We have an appropriately LOVE-ly treat planned for the February Left Coast Writers Literary Salon: Author and well-known songwriter and performer, Zoe Fitzgerald Carter will be brightening the month by sharing her take on how to turn life and love into lyrics.

As Zoe says, “In many ways my songwriting feels like it builds on everything I’ve done as a writer over my lifetime. It’s just another, more concentrated way to explore language and storytelling and, like all my first-person writing, draws on lived experience.

Zoe FitzGerald Carter will discuss how she decided to become a full-time songwriter and musician after working as a journalist and memoirist for 30 years. While the form is different, the challenge is the same: How to be a vivid—and economical—storyteller. Zoe will share her tips and we think she has some surprises in store, one of which involves a guitar.

Zoe FitzGerald Carter is an author, teacher and journalist who has published in The New York Times, Salon, Vogue, and Newsweek among other places. Her 2010 memoir, Imperfect Endings, about her mother’s decision to end her life, was excerpted in O magazine and was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick. Since 2017, she has turned exclusively to music, writing and performing original songs with her band, Sugartown. Her first album, Waiting for the Earthquake, came out last year and she is about to record a full-length solo album of original songs. She teaches memoir at The San Francisco Writers Grotto and Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, where she also teaches a six-week course on songwriting. Find more at zoefitzgeraldcarter.com.

Author Antoinette Constable, who was a young girl in WWII France, has written a compelling coming-of-age novel for young adult readers, Natalie in the Shadow of the Swastika. Set in 1940 occupied Paris, eight-year-old Natalie and her family—a Jewish mother, gentile father, and two sisters—cope with the harsh facts of war and Hitler’s occupying army. When her ailing father suddenly disappears, Natalie’s safe surroundings are forever changed. Her struggles with the painful family separation and the dangerous threats against her Jewish mother reveal a growing maturity in the face of confusing loss. Natalie’s fierce resolve to hold onto hope and her love of family leads her from innocence to understanding and resilience, despite the violence of war.

Born and raised in France, Antoinette Constable was a career nurse holding British and American degrees, and is also retired from her own catering business. She has lived in the United States for many years, where she raised her four children as a single mother. Her work has won the PEN First Prize for Poetry, as well as the Ann Stanford Award from the University of Southern California, and has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barnabe Mountain Review, Bay Area Poets Coalition, California Quarterly (CQ), Denver Metropolitan State Magazine, The Healing Muse, Louisville Review, and POEM. Her chapbook of war-related poems, The Lasting War, was published in December 2014.

Author Antoinette Constable, who was a young girl in WWII France, has written a compelling coming-of-age novel for young adult readers, Natalie in the Shadow of the Swastika. Set in 1940 occupied Paris, eight-year-old Natalie and her family—a Jewish mother, gentile father, and two sisters—cope with the harsh facts of war and Hitler’s occupying army. When her ailing father suddenly disappears, Natalie’s safe surroundings are forever changed. Her struggles with the painful family separation and the dangerous threats against her Jewish mother reveal a growing maturity in the face of confusing loss. Natalie’s fierce resolve to hold onto hope and her love of family leads her from innocence to understanding and resilience, despite the violence of war.

Born and raised in France, Antoinette Constable was a career nurse holding British and American degrees, and is also retired from her own catering business. She has lived in the United States for many years, where she raised her four children as a single mother. Her work has won the PEN First Prize for Poetry, as well as the Ann Stanford Award from the University of Southern California, and has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barnabe Mountain Review, Bay Area Poets Coalition, California Quarterly (CQ), Denver Metropolitan State Magazine, The Healing Muse, Louisville Review, and POEM. Her chapbook of war-related poems, The Lasting War, was published in December 2014.

Jefferson lived through world-altering upheavals in his lifetime. Not only was he one of the most important founding fathers, but he also served his new nation as one of the most influential precepts of civic responsibility in a democracy. All of this came at a time of three converging revolutions in history: the democratic revolution in America and France, the Scientific Revolution, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In The Radicalization of Thomas Jefferson, Dr. Clark J. Chelsey traces the living fabric of Jefferson’s ideas through these turbulent changes and how Jefferson modified, refined, and increasingly radicalized them in a coherent and systematic way.

Dr. Chelsey has Ph.D.s in philosophy and history from the University of California, Santa Barbara. The Radicalization of Thomas Jefferson is the result of an over 40-year fascination with Jefferson, during which Chelsey read hundreds of books and articles while researching the founding father.

Is your favorite color warm and sunny, or is it cool like water? Does it appear with the rain, or does it glow and shine in the sun? In Wild Colors of the West, the latest board book from the author of Living Wild, photographs of animals in their natural habitats show young readers the prismatic hues found in nature, from the tangerine of monarch butterflies to the fresh green of new sorrel. Each page names and locates the Western park or city where author Elaine Miller Bond photographed the featured species.

