Why There Are Words presents the the following authors, reading from their works on the theme of “Gravity.” In considering gravity–a natural phenomenon by which all physical bodies attract one another; the only force acting on all particles with mass; it has an infinite range; it is always attractive and never repulsive; and it cannot be absorbed, transformed, or shielded against–we fall (as bodies with mass must) in love, deeply attracted to the metaphorical possibilities. Join us to have your solar system heated, transformed, evolved. November 13, 2014, at Studio 333 in Sausalito. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Julia Fierro is the founder of The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, which has been a home to over 2000 NYC creative writers since 2002. Her first novel, Cutting Teeth, ( St. Martin’s Press, May 2014), was picked by HuffPost Books, Flavorwire and The Millions as one of the most anticipated books of 2014. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow, her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, The Millions, Flavorwire, and other publications. She has been profiled in The L Magazine, Brooklyn Magazine, The Observer, and The Economist. She lives on the Brooklyn waterfront with her husband and two children.
Molly Giles has published a novel, Iron Shoes, and three award-winning collections of short stories, Rough Translations, Creek Walk, and Bothered. Her ebook of three stories titled Three For the Road was recently published by Shebooks and is available from Amazon, and her newest collection, All the Wrong Places, just won the Spokane Prize and will be forthcoming from Willow Springs Press next January. She has current work in The New Flash Fiction Review and The Louisville Review. She has submitted to Glimmer Train seventeen times and has never even made the runners up list.
Don Mitchell is an ecological anthropologist, writer, and photographer, who grew up in Hilo, on the island of Hawai’i. He studied anthropology and creative writing at Stanford and earned a PhD in anthropology from Harvard. He taught anthropology for many years at a state college in Buffalo, NY. His story collection A Red Woman Was Crying (2013) takes the reader into the rich and complex internal lives of a South Pacific people called the Nagovisi, among whom he lived for several years in the 1960s and 70s. Through the narrators the reader knows the young anthropologist, himself struggling with his identity as a Vietnam-era American, who’s come to study their culture in a time of change. Don Mitchell lives in Hilo with the poet Ruth Thompson.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.
Ruth Thompson is the author of Woman With Crows (2013) and Here Along Cazenovia Creek (2011). Woman with Crows explores a new mythology of the divine feminine, from encounters with “hungry ghosts” to the fool-crone, “dancing what she does not know to dance.” The book was a finalist for the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To the Lighthouse Prize, and includes poems that won the New Millennium Writings Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler prize. Her chapbook Here Along Cazenovia Creek was the basis for “The Seasons,” a collaborative performance of poetry and dance with the great Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu. Much of her new work explores the experience of dementia through figures like “The White Queen” and the mad Pythia of “Dementia,” and some of this new work appears in Poetry Flash and Tupelo Quarterly. She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Indiana University. In a previous life, she was a college dean in Los Angeles. She now lives in Hilo, Hawai’i with writer-anthropologist Don Mitchell. She teaches writing, and meditation, yoga, and writing workshops throughout the US.
Peter Turchi‘s books include A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic ; Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie, in collaboration with the artist; a novel, The Girls Next Door; and a collection of stories, Magician. He has also co-edited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Story, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, and the Colorado Review. From 1993 to 2008 he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Peter Turchi recently taught at Arizona State University, where he was director of the creative writing program, and he’s currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when people come from San Francisco, the North Bay, the East Bay, the South Bay–everywhere–to crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong into its fifth year.
