The Cascadia Subduction Zone
For nearly ten years The Cascadia Subduction Zone served to provide thoughtful and insightful work: essays, flash fiction, interviews, poetry, and reviews of fiction and non-fiction for readers seeking innovative analysis, especially showing the work by women as central to the world of arts. Thanks to our volunteer editors and staff we were able to show the impact of the work of many authors over the years. These include Timmi and Tom Duchamp, Lew Gilchrist, Arrate Hiladgo, Nisi Shawl, Kath Wilham.
The geophysical reality of the Cascadia Subduction Zone offered us insight into the social and political reality in which we live. Humans like to think of the earth as the ultimate symbol of stability: hence the cliché “down-to-earth.” But for us living near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, “down-to-earth” necessarily means something else. To be grounded, here, is to be ever mindful of the plates shifting below us, slipping and striking and moving magma, of sloping fault lines that separate and yet merge, of one plate being inexorably pushed beneath another, with enormous consequences. Mainstream culture is chiefly a matter of large-scale human-made structures towering over us.
The relationship between readers and reviewers interested us. We wanted to bring attention to work critics largely ignore and offer a wider, less narrowly conceived view of the literary sphere. We strove to offer our readers a forum for discussion that takes the work of women as vital and central rather than marginal. What we see, what we talk about, and how we talk about it matters. Seeing, recognizing, and understanding is what makes the world we live in. And the world we live in is, itself, a sort of subduction zone writ large. Pretending that the literary world has not changed and is not changing is like telling oneself that Earth is a solid, eternally stable ball of rock.
Click the Issues button to access free copies of all the CSZ’s issues. At the top is a file providing a full index by author of all the reviews, essays, flash fiction, and poetry published over the years.