I am going to launch Desire Lines at Elliott Bay Book Company on Friday, October 9th. My dear friend, the Salon critic Melanie McFarland, will moderate our discussion of the lyric essay, the pagan bedrock beneath Catholic icons, Latinidad and the complications of motherhood within the patriarchy, and the enduring power of the divine feminine.
JS: For those who don’t know the many hats you wear (and have worn) in Seattle’s literary community, can you tell us some of your career highlights?
KMY: Well, let’s see. From 2018 to 2026, I reviewed dozens of books for the Washington Post, whose diminishment is a good reminder that oligarchs should not control the means by which we inform each other of vital truths. RIP, Book World. I am in talks with other outlets, but I want to take a moment to praise my editor Stephanie Merry for encouraging me to bring queer, BIPOC and indie thought into the canon.
I just wrapped up five years with the Humanities Washington Speakers Bureau, crisscrossing the state to serve 800 writers with fifty free and bilingual creative writing workshops. After a series of distinguished visiting writer gigs, I have joined the faculty of a low residency MFA program hosted by Oregon State University’s Cascades campus in Bend, Oregon.
A little while back, I edited SEISMIC — Seattle, City of Literature, an essay collection that reflects on the UNESCO designation by which “Seattle’s literary reputation was solidified on the world stage,” according to the Seattle Times. A 2021 Washington State Book Award finalist available via free download, SEISMIC opens with an exhortation by Rena Priest (Lhaq’temish (Lummi) Nation) and closes with an oral history by Ken Workman (Duwamish).
JS: Okay, let’s talk about Iceland. We were so pleased when you were selected for the residency in our sister City of Lit Reykjavik last November. What was that experience like for you?
KMY: Reykjavík’s literary scene is how I imagined 1920s Paris to be.
JS: How wonderful!
KMY: To give you an idea, I walked into Kaffi Vest, a café across the street from the Vesturbæjarlaug geothermal pool. I was a bit early because I was going to meet Sjón. The author of Moonstone and The Blue Fox, Sjón was in an anarcho-Surrealist political party that came to power through satire. An interesting thinker. Anyhow, I was trying to get a seat, and there were some of the country’s foremost writers, stacked table upon table: Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (Miss Iceland), Jón Kalman Stefánsson (Fish Have No Feet), Thóra Hjörleifsdóttir (Magma), and Eva Rún Snorradóttir (author of Older Women and co-founder of the Queer Situations festival). We said hello and gave hugs.
After interviewing thirty leading authors and feminists for my project, I came to think of Reykjavík as a global village. I kept running into intellectuals on the street.
JS: What other impressions of Iceland did you come away with?
KMY: The Icelanders I met are hardworking, ethical, funny, thoughtful, direct, and erudite. Even when the country’s residents lived in crushing poverty for centuries, they read the sagas and treasured poetry. Amidst a high literary culture which now includes free college tuition and grant-based salaries to artists, the writers I met have more capacity to write their books.
The hustle is real and ongoing, but health care, parental leave divided between both parents, and access to early childhood care make a real difference in society. America should try spending less on war and more on care.
JS: So, what was your focus project while you were there?
KMY: I went to Reykjavík hoping to understand the literary and sociocultural context for the 50th anniversary of the Icelandic Women’s Day Off. In 1975, ninety percent of Icelandic women went on strike, effectively shutting the country down. They didn’t call it a strike – too political. Instead, they called it a “day off” – and who doesn’t deserve a day off?
But truly, the Women’s Day Off, or Kvennafrídagurinn, was anything but. Mass mobilizations led to walkouts, from factories and daycares to homes and the holds of ships. One year later in 1976, a gender equality bill passed the Icelandic parliament, paving the way for the world’s first nationally elected female president and a host of ongoing reforms.
For the first time, Iceland’s government is run by a majority of women: both the president and the prime minister are women, most of its cabinet ministers are women, and the coalition that took power in 2024 was formed by three women-led parties. Iceland has led the world in gender equality for fifteen years, according to the World Economic Forum.
Iceland is a good model for what is possible when a country values women and the arts. And yet, forty percent of Icelandic women have endured domestic violence, and the nation’s leading experts say that the judicial system cannot deliver justice to survivors of sexual assault.
How to create liberty within a system which, while leading the world in gender equity, can become complacent? And what can we, as Americans, learn from a country whose model is far more equitable than what we’re dealing with at home?
