Tag: Poetry

Reading + Signing w/ Regina O’Melveny, Carolyn B Flynn, & Deena Metzger

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.

Table Reading

Presented by the FRDLP. Hosted by Renée Petropoulos

Join us for a session of careful, attentive live reading and interpretation of “What is Authority?” by Hannah Arendt and The School of Public Life by the late Fred Dewey. Table Reading sessions are hosted at Beyond Baroque, led by Renée Petropoulos and the Fred Rogers Dewey Legacy Project (FRDLP).

Historically, these sessions presented texts from the work of Hannah Arendt, but the FRDLP is celebrating Dewey’s work by reviving this series with one of his own texts, The School of Public Life. This project involves participants reading aloud around a table and interpreting the text as each pulls meaning from it. The activity is a public interpretation of ideas, read together without “expertise,” but with mind and heart. Following Dewey’s commitment to her work, this series will include readings of Hannah Arendt as we move through the months.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Skulls & Stairs: Osmani Ochoa, Poeta del Río, Rosa Christina Pam Concepcion

September installment of our reading series in the staircase of the BB building!

Skulls & Stairs is a reading series at the infamous staircase of the original Venice city hall building featuring poets writing with grit, punk, and goth attitudes, among other experiments. This installment features L.A. based poets: Osmani Ochoa, Poeta del Río, Rosa Christina, and Pam Concepcion.

Doors Open: 7:00 PM I Readings: 7:30 PM

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Book Launch: Sutra Americana by Monona Wali

Monona Wali presents her new novel in conversation with Neelanjana Banerjee.

Join us for a conversation with author Monona Wali as she presents her novel Sutra Americana, the decades-long story of a close-knit Indian immigrant family who, in learning to be American, a complex and exhilarating project, find the threads of their relationships unravel. Weike Wang, author of Rental House writes: “The love in this luminous family saga is fierce and tested through the competing forces of devotion and reinvention.”

Monona will read and be in conversation with Neelanjana Banerjee, writer and Managing Editor of Kaya Press.

About the participants:

Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. Born in Benares, India, she now lives in Los Angeles, California.

Neelanjana Banerjee’s fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She is based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches creative writing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University, and in the Literary Editing and Publishing Program at USC.

About the book:

In 1960 S. K. Sharma, a brilliant young astrophysicist at the beginning of his academic career, has finally succeeded in bringing his wife, Sushila, from India to America. Intensely drawn to one another as star university students, the couple pursue an unlikely affair and marriage that crosses caste lines. Their sweeping, decades-long story of love, forgiveness, and coming of age takes place in a country that is both fascinated by and shuns them. The United States, with its exaltation of individualism, offers immense opportunities, but its looser sexual mores threaten to undermine the family’s happiness and devotion to one another.

As their three daughters become young women, they must navigate the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. In their journeys of self-discovery, they upend their parents’ hold on them to craft radically new identities for themselves. As they discover their parents’ faults they grow increasingly puzzled by their devotion to one another, eventually learning how love and forgiveness have the power to overcome the most uncomfortable truths.

Mariano Zaro and Blas Falconer, A Night of Poetry in Translation

A Reading in celebration of Mariano Zaro’s “Padre Tierra” translated by Blas Falconer.

Beyond Baroque celebrates the book-length poem, Padre Tierra (Artepoetica Press), by Mariano Zaro, translated from the Spanish by Blas Falconer. A bilingual edition that moves between the rooms of a childhood home in rural Northern Spain and the body of a father becoming, by degrees, the land itself. The poets will be reading excerpts from the book in The Wanda Coleman Theater followed by a reception and book signings.

Doors Open: 7:00 PM I Readings: 7:30 PM

About the authors

Mariano Zaro is the author of six poetry collections, including Padre Tierra (Olifante 2019, Zaragoza, Spain), a book-length poem inspired by the author’s own relationship with his father, a farmer, and the rugged landscape of his home in Northern Spain. Zaro earned a Master’s in Literature from the University of Zaragoza (Spain) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Granada (Spain). He is a professor of Spanish at Rio Hondo Community College in Whittier, California.

Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body , This Failure (Four Way Books 2018). He is a poetry editor at The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Livestream: If you can’t join us in person the event will be livestreamed on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube channel at the scheduled time of the event. If you are tuning in this way, no ticket purchase is necessary.

If you are attending in person, ticket purchase is required. Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.