Overview

Literary Nonfiction. Poetry. Tom Jay's work is inspirational, sui generis, and magical. He delves into tiny crevices in the quotidian world and emerges with flakes of gold. His is the voice of the grandfather, the student, and the lover rolled into one. To read him is to awaken.â Barry Lopez Tom Jay is renowned in the Pacific Northwest for his cast bronze bells and vivid sculptures of salmon. His writing, as collected here, is every bit as forceful and beautiful. Reveling equally in etymology and bioregional ecology, Jay's essays and poems attune us to the intertwined depths of language and landscape. 'Language's vitality metaphors the world it attends, ' he writes. 'It is the spoken music of our animate, many-weathered and deep-soiled home.' His writing urges us to live in 'mortally tempered attention, ' and shows us precisely how it's done.â Charles Goodrich Essayist, poet, sculptor, and ecological and wild visionary, Tom Jay is an eloquent spokesman for the riverine realm of the Pacific Northwest. These poems and essays shimmer with insight and hard-won wisdom. Like salmon at sea, Jay's subjects range widely. His essays move easily and surely among history and folklore, nature and community. They explore the hidden roots of language and commonplace mysteries of watersheds. and his words inevitably circle back homeâ to the heart of what it means to be human in a wondrous but threatened world.â Tim McNulty

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Tom Jay was born in Manhattan, Kansas, and spent his early years in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah, Nevada and California. After dropping out of college, he wandered the world in the mid-60s, stowing away on a cruise ship to Europe, working in an Iceland cement factory and a Danish farm. An active member of the Northwest Art Community since 1966, when he built the first bronze casting facility for Seattle University. He went on to supervise and construct casting facilities at the University of Washington. Upon graduation, with an MFA from the University of Washington in 1969, he established Riverdog Fine Arts Foundry in Chimacum, which cast, in addition to his own work, sculpture for such notable sculptors as Tony Angell, Hilda Morris, Phil Levine, Richard Kirsten, Louise McDowell, George Tsutakawa, Everett DuPen, Ann Morris, John Hoover, Marvin Oliver, Larry Anderson, Gizel Berman, Doug Granum, Barry Herem, Clayton James, Jeff Day and others. For many years he and his wife, Sara Mall Johani have engaged the community imagination in place-based culture through art, festivals, educational adventures and salmon restoration projects.

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