Robert McLean

Here's a little background about my first book, 'The Real Sedro-Woolley & Other Imaginings of the Pacific Northwest'. It's a collection of short stories and one novella I began writing fifteen years ago. I lived in Seattle in the mid-90s, and spent a lot of my spare time hiking and travelling around the Pacific Northwest. Aftter I moved away, I started writing short stories set in the Northwest as a hobby. The first one I wrote, called 'The Time Capsule', was published in one of the first-ever online literary reviews called The Dragonfly Review, published out of the San Juan Islands. It was a nifty little journal, but way too far ahead of its time. You'll find no trace of it now on the internet. I've included 'The Time Capsule' in this book.

The first story in the book is a novella called "The Real Sedro-Woolley". When I lived in Seattle I often had to drive up to Vancouver BC, and I used to take a break at the exit for S-W. I always thought it was the coolest name ever for a town. The novella isn't set in S-W, but in a town in eastern North America that the narrator - a 17 year old named Landon Go - wants to keep secret. His dream is to one day head west and visit the real S-W (hence the name of the story) and make his home in Washington. I know what you're thinking - it's yet another YA/coming-of-age story. I suppose it is, although it's not exclusively YA, and Landon doesn't really come of age in the story. As if any of us ever really comes of age.

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