Dear Writers, Readers and Friends:
Fall is not quite in the air, and yet, the fall literary season is upon us here in Sacramento! Here is a selection of events this week and coming soon. Anne Lamott, author of the beloved Bird by Bird and many other fine works, returns to Sacramento in December in the Moon Lecture series…don’t miss that, below.
I hope to see you at many of these fine events, including Stories on Stage this Friday night, one or more of the Literary Lectures at Sacramento Poetry Center (see below) and at Anne Lamott’s talk!
Yours in writing,
Kate
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STORIES ON STAGE
Friday, September 28th
7:30 PM
Stories on Stage continues its third season featuring Lysley Tenorio and Ana Cotham. This month’s performers are Ruby Sketchley and Wade Lucas.
Sacramento Poetry Center
1719 25th St
Doors open at 7PM
$5
Lysley Tenorio is the author of Monstress (Ecco/HarperCollins). His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, The Chicago Tribune, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California, and lives in San Francisco.
Wade Lucas (Board Member at Big Idea Theatre) is from Yankton, South Dakota. He was recently seen in the incredibly dark show Killer Joe. He has also been in many incredible productions at many of the local theaters in the Sacramento region. His longest project has been working aboard the Delta King for the Suspects Murder Mystery Dinner Theater off and on for the last 10 years. Much love goes out to you and anyone who comes and supports their local community theater…it means more to us than you know. To learn more about what makes Wade tick, go to mistabone.blogspot.com or on twitter @lucasimages.
Ana Cotham earned her Bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley and spent the next 10 years doing nothing lucrative with it—in other words, writing fiction. Her general love for writing in the form of novels, short and flash fiction—she self-published and illustrated, by Crayon, her first book at the age of 6—eventually translated into an actual career; she currently works as a technical editor and freelance writer and has published with Sacramento Magazine, UC Davis, and any other organization that will pay her. She used to live around the corner from SoS but now has to travel all the way from Southside Park, so she is very happy she could make it tonight.
Ruby Sketchley divides her love of acting between theatre and film. Both offer deep satisfaction and reach diverse audiences. She has performed at Big Idea Theatre, MSTW in Jackson, Resurrection Theatre, and ASQP. She can also be seen and heard on television and radio commercials, as well as feature and short films. She and her husband have a film production company and they are currently making a documentary on home death care.
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CWC-Sacramento presents
Let’s Publish An Ebook LIVE! Workshop 9/29/2012
How To Produce, Distribute & Sell Your Work In The Evolving Eworld
California Writers Club, Sacramento Branch Presents Nationally-Acclaimed Ebook Expert Mark Coker, Founder and CEO of Smashwords; and Author of the new The Secrets to Ebook Publishing Success.
Please see below for workshop info and website links for flyer and to register by mail or online with PayPal. The workshop flyer is also attached.
There is much interest in this workshop and we expect seats to fill up quickly. Sign up today to guarantee a spot and to receive the free sign-up bonus!
Please be sure to share this workshop info with your friends and writing groups too.
If you have any questions, please contact me at Margie@CatMulan.com.
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Anne Lamott featured at Moon Lecture Series, December 7
St. Mark’s United Methodist Church is pleased to announce its lineup for the Fall 2012 Moon Lecture Series
The Bob & Dorrie Moon Lecture Series brings dynamic speakers and liberal Christian authors to the Sacramento community to speak to important ethical issues of our time. Bob and Dorrie endowed this series as a gift and as a challenge to think critically and act ethically.
The Rev. Bob Moon, now retired from being a pastor and leader in the United Methodist Church locally and nationally, is passionate about progressive issues such as social justice, his faith and intellectual inquiry. We are grateful for his vision in creating this lecture series and for his continuing challenge to stay up on the critical issues of our time.
All lectures will start at 7:30pm and will last approximately one hour, with a twenty-minute Q&A to follow.
Tickets are $60 for the series of three lectures.
$25 per individual lecture.
Click here to purchase tickets.
No assigned seating.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2012, ANNE LAMOTT
Anne Lamott is a progressive political activist and the author of seven novels including, Hard Laughter, Rosie, Joe Jones, Blue Shoe, All New People, and Crooked Little Heart (the sequel to Rosie), as well as five bestselling books of non-fiction, Operating Instructions, an account of life as a single mother during her son’s first year and Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, a guide to writing and the challenges of a writer’s life, Traveling Mercies, a collection of autobiographical essays on faith, and Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. Anne Lamott has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has taught at UC Davis, as well as at writing conferences across the country.
