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A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Michael Toms for the iconic New Dimensions radio show. Toms, often called the Socrates of Radio, showed up for the interview with a legal pad that was completely filled with tiny handwritten notes and queries about my book Crow Planet. He knew the contents of the book better than I did and, like the real Socrates, drew thoughts from my mind and heart that I didn't even know were there. When I learned of his death early this year, I recalled our post-interview walk in his garden, Michael leaning heavily on a walking stick. He and his wife, Justine, had loaded my arms with gifts: copies of all the books they'd both written, topped with a bright green bumper sticker printed with the words: Celebrate Fiercely. The studio, which occupied the bottom floor of Michael and Justine's home, was perched on an arid Northern California hillside. I remember looking at the sticker, breathing in the pungent fragrance of white sage, and lifting my face to that deserty sun, so different from the moist-clouded sun ...

Editor's note: Chris Bolton is not only a former Powell's employee, he was also once the primary writer for this blog. So we are particularly proud today to post the following essay by our former coworker and friend as he promotes the publication of his first book. Congratulations, Chris!

As is so often the case in life, the conception of Smash was a whole lot easier — and faster — than the birth.

A bit of background first. My younger brother Kyle and I grew up loving comic books. The monthly trip to the comic shop was our mecca. We spent our $20 allowance in a heartbeat — although our poor, sainted mother, waiting in her hot car, might argue it took many, many heartbeats. The comic books of the 1980s influenced our creative growth: Kyle became an artist whose style bore a distinctly comic-bookish flavor, while my writing was heavily influenced by the serialized storylines and cliffhanger endings of comics.

Several years into reluctant adulthood, while Kyle was attending the Art Institute of Seattle, I took the train north for a visit. We were walking around downtown Seattle when ...

You may have heard of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments. Perhaps you've read about them in a textbook at school, as I did. Even if you haven't, you've likely come across them without knowing it — in the episode of The Simpsons, for example, where a therapist hooks the family up to a shock machine, and they zap one another as Springfield's electricity grid falters and the streetlights flicker. You might have seen them referenced in other TV programs, from Malcolm in the Middle to Law and Order: SVU. Perhaps you read in the news about an infamous 2010 French mock game show where contestants believed they were torturing strangers for prize money. Or you might have heard the experiments mentioned in a documentary about torture or the Holocaust.

Milgram's obedience research might have started life in a lab 50 years ago, but it quickly leapt from academic to popular culture, appearing in books, plays, films, songs, art, and reality television.

The routine description of the research goes something like this: Stanley Milgram found that 65 percent of people will deliver lethal electric shocks to a stranger because they are ...

Snow White has always been my favorite fairy tale. It's so strange: that glass coffin in the forest, the stepmother asking for the princess's heart, the talking mirror voicing her deepest fears and desires. I saw the classic Disney film when I was very young, and I was as terrified by the sinister forest and poison-apple-bearing villainess as I was entranced by the beribboned princess and dashing prince. It's the perfect mix of that beauty and darkness at the heart of the best fairy tales. The Grimm and other older versions are even better (darker): the heart swapped out for lungs and liver, Snow White dying and coming back to life multiple times, in some versions the prince so in love with the seeming dead girl that he can barely leave her side to eat or sleep.

By the time I came to Snow White, though, I'd already reworked Cinderella (in my novel Godmother) and The Little Mermaid (in my novel Mermaid). My editor wanted another retelling and I was torn: I wanted to write something new (not a fairy tale!), but I felt excited by the ...

A few weeks ago I sent my son off to Bristol Bay, where a job waited as a deckhand on a fishing boat. Ethan was excited to have lined up one of the summer jobs most coveted by teenagers in our small coastal town: high pay and hard work chasing salmon in the wild estuaries of Alaska. He is 18, tall and strong, a varsity athlete freshly graduated from high school with college ahead in the fall. But as we walked to the security-free gate in Anchorage where his prop plane to Dillingham waited, he admitted to a few butterflies.

I felt them, too. A summer like this would change him, whatever happened. I had only to think about the summer when I, too, went to sea in Alaska. It had been a season that changed everything, including the direction of my career as a writer.

My invitation to work as a deckhand came at the end of a long, dark winter. I happily shelved the historical fiction that had swallowed me whole, relieved to trade the guilt of long hours at a snowbound desk for the simple urgency of ...

