SDWI Unheard Voices Reading and Writing Workshop: Resist, Rebuild, Perform

Crisis! Today’s troubling headlines, articles, and Tweets can be overwhelming! What to do? Come listen, rebuild, write, perform, and share with us. At tonight’s Unheard Voices Reading (Friday October 26), the fabulous Sandra Hunter reads from Trip Wires (Leapfrog Press, 2018), a collection that personalizes global-scale catastrophe by taking brief looks into the everyday lives of young people around the world from Columbia to Afghanistan to Glasgow and beyond. 

A teacher and avid supporter of women's causes, Meliza Bañales celebrates her new non-fiction book, Adventure Awaits You in Hell: A Survivor's Manifesto (Ladybox Books). 

Tania Pryputniewicz celebrates the anthology, America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2018). Audience participation encouraged for a lively discussion

Link to more information:  Unheard Voices Reading

Saturday’s Unheard Voices Writing Workshop with the same three writers has a triple focus: generate, revise, perform! Roll up your sleeves and come join us, again at San Diego Writers, Ink.

Link to more information: Unheard Voices Writing Workshop: Resistance, Resilience, and Rebuilding

*Fee: $30 member, $36  nonmember. Course feel includes a copy of Sandra Hunter's story collection, Trip Wires.

Related Link:


Sandra Hunter on the San Diego Writers, Ink blog:  Sandra Hunter on Trip Wires, Trippings, and Assumptions

Instructor Bios:

Sandra Hunter will read from Against the Stranger, one of the stories in her new collection TRIP WIRES (Leapfrog Press, June 2018). The collection personalizes global-scale catastrophe by taking brief looks into the everyday lives of young people around the world, from Columbia to Afghanistan to Glasgow and beyond. TRIP WIRES earned praise as “a beautifully written collection, both poetic and melancholic. Deeply moving, and often grim and uncomfortable in their confrontations of unimaginable tragedies, each story evokes a bold, emotional response,” according to Katie Asher (Foreward Reviews, May/June 2018).

Meliza Bañales will read from her new non-fiction book ADVENTURE AWAITS YOU IN HELL: A SURVIVOR’S MANIFESTO. From her teaching to her activism, all of her work in speaking up — shouting out — has been in support of women’s causes. Meliza says, "Just remember… someone is [always] going to dislike you for being too honest — or not honest enough. But better to be too honest, because the people that really appreciate it will find you.” This is Meliza’s honesty without mercy.

SDWI Poetry Instructor and contributor Tania Pryputniewicz will read from the newly released anthology, AMERICA, WE CALL YOUR NAME: POEMS OF RESISTANCE AND RESILIENCE (Sixteen Rivers Press, September 2018). Born in response to the 2016 Presidential election, the anthology combines voices of poets from across America–from red states and blue states, high schools and nursing homes, big cities and small towns–with the voices of poets from other countries and other times. From Virgil and Dante to Claudia Rankine and Mai Der Vang, from Milton to Merwin, from Po-Chiu to Robin Coste Lewis, these voices, now raucous, not muted, now lyric, now plain–join together in dissent and in praise, in grief and alarm, in vision and hope.

A Cat Cafe, A TCJWW Review, Mentor Doll Musings and a Poetry Circus for You

You’d never guess what a stressful month we’re navigating by looking at these two—our husky and the kingly baby, Sam, lounging in their select stripe of sun. They’re my joy spot in a month overflowing with extra laundry (washing machine broken), family frays with flying elbows (five family members plus ocean wet dog in tiny four-door box of a car since engine block cracked in van), the five us falling like dominoes to the flu, water coursing down our daughter’s walls (broken courtyard ceiling pipe), said water driving hoards of termites to plaster their wings across the slider, and more I won’t broach here.

by Padgett Mason

No shortage of love, as always, to balance it out--caught the 14 year old teaching the 8 year old kickboxing moves in the tub in order to faciliate sure shampooing of that 8 year old’s hair…and my darling sister joined me to check out the Cat Café, newly opened in San Diego (427 Third Avenue), where you can order yourself a mocha or a latte and head to the adjoining room to peruse the adoptable cats and the rainbow

psychedelic cat paintings—for sale-- by Padgett Mason (“pet portraits and funky felines” reads Padgett’s business card).

Here's my sister out in front of the Cafe; we enjoyed chatting with owner Tony Wang and noticed a healthy circulation of coffee-wielding potential cat adopters scoping out the cats. Tony mentioned the coffee and the art are local--and he's open to hosting more artwork.

Other high spots: Jenn Teeter-Moore reviews November Butterfly at The California Journal of Women Writers: 

Pryputniewicz’ Guinevere is opinionated and strong compared to Marilyn and is a direct contrast to the helpless heroine she is in medieval poetry.—Jen Teeter-Moore, TCJWW

I also attended a beautiful reception for approximately 300 authors at San Diego Public Library on January 30, thoroughly enchanted by the indigo light swarming the columns and the gold circle lattices crowning the ceiling. Wouldn’t you know just as the speakers started, I found myself more than mildly annoyed to be fighting to hear over the sound of my husband bantering with an acquaintance. Fortunately for him, I fell in love with the friend’s wife, a brilliant millenial named Ellen Gustafson whose book I’m on fire now to read: We the Eaters: If We Change Dinner, We Can Change the World.

This Friday, I join thirty authors honored at “A Night at the Library: A Celebration of Local Authors.” Hosted by Friends of the Coronado Library, the fundraiser goes from 6-9 p.m. at 640 Orange Avenue; $50 person includes food, wine, beer and a $10 voucher for Second Hand Prose bookstore. See www.CoronadoFOL.org for more information or call Brenda Jo Robyn (619)890-6148.

Mary and I wrote about the Universe Card and the Two of Wands this month over at our new Tarot for Two blog; I opened with, “I took a look at this month’s Thoth Two of Wands with its red-faced grumpy Tibetan doorjies set against a blotchy uteral pink mess of a background suffused with a Kindergarten sky blue and decided to focus on the Rider Waite image instead.”

And Mary opened with: “My card this month was the Universe.  I used to get this card fairly often about twenty years ago, around the time I sold my book in an almost magical way and bought the house I live in now with the advance.  Back then I thought the card was telling me that the universe was waving its big old wand over my life…” Read the rest of The Two of Wands and The Universe.

Why Mentor Dolls? 

Why do you use paper dolls in your Writing Past Fear: Free Your Butterfly workshops? When a friend asked, I answered in a post on my main website, Shadow Bags, Joan Swift’s Dark Path of Our Names and Mentor Dolls on #LivetheQuest:

Additional Links of Interest: 

 Sandra Hunter shares her stunning black and white xray ice scapes—at least that’s how I describe them; her interview starts on page 18 and she dives deep into the subject of exposure and agency despite trauma; she says, "Art is the axle tree," and discusses "exhilaration as form of meditation." ART Habens Review, Winter 2015. 

If you are looking for a new place to post a poem, give Christine Klocek-Lim’s new daily publication a try; she’s back, with Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

And check out Nicelle Davis, such an innovative poet and performance artist, celebrating her latest book, In the Circus of You (a collaboration with Cheryl Gross) with a wild event in Los Angeles, at the Merry-Go-Round in Griffith Park. Here’s her guest post for us over at Mother, Writer, Mentor: Circus as Sanctuary.