There are three weeks before the 20th Poetry Postcard Fest begins. Cumberland, BC and Cortes Island postcarder Scott Lawrance sends an article from The Guardian about the tradition of using poetry to get through the conflict. Link below.

If you have not yet registered for the 2026 Poetry Postcard Fest, time’s wasting. https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/poetrypostcards/

Two workshops coming up have room and are poised to appeal to different types of postcard poets.

Postcarding and DaySinging, Sunday, June 14 from 3-5PDT is for people who want to put a poetry postcard practice into an annual rhythm, along with the daylong writing ritual experiment called the DaySong.

I Want to Write a Poem But I Don’t Know How is for folks who want to get started. Zach Charles of Cascadia 2050 is the facilitator. That happens Saturday, June 27, from 3-5pm PDT. Know that attending these workshops helps sustain our work, the Cascadia Poetics Lab founded in 1993.

From the Guardian article:

War tries to destroy culture because culture sustains identity and memory. Literature is not only a victim of war, it is an instrument of survival, resistance, witnessing – and, sometimes, welcome refuge. When civil war broke out in Sudan in 2023, one resident of Nyala in Darfur concluded that the best thing he could do for his suffering neighbours was to open his own library to replace those closed or destroyed, allowing them to escape an oppressive reality.

Don’t let the fascists and scholars of war screw up your summer of postcard mirth!