December 2007
Odd Monday Series , December 3, 2007, 7 PM
Authors Summer Brenner
and
Joe Sutton
Summer Brenner was raised in Georgia and migrated west, first to New Mexico and eventually to northern California where she has been a long-time resident. She is the author of poetry, fiction, essays, and performance work. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals. Her work includes Dancers and the Dance, Ivy: Tale of a Homeless Girl in San Francisco, Presque nulle part, One Minute Movies, The Soft Room, and From the Heart to the Center. A CD of her poems was issued in 2004 in collaboration with poet GP Skratz and musician Andy Dinsmore as Arundo Salon. (from Spuyten Duyvil).
“The women in Summer Brenner’s world grow wiser by defying expectations, both the world’s and their own. Her characters are tonic and poetic, weaving melancholy with healing. We are in the hands of a first-rate story teller.” Andrei Codrescu, author of New Orleans, Mon Amour
“The wisdom of the body is Summer Brenner’s terrain. She is the author as choreographer, a moving force with a pen.”
The Los Angeles Times
“....graphic, lyrical language to make us feel the rhythms, the hard work, the disappointments and the occasional exhilaration of something that transcends ourselves.”
Joe Sutton’s "Write Now! On the Road to Getting Published or How I Learned to Sell My Book" is a BIG/little book about writing, writer’s block, getting published and selling your book. It’s about the urge to write, fighting against complacency, when to start to write and what to write. This book is not only the story of the making of a writer, it’s a book that will make you want to write.
"Joe Sutton, God bless him, writes in the grand storyteller tradition of Jean Shepherd and William Saroyan, both of whom would have been happy, I'm sure, to treat Sutton to a steak and a few martinis in exchange for an autographed copy of his book." Barry Gifford, author of "Wild at Heart"
Joe Sutton was born in Brooklyn and raised in Hollywood. He played football at the University of Oregon and received a degree in Philosophy. He has been a high school teacher and a costume jewelry salesman. In addition to "Write Now!," he is the author of "Morning Pages: The Almost True Story of My Life" and "The Immortal Mouth and Other Stories." His short works have appeared in Writer’s Digest, Tin House, the San Francisco Chronicle, Writers’ Journal, as well as other magazines and journals. Joe lives in San Francisco with his wife Joan.
Odd Monday Series , December 17, 2007, 7 PM
Author Leonard Pitt
In his new book, A Small Moment of Great Illumination: Searching for Valentine Greatrakes, The Master Healer, Leonard Pitt (Walks Through Lost Paris) delves into the life and times of the now obscure but once famous Irish “healer,” Valentine Greatrakes, a wealthy member of the gentry who amazed 17th-century contemporaries with his seemingly God-given ability to lay his hands on the afflicted, and cure them of every ailment, from dropsy to cancer. Patients said they felt the pain “move” through their body and leave via their fingertips, nose, toes, eyes, mouth or ears, never to return. Pitt, intrigued by a footnote in a history of medicine he happened to read in 1989, describes his years-long journey to discover as much as he could about this enigmatic man: was he a charlatan, a well meaning quack or an authentic healer? Greatrakes’s well-placed friends, such as the great scientist Robert Boyle, were inclined to believe the latter (as does Pitt, one infers), but he was subjected to bitter attacks by his many enemies. In the Middle Ages, Greatrakes might have had an easier ride, but living as he did on the cusp of the Enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method, Greatrakes’s claims were intensely scrutinized.
“Endlessly fascinating and great fun, full of literary intrigue and unexpected pleasures.”
June Sawyers in The American Library Association’s Booklist
