Acclaimed authors Regina O’Melveny, Carolyn Brigit Flynn, and Deena Metzger share their newest work and sign books.

Join us at the studio at Village Well for a reading and signing!

Authors Regina O’Melveny, Carolyn Brigit Flynn, and Deena Metzger will present work new and old and sign copies of their books.

About the authors:

Regina O’Melveny is an artist and writer whose work has been widely published in literary magazines such as The Bellingham Review, The Sun, West Marin Review, and Barrow Street. Her poem, Fireflies, won the Conflux Press Poetry Award, released as an artist’s book designed by Tania Baban. She has published three chapbooks, Secret, New and other gods which won a prize from the Munster International Literary Centre in Ireland. Full-length poetry books include Blue Wolves winner of the Bright Hill Press award and The Shape of Emptiness released by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. Her novel, The Book of Madness and Cures, published by Little, Brown and Company was listed as one of the six best historical novels of the year 2012 by NPR. Her novel The Sea-Cure is forthcoming from Running Wild Press. She lives in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Carolyn Brigit Flynn is a poet, essayist, and teacher. Her works include the poetry collection Communion, and three literary anthologies, most recently Sacred Stone, Sacred Water: Women Writers and Artists Encounter Ireland. Her poems and essays have been published worldwide, and she writes a monthly Substack newsletter. For more than 25 years, she has taught writing and led retreats in Ireland and California titled “Writing to Feed the Soul.” She lives in Santa Cruz, California, with her wife, the poet Jean Mahoney. More at www.carolynbrigitflynn.com and www.carolynbrigitflynn.substack.com/.

Deena Metzger lives at the edge of Topanga State Park with Coyotes, Bobcats, Cougars and Ravens. She has published 20 books. The Story that Must Not Be Told is her latest novel, following the eco-fictions, A Rain of Night Birds and La Vieja: A Journal of Fire. The Burden of Light is her latest book of poetry following Ruin and Beauty, New and Selected Poems. She has introduced Literature of Restoration as an Earth and spirit centered genre that doesn’t lead to extinction. Her essays are at Desperate Love Letters to a Wounded Earth, Website: deenametzger.net.

About the featured titles:

The Sea-Cure:

The Sea-Cure, a novel of journeys in the seventeenth century will transport you, dear reader, far beyond the first passage from Holland to Tenerife, aboard a merchant ship that also carries misfits and the mad sent away from their towns as outcasts. The ship sails between known and unknown islands, where the voyageurs traverse human and animal realms, beauty and beastliness, servitude and freedom, isolation and love. You’ll discover what brings together Hans, a handsome but poor Dutchman who tends the mad aboard ship, and Toñina, a fascinating Spanish lady of Tenerife whose bewildering appearance, an oddity inherited from her father, challenges all who meet her with both aversion and wonder. Shipwrecked on an unknown island, they will encounter and create the strange new geography of their lives.

The Light of Ordinary Days:

In 2013, exactly a century after her grandparents emigrated from Ireland to America, Carolyn Brigit Flynn returned to her ancestral homeland in the wake of a family tragedy. Raised in a boisterous Irish Catholic family in 1970s Washington, DC, Flynn grew up amid traditional music, stories, and blarney—but also with silence about the poverty and hardship her grandparents left. Her charismatic father bore his own wounds and shunned her when she fell in love with another girl in high school.

In her thirties, Flynn realized she could not build an authentic life until she reckoned with the Irish ghosts she felt coursing through her blood. Her journey took her from the sacred stones of Newgrange to a windswept Irish island where she lived alone for a month. In the coming years, she braided her own experience of trauma and healing with the deeper thread of Ireland’s history of colonization, ancient spirituality, and profound resilience. At once intimate and expansive, Flynn’s memoir is both a personal love letter and a historical excavation. Ultimately, The Light of Ordinary Days invites readers to consider how we reassemble ourselves after tragedy—how we make a true home, across the sea or within the soul, by honoring the places and people who came before.​​

The Story That Must Not Be Told:

In 1975, a German student Ina Andreae, comes to Los Angeles to study, and later commits suicide. Fifty years later, her brother, Wolfgang Andreae, visits Deena Metzger, who was Ina’s teacher, to ask what she knew. What followed from that alliance is this novella, a fiction that is not a fiction, an unfolding emergence of facts, events and stories, showing us how wounds going back to Hitler still affect us, and their startling resemblance to the grim political dramas of today.