Washington state has long been a fertile ground for creative minds, nurturing artists, musicians, and writers who embrace the weird, the wonderful, and the profound. Two of its most distinct artistic voices—novelist Tom Robbins and filmmaker David Lynch—share more than just their ties to the Pacific Northwest. While they worked in different mediums and never directly collaborated, their works are linked by a deep love for the surreal, a fascination with American counterculture, and a unique ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary.
This post celebrates Robbins and Lynch, exploring their artistic connections and how Washington state influenced their distinct storytelling styles.
A Place for the Strange and Sublime
Washington’s foggy woods, out-of-the-way towns and countercultural havens have lured artists with a taste for the anarchic for decades. Robbins and Lynch were both inspired here, but in different ways. Channeling the region’s free-spirited energy in his novels, Robbins filled his novels with rebellious characters, philosophical musings and offbeat humor. And Lynch, who never lived there but who set Twin Peaks in the fictional Twin Peaks, borrowed the otherworldly beauty of the Snoqualmie Valley to create his most iconic image of town-mystery.
Tom Robbins: A Literary Alchemist
Tom Robbins, who was born in North Carolina in 1932, emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in American literature with novels like Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Still Life with Woodpecker (1980) and Jitterbug Perfume (1984). His prose is exuberant, playful, and deeply philosophical — a melting pot of magic realism, absurdist humor, spiritual inquiry. His protagonists — be it a hitchhiking woman with impossibly large thumbs or a can of beans with cosmic awareness — are typically outsiders desperately seeking deeper truths in a chaotic world.
Robbins relocated to Washington in the 1960s and took up residence in La Conner, a sleepy waterfront hamlet that became his creative Shangri-La. La Conner’s bohemian vibe, with its artists and eccentrics, along with the stunning surroundings suited Robbins’ sensibilities. One can easily picture his characters walking the docks of the town, musing about love and existence over a cup of coffee in a warm cafe. His writing embodies this Northwest ethos — a combination of rebellion, introspection and playful irreverence that has made his books beloved by free spirits and dreamers everywhere.
David Lynch: The Architect of American Nightmares
David Lynch, who was born in Montana in 1946, spent most of his early years in the American Midwest before heading east to Philadelphia for art school. But the setting for his most famous work, Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017), a show that revolutionized television narrative, was Washington state. These films, Lynch’s own — Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006) — probe the shadows beneath the surface of American life. His work is dreamlike and often unsettling, packed with cryptic dialogue, ominous music and a sense of foreboding.
Lynch’s ties to Washington run deep through Twin Peaks. Filmed in North Bend and Snoqualmie, the show introduced viewers to the misty-covered woods and gray-mountain landscape of the Pacific Northwest and backlit it with murder, mystery and the metaphysical horror. Like Robbins, Lynch is fascinated by the tension between the bucolic and the surreal, but his angle is much darker. Where Robbins sees cosmic jubilee, Lynch sees existential dread.
Surrealism, Americana, and Counterculture
Though their tones vary (Robbins is celebratory and mischievous; Lynch, unsettling and cryptic), both revel in surrealism and subversion of American culture. Their writing routinely makes the familiar feel unfamiliar, sends its characters into absurd predicaments that strip them down to deeper truths.
The Magic of Everyday Life
For Robbins, the world is a a playground of infinite possibility, where the mystical and mundane are inextricably entwined. In its pages, an ancient king’s quest to find immortality is interwoven with the lives of modern-day perfumers in Seattle and New Orleans. In Skinny Legs and All (1990), inanimate objects — even a sock and a can of beans — possess their own consciousness, and set out on an adventure. His work honors the absurdity of life while containing great wisdom about love and art and existence.
Lynch, instead, renders the familiar uncanny. A diner, a gas station, a sleepy suburban street — these mundane locations become gateways to otherworldly horrors. His characters, from the tragic Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks to the lovestruck ne’er-do-wells of Wild at Heart (1990), are frequently caught in a slipstream between dream and nightmare. If Robbins strives for transcendence via humor and sensuality, then Lynch finds transcendence in fear, mystery.
America, Reimagined
The two artists share a deep interest in American culture, especially its contradictions. Robbins’s novels are carnival-pageant critiques of materialism, blind nationalism, and inflexible social mores, which he favored to wild individualism and the pursuit of joy. His protagonists more or less abandon mainstream life paths in favor of love, art, adventure.
Lynch, on the other hand, takes a deep dive into the dark side of the American Dream. Blue Velvet lays bare the dark underside of small-town life, and Mulholland Drive unspools Hollywood’s illusions. His vision of America is one in which innocence and corruption cohabitate, in which there is a roomful of secrets behind every diner’s wholesome exterior.
Washington’s Influence
The artists don’t just live in Washington state, they are Washington state—the heart of their work. The region’s landscapes, from foggy woods to funky small towns, serve as ideal settings for both Robbins’ freewheeling explorations and Lynch’s dark mysteries. The history of countercultural movements, environmentalism, artistic experimentation in the Pacific Northwest harmonizes so well with their themes of rebellion and transformation.
For Robbins, Washington is a city that serves as a refuge for the creative misfit community — a place where artists, dreamers and nonconformists can flourish. For Lynch, it’s a limnal space, reality twists and the unknown lurks every tree. Both views express something fundamental about the region’s identity: its power to evoke both awe and disquiet.
A Legacy of the Unconventional
Both Tom Robbins and David Lynch are among Washington’s most iconic artists, each having transformed his art form in ways that still resonate. Robbins’ novels are still cherished for their limitless imagination and extravagant disobedience, while Lynch’s films and television projects are still unrivaled in their sinister, surreal intensity.
Their work serves as a reminder that there are few places more strange than the world, and with it a reminder that the extraordinary, the surreal, the profound is lurking in the normal houses of our lives. Whether through Robbins’ playful storytelling or Lynch’s cosmic imagery, both artists have gave us new ways of seeing the world, and for that, Washington is proud to call them our own.
So when you find yourself wandering between trees shrouded in fog in the Pacific Northwest, remember: you’re in Twin Peaks and Jitterbug Perfume territory, where nothing as it appears.