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Third Thursdays in the Sacramento Room Return
Thursday, September 20 at the Central Library
828 I Street, 12 Noon
Mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins, hosts
Seeing the world (past, present and future) through other eyes, getting a sense of how other minds interpret what they see, of how they shape that experience (into language, into poetry) not only enriches our own lives and work but also gives us a sense of ongoing community. On Third Thursdays, we share poems by a wide spectrum of writers, exploring our roots, expanding our horizons, learning together.
For this Thursday, consider:
The heat of autumn
Is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens the apples, the other turns them to cider.
–Jane Hirshfield
And, of course, the light changes. As we move toward the autumnal equinox, early morning shadows turn sharp and crisp. September’s light offers fresh perspective, new clarity. On September 20, our first session post-summer-hiatus, bring your favorite poems (preferably by a writer other than yourself) which offered you such perspective, made you “see” an image, a person, an idea in a new light, which let you understand in a new way. Cast your net wide. Think metaphorically as well as literally. Let your mind (and your senses) run free.
Third Thursdays in the Sacramento Room
Thursday, September 20 at the Central Library
828 I Street, 12 Noon
Mary Zeppa and Lawrence Dinkins, hosts
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The second edition of SPC’s Literary Lectures
Six Thursday nights in autumn at SPC, 1719 25th St., (25th and R in the arts complex) in Sacramento at 7:30 PM.
This series features lecturers:
Camille Norton, Chana Bloch, Rebecca Foust, Indigo Moor, Brad Buchanan, Kathryn Hohlwein, and Ann Keniston
Suggested donation of $45 for the entire series of six lectures or $10 for any one lecture.
Program managers, Lisa Jones and others will facilitate lectures. Frank Graham is the event director and organizer.
Contact Frank or Lisa for more more information.
SCHEDULE
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October 4; Ann Keniston
“The New American Poetry of Engagement: Politics and Contemporary Poetry”
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October 11; Indigo Moor
“Taming the Hydra: Writing in Many Genres — Poetry, Fiction, Playwriting, Scriptwriting” New Title
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October 18; Camille Norton
“Adrienne Rich and the Politics of Lyric Poetry”
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October 25; Chana Bloch
“Learning from Translation”
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November 1; Kathryn Hohlwein and Brad Buchanan
“Understanding Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey”
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November 8; Rebecca Foust
“Rehabilitating the Maligned Cliche”
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BIOGRAPHIES
CAMILLE NORTON will present her lecture, “Adrienne Rich: A Life in Poetry” for Literary Lectures. Ms. Norton the author of “Corruption” — a National Poetry Series winner published by Harper Perennial in 2005. Her poem, “The Prison Diary of Bartlett Yancey Malone,” appears in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler. She was co-editor, with Lou Robinson, of Resurgent: New Writing by Women (University of Illinois, 1992), an anthology of experimental writing by women working in film, art, and narrative. Her poetry has appeared in: The Colorado Review, Feminist Studies, The Georgia Review, The Greensboro Review, and Tiferet, among others. She earned her B.A. from the University of Massachusetts/Boston and received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. Her honors and awards include The Grolier Prize in Poetry and a NEA fellowship at The MacDowell Colony. She has been awarded poetry residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ragdale Foundation, The Ucross Foundation, Hedgebrook, Saint Mary’s College, Maryland, and Red Cinder. She is Professor of English at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.
CHANA BLOCH will teach, “Learning from Translation” at Literary lectures. She’ll speak about experiences translating from Yiddish (poetry and prose: Glatstein, I B Singer) and Hebrew (biblical and contemporary: Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai). Bloch gave the annual Stronach lecture at UC on the subject last year. Chana Bloch is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the Creative Writing Program, she is the Poetry Editor of Persimmon Tree, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty. Bloch has published four poetry collections, The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey. She is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open, and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, and the author of a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and many literary journals, as well as Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. Bloch’s book awards include the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for Blood Honey, selected by Jane Hirshfield; the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry for Mrs. Dumpty, selected by Donald Hall; the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, together with Chana Kronfeld, for Open Closed Open; and the Book of the Year Award of the Conference on Christianity and Literature for Spelling the Word. Among her honors are two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in poetry and in translation, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Writers Exchange Award of Poets & Writers, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Discovery Award of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center. Bloch has held residencies at the Bellagio Center for Scholars and Artists, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Bloch has a B.A. from Cornell University, M.A. degrees in Judaic Studies and English Literature from Brandeis University, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. She has given poetry readings and lectures on her work at colleges and universities around the country, including Boston, Chicago, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Harvard, Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Oberlin, Princeton, Stanford, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Wisconsin, and Yale.
