It’s here! The launch of The Salmon Shanties will be at Pamplemousse Jus Winery in Summerland, at 4 pm on September 19, as part of the Ryga Arts Festival.

See you there at 9819 Lumsden Ave, Summerland. This blog was created to write this book. This reading was created so we could sample some wine made from the land and talk about poetry and its shared terroir with wine here in Cascadia. Here’s what Sharon Thesen says about this book:

“This is an astonishing book. It rips the world open. It takes no prisoners. It upends the entire overlay of globalism that has turned a peach into an industrial product. It is an ecstatic unravelling of the delusions of the present. Rhenisch’s visionary and prophetic voice joins those of the Indigenous Cascadian past to restore, in poetry, the sane and beautiful way of its water-keepers.” —Sharon Thesen

I will be reading selections from the book, along with a show of images, including a loon flying underwater, vineyards growing in shale scree in Germany, a theosophical vineyard in Switzerland, and so much more. Our local terroirs will be set amidst many others in Washington and Oregon, growing on the same soil, from the Wahluke Slope to Rattlesnake Ridge, the Horse Heavens, and the Willamette. All will be rooted in Indigenous land. With any luck, we will get to taste some sumac, if the guys have any of that still in the bottle!

The Pamplemoussers Getting Ready for us!

I hope you can come! This is going to be a very unique event. Even better, if you come to the opening of the Festival at 6 pm on Wednesday, September 18, I will read from the sequel to The Salmon Shanties, We are George Ryga. This is the year that fruit growers in the Okanagan Valley are in crisis as they haven’t been for fifty years, so I will take you back those fifty years, and forty before that, with a vision of moving forward. You’ll have to come and hear the details of just why we are George Ryga and how we can make it all work. There will be a slide show of the United Fruit Growers protest of 1973, when activism changed the Okanagan world forever. Come and meet the BC Fruit Police, and see them and the RCMP meet their match against a convoy of partisans and black marketeers from European wars, and a WWII fighter pilot, too. The opening will be at Summerland’s Ryga Arts Centre at 6 pm. See you there.