Seattle has had a longstanding connection with the Francophone world. As one of the top 15 most common non-English languages spoken among Seattle residents, French is a vital part of the city. The Alliance Française de Seattle is a local nonprofit that serves as one of the central hubs for both language instruction and Francophone cultural events and programming, and has been doing so since 1987.
On March 12, AFdS hosted a screening of the 2023 film Ru at Northwest Film Forum. The event was co-sponsored by the Québec Government Office, which opened a new delegation in Seattle this year.

Equipoise, defined as a balance of forces, is a name well suited for the debut Seattle dance company created by Heather Smith and Samantha Weissbach. The company, which set upon their first performance at the Yaw Theater on Friday, February 28, offered audiences a blended style of movement, tapping into the grounded athleticism and aesthetics of modern dance and the emotionally driven, raw beauty of contemporary dance.

I’m returning to my usual Parker’s Pages standard today and have an intense and thrilling novel to offer. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka had me up all day and night, gobbling pages like a Thanksgiving feast. This novel is, quite simply, brilliant, and a great weaving of mystery, crime, horror, and intense character study. There simply isn’t anything else like it.

On February 28, Seattle band Deep Sea Diver released their fourth album, Billboard Heart, their first release on the Sub Pop label. As part of their promotion of the record, the band performed songs from the album on release night at Easy Street Records in West Seattle and hosted a record signing event for fans after the show.

Curry painted iconic musicians from Jimi Hendrix to civil rights activists James Baldwin, Michelle and Barack Obama, John Lewis, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Curry titles his show Where Do We Go From Here—prodding conversation about how we continue to fight and move forward as agents of change.I asked Curry how the people in his portraits answer the question posed by his show. “We keep fighting. We keep supporting,’” Curry answered. 

In the 2020s, the topic of sustainability has become a major focus in classrooms—specifically regarding fast fashion, prompting many students to face the fact that their shopping habits or favorite retailers may be harming people and the planet. In recent years, fashion has gained a reputation for being one of the most extractive and exploitative industries. Student organizations play an important role in creating collective change by holding space for education and action, both with their members and their greater campus and local community.

February 12 was, aptly, a bit of a dark and stormy night. Wet snow dripped onto the sidewalks as people in winter coats trudged into Third Place Books in Ravenna. That night, Tacoma-based writer J. Ann Thomas was discussing her newly published novel, The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall, a Gilded Age romance novel, and her first adult novel. 

Every quarter, SFS hosts the In Focus series celebrating Seattle directors and cinematographers that features shorts, music videos, and more in a diverse range of content. SFS chooses a director who has a strong intention and vision to their stories with robust elements of “framing/staging/blocking, confidence in editing, making distinctive choices, and thematically cohesive style choices,” said the SFS Artistic Director, Marcus Baker.  

February 2025’s In Focus event showcased director and cinematographer June Zandona, known for her work on Penelope, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Special, and I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. The screening featured three of Zandona’s shorts: Dancer, Wedding Video, and This is Concrete. 

This week we’re taking a look at a book that’s a bit out of my normal reviews here in Parker’s Pages. This one is an interactive Tarot card guide called Every Little Thing You Do is Magic by two Seattle artists, Callie Little and Moorea Seal. While doing my usual rounds of the local bookstore, I came across this guide while digging through the store’s collection of Tarot decks and just knew I had to have it.

Playland gives us one last night in Boston’s oldest and most infamous gay bar, featuring the ghosts who, even in life, haunted this place. Whimsical and bittersweet, Georden West’s film pays tribute to one of the oldest gay bars in the country: the Playland Cafe, previously located in the so-called Combat Zone in Boston, the city’s adult entertainment district. The cast of characters includes bar flies, performers, servers, and all manner of debauches and renegades.

Seek out designers like Titus Ross of Thirty+ Clothing. He presents an alternative approach, embodying sustainability through the art of upcycling and strengthening community. On January 25, 2025, he showcased pieces from his current collection alongside Clementine Cimetiere of ClemCreations—who debuted on January 26—at the first-ever PNW Fashion Week. The shows took place at the QFC – Quality Flea Center and featured other local artists and advocacy vendors who promote creativity and challenge the status quo.
I spoke with Titus ahead of PNW Fashion Week to discover his inspiration for Thirty+ Clothing and find out what the future of sustainable fashion in Seattle looks like from his perspective as an emerging designer.

