Notes from the Bookshop: Quimper Peninsula Meditations

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Photo by  Girma Nigusse  on  Unsplash         [/caption]

Notes From the Bookshop is a monthly column dedicated to the fine art of reading by Conner Bouchard-Roberts, publisher and bookseller at Winter Texts. He is also Jefferson County’s first poet laureate.

Moving into the new year always rings with an elongated echo that stretches back to beginnings. On the Quimper Peninsula, in Port Townsend, beginnings are often awash in colonial myth or a nostalgic forgetfulness–and on occasion informed fact. It is not an easy task to live with a long sense of history, in this windy limb of land, when the inherited names and the codified stories often do more to blur reality than illuminate it.

“Quimper Peninsula”: one of the many places Spanish Naval Officer Manuel Quimper named after himself. “Port Townsend”: A town named as a favor to someone who never set foot on the Salish Coast. “Port Townsend: A Victorian Seaport and Arts Community”: A branding exercise to help promote tourism in a town that can’t seem to house its own.

“A Victorian Seaport and Arts Community”

by Conner Bouchard-Roberts

Hard to say

where memory and

story of memory

lay along the shore

this is of course

the gull’s call and echo

down streets

down bluffs

the stone’s weight

of time and present

in one hand,

in the other, bills

eroding cliffs

rising sea

a long walk

to think this over

this all got going

as waves, wind, and roots—

long before she was born

Victoria’s hands were sea-water

walking the valley

again, lost names

accruing silt

and translations

forward and back

in time

Water Street

holds its name