November 9, 2009


Monday, November 9th, 7:30 PM at the Noe Valley Ministry Fellowship Hall (downstairs),
1021 Sanchez Street

Kathleen McClung, author and teacher and Joan Sutton, Classicist

Kathleen McClung has taught writing for over fifteen years at Skyline and other colleges, mentoring hundreds of writers
including Women in Transition and Honors students. She has taught classes at The Writing Salon in San Francisco and Berkeley
and provided supervision and advocacy for student teachers in the credential program at Mills College. In addition to teaching,
Kathleen has served as a book editor at small presses including UCSF Nursing Press, Food First Books, and Westview Press,
producing cutting-edge books for clinicians, scholars, and activists.  Her memoir, fiction, and poetry have been published in
The Rambler, Spirituality & Health, Hawaii Pacific Review, Poetry Northwest, Albany Review, Hot Flashes, off our backs, and
elsewhere.  Her work has won awards from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Writer’s Digest, Memoirs,Ink., the National
Society of Arts & Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Kathleen will read from her current writings including a story
about the opera "Tosca."


Joan Sutton has been a professional storyteller for many years, entertaining both children and adults. Fifteen years ago, her
interest in Greek mythology finally led her to learn the ancient Greek language. In 2008, she received an MA in Classics at
San Francisco State University, with a special emphasis on ancient Greek poetry, and was awarded the Distinguished
Achievement Award for Academic Excellence, SFSU College of Humanities. She has published articles in Storytelling
Magazine, The American Classics League Newsletter, Pithos (the yearly journal publication of the SFSU Classics
Department) and The Healing Alliance, an online publication of the National Storytelling Network “Peace in the
Midst of Battle, a Trojan War Story” (http://www.healingstory.org/treasure/trojan_war/trojan_war_story.html).
Her first love has always been the epics of Homer, and this continues to be her lifelong interest. In addition, she has
translated and written of other Greek poets, especially the dramatists. Last summer, she taught a course entitled
“Gender and Power in Ancient Greek Drama” at San Francisco State’s Osher Lifelong Learning
Institute (OLLI), and this coming spring she is offering “Homer: the Epic Experience” at OLLI. This Odd
Monday presentation will meditate upon Aristophanes’ comedy about war and peace, the Lysistrata.

November 23, 2009


Monday, November 23rd, 7:30 PM at the Noe Valley Ministry Fellowship Hall (downstairs),
1021 Sanchez Street

Mike Miller and Susan Griffin, authors, activists


Susan Griffin is a poet, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. She was born in Los Angeles California in 1943, in the midst of
the Second World War and the holocaust, and these events had a lasting effect on her thinking. The time she spent as a
child in the High Sierras and along the coast of the Pacific Ocean also shaped her awareness. As she draws connections
between the destruction of nature, the diminishment of women and racism, and traces the causes of war to denial in both
private and public life, her work moves beyond the boundaries of form and perception. She is known for her innovative style.
Her groundbreaking book Woman and Nature is an extended prose-poem. A Chorus of Stones, the Private Life of War,
blends history and memoir as does Wrestling with Angel of Democracy, the Autobiography of an American Citizen her most
recent book (published by Trumpeter books in April, 2008.) This work explores the state of mind that engenders and sustains
democracy. Both books are part of a larger series of several volumes, comprising "social autobiography." A Chorus of Stones,
a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award, and winner of the BABRA award in 1992, was also a NY
Times Notable Book of the Year. Her play Voices, which won an Emmy in 1975 for a local PBS production, has been
performed throughout the world, including a radio production by the BBC. The Book of the Courtesans, a Catalogue of Their Virtues,
was published by Broadway Books (Random House) in 2001. Woman and Nature, the classic work that inspired eco-feminism,
was published in a new edition by Sierra Club Books in 2000.

Mike Miller has fifty years of experience in the field of community organizing as a lead organizer, consultant, workshop leader, teacher,
writer, trainer and initiator of new projects. He has worked with broad-based community organizing groups, organizing networks,
local religious, labor, civic, senior, neighborhood, minority, women's, welfare rights, tenant, homeowner, youth, merchant and other
organizations, as well as with regional and national religious and labor organizations.
Through his work with SLATE as a UC undergraduate in Berkeley, Mike was appointed the SNCC representative in
the Bay Area in 1962 and, after working for a year in Mississippi, returned to San Francisco to establish a SNCC office there
Mike’s articles on organizing and related subjects have appeared in Social Policy, Dissent, Generations, Socialist Review, the liberal
democrat, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, The Movement, Christianity & Crisis, Just Economics, New Conversations, Organizing,
The Ark, Boston Review, Living Pulpit, The Sun Reporter and other publications.
As a SNCC staff member, Miller pioneered the organization’s activism on behalf of agricultural workers. In 1964 he wrote a
working paper comparing California’s Central Valley to the Deep South and presented it at a national SNCC staff meeting.
At the same time, SNCC became interested in conducting voter registration among migrant farm workers on the East Coast.
Even though migrant farm workers in that region were primarily African-American, Miller persuaded SNCC to explore the idea
of voter registration among California’s Mexican-American farm workers. Miller met with Cesar Chavez and NFWA organizer
Dolores Huerta in late January 1965, which established the first formal connection between SNCC and the NFWA. This connection
proved to be advantageous within a few months of the initial meeting when in July 1965, the NFWA and the California Migrant
Ministry organized a rent strike against the Tulare County Housing Authority. The issue at hand was the doubling of the rent at
the Woodville and Linnell labor camps, despite no increase in pay and no improvement of the Depression-era tin huts, which had
been condemned by the county health department. Finding themselves ill prepared for a rent strike, the NFWA called on the
San Francisco SNCC office, which quickly sent organizers.
Mike has taught at the University of California (Berkeley), Stanford University, University of Notre Dame, San Francisco State
University, Hayward State University and Lone Mountain College. He is editor-at-large of Social Policy Magazine ,
and his memoir, People and Power in San Francisco: A Community Organizer’s Tale, was just published.

We gather ahead of the program for a no-host supper at Haystack Pizza promptly at 6 PM, one block away on 24th Street
between Sanchez and Vicksburg streets. Parking is available at 5 dollars for three hours in the parking lot
almost next door to the restaurant. The 24 line and the 48 line and the J Church are the nearby Muni transportation lines available.


The Odd Mondays Series is a Project of The Noe Valley Ministry
Presented by Ramón and Judith Sender