There are those of us (author included) for whom Halloween is not enough—we like to be scared year-round. Two such individuals are Taylor Bartle and Tony Gee, aka Taylor of Terror and Skeletony, co-hosts of the Grave Plot Podcast and Grave Plot Film Festival. “Thank you guys for traversing the arctic tundra,” Bartle said in his introduction, adding that when they first began the festival in 2019, the duo didn’t expect it would last more than a year. This was the 7th annual iteration of the festival, and its first at Central Cinema, the delightful 123-seat dine-in theater in Seattle’s Central District. 

As they wrapped up the speeches and braced for the ribbon cutting, Savanna Boles was invited to sing. During her rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”, it began to snow. At first it was a magical dusting, but as the music swelled, so did the weather. We followed the singer as everyone was ushered inside and out of the cold. A few joked that the ancestors were saying, "Get on with it, it's cold!" Inside the music switched to a vocal accompaniment to “Glory,” and the ribbon was cut. With that, the Washington State Black Legacy Institute was officially open.

When life gives you a book about frogs, by golly, you’ve got to jump on it.

This week I discovered Frog Day, a stupendously cute and informative book all about frogs and toads and the wonderful world they live in. From the Earth Day series of the University of Chicago Press comes a 24-hour story about 24 different frog and toad species, written by herpetologist (a biologist who studies amphibians and reptiles) Marty Crump and illustrated by local Seattle artist Tony Angell.

Barboza in Capitol Hill is a long, rectangular underground bar. Seventies ballads are playing while pink and blue lines of light beam down from industrial rafters to the dance floor below. People sit tucked away at cozy circular booths lit by flickering red candles while others gather near the stage. In the crowd, I see the opening band milling about and chatting with audience members. This is the band waltzerr, and they are about to perform their opening set before a performance from Kellan, followed by the night’s headliner, Ayo Dot & the Uppercuts. 

Past the coffee cup, a thriving coffee shop is filled with satisfied customers having the ability to sit at a table, lounge leisurely, and possibly work on a laptop with free wifi. Seattle shops routinely deliver these modest customer requests.

Here are four coffee shops around the Seattle area that can be ideal for finding your next open seat—and of course local art.   

Staged in Capitol Hill’s Annex Theatre, Marcus Gorman’s Gold: A True-ish Jewish Story is one part coming-of-age road trip and one part psychedelic music video. Directed by Jasmine Joshua and starring Rebekah Nachman and Megan Huynh, Gold follows two friends as they take a trip across America and time to uncover the raunchiest details of the Gold family’s patriarch’s secret love life. Learning about a deceased grandparent’s adulterous past might not be the fun vacation college students Frankie and Mona believe it to be.

I desperately needed an escape this month and happily uncovered one of the most delightful fantasy novels I’ve ever read while scouring the local bookstore. The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister creates a cozy atmosphere right off the cuff, weaving lyrical writing with gloriously sensual descriptions of scents to create a reading experience that feels like no other. I have never had a novel tug at my sense of smell quite like this one; it brings to mind memories old and new, just as it does for the main character of the novel, Emmeline.

Jim Lynch is a Washington native and you can tell. This book practically reeks of the Puget Sound, of Olympia, and the clear water of the bay; you can hear, taste, and feel it on each page. This novel was written by someone who knows the Sound like an old friend, and although I’m not a natural born Seattleite, I could picture each place described in this novel with sharp clarity. Be they skittling crabs, spitting geoducks, or a squirming sea slug, this book brings the animals of the bay to life.

The Beacon is located at the very edge of Columbia City, nestled in a wall of ivy and wedged between nail salons and a neon-illuminated funeral home. The single-screen cinema opened its doors in 2019, boasting an eclectic mix of curated films. Amidst the popularity of Robert Eggers’ new film, it’s only logical for a place like The Beacon to showcase one of its predecessors: Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: The Vampyre.