Spring Creek Project Presents: Waveshock: A Reading with Jerry Martien
Join us for a reading with poet and author Jerry Martien as he shares his new book, Waveshock: Ed Ricketts, the Voyage of the Grampus & Our Biopoetic Future.
In Waveshock, Martien recounts a story set in the spring and summer of 1932, when a cohort of four questing souls made its way north to Alaska aboard the 33-foot cabin cruiser known as Grampus. Pioneering intertidal ecologist Ed Ricketts needed 15,000 tiny jellyfish Gonionemus for his biological supply lab; unemployed scholar Joseph Campbell sought philosophical direction and a clue to his future; and early environmentalists Jack Calvin and his Russian-Tlingit partner Sasha Kashevaroff wanted to live free on a homestead in wild Alaska.
That voyage — part science lab, part writing workshop, and part symposium that began in Ricketts’s famous laboratory on Monterey Bay — lives on as two classic books: Ricketts and Calvin’s Between Pacific Tides and Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. But the deeper legacy lies in its breakthrough concepts of ecology and myth, the recognition of their essential unity, and the bioregional principle that place shapes life. From his home on the shores of Humboldt Bay, Martien revisits this epic voyage, drawing its collaborative lessons into a field he calls biopoetics, seeing the roots of his own generation’s journey and a chart for future voyagers.
Jerry Martien is the author of several collections of poetry as well as the books Shell Game and The Price of a Life, both histories of money and exchange in North America and northwest California. He also edited the 2023 Freeman House collection A Watershed Runs Through You: Essays, Talks and Reflections on Salmon, Restoration and Community.
This event is free and open to all; no tickets required. Grass Roots Books will have Jerry's titles available. Book signing to follow reading.
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