A chorus of voices from the Northwest
ON THE PALOUSE, where Washington and North Idaho meet, the rolling fields appear desolate and shorn in January, as the months-old stubble of harvested wheat pokes through patches of wind-crusted snow, like millions of splinters jutting from the earth. It’s a sharp contrast to those same hills in July, when the lush green-gold of ripening grain looks like an ocean, wind-blown swells rippling across its surface.
Those mesmerizing summertime waves of wheat are reimagined through a darker lens in, a new anthology of stories, poems and essays. Set in an alternate present or near future, “Habitat” imagines that an invasive neon-green fern has replaced the wheat sprouting from the fields of the Palouse. Rather than wind creating the iconic “shimmer and sway” along its verdant hillsides, the motion is caused by an infestation of fluorescent green snakes — a shift in habitat that has forced the area’s human inhabitants to flee.
