Interviews with Cascadian creative luminaries about the practice of poetry and deepening connections to place, self and the present moment.
Reading the feed…
Death of Portland poet John Brehm and a re-posting of the 2022 interview of him conducted by Paul E Nelson
Nicole Cromartie and Katie Watson-Best of the Clyfford Still Museum are interviewed about" “Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’”: An Exhibition Curated by Children of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
Interview with Joyce Tsai, Director of the Clyfford Still Museum, on his life and work.
David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website. To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
Clyfford Still's Astrology by Lulu Zilinskas, an archivist and intuitive practitioner utilizing astrology and tarot. She currently serves as the archivist and manager of digital collections at the Clyfford Still Museum and discusses the aspects of astrology that possibly affected the life and work of Abstract Expressionist legend Clyfford Still.
Michael Holloman (AKA M. Yellowbear) is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation, located in Northeastern Washington State. A tenured Professor in the Department of Art at Washington State University in Pullman, he discussed Abstract Expressionist legend Clyfford Still's transformative experience as co-founder of the Nespelem Art Colony.
Phyllis Curott is a Wiccan High Priestess, lawyer, author, and spiritual pioneer. This archival interview from November 2001 was about the growing popularity of religions like Wicca and why they weren't just popular to begin with. She touched on the origins of the propaganda against witches as dangerous people with green skin, big noses, and warts who will turn you into newts, and how the reality is that witches are really just people who pay close attention. She says this is the beginnings of magic as well - paying careful attention. The book in question in this interview was Witch Crafting:
This interview with Finn Menzies is an archival interview from November, 2017. Finn Menzies is an out transgender teacher in Seattle, WA. His work is his spiritual practice and his activism. He received his MFA from Mills College. He is the creator of FIN Zine, a bi-annual zine dedicated to his emotional journey throughout his transition. Finn’s debut collection, BRILLIANT ODYSSEY DON’T YEARN came out in 2017 with FOG MACHINE. His poetry can also be seen in Gigantic Sequins, Quiet Lightning, SUSAN /the journal, , SPORK, HOLD: a journal, The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, and various other journals.
If you were to give the third or fourth longest river in the world a wish, it might simply to run free or to be clean and pure again. In the summer of 2013, the world's third longest river, the Yangtze, will get 2,000 wishes in a program called the Kinship of Rivers. The 2,000 will be done through prayer flags, in the spirit of the 1,200 flags that have been placed alongside the Mississippi River and its tributaries over the last three years. These river flags, modeled after Tibetan prayer flags, were accompanied by poetry and art as part of an outreach project designed to promote peace and li
How does one make literary art about this time in history that avoids rhetoric and facile political positioning in this era of the spectacle? How does one avoid being consumed by the simultaneous collapse of so many systems -- some being eviscerated by people in positions designed to protect such systems? Deborah Poe has some idea based on her submission to the upcoming anthology Winter in America (Still. Deborah is the author of several books of poetry including keep, Elements, and Our Parenthetical Ontology, as well as a novella in verse, Hélène. Her visual works--video poems and handmade bo
Sam Hamill wrote in his final book blurb: “Zhang Er brings us startling 'burial ground poems' from Chinese that are striking in their perspective and elegant in style and presentation. They represent a poetic sensibility that is unique and often profound, and I read them with great surprise and gratitude." Zhang Er, a poet and opera librettist from Beijing, is the author of many books of poetry in Chinese, 2017’s Closest to You, also Verses on Bird and So Translating Rivers and Cities. She has co-edited Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry and her opera libretti
Aldon Lynn Nielsen says the time is right to say it straight, Gil Scott-Heron should be recognized as an important writer. As the George and Barbara Kelly Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Penn State University, specializing in, among other things, African American poetry and poetics, Aldon Lyn Nielsen has published several books of his own poetry, along with scholarly books and anthologies such as Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, and his recent essay: Choruses for Gil Scott Heron. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and arch
Open the anthology Women of the Beat Generation to page 256 and read the words of Brother Antoninus, William Everson, who said, "A series of women poets emerged in San Francisco who identified with the establish Beat Poets even as they challenged them on their grounds, including Joanne Kyger and Mary Norbert Körte. Of these, the career of Mary Norbert Körte most sharply defines the historic tension between the women of service and the women of passion. The strongest woman poet to emerge in the west, she became a student of Lew Welch, cracking convention within the bastion of the religious orde
