Cascadia Poetics Lab announces an event in the Readings Gallery at Village Books and Paper Dreams in Fairhaven, 1200 11th St, Bellingham, WA 98225 on Sunday, April 21 at 2:00 PM. The event is part of the Spring 2024 Nature of Writing Speaker Series presented by Village Books and North Cascades Institute. The readers include Jason Wirth, Paul E. Nelson, and Adelia MacWilliam, who are the founders of Watershed Press (Seattle, WA USA and Cowichan Bay, BC CAN) and the editors of the anthology, Cascadian Zen Volume I: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, Watershed Press). Kirkus Reviews recently described the anthology as “a many-layered and deeply spiritual collection celebrating the landscape of the northern Pacific coast."
Cascadian Zen explores the nature of the Cascadia Bioregion, Zen practice, and the many questions that follow these topics. The included works were inspired by the spirit of Zen and “any practice for awakening, awareness, mindfulness, and care for the place and time of the ecological self."
Paul Nelson is a poet, interviewer, and founder of the Cascadia Poetry Festival and the Cascadia Poetics Lab, whose mission is to “empower people to practice poetry and deepen connections to place, self, and the present moment.” His recent books include Cascadian Prophets: Interviews 1999-2023 (2024), Haibun de la Serna (2022), American Sentences (2021) and A Time Before Slaughter (2020).
Adelia MacWilliam is a poet, founder of Terra Poetics, and board member for Cascadia Poetics Lab. Her work has appeared in the anthology Sweet Water: Poems for the Watersheds and Reckoning: Creative Writing on Environmental Justice. Her poems explore areas that include “the complexities of a settler culture struggling to create a home in a world it is simultaneously gutting” and what she encounters “amidst the remnants of a stunning wilderness – a savage history, with its culturally sanctioned amnesia – “ that changed her view of her home forever.
Dr. Jason Wirth is a professor of Philosophy at Seattle University, an author, and an ordained priest in the Soto Zen lineage. He is known for his research on environmental philosophy. Recent books include Nietzsche and Other Buddhas (2019) and Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis (2017). He is currently completing a manuscript on the cinema of Terrence Malick and a work of ecological philosophy called Turtle Island Anarchy.
The founding editors of Watershed Press live and work in the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish, specifically, the Duwamish, and the Cowichan. Cascadia Zen includes Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors and artists from the traditional and unceded territories of many nations in the bioregion of Cascadia, and elsewhere, who have stewarded these lands from time immemorial.
The anthology brings together nonfiction, poetry, interviews, translations, and artwork that explore expressions of Zen within the Cascadian Bioregion. Writers include Daphne Marlatt, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Cedar Sigo, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Jane Hirshfield, Robert Michael Pyle, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Sam Hamill, Denise Levertov, Tim McNulty, Robert Sund, Samuel Green, Holly J. Hughes, Tess Gallagher, Michael Daley, Red Pine (Bill Porter), Alice Derry, Tom Jay, Judith Roche, Robert Bringhurst, Wedlidi Speck, Rena Priest, Jan Zwicky, Robin Blaser, Brenda Hillman, Gary Copeland Lilley, John Brehm, and Michael McClure.
At the back of the book, a foldout map by David McCluskey. Ecoregions of Cascadia shows the Cascadia Bioregion from the icefields of the St. Elias Mountains in southwest Alaska to the Cape Mendocino area in northern California. This region encompasses the watersheds from the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. David McCloskey is an Emeritus Professor from Seattle University and is considered “The Father of Cascadia.” He has been mapping the Western bioregions for over forty years. In 2023, he published the second edition of the Map-Atlas entitled Cascadia: A Great Green Land.
For information on the reading, see https://www.villagebooks.com/event/litlive-cascadian-zen-042124
For tickets, see www.eventbrite.com/e/791669243017
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Cascadia Poetics Lab, a Seattle-based nonprofit, was founded in Auburn, Washington on December 14, 1993. Founding Director Paul E. Nelson is available for interviews. (206) 422.5002 or pen@cascadiapoeticslab.org.