Never in a million years did I imagine myself becoming a self-help author. But since my first book, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, was published several weeks ago, I've often found it classified in that very category. For a brief period, I was even Amazon's 72nd bestselling self-help author, sandwiched between Carol Kline (Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul) and Jessica Alba.

Not that I mind being a self-helper. While my primary goal with the book was to present entertaining biographical sketches of writers, painters, composers, and other great artists and thinkers — explaining how they made the time each day to do their work, and what rituals helped (or hindered) their creative process — I also hoped that readers would find inspiration for their own creative projects or just for getting more done each day.

But, let's be honest: if you're looking for guidance on how to be a better person, more connected to your family or peers, healthier, or more even-keeled, history's great artists are pretty much the last people you want to emulate . So many of my subjects created amazing, timeless works of art — ...

Her name was "Waterloo Sunset," and she wasn't a girl (or a boy for that matter) but rather a song by the Kinks, and I fell in love just the same.

It was the late 1980s, and I was adrift. I was an undergrad at San Francisco State, and after a torturous breakup and indecision about my major, in a moment of clarity that occurs just a few times over the course of a life, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and that was write novels.

Music never sounds better than when you're 19, and with "Waterloo Sunset," I can remember listening to it while looking down on California from an airplane window. It was the song I played when I returned home to my apartment on the night of the earthquake that knocked over my bookshelves made from cinder blocks and boards. It was a song I played on a Sunday afternoon in October 1988 when I was deciding what to do to give my life direction. I have no idea why music makes me want to write novels — rather than, say, play in ...

I was lucky enough to have a fantastic Shakespeare professor in college. She brought the material to life with her vast knowledge and brought students to tears with her brilliantly structured lectures. Every year she split the class into groups of five, assigned each group an act of a play, and had students stage a production all over campus. It was my first and only appearance as Hamlet, but I did get the big graveyard scene. The experience stuck with me forever.

So when I sat down to write a novel about a Shakespeare professor, out this month called Elizabeth the First Wife, I borrowed liberally from my own exceptional teacher. Except the vast knowledge of Shakespeare part. I quickly realized that being a Shakespeare enthusiast is not really even in the same ballpark as being a Shakespeare scholar. There was almost no academic question I could cook up for my fictional professor to study that hasn't already been beaten to death by those in the know, in books, blogs, and message boards. I couldn't compete with the real deals, even in fiction. So I decided ...

When my editor at Sasquatch Books pitched Full Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest to higher-ups in the publishing world, they weren't enthusiastic.

"Is there anything positive in it?" they asked with dismay.

It's a good question. Who wants to read a depressing litany of the ways in which we are doomed?

As I see it, though, the story is a hopeful one.

Knowledge is power, and thanks to the work of a generation of geologists, we finally know our region's true seismic nature.

Less than 30 years ago, no one could have imagined that Oregon, Washington, Northern California, and British Columbia face the same type of monster quake and tsunami that slammed Japan in 2011. Today, governments, businesses, schools, and utilities are making upgrades and mapping out what still needs to be done to ensure that the region will be able to bounce back from a catastrophe that is inevitable.

"We cannot avoid the future earthquake, but we can choose either a future in which the earthquake results in grim damage and losses and a society diminished for a generation, or a future in which the earthquake is ...

When did I first realize what I had gotten myself into?

Was it that morning in the 102-degree Bikram studio when, slick with sweat, leaving little puddles on my mat as I grunted through a series of yoga poses, I face-planted during a strenuous downward dog sequence and gave myself a bloody nose?

Maybe it was the evening of the 12th day of my detox and fasting regimen when I made chicken parmesan and spaghettini for my family and then sat down to a sludgy gray rice protein shake.

Or it could have been that afternoon at the Bowerman Sports Clinic, cycling hard on a stationary bike with a heart monitor strapped to my chest, a pair of plastic clips pinching my nose, a mask-and-hose contraption crowning my head, and a nervous young grad student inexpertly pricking my finger every three minutes.

At some moment — really during all these moments and more — I thought to myself: This whole human guinea-pig approach to researching a book has its, uh, downside. Why exactly am I doing this again? Why aren't I sitting comfortably at home in my nice, book-lined office? ...