He then had an accidental meeting that changed his life, an encounter with an American family lost near the Chapultepec Castle. They subsequently invited him to join them in Seattle. After being drafted into the army during the Korean War, he visited Japan, which later became an important reference point for his art. While studying at the University of Washington in the 1960s, Arreguín explored European modernism in addition to following his own interest in Mexico. La Serape indicates that intersection with its strong geometric x-shape indicating an abstracted serape all embedded in an all-over pattern.

Whatcom Museum is a perfect place for Arreguín’s art, given the museum’s strong commitment to Northwest culture. There are permanent exhibits featuring artifacts and detailed explanations of Northwest Native American fishing, weaving, and other practices. The museum also feature exhibits about the local shipbuilding industry.

Bellingham is a delightful city to visit. The Whatcom Museum is in the magnificent early-twentieth-century city hall building close to the waterfront. It includes two other buildings nearby. Hopefully you can get there before Arreguín’s show closes on July 6. 

Susan Noyes Platt 

Susan Noyes Platt writes for local, national, and international publications and her website: www.artandpoliticsnow.com.

“The Exquisite Veil” is on view through July 6 at Whatcom Museum’s Old City Hall Building, located at 121 Prospect Street, in Bellingham, Washington. Museum hours are Wednesday through Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. For further information, visit www.whatcommuseum.org.

In March, Smith & Vallee Gallery in Edison, Washington exhibits the work of three artists: Nicki Lang, Brian O’Neill, and Tia Matthies. The gallery often pairs artists together in their large gallery, and this month-long exhibit displays Lang and O’Neill’s work side by side. Matthies’ encaustics are installed in The Flex Gallery, a smaller, more intimate room in the back of the gallery. The styles are as varied as the materials used by each artist, but all draw attention to the surface of the object or picture plane in their work. Smith & Vallee Gallery focuses primarily on artists based in the Northwest with a connection to the landscape and natural environment, and this thesis holds true this March.

Nicki Lang paints her landscapes primarily with a palette knife, and this body of work captures images ranging from the Oregon coast to British Columbia mountains. Lang states that she paints what she sees; these aren’t imagined landscapes but are scenes depicting real places. The paintings feel immediate, almost as if they were intuitive reactions to the artist experiencing these places in real time. Because she paints with a palette knife, the paint accumulates with every movement and creates an enticing texture, almost mimicking a frosted cake of landscapes. In Bull Kelp, the paint deposits from the palette knife start to mold a surface that comes out of the picture plane toward the viewer as if the kelp itself was emerging. The nuances of color are reminiscent of the changing tones of the Puget Sound as water moves and overlaps with marine vegetation. This movement creates a dynamic image as the colors and textures swirl around the landscape, created by layers of paint and color to build both depth and tactile texture.

It seems very fitting that Lang’s dimensional and layered paintings are paired with Brian O’Neill’s ceramics, which are described by the gallery as “monumental at any scale and ancient, as if unearthed from the sea.” The forms of O’Neill’s work are so appealing and balanced, yet they also feel very organic and fluid. The patterns swirl along the surface to create more dynamic movement and recall certain elements of mid-century design. O’Neill is part of a long history of ceramicists in the Northwest, each with their own way of bringing art, design, and the natural world together in their work. One favorite in this body of work is Black/White Crater Egg Sphere. The object is small, measuring 8 x 4.5 x 4.5 inches, and appears as if the bottom half was charred by fire. These objects tell a story in their own way through the narrative interpretations of the marks on the surface.

The Flex Gallery at Smith & Vallee is a small space that allows the gallery some flexibility in their programming. Sometimes the room has a rotating selection of artwork in the gallery’s inventory, and during other months an artist is selected to display their work. In March, the space features the work of Seattle-based artist Tia Matthies. The show focuses on Matthies’ reflections on the Pacific Madrone trees on Orcas Island, and that artist writes in her statement that the trees “have a flesh-like quality that sends my imagination to a place where I start to see them as beings that express in shape and form and also have a particular way of relating to each other in their tree world.” The artist creates these images using encaustic on panel, and the luminous quality of the material combined with the intertwined branches of the Pacific Madrone trees create an image that glows and moves from within.

All three artists featured in the current shows at Smith & Vallee Gallery take direct inspiration from the natural world. Lang’s visual interpretation is direct, while O’Neill and Matthies use their chosen material to bring an element of conceptual interpretation to their subjects. Lang and O’Neill consider the texture and artist’s physical intervention in the work. In contrast, Matthies attributes human emotion and relationships to her Pacific Madrone trees in such a way as to personify them for the viewer. All three seek to make a stronger connection between the viewer, the artwork, and the environment that surrounds and inspires them.

Chloé Dye Sherpe

Chloé Dye Sherpe is an art professional and curator based in Washington state.

Artworks by Nicki Lang, Brian O’Neill, and Tia Matthies are on view through March 30 at Smith & Vallee Gallery, located at 5742 Gilkey Avenue in Edison, Washington. Gallery hours are Thursday through Sunday from 11 a.m, to 5 p.m. and by appointment. On Saturday, March 1, 3 to 5 p.m. hosts a reception for the artists. For more information, visit www.smithandvalleegallery.com.

Thirsty

Their first real fight caught Charlie

at a low spot tractor broken down

just with the wheat coming on

golden heads nodding in the sun

no room time money for anything

but this toothless gear to mend

when Evaleen had most need of him

with her firstborn just starting to show

he loaded up sold half the pigs

they were fattening for the fall

counting on said not one word

until there was the check in his hand

to squander on tractor parts

the deed done an announcement

she met with an absolute silence

which meant he slept in the hayloft

took a couple days quiet thinking how

to lift the whole thing on his shoulders

carry on like he knew best

somehow with or without her

ignore her while she simmered down

forgetting how good she could be

figuring things close which only meant

his first mistake he compounded

so there they were both broken down

stuck in the road where life went

silent in slow motion on around them

untouched untasted all but meaningless

each put-upon staggered like a young

mule overburdened scared to take a step

then he recalled how folks used to say

looks like you threw both your

bucket and rope down the well

better hope you don’t never get thirsty

which to look at her he surely did

so drug out his heart’s longest ladder

in the cobwebby dark after supper

got set to climb down that hole

sundown on the porch apologize

down on his knees like he meant it

purely ask her forgiveness and vow

from now on to forever ask her first

Paul Hunter

Paul Hunter is a Seattle poet who has won the Washington State Book Award for his farming poems, and is currently working on a series of contemporary cowboy novels that wrestle with how we might savor nature more fully and accommodate ourselves to climate change. The first cowhand book won a Will Rogers Medallion. His last book was  Untaming the Valley, and the next to appear soon in 2025 is Desert Crossing. “Thirsty” is from a book of comic poems about a farming couple, Charlie and Evaleen, that is titled Starry Dark Farm Romance.