Robert McLean

The Real Sedro-Woolley and other imaginings of the Pacific Northwest Robert McLean

Beyond the hippy greenness of Portland, the tech-grunge wealth of Seattle, and the cosmopolitan cool of Vancouver is the older, elemental Pacific Northwest, where landscape and people combine in a spare geography of rock, water and forest. This collection of short stories is populated by characters who are a product of that geography, and others who are drawn to it like moths to lights. The title novella introduces Landon Go, a bookish seventeen-year-old skateboarder navigating strong women and small town complexity, all the while staying focused on his dream of a life in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. In other stories we meet an aging surfer who speaks to himself across time, a parole officer watching helplessly as his small town disintegrates, and a mysterious backwoods woman who leads a software millionaire on a romantic hide-and-seek chase through the North Cascades.