Author: Jodie Vinson

Jodie has lived most of her life in the open landscape of the Midwest, but left the landlocked states three years ago to explore the mountainous coastlines of the Northwest. While she loves the life of the wanderer, enjoying the transitory existence Seattle offers many new arrivals, she is interested in exploring the rootedness of cultures and communities of the places she finds herself in.

In her travels and writing Jodie examines how landscape shapes a culture and carries its past. She recently planned and executed a six-month literary pilgrimage across Europe to explore the relationship between literature and landscape. She read and wrote extensively while researching how the past is made immanent in the present through the structures and landscape that hold a history. Leaving the West was something like time travel into the past, as evidenced in the elder East Coast and ancient structures of Europe. Returning to Seattle brings with it the challenge of finding a past identity and a way to relate to ones own place in the world, something even the most nomadic traveler longs for.

The Puget Sound is a unique area to explore the elusive identity of the American West. Through her travel writing Jodie hopes to capture the transient roots flowing through the Puget Sound, exposing others to the richness of their surroundings that may lie just beneath the surface.