The Fire Season collection of books gather a diverse community of visual artists, poets, and writers to look at wildfire as part of more complex topics like grief, climate change, loss, new growth, renewal, changing ideas of landscape, resilience and economy. For anyone, anywhere grappling with the reality of longer, more severe wildfire seasons, Fire Season is for you.

Liz Toohey-Wiese, is a Fine Arts professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, British Columbia. As a landscape painter, since 2018 her art practice has focused on the subject of wildfires.

“Over the years, this research has taken many forms, including painting post-burn landscapes, interviewing wildfire fighters and fire lookouts, installing billboards, and recently completing my S-100 wildfire fighting course.

“Every two years I also publish an artist book with my collaborator Amory Abbott. Titled Fire Season, the book brings together visual art and writing that engage with the realities of wildfire.”

Toohey-Wiese explains that Fire Season was launched as a means of collective sense-making around wildfires.

 “The book is not intended to assign blame or propose tidy solutions to this complex and ongoing crisis. Instead, it gathers a wide range of voices—artists, academics, writers, wildfire fighters, Indigenous community members, and people working in logging, government policy, and environmental activism—who contribute their stories, ideas, and questions to a broader conversation.

The next edition of Fire Season will be released in the northern hemisphere summer of 2026, and the call for submissions is currently open with a deadline of April 15, 2026.

They are seeking submissions of visual art, photography, film, performance, material-based processes, academic writing, essays, anecdotes, prose, poetry, or any other printable form of expression. Previous issue had a strong focus on British Columbia fires, but submissions are welcome from anyone, anywhere around the world.

“We tend to favour personal writing over journalistic or strictly scientific papers. For those who work in wildfire-related fields, we invite reflections on what you feel about your profession, what cannot be expressed in official reports, and what you wish the public understood about your work and research. We look forward to hearing from you.”

For full submission details, visit the website www.fireseason.org.

You can also explore the Featured Works section to see examples from previous editions.

Toohey-Wiese spoke about the Fire Season project at the 18th International Wildland Fire Safety Summit and the 7th Human Dimensions of Wildland Fire Conference in Calgary, Canada, in October last year.