2/3/2020 Dee Allen & Heather Scott

2/3/2020 Dee Allen & Heather Scott hosted by Elaine.

Session will start PROMPTLY AT 7PM to allow time for both features.

Dee Allen is an African-Italian performance poet based in Oakland, California. Active on the creative writing & Spoken Word tips since the early1990s. Author of 4 books [ Boneyard, Unwritten Law, Stormwater and Skeletal Black, all from POOR Press ] and 24 anthology appearances [ including Poets 11: 2014, Feather Floating On The Water, Rise, Your Golden Sun Still Shines, What Is Love, The City Is Already Speaking, The Land Lives Forever, Extreme and Civil
Liberties United, edited by Shizué Seigel ] under his figurative belt so far. Allen’s fifth book, Elohi Unitsi, will be released Earth Day 2020
from Conviction 2 Change Publishing.



Heather Scott is a teacher in Oakland and sometimes writer. She writes about love and relationships. She received her MA in Creative Writing at the University of New Hampshire. 

Dan Lineham Features 1/27/2020

1/27/2020 Dan Linehan hosted by Gary

A longtime professional writer, author, and award-winning poet, Dan Linehan often interweaves nature, current events, and far-flung lands. His poetry has been published widely in books, newspapers, and literary journals, including in The Anthology of Monterey Bay Poets. He is passionate about helping to solve environmental crises through creativity. Dan’s new multimedia serial novel The Princess of the Bottom of the World includes poetry inspired by his travels to Antarctica and Argentina. For more, visit: www.dslinehan.com

THE BEAGLE CHANNEL

by Dan Linehan

Sandra told me about her silver ring.

Her mother had said

            silver has healing powers.

I showed her my silver earring.

I feel like a pirate now.

She has a telescope back in Chile.

This is her last cruise.

She knows magic tricks.

We watched the comet,

            sharing a pair of binoculars.

* Check out links for The Princess of the Bottom of the World:

       Watch Video Trailer

       Get the Series

       Multimedia Traveling Companion

       Events

* Participant Media films a short profile of me and my work

* My work in Argentina: writing, teaching, film, and a deadly storm...

* Climate change interviews with Sylvia Earle, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Charles Ferguson

* For these and more, visit my website at www.dslinehan.com

Attachments area

Preview YouTube video The Princess of the Bottom of the World Book Trailer

The Princess of the Bottom of the World Book Trailer

1/20/2020 Caroline Goodwin features

1/20/2020 Caroline Goodwin host Bruce

Caroline Goodwin's books are Trapline (2013), Peregrine (2015), The Paper Tree (2017) and Custody of the Eyes (2019). Her recent poem, "Snaketime III", was runner-up in The Sewanee Review 2019 poetry contest, judged by Carl Phillips. She teaches at CCA, Stanford Continuing Studies and UC Berkeley Extension (in the summer). In 1999 she moved from Sitka, Alaska to California to attend Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Fellow; from 2014-16 she served as San Mateo County's first Poet Laureate.

SNAKETIME III

If you show up

today I will open

the door, put on

the kettle. Familiar

as the net-vein willow,

catkin fur

we use for

wicks. At night

I can hear

the roots

beneath the floor. Girl

who sits humming

on the back porch,

tapping her hands

into fins.

If under

the lichens the weevils

are moving,

if under my

palms the water

spreads.

A faraway flapping.

A trap door,

wind. The ways

in which the river

speaks. Open it up,

you’ll see. You’ll let it in.

Paul Jolly features 1/13/20

1/13/2020Paul Jolly hosted by Jim

Paul Jolly was raised in Oakland, and, after a thirty year detour on the East Coast, returned to Berkeley in the summer of 2019.  His poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Columbia Review, and Straylight.  His first book, Why Ice Cream Trucks Play Christmas Songs, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2018. 

Miracle drugs

Sunlight through clouds, taa-daa!  Trumpet

fanfares in the lab window, refracts

on beakers and test tubes.  Lab

drudges halt their rote to compare

charts with angels.  The apothecary

cleric’s shelf recently held a smatter

of cures: saints’ relics, holy

water, tinctures, unguent.  Now

many shelves hold baskets and baskets,

loaf baskets, fish baskets. 

High church muckety mucks

(mucks at least) preside at drug

trials.  The mucks want crutches

heaved by healed cripples, billion

dollar profits, Nobel prize, handicapped

stickers discarded from cars.  Proof

requires reams of forms.  Check

miracle type: blindness cure,

hemorrhage plug, cripples walk,

or the Lalapalooza: Lazarus alive

post-flatline.  And randomized

samples!  No chocolate sampler

was ever so random.  Did placebo

-takers get prayed at same as druggies? 

Did all the docs carry the same tracts

in their grand round lab coat

pockets?  Did prayer warriors spout

glossolalia in the same dead language?

Was there a between-shifts non sectual

moment of silence at the nurses station

in each clinic?  Identical hymns, time

-release capsules, scriptures, syringes,

Hallmark prayer cards, patches, inhalers,

beads, inhibitors, enzymes, chants,

implants?  Double-blinders want to know:

Was the philanthropist who endowed each hospital

faithish?  Does a buried urn in the arid

land of Genesis hold test results that went

wrong for pharma, papyrus

that proves placebo as helpful as drug? 

2020 Starts with a Roar: Kelliane Parker Features

1/6/2020 Kelliane Parker hosted by Elaine Brown

Kelliane Parker is a Bay Area poet and co host of My Word Open Mic. Her work has been featured  in local anthologies and she has performed around the Bay Area and. Her work gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and other violent trauma to heal and break the cycle.

While the world sleeps

By Kelliane Parker

While the world sleeps, I negotiate and wrestle

I let go and become. The night person, sleepless.

Untamed and improper, irreverent and unmanageable,

Unpredictable and uncooperative. I unearth secrets

And deconstruct stories, stories carefully crafted and rehearsed

By the entire cast in the role of a lifetime

For a lifetime…a life sentence, really.

And I nurture and embrace The Survivor

The one who faced down monsters from untold fairy tales

Where the outside world finds most of us unworthy

Of be saved or believed. So again we save ourselves,

Unless we don’t. And then the body count is uncounted,

By the unspeakable cancer called shame.

And another is lost

And, another…is… lost

So, tell me your secrets, the ones you don’t even tell yourself

What could you lose to tell another unworthy, the familiar tale.

Only the cast member names are different, but the story is the same

So we share the secret handshake, to acknowledge our membership

Only this time, it is different, we are the majority

And the light no longer stings our eyes, or maybe it just makes us feel alive

To feel something, anything even pain is beautifully real

You, my sisters, count

I see you, I hear you

I will remember your name

And I, I believe you