Sea Ya!

A Fisher Poets Adventure in Astoria, Oregon.

On a perfect-weather day, I packed my bags and I started my three-hour roadtrip from Corvallis to Astoria. Months earlier, a friend and I brainstormed a plan to meet up for Fisher Poets, an annual celebration of the commercial fishing industry in poetry, prose, and song, and we wisely booked our lodging early.

I met my dear friend at the Bowline, a hotel repurposed from a historic 100-year-old industrial fish processing plant and sardine cannery. We dropped off our bags and set off on foot to meet some friends at Fort George Brewery, one of the many venues for Fisher Poets events and home to my favorite beer, Pizza Pals.

The event always occurs during the last weekend in February and begins on Friday. For $20 you get a button, and that button is your all-access pass to Fisher Poets events. I attended this event for the first time in 2024 and it lit up the anthropologist in me. You can transport yourself into fishing culture through music, storytelling, poetry, workshops, and films - all happening throughout the weekend at several cafes, breweries, wine shops, and theaters, and it’s all within walking distance of downtown Astoria.

The website is hard to navigate. But there you’ll find a long list of entertainers.You can view a schedule of who’s performing when and where, but it’s a lot. Many venues are packed too tight and some have a seating limit. I enjoy wandering aimlessly, finding a place with a seat and discovering an unexpected surprise.

On Saturday, after a nap, my friend texted me that she found some seats at Xanadu, a queer-owned bar and grill and prized venue for Fisher Poets events. She said the Skamokawa Swamp Opera was setting up. I rushed over and secured the saved seat next to her. I wasn’t sure what to expect from a Swamp Opera, but I knew I would like whatever it was. The animated four-member eclectic folk band did not disappoint. They announced they were playing a Mary Garvey song “Oystershell Road” that was based on an interview with the son of a woman from Nemah, on Willapa Bay. It was particularly haunting to hear, having just received news of the Iran bombing, a song about World War II, when the town was emptied of men, leaving the women to take over the primary business of the bay - oyster farming. I therapy cried. After the song we all celebrated Mary Garvey, an older woman, sitting in the front row. I therapy cried again. There is something about shining a light on wise women, often hidden by cultural invisibility, that I live for. It feels subversive, it feels needed.

Another song was written by the most animated band member, Wren Hendriks, a fiery piece about her mother, the first female boat captain in Los Angeles Bay. She looked across the room and pointed to her mother in the crowd. And then began singing and you were instantly taken on the water with her and her mother. I therapy cried again.

I laughed so hard during another Mary Garvey song “Cannery Shed” a song about young love, a little naughty and very catchy.

On Saturday they released the rules of the annual Umpteenth Annual On-Site Poetry Contest.

• Write from the perspective of a common piece of commercial fishing equipment at the point it’s about to fail.

• Must be performed in 30 seconds or fewer.

• Needn’t rhyme.

• Must include sensory description, implied or explicit. (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch)

Just as I did the last time I attended Fisher Poets in 2024, I wrote a poem. But neither time was I able to show up to the late-night contest to deliver it to an audience. This year I turned the poem into a two-track comic mini-zine for my Yearlong Comic Intensive Course with the Sequential Artist Workshop.

Now that I am off the socials, you can find these gems available for free at some of my favorite local places in Corvallis: the Kinetic Bagel Institute, the Naked Crepe or the Interzone Cafe.

Thanks for being my audience this year!

Let’s connect. Tell me about a live performance experience where you were so moved.