Nature of Writing Speaker Series | Spring 2025
Calling all nature lovers and bibliophiles! Discover your next great read in presentations by authors, artists, poets and naturalists sharing their new works during our Nature of Writing Speaker Series. In partnership with our bookseller co-hosts at Village Books in Bellingham and Third Place Books in Seattle, our Spring Series invites you to dive into Cascadian-inspired poetry collections; float and forage along the Pacific Northwest coast; journey deep into coastal temperate rainforests; discover wildlife & geology just outside your door; and meditate on your connection to this unique landscape through works by local and indigenous scientists, authors & poets. We hope to see you at a reading this Spring!
FEBRUARY
by M.L. Herring
Tuesday, February 18 at 7 pm
Third Place Books, Ravenna
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If you live on a rapidly changing planet, you’d be wise to learn how it works. In this engaging book science writer M. L. Herring takes readers into the Pacific temperate rainforest at the tumultuous edge of a shifting continent in a precarious moment of time. Readers peek behind the magnificent scenery into a forest of ancient trees, exploding mountains, disappearing owls, tsunamis, megafires, and ten million people to learn what it means to be a forest in a world of upheavals. Through Herring’s words and pictures, readers drift into the canopy through masses of ferns and lichens, burrow into soil through hair-thin threads of fungi, and plunge headlong through a watershed flushed with rain and snowmelt. Readers experience the temperate rainforest through science and art as it faces a shifting climate and the shifting priorities of a constantly changing society. The book journeys beyond the grid of latitude and longitude and into places only one’s imagination can fit, to discover what it means to be human in an ecological world.
MARCH
by Kara Briggs
Sunday, March 2 at 5 pm
Village Books Reading Gallery
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With calm elegance and precise language, Rivers in My Veins is a work of lyric courage celebrating the connection we all share to the earth. Kara Briggs' poems sing her people, Sauk-Suiattle and Yakama, onto the pages. "Land we live on land," she writes, calling us to embrace our kinship with the earth. As a career journalist, Briggs uses documentary poetry to expose the false settler-colonial narratives while innovating rhythms from the social dances of her tribes in poems that take the reader to the dance circle. She received the 2024 James Welch Prize for Indigenous Poetry for "Acknowledgement Two," a poem in this collection about her uncle who fought for fishing rights. Her fierce love of lands, waters, and stories of her peoples are carried in familiar poetic forms-sonnet, pantoum, and haiku-as vehicles to carry the readers on a journey through our shared world of literary - and deeply alive - landscapes.
by Harold Rhenisch
Monday, March 10 at 6 pm
Village Books Readings Gallery ▸ RSVP
Tuesday, March 11 at 7 pm
Third Place Books, Ravenna ▸ RSVP
A collection of shanties (songs) laid out in couplets that move between English and Chinook Wawa, The Salmon Shanties celebrates a poetic tradition deeply rooted on the West Coast. Harold Rhenisch explores memories of people, place, and of returning home, speaking the land’s names as a music of its own and creating a series of aural maps. Imbued with rhythms of Secwepemc grass dances, the colloquial chatter of the Canadian poet Al Purdy, and the voice of poet and historian Charles Lillard, Rhenisch’s work sings of roots to the land lifted up by the sea into the sky—as if Ezra Pound had sung of Cascadia instead of Europe.
by Rob Casey
Saturday, March 22 at 5 pm
Village Books Readings Gallery
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In Paddling the Salish Sea, professional kayaker and paddling coach Rob Casey guides paddlers to the most rewarding destinations across the region. This comprehensive guide covers everything from the quiet inlets of the South Sound to an entirely new section featuring the fjords, waterfalls, and local waterways around Vancouver, B.C. In between, paddlers will find urban explorations near Seattle and Everett; routes on the lakes, rivers, and shorelines of the Olympic Peninsula, Hood Canal, and the islands of the North Sound; and even more new choices in Canada’s Gulf Islands and around Victoria, B.C. Beginner, intermediate, and advanced paddlers all can find beautiful, rewarding routes for their skill levels. Casey’s expert advice on navigating the marine environment, paddling safety, gear, trip planning, and more provides all the practical information paddlers need to prepare for a successful, safe outing. For sea or flatwater kayakers, canoeists, rowers, or stand-up paddle boarders, Paddling the Salish Sea is the must-have guide for discovering the wonders of the Puget Sound.
APRIL
by Betsy L. Howell
Friday, April 4 at 7 pm
Third Place Books, Ravenna
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Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Betsy L. Howell spent her childhood exploring and thriving in old-growth coniferous forests. In the summer of 1986, she volunteered in Mt. Hood National Forest, surveying northern spotted owls. That summer position turned into three decades as a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service during a time of tremendous change within the agency. The twenty-five essays in Wild Forest Home chronicle Howell’s career and personal experiences studying the wildlife of the Pacific Northwest during the litigious listing of the northern spotted owl and marbled murrelet under the Endangered Species Act and the Clinton administration’s adoption of the seminal 1994 Northwest Forest Plan. Meanwhile, Howell toiled on fire crews, searched for rare species, helped to monitor fishers reintroduced to the Olympic Peninsula, tested amphibians for deadly diseases, became a writer, and mourned the deaths of her parents. This captivating memoir seamlessly blends story and science to reveal a unique portrait of the struggles and joys of one wildlife biologist.
