About the Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry

For those not familiar, in the first ever ‘Cascadia’ field guide, local experts, poets and artists are working to create a literary field guide for the Cascadia bioregion. This area is defined by the watersheds of the Fraser, Columbia and Snake rivers, and stretches from Mt. St. Alias in the north, to Cape Mendocino in the south, and as far as Yellowstone in the East.

Instead of using Western scientific taxonomy as the primary method of organization, and separating species by type or kind (insects, birds, mammals, etc.), this guide uses communities such as Salish Sea, Pine Forest, and Montane. Each community contains 7-11 species, or beings, who are interrelated and rely on each other. In this way, and others, the guide blends Indigenous ways of knowing with Western ones even as it gives place a voice. It is designed to focus not on the divisions but the many cohesions that make up our bioregion.

Cascadia stretches from Southeast Alaska to Northern California and from the Pacific Ocean to the Continental Divide. Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry blends art and science to celebrate this diverse yet interconnected region through natural and cultural histories, poetry, and illustrations. Organized into 13 bioregions, the guide includes entries for everything from cryptobiotic soil and the western thatching ant to the giant Pacific octopus and Sitka spruce, as well as the likes of common raven, hoary marmot, Idaho giant salamander, snowberry, and 120 more!

Both well-established and new writers are included, representing a diverse spectrum of voices, with poems that range from comic to serious, colloquial to scientific, urban to off-the-grid, narrative to postmodern. Likewise, the artists span styles and mediums, using classic natural history drawing, form line design, graffiti, sketch, and more. All writers and artists have deep ties to the region.

Edited by Derek Sheffield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Elizabeth Bradfield

COMMUNITIES & ARTISTS

Cascadia Field Guide reflects and honors relationships through its very structure.  The beings of the book are organized not by Linnean taxonomy, but by communities. A community might be made because one being eats another (Brown Bear eats Salmon) or in more nuanced ways (Spotted Owl's call echoes over Red Huckleberry).  

Each community is illustrated by a different artist from Cascadia; the artists work in form line design, cut paper, pen and ink, and engage with sensibilities from playful to scientific.
 
Meet the communities and their artists:

• Tidewater Glacier (Chloey Cavanaugh)

• Muskeg (Cori Dantini)

• Salish Sea (Carmen Selam)

• Coastal Urban Woods (Sarah Van Sanden)

• Temperate Rainforest (Erin Fox)

• Urban Shore (Rachel Kessler)

• Pine Forest (Xena Lunsford)

• Eastern Rivers (Justin Gibbens)

• Shrub-Steppe (Emily Poole)

• Montane (Claire Emery)

• Loowit–Mount St. Helens (Travis London)

• Willamette Valley (Jillian Barthold)

• Outer Coast (Raya Friday)

POETS & WRITERS

 In Cascadia Field Guide, writers with deep ties to the region–-both established and emerging-–share work alongside art and natural history/TEK-based stories engaging Orca, Mountain Goat, Bitterbrush and other iconic and endemic beings of Cascadia.

Some writers are new arrivals, either from overseas or through cross-continental migration; some have lived in the region for generations; some don't live here any longer, but spent significant portions of their lives in Cascadia. 

The writers (mostly poets) are from urban and rural areas, from all the states and provinces; they are emerging writers and venerable voices.  40 poems in Cascadia Field Guide are newly-written just for this book.

WRITERS include Sherman Alexie, Betsy Aoki, Rick Barot, Linda Bierds, Allen Braden, Robert Bringhurst, Laura Da', Nora Marks Keixwnéi Dauenhauer, Chris Dombrowski, Kathleen Flenniken, Tess Gallagher, Lyanda Haupt, Kim Heacox, Sean Hill, Garret Hongo, Ever Jones, Robert Lashley, Dorianne Laux, Ursula K. LeGuin, Denise Levertov, Claudia Castro Luna, Colleen J. McElroy, Frances McCue, Kevin Miller, Shankar Naryan, Richard Nelson, Lucia Perillo, Jennifer Perrine, Vivian Faith Prescott, Matt Rader, Lois Red Elk, Paisley Rekdal, Theodore Roethke, Gary Snyder, Kim Stafford, Rob Taylor, Alexandra Teague, Jane Wong, Joe Wilkins, Robert Wrigley, Bill Yake, Isaac Yuen, Maya Jewell Zeller, Jan Zwicky...and more.