rain shadow poetry festival
language and the land
Friday, August 22
opening night of the festival presents an intimate reading environment to gather, reconnect, meet fellow travellers, and traverse the thoughtscapes of our bioregion
7:00pm – 10:00pm:
Reading – Watershed Press Writers Night
Our official opening features poets published by Cowichan Bay’s Watershed Press, including writers from the anthologies Cascadian Zen: Volumes One & Two.
Lorin Medley will be launching her chapbook, On the Way to Kluusms, with special guests from as far away as Seattle. Stick around for refreshments.
$20, SOLD OUT ONLINE
contact rainshadowpoeticslab@gmail.com for more info
limited tickets available at the door
Artful : The Gallery
526C Cumberland Road, Courtenay
Saturday, August 23
The main day of this year’s festival is overflowing with power, bringing together practitioners of foundational coastal poetics with new voices to develop an emergent image of the Cascadian language continuum
9:00am – 11:00am:
Talk – Robert Bringhurst
Cascadian Languages & Literatures
Renowned poet, typographer, essayist and translator Robert Bringhurst is developing an illustrated lecture specially for the 2025 festival! This lecture promises to investigate the enduring and emergent mindscapes of the bioregion through the language traditions and poetics of its inhabitants.
$30, included with all festival passes
Cumberland Museum
2680 Dunsmuir Ave., Cumberland
1:00pm – 2:30pm:
Workshop – Jan Zwicky
Note: capacity for this workshop is 18 people
Scholar, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and educator Jan Zwicky has been advancing a poetics at the matrices of language, logic and the world for decades. This workshop is sure to expand participants’ understanding of their own work by amplifying music and philosophical inquiry as core areas of inquiry in poetic discipline.
$75, included with festival Copper pass
(limited number of Copper passes available)
SOLD OUT!
The Abbey Studio
3273 First St., Cumberland
3:30pm – 5:00pm:
Panel – What is a Bioregional Poetic Practice?
Join Garry Gottfriedson, Jan Zwicky and Harold Rhenisch as they discuss approaches to a poetics of place, investigating the development of their language forms and relationships to the tongues and canyons of the broad Cascadia bioregion. Areas of inquiry may include sense of responsibility to place, language forms and fields, the continuum of voice, the social role(s) of writing poetry in this strange time, and language and mind. Moderated by poet and interviewer Paul E Nelson.
Each poet will have the opportunity to read from their work to provide context to the panel.
$30, included with all festival passes
The Abbey Studio
7:00pm – Late:
Readings – Cascadian Spacetime
Round out a day of thought-provoking poetry and poetics with an evening of readings!
Introduce yourself to some of the new voices of the bioregional poetry movement, as poets Veronica Martinez, Zach Charles and Zaylan Jacobsen from Cascadia 2050 join us to share their work from one of our partners of spirit, Seattle’s Cascadia Poetry Lab.
Our keynote reading of the 2025 festival is provided by Robert Bringhurst, whose poetic trajectory, as writer and translator, spans decades (at a minimum), cultures and languages.
$30, included with all festival passes
The Abbey Studio
Sunday, August 24
the final day of the festival is an opportunity to look around the bend in the river, reflecting on the state of poetry in Cascadia with new friends & comrades
10:00am – 12:00pm:
Workshop – Harold Rhenisch
Language as Ancestral Gift
Note: capacity for this workshop is 18 people
Poet, gardener, columnist, educator, and dedicated developer of workshops, Harold Rhenisch’s work aims to ‘reclaim the Indigenous heart of English, a seagoing and farming language of people of the Earth, from the colonial gloss’ that strives to impose itself over our collective modes of expression. Harold’s workshop is sure to open new directions for heart, breath and ear.
From Harold:
“In this workshop, we will explore the possibilities of English to speak of intimate relationships between people, earth and water in a world in which identity, society, earth, water, sky and other beings are one and in which action is vital and earth is memory. These old capacities of English remain alive in a language that developed historically at the same time as European colonialism. It is time to reclaim this ancestral gift. In the workshop, we will explore tools for speaking and writing as bodies in Earth capable of speaking in the plane of Indigenous ways of being. There will be a physical component, to allow us to explore words with our bodies.”
SOLD OUT!
$75, included with festival Copper pass
(limited number of Copper passes available)
The Abbey Studio
12:00pm – 12:30pm:
Closing Reading – Paul E Nelson
From Seattle by way of Chicago, the Soto School and the sociopoetic ethos of Bolinas, known to many in the Vancouver Island poetry community, Paul E Nelson has been keeping tabs on the poetic practitioners of Cascadia and beyond for decades. As a friend and collaborator of rain shadow poetics lab, Paul’s reading to close the festival is a reminder of our collective responsibility to keep our antennae ringing and bring the eternity news.
$20, included with all festival passes
The Abbey Studio
rain shadow poetics lab 