de Gutes and Miller: memoir

This should be an exceptional evening at Village Books in Bellingham: Kate Carroll de Gutes and Brenda Miller read from their latest books, The Authenticity Experiment: Lessons from the Best & Worst Year of My Life (Two Sylvias Press) and An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books), respectively. In each of these books, essays-as-memoir shine with personal and poetic grace. Join the audience on Wednesday, October 4, 2017, at 7:00pm.

lit start

Do you know a person age 16-24 who is considering a literary career? Literary Career Day takes place on Saturday, October 7, 2017, at The Seattle Central Library from 11:00am–4:00pm. This free event provides attendees with direct access to industry professionals through networking, experiential learning, engaging conversations, and performances. Participants are exposed to a wide range of career opportunities, including writing, editing, publishing, arts administration, retail, library sciences, journalism, teaching, and more.

Literary Career Day is produced in partnership with One Reel, Seattle Public Library, Seattle Office of Film and Music, and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.

poetry riches

This weekend is full of poetry treasure…

On Friday, September 29, in Bellingham, Poetry at St. Paul’s opens with a presentation by Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image Journal, followed by a reading by poet Luci Shaw. Events begin at 7:00pm at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

Also on Friday, September 29, in Deming, Frida and Friends features Susan J. Erickson reading from her book of poems, Lauren Bacall Shares a Limousine, joined by poets Lois Holub, Stephanie Hopkinson, J.I. Kleinberg, C.J. Prince, and Leslie Wharton. The reading begins a 7:00pm at the Deming Library.

Also on Friday, September 29, 2017, in Seattle, Meghan McClure and Michael Schmeltzer will read from their new collaborative volume, A Single Throat Opens (Black Lawrence Press). Join them at their book launch at 7:00pm at Open Books.

On Saturday, September 30, Poetry at St. Paul’s continues with a trio of workshops offered by Jennifer Bullis, Luci Shaw, and Caitlin Thomson. Registration is required. Workshops run concurrently, 1:30-3:00pm, at St. Paul’s.

Later on Saturday, September 30, head back to Open Books in Seattle for a launch party for Hailey Higdon’s chapbook, Rural (Drop Leaf Press), featuring readings by the author, Sarah Heady, and Tanya Holtland.

This is just a sampling of the weekend’s goings-on. Enjoy!

books!

Very excited to finally have in hand the August Poetry Postcard Fest (APPF) anthology, 56 Days of August (Five Oaks Press).

Each August, hundreds of people from around the world write and mail a daily poem on a postcard — spontaneous, un-edited, and, more often than not, going to a complete stranger. 2016 was the tenth anniversary of APPF, and the anthology was assembled to honor the occasion. It includes poems and full-color images selected from the participants’ submissions. Your faithful blogger was honored to be invited to co-edit the collection with Paul Nelson and Ina Roy-Faderman.

A number of free book-launch-poetry-postcard events are scheduled and more are in the works:

Monday, October 9, 2017, 7:00pm
Bellingham, Washington
Poetry Postcards: a panel and conversation
at the Mount Baker Theatre, Encore Room
A conversation about the possibilities of postcard poetics with panelists Tallie Jones, Nancy Pagh, Eugenia Hepworth Petty, Ina Roy-Faderman, and Joanna Thomas, plus moderator Paul Nelson. They will show images, offer resources, read postcard poems, and may even lead exercises or offer prompts. As a bonus, there will be a postcard exchange: bring unused postcards (commercial or handmade) and take home an equal number contributed by others. (J.I. Kleinberg, coordinator) Click for PDF event flyer with panelist bios.

Thursday, October 12, 2017, 7:00pm
Tacoma, Washington
56 Days of August Book Launch
at King’s Books
Readings by contributing poets — just one of many events scheduled for the Cascadia Poetry Festival

Friday, October 27, 2017, 7:00pm
Portland, Oregon
56 Days of August Anthology: PDX Launch Event & Poetry Reading
at Mother Foucault’s Bookshop
Readings by contributing poets

56 Days of August will be for sale at each event and online. In addition, there’s a 56 Days of August Indiegogo campaign to cover a variety of costs. There are some swell perks — primarily signed copies of poetry books due out this winter. Have a look, buy a book, and please join us at one of these events.

