liz gonzalez dances on the Santa Ana Winds to Ventura to read tonight Th. 10/11 730pm
Sonia Sanchez says that “All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo or they say “Something’s wrong, let’s change it to the better.” Meet liz gonzalez, one those writers who has worked for years as a community college teacher and as a community leader to change the world through her words and her work to make the world better.
According to her website, “liz gonzález, a fourth generation Southern Californian, grew up in the San Bernardino Valley. She is the author of Dancing in the Santa Ana Winds: Poems y Cuentos New and Selected (Los Nietos Press 2018) and the poetry collection Beneath Bone (Manifest Press 2000). Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have been published widely and will appear in or recently appeared in Voices de la Luna, the City of Los Angeles 2017 Latino Heritage Month Calendar and Cultural Guide and Litbreak Magazine, and in the anthologies, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Voices from Leimert Park Anthology Redux.
Fall Books 2018: Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl
As we move into fall, it’s time to settle in by the fire and read!
Or more likely, here in sunny southern California, sit at the beach and read…
In late August, I devoured Lab Girl by by Hope Jahren, the book selected by Ventura College for our “One Book One Campus” program. That means faculty are encouraged to use the book in their classes across disciplines and to make public special events and speakers, particularly during the month of October. Read more…
Out of the Mud and Ashes We Rise for Ventura’s 2018 ArtWalk
There’s plenty of inspiring art to go around this weekend in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties!
“It’s all about the descent into the shadow, and coming back out,” “Out of the Mud and Ashes Artistic Director John Lengsfelder said recently in an interview with the SB Independent. “It’s shattering; it’s raw; it’s the earth; it’s dark; it’s perilous — and yet we have to see our way out. That is what we are trying to do.”
In Santa Barbara at the Lobero Theater on Saturday night, I am excited to be joining these artists with my spoken word performance “What Does Thomas Teach Us?” Read more…
LANGUAGE: In a Word, a World
Words are written language, and carry for us the breath of life.
As a writer, words are my paints on my palette, my tools in my tool box.
Words are everything — and they are nothing if we don’t imbue them with power, with meaning, if we don’t follow the advice to “choose our words wisely.”
Poets and writers are passionate about words as described by poet C.D. Wright in her prose poem “In a Word, a World”:
I love them all.
I love that a handful, a mouthful, gets you by, a satchelful can land you a job, a well-chosen clutch of them could get you laid, and that a solitary word can initiate a stampede, and therefore can be formally outlawed — even by a liberal court bent on defending a constitution guaranteeing unimpeded utterance. I love that the Argentine gaucho has over two hundred words for the coloration of horses and the Sami language of Scandinavia has over a thousand words for reindeer based on age, sex, appearance-e.g., a busat has big balls or only one big ball. More than the pristine, I love the filthy ones for their descriptive talent as well as transgressive nature. I love the dirty ones more than the minced, in that I respect extravagant expression more than reserved. I admire reserve, especially when taken to an ascetic nth. I love the particular lexicons of particular occupations. The substrate of those activities. The nomenclatures within nomenclatures. I am of the unaccredited school that believes animals did not exist until Adam assigned them names. My relationship to the word is anything but scientific; it is a matter of faith on my part, that the word endows material substance, by setting the thing named apart from all else. Horse, then, unhorses what is not horse.
Honest Abe: I’d Rather Play Video Games
Did you know that Abraham Lincoln would rather be playing video games? It must be true because he said so — right there on a t-shirt I bought at department store. Why would they lie?
So I actually got this t-shirt for my son but I knew I’d want to borrow it. So far, he has no interest in wearing it — but I’m wearing it today to class to talk about RESEARCH and SOURCES. Whether in a research paper, a blog post or a presidential tweet, it is critical that credible sources are used and cited as possible and where necessary. Read more…
Do you have Nature Deficit Disorder? Do you need a Nature Fix? Join a Coastal Cleanup!
Richard Louv coined the term “nature deficit disorder” to describe modern society’s lack of connection to nature.
Florence Williams describes the “Nature Fix” in her book of the same title:
Can nature really make us feel better, do better, and be better?
I think so!
And so do many researchers.
Children of all ages need to get outside and explore, play, and test boundaries by climbing trees, creating structures, and going deep into nature. But in the US, this just isn’t happening as much any more. The video below compares and contrasts childhood experiences with nature in the US with this elf children in Europe:
Read more…Rising Out of the Mud and Ashes
On Sat. Oct. 6, 2018, at 7:30pm in the 600 seat Lobrero Theater in Santa Barbara CA, OPUS Archives presents Out of the Mud and Ashes, an evening of reflection and entertainment featuring the recipients of the 2018 New Mythos Artist Grants — and I am one of the awardees! Read more…
Climate scientist Robbie Andrew, a senior researcher at CICERO (Center for International Climate and Environmental Research) depicts the increasing “wave” of CO2 riffing on the iconic painting “The Great Wave off Kanazawa” by Japanese artist Hokusai. At the current rate of increase, CO2 will be approximately 900ppm by 2100. A 900ppm CO2 atmosphere means a 4.5C increase in the global average temperature, rendering significant parts of the Earth uninhabitable for humans. At 650ppm, human cognitive functionality drops. More info here. http://artforclimatechange.org/1373-2/
“The dire and seemingly unsolvable fact of climate change—just like the unsolvable fact of our own morality—doesn’t signify the end of ethical thought but its beginning, for it’s only in recognizing the fact that our lives are limited, complicit, imperfect, and interdependent that we begin to understand what it means to live together in this world.” — Roy Scranton, “Raising a Daughter in a Doomed World”
On Sat. Sept. 8, hundreds of thousands of people will RISE for Climate, Jobs, and Justice.
“We need to learn to see not just with Western eyes but with Islamic eyes and Inuit eyes, not just with human eyes but with golden-cheeked warbler eyes, coho salmon eyes, and polar bear eyes, and not even just with eyes at all but with the wild, barely articulate being of clouds and seas and rocks and trees and stars.” — Roy Scranton, “We’re Doomed. Now What?”, New York Times, Dec. 21, 2015
And as this series of tweets from 350.org’s Bill McKibben shows, people are getting the message out NOW and in many creative ways. Read more…
Diversity and Burning Man’s Principle of Radical Inclusion
photo by Leori Gill of Black Rock Citizens gathered around the Man on Burn Night 2018
Just like any city in America, Black Rock City is made up of a wide range of people. Sometimes people are surprised to find that there are even families and children at Burning Man: in fact there are over 600 residents each year in KIdsville, the largest camp at Burning Man, and BRC is full of people of all genders, sexual orientations, and colors.
But while one of the 10 Principles is Radical Inclusion, Black Rock City is remarkably white. Read more…
BE Creative
Right now, lots of my friends are doing something that they’ve been trained not to be — creative. Read more…
art predator 