It's April, everybody. The migrating whales are being welcomed this week in La Push. The volume on the chorus of pacific tree frogs seems stuck on 11. And rhinoceros auklets are on their way back to lay eggs on Destruction Island. This year, Eric Wagner won't be there stealing fish from the mouths of newly hatched auklets in the name of science. Instead he'll be with us at the Dungeness River Nature Center telling us what he learned. That's at 6pm this Saturday, April 11.

Signs of abundance can be found in the bookstore too: the bookshelves are filling up faster than we can face them out. Independent Bookstore Day is right around the corner. The celebration leveled up this year with the Salish Sea Book Voyage—a passport challenge that turns a bookstore crawl into a proper adventure across the peninsula and the islands. Details below.

Oh, and we're launching a naturalist book club, too.

It's Earth Day month, it's National Poetry Month, and it's the kind of spring that reminds you why you live here. Come in. We've been saving things for you.

We have so much planned for the first Saturday of April, aka Independent Bookstore Day: Spin the wheel for discounts, prizes, and bad jokes. Bookstore Bingo — bingos and blackouts win prizes. Every purchase enters the raffle; anything over $100 earns a prize on the spot. Hunt for the hidden Libro.fm Golden Ticket. Watch our socials for the Spirit Week challenge. And there will be treats.

The Salish Sea Book Voyage kicks off the same day. Pick up your free passport at PBN, then collect stamps from participating indie bookstores across the region through May 2. Six stamps completes the challenge. No purchase required — just bring your passport and say hello.

More info: salishseabookvoyage.com

Staff Picks

I called biographer Jamie Morris to ask why someone who mostly reads fiction should pick up a biography. His answer started with a date: 1975, when Robert Caro published The Power Broker and reinvented the genre overnight. "Biographers stole all the methods of novelists," Morris told me. "Foreshadowing, unreliable narrators, scene-building. There's one thing we never do — we never change the facts. All we're doing is changing how the story is told."

Morris is Peninsula College's Writer in Residence this spring and we are excited to be along for the ride. The author of biographies of Pulitzer, journalist Ethel Payne, and Tony Hillerman, and a co-founder of the Biographers International Organization, his insights and experiencxe are incredibly wide-ranging. He visits the Peninsula May 13–14 for three events. We'll have his books at all of them, and keep an eye out in the store for Morris' curated shelf of biographies to check out and more from our conversation next month.

Apr 11 — Eric Wagner, Reading & Signing, DRNC (6 PM)

Apr 25 — Independent Bookstore Day

Apr 25 -May 2 — Salish Sea Book Voyage

May 13 — James McGrath Morris, Peninsula College (10 am)

May 13 — Morris, Port Townsend Public Library (4 PM)

May 14 — Morris: Studium Generale, Peninsula College (12:35 PM)

May 14 — Laura Garrard & Linda B. Meyers, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center (5:30 PM)

May 18 — Ben Hertel with Kate Reavey, NOLS (6 PM)

May 28 — Land & Letters Book Club at NOLT on Peabody St (6 PM)

May 29 — Eli Raphael, Night Objects launch at NOLS (6:30 PM)

Two Poet Laureates and a posthumous collection.

"And like Billy Bray I go my way, and my left foot says 'Glory,' and my right foot says 'Amen': in and out of Shadow Creek, upstream and down, exultant, in a daze, dancing, to the twin silver trumpets of praise."

— Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974).

Dillard spent a year watching one creek in Virginia the way Wagner watches Destruction Island — not because the place was extraordinary, but because she decided to pay attention.