Sitka locals share stories from the sea in Cascadia Works: Tend Gather Harvest Restore, an anthology of literary and artistic pieces co-edited by Tele Aadsen, a Southeast Alaska troll fisherman, and Jessica Gigot, a Skagit Valley farmer. It was released in late September by Empty Bowl Press.
The anthology displays forms of writing that reckon with the question of what it means to work with the land and waters of the Cascadia bio-region.
Sitka authors Paul Rioux, Mariah Warren and Kariel Galbraith, and Sitka artist Adrienne Wilber, contributed works to the anthology. These locals are among 150 authors who hail from areas spanning the islands of Southeast Alaska to the southern tip of Oregon.
Although all the featured works follow similar themes of connection and rootedness, the content is as diverse as the bio-region itself. Articulations of the landscape range from Ed Edmo's “Indian Education Blues,” a punchy but poignant poem about the importance of remembrance, to an excerpt from Ron Charles’s “My Heart is Good,” detailing the success Washington tribes had in securing fisheries rights in the 1960s.
Empty Bowl Press, founded in 1976 on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, “conceived this anthology in celebration of their 50th anniversary,” Aadsen said in an email to the Sentinel. She said Cascadia Works echoes an Empty Bowl anthology from 1986, Working the Woods, Working the Sea, edited by Finn Wilcox and Jerry Gorsline.
The Press’ latest anthology partitions the land and water into two sections. Aadsen, who has been fishing the waters in Sitka and Southeast since childhood, edited “On the Sea.” Gigot, a poet and farmer in the Skagit Valley, edited “On the Land.”
Aadsen told the Sentinel in an interview last week that she sees the “Sea” section as both a “mirror for fellow fish folks and window for people outside of commercial fishing.” Readers see pieces “authentic from people doing the work on the water,” Aadsen went on to say.
In selecting and editing the submissions, Aadsen said she had to “recenter parameters about what that work actually is.”
Although Aadsen is herself a commercial fisherman, she was struck by contributions about engaging with the sea in ways where monetary profit is not inherent. Accounts of subsistence, recreational and traditional practices are featured in the anthology, providing a complex account of engaging with the sea, and how that manifests across individuals.
In Sitkan Paul Rioux’s piece for Cascadia Works, titled the “Diorama of a Lighthouse on a Clam Shell,” he lays out his relationship with water: from playing with seashells his grandma brought him from Maine's coast, to a life on Sitka's waters where he is responsible for his community, food, and income.
Rioux is a marine hydraulics specialist and vice president of the Sitka School Board. In an interview with the Sentinel last week he said his relationship with water is “ever-growing.”
As a boy he lived 30 minutes from Maine's coast, and his dad would take him fishing in the Kennebec River. After high school, Rioux got even more intimate with the water, “...living and working just feet from the waters of Linekin Bay in Boothbay Harbor, at a resort specializing in sailing small boats.”
The summer after high school, long removed from his days of gluing toy lighthouses on clam shells, he moved to Alaska to catch king salmon and was hooked. Rioux said he made the switch to boat building when, after being out for a month on a commercial troller, his newborn son didn’t recognize him.
The switch has kept him within the commercial fishing community, where he now gets to work with a diverse array of boats and people, from “trollers catching one fish at a time to crabbers one-hundred feet long.”
Of his Cascadia Works contribution, Rioux said that “in my story the ocean is both a setting and a character… as a child the ocean was like a favorite cousin that you only saw on holidays.”
Aadsen writes in Cascadia Works that a conversation she had at the Backdoor Café captured what unites all the pieces she selected for the “Sea” section – they are “all-immersive.”
Working on the water requires labor that connects the mind and body, and, Aadsen said, “[expands] the definition of what work and using your hands means,” which she hopes is equally reflected in the anthology.
Copies of Cascadia Works are available to order from www.emptybowl.org, and are forthcoming to Old Harbor Books in Sitka.
Aadsen said that Empty Bowl hopes to coordinate online Cascadia Works readings this winter. The press held a book launch event in Port Townsend, Washington, on Sept. 24.
Asher Glickman-Flora and Iris Segal are second-year students at Outer Coast in Sitka.
