Left Coast Writers

Left Coast Writers®: David Hathwell - The Power of Telling (San Francisco Ferry Building Store)

Monday, September 9, 2019 - 6:00pm

In The Power of the Telling, his shining collection, David Hathwell gathers his previously published poems together with new poems, enhancing the luster of the whole with illuminating commentaries.

Hathwell's finely crafted poems have won wide acclaim. Richard Wilbur, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, praised the leading poem in Muses as "concretely evocative, with a clear flow of argument, and a seriousness that allows itself to be locally playful." California poet laureate Dana Gioia commended Hathwell for "writing with quiet intensity about significant things." These qualities distinguish Hathwell's poems overall.

Hathwell has published two prior collections, Muses and Between Dog and Wolf.

1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111

Left Coast Writers® Launch: Donna Fado Ivery - Sleep, Pray, Heal (Corte Madera Store)

Saturday, October 12, 2019 - 7:00pm

When a two-hundred pound glass partition fell on Donna Fado Ivery’s head resulting in brain injury, disability, and chronic pain, she could no longer count on walking, speaking, thinking, or caring for her young children and husband. In her eighth year as a pastor, her ministry, too, seemed terminally compromised. With words awash, she painted her prayers and discovered in the images her path toward healing.

This inspirational memoir shares her struggle through medical, social, and church prejudice, and her support through the loving bond of family, community, and spirit. It was only through faith, prayer, and a new understanding of the miraculous ways that the Holy Spirit can work in our lives that she was able to eventually rise, function, realize, and share a newly refreshed and ever-unfolding relationship with God. Sleep, Pray, Heal: A Path to Wholeness and Well-Being charts the path through hardship and despair and offers a map—through scripture, theology, poetry, painting, and storytelling—to faith, healing, recovery and well-being.

In the twenty-five years since her injury, Donna Fado Ivery has served as featured preacher, painter, speaker, and lecturer at conferences, seminaries, workshops, and retreats across California and the United States. Sleep, Pray, Heal: A Path to Wholeness and Well-Being reflects the clarity and authenticity Donna brings to seekers of spiritual support and faith development. Last year a portion of Sleep, Pray, Heal: A Path to Wholeness and Well-Being placed in the William Wisdom-William Faulkner competition.

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925

Left Coast Writers® Party: Bevan Atkinson - The Fool Card (San Francisco Ferry Building Store)

Monday, August 12, 2019 - 6:00pm

The Fool Card is the first in a series of mysteries linked to the tarot deck. In this first book, Xana Bard has chosen a quiet life----drinking tea, talking to her pets, reading, and conferring with the Pacific Ocean beyond her picture window. She calls the ocean Doctor P., and it's cheaper than her therapist and may be a little more helpful. She's happy enough, until the night Thorne Ardall, shot while chasing his boss's killer, crashes into her house. Using her tarot-trained intuition rather than her better judgment, Xana patches Thorne up and they agree to track down the murderer as a team. She's sure her mother will have a cow. Her friends will have a cow. Her shrink will have a cow. They can start a dairy farm for all she cares; she has taken hold of her life again.

Bevan Atkinson, a San Francisco resident since she had any say in the matter, has been a writer in various corporate environments for some decades. She began writing The Tarot Mysteries series in 2006. Ms. Atkinson has no pets.

1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111

Left Coast Writers®: Natalie Galli - The Girl Who Said No (Corte Madera Store)

Saturday, August 17, 2019 - 7:00pm

An eighteen-year-old woman named Franca Viola made history in 1966 as one of the first "#metoo" heroines of modern times when she refused to go along with a centuries-old forcible marriage custom in Sicily. Having endured kidnap and rape, she publicly defied the expectation that she would marry the rapist to "restore her broken honor." A social uproar occurred throughout the island ― and beyond.

