Fearless Poetry Workshop with Julie Bruck
2020-10-29 19:00 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Now celebrating over 15 years at The Writing Salon, this workshop draws people who want to jumpstart their poetry practice and to keep the engine oiled. You’ll do plenty of writing and reading, and we’ll have lively discussions about both the craft and the process(es) of poetry.
Each weekly homework assignment provides fresh angles of approach designed to surprise, even startle, both the writers and their readers. “We all get stuck in familiar ruts,” says instructor Julie Bruck, “and this class offers ways of digging ourselves out, whether we use these strategies to start a new poem or to revise a particularly challenging one. With fresh poems on the table each week, an early question is often, how does this poem move? Our group task is to offer constructive help in locating and enhancing that movement. Poets are always learning how to read their own drafts (and those of others), much as we keep learning how to read the world.”
The remote class is suitable for a wide spectrum of people. “We’ve had students with an interest in poetry but no experience writing it, and others with MFA’s from Iowa, and it’s always been a good mix,” says Julie. “The aim of the class is to get everybody excited about new work, to take away strategies that can help with current and future writing—and to have a great time while we’re at it.”
October 29 – December 03
5 Thursdays, (PST) 7:00pm – 9:30pm

$274.35 for members
$295 for non-members

Matthew McConaughey with Reese Witherspoon - Greenlights (Virtual Event)
2020-10-30 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
“This is not a traditional memoir, or an advice book, but rather a playbook based on adventures in my life. Adventures that have been significant, enlightening, and funny, sometimes because they were meant to be but mostly because they didn’t try to be.”
Matthew McConaughey has kept a diary for thirty-five of his fifty years, and recently worked up the courage to take those writings into solitary confinement and read through them. He found not only stories, questions, truths, and affirmations, but also a reliable theme. Greenlights is an album and a record of what he has seen and learned along the way—“my sights and seens, felts and figured outs, cools and shamefuls.”
In Greenlights, readers will learn about many of the adventures and formative moments in McConaughey’s life, and the sense of meaning he’s found through his philosophy of the same name. From growing up as an adventurous kid in a tough-love Texas home of rule breakers, to revelatory journeys to Australia, Peru, and Mali, to his early days in Hollywood and meteoric rise to fame, McConaughey shares how his life experiences have instilled in him the importance of competent values, the power of new experiences, and, as he puts it, “either changing your reality or changing how you see it.”
Written with candor, humor, and profound insight and humility, the uniquely McConaughey Greenlights is an unconventional portrait of an unconventional artist and a wise road map to navigating a life of more greenlights—one that recognizes that the red and yellow lights eventually turn green, too.
Academy Award–winning actor Matthew McConaughey is a married man, a father of three children, and a loyal son and brother. He considers himself a storyteller by occupation, believes it’s okay to have a beer on the way to the temple, feels better with a day’s sweat on him, and is an aspiring orchestral conductor.
In 2009, Matthew and his wife, Camila, founded the just keep livin Foundation, which helps at-risk high school students make healthier mind, body, and spirit choices. In 2019, McConaughey became a professor of practice at the University of Texas at Austin, as well as Minister of Culture/M.O.C. for the University of Texas and the City of Austin. McConaughey is also brand ambassador for Lincoln Motor Company, an owner of the Major League Soccer club Austin FC, and co-creator of his favorite bourbon on the planet, Wild Turkey Longbranch.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #33
2020-10-30 18:00 | CA
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
https://forms.gle/1ZNKSnnzRZpXxvUE7
If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nomadic-press-virtual-open-mic-33-tickets-126619904543;
OR 3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Nomadic Press is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #33
Time: Oct 30, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 825 6526 7961
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Mindy Uhrlaub - Unnatural Resources (Virtual Event)
2020-10-30 18:30 - 20:30 | CA
When her Congolese village is destroyed by an invading militia group, eleven-year-old Therese is injured and outcast. Stranded with only her little brother’s best friend in a war-torn jungle, she is forced to make a choice: lie down and become another victim of the war or stand up and survive. Desperate to find her mother and beloved brother, Felix, she uses her greatest gift, her knowledge of English, to navigate the vast web of humanitarian aid groups. Along the way, she meets the charismatic one-legged teenager, Robert, who takes her on an adventure with a film crew which becomes her lifeline back home.
Luna, Therese’s mother, has been taken as a slave and concubine to the handsome and evil leader of the militia, The General. In a harrowing act of bravery, she uses her own knowledge of languages to make the difficult choice to escape into the mountainous jungle. In her struggle to reunite with Therese and Felix, some of the least likely people become her friends. With its themes of women’s empowerment, Unnatural Resources is a stunning and unflinchingly brutal redefinition of the meaning of family. This book tells the story of a young Congolese girl who becomes a symbol of hope in the worst place in the world to be female.

