Tarot at AWP Portland 2019

Calling Your Writer's Block Bluff: Three Card Draws (Mini Tarot Readings)

AWP, Portland 2019
Oregon Convention Center

Drop by the Saddle Road Press Booth to sign up for a free mini tarot reading in celebration of the Heart's Compass Tarot and Writing Workbook, forthcoming soon from Saddle Road Press.

I will be giving ten minute readings on Thursday March 28, 2019 from 9-4 and Friday March 29 from 2-5. These three cards draws will be based on your writing project at hand or any other question of the heart.

You can also pick up a sample chapter from the tarot workbook that gives you an exercise for using tarot principles to write a cento (poem compromised of lines by other poets).

Here's a list of Saddle Road Press authors and the books you will find at our table:

• Dane Cervine, The Gateless Gate and Polishing the Moon Sword
• Erika Howsare, How Is Travel A Folded Form? 
• Stefan Kiesbye, The Staked Plains 
• Ire’ne Lara Silva, Blood Sugar Canto
• Ire’ne Lara Silva, Cuicacalli: House of Song
• Don Mitchell, A Red Woman Was Crying (2019 edition)
• Tania Pryputniewicz, November Butterfly
• Jessamyn Smyth, The Inugami Mochi 
• Ruth Thompson, Whale Fall & Black Sage
• Rolf Yngve, Dog Watches

Unmasked: Women Write About Sex and Intimacy After 50. Join us also on Thursday evening from 5-7 p.m. for an off-site reading from Unmasked featuring eight poets and essayists who contributed to the anthology. They include Debbie Brosten, Roberta Feins, Ellaraine Lockie, Tanya Ko-Hong, Bernadette Murphy, Lisa Rizzo , yours truly, and Cathie Sandstrom. The event will be at the offices of Nurture Realty, 1100 SE Division Street, Suite 120, Portland, 97202.

Heart's Compass Tarot News and Joy

Happy March! How can it be, that my firstborn trammels towards graduation? Monumental for this Feral Mom, Feral Writer, to have one of three children at graduation's threshold. In honor of that passage of time, I'm posting a link to my very first post, The Desk, all of two paragraphs long, about, you guessed it, what it takes to get to the Desk: 

The Desk

How far things have  moved since then, though I still keep Emily's #1263 in my typewriter pencil sharpener on my desk, and that little half wing of a framed butterfly turned into my poetry collection November Butterfly. 

Tarot Fun

I am super-charged about a new tarot workbook I am writing as we speak. I'll be bringing an excerpt from the workbook to pass out for free at AWP in Portland at the end of March where I'll be manning the Saddle Road Press table. Do stop by and take advantage of the free ten minute tarot readings I'll be giving on writer's block, latest writing project, or whatever is weighing on your heart that day. Here is a post at my main website about my Heart's Compass workbook and and why I'm changing the name of my tarot work and Facebook page to Heart's Compass Tarot and Writing.

I had a beautiful weekend reading tarot cards at the San Diego Yoga Festival. Kalli volunteered with me; we are so in love with yoga time through Yoga with Shawna in Imperial Beach. Here's a new post at Tarot for Two about the return of yoga and its impact on my well-being, how it is helping me shed the past and integrate spiritual studies:

Tarot for Two: The Nine of Wands, the Hierophant and the Star card. 

Mary and I haven't blogged for awhile together--we both had good reasons, and we write about them in the post. I connect the Hierophant to a family memoir I'm writing and Mary connects the Star card to a novel about the afterlife she is writing.

Poetry Fun

Second Saturdays Poetry Read and Critique meets this coming Saturday March 9,  from 10-12 at San Diego Writers, Ink. We are a lovely, open-hearted group of devoted poets coming together to write, read, and offer suggestions on one another's poems. Drop-ins always welcome; I hope you'll join us.

America We Call Your Name: February 8 Poetry Reading at Beyond Baroque

I'll be reading in Los Angeles from the anthology, America We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) along with featured readers Martin Ott, Murray Silverstein, David St. John, and Eliot Schain.

Friday, February 8, 2019 at 8 p.m.

Beyond Baroque

681 N. Venice Blvd.

Venice, CA 90291

Link to Beyond Baroque Facebook Event page

The anthology, born in response to the 2016 Presidential election, 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.

What a fertile collection--beautifully organized, powerful in the classroom (I loved sharing it with my poetry students and using it to help us seed new work). I'll even admit I printed out the list of contributors and taped it beside my writing desk just for the joy of seeing the name-field, so diverse, so rich, and so numinous with the energy of the poems in the anthology.

Heres a partial list of other contributors included in the anthology: Elizabeth Alexander, Ellen Bass, Lucille Clifton, Natalie Diaz, Molly Fisk, Terrance Hayes, Robinson Jeffers, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Czeslaw Milosz, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Irma Pineda, Adrienne Rich, Evie Shockley, Wislawa Szymborska, Susan Terris, Ocean Vuong, William Carlos Williams, Joseph Zaccardi and more...

If you are unable to attend the reading, but would like to order a copy of the anthology, visit Sixteen Rivers Press.

Here's a link to a post about the process of writing the cento chosen for inclusion in the anthology:

Poetry Meets Tarot Synchronicity: Crafting Centos and Leaning on Your Beloveds

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.