ANN KENISTON will present her lecture, “Greedy Reading: Toward a New (and Practical) Theory of Literary Influence,” at SPC’S Literary Lectures, to open the series on October 4, 2012. Ms. Keniston is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, with a specialty in American Poetry.She is the author of a monograph, Overheard Voices:Address and Subjectivity in Postmodern American Poetry (Routledge, 2006) and a collection of poems, The Caution of Human Gestures (David Robert Books, 2005).She is also coeditor (with Jeanne Follansbee Quinn) of Literature after 9/11 (Routledge, 2008). Recent poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Interim, Southwest Review, North American Review, and elsewhere; recent reviews and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review. Twice a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize, she has received artists grants from the Somerville (MA) Arts Council, the Sierra Arts Foundation (NV), and the Nevada Arts Council. She is at work on a new collection of poems, provisionally entitled Lament/Praise, and a scholarly book, Ghostly Figures: Memory and Belatedness in Postwar American Poetry, which considers the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Mark Doty, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, and others. She lives in Reno, Nevada, with her husband and two sons.
KATHRYN HOHLWEIN will be lecturing on the poetry of Homer at Literary Lectures in the autumn series. Ms. Hohlwein received her M.A. from the Bread Loaf School of English, of Middlebury College, Vermont. After a year on scholarships to France, where she studied Philosophy at Rennes, Bretagne and Spanish at the University of Santander in Spain, she moved to Lebanon, where she taught Literature at the Beirut College for Women. Hohlwein has taught for 35 years at the English Departments of the following Colleges and Universities: Beirut College for Women; Drake University, Des Moines; Mount Mary College; University of Wisconsin; Ohio State University; American River Community College, Sacramento, and California State University, Sacramento. The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library of American Women at Harvard has requested her papers and letters for its permanent archive. Since retirement Kathryn Hohlwein founded and is the president of The Readers of Homer, a non-profit, tax exempt organization that produces night long audience participation readings of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, in the US and around the world.
BRAD BUCHANAN is Chairman of the English Department at California State University, Sacramento, where he teaches creative writing as well as British and world literature. His poems have appeared in more than 100 journals, among them Canadian Literature, The Notre Dame Review, The Portland Review and The Seattle Review. His book of poems The Miracle Shirker was published in June of 2005 by Poet’s Corner Press. He maintains a poetry blog at www.miracleshirker.blogspot.com, and he served the Poetry Center as a board member and Managing Editor of Tule Review.
INDIGO MOOR’s appearance for Literary Lectures will focus on multi-genre writing: Poetry, Fiction, Playwriting, Scriptwriting, etc. Jane Hirshfield has said, “Indigo Moor’s work is sense-embedded, peeled to perceptive freshness, with a gift for the muscular and concentrating phrase.” Moor is an award-winning writer and teacher. His second book of poetry, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won the Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first book, Tap-Root, was published as part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. His stageplay, Live! at the Excelsior, was a finalist for the Images Theatre Playwright Award. Mr. Moor is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program—where he studied poetry, fiction, and scriptwriting—and a graduate member of the Artist’s Residency Institute for Teaching Artists. Former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, Indigo has served as editor for the Tule Review and the Lily Lit Review as well as judge for the SPC Book Contest. Indigo Moor has spent the last seven years lecturing and teaching creative writing workshops at conferences, residencies, and universities. He is the recipient of Indiana University’s Vesle Fenstermaker Prize for Emerging Writers, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a winner of The Jack Kerouac Poetry Contest. Additionally, Moor was a finalist for: the T.S. Eliot Prize, Crab Orchard First Book Prize, Saturnalia First Book Award, Naomi Long Madgett Book Award, and WordWorks Prize. Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Tretheway has said that Indigo Moor’s poems, “ache and tremble with urgency.”
REBECCA FOUST will present a craft lecture entitled “Rehabilitating the Maligned Cliche,” in which she will discuss why a cliche becomes a cliche to begin with and offer techniques for redeeming their value and potency in poetry writing, rather than just eliminating them wholesale as many poetry workshops instruct us to do. Foust was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Hollidaysburg, a tiny town surrounded by farmlands and forests, quarries and strip mines. She attended Smith College and Stanford Law School as a scholarship student. After practicing law in San Francisco for ten years, Foust worked as an advocate and grassroots political organizer for parents of kids with autism and other learning disorders. Her writing career began in 2007, in a memoir class taught by Linda Watanabee McFerrin at a Book Passage bookstore. She enrolled in Warren Wilson’s MFA program the following year and graduated in January 2010. Dark Card and Mom’s Canoe won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes in consecutive year and were published in 2008 and 2009, and two full length poetry collections followed in 2010: All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Poetry Book Award), and God Seed, a book of environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens. She is published in: Atlanta Review, Cincinnati Review, Hudson Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, North American Review, and Poetry Daily.