Hollister Rand - Everything You Wanted to Know about the Afterlife but Were Afraid to Ask (Virtual Event)
2020-10-30 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Is it possible to continue relationships beyond death? Do loved ones see what’s going on in our lives? Can they help us with the challenges facing us right now?
Get answers to these questions from the spirits themselves! Experience the peace of knowing that those you love remain close to you.
During the event, a number of audience members will receive messages from loved ones living in the spirit world. There will be time to ask general questions about mediumship and what life is like on the other side.
During the last twenty-five years, Hollister Rand’s dedication to the healing work of mediumship has included events and workshops in the United States and abroad. Hollister’s work on television includes Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood and America Now. Her radio appearances include Sirius XM’s “The Séance with John Edward” (on John Edward Psychic Radio), KOST FM’s Angels in Waiting, KBIG-FM’s Radio Medium, and Coast to Coast with George Noory.
Hollister’s first book, I’m Not Dead, I’m Different: Kids in Spirit Teach Us About Living a Better Life on Earth, published by HarperCollins, is available in several languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her impossibly small chihuahuas, Bodhi and Amara Metta. Visit her at her website, MediumHollisterRand.com
Please note: Spontaneous messages are provided throughout the evening. However, everyone in attendance is not guaranteed a reading.

Anxious People by Frederik Backman | GGP Online Book Club
2020-10-31 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Please join us on Tuesday, December 8, 2020 at 7 PM PST for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Frederik Backman’s new novel, ANXIOUS PEOPLE.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87874523125.
You can order a copy in hardcover at https://bit.ly/ggpAnxious, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/AnxiousAB.
Description

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
A People Book of the Week, Book of the Month Club selection, #1 Indie Next Pick, and Best of Fall in Good Housekeeping, PopSugar, The Washington Post, New York Post, Shondaland, CNN, and more!
“[A] quirky, big-hearted novel… Wry, wise, and often laugh-out-loud funny, it’s a wholly original story that delivers pure pleasure.” —People
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove comes a charming, poignant novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined.
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. The captives include a recently retired couple who relentlessly hunt down fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage. There’s a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else and a young couple who are about to have their first child but can’t seem to agree on anything, from where they want to live to how they met in the first place. Add to the mix an eighty-seven-year-old woman who has lived long enough not to be afraid of someone waving a gun in her face, a flustered but still-ready-to-make-a-deal real estate agent, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom, and you’ve got the worst group of hostages in the world.
Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them—the bank robber included—desperately crave some sort of rescue. As the authorities and the media surround the premises these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next.
Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope—the things that save us, even in the most anxious times.
About the Author

Fredrik Backman is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Man Called Ove, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, Britt-Marie Was Here, Beartown, Us Against You, and two novellas, And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer and The Deal of a Lifetime, as well as one work of nonfiction, Things My Son Needs to Know About the World. His books are published in more than forty countries. His latest novel, Anxious People, was an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with his wife and two children. Connect with him on Facebook or Twitter @BackmanLand or on Instagram @Backmansk.

Santa Clara University Osher: Exciting Adult Learning Zoom Classes
2020-11-01 09:00 - 2020-12-04 17:00 | 56941
Fall Quarter Open Now through December 4th, 2020
OLLI@SCU: Enjoy learning from home with exciting Zoom (virtual) classes taught by instructors who design their varied courses for curious audiences like you. Join and take advantage of our classes, events, and programs (currently remote until safe to be in-person) designed for adult learners who love learning. We offer more than 15 thought-provoking courses each quarter, on a variety of topics including history, science, art, current events, law, literature and culture – all without homework, tests or grades. There are member-only Special Interest Groups exploring such topics as food, genealogy, Italy, mystery books, memoir writing, photography and contemporary issues. OLLI@SCU is here for you, now. Join us!
Membership is $55; course fees vary from $50 – $110 depending on length.
Presented by Santa Clara University Osher Lifelong Learning.

