PORT ANGELES — Ask Alan Turner how he got journalist Amy Goodman to come out to the North Olympic Peninsula, and he gives a blunt nonanswer.
“I don’t know,” said Turner, who initially scheduled Goodman, host of “Democracy Now!” a bestselling author and a Peninsula Daily News columnist, for an appearance at his bookstore, Port Book and News.
He did see her briefly at the giant Book Expo America convention last May in New York City.
While waiting for a copy of her newest book, Breaking the Sound Barrier, Turner was asked to face a video camera and talk about his town of Port Angeles and his store at 104 E. First St.
“I have no clue what I said,” he admitted.
Turner must have said the right thing, because Goodman, the independent writer and broadcaster who has commanded respect from journalist Bill Moyers and complaints from former President Bill Clinton, will step into the Port Angeles Library at about 12:15 p.m. on Friday.
Goodman was not available for an interview this week.
Talk at library
She’ll give a short talk and then sign copies of Sound Barrier, a wide-ranging collection of her columns.
The book, her fourth, travels all over the map, mixing sections about grass-roots activism, President Barack Obama, health care, the global economic meltdown and “news from the unreported world.”
Moyers provides the foreword, hailing Goodman as “impervious to government subterfuge or spin,” and quoting a Washington Post reporter who calls her “the journalist as uninvited guest” who stands up and asks the impolitic questions.
Also in the book are Goodman’s detractors, such as former President Clinton. He labels her “hostile, combative and even disrespectful,” and she liked that so much she quoted it on the first page.
Break sound barrier
Goodman makes herself clear in her introduction:
“My goal as a journalist is to break the sound barrier, to expand the debate, to cut through the static and bring forth voices that are shut out,” she writes.
“The media’s job is to be the exception to the rulers, to hold those in power accountable, to challenge and to ask the hard questions . . . the media also need to find stories of hope, to tell stories that resonate with people’s lives in the real world [not the reel world].”
The “Luminaries” section of Sound Barrier is replete with those stories: Goodman devotes columns to inspirational figures from Martin Luther King Jr. to Pete Seeger to Harry Belafonte, and seeks to make their 1960s-vintage messages relevant now.
“I see the media as a huge kitchen table,” she writes, “that stretches across this globe, one we all sit around to debate and discuss the most critical issues of the day: war and peace, life and death.”
“Democracy Now!”, a daily television and radio news program hosted by Goodman and Juan Gonzalez, airs on more than 800 stations.
In the weeks since he announced Goodman was on her way here, Turner has been awash in what he says is a “huge” response.
Numerous fans have been calling to ask about tickets, of which there are none.
“Get there early,” he advised; the library’s Raymond Carver Room holds only 100, and Turner thinks twice that number will come out.
“It will be good for Amy to come to a place like this and see hundreds of people,” he said, adding that off the Peninsula, Port Angeles is perceived by some as a uniformly conservative mill town. In his 23 years since opening Port Book and News, he’s seen that change.
And while Turner expects Goodman will draw “the usual suspects,” who come to other Port Book and News readings, he also anticipates others — “unusual suspects” — from other corners.
“It will be good to watch this community come together,” he said. “For the community of readers and freethinkers, this has a lot of meaning.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladaily news.com.
