It won’t be long until we’ve been at this 30 years. Who knows exactly how we started.

There was a magazine, an industry magazine, the Alaska Fisherman’s Journal. A copy lay on every fishing boat’s galley table from Seattle to Dutch Harbor.

Each month, its editor, John van Amerongen, published not only industry news, equipment reviews and classified ads but also visual art and poetry by commercial fishermen and women, say, reproductions of Katy Johnson’s construction paper collages “An Evening at the Red Dog” or “South Naknek Cannery Dock,” or Rich Bard’s poem “The Kestrel,” describing a foggy encounter far offshore.

Toby Sullivan, spare on sentiment, described leaving harbor, coming home. And not coming home. Amid all the industrial trade news lay these gems of creative imaginations.

Writing creatively about working life isn’t uncommon among other trades and professions. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Canadian poet Tom Wayman collected the honest, unpretentious poems of cab drivers, nurses, heavy equipment operators, loggers, schoolteachers, commercial fishing men and women, and other workers in two volumes: “Paperwork: An Anthology” and “Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job,” both from Harbour Publishing. Cowboys, of course, have a long tradition.

Oregon’s Clemens Starck had been writing lean, precise poetry for years, much of it distilled from his jobs as a union carpenter, a merchant mariner, a laborer, before his first book of poetry, “Journeyman’s Wages,” from Storyline Press, was published in 1995.

It includes titles like “Slab on Grade,” “Putting in Footings” and “Falling off the Roof, I Miss the Falls City Fourth of July Parade and Picnic.” Starck’s poetry and deliberate delivery convince us that our work wants our creative attention.

These people inspired the FisherPoets Gathering.

In the fall of 1997, the high school soccer season had ended. A three- or four-hour hole in the head coach’s daily schedule was about to fill itself. He made a couple of phone calls, one to Hobe Kytr at the Ilwaco Heritage Museum, another to Julie Brown at Clatsop Community College, folks who might be interested in gathering together storytellers, songsters and poets from the commercial fishing industry to share with each other creative versions of the working lives they’d lived in the commercial fishing community, in Astoria. Maybe in February.

“That’s a good idea,” said one person after another. “Let me make a phone call.”

Local poet Florence Sage joined our planning team. Van Amerongen forwarded the addresses of 40 contributors. Thirty-nine later showed up with their friends and packed the Wet Dog Cafe, now Astoria Brewing Co.

Van Am, a fine singer-songwriter himself, joined them, bringing “The Last Troller’s Waltz and The Kid on the Corva May” with him. Toby Sullivan came clear from Kodiak, Alaska, for crying out loud.

“We should do this again next year,” everyone said.

So we did and continue to do so, inviting anyone who has earned an hourly wage in a cannery or a share on a fishing boat, whether they worked a single summer or an entire career, to come tell us about it.

And, thanks to a thousand inspiring people who’ve said “That’s a good idea,” here we are.