Spring is here! Let’s Write!

Date: Saturday, April 21

Time: 10:30am-1:00pm

Location: The Share Exchange in Santa Rosa

During this Saturday morning creative writing prompt session, we will leap together into the tremendous adventure of writing. Get ready for fun and thoughtful in-class exercises to spark your imagination and get you jumping for your pen. For those who have attended before, we have a whole new set of exciting exercises to explore! Plus, you’ll get the opportunity to share your writing with the class without stressing about judgement or critique. No doubt, you will leave with plenty of new ideas and inspiration to last a long while. Tea and snacks will be provided!

$35.00-$60/Sliding Scale – Scholarships available

Email us at petalsandbones@gmail.com to sign up!

Dates: Thursdays, May 10, 17, 24, 31

Time: 6:30-8:45pm

Location: Leilani’s house (near downtown Santa Rosa)

Cost: $80-$100 sliding scale

$25 deposit due on registration via Pay Pal or check to reserve your spot.

Enrollment limited to 6

In this 4 week series, participants will engage with creativity through clever and though-provoking writing exercises and will receive positive feedback and tidbits and ideas to keep the writing practice flowing throughout the week and in between our weekly meetings.

Dates: Thursdays April 5, 12, 19, 26
When: 6:30pm – 9pm
Where: Atlas Coffee, 300 South A Street. Santa Rosa
Cost: $100– scholarships and sliding scale available
Who: You!

Please visit www.petalsandbones.com

or email petalsandbones@gmail.com or danisavestheworld@yahoo.com for more information!

Come celebrate International Women’s Day with KWTF Radio, the Arlene Francis Center and a PALOOZA of your favorite women artists!!

ART SHOW w/
Julia Davis
Zohn Mandel
Mica Jennings
Victoria Wagner
Carrie Elzey
Caitlin Childs
Whitni Rader
Heidi Iverson
Danielle DeMuro
Gwendolyn Grace
Kirsten Dearing
Meredith Johnson
Genevieve Pea
Sara Davis
Xenia Craft
Sara Sanger
Ava Burlison
Zelia Harger

FUN INTERACTIVE TABLING

Petals and Bones
Dani Burlison
Leilani Clark

Shop Party
Olivia Browning
Meredith Jayne Lenci

Roller Derby Girls
Lacey Graham

Words w/ Hiya Swanhuyser

KWTF Radio
Desiree Poindexter
Caitlin Childs
Ben Saari and more!

MUSIC

DJ JEWSY
DJ AMY

Darkfoot feat. Alexandria Wotring
Sharky Coast
The 50/50s
Little Lost Boys (confirmation pending)

PLUS raffle, bake sale, special guests and more TBA!!

FIVE DOLLAR REQUESTED DONATION AT DOOR*
*no one will be turned away for lack of funds

THIS IS AN ALL AGES EVENT

BEER AND WINE AVAILABLE for 21+

OFFICIAL POSTER COMING SOON BUT FOR NOW ENJOY SOME COMMIE HEDGEHOG PROPAGANDA

For more info on IWD:
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

For more info on this event contact: Lila Cugini

For more KWTF info:

http://kwtf.net/

Crossing

Ever been crossed by someone you thought could be trusted? Randomly crossed paths with an old lover while backpacking through Patagonia? Crossed a threshold, arriving at the other side with new insights? Crossed a metaphoric line that you never knew you had? Crossed over bodies of water or masses of land in unconventional manners? Decided to cross the road and see for yourself what the proverbial chicken experienced? Found your hands tracing the air in the Sign of the Cross after surviving a potential catastrophe? Cross an item off of a long wish list? So many ways to engage in crossing and we want to hear all about it. Please send us your stories, poems, lyrics, lists and dreams of up to 2,000 words by June 30, 2012. petalsandbones@gmail.com

Issue #4 Collected Interviews from the Blog!

Our latest issue features interviews on creativity, persistence, your paleolithic brilliant birthright, and the importance of french presses, with artist and writers  like Tomas Moniz, Ariel Gore, Inga Musico, Mike Sacks, Vanessa Davis, and more. If you’ve ever needed the inspiration to embrace your own “mortal fucking genius” (in the words of our lit idol Inga) then this is the zine for you!

On sale for $5 in the zine shop.

Here’s the details from the Word Up website:

Free & Fun Word Up! Fair!

Sunday, October 30, 2011,
11 AM to 6 PM
Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in Petaluma, CA

5 Learning Lounges featuring new things to learn from 30 local organizations including…

Eat Grass Roots, Southern Sonoma County Resource Conservation, Bite Club Eats, Boys and Girls Club, Petals and Bones, Paleotechnics, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, Talk is Sheep, Aqus Community, Livability Project/Share Exchange, Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition and Mentor Me Petaluma.

