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Between cultures: Dao Strom’s “On an Open Field”
Refugees from Vietnam are again in the news, now that the Trump administration is moving to deport people for minor legal violations who came to the US more than forty years, ago. It’s having a terrible impact on communities in the Pacific Northwest, according to an article at Crosscut.
Portland multi-media artist and poet Dao Strom came to the US as a refugee many years ago, and that experience continues to resonate in her work. In an interview now online at Cascadia Magazine, Strom talks about that experience, returning to Vietnam, and how her art resides in a place of “non-belonging”:
“The first time I went back I was 23. Since I’d left as a 2-year-old, I had no memories of Vietnam or of leaving. So the biggest thing I learned, on that first return, was that collective consciousness and inherited trauma are very real things.”
Cascadia Magazine is also proud to publish a multimedia work by Dao Strom: “On an Open Field” — a mix of photography, music, and text that explores that space between cultures of Vietnam and America:, in which Strom finds herself “wandering, being drawn, to both aesthetic and personal degrees, into a terrain I had no map for, could cite no single context or guidelines to follow or fit my confluences into, a hinterland of sorts.”
Read more here.
Cascadia Magazine poetry: Two poems by Samuel Green
“This was the year the elk swam
to the island, a stray bull turned out
of its Cascade herd & somehow
kicked its way across a mile of saltwater
currents…”
Former Washington state poet laureate Samuel Green, who lives in the San Juan Islands, has two poems online at Cascadia Magazine about human interactions with wildlife: “Falcon Watching, Disney Point,” and “Elk.” Take a moment to read them here.
Oregon Senate passes rent control
OPB reports that a bill that would limit rent increases and increase tenant protections passed the Oregon senate today and will likely pass the Democratic-controlled House. It would be the first statewide limit on rental costs in the US. Meanwhile Canadian premier Justin Trudeau was in Vancouver today to announce $20 million in federal funds for new affordable housing in BC.
WA Muslim group funds hotel rooms for homeless
The unusually heavy snowfall and cold in the Northwest is hard on the homeless — one man died from exposure in Seattle earlier this week. Lilly Fowler at Crosscut reports that the Muslim Association of Puget Sound helped out by purchasing hotel rooms for people living in an encampment in Issaquah, WA during the cold snap.
Vancouver MP quits Canadian cabinet in wake of scandal
Jody Wilson-Raybould — the former Justice Minister of Canada, an MP from Vancouver, and a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw First Nation — resigned from her cabinet position of Veterans Affairs over a growing scandal involving favorable treatment of a Quebec-based construction company. Indian Country today has more on the controversy. Meanwhile, Justin Trudeau was in Vancouver campaigning for an important by-election in Burnaby, where race has become a potent issue. And in other political news, BC premier John Horgan came to Olympia, WA to give a speech in support of strengthening the Cascadia Innovation Corridor. An article at The Georgia Straight notes that “British Columbia’s exports to Washington are nearly equal to the value of all the province’s exports to China.”
Eugene’s missing and murdered women
Eugene Weekly has a fantastic piece of detailed (and tragic) reporting about scores of women who’ve gone missing or murdered in Eugene over the past two decades — and in particular, Eryn Beth McClary, a woman with a troubled past who went missing in 1995.
Brandi Carlile’s Grammy moment
Singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who lives in Maple Valley, WA and won several Grammy awards for her album By the Way, I Forgive You, completely stole the award ceremony with a live performance her stunning song “The Joke.” For those late to this amazing album, NPR has a review here. Seattle Weekly notes that Carlile wasn’t the only local artist to do well at the Grammys– Seattle Symphony also took honors for its recording of Aaron Jay Kernis’s violin concerto.
BC artist’s home filled with fake masterpieces
Vancouver Sun has a fantastic feature and video about Cosimo Geracitano, a 71-year-old retired electrical repairman and amateur painter who lives in Coquitlam, BC and has a home full of life-size replicas of masterworks of European paintings he meticulously creates. His house is a combination of Louvre, Uffizi, and the Sistine Chapel, with really good fakes of DaVinci, Boticelli, and Vermeer among them.
That’s today’s Snowpocalypse 2019 edition of Cascadia Daily, where we’re really hoping there’s school tomorrow! ❄️ –Andrew Engelson
Photo credits: Brandi Carlile by Kirk Stauffer via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0