Bob Redmond: 1966–2023

After surviving six years with active metastatic colorectal cancer, Bob Redmond, 57, died on September 12, 2023. A Master Beekeeper and founder of Survivor Bee—focused on pollinator advocacy and relational beekeeping—Bob understood intimately the nature of resilience and counted us all as Survivors.

While cancer set the physical agenda for many aspects of Bob’s final years, he remained steadfast in the practice of engaging family and community in making the best use of our time. From recent years serving as a volunteer parent coach for West Seattle Baseball, to sharing his beekeeping resources and knowledge of nonprofits with Indigenous communities, to maintaining and repairing the family home during the pandemic, to sharing the seasonal thrill of the classic wooden roller coaster at the Washington State Fair with his son and wife, Bob attempted to live each day—with its joys and pains—to its fullest. Much of the fullness and joy of Bob’s life came from cherishing his young son and wife.

One of four children, Bob grew up with his sisters and brother in Russell Township, Ohio. A self-described “midwestern boy at heart,” Bob had a strong work ethic and later in life would fondly recount the lessons he learned working at Turney’s hardware store in Chesterland, Ohio. He delighted in sharing his hometown with his son and wife, especially in the summer season.

After graduating from St. Ignatius High School, Bob attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he graduated cum laude in 1988 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and emancipatory pedagogy, two fields that deeply informed his life and work as an artist, activist, and environmentalist. Upon graduating, Bob joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC), relocating to Washington state where he would live most of his adult life.

Bob’s advocacy work in Seattle grew to include Northwest Harvest, the Downtown Emergency Service Center, and Highline Evaluation Treatment Facility before he journeyed east to New York City with friends to continue community-focused work. By 1995, Bob boomeranged back to the Pacific Northwest where he would ultimately settle and start a family.

In his early career (1997–2000), Bob directed music at KBCS in Bellevue, was managing editor at Real Change in Seattle, and then cofounded and directed Eleventh Hour Productions, a literary arts nonprofit, which produced 120 events in its first three years, including the Seattle Poetry Festival. Bob’s early experience launched him into midcareer program and event management (2000–2014) at many signature cultural spaces in Seattle: Experience Music Project, Seattle’s music and pop-culture museum (now called MoPop), Capitol Hill Arts Center, One Reel, Town Hall Seattle, and Luna Park Group—founded by Bob. He was also a former producer of Bumbershoot, the renowned international music and arts festival. Additionally, he served as board president of the Seattle City of Literature (2015–2018).

Concurrent to his arts career, in 2008 Bob became a professional beekeeper, founding the Urban Bee Company—managing backyard hives in the Seattle area, making honey, and running a bicycle-powered honey-delivery service. In 2010, he founded The Common Acre—a local, nonprofit organization whose mission was the nexus of many of Bob’s ideals—restoring relationships between people and the land through ecology, agriculture, and art. As part of The Common Acre, Bob established Flight Path, a project that turned unused green spaces in the south end of Seattle into native pollinator habitat. In 2017, The Common Acre won the Port of Seattle Environmental Excellence Award for Innovation.

Bob’s expertise in beekeeping was recognized when he became a Washington State certified Journeyman Beekeeper in 2011. After his cancer diagnosis, Bob rebranded his beekeeping business to Survivor Bee, focusing on holistic and relational beekeeping. His stewardship and study of bees culminated in Master Beekeeper certification by the Washington State Beekeepers Association in August 2023.

The art of writing undergirded Bob’s dynamic career. Whether writing for Real Change, journaling and self-publishing or seeing his haiku printed in the likes of The Heron’s Nest, Haiku of the Day, and Tinywords, Bob carved out time and courted language. His haiku practice began in 2005 when, as a writer-in-residence for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House, he lived in one of the “Hugo Huts” located in the center of Belltown’s P-Patch garden. In 2020, his manuscript, Under the Chestnut Tree [http://www.snapshotpress.co.uk/ebooks/Under_the_Chestnut_Tree.pdf], won an eChapbook award from Snapshot Press. Bob was subsequently named the winner of the Snapshot Press 2021 book award for his previously unpublished book-length haiku collection, Into the Woods, which is expected to be published in 2024.

Beekeeping Lessons, his final project to have been published by Mountaineers Books, would have brought together the many threads woven throughout Bob’s career: ecology, medicine, haiku, community, education, and the interconnected nature of our lives. Though the work remains unfinished, the qualities Bob wrote about in Beekeeping Lessons—abundance, risk, patience, and tenacity—are gifts he’s left with us.

From https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/bob-redmond-obituary?id=53208705 (lightly edited)

The matter of the hive and our survival remained at the heart of Bob’s conscience until his final conscious hours. So too the survival of the actual hives that he stewarded became the dominant discussion in the weeks and days leading up to his death. Since I decided to keep the hives at our home (a surprise to Bob and a little to myself) our discussions at the end of his life were largely about the goings on of the season and preparation for spring. Joining in these discussions were two new friends—Curtis and Dierdre—fellow baseball parents and Dead Heads who were fascinated with bees. Their gentle and community-focused nature appealed to Bob and they have become stewards to his remaining two hives. As Bob said, “three novices are better than one”—his way of encouraging us in our new beekeeping journey. The Washington State Beekeeper’s Association awarded Bob his Master Beekeeper certification in August of 2023, just in time for him to savor the fruits of his labor. Meeting the program requirements and working as a Journeyman beekeeper for many years was a title that brought Bob deep satisfaction and joy. With that much lived experience as a beekeeper, as you can imagine, the knowledge Bob had to share with us in the time he had left was very precious.