Pacific Harvest: A Northwest Coast Foraging Guide
by Jennifer Hahn
Wednesday, April 16 at 7 pm;
Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park
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Discover the Pacific Coast’s tastiest wild delicacies from the beach, field, and forest! Written by expert forager and guide Jennifer Hahn, this guide introduces both novice and more experienced foragers to the Pacific Coast’s ample and diverse edible species. Recognizing your local edible berries, flowers, greens, roots, tree parts, mushrooms, seaweeds, beach vegetables, and shellfish is a passport to a comforting sense of place. Hahn also highlights authentic Indigenous harvesting practices including profiles of Indigenous leaders in the traditional foods movement. Hahn emphasizes a sustainable approach to foraging, reminding readers what other beings also depend on these plants and animals as food and shelter sources.
by Brooke Williams
In conversation with Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Thursday, April 24 at 6 pm
Village Books Readings Gallery
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Two decades ago, naturalist and environmental writer Brooke Williams had a powerful dream about a dragonfly, a dream that cracked open his world by giving rise to a steady stream of dragonfly encounters in his waking life. Encountering Dragonfly is his account—related in a series of odonate encounters—of being drawn into a different kind of relationship with the natural world. By opening himself to the personal and mytho-poetic meanings of dragonfly, and patiently courting an understanding of these creatures that is built upon, but also transcends, a naturalist’s observation, Brooke has come to believe in the importance of ‘re-enchantment.’
MAY
Pacific Harvest: A Northwest Coast Foraging Guide
by Jennifer Hahn
Friday, May 2 at 6 pm;
Village Books Readings Gallery
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Discover the Pacific Coast’s tastiest wild delicacies from the beach, field, and forest! Written by expert forager and guide Jennifer Hahn, this guide introduces both novice and more experienced foragers to the Pacific Coast’s ample and diverse edible species. Recognizing your local edible berries, flowers, greens, roots, tree parts, mushrooms, seaweeds, beach vegetables, and shellfish is a passport to a comforting sense of place. Hahn also highlights authentic Indigenous harvesting practices including profiles of Indigenous leaders in the traditional foods movement. Hahn emphasizes a sustainable approach to foraging, reminding readers what other beings also depend on these plants and animals as food and shelter sources.
by Cara Stoddard
Saturday, May 3 at 6 pm
Village Books Readings Gallery ▸ RSVP
Thursday, May 15 at 7 pm
Third Place Books, Ravenna ▸ RSVP
Writing from ten years after her father's death, she traces her experiences of becoming a stepparent, carrying on her dad's legacy, and, in unimaginable ways, bringing him back to life. Spirography is a coming-of-age memoir about the bond between a father and daughter, their intertwined illnesses, and the enduring love that persists even after death. This memoir follows author Cara Stoddard's intersecting experiences of cancer, grief, and sexuality, rooted in the suburban Midwest of the late twentieth century—where idyllic lake life, water sports, NASCAR, Christian rock, and a willful ignorance around queerness define the landscape. Set in the author's childhood home on a lake in Michigan, this lyrical archive of a family navigating crisis is an elegy not only for the memory of her father but also the end of her childhood spent outdoors.
by Lynda V. Mapes
Friday, May 16 at 6 pm
Village Books Readings Gallery
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Ancient and carbon-rich, old-growth forests play an irreplaceable role in the environment. Their complex ecosystems clean the air, purify the water, cool the planet, and teem with life. In a time of climate catastrophe, old-growth and other natural forests face existential threats caused by humans--and their survival is crucial to ours. In a bicoastal journey, environmental journalist Lynda V. Mapes connects the present and future of Pacific Northwest forests to the hard-logged legacy forests of the northeastern United States. With vibrant storytelling supported by science and traditional ecological knowledge, Mapes invites readers to understand the world where trees are kin, not commodities. The Trees Are Speaking is essential reading for those with a deep interest in environmental stewardship, Indigenous land rights, and the urgent challenges posed by climate change.
by Alison Jean Cole
Thursday, May 22 at 7 pm
Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park
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The Pacific Northwest’s complex geologic history makes it a treasure trove for rockhounds! In this guide, artist & geology enthusiast Alison Jean Cole shares 60 sites where you can explore ancient sea-floors, epic lava flows, glacier-carved landscapes, and evidence of 200 million years of tectonic action. Discover agates and jaspers in the volcanic Cascade Range and marine fossils along the Oregon Coast. Search for concretions along the Olympic Peninsula, petrified wood in the Owyhee Uplands, and much more. Cole offers detailed information on where exactly to begin a rock hunt, including an overview of the area’s geologic history and age, what types of rocks are worth finding there, needed tools, land manager, and collection limits.