Fiction Workshop: Honing the Art of Storytelling with Andy Touhy
2020-11-01 10:30 - 13:00 | CA
You write something down and it’s awkward, trivial, artificial, approximate. But with effort . . . you can get it to open up, and expose what’s lurking there beyond the clumsy thing you first put down. —Deborah Eisenberg
“What makes a story compelling?” asks instructor Andy Touhy. “More importantly, what are the ways to make it compelling? In this online workshop, we’ll begin to really think about how to tell a good tale (short story or novel).
“Opening lines matter, as does point of view, as does the difference between what a character wants and what a character gets (the conflict that creates plot), as does engaging dialogue, and artful prose style, and images that fire the imagination. We’ll explore all the basic elements of craft—with an eye toward creating narratives that stick with readers long after the reading.”
Though the class may mix in readings for discussion and exercises, workshopping (sharing and critiquing of two drafts per writer) will be the primary focus. “We’ll grow as readers and listeners,” says Andy, “by approaching one another’s work as if it were our own, testing choices and material, and identifying strengths and weaknesses, so that the best of our hearts and minds make the page.” Andy will also give generous written feedback to each participant.
November 01 – December 06
5 Sundays, (PST) 10:30am – 1:00pm

$274.35 for members
$295 for non-members

Colossus: Home Reading
2020-11-01 21:30 - 23:30 | CA
Dena Rod
Karla Brundage
Peggy Morrison
Sharon Coleman
Norma Smith
Zakiyyah G.E. Capehart

Carol Dorf

Alta Asks Live: Keenan Norris
2020-11-04 12:30 - 13:30 | CA
Author Keenan Norris is joined in conversation by author and Alta contributor Susan Straight on Wednesday, November 4 at 12:30 p.m. Pacific time for an intimate discussion on writing and race in the suburbs of Southern California.

Author Keenan Norris came of age as a member of one of a growing number of Black families who moved to the Inland Empire from Los Angeles in the late 1980s. His essay in the Fall 2020 issue of Alta Journal recounts a childhood amid snakes, scorpions, and racism. Norris is joined in conversation by author and Alta contributor Susan Straight for an intimate discussion on writing and race in the suburbs of Southern California. REGISTER
About the author:
Keenan Norris’s novel, Brother and the Dancer, won the 2012 James D. Houston Award. His essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and PopMatters, among other outlets. His short fiction has appeared in several anthologies, including Oakland Noir, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, and San Bernardino, Singing. He serves as an editor for the Oxford African American Studies Center and teaches American literature and creative writing at San José State University. His next novel, The Confession of Copeland Cane, will be published in June 2021.
About the moderator:
Susan Straight has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, Between Heaven and Here, and A Million Nightingales. Her memoir, In the Country of Women, is Barnes & Noble’s September 2020 Nonfiction Pick. Straight has been a finalist for the National Book Awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, and the National Magazine Awards. She is the recipient of the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, Granta, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Harper’s, and other journals. She is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family.

Contemporary Classics - Weather Pat Holt's monthly book discussion group
2020-11-04 18:30 - 20:30 | CA
Patricia Holt, former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, continues her popular book group, “Contemporary Classics.”
A book should stand the test of time before becoming a classic, but very often, critics and literary judges leap to praise books as “instant classics” soon after publication. These are the titles Pat’s group will hold up to scrutiny—in fact, the chewier, more literary, more dense, and “hard to read” the better. One needn’t have read widely, studied literature, or learned about literary criticism to join. Just drop in or join us for the whole series, and let the developing wisdom of the group be your only guide.
Email Pat to register and to receive a Zoom link for the meeting. You can write to her at p.holt12@comcast.net.
Fall dates:
October 7: Call Me Zebra, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
November 4: Weather, Jenny Offill
December 2: Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
January 6: Disappearing Earth, Julia Phillips
February 3: The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai

About Patricia Holt
Pat was book editor and critic at The San Francisco Chronicle for 17 years and has been writing reviews and book industry commentary at Holt Uncensored since 1998. She has facilitated book groups for the past 15 years and also joins the Marin West Review’s editors, Myn Adess and Doris Ober, on Radio Bookmobile, a lively discussion on West Marin Community Radio KWMR, usually the first Thursday of every month at 10-11 a.m., about the most beautiful passages and stirring controversies they can find on the current book scene.

Orion Magazine presents Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams
2020-11-04 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
An Intimate Conversation About the U.S. Election, the State of Democracy, and The Most Radical Thing You Can Do.
Join Orion Magazine and Point Reyes Books for a post-Election Day exchange between two of the world’s most prominent voices for justice and the environment, Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams. Solnit is currently an advisor to Orion, while Williams is a contributing editor.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel. Please REGISTER HERE.
About The Most Radical Thing You Can Do
This event marks the publication of Orion’s new anthology, The Most Radical Thing You Can Do: The Best Political Essays from Orion Magazine. The collection includes work by both Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as Robin Wall Kimmerer, Glenis Redmond, Bill McKibben, Winona LaDuke, Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry, Sandra Steingraber, Barbara Kingsolver, and others. The book is available here.
About the Authors
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.
Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; and When Women Were Birds, among other books. Her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah.

