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Southwest Washington, by the book: Our corner of the world takes center stage in these literary works

From Ursula Le Guin's 1971 “The Lathe of Heaven” to 2019's “Deep River” by Karl Marlantes, Clark County lands literary locations

By Scott Hewitt, Columbian staff reporter

Published: March 20, 2025, 6:08am

2 Photos

Hunting for a novel that stays right here in familiar Southwest Washington? We have some recommendations. (The Columbian files) Photo Gallery

When I was a young science-fiction sponge growing up on the East Coast, I fell hard for a weird little novel called “The Lathe of Heaven” by Ursula K. LeGuin.

The star of “The Lathe of Heaven” (1971, Avon) is George Orr, a desperate fellow whose nighttime dreams literally — shockingly — remake the waking world. Every time poor Orr wakes up, he finds that the ground of reality has shifted under his feet.

That ground turns out to be our own regional turf. “The Lathe of Heaven” is set in perpetually rainy Portland, where author LeGuin lived. The book gets specific about place names — local streets, parks and landmarks like the Willamette River and nearby Mount Hood.

LeGuin also mentions that Orr “rode the Vancouver subway” back and forth to work at a regional power facility that’s never named. During a recent re-read, I realized that this must be the Bonneville Power Administration’s Ross Complex.

Names like Vancouver and Portland meant nothing to me when I first read this book. It’s just a small detail, but the Vancouver connection in “The Lathe of Heaven” adds a little extra magic for me, and makes rereading the story feel like coming home. (A terrific 1980 TV-movie version can be found for free on YouTube.)

It got me curious about Southwest Washington as a setting in other literary fiction. I asked some local literature lovers — librarians and booksellers — to survey their stacks. Here are some novels where our home plays a starring role.

Wild woman

Science fiction isn’t the only genre that can blend reality and fantasy in the Pacific Northwest. “Wild Life” by Portland author Molly Gloss (2000, Simon & Schuster) is a historical novel that takes a surreal turn in the mysterious woods of Southwest Washington.

Charlotte Drummond is a freethinking, self-educated, single mom in the early 1900s. She wears men’s clothing, gets around on a bicycle and writes adventure stories in the vein of her hero, the French science-fiction pathfinder Jules Verne. Drummond is determined to scratch out an intellectual existence in the logging camps of Skamokawa Valley. That’s in Wahkiakum County, halfway between Longview and the Washington Coast.

“When the six of us are left to our own devices,” Drummond tells us, “I teach the children Thucydides & Co. in the mornings, and then — having encouraged them to form museums, to collect fossils and butterflies and to dissect worms — I let them run wild in the woods and fields for the rest of the day while I scribble.”

Drummond’s way of life is plenty wild to begin with, but the story grows far weirder when she joins the search for a missing child who may have been snatched by a group of fearsome, monstrous “Wild Men of the Woods.” That search turns into the unlikeliest of survival stories, as Drummond eventually encounters those strange beings and finds herself completely transformed by their gentle ways.

Big trees

The same coastal woodland is the setting of “Deep River” by Karl Marlantes (2019, Atlantic Monthly Press). It’s a 736-page saga about the farming Koski family of Russian-ruled Finland, who make an agonized decision to emigrate to America, where they struggle to get established and embrace a new world, all while holding onto tradition.

Spanning 80 years and multiple generations, “Deep River” intimately conveys the hardscrabble history of coastal logging camps, the upheaval and violence of labor struggles, the birth of modern development and the environmental devastation left behind as whole swaths of ancient giants come down.

“Deep River” is long and deeply detailed, but Marlantes’ writing style stays simple and digestible. He opens a vivid historical window on the semi-mechanized process of cutting down towering tees, which seems nothing short of miraculous to one Finnish émigré:

“Aino stood there transfixed amid the tooting of the whistle punks and the roaring steam donkeys. She became aware of the constant, steady thump and thwack of double-bitted axes and the rasping of twelve-foot-long crosscut saws as men felled trees taller than any building Aino had ever seen.”

Paper mill people

Camas is the setting for “The Brothers K” (1992, Doubleday), a family epic by David James Duncan that’s become something of a cult classic. K has multiple meanings: it stands for narrator Kinkaid Chance; for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” an influential family epic of the 19th century; and for a baseball strikeout.

Chance is a telling name for this big book’s complicated Camas family, headed by a millworker whose dreams of becoming a baseball star are crushed when he suffers an industrial accident at the mill.

“The night lights have all come on — whole constellations of them — spotlights and floodlights and huge square-bulbed power lights, suspended and shining from walls and wires, lighting the fog from here to the middle of the Columbia,” Duncan writes of that familiar Camas sight. “It’s got wings as big as whole office buildings, with snarls of exposed vents and flumes and overhead or underground pipes feeding them a steady river’s worth of water, some of the pipe and flumes big enough to drive semis through.”

At 643 pages, “The Brothers K” is about two-thirds as big as Dostoevsky’s tome, but it’s still a dense and philosophical read that follows the Chance brothers all over the world during the churning 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — from Camas ballfields and Washougal Sunday school classes all the way to Canada, India and the killing fields of Vietnam.

Fort photos

Strolling the grounds of the Vancouver Barracks one afternoon in 1885, Sophie Allen spots the fort blacksmith awkwardly attempting to strike a pose in front of strange new technology: a portable camera.

The black-clothed machine and its fledgling operator are both destined for Alaska, the luminous landscape of the title “To the Bright Edge of the World” (2016, Back Bay Books). But a big chunk of this celebrated historical novel by Eowyn Ivey takes place here in Vancouver.

Sophie intends to join her husband, an officer and explorer, on a journey to Alaska, until her complicated pregnancy prevents it. The couple must endure a suspenseful separation, as he ventures into the dangerous, occasionally brutal unknown while she perseveres — and pursues her own new adventure, photography — at Fort Vancouver.

Local folks familiar with our national historic site will find that Sophie’s diary entries and letters about barracks society of the 1880s — domestic life, daily labor, ladies’ gatherings, community dances — are a delightful way to watch local history come alive.

“Enlisted men do put on the most entertaining affairs that, in comparison, make officers’ balls seem stuffy and contrived,” Sophie writes in her journal. “Fiddle, banjo, accordion. And never would I have dreamed that my staid husband could dance the polka! All the laughter and merriment! There is something truly wondrous about such a gala with its lights and music spilling out into the dark forest.”

End of the trail

After the devastating loss of both parents along the Oregon Trail in 1842, a young sister and brother headed for the Willamette Valley are rescued from yet another emergency by a British explorer, and wind up diverted to Fort Vancouver.

That’s the setup for “The Journey: A Legacy of Love Novel” (2021, Ember Roth) by Oregon author Melanie Dobson, who appears to be a human historical-romance-writing factory. Dobson has written nearly 30 books, all of which foreground Christian faith, according to her website. Her eight-novel “Legacy of Love” series focuses on historical American women and the men they love.

But 18-year-old Samantha doesn’t love the many men at the fort who are eager to woo her. Determined to live an independent life, Samantha must turn to the one man who intrigues her, but she cannot have, when emergency strikes again.