Edge Effects

by Pepper Trail, PLAYA Science Council In February 2025, PLAYA joined a worldwide wildlife tracking program called Motus, coordinated by Birds Canada. PLAYA facilities manager Simon Lagneaux and Motus Pacific Northwest Coordinator William Blake installed a tracking...

Read PLAYA's 2025 Annual Report here!

October brought a flurry of special programs including the highly anticipated Wildfire + Water: Artists and Scientists Collaborating for Change Residency. After a year of planning and coordinating, a combination of artists, writers, scientists, landowner collaborators...

PLAYA is pleased to announce the participants for our 2023 Wildfire + Water: Artists and Scientists Collaborating for Change residency. These artists and scientists will spend time on the PLAYA campus and the surrounding area in October sharing and learning about land...

A Case for Solace is Liz Ahl's second full-length poetry collection, recently released in October 2022 from Lily Poetry Review Books. Liz was tinkering with the manuscript that became this book during her Spring 2019 residency, and was working on edits to the accepted...

Miriam Gershow's second book, SURVIVAL TIPS: STORIES, will be released in March 2024 from Propeller Books. The collection spans 20 years of her story writing career and includes three stories born in magical Cabin 6 in March 2022 (with my dear friend, Cai Emmons, next...

The work David Carmack Lewis created during his 2013 PLAYA residency, and the entire experience of being at Playa, sitting around the fireplace in the evenings and contemplating the remnants of the Toolbox Complex wildfire along the slopes of Winter Ridge, was the beginnings of a four year project, a visual essay called “A God in the Hearth”. The work explores humanity’s deep connection to fire and the implications of our dependence on fossil fuels, including the increasing risks of wildfire in the American West.

Charles Goodrich’s new poetry collection, WATERING THE RHUBARB (Flowstone Press) includes several poems composed during his residency at PLAYA. His first novel, WEAVE ME A CROOKED BASKET will be published by the University of Nevada Press in Fall 2023. It’s an unconventional love story involving a makeshift coalition of farmers, artists, scientists, and community members who turn a small organic farm into a work of art to save it from unscrupulous developers. Deep gratitude to PLAYA for a residency where I completed some pivotal chapters.

During the pandemic, Alex Hirsch was awarded a public art commission by Washington Arts Commission and Puyallup School District. She worked remotely with the committee, visited the campus using Covid precautions, and successfully completed the commission with the...

Started during his residency, PLAYA alum Charles Hood received a prize for his essay collection, titled A Salad Only A Devil Would Eat: the Joys of Ugly Nature. It won the Editor’s Choice Prize from Foreword, for being the best nonfiction book of 2021. In 2022, he...