In Natalie Galli's The Girl Who Said No, Viola's remarkable story unfolds when the author arrives in Palermo to search for this brave heroine, with little more than the memory of a tiny article she had spotted two decades prior. Galli wanted to know: whatever had become of this courageous girl who had overturned an ancient, entrenched tradition?

The riveting events after Franca pressed charges with the police form the core of this gripping memoir. Viola was subjected to public taunting whenever she appeared on the streets of her town; Mafia-orchestrated bullying threatened her entire family. Galli traced the dramatic tale to its conclusion, in spite of initial warnings from her own relatives not to break the Sicilian code of silence.

Throughout her search for the enigmatic Franca, Galli shares her own poignant and hilarious observations about a vibrant culture steeped in contradictions and paradoxes. Does she succeed in locating the elusive proto-feminist whose case forever changed Italian culture and history? Travel along on Galli's engaging odyssey to find out.

Natalie Galli, a San Francisco native of Italian background, has penned two illustrated children's books for Sunbath Studios: Ciao Meow and Spin The Hound Lost and Found, A Tale of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. She edited a third Sunbath Studios publication: LeeLee The Lizard Wants A Pizza. Her writings have been anthologized in Italy, A Love Story and in four volumes of Travelers' Tales, three of which were awarded gold and silver prizes by the Bay Area Travel Writers. She has worked as an editor and proofreader for Burning Books, as a columnist for The Berkeley Monthly, and as a freelance contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925

Left Coast Writers® Party: Chris Delyani - Best Man (San Francisco Ferry Building Store)

Monday, July 8, 2019 - 6:00pm

Frank Mercer is a forty-year-old high school math teacher, newly divorced from his husband and struggling to make his mortgage payments. He thinks his problems will be solved by a romance with his old friend Jonathan Butler, a man Frank has secretly admired for over twenty years. But Jonathan is engaged to Marcus Pierce, his unfaithful longtime boyfriend. When Jonathan asks Frank to serve as best man at his wedding, Frank must choose between supporting his friend and speaking from his heart.

Julio Robles is Frank's roommate and a popular yoga teacher. Julio's star student is none other than Marcus, Jonathan's fiance and Frank's nemesis. And Marcus has made it clear he'd like more from Julio than yoga lessons. When Frank asks Julio to pretend to be his boyfriend on a dinner date with Jonathan and Marcus, Julio can't resist accepting the invitation, and soon finds himself in over his head.

Frank and Julio invent a fake relationship in the face of Marcus and Jonathan's all-too-real relationship. But which relationship is real, which relationship is fake? In Best Man, they find themselves confronted with fundamental questions about love, friendship, and what it means to be true to one's partner.

In 1993 Chris Delyani moved to San Francisco from his hometown of Boston to devote himself to fiction -- and has been at it ever since. He is the author of The Love Thing (2009) and You Are Here (2012). In 2013 You Are Here won the Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Award in the General Fiction category. He lives in Oakland, California.

1 Ferry Building
San Francisco, CA 94111

Left Coast Writers® Launch: Kalpana Mohan - Daddykins (Corte Madera Store)

Saturday, July 13, 2019 - 7:00pm

When journalist Kalpana Mohan's elderly father falls ill in Chennai, she is on the next flight over from California and the home she has shared with her husband for three decades. Caring for her sometimes cranky, sometimes playful, and always adored father at his home in Chennai, Mohan sets out to piece together an account of her father's life, from his poverty-stricken childhood in a village in south India, to his arranged marriage, to his first job in the city, all the while coming to terms with his inevitable passing.

Mohan's tender, moving, and sometimes hilarious memoir is an account of a changing India captured in her father's life, from the sheer feat of surviving poverty in I920s India of his birth, to witnessing key moments in the nation's history and changing alongside them. Above all, Daddykins is an intimate and deeply relatable account of our relationships with our parents whatever our age, and the shared experiences of love and grief that unite us all.

51 Tamal Vista Blvd
Corte Madera, CA 94925

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