How Do You Find Local Events?

How do you decide what to do around Seattle? Do you read about upcoming events in the Seattle Times or The Stranger? Like me, do you browse bulletin boards in local coffee and tea shops and those flyers stapled to electricity poles? To enjoy these last few weeks of summer, I wanted to make sure to find events and activities which would be fun and new for me and thought I would share some other local resources with you.

localaccordianThe Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau web site is always a guaranteed up-to-date web site to browse. I clicked on the Festivals link. I am Italian and, yes, this is the year when I am getting myself to the Festa Italiana Seattle, taking place September 26-27th at Fisher Pavilion at Seattle Center. One gets to enjoy cooking demos, accordian music, grape stomping, and even a showing of the 1962 film called Mafiosa.

The Capitol Hill Times,  North Seattle Herald-Outlook, and South Seattle Beacon are local neighborhood newspapers produced by Pacific Publishing.

3 Legged Cat by Lottie Motts
3 Legged Cat by Lottie Motts

It gets distributed to many, many coffee shops and other cool places around the city. This newspaper has great calendar listings of events and activities in its print copies and includes some on its website calendars. The August 19th edition gives me a great idea for Labor Day weekend. I have heard about this diverse music event! The Columbia City BeatWalk is on Friday, September 4th from 7 to 10pm on Rainier Ave South between South Angelina and Hudson streets.

The Seattle Public Library’s Databases & Web Sites page has a large list of  links to Seattle Magazines and Newspapers. A new patron at my branch told me he learned about Bicycle Paper and its calendar of racing events. A fellow staff member shared that she only reads newspapers online and likes that she is being a local environmentally conscious citizen.

So, all of you reading this blog entry, consider taking a moment or two to comment below on your favorite way to find out about local events!

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5 responses to “How Do You Find Local Events?”

  1. King Rat

    I look through the author events for almost every single local bookstore and libraries and compile an author reading list every month. I started posting them at http://reading.kingrat.biz/events recently. Frankly, I’m usually not interested in musical events listings or other such things. I love going to them when they are good, but the listings are high noise to signal because there’s a billion local bands doing shows and knowing what’s good is impossible to tell.

    Reply
  2. Marion

    King Rat, that’s a great site you have authored! We are so lucky in this city to have some fabulous bookstores or similar places which have author events.

    Reply
  3. Tracy at WSB

    Hello – Omitted here are the independent neighborhood-news sites such as ours that keep copious events calendars – ours have West Seattle events all the way into 2010. (And that includes SPL events as well as other events of interest to readers – just one example, West Seattle-residing mega-selling author Terry Brooks reads at Barnes and Noble in WS this Saturday.) The permanent link for the West Seattle Blog events calendar is:
    http://westseattleblog.com/blog/?page_id=3402

    and you can send us an event for listing at:
    editor@westseattleblog.com

    (Or on Facebook, we’re WS Blog)

    Thanks!

    Reply
  4. Rabbit

    I love looking at things stapled to telephone poles because they often have such high eccentric entertainment value on their own, even if I never go see the thing they are promoting. To find out about events I might really want to attend, I like looking at library and cafe bulletin boards and talking to the other people who are looking at them or posting to them. Sometimes, the best local events are the ones that come up by word of mouth. Sometimes, people see me reading a book and spontaneously recommend a book or an organization to go with it, like suggesting wine with my meal. That’s fun, too.

    Reply
  5. Marion

    I called them electricity poles, but you’re right, they are telephone poles! With the proliferation of cell phones and underground wiring, I wonder when those poles will be considered historic?!

    Reply

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