Matt Trease

is a poet, artist, teacher, and astrologer. He serves on the board of the Cascadia Poetics Lab, co-curates the Margin Shift reading series, and serves as the poetry editor for the CAELi Review. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of The Outside (forthcoming Carbonation Press, 2024) and the chapbooks Later Heaven (busylittle1way designs) and rcvrdtxt (rlysrslit). He lives in the Salish Sea region of Cascadia on the homeland of the Duwamish people with his partner Xan, his son Harvey, and their dog, Hoopla. Find out more @ https://bio.site/mjtrease.

Thinkingwith: writing strategies for reconnecting to earth

Our current media landscape seems hooked on a doom loop, an apocalyptic dream of human self-annihilation from collapsing nation states and anarchy to climate change to AI terminators, to genocidal warmongering. In order to avoid going down with that ship, we, as humans, are going to need to flip the script, to learn to think differently.

This lab will focus on writing strategies, applicable for poetry or prose, for breaking the spell that objectifies and cuts us off from the earth and from place and all the living beings that we (often) obliviously live in relationship with. We’ll do that by intentionally widening the socially-imposed conventions of “normal” perception via some minor alterations to our daily writing practices.

As a trail guide in this 5-week excursion, we’ll read through the first section of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth by the late herbalist and self-described “Bardic Naturalist” of the Gaian movement, Stephen Harrod Buhner as well as writing by Goertha, Gertrude Stein, Francis Ponge, Will Alexander, Bernadette Mayer, Italo Calvino and more.

Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
February 23 – March 23, 2025

February 23
March 2, 9, 16, & 23

*Note: Canadian registrees: if funds are tight, you can pay the CAD equivalent. Please reach out via the contact form.