On the Way to Kluusms is the first poetry chapbook to be published by Watershed Press, a bioregional press based in Seattle, but with strong connections to Vancouver Island. The author is Lorin Medley, whose poetry has been published in anthologies like Winter in America (Again, Cascadian Zen Volume II and Drift: Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley. Lorin lives, gardens and writes from her home in Comox, British Columbia, the unceded territory of the K’ómoks First Nation. She speaks about On the Way to Kluusms, what it means to live in place and how we disconnect from ourselves. Check out mo
On November 10, 2012, Sam Hamill and Ian Boyden joined together to do an interview on Hamill's chapbook Border Songs, as well as Habitations, a collaboration between the poet, Sam, and the painter, Ian. Fewer than a dozen copies were made of the book, although in the interview Boyden recommends you forget whatever notions you hold about what a book is and can be. About 3 feet high and 10 inches wide, the cover made of fossilized maple, this book was the result of the organic collaboration between these two artists. Each page was a painting done by Boyden, using his typically atypical pigments
In this edition of Cascadian Prophets, we hear Bill Barillas on Theodore Roethke. Bill Barillas is the editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke and serves on the board of The Friends of Roethke Foundation. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
In this interview with Thom Hartmann on the theft of human rights via corporate personhood and its history, he discussed the East India Company, the Boston Tea Party & an 1886 Supreme Court decision, Santa Clara vs. Southern Pacific that was twisted to give corporations human rights. He went on to illustrate its ramifications and solutions to the problem of corporations operating with rights designed for human beings. Thom Hartmann is an international relief worker, psychotherapist, father and author of over a dozen books, including the subject of this interview: Unequal Protection: The Rise o
You’d expect poetry to be part of an event inaugurating such a figure and that the poem offered for the occasion would be bland, written by a committee, or full of platitudes, but the poem delivered yesterday matched perfectly the tone of a campaign that appears to be built on mutual respect, vision, human rights and empathy.
If artists are the antennae of the race, then the poets and writers of British Columbia are onto something that the general populace may be ready to recognize and act on. That is the West Coast of the U.S. and that of Canada has more in common with each other than with the power centers back east, Ottawa and Washington, DC, New York City and Toronto. But some go a step further in recognizing a new culture emanating from what some call Cascadia. Trevor Carolan is one of them and if you believe the culture and literature of a nation is a critical component of any nation’s foundation, a new book
"The first pew in the old time Black church is the Moaners' bench." - Gary Copeland Lilley Artificial intelligence and it's racist assumptions suggests "mourners' bench" as a clarification, but the moaners' bench refers to the audible expression of those in spiritual need due to grief, the blues, or simply the harshness of our time. Raven On The Moaners' Bench is the title of the latest collection of poetry from Gary Copeland Lilley. Originally from North Carolina, now living in Cascadia, Gary has published nine books of poetry, has work in several anthologies, is a graduate of the Warren Wils
To preserve a bit of one's art is a true act of love, even if the book of stories it comes out of is titled Surrounded by Weasels: Stories from the Northwest of Ireland. The late Josie Gray is the story teller, and his widow Tess Gallagher, the world renowned poet, is the editor...
This interview is brought to you in memory of Jack Foley, who passed away earlier this month at the age of 85. The interview is with Jack and his wife Adelle, who were poets from Oakland, California.
In this interview on her book Vodou Visions with Sallie Ann Glassman, she discusses becoming a Manbo, or Vodou Priestess, Vodou, its history as a religion created by enslaved Africans, common misunderstandings about it...
Linda Russo is a poet, scholar, essay writer, willing co-creator, collaborator and student of ecospheric care. Through the lens of ecofeminism, or geopoetics, or inspired by indigenous practices of interspecies kinship, her works explore relationality, with a more than human world alongside the complexities presented by fragmentation of land and human attention to place.
Hear a Salish perspective on wellness with Beaver Chief. Fred Beaver Chief Jamison was a spiritual leader who brought out the traditional teachings of the Northwest Coast (Native American) Salish people. He discussed his heritage, the songs and stories that are part of the Shaker Indian Doctor tradition, his collection of medicine songs on a C.D., and some of the differences between his culture and “settler” culture, such as concepts of land ownership.