Berkeley Lunch Poems: Aria Aber
2020-11-05 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Berkeley Lunch Poems
A noontime poetry reading series
Readings will take place remotely for the 2020-2021 academic year. Zoom links will be available approximately two weeks before the event. All readings will be recorded and posted to youtube. To keep up to date, please join our list by emailing poems@library.berkeley.edu.
Link for all readings: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/96370640480
Aria Aber
Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a Whiting Award. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, POETRY, the New Republic, and elsewhere. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, she holds fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She is a 2020-2022 Stegner Fellow in Poetry.

Jordy Rosenberg in Conversation with Susan Stryke
2020-11-05 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Jordy Rosenberg in Conversation with Susan Stryker, 2020–22 Barbara Lee Distinguished Professor of Women’s Leadership (RSVP to receive the event link)
Thursday, November 5, 2020 | time TBA | mark your calendar
Jordy Rosenberg is the author of Confessions of the Fox, a love story set in the eighteenth-century London of notorious thieves and queer subcultures. This genre-bending debut tells a profound story of gender, desire, and liberation which Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, called “Astonishing and mesmerizing.” A New York Times Editors’ Choice Selection, Confessions has been shortlisted for multiple awards and was named a best book of 2018 by the New Yorker, Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, LitHub, and others. Rosenberg is a Professor of Literature at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches eighteenth-century literature and gender and sexuality studies.
Co-sponsored by We Are the Voices.

Writers Against Trump
2020-11-05 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
Writers Against Trump
Join us as writers and booksellers across the nation come together in a day of solidarity. City Lights hosts a regional event featuring Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books as host. He will be joined by activist and writer Roberto Lovato, activist and poet Margaret Randall, and San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck.
Event is free, but requires registration
(CLICK HERE) to register
Writers Against Trump are American writers who have come together to oppose the racist, destructive, incompetent, corrupt and fascist regime of Donald Trump, and to give their language, thought, and time to his defeat in November. They believe that this presidency is uniquely dangerous to our present and future society. Writers Against Trump collaborates with organizations seeking to encourage voter turnout, promote candidates who resist the Trump apparatus, protect the election from fraud and theft, and mobilize in the event of post-election trouble.

Writers are well-positioned to advocate for our democracy. They understand the strength of words, of rhetoric. Collectively, American writing has brought so much change. And Writers Against Trump seek to honor the legacies of the revolutionary writers who came before us by joining in now——and their choir must be deafening.
The brutal and criminal regime called an “administration” may remain in power a while longer, spewing disinformation, exacerbating ill health, earth-hatred, obscene inequality, race- and woman-hatred, and encouraging violence, but as an unintended consequence, writers and booksellers across the nation are coming together to resist. Join us in this struggle.
For more information visit: www.writersagainsttrump.org

Karen Tei Yamashita in Conversation with Andrew Way Leong
2020-11-05 14:30 - 15:30 | CA
Join us for a book talk with Karen Tei Yamashita, author of I-Hotel, Letters to Memory, and Sansei and Sensibility. Hosted by Andrew Way Leong and followed by a Q&A session with the audience.
WHEN: Thursday, November 5, 2020 | 2:30 PM PDT
About the books:
I Hotel – A multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy that spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.
As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2497/I_Hotel.html
Letters to Memory is an excursion through the Japanese internment using archival materials from the Yamashita family as well as a series of epistolary conversations with composite characters representing a range of academic specialties. Historians, anthropologists, classicists—their disciplines, and Yamashita’s engagement with them, are a way for her to explore various aspects of the internment and to expand its meaning beyond her family, and our borders, to ideas of debt, forgiveness, civil rights, orientalism, and community.
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p1626/Letters_to_Memory.html
Sansei and Sensibility – In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance—familial, cultural, emotional, artistic—really means. In a California of the sixties and seventies, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives’ freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community’s gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants. Mr. Darcy is the captain of the football team, Mansfield Park materializes in a suburb of L.A., bake sales replace ballroom dances, and station wagons, not horse-drawn carriages, are the preferred mode of transit. The stories of traversing class, race, and gender leap into our modern world with wit and humor.
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2176/Sansei_and_Sensibility.html
About the Authors:
Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books, including I Hotel, a finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently, Letters to Memory, all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and a U.S. Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
About the host:
Andrew Way Leong is a comparativist who works primarily in Japanese and English with additional interests in Spanish and Portuguese. His research focuses on the literature of Japanese diasporas in the Americas as well as queer and critical theoretical approaches to the study of literary genre, gendered embodiment, and generational time. He is the translator of Lament in the Night. He is currently an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s English Department.
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p1106/Lament_in_the_Night_.html
—
Eastwind Books Multicultural Services (EBMS) is a 501(3)c non-profit dedicated to the promotion and accessibility of Asian American and Ethnic Multicultural Literature. EBMS is the community education arm of Eastwind Books of Berkeley which is comprised of a dedicated staff of booksellers, artists, poets, and community workers. Our events are for educational purposes and we appreciate your tax-deductible donations and continued support.