This year [2023] Bob was able to produce one last harvest—the supers were carried by Curtis, Dierdre, and me into the harvest room, the frames uncapped by our newbie hands, the honey spun, jarred, and distributed.

To honor Bob’s work and commitment to the hive (both literal and figurative), I decided we’d perform the centuries-old tradition of telling the bees. This tradition traces back to Celtic mythology and has since been practiced by European beekeepers. When a beekeeper dies the new beekeeper must introduce herself and ask the bees for acceptance for fear of the bees absconding the hive. Other major family news can also be discussed with the bees (marriages, births . . .). Curtis and I performed this rite at our respective apiaries before next sundown after Bob died. We fastened black mourning bands around the hives, knocked on the boxes, introduced ourselves as their new stewards, told them the news of Bob’s death and read them his jisei—hoping they’d accept us as their new keepers.

honey-laden supers

too heavy to lift

the hive carries on

It happens that Bob shared this with me about his jisei, he said: “i like that it’s rather positive, in that there is bounty and survival, even if i can’t be here for it.”

That life and death are connected as one experience, not distinct from each other, and that we—all living things—are as related to each other in life as we are in death was one of Bob’s last learnings that he shared before his transition. He wrote about this in his final post on CaringBridge.

A writer since he could write, it was ultimately haiku that became the essential medium for the expression of Bob’s voice, and his beekeeping craft. It was not just the haiku but all of you—the dedicated practitioners (both seasoned and newbie) that fed his expression. So, thank you. And thank you for carrying whatever memories you have of Bob for as long as you can.

With Love,

Amy

See the August 11, 2020 Seattle Times feature story by Jackie Varriano: “Cancer survivor and beekeeper Bob Redmond shifts his company’s focus from hives and honey to habitat and ecological literacy.”

A loving do-gooder who always lent a helping hand—that’s how Bob Redmond is remembered in light of his recent passing.

Redmond was the first full-time managing editor of the Real Change newspaper in the late 1990s. It was a time when our paper was just starting to spread its wings and went through many changes, both in frequency and format. And Redmond was the “intrepid, often amused but never impatient” leader of it, said Michele Marchand, a member of WHEEL and former Real Change contributor who sat on the editorial committee at the time. 

“Through it all, Bob was unflappable. We trusted his judgment, but always felt like he knew more than what he was saying,” Marchard said. “There was genius under the surface of everything he wrote, said or did, but he wanted us to figure things out for ourselves.”

Later in life, Redmond took on the hobby of beekeeping, a transition from editing that didn’t surprise Marchand, who said he possessed and practiced all the skills of a beekeeper in his role as editor. These skills could be seen in action most often at what was then called the Crocodile Cafe, now just the Crocodile, where the editorial committee used to meet weekly to generate story ideas and vote on submissions for the paper.

“My impression of beekeeping is you have to be awfully patient, move pretty slowly and develop a level of trust,” Marchand said. “And Bob did the same with this disparate group of wacky editorial committee members who quite often buzzed around, needed refocusing and sometimes stung with our anger and our arguments—it was a lively group.”

Ultimately, Redmond’s colleagues say he was driven to do good by organizing through writing and the arts. “He knew that by helping to put out this paper, he was helping a lot of people,” said Anitra Freeman, a WHEEL member and former Real Change board member. “He took it seriously. He was the kind of editor who can pull things out of other people.”

Redmond could easily build trust with people and never pulled rank. According to Marchand, he submitted his poetry for publication like everyone else and abided by the democratic votes of the editorial committee. He would even ask, and on some occasions demand, to know what people thought of his writing.

“One day, he was giving me a ride home, and I said, ‘I loved your poetry’, and he said, ‘What do you love about it? Tell me more, tell me,’” Freeman said. “He helped me realize: You don’t shut down compliments. Take it, and get the most you can. You want the critique.”

Beyond being an editor, Redmond had his roots planted deeply in the Seattle poetry community, which is how Dr. Wes Browning, Real Change’s circulation specialist, first met him.

“I started going to open mics, and Bob was a regular,” Browning said. “I was really impressed by his poetry a lot. I thought it was pretty insightful.”

Browning recalled a movement around 1997 to turn April Poetry Month into a festival in Seattle. Redmond took up the effort to make it a reality.

“He was the chair of a committee to organize events for three months. There were special venues for open mics and a party at the end,” Browning said.

And this passion for poetry is what all of Redmond’s colleagues consider to be his biggest legacy.
“In spite of how important he was in a lot of other respects, I think he really wanted to be remembered as a poet,” Freeman said.

And this is how I, as the current editor of Real Change, would like to honor Redmond. Read his poem “Rise,” and may Bob Redmond’s legacy live on—here at Real Change and in the Seattle community as a whole.