Finalist in the "Fiction and Poetry" category for the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival.
24 weeks on the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association bestseller list since March 1, 2023.
24 weeks on the Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Association bestseller list since March 1, 2023.
Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield; Mountaineers Books, 2023
400 pages, ISBN: 978-1-68051-622-7 
Book tour details (addresses, readers, etc) can be found at our "News/Events" page.
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Cascadia Field Guide brings together art, poetry, and stories holding scientific, sensory, and cultural knowledge to celebrate and illuminate Cascadia, the diverse ecoregion stretching from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to Northern California and from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide.
This unique book contains 13 communities (from Tidewater Glacier to Shrub-Steppe) and 128 beings (from Geoduck to Devil's Club to Cassia Crossbill), offering locals and visitors a new way of connecting-–with heart and mind and body-–to place.
more praise for Cascadia Field Guide:
"Already, my “Cascadia Field Guide” is getting Deer-eared. The cover’s French flaps bulge a bit from being used as bookmarks, the front one pushing the cover open, inviting me to browse. The other day a few pages became stuck together from the tears of a Douglas-Fir that cascaded onto the page when a gust of Wind blew Rain through its branches. And now I find myself capitalizing Wind and Rain."––Washington Park Arboretum Bulletin “...a love story masquerading as a field guide.....Whether you have a longstanding love affair with Cascadia or are new to its charms, this field guide is a fresh and intimate illumination of the extraordinary place we call home."–Cascadia Daily News "This is a volume that should live in a pack, alongside binoculars, a hand lens and a notebook. Read a poem to a forest, rest your lunch on the pages while you watch foraging birds, enjoy a drawing of skunk cabbage and give it a sniff. And introduce yourself!"–Mount Baker Experience “I really do want everyone to go out and get this field guide because, I can honestly say, I’ve never seen an anthology like it. Its beauty, its plentitude, and its inclusiveness. It’s really startling and wonderful.” –Paisley Rekdal, in a conversation with Derek Sheffield and Garrett Hongo for High Country News. Listen to the whole conversation here. |
Where is Cascadia?
SOUTHEAST ALASKA, IDAHO, OREGON, BRITISH COLUMBIA, WASHINGTON--AND BITS OF MONTANA, CALIFORNIA, NEVADA, WYOMING... Cascadia is a place defined not by political maps but by watersheds. Cascadia is defined, according to the Sightline Institute, by “the watersheds of rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean through North America’s temperate rainforest zone.” Bates McKee first used the word Cascadia to define a region in 1972. David McCloskey, a Seattle University bioregionalist, then used the term in 1993 to describe and map a “land of falling waters." Do you live in Cascadia? See the map below.
led by story |
shared through synergy |
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Story is foundational to our ways of engaging experience as humans and in Cascadia Field Guide.
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). In Cascadia Field Guide, the being stories for each of the 128 beautiful inhabitants of this region hold natural history, sensory awareness, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, scientific understanding, personal connection, and more. |
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Artists |
writers |
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Each community of Cascadia Field Guide is illuminated by a different artist from Cascadia; these artists work in form line design, cut paper, pen and ink, and approach their work in sensibilities from playful to scientific. We invited them to be free in their engagements, and the love and play shines through.
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Writers with deep ties to the region–-both established and emerging-–engage Orca, Mountain Goat, Bitterbrush, and other iconic and endemic beings in Cascadia Field Guide. They are urban and rural, old and young, and write from a wide range of cultures spanning this vast land. 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. |