Virtual Reading: Nate Klug and Fiona Sze-Lorrain
2020-11-05 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
Join us on Thursday, November 5 at 5pm when Nate Klug and Fiona Sze-Lorrain read from their new collections, Hosts and Guests and Rain in Plural, on Zoom!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83679639869
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,83679639869# or +13462487799,,83679639869#
Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
US: +1 669 900 9128 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 646 558 8656 or +1 301 715 8592
Webinar ID: 836 7963 9869
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kmEIyss6Y
Praise for Hosts and Guests
“Nate Klug’s Hosts and Guests is a fine book full of rich nuance, complex emotions, and sharp observations. These are poems replete with hosts and guests from a wide range of ecosystems in which Horace, Rihanna, Leviticus, Dickinson, and even Pikachu and Pokémon Go make smooth appearances. Hosts and Guests is a book that feels as though, in Klug’s own words, ‘day’s first words // arrive like nets, flung / from somewhere behind // our heads.’ These are beautifully crafted, contemplative poems that stay with you long after you’ve read them.”—Rowan Ricardo Phillips, author of Living Weapon: Poems
“What’s the secret of these fresh and mysterious poems? In their lightness of touch, clarity, probity, and almost Japanese spareness, they bathe the ordinary in otherworldly light. Cicadas, young parents, a baby, North American bars and highways, jellyfish, a Horatian ode, the death of Pompey, religious faith feeling its way, an inchworm shrinking from em dash to hyphen—all find their places, revealed, in Nate Klug’s delicately paced syntax and gracious reticence. A book both timely and ageless, a balm, a boon.”—Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems

About Hosts and Guests
An exciting new collection from a poet whose debut was praised by Colorado Review as “a seduction by way of small astonishments”
Nate Klug has been hailed by the Threepenny Review as a poet who is “an original in Eliot’s sense of the word.” In Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. The poems move from a San Francisco tech bar and a band of Pokémon Go players to the Shakers and St. Augustine, as they explore the push-pull between community and solitude, and past and present. Hosts and Guests gathers an impressive range: critiques of the “immiserated quiet” of modern life, love poems and poems of new fatherhood, and studies of a restless, nimble faith. At a time when the meanings of hospitality and estrangement have assumed a new urgency, Klug takes up these themes in chiseled, musical lines that blend close observation of the natural world, social commentary, and spiritual questioning. As Booklist has observed of his work, “The visual is rendered sonically, so perfectly one wants to involve the rest of the senses, to speak the lines, to taste the syllables.”
About Rain in Plural
The highly anticipated new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Rain in Plural is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by The Rumpus as a master of musicality and enlightening allusions. In the wholly original world of these new poems, Sze-Lorrain addresses both private narratives and the overexposed discourse of the polis, using silence and montage, lyric and antilyric, to envision what she calls creating between liberties. With a moral precision embracing us without eschewing I, she rethinks questions of citizenship, the selections of sensory memory, and, by extension, the tether of word and image to the actual. She writes, I accept the truth in newspapers / by holding the murder of my friends against my chest. // To each weather forecast I give thanks: / merci for every outdated // dusk/dawn. Agrippina the Younger, Franz Kafka, Bob Dylan, a butoh performance, an unnamed Raku tea bowl–each has a place here. Made whole by time and its alteration in timelessness, synchrony, coincidences, and accidents, Rain in Plural beautifully reveals an elegiac yet ever-evolving inner life.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas
2020-11-05 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
reading from his new novel
Aphasia
published by Farrar Straus Giroux
Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author of The Revolutionaries Try Again—”an original, insubordinate novel” (New York Times)—pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America.
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book (Link to be posted soon)
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Antonio wants to avoid thinking about his sister—even though he knows he won’t be able to avoid thinking about his sister—because his sister is on the run after allegedly threatening to shoot her neighbors, and has been claiming that Antonio, Obama, the Pentagon, and their mother are all conspiring against her. Nevertheless, Antonio is going to try his best to be as avoidant as possible, because he worries that what’s been happening to his sister might somehow infect his relatively contented, ordered American life, and destabilize the precarious arrangement with his ex-wife that’s allowed him to stay close to his two daughters.
In fact, he’s busy doing everything except facing his problems head-on: transcribing recordings of his mother speaking about their troubled life in Colombia, transcribing recordings of his ex-wife speaking about her idyllic life in the Czech Republic; writing about former girlfriends whose words and deeds still recur in his mind; rereading stories by American writers that allow him to skirt the subject of his sister’s state of mind without completely destroying his own.
Written in long, unravelling sentences that accommodate all the detritus of thought—scenes real and imagined, headphones and heartache, Toblerones and Thomas Bernhard—Aphasia captures the immensity of the present moment as well as the pain of the past. It cements Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s place as one of the most innovative and extraordinary novelists working today.
Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of The Revolutionaries Try Again, which The New York Times called “an original, insubordinate novel.” In 2017, the Hay Festival included him in Bogotá39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today.

