SebARTS launches new literary offerings

Writers salons, lit crawls, poetry readings, author visits and more as Sebastopol Center for the Arts re-ignites its literary offerings

Sebastopol Center for the Arts, which over the last few years has focused primarily on the visual arts, has launched a robust new literary program, which they kicked off last week with the sold-out Rumi’s Caravan, an extravaganza of ecstatic music and poetry.

“Our literary arts program was one that kind of fell off during COVID, and we wanted to very purposefully reengage the literary community and invite them back in,” said SebARTS director Serafina Palandech. “We wanted to hear what folks wanted, what they missed, and then create some new avenues for engagement for new and different literary voices.”

“So we sent a survey out to our literary arts community, folks who’ve participated in the past, and then we developed an entire literary arts program for this year,” she said. “We're now hosting regular writers salons; there's going to be poetry readings; and then we added a lit crawl in April.”

The Writers’ Salon begins February 29

SebARTS Writers Salon is a monthly in-person gathering for local writers, which takes place the last Thursday of the month. Each person will have five minutes to read their work and then get feedback and insights from their fellow writers.

The salon is hosted by the center’s popular arts lecturer Linda Loveland Reid.

“We wanted to provide a place where writers could come and read their work—they can read anything they want: poetry, prose, an essay, anything. The idea will be to give them a comfortable place to put their work out there in a very supportive atmosphere and get feedback.”

“One of the things that really is nice about something like this is that you get all these different opinions,” she said, “You have all these personalities that could come back and say, you know, that was really great or it didn't work for me.”

“This is the first time that Sebastopol Center for the Arts has done a class like this, and I think it's going to be well received,” Reid said.

Find out more about the Writer’s Salon here.

The Lit Crawl on April 13

SebARTS’ website describes the Lit Crawl Sebastopol this way: “It features dozens of authors during its four hours of literary mayhem and will draw hundreds of readers, writers and revelers to crawl through downtown Sebastopol, listening to readings and celebrating Sonoma County’s spirited and diverse literary community.”

“So the idea of the crawl, it's like a pub crawl, and instead of going from bar to bar to bar, you're going from business to business and hearing different authors reading their work over the course of four hours,” Palandech said. “They’ll be at Retrograde Coffee, Silk Moon Milk and Honey, the Senior Center, the library and Luminarium, of course,” which is one of the businesses that Palandech owns in town. “And hopefully other bars and restaurants as well. Pretty much every hour there will be a reading at one of those locations. So you can just go from location to location and hear different authors reading their work. It's all free.”

“I really want to engage our community and our greater downtown business association with the arts,” she said. “I think that arts is a huge revenue driver for our town.”

“We're accepting submissions from folks who want to be a reader, who want to present their work, and then we'll prepare a schedule, and we'll share that out with the community so folks can know on that Saturday, April 13, where to go to hear what they want to hear. Think like a big film festival except it's like a literary festival.”

If you would like to apply to be a reader at the lit crawl, apply here. The deadline is March 4 at 11:59 pm.

The lit crawl will culminate in an author event at SebARTS at 6:30 pm, featuring Alka Joshi, the internationally bestselling author of the Jaipur Trilogy: The Henna Artist, The Secret Keeper of Jaipur and The Perfumist of Paris. Her debut novel, The Henna Artist, was a New York Times bestseller, a Reese Witherspoon Pick, an Indigo 10 Best books of 2020, and was long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

"Being Brave" Writing Workshop with Elizabeth Herron, April 14

The day after the lit crawl, Sonoma County Poet Laureate Elizabeth Herron brings her Being Brave Poetry Workshop back to SebARTS.

The description the website describes it this way: “The Being Brave Poetry Workshop brings people together to discover their deeper, often hidden, feelings of hesitation and fear and to transform those feelings through writing using poetic language. Simple suggestions for connecting with the heart and brief writing prompts take participants into the imagination where the possibilities for transformation arise through the discovery of personal images and their shaping into words. This in itself is profoundly empowering. We long to have our hearts awakened, and poetry is about the heart. In the Being Brave Poetry Project, we hear the heart speak.” 

Learn more about this workshop here. You can also read this Sebastopol Times article on Elizabeth Herron, in which she talks about her approach to teaching this workshop.

And it just keeps on going…

In addition to the events listed above, this summer SebARTS will be doing another iteration of the Reverberations exhibition, which combines art and poetry, offering pieces of artwork and poetry inspired by those pieces of artwork (this is known as ekphrastic poetry). Then, starting in July, SebARTS will also host a series of lectures on Mentors & Teachers of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Just the tip of the iceberg

The amazing thing is that these new literary offerings are just the tip of the iceberg. Palandech and the center’s staff and volunteers are also injecting new energy and creative ideas into the center’s fine arts and music and film programs as well, which we will cover in upcoming articles.

Learn more about the center’s literary offerings, upcoming classes, and calls for entry.