The FisherPoets Gathering feels a bit like a film festival…a weekend packed with daytime workshops and evening performances. Only here, instead of filmmakers, it’s fishermen sharing their work, live on stage.
Maggie Parrish, a second-generation net-setter in Bristol Bay, Alaska who is based most of the year in Anacortes, Washington, stood in jeans and muck boots onstage at the Columbian Theater.
As a new mom, she said she took some inspiration from nursery rhymes. And she wanted to portray the tremendous variety in the workforce – with fishers who identify all kinds of ways. After bravely belting out a cover of a Taylor Swift song – rewritten with fishing lyrics, of course — she recited her original poem:
Fisherperson
Fisher lady, Fisher woman,
Fisher mama, Fisher dude,
Fisher brother, Fisher mother,
I'm in a fishing mood.
Fisher sister, Fisher mister.
Fish is what I need.
Fisher person, what's your version?
I'll meet you out at sea.
Fisher baby, Fisher doggy,
Fisher kitty on the line,
Fisher honey, fishing money,
Fisher lover, you're all mine.
The fisher-people came to this event from as far as northern Alaska and Maine, from remote British Columbia, even rural Arkansas. The only requirement to take part as a performer is to have true ties to the commercial fishing industry and want to write about it.
“We have writers, we have poets, we have storytellers,” said Jay Speakman, a writer and musician who has helped keep the gatherings going for more than two decades now.
“We have people that just chronicle. And they'll get up and read a letter that they got from their dad before he went to sea and never came back,” Speakman said.
“It's pretty emotional stuff...there's no jury that judges people,” he said. “If they've worked on the water, they get a piece of it.”
Speakman was standing in a crowded popup bookstore they call 'The Gear Shack,' where poets can sell their work and other wares. Speakman said Astoria is very welcoming to the Gathering and the town has a lot of storefront turnover.
So the event’s producers put their Gear Shack in a different location every year – wherever there’s a convenient empty space. The Gear Shack is where all the poets and writers check in to see where and when they’re up.
Inside, a silent auction with donated items helped cover the nonprofit’s expenses and subsidized some of the poets’ travel costs. Spectators could buy a festival button for $20, providing access to two evenings of performances at seven venues all over town.
Speakman’s buddy, Jon Broderick, is lurking nearby. They performed and hosted the opening night sets at the Fort George Lovell Taproom, where they sang their poems together – with Speakman on harmonica and Broderick on banjo and guitar.
“Trade war over in Asia… overnight the price just tanked,” Speakman sang, in a song about the inherent financial risks of fishing, a business based on a global commodity. Broderick’s banjo backed him up on the blue-grassy tune.
Broderick takes credit for making the first phone call to get the FisherPoets Gathering started 28 years ago. He said he was inspired by literary journals he saw in the 1980s, with collections of poetry from working people – and great poets like Rich Bard, Toby Sullivan and the recently deceased Oregon journeyman and Merchant Marine Clem Starck – who wrote plainly and clearly about their lives.
“Lean … spare with words. Accessible. Nothing obscure, nothing hard to understand. Things that leave you thinking, but not poems that are hard to understand,” Broderick said.
Broderick and Speakman have built a following as singer songwriters and have played all around the Pacific Northwest region.
Broderick still fishes in Southwest Alaska every year, while Speakman has become more of an advocate for the commercial fishing lifestyle. He said the FisherPoets Gathering is needed now more than ever.
“Our food production is controlled by a very small group of people,” Speakman said. “And we're the people that go out there and risk our lives taking chances to produce that food. And I think it needs to be celebrated.”
Nearly three decades into this, they’re also trying to get more new voices involved. This year, about 20 of the 103 performers were so-called 'Greenhorns,' reading here for the very first time. Among them: Sunny Rice from Petersburg, Alaska – who worked in a cannery for five summers many years ago.
The final poem of her first 15-minute set was a short one, called “Seabird.”
“This for the fisherwomen and fishermen out there,” she said as she introduced it.
Sea Bird
The storm will try
with its waves and gales
and brave bluster
to ruffle your feathers,
but you will rise up with the crests
and slip down with the troughs,
Unflustered
through the worst of the spitting
winds.
One of her other poems described an immigration raid on the cannery where she worked. Another, the loneliness of sometimes being the only woman on the packing line.
She wants to be a voice for all of that and more.
“You write things so that others will experience them. They don't mean as much if they're just sitting in your notebook,” Rice said in an interview before her debut, after attending the FisherPoets workshop called "From Page to Stage.”
She said she was energized by the challenge of getting up there and bringing her work out into the world.
“But it's – at least the way I write, is pretty from the heart. So it feels like you're baring your soul. So that's exciting – and scary.”
But everyone I talked to said this is more like a homecoming than a showcase – something many of them look forward to every year.
The organizers say this year more than 2,000 spectators crowded into the Gathering’s seven venues, drawn to the authenticity that has brought the FisherPoets back to Astoria year after year, since 1998.