Great Good Gifts for the Holidays #1: Cookbooks and Gift Books
2020-11-05 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, November 5, 2020 at 7 PM PST for staff recommendations on cookbooks and giftbooks in the first episode of our Great Good Gifts for the Holidays series.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83160582546.
This is our first recommendations night of the season. Mark your calendar for these events too:

11/12: Kids & graphic novels;
11/19: Adult non-fiction
12/3: Adult fiction
12/10: Recommendations for the Hard-to-Shop-For Person on Your List

Location:

6120 LaSalle Avenue

Oakland, CA 94611
United States

Awesome Asian Americans: Children's Story Time with Oliver Chin
2020-11-07 14:00 - 15:00 | CA
It’s about time – rebel girls, rad women, little leaders, and great guys are Asian American too!
Readers will enjoy learning about 20 trailblazers who have contributed to our country. All compelling personalities, these unique men and women come from diverse backgrounds and vocations.
Featured Asian Americans in the book are:
-Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (actor)
-Bruce Lee (martial artist)
-Mindy Kaling (comedian)
-Lea Salonga (singer)
-Yuri Kochiyama (activist)
-Helen Zia (journalist)
-and more!
Artist Juan Calle’s 60 dynamic color illustrations bring these fascinating and relevant portraits to life. Immigrants and their children continue to enrich our nation’s culture. Discover important chapters of American history not covered in school textbooks, and the marvelous accomplishments of these groundbreaking pioneers.
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About the authors and illustrator:
Oliver Chin wrote the popular annual children’s book series Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, Julie Black Belt, Welcome to Monster Isle. He co-wrote The Asian Hall of Fame series with Phil Amara. He lives in San Francisco, CA.
Phil Amara was an editor at Dark Horse Comics, and wrote The Nevermen, The Treehouse Heroes, and So, You Wanna Be A Comic Book Artist? He is an elementary school teacher in Boston, MA.
Juan Calle founded Liberum Donum Studios (Bogotá, Colombia) which works on TV, film, and video games. Juan created the children’s book Good Dream, Bad Dream and illustrated The Year of the Rooster and The Asian Hall of Fame series.
About Immedium:
Immedium, Inc. inspires a world of imagination, and creates entertaining books that have multi-dimensional appeal. Based in San Francisco, CA, Immedium sits on the Pacific Rim, a vibrant intersection for crossover cultural trends from Asia and America. Embracing an increasingly diverse and “multimedia” world, Immedium publishes titles ranging from eye-catching children’s books and contemporary non-fiction to commentaries on art and popular culture. Visit us at www.immedium.com. ​

Conversations with Authors - Anthony Lee Head with Peter Coyote (Virtual Event)
2020-11-07 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
Anthony Lee Head’s debut collection, Driftwood: Stories from the Margarita Road, tells the story of modern-day runaways escaping the rat race and heading to a tropical paradise in search of a fresh start—a timely antidote for anyone who has grown weary of quarantines and sheltering in place.
Anthony knows firsthand the challenges of the expat lifestyle. In a fit of middle-aged madness, he gave up an established career as a trial lawyer in San Francisco to travel 3500 miles to tropical Mexico, where for a decade he and his wife ran a small hotel and a margarita bar near the Caribbean Sea. That adventure became the inspiration for this book. Anthony now lives in San Rafael, California with his wife and an embarrassingly large number of Mexican rescue dogs and cats. He is currently working on both a memoir and a new novel.
Peter Coyote is the author of the 1960’s counter-culture memoir Sleeping Where I Fall, which received universally excellent reviews and has been in continuous print since 1999. His second book about mentors and the search for wisdom, The Rainman’s Third Cure: An Irregular Education, was nominated as one of the top five non-fiction books published in California in 2015. His third book, Unmasking Your True Self (the Lone Ranger and Tonto Meet the Buddha) combines 50 years of Buddhist practice with acting and uses masks and improv exercises to foster liberation experiences and teach people “how to get out of their own way.” It is forthcoming from Inner Traditions Press, as his first book of poems, The Tongue of a Crow.
Peter has performed as an actor in over 160 films for theaters and TV. He is a double Emmy-Award winning narrator of over 150 documentary films. An ordained Zen Buddhist priest and transmitted teacher, Peter is currently giving live weekly dharma talks on Facebook, preparing for a fourth book called Vernacular Buddhism.

