About Upriver Readings

Spring 2024

Swedish Sisters section

I am adding posts about family history, starting with my paternal grandmother who came to Seattle in 1906 from Aland Island, Finland. The section Swedish Sisters will be the featured for now in Upriver Readings.

Watershed Plants section

I spend part of my time in the North Creek area of Bothell, Wa, where I have a home-based nursery. Writings about Northwest native plants and gardening topics are in the section Watershed Plants.

Origin of this Substack publication

Upriver Readings started in 2020 as comments related to Story Club with George Saunders, my responses to this study of short stores. I called it Upriver Readings since it was my “reading,” or my reaction to ideas presented. Upriver, because I live part of the time near the Sauk River in the North Cascades, an inland tributary of the Skagit.

I also started using icons of the little mouse offering up the purple pebble, an image I made in cut paper, based on an illustration from Lio Lionni’s Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse. Its a way to say here’s my .02 on the subject, my offering of an idea.

And then there’s the perplexed observer, taking notes, from clipart I found online, and took the liberty of using in cropped and recolored forms:

Thanks for stopping by — Sylvia