Banned Books Week

September 24-30, 2017, is Banned Books Week, a celebration of the freedom to read. Artist Marta Minujín constructed a monument to that freedom as part of the international biennial art exhibition documenta 14. Originally constructed in Buenos Aires in 1983, A Parthenon of Books was constructed on Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, Germany, where, on May 19, 1933, some 2,000 books were burned by the Nazis. The artist solicited donations of 100,000 formerly or currently banned books from all over the world for her replica of the Parthenon. Read the story in Dezeen. Read about Minujín’s 2011 book-built Tower of Babel in The Guardian.

. . . . .
Roman Maerz photography

Standing on the Shore of Yellowstone Lake*

2017 Merit Award
By Roger William Gilman

Some of my brothers are broad-backed low-set men
unlike the other who stands like me tall and scrawny
vulnerable to the wickedness of weather.

We’re ducks and herons standing by the great lake
fists jammed to pockets shoulders hunched, soldiers
against fierce wind, five hundred miles away from home

longing, preparing for hard flying, drunk with desire,
between moonlit clouds and the shine off the Snake — as
it turns west through the Tetons toward the prairies

of Idaho, rivers-on through rolling sage of the Palouse
into Columbia Basin where it stretches tongue out mouth
past a broken line of island teeth to taste the Pacific —

the shine showing us the way home.

It’s the shoulders we have in common . . . as we stand
along the lake in the snapping wind . . . crafting silences
more articulate than ever . . . getting ready to leave

for home . . . the distance in our heads.

. . . . .
*Copyright 2017 by Roger William Gilman. Broadside illustrated by Megan Carroll.

Call for words of resistance

Like many communities nationwide, Whatcom County, Washington, has an annual, one-book-together reading and discussion program, known as Whatcom READS. This year’s selection is Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa, a fast-paced story set in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization protests.

In addition to the book, discussions, and readings by the author (in March 2018), writers are invited to read the book and contribute their own words to Whatcom WRITES, a contest and annual print and electronic publication.

This year’s theme is resistance and the deadline for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry submissions is midnight, Tuesday, October 31, 2017. Winning entries will be included in the publication and a selection of authors will be invited to read their work at Village Books Fairhaven on Sunday, February 4, 2018, 2pm, and at Village Books Lynden on Sunday, February 11, 2018, 2pm.

Find the details and a downloadable flyer on the Whatcom WRITES page.

poetry film in the making

We’ve mentioned the poet Ella Higginson before, and we’ve certainly mentioned poetry on film on many occasions. Here’s a place where the twain shall meet: Just Like the Men.

Just Like the Men is a screenplay written by Ella Higginson in the era of silent film. In essence, it is a romantic comedy depicting the first woman (Frances C. Axtell) elected into legislative office in Washington State, in 1913, and her clever campaign manager.

The community-focused team of filmmakers and multimedia artists known as Talking to Crows has now picked up where Ella left off and is adapting Just Like the Men in the spirit in which it was written.

Read more about the “Ella” project on Talking to Crows, like Just Like the Men on Facebook, and, most important, pitch in a couple bucks to help this piece of Washington literary and political history make its way to the big screen by supporting Just Like the Men on Seed & Spark.

get away and write

On the cusp of autumn it’s none too soon to consider your winter getaway and Tin House Winter Workshops should be high on your list of options. Held at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Oregon, each three-day session includes morning workshops, one-on-one meetings with faculty, afternoon craft discussions, and generative exercises. Applications are now open for winter workshops in short fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and novel.

vital voices

Somehow, it escaped our notice that the U.S. now has a National Youth Poet Laureate. Spearheaded by the New York City youth literary arts organization Urban Word, the National Youth Poet Laureate program was founded in 2008 and has partnered with literary organizations in 35 cities (including Seattle and Portland) and states to name a local Youth Poet Laureate. Each winner is awarded a first book deal from Penmanship Books.

In this new phase of the program, to appoint a national winner, competitors from around the country were narrowed down to five finalists, each representing a geographic region. From the five ambassadors, Harvard sophomore Amanda Gorman was selected as the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate.

Ms. Gorman is the inaugural Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate, and founder and Executive Director of One Pen One Page, a nonprofit that promotes literacy and leadership through international storytelling initiatives and an online teen‐lit mag. She has served as a United Nations Youth Delegate in New York City, an ANNpower Vital Voices Fellow in Washington, D.C, and an ANNpower Vital Voices Global Delegate in London. She is an ambassador, editor, and leader of diversity initiatives at the online platform School of Doodle, and her work has been published in her book The One For Whom Food Is Not Enough, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Elle, and The Huffington Post.

Watch Amanda Gorman perform her poem “The Gathering Place” at the Social Good Summit 2017.