Current Rainshadow Community

Karen Sullivan is a Port Townsend writer and poet, former ship captain, marine biologist, and spokesperson for a federal agency. She is a member of the Rainshadow Journal collective and is at work on a book.
You can see her other work at https://karenlsullivan.com

Designer, writer, editor, teacher and spokesperson over the years, Mark Clemens came to Port Townsend in 2010. His stories and poems have appeared in The North American Review, Gray’s Sporting Journal and Mountain Gazette. His first novel, Infinite Tenderness, is now in search of a publisher. He has also written a screenplay about two young sisters running a small-town newspaper in the depths of the Depression.

Photographer & Writer and founding member.
Joel Rogers is a photographer and author based in Port Townsend, Washington. Joel is the author and photographer of "The Hidden Coast, Kayak Explorations" from Alaska to Mexico, which won the Washington Writers Award in 1992, "Watertrail, the Hidden Path through Puget Sound, British Columbia: Vancouver and Victoria, and Seattle."
Check out more of his work at : https://www.joelrogers.com/

JoAnne Tompkins is the author of WHAT COMES AFTER, the 2022 winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Runner-up in Fiction Award. WHAT COMES AFTER was a NY Times Editorial Board Selection & NY Times Group Text selection in April 2021. It was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her personal essays, short fiction, interview & poetry explore the possibility of finding grace in life's darkest moments & have appeared in print and online journals such as LitHub, Writer in The World and High Country News. She lives in Port Townsend and continues to work as a writer and developmental editor.

Diana Talley has been around wooden boats since the 1970s in Sausalito. She is a shipwright by trade. She has built sailboats, fished along the Pacific Coast, and moved to Port Townsend in 1990, creating Taku Marine, a boat repair service she ran with her late partner Rick Petrykowski until the mid 2010s. Now retired, she still lives in Port Townsend.

After a varied career as teacher, construction estimator, technical writer and corporate trainer, poet Bill Mawhinney came to the Olympic Peninsula in 2005. Bill has published two collections of poetry. His poems have appeared in Heron Dance, Windfall, and Minotaur. He curated and hosted Northwind Reading Series at Northwind Arts Center for 13 years. In 2011, the Port Townsend Arts Commission named him Angel of the Arts.

Founding member and Rainshadow webmaster emeritus. Prior to 35 years wandering about the industrial construction world, Carl Berger spent five years as publisher, editor, reporter, photographer and janitor for a small weekly newspaper in Wyoming. Retired now, he moved to Port Townsend in 2017 and keeps busy tending to his wooden boat, Sockeye, a 45-foot converted Pacific Northwest fishing troller built in 1944.

Founding member & writer
Ross Anderson worked 30 years for the Seattle Times, writing about Pacific Northwest politics, history and natural resources. He won a number of awards, including a 1990 Pulitzer for coverage of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. He lives in Port Townsend and is a founding member of the Rainshadow Journal. Email him at ross_inkstainedwretch@hotmail.com (photo by Karen Knaur)

After a diverse career running a film production and creative team in Seattle, small scale sheep farming on Marrowstone Island and inn-keeping at La Finca Caribe on Puerto Rico‘s Vieques island, Corky published her self illustrated memoir, LA FINCA, in 2021 with Trinity University Press. She is a graduate of Bennington College. When not sailing she considers Port Townsend home.

A native to the PNW, Cathy Nickum lived on Bainbridge Island for many years before moving to Port Townsend in 2019. She received a degree in journalism from the UW in 1976 and has been a contributing writer, editor and columnist at various newspapers and magazines including the Bainbridge Review, 48 North, Latitude 38, the Kitsap Sun, the Weekly, the Seattle P-I and others. She also published the Busy Bee, a women's journal, and the Bainbridge Buzz, an online magazine, during her time on Bainbridge Island.

A staff writer & editor for the National Fisherman long ago in Camden, Maine, Townes has also been a daily newspaperman, a boatyard worker, boat deliverer and a commercial fisherman. He once managed San Francisco Maritime Museum’s square-rigger, the Balclutha. He reports the old Mainer and he took to nodding at one another when they passed. Retired now in Port Townsend, Townes said “This all came to mind when I decided my back porch ceiling here needs painting come spring. When you’re out there and look up on grey winter days you’ll be able and see sky-blue.”

Tayloe is a former history major and history high school teacher. He devoted most of his career to practicing land use law in Seattle, until he left law to start and serve as Dean of the Seattle Graduate Campus in South Lake Union for Northeastern University. He has retired and he and his wife Deborah now live in Port Townsend, where he devotes his time to tennis, Petanque, biking and service on the Fort Worden Foundation Board. As he has a nautical flagpole outside his home, a few times a week he writes a “Mast Memo” on the flags being flown that day, which covers a topic of current or historical interest.