Cascadian Prophets

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...

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...

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...

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 Americ...

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...

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 antholo...

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 tensio...

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...

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 wi...

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 desig...

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...

"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...

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 an...

What a great way to entice someone to read a book: "Like a prize-fighter boxing over his weight, Stephan Torre has long made his home in the wilderness, negotiating environments that are hostile...

On the morning of Wednesday, August 14, 2013, Habib and Paul Nelson awoke before 6A and were hiking with full packs up to “Jack’s Shack." But after an hour, maybe less, they knew they were not going to make it with those heavy packs.

The 9th Cascadia Poetry Festival is happening October 10-12th, 2025 at the Rainier Beach Community Club. One of the featured poets is Sharon Thesen, a legendary B.C. poet who considers herself a "Cascadian poet."

The latest and perhaps most complete translation of Han Shan has been done by Levitt in collaboration with Kazuaki Tanahashi and published by Shambhala Press.

Four contributors to Winter in America (Again discuss how they respond as writers without resorting to rhetoric or invective. The outrages, for any person of conscience in the United States in the trump 2.0 era, almost come hourly. Many warned of a constitutional crisis were we to find ourselves in this situation. Disappearing non-violent citizens and tourists to for-profit gulags while key cabine...

A couple years back I steered a kayak over the stone remnants believed to be of that dammed weir and felt the tears of Southwind and his grandmother that broke the spell of ice and separation. In a moment I felt that wheel turning me, releasing the grief over my own people, still a mystery to me from centuries of migrations, of imperial assimilation, erased by the cold wind of empire and science a...