I am delighted to present an interview about the art book Heavy Lifting, a collaboration by Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and the poet Theresa Whitehill. Recorded Friday, March 25, 2023, via Zoom about how the project came together, what it means to create stunning works of art that are also books and how we engage the realities of the anthropocene. This is an incredibly important fact given that Felicia’s home and studio was totally destroyed by a wildfire that has become the new normal in the California summer. Theresa Whitehill’s poetry works seamlessly with Felicia’s design in a book that is like few others every created. For book nerds, this is nirvana and we get inside of the whole project via the video version of this Cascadian Prophets interview.
Note that Theresa Whitehill will be part of a talk on Saturday, October 7, 2023 at the 7th Cascadia Poetry Festival with Robert Bringhurst entitled Bioregional Typography.
See: https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/workshops-2023-cascadia-poetry-festival/
Bioregional Typography
Robert Bringhurst and Theresa Whitehill
Clearcutting of languages and cultures has been widespread in Cascadia, just like the clearcutting of forests. Even so, this remains a rich and highly varied landscape, geologically, biologically, and linguistically. Cascadian Zen: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now is an anthology of pieces written and spoken in English, but many languages and writing systems are present in the text – mostly as placenames, personal names, references, and quotations.
This was really a wonderful interview filled with detail and emotion. The interviewer knew when to ask the right question and make an appropriate literary association.He also knows when to step back and let them circle around what they are trying to get at. Theresa read wonderfully and Felicia was as always a plain spoken realist/dreamer/activist artist/printer. I love the underlying political/personal/community ideas that are emerging from their “listening” tour!