Nathan Vass
Nathan Vass is an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and author by day, and a Metro bus driver by night, where his community-building work has been showcased on TED, NPR, The Seattle Times, KING 5 and landed him a spot on Seattle Magazine’s 2018 list of the 35 Most Influential People in Seattle. He has shown in over forty photography shows is also the director of nine films, six of which have shown at festivals, and one of which premiered at Henry Art Gallery. His book, The Lines That Make Us, is a Seattle bestseller and 2019 WA State Book Awards finalist.
"How's it goin', old school," said one man to another.
They shared in the brotherhood of being tall, a slow-hipped swagger from the American past, two dark-skinned street denizens born before the microwave. They were the generation that saw Vietnam come home and remembered the days before computers. I...
This one is a companion piece of sorts to one below.
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He swaggered onboard with the lost hope of a man who wished he ruled the world. In delusion there is comfort; maybe he did and still would, in the final place where such things matter, the secret recesses of your...
In case you missed the broadcast earlier this week, here it is online! Hope you enjoy!
A huge thank you to Joseph Suttner, Suzie Wiley, Julia, and of course Michael King, for their graciousness and enthusiasm.
I suspect my early formative days, spent as they were in the predominantly black and otherwise ethnic neighborhoods in South Central LA, have left within me with a certain positive bias, a subtle sense of long-ago comfort toward certain culture groups. It's not really a sensation based on specific...
We knew each other once, intimately. The trim figure, the vivacious brown eyes and half-smile that just about screams vitality, even when silent. Many people merely repeat the headlines they've read; she was different. She could give a reason for every word she blurted, no matter how unconsidered they...
It's the urban fashion du jour for how to hold a phone, and it confounds me.
You hold your phone, which is not on speakerphone, like a fragile radioactive pebble of a walkie-talkie, and you constantly switch from holding the phone to your ear to listen, and more often holding...
If you’ve read this, you won’t be surprised at my reaction to Seattle Magazine choosing me as one of their 35 Most Influential People of 2018 (!). I feel outrageously, ridiculously humbled. Let’s put it this way: I’m no Bob Ferguson! (Read my in-depth praise of Bob's actions in...
"Congratulations," a friend once told me, after I'd finally gotten a New York literary agent. "Let yourself feel it today, and breathe. You deserve this."
The thing is, I don't know how to do that.
Humility is one of the great human virtues, and maybe the final pit stop on the spectrum of...