Port Book & News — April 2026

It's April, Everybody

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.

Independent Bookstore Day is April 25

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 Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman (Apr 26)

This book will open your eyes to a lot of things. The women in this story show that even in a really strange world that you know nothing about, you can find your humanity. It makes you think about what really matters — feelings, connections, the small things we take for granted. I picked it for our book club because it starts conversations you don't expect. People come in with one idea about what the book is and leave thinking about something completely different. That's the kind of book I want to hand someone.

—Belle

In Trees by Robert Moor (Apr 7)

Robert Moor's In Trees is a worthy follow-up to his brilliant and beloved On Trails. Moor explores every imaginable facet of our relationship with trees, bringing a wide-ranging, experiential, philosophical sensibility reminiscent of Robert Macfarlane alongside the reported narrative heft of Michael Pollan. At its most profound, this work ventures far from a book about trees as charismatic megaflora themselves into trees as metaphor. Maybe the best book to use trees as a lens for something much more conceptual since John Fowles's The Tree.

—Steven

James McGrath Morris: "It's the Heyday of Biographies"

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. We'll have his books at all of three of his events May 13-14. Look out in the store for Morris' curated shelf of biographies to read and more from our conversation next month.

Upcoming Events

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

May 21 — Laura Garrard & Linda B. Meyers, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center (5:30 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)

New Books

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke (Apr 7)

Behind the curtain of a social media influencer's curated life. Burke skips the easy satire to expose a darker question: why can't we look away?

Transcription by Ben Lerner (Apr 7)

144 pages on memory, speech, and the difference between what someone said and what you remember. If you haven't read Lerner, one of our talkiest writers, start here.

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (Apr 7)

The master of investigative non-fiction (Say Nothing) returns. A body in the Thames, a teenage imposter, and an aging gangster. Keefe investigates the collision of high-society fantasy and London's criminal underbelly. As addictive as any thriller.

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta (Apr 28)

1970s New Jersey, a thirteen-year-old boy's mother has just died, and the summer that follows reshapes everything. From the writer Time calls “the Steinbeck of Suburbia”.

Poetry Month

Against Breaking by Ada Limón (Apr 7)

Fans of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Matthew Zapruder, or Jesmyn Ward will find here a refuge and a reminder of the resilience and beauty around us.

Creature Feature by Dean Young (Apr 7)

The first posthumous collection: surreal, funny, heartbroken, daring (and on local publisher Copper Canyon). Someone who refused to write a safe poem.

Transient Worlds: on Translating Poetry by Arthur Sze (Apr 14)

Also new from Copper Canyon: 25th U.S. Poet Laureate Sze guides readers through 1,500 years of world poetry in translation.

Famous Last Words

"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.