About Watershed Press

Watershed Press was founded by Paul E. Nelson, Jason Tetsuzen Wirth, and Adelia MacWilliam in 2023 to support their first publications, Cascadian Zen, Volume One and Two, a carefully curated collection of poetry, essays, interviews, art, and photography from the bioregion of Cascadia.

The founding editors live and work in the ancestral lands of the Coast Salish, specifically, the Duwamish, and the Cowichan. Our publications include Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors from the traditional and unceded territories of many nations in the bioregion of Cascadia, and elsewhere, who have stewarded these lands from time immemorial.

We foster compelling work by a wide range of voices allied deeply with place and sustainable and Indigenous approaches to navigating the ecological and political harm of the Anthropocene in the bioregion of Cascadia. We’re committed to poetries, and stories that have been traditionally suppressed and distorted by colonization. We want to make room for all marginalized voices, including writing at the aesthetic margins, and believe in speaking truth to political power with compassion. 

We practice collective decision making in all our dealings at an institutional level. We are committed to offering works that do not compromise art for fashion or commerce. We mirror the act of attention essential in creating radical poetry and prose in our publishing process. To quote Robert Bringhurst:

The Old World and the New are not two regions marked reliably on maps.
The Old World is wherever indigenous traditions are permitted to exist.
The New World is wherever such traditions are denied and a vision of human
triumph is allowed to take their place. The Old World is the self-sustaining world
– worldwide – to which we all owe our existence. The New World is the synthetic,
self-absorbed, and unsustainable one – also worldwide – that we create.

– From: A Story As Sharp As a Knife