Ayşegül Savaş Reading
2020-11-07 18:30 - 19:30 | CA
You must register to attend this event!
Free and Open to the Public.
Co-sponsored by the MFA Program in Writing and the English Department.

Ayşegül Savaş is the author of Walking on the Ceiling. Her second novel White on White is forthcoming from Riverhead Books. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and The Guardian. She lives in Paris.

Eves at the (Virtual) Beat: Womxn Reading Curated by Mia Ruiz
2020-11-07 19:00 - 2020-11-12 21:30 | CA
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2020 AT 7 PM PST – 9:30 PM PST
During Women’s History month a constellation of events brought together a group of fabulous womxn+ writers. The meeting of these hearts and minds exploded into something powerful and a new monthly reading series concept was born, “Eves at the Beat”.
This month’s Eves at the Beat is curated by the incredible, sweet Mia Ruiz, tuning in from Lake County!
Readers & Performers for this event:
TBA
Cassandra (she/her, Berkeley) is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Eves at the Beat w/Mia Ruiz
Time: Oct 22, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/4171477773
Meeting ID: 417 147 7773
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Conversations with Authors - Elizabeth Strout (Virtual Event)
2020-11-08 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
Elizabeth Strout‘s latest novel, Olive Again, continues the life of her beloved Olive Kitteridge, a character who has captured the imaginations of millions.
Elizabeth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Olive, Again, an Oprah’s Book Club pick; Anything Is Possible, winner of the Story Prize; My Name is Lucy Barton, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize; The Burgess Boys, named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post and NPR; Abide with Me, a national bestseller; and Amy and Isabelle, winner of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize. She has also been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the International Dublin Literary Award, and the Orange Prize. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker and O: The Oprah Magazine. Elizabeth lives in New York City.
Cathleen Schine‘s most recent work is the best-selling novel The Grammarians. She is also the author of The Love Letter, Rameau’s Niece, Alice in Bed, To the Birdhouse, The Evolution of Jane, She Is Me, The New Yorkers, The Three Weissmanns of Westport, Fin & Lady, and They May Not Mean To, But They Do. In addition to her novels, she has written articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Her essays have been included in Best American Essays 2005, Fierce Pajamas, an Anthology of New Yorker Humor, and The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs. She grew up in Westport, Ct. and lives in Venice, California.

Below, please find links to purchase their books.

November Manuscript Intensive Program
2020-11-09 | CA
Send your book out without the self-doubt. Instead work with one of our editors to get your manuscript in shape. In this month-long one-on-one intensive, an experienced published author will closely read your entire book and mentor you, giving focused editorial feedback on the first 25 pages and an editorial letter to guide revision of the rest.
There will be significant opportunity for extended correspondence with your mentor, who will provide specific suggestions for revision and offer general advice on the current state of publishing, and next steps for you to take in your publishing journey. Work with us before sending out your manuscript to help your book really shine!

How it works:

The San Francisco Creative Writing Institute Manuscript Intensive is a four-week, one-on-one mentorship with a published writer to get help with your completed prose manuscript (novel, memoir or other non-fiction, essay or story collection) and receive valuable feedback for revision or submission to agents or publishers.

If you have a completed manuscript and want to know what the next steps to take are, this is the course for you.

Next Steps:
After you register, you’ll email the manuscript to us at mentor@sfwriting.institute along with tendering a retainer fee.

We will look at your manuscript and assign you one of our mentors based on your work and their specialties. Read up on our list of mentors here.

Weekly Schedule: November 09, 2020 – December 04, 2020, All Day
Week 1 – Your mentor will spend the first week of the month reading your entire book.

Week 2 – In the second week you will receive an editorial mark-up of the first chapter or first 25 pages (whichever is most appropriate) and an editorial letter oriented toward revision.

