Women in America Exhibit Tour

The Women in America exhibit at the Mistlin Gallery was open for two days before being closed due to the additional orders and our high virus numbers. The exhibit celebrates the 19th Amendment and the success of Women In America. The Modesto branch of National League of American Pen Women participated with artists and writers pairing to respond to the other’s work in the ekphrastic method. The ekphrastic section of the show has both the art and writings of the works and some other individuals in addition to Pen Women participated with their ekphrastic work. In addition to the ekphrastic pairings of art there is a variety of different works relating to the theme of Women in America and the 19th Amendment.

Though there is virtual tour information on the gallery website, it is not the same as seeing the work in person. For this reason Henrietta Sparkman has organized private showings on these upcoming dates to see the exhibit:

October 8th at 1:00pm
October 15th at 1:00pm

The showing are for about 5-6 people in order to stay safe. Of course masks are necessary and physically distancing inside the gallery. Please contact the gallery director at ccaagallery@gmail.com in order to schedule your viewing of the show.

The gallery is located at 1015 J Street. If there is no available parking on the street, you may park at the 10th Street parking facility only and receive a parking voucher at the gallery that is good for 4 hours.

Women in America Exhibit Tour

The Women in America exhibit at the Mistlin Gallery was open for two days before being closed due to the additional orders and our high virus numbers. The exhibit celebrates the 19th Amendment and the success of Women In America. The Modesto branch of National League of American Pen Women participated with artists and writers pairing to respond to the other’s work in the ekphrastic method. The ekphrastic section of the show has both the art and writings of the works and some other individuals in addition to Pen Women participated with their ekphrastic work. In addition to the ekphrastic pairings of art there is a variety of different works relating to the theme of Women in America and the 19th Amendment.

Though there is virtual tour information on the gallery website, it is not the same as seeing the work in person. For this reason Henrietta Sparkman has organized private showings on these upcoming dates to see the exhibit:

October 8th at 1:00pm
October 15th at 1:00pm

The showing are for about 5-6 people in order to stay safe. Of course masks are necessary and physically distancing inside the gallery. Please contact the gallery director at ccaagallery@gmail.com in order to schedule your viewing of the show.

The gallery is located at 1015 J Street. If there is no available parking on the street, you may park at the 10th Street parking facility only and receive a parking voucher at the gallery that is good for 4 hours.

Second Tuesday @ Barkin’ Dog – on Zoom!

Join host Stella Beratlis in our monthly reading + open mic series. This month we are excited to feature Eliot Schain, author of THE DISTANT SHORE, and Patrick Cahill, author of THE MACHINERY OF SLEEP.

Patrick Cahill’s prose and poems have appeared in over forty journals, including TriQuarterly, Volt, Poets Eleven, the Irish magazine Into the Void, Subprimal, and Eclectica. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. He is a cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal and was a contributing editor for the Sonoma County anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots. Patrick received his Ph.D. in History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of this work have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve.

Eliot Schain’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Santa Monica Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Miramar, among other journals, as well as in three anthologies: The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Christopher Buckley and Gary Young’s Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California, and America, We Call Your Name: Poems of Resistance and Resilience. Schain’s books include American Romance from Zeitgeist Press and Westering Angels from Small Poetry Press. He has served as program director for the Poetry Society of America, has taught high school, and now works as a psychotherapist. A proud member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, he lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Mary.

 

Open mic follows: sign up in advance (10 slot available): https://form.jotform.com/berattle/secondtuesday

Zoom: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/91739636824

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +16699006833,91739636824# or +12532158782,91739636824#

Or Telephone: +1 669 900 6833 (US Toll)/Meeting ID: 917 3963 6824

Sep 23

Poems of Joy and Celebration, Day 19

The Secret of Youth

by Micah Daniels

Last night I asked my mother to cornrow my hair
A skill I had been practicing since last summer
But always ended with a tumbleweed excuse of a braid

My black has always resided in braids
In tango fingers that work through tangles
Translating geometry from hands to head

For years my hair was cultivated into valleys and hills
That refused to be ironed out with a brush held in my hand
I have depended on my mother to make them plains

I am 18 and still sit between my mother’s knees
I still welcome the cracks of her knuckles in my ears
They whisper to me and tell me the secret of youth

I want to be 30 sitting between my mother’s knees
Her fingers keeping us both young while organizing my hair
I never want to flatten the hills by myself
I want the brush in her hand forever

Copyright © 2020 by Micah Daniels. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 5, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Most Poetry will post a poem on the theme of joy and celebration, selected by our members, each day through the month of September.

Sep 22

Poems of Joy and Celebration, Day 18

And what if the wilderness…

by Ross Gay

And what if the wilderness — perhaps the densest wild in there — thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) — is our sorrow? Or, to use Smith’s term, the ‘intolerable.’ It astonishes me sometimes — no, often — how every person I get to know — everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow. Brother addicted. Mother murdered. Dad died in surgery. Rejected by their family. Cancer came back. Evicted. Fetus not okay. Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

From The book of delights, Ross Gay, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Most Poetry will post a poem on the theme of joy and celebration, selected by our members, each day through the month of September.