Memory’s Vault: The Poetic Heart of Fort Worden offers a retrospective look at a powerful piece of public art and a community’s responses to it. Created in 1988 at Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Memory’s Vault was designed by artist Richard Turner and features the poems of Sam Hamill, cofounder of Copper Canyon Press. This richly illustrated collection includes an essay by Turner, the full text of Hamill’s poem sequence, and contributions by local residents. Edited by Bob Francis, the book also offers a variety of contemporary responses from writers and poets who’ve been in residence or taught at Centrum, including essays by Natalie Goldberg and Wendy Call and poems by Alice Derry, CMarie Fuhrman, Gary Lilley, Claudia Castro Luna, Shin Yu Pai, and Rena Priest. To further this conversation, the book invites all who visit to reflect on their responses, offering suggestions and blank pages for readers to do so. It’s our hope that the collection serves the artist’s and poet’s original vision to engage the community and inspire reflection on the complexities of our human history and our relationship with an increasingly threatened natural world.  

“This is what is best about public art of this sort. It not only brings you outside, into the fresh air, making you stop and look and contemplate, but it also engages a person outside the periphery of their normal way of thinking…. [taking] you to a space uncharted by words, into something empty and vast. I call that an experience of pleasure.” —Natalie Goldberg, “Three Hundred Kinds of Rain”

$20.00 ISBN 979-8-98837-016-1 Preorder now Available May 15, 2024