Adrian Rogers

Terry Gieber, inventor of the tornado jar, likes some muscle in his weather, a show of strength. But on his arrival in Eastern Washington some 30 years ago, the artist found the skies anemic – drizzle measured in weeks, a palette of gray.

On a Thursday at Riverside High School, Shelby Morgan learned CPR. That Friday, she learned how to use an automated external defibrillator, which can deliver a lifesaving shock to the heart. The following Monday, she saved her grandpa.

Walter Lindstrom is wired, each of the stopwatch-size devices implanted in his chest connect via leads running up his neck to a set of electrodes in his brain. But the device that turns him on and off is wireless.

As failures go, it was a glorious one, in Peter Stark’s estimation. With sights on the Pacific Coast, one party of explorers set out by sea, a “shaggy bunch” of fur traders, craftsmen and clerks led by a rigid naval hero. As described in Stark’s book about their three-year westward expedition starting in 1810, pistols were drawn on the voyage’s first night over what time to put out the lights.

Keely Honeywell is pitching Anthology, a fundraising event for the Spokane literary magazine RiverLit at a new all-ages venue downtown, as a literary variety show. “We’ve got fiction readers. One or two people are doing an essay. We’ve got poetry,” said Honeywell, the magazine’s editor. “And then we’ve got music from the Rustics, and then bad poetry, comedy …”

Diagnosed with manic depression, now known as bipolar disorder, as a teenager, Charles Webb has been prescribed many pharmaceuticals and experienced many of their effects. He knows what he feels like when they’re not working: way up and way down, he explained in a small room last week at the Frontier Institute near downtown Spokane, where he’s undergoing a clinical drug trial. He made a roller-coaster motion with his hand. Or – when he’s been prescribed depressants – sometimes he feels too sleepy, or as if the world has gone slow-motion.

Johnnie Bosworth’s memory is eroding for two reasons, she said: aging and Parkinson’s disease, which often leads to some cognitive impairment. She repeats stories. When her alarm sounds, set to remind Bosworth, 72, to take her medication, she might turn it off and walk away. And the longtime bookkeeper can’t keep accounts as well as she used to, she said: “I get confused and that kind of thing.”

Elizabeth Mick waited until her senior year at Lewis and Clark High School to get serious about dancing as a career – late for a ballerina, she said. She’s 5-foot-4 – on the short side for a ballerina.

Lice happened twice to Brianne Ball’s family, and it was a commitment for everyone involved: her three daughters, her husband, herself. One child would come home infested, and it would spread to the whole family. And, as daughters put their heads together, it would spread again. The lice proved especially commited, chemical treatment after treatment, painstaking comb-out after comb-out.

At first glance, the pieces seem to come from different worlds. Ruben Trejo’s “Cruciform # 94 (In Honor of My Mother)” hangs in the Jundt Art Museum next to Franz Muller’s “Madonna of Kevelaer.”

Marilyn Bafus had always stayed active on the wheat farm she and her husband operate near Colfax, doing “farm wife things,” maintaining a big garden and caring for the half-dozen horses she rode on trails with friends. Until, as the hip pain that started five years ago worsened slowly but persistently, she couldn’t. At some point, she grew unable to swing a leg over a horse. Smaller gestures – using the stairs, climbing in and out of a car – grew painful, too.

Bigger mattresses are a big deal in Valley Hospital’s emergency department, as part of its effort to create a “senior-friendly” ER. At 5 inches thick, the mattresses – replacing the standard 3-inch-thick ones on the department’s 21 beds – are more comfortable, according to ER staff, and help protect patients’ fragile skin.

A train crash, a family swept to sea, a dropped baby, a botched surgery. The events in Nance Van Winckel’s short-story collection “Boneland” are dramatic and life-altering. But her stories focus less on the events than on her characters’ efforts to understand them – not only how to live with their ramifications, but what happened, exactly, or why or how.

I t was 9 a.m., and change was coming, Lori McCormick warned her students as they sat on cushioned chairs arranged in an oval in a brightly lit studio. There would be a new soundtrack for their workout, new tunes to offer a beat. “Play some waltzes!” called a white-haired, white-mustachioed student in jeans and sturdy sneakers.

After falling in love with dance as a girl in Spokane-area studios, Amanda Hulen, 31, has performed professionally her entire adult life. But when she takes the stage Wednesday at Martin Woldson Theater at the Fox, it’ll be the first time as a pro back in her hometown. She won’t stay long. Hulen is on an eight-month tour with the MOMIX modern-dance company’s “Botanica,” traveling fast from city to city. Also on tour: Hulen’s husband and fellow “Botanica” dancer, Morgan Hulen, 32, and their 2-year-old daughter, Corinne.

Labor is a commodity, says Judge Joe Brown, and in these days of surplus – too many workers for too few jobs – it’s a commodity that has to be stored somewhere. Like grain is kept in bins, Brown said in an interview this week before scheduled appearances in Spokane, the workers who aren’t working are kept in jails and prisons. The American justice system has transformed from “a crime control device to a system to control surplus labor,” he said.

Before she ever stood in front of a group of college students, waving condoms in the air and telling stories about adult diapers, Miss September 1986 came out as a woman with HIV to some gang members in her neighborhood. They were young men she’d gotten to know in Los Angeles, and one of them started telling her about his life – about seeing a friend get shot in a park, describing the smoke as it exited a bullet wound. So the Playboy model, Rebekka Armstrong, told him about her life. She’d been diagnosed with the virus at 22, six years after she believes she was infected as a 16-year-old small-town high school student at a college party. Her treatment, high doses of a then-new drug called AZT, wracked her body.

Pencils. Tractors. Kitchen knives. Wooden spoons, bottle openers. Great pyramids, stone sphinxes, diesel engines. Harrington, Wash., artist Leslie LePere, whose show is underway at the Jundt Art Museum, finds magic in objects – small and large, domestic and those found outdoors – that others find ordinary.

Monthly or so, Dr. Dieter Lubbe sees another woman in her 30s with heart disease. The cardiologist at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center often takes his patients to a catheter lab, where he does an angioplasty – inflating a balloon inside the patient’s blood vessel to squeeze the accumulated plaque against the arterial wall – and then inserts a stent to keep the passage clear. Some of the women’s hearts are significantly damaged by the time Lubbe sees them.

The gonorrhea warning call can be hard to make and hard to receive. But phone calls to sex partners of people diagnosed with the sexually transmitted infection are part of regional health districts’ efforts to stem its spread. After telling residents they may have been exposed to gonorrhea, health officials help them get testing and antibiotics.

A new Whitworth University clinic, staffed by students learning to help clients navigate the pitfalls of marriage and family life, aims to help fill a gap in affordable services by offering low-cost therapy to clients. The Marriage and Family Therapy Wellness Center, opening Wednesday, also aims to fill a need for students in the university’s master’s program in marriage and family therapy who need a place to practice what they learn in the classroom.

Breast-feeding her son, Mateo, was painful and difficult for Becky Alcala. The baby had a tongue-tie, limiting his ability to nurse. A specialist confirmed the condition and snipped the baby’s short frenulum – the piece of tissue that connects the tongue to the bottom of the mouth – but the long learning curve continued for both mom and son. Alcala stocked up on creams and cabbage leaves to soothe her sore breasts. Then, when Mateo was 9 weeks old, Alcala returned to her full-time job as an aquatics manager at Fairchild Air Force Base. And – as happens for many working women who want to continue to breast-feed their babies – there arose a whole new set of challenges.