Presented by Literacyworks, The Word Up! Fair will be a day full of authors, entertainers, local learning resources and “how to” opportunities. It is a chance for all who participate to learn and experience something new for and about themselves, their families and the community.

And here are the specifics about our contribution.

1. Can you give some background on your life as a musician? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you have a formal education in something music related?

I grew up in Ft. Bragg/Mendocino, California. I started playing basic piano when I was 5 years old. I took lessons from pre-school through first grade and then quit because I had a decent ear and wasn’t interested in reading music or following lesson books. I picked up piano again when I was 14 with an art therapy teacher who let me improvise and learn any piece I wanted. I then moved on to an improvisational jazz teacher. Around the same time my father, who is also a guitar player, introduced me to a few open chords with which I was able to learn a few covers.

During my college years at UC Santa Cruz I began playing in a few punk/rock bands. I played electric guitar and keyboard. I then picked up the acoustic guitar after a serious heartbreak and began writing my own songs at the age of 20. I started with an all girl group called The Diamond Star Halos and then went on to pursue my own solo music after our lives went in different directions. I essentially made it a goal in 2005/2006 to record my first record. I released it in 2007 and had some success here and in Europe which has continued to build. I’ve released three records. My first two were released in Europe and in the US. The third one was released in Europe last year and I’m hoping to release it in the US sometime soon.

In regard to formal musical training, I took many piano lessons and a music theory class in college but I never pursued any kind of formal training on a serious level.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

I’ve been touring so much these past three years that I’ve currently taken a break from writing with the intention of making a record. I needed to take the pressure off myself for awhile. However, I sing and write all the time. I often sit with my guitar and record whatever comes out, or sit at the piano and improvise. I have about 50 sketches of songs on my computer right now. Music is a life practice for me. I write because I have to. It’s a form of catharsis. I never intended for music to be my main career but am grateful it has become this way for now. Because I essentially manage my whole musical project, I sometimes get caught up in the mundane maintenance of that and it distracts me from my creative process. I’ve recently been designing and enforcing a structure for myself to write at least one thing a day, whether it be a poem or a song.

My ideas come from strong autobiographical sentiments within, or reactions and empathic responses to things I have heard about or witnessed. My songwriting is a way for me to channel political criticism, negative sentiment, anger, and primarily sadness and melancholy, into something transformative and hopeful. My most recent record is autobiographical but my first two records have a few songs written in response to the legacy of other artists by whom I’ve been strongly influenced, literature, or political issues.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Well, I’m no expert on the creative process. But, one thing that has been helpful and was recommended to me by a dear artist friend of mine is to pick up a copy of “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke and really ask yourself the question of what do you want to create and why? What is it that you want and have to say? By what are you informed? Who do you want to inform? There are a lot of inexplicable elements to the creative process making it hard to talk about. Some of these elements are deeply personal and hard to translate to others.

Another way is to simply free write. I was taught how to free write in middle school and it has been of great use to me. I simply write whatever I’m feeling or thinking for 20 minutes without stopping or censoring myself. It helps to remove creative blocks.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

These are great questions!  Creating art takes work and discipline. There is no doubt about that. It depends on what you’re doing with your idle time and relaxation. A lot of my work was initially written in solitude. I have played with extraordinarily talented musicians, so during rehearsal the songs took on a new life once I played them for my band mates and allowed for collaborative accompaniment. I have to stay firmly disciplined in protecting my solitude and alone time if I want to stay in touch with my creative process.

Since I’ve been on break, I’ve allowed myself time for distraction, leading me to take a good look my artistic life and the structure it needs.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

I spent so much time these past 3 years recording records and touring that my day to day when I return home is not very routine. I spend a lot of time walking and exercising. While I do this I often listen to a lot of interviews with artists that I really admire. I have suffered a few repetitive motion injuries over the years so I do a lot of physical exercise to deal with those. I read articles and listen to NPR and music I’ve never heard before. I also spend a lot of time dealing with e-mail, contracts, those kinds of things. Having spent so much time away, I do make friends and family a priority.

A sample of Emily’s talent: Emily Jane White live: A Shot Rang Out

1. Can you give some background on your life as a writer? How did you come to choose this career?

Although I write for a living – freelancing without a job – I don’t think I can say writing is a career. Journalists aren’t professional writers; they/we are assemblers and disseminators of information, story-shapers, certainly, truth-seekers, perhaps, full-time fighters for justice, sometimes; in any case, writing is just part of the job. We don’t think of a storeowner’s career as being in the shop, though often that is the most primary part of his or her job – that’s what I mean.

