EMPTY BOWL
Empty Bowl, an independent press founded in 1976 in the Pacific Northwest as a cooperative letterpress publisher, publishes literary anthologies, poetry, translations, essays, and occasionally fiction.
Writing Home
Our Newest Release—Coming March 24
A memoir
Anna Odessa Linzer
In Writing Home, American Book Award winner Anna Odessa Linzer gives us her heart’s measure of that pain and also the hard-earned pleasures of creating life in its aftermath. She finds herself in the Treehouse, built in an old forest teeming with life on a deep, isolated bay in the Salish Sea. In this rich and lyric memoir, Linzer slowly, and with a poet’s eye for detail, charts her journey to discover and reveal the essence of home.
“ . . . just as two black brushstrokes across the
cream of handmade paper evoke a mountain
in the moonlight, they also join other nights,
other mountains, other moonlight. These
brushstrokes join to other days. Other words.
Sometimes the simple black brushstrokes
are enough. All we need.
The Treehouse became a gift of a dream.
Time folded in on itself, expanded, and
sometimes fell away altogether. Leaving us
there, perfectly. We might have been there
lifetimes, years, seconds. Who is to know.
Maybe we are still there.”
Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska
Science, History, & Reflections Along the Pacific Coast
Edited by Jan Staley
In January 2025, we were pleased to publish Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, the Voyage of the Grampus, and Our Biopoetic Future by Jerry Martien. Waveshock was inspired by Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska, a collection of essays edited by whale biologist Jan Straley. Empty Bowl is pleased to announce that Straley’s book is now available on our website.
In 1932, marine ecologist Ed Ricketts, with friends Jack and Sasha Calvin and mythologist Joseph Campbell, departed Puget Sound on board the Grampus for a journey up the Pacific Coast to Southeast Alaska. Ricketts crafted an essay on his "wave shock theory" during that ten-week trip that explored the impact of waves on coastal marine life. However, the essay and the Alaskan voyage were largely overshadowed by Ricketts’s California adventures. In Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska, a fresh and compelling collection celebrating the life of this iconic scientist, editor and whale biologist Janice M. Straley writes poignantly of Ricketts’s influence on her own life and career.
With a foreword by Nancy Ricketts, Ed Rickett's daughter, and a preface by the editor, this unique collection includes works by researchers and scientists, with Ed Ricketts's breakthrough "Wave Shock Essay" the book's centerpiece. Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska is beautifully designed by Carolyn Servid of Old Sitka Rocks Press, with additional illustrations by Sitka artist Norman Campbell that provide intimate visual renderings of Ricketts's passion: the diverse and bountiful inhabitants of the waters along the Pacific Coast. This edition was revised from an earlier edition by the same title, published by Shorefast Editions in 2015.
Of Note
Read more about the award in a recent story from the Port Townsend Leader.
Chemakum tribal elder, Empty Bowl Press receive Humanities Washington awards by Kirk Boxleitner at The Leader
We were surprised and deeply grateful to have received one of fifty awards given by Humanities WA this year in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, acknowledging Empty Bowl’s five-decade-long contribution to the humanities. We were especially moved by the words of our nominators: “The people of Washington State are fortunate to have a publisher like this, which originated as a quixotic idea from a bunch of muddy tree planters, but which has become a literary press of unique and diverse voices connecting the Pacific Northwest to the world, and vice versa.” We’re honored to be in good company with forty-nine others, including two of our Empty Bowl authors, Shin Yu Pai and Kate Reavey! For more details, visit the Humanities WA website. To register to watch the Humanities WA award ceremony, use this link to register.
Please join us for a reading and conversation with Jerry Martien, author of Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, the Voyage of the Grampus, and Our Biopoetic Future, and editor of A Watershed Runs Through You, a collection of essays by bioregionalist visionary Freeman House. Waveshock reflects on the voyage and conversations of scientist Ed Ricketts, early environmentalists Jack Calvin and his wife, Sasha, and mythologist Joseph Campell. In A Watershed Runs Through You, Freeman House's engaging, lyrical essays offer equal parts inspiration and on-the-ground knowledge for our increasingly climate-challenged times.
The event will begin at 6:00 p.m. in the Stuart T. Rolfe room in Seattle University’s Admissions and Alumni building. It is hosted by the Seattle University Philosophy Department.
