An Empty Bowl Party Filled with Poetry and Community
Saturday’s event includes a walk with the poet laureate.
They’re “a bunch of muddy tree planters,” as the poet Red Pine called them: the people of Empty Bowl, an independent press celebrating its 50th anniversary this week.
The press’ party—free to the public—is multifaceted and lasts much of the day Saturday at the Cotton Building, 607 Water St. More details about this event, sponsored by the Port Townsend Arts Commission, are available at https://www.emptybowl.org/events.
Doors will open at 11 a.m. with Empty Bowl publishers Holly J. Hughes and John Pierce setting up the book table and a raffle for free books. At noon, Port Townsend Poet Laureate Rufina C. Garay will lead a walk to one of Port Townsend’s poetic hot spots: Memory’s Vault at Fort Worden State Park.
Regardless of whether you consider yourself a poet, you’re invited to join Garay and carry with you a small notebook, a pen and an object related to a personal memory. The noontime meeting place will be outside Building 315, aka Rainshadow Recording, at the fort; participants can pick up a map of the fort campus at the Cotton Building.
Next on the agenda are live poetry readings on stage back at the Cotton Building. At 2 p.m., recently published Empty Bowl writers, including salmon troller and fisherpoet Tele Aadsen, poet and painter John Brandi, Brooding Heron Press co-publisher Sally Green, poet and English professor Ed Harkness and fisherman and Zen practitioner Kurt Hoelting. Peter Quinn, former co-owner of Imprint Books in Port Townsend, and Ann Spiers, former Vashon Island poet laureate, will also read.
Saturday’s celebration is a chance to “learn about the press’s colorful history and what we’ve been up to,” said Hughes.
“We’ll be celebrating writers and readers, beautiful books, our bioregion and, of course, our community. Port Townsend has a long history of support for the arts—the literary arts in particular—and we’re glad to celebrate Empty Bowl’s place in that history.”
At 4 p.m. Saturday, the party will move into story-sharing: founding poets Michael Daley, Tim McNulty, Red Pine, Bill Ransom and Finn Wilcox will join Richard Meadows in a conversation about Empty Bowl’s early years. They will also pay tribute to Empty Bowl authors who are deceased, reading poems and bits of essays by Tom Jay, Freeman House, Jerry Gorsline, Mike O’Connor, Bill Yake, Clemens Starck and Pat Fitzgerald.
These were the original muddy tree planters, writers who loved the woods and composed poems about this part of the planet.
A reception and book-signing follows at 5:30 p.m., with a light buffet, desserts and soft drinks. The finale is a 7 p.m. reading with Daley, McNulty, Red Pine, Ransom and Wilcox. Each will read from his own work, both old and new; their Empty Bowl Press books will be available for purchase and author inscriptions.
Since its birth in 1976, Empty Bowl has been based in and around Port Townsend, with leaders over the years including Daley, the founding editor, poet and translator Mike O’Connor, and poet Wilcox.
Four years ago, Hughes and Pierce, who live in Chimacum, became the co-publishers. The press has since published 24 books, including “I Sing the Salmon Home,” edited by Rena Priest, which won the Washington State Book Award for poetry in 2024. That same year, Aadsen’s book “What Water Holds” received a Nautilus Gold Medal, and in 2025, Empty Bowl received a Humanities Washington award.
Hughes offered some background for the press’ name.
“Michael Daley has said he thinks of Empty Bowl as “the gift that moves,” a nod to Lewis Hyde’s book ‘The Gift’ that came out in 1983 and looks at how artistic creation survives in a commercial world,” she said.
“Then there’s also the Buddhist example of monks going out with their empty bowls into the community, where the bowls are filled. We love this sense of reciprocity, or connection to our community: that the press offers curated books about our bioregion and the community receives the books, and in doing so, fills the bowl—until it empties again.”
From its start as a cooperative letterpress publisher, Empty Bowl has produced literary anthologies, collections of poetry and essays, books of Chinese translation and more recently, the “Madrona Project” series. Its books include “Memory’s Vault: The Poetic Heart of Fort Worden” (2024), “Curve” by Kate Reavey (2022) and “The Blossoms Are Ghosts at the Wedding” by Tom Jay, originally published in 2006 and revised and expanded in 2019.
“Our mission,” Hughes said, “is to publish the work of writers who share Empty Bowl’s founding purpose: the love and preservation of human communities in wild places.”