As for professional fiction writers, to give another example, who support themselves entirely on the income of their books, I dare say that a hefty percentage of these people are essentially customizable stampers – they create a basic template or formula and reproduce it with varying details. I think this kind of career is called commerce. I like to think of the process of writing (put as simply as possible) as the development of self. Career fiction writing – commerce – is not mine.

In that regard, I never chose to be a writer. I decided to write because it seemed to me that writing was the most difficult pursuit in that it forces one to constantly develop the self and therefore to remain honest. I chose to continue to grow and perceived writing to be the best tool to that end. Also, I chose to write because it seemed (and still seems) to me that the verbal expression of human experience is the most valuable activity in which one can engage. We are able to find ourselves through the process and to document our evolution as a species (and, one would like to argue, from one species to another); such records allow us to learn from the past and from others so that we can proceed and, hopefully, do so together. This can be applied to individual development too, of course.

It’s not what we do, but how, that’s important. For better or worse, language is the backbone of human nature. I want to support the growing animal.

What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you have a degree in creative writing or journalism?

I created – with the help of many people – San Francisco’s first monthly submission-based reading series, Quiet Lightning, which is now a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Quiet Lightning, as far as I can tell, is responsible for several revolutions: 1) The submission process is blind because it is the quality of work that is most important. 2) We do not introduce the accepted authors and do not allow them to introduce themselves (or to banter in any way) because each pattern of language is a self-contained spell; when they interpenetrate one another in rapid succession, the audience is forced to continually reinterpret the context of each spell. This is dizzying in all the best ways. (Is it the name that grounds us, stamped from the start as something specific?) 3) We publish each show and have the books for sale at the shows. Another way to look at this is that we accept submissions to a monthly book or magazine — comprised exclusively of creative writing (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.) — and perform each issue only once, as though the reading series were really a monthly book release. I think we’re the first people to do this.

I also created Litseen, which serves the Bay Area literary community by documenting readings of all kinds and discussing them, publishing book reviews and author interviews, and providing an extensive video archive of performances. There are now two other staff members and a handful of additional contributors to Litseen and, to date, we have filmed over 2500 author readings… in the past 18 months.

Also, I am the official blogger for Litquake, the largest literary festival this side of the Mississip’. I mention this because, as you can see if you look at my coverage the first year [through page 16] and last, it definitely qualifies as a major ‘project!’

I do not have any degrees. I dropped out of school twice. I am proud of this, and like to think of “my piece of paper” as my lack of a need for one. Degrees, in so many ways, are just crutches, and you don’t need those to get a library card.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

The desire to be creative is the procreant urge! When I said it’s not what you do but how that’s important I meant that our character is defined by the details of our lives: do we cut corners or do we express ourselves to the degree that others can plainly see we express the wholly inexpressible, that, though we have added every flourish imaginable, we in fact have done so by an exudation of limitless energy, and are, in effect, shaping ourselves through the process. If we don’t express this every time we express something, we lose access to the bottomless well – to the self. (This is called aging.) If we can’t find anything else to do, we should dance until we are needed.

Ideas come from activity. If you keep doing, and you keep an open mind, you will wish that you had fewer ideas and more time.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Surround yourself with inspiration. What makes you think: HOLY FUCK? Plaster that shit on your walls! Don’t take it for granted. Why would you take something that makes you think HOLY FUCK for granted?

Also: treat yourself like a little punk. Talk trash to yourself. But don’t just take it! Show yourself who’s boss. Do things despite yourself. If you’re getting tired and want to sleep, for instance, perhaps you should try another voice. Is that obtuse? To become tired, I mean, is to acquiesce to one perspective. Role-play yourself. Stop thinking about what you’re doing. Remember (I cannot stress this enough): it’s how you do things that’s important, not what things you do. Let justice be the thing you do.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

Discipline is crucial. But so is flexibility. You must not rest until your work is finished (and perhaps not then, either). But how and when you work is another thing. Trust your instincts. You’ll talk to yourself (you’re doing it now, though probably I’m providing the bulk of the words)… make sure you listen.

Idle time is preposterous. In the words of Henry Miller, stand still like the hummingbird. Relaxation – a deep breath of fresh air – is possible through work (believe it or not). Have you tried painting?

A common misconception is that art is something that requires strangulation. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it. Have to do it? Make it fun.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

These are parts of my everyday: I brush my teeth, eat, sleep, and send out and receive a lot of emails. The rest just depends. And once a week I don’t touch my computer.