SPLAB becomes the Cascadia Poetics Lab
Seattle, WA, September 1, 2021—The Seattle Poetics LAB (SPLAB), a 501(c)(3) literary arts-oriented nonprofit organization founded in 1993, has changed its name to the Cascadia Poetics Lab, effective today.
Founding Director Paul E Nelson said, “the new name reflects better our mission, the clarity provided by the current board and our recent and extensive organizational development work.”
The new mission is:
Empowering people to practice poetry & deepen connections to place, self & the present moment.
Over the past 28 years SPLAB has been instrumental in leading a bioregional cultural investigation using poetics, poetry festivals (such as the Cascadia Poetry Festival, and the Poetry Postcard Festival) along with publications and education.
In addition to the new website
the organization is launching a podcast which will lean on the 700+ hours of original interviews conducted since 1993, when the organization was founded in Auburn, Washington, on December 14, 1993.
Founding Director Paul E Nelson is available for interviews and can be contacted at (206) 422.5002 or Splabman@icloud.com
Cascadia Poetics Lab, 9030 Seward Park Av S, Unit 213,
Seattle, WA 98118, USA
We have put a great deal of thought into this and we will be announcing aspects of this evolution over the next few weeks, including a podcast, a new anthology, a writer’s retreat space and other projects designed to allow people interested in the confluence of poetics, place and the present moment.
& be sure to check out the first of our Fall online workshops, Poetics as Cosmology 2021.
Paul Nelson’s Poetics as Cosmology course was resonant and revelatory. — Laura King, Helena, MT
Paul Nelson’s organic poetry workshops are less a class than a journey, leading the participant not only to an ingeniously natural method of writing, but to the living energy of the poem itself. — Rob Lewis, Bow, WA
Thanks so much for an engaging workshop – what fun! The best thing about it, to my mind, is your affirmative and humor-graced approach to all. You have a genius for getting people connected and encouraging their work… — Margaret Lee, Tulsa, OK
Diana Elser was elected to the SPLAB Board on April 5, 2021. Diana graduated from Utah State with a BA in English, then worked as a grant and technical writer in healthcare services and consulting. Born in Montana, she’s lived in El Paso, Texas, Great Falls, Montana; Jackson, Wyoming; Bountiful, Utah; Bay Area (Rodeo/Crockett); and Seattle (also Canada and Thailand). She’s turned over peaches, waitressed, tended bar, and sold Bibles along the way – as well as raising three children and helping raise a stepson. She moved to Seattle for love (which has lasted) in 1994 and went to work for Group Health (now Kaiser Health Plan of Washington) where she did market research and competitive intelligence as part of strategic planning. In 2013, she retired, and dedicated her retirement to “the arts” and having fun – taking writing classes at Hugo House and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, year after year, as well as traveling, gardening, playing guitar/songwriting and becoming a grandmother. Finishing Line Press published her first chapbook in April, 2021, and she has a couple more in the works. Diana discovered SPLAB through the 
When Adelia MacWilliam did her poetry thesis at the University of Victoria she discovered that if you cast the mythic imagination across a piece of land that has always been part of your life, everything will out. What she encountered amidst the remnants of a stunning wilderness – a savage history, with its culturally sanctioned amnesia – changed her view of her home forever. Her work explores the complexities of a settler culture struggling to create a home in a world it is simultaneously gutting.
