Since 1990, Holly Gwinn Graham has been a treasure of Olympia’s music and activist communities. In September 2023, she released her 10th album, Hopeful Traveler, at Traditions Cafe, the site of many of her concerts over the years, to a crowd of friends and fans. Sadly, she passed in February, leaving her wonderful songs to enlighten our hearts and minds for years to come.
Posts published in “–”
I’ve been alive for a long time. I survived the rain, ice, floods, wind. I found a home here in Thurston County as the glaciers receded. Under the prairies. Over the meadows. I swam the vast marshes with beaver dams. As those habitat creations evolved to airports and farms, I…
Privilege weaves blinders so soft and light they are almost not there. I could peek, but guilt is the price of seeing. No matter that I started with a leg up, a few rungs up the ladder. Life isn’t fair or so my parents told me. I never…
Fern Roush is a writer, teacher, organizer, long-distance runner and hiker based out of Olympia, WA. Her/their work has appeared most recently in the Cooper Point Journal, Slightly West, The Jackson Hole Poetry Box, and The Mobile Moon Collective Zine. She was a featured poet at the 2023 Cultivating Voices…
Like it or not, our world has become so interconnected and interdependent that events that have hitherto been regarded as regional in nature now threaten our well-being everywhere. The Ukraine war triggered global food and energy crises, global inflation, exacerbated the worldwide refugee crisis, and renewed the specter of a…
Brydon Stewart is a longtime Olympia artist whose work may be found at the Saturday Farmers Market
Zine Workshop -- Food Planet Future -- Music of the Forest -- Lacey Cultural Celebration -- Greet your creatures -- Capitol Theater -- Story Swap... More
Zine Workshop -- Food Planet Future -- Music of the Forest -- Lacey Cultural Celebration -- Greet your creatures -- Capitol Theater -- Story Swap... More
The Action On Friday December 15, 2023, there was an action at the Eastside Olympia, WA RE/MAX office to protest ReMax’s business dealings in Israel. This action was organized old-school style. Kept off social media, word of mouth and distribution of printed flyers got the word out. On the day…
What can we do to enhance the resilience of our community and the long-term productivity of our land? Permaculture is a system that answers that question with general principles that are adapted to each bioregion. Permaculture has been practiced under that name since the 1970’s, and for thousands of years…
My background causes me to support the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestine including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Since 1967, I have actively opposed the U.S. military aid and ideological support for Israel, and in solidarity with Palestine. I mourn the deaths of 26,000 people…
Lacey, WA – On Sunday afternoon, December 17th, nearly 100 people gathered in Lacey to shut down an Amazon fulfillment center and halt the flow of delivery trucks. Amazon is the technologic backbone of the Israeli apartheid regime – they have multi-billion dollar contracts providing cloud services and servers to…
This is part one of a two-part series on this issue. Click here to view part two. This article was submitted to Thurston County for consideration in the land use chapter of its Comprehensive Plan update, Thurston 2045. Just about everyone deplores and bemoans the sad state of rural America.…
This is part two of a two-part series on this issue. Click here to view part one. Thurston County is in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan, known as Thurston 2045. The comprehensive plan is the 20-year growth plan and policy document for unincorporated Thurston County that guides future…
The District Court set a November 2, 2023 date for a case brought by the Thurston County Prosecutor charging the abuse and neglect of 2 horses, and he was doubtless confident it was an easy win to boost the Office’s conviction rates. It didn’t turn out that way. Here are…
It is not enough to lobby elected officials. We must build a big grassroots movement to make elected officials do what we want. When we talk to elected officials, they think there are only a few of us, so it’s safe to simply listen politely and then ignore what we…
In 1945 the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on two cities in Japan. Since then eight other nations, (Russia, United Kingdom France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea) – fearing for their own “national security” – developed nuclear weapons. Since the 1940s the U.S. has led each step in escalating…
Thurston County has begun the Comprehensive Plan Update, called Thurston 2045. As the name implies, the update will determine codes for the next twenty years. One important question will depend on citizens’ values – do we want industrial development, including mega-warehouse complexes, on land currently zoned for agriculture? Or do…
The Washington State Legislature will convene on Monday January 8, 2024, for the short even-year session (into early March). Sessions in odd-numbered years (after the even-year November elections) are longer. Important issues are dealt with every year. A great number and variety of excellent non-profit organizations work on legislation every…
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” -Buckminster Fuller Just as the US was founded on the ideas of equality and democracy, with diverse people united by that common ideal, the original Jewish people were…
I love electric vehicles. And until I read this book about Elon Musk, I had a fairly good opinion of Elon Musk, the owner of the biggest electric vehicle company in the world. But now my opinion of Musk has changed. Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, published in…
Citizens’ Voices Must Be Raised Again In 2021 the owners of Beaver Creek Dairy Farm requested that the 365-acre property be rezoned from Rural Resources/Residential to Rural Resources Industrial. In 2021 over 150 people, including many biologists and hydrologists, wrote comments to the county opposing this rezone because of the…
The Local Good Governance Coalition, which consists of several Thurston County civic groups focusing on housing and environmental issues, recently voted to send a letter to the City of Olympia to urge them to adopt a code of ethics, which it does not currently have. Several other Washington cities, including…
This Trump design is taken directly from the Nazi Party’s 1932 election poster showing Hitler standing behind a speaker’s podium wrapping himself in the Nazi Party flag, his pose identical to my Trump/Republican Party’s figure. The original Nazi poster featured the Nazi’s election slogan in the upper left corner “Ein…
Works in Progress, or WIP, is transitioning. The workers of the past few years will no longer be with the paper; also, a key philanthropist has died and we must adjust to the loss of his funding. Until other sources of funding can be secured, after this WIP will be an online paper.....