Week 3 – In the third week, you can initiate an email conversation about the edits and feedback, and even offer a revision of the first pages for a “second look.”

Week 4 – In the final week, your mentor will respond to your commentary and any possible revisions to the opening pages and offer final guidance for revision or submission.

Online Evening Literary Seminar: Let's Pretend This Never Happened, Jenny Lawson
2020-11-09 17:00 - 18:30 | CA
Jenny Lawson’s ridiculously eccentric childhood in Texas—combined with a hefty dose of anxiety, depression and serious intelligence—makes for a hilariously dark memoir that will bring the comic relief we might all need in November. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened feels like a Mary Karr-David Sedaris-Amy Poehler mash-up, a look at how to cope when things are just plain absurd. It would be a crime during this Covid fall NOT to turn to Lawson for commiseration, solace and some much-needed laughs.
Join Kimberly to delve deeper into a novel that has been described as “transformed by intragenerational retelling rather than passed down,” one made up of “quick and dirty mythmaking,” a book we should all be reading now.

Odd Mondays Reading "Far Away Places"
2020-11-09 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Odd Mondays Reading “Far Away Places”

Now that the election is (sort of) over, are you looking for escape? Or were you already ready to book passage? Either way, books offer that respite in another place and time, especially the three their authors are reading at Odd Mondays Nov.9, 7pm Pacific. Travel first-class via Zoom. Get your ticket by responding Going or Interested at https://bit.ly/37PzrrW. Here’s more about the books to start you dreaming. You can buy all 3 at www.foliosf.com

ALL THE RIGHT PLACES by Wayne Goodman is a collection of short stories, most written for submission to anthologies or collections. Starting in the near future and proceeding to the near past, men interact with other men in the pursuit of love and companionship from a future of artificial lovers to Civil War California to 17th Century Japan. Waynegoodmanbooks
THE UNPASSING by Chia-Chia Lin was a NY Times Books Review Editors’ Choice. In this debut novel, a Taiwanese immigrant family of six struggles to make ends meet on the outskirts of Anchorage, Alaska. THE UNPASSING is a deeply felt family saga that dismisses the American dream for a harsher, but ultimately more profound, reality.

In June of 1940, when Paris fell to the Nazis, Hitler spent a total of three hours in the City of Light—abruptly leaving, never to return. To this day, no one knows why. Cara Black, the New York Times bestselling author of the Aimée Leduc investigations, reimagines history in her masterful, pulse-pounding spy thriller, THREE HOURS IN PARIS.

San José Poetry Slam
2020-11-09 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
San José Poetry Slam
Sunday, November 8, 6:30pm sign-ups, 7pm slam!
Featuring Michael Jasso
Hosted by San Jose Slammaster Scorpiana Xlent!
Zoom information to be announced on Facebook
Room opens at 6:30 pm
Sign up list will be open from 6:30 to 7pm, Slam starts at 7
This is a free event!
Follow the Slam on Facebook!
Michael Jasso (not to be confused for your dad) is a poet, teaching artist and organizer based out of California’s Central Valley. He is the founder of The Loud Mouth Poetry Jam, Visalia’s premiere slam venue for 8+ years. Since he started competing 11 years ago he’s represented his venue at NPS 2014 & 2015, competed as a storm poet at IWPS 2018, and has coached several of Visalia’s reps. Much like your dad, he tells cringey jokes, loves grilling, and askes if your oil has been changed as his form of “I love you.”

Bookseller Happy Hour: GIFT PICKS
2020-11-09 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Make gift giving easy! Grab a beverage and join us from the comfort of home as our booksellers share terrific books that make great gifts for everyone on your list. Have your holiday list nearby and get ready to check it off and finish your shopping.
Register for this free event on Crowdcast here!

SIP & LEARN: THE ART OF THE STENCIL WITH KRISTIN HUGO
2020-11-10 18:00 - 19:30 | CA
Grab a cocktail and join us for another edition of Odd Salon Happy Hour Sip and Learn.

Odd Salon Fellow and stencil artist Kristin Hugo will be sharing with us the history and art of the stencil. So get ready to get to use your hands and make a stencil.

Tues, Nov 10, 6pm PT/9pm ET
Odd Salon Sip & Learn
THE ART OF THE STENCIL
Odd Salon Happy Hours are private community events, free for all Members, Patreon Supporters, and Fellows. Zoom details will be sent out via email and Patreon post.
Patreon Supporters and Members are our heroes, keeping us afloat and participating in our crazy Zoom experiments during these uncertain times without theaters.

Sip & Learn: The Art of the Stencil with Kristin Hugo