Elaine Miller Bond got her start as senior science writer for the University of California Natural Reserve System and went on to write and photograph independently. Her photos have appeared on Discovery Channel Canada, and her publishing credits include Science, NPR, BBC Earth News, The American Naturalist, The Washington Post, Journal of Mammalogy, Berkeleyside, and other scientific and popular outlets. She wrote and photographed three children's board books: Running Wild, Living Wild, and Wild Colors. She is the photographer for The Utah Prairie Dog: Life Among the Red Rocks by Theodore Manno. This book features more than 150 of Bond's images, depicting both prairie dogs and the scientists who study their behaviors. Bond is also the author of Dream Affimals and Affimals — short, uplifting books that celebrate wildlife as majestic as snow leopards and as humble as earthworms, and the lessons we can learn from them. Bond took her master's degree from the University of Cambridge in England and her bachelor's degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

Tania Romanov hangs from the final limb of a family tree of generations of unintentional travelers—exiles, refugees, displaced people. She grew up with stories of exile—stories of adventure. Perhaps that’s why, as an adult, Tania started living her own adventures—and hasn’t stopped since. In India, she learned that to Indians the way she mourned her husband was far less personal than their custom of dropping cremated bodies into a river; in Japan, that her ancestors could find her in the oddest of circumstances. In Bhutan, she found family, and in Namibia she learned to ease her fears of being trapped in her own past.In Never a Stranger, Tania shares those experiences and more, unforgettable stories of travel, connection, and self-discovery.

Tania Romanov is an award-winning travel photographer and author of Mother Tongue: A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women. A Solas Award winner, Tania’s work has been featured in multiple travel anthologies, including the Best Travel Writing series. Born in the former Yugoslavia, Tania fled the country and spent her childhood in a refugee camp in Trieste, Italy, before emigrating to the United States. She hasn’t stopped traveling since.

Oregon, 1806-1839. When four girls from the Tillamook and Clatsop People befriended Joseph Gervais, he changed from the cantankerous French-Canadian fur trapper to become an amusing storyteller and hero. One day, he saved a Métis girl from being snatched by a stranger and earned respect from the Chinook and Clatsop Tribes as well as the love of a child who claimed she would become his wife. And she did. It was a time of turmoil at Fort Astoria: the British and Americans vied for control of the Northwest, yet it was a time of rapport between the native people and the fur trappers. In fact, three daughters of Tyee Koboway, Chief of the Clatsop People, sought to marry white men; however, their Tillamook friend Pocket did not want to marry anyone; she strove to be a shaman and to speak English.

Pocket in the Waistcoat by RC Marlen tells about the Native People living in the Northwest since time immemorial, and how their lives and cultures once were harmonious with the Americans and Canadians.

RC Marlen will be in conversation with Todd Silverstein, who will also provide live music. 

Left Coast Writers presents a book launch celebration for a new chapbook, The Unexploded Ordnance Bin by longtime LCW member Rebecca Foust, joined by cover artist Lorna Stevens.

“The ticking IS the bomb,” Nick Flynn says, and the idea of events from our genetic, cultural, historic, and experienced past—coiled and waiting to explode in our lives—lies at the core of this Rebecca Foust’s new collection, winner of the 2018 Swan Scythe Press Chapbook Award. The Unexploded Ordinance Bin presents new poems that ignite a long, sparking fuse about contemporary culture, society, and political events now dividing family, community, and country.

The program will include a short reading of poems from the book, brief remarks from the book’s cover artist, and audience Q & A. Refreshments will be served.

Rebecca Foust’s writing career began the year she turned 50, in 2008, and right here at Book Passage with Left Coast Writers and Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s Life into Lit class. Since then, Foust has published six books, including The Unexploded Ordnance Bin and Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53 Poetry Award and reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, The San Francisco Chronicle, and widely in journals including the Georgia, Harvard, and Hudson Reviews. Recognitions include the CP Cavafy and James Hearst poetry prizes, and fellowships from The Frost Place, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Sewanee. Foust was Marin County Poet Laureate in 2017-19 and works now as Poetry Editor for Women’s Voices for Change, an assistant Editor for Narrative Magazine, and co-producer of a new series about poetry for Marin TV, Rising Voices.

Five young college women from California who shared their junior year in Paris once banded together to form a network of friendships they believed would last all their lives. Twelve years later, one goes missing. The instigator of the Paris trip, J.J., now a journalist, decides to uncover the fate of the missing Melanie Hart on a quest both professional and personal. Last seen, Melanie was the meek, besotted wife of a young classical musician. Now, rumors abound: Melanie had a breakdown and left him. She was seen at Woodstock. She was running drugs. She became a mystic, a mother, a radical. She may be on the lam. She may be dead. J.J.’s investigation leads her into a world of off-the-grid radical activists and bad cops, as well as the Hart family’s own carefully constructed version of events. Played out against a background of Vietnam War protests, the Watergate scandal, and Richard Nixon’s eventual resignation, Melanie's Song calls into question the very nature of choice, and what it means to lead an authentic life.

A native Californian, Joanna Biggar is a fiction and travel writer, journalist and teacher, and co-founder of the international travel writers' workshop, Wanderland Writers. Her articles, profiles, and travel writing have been appeared in hundreds of publications. For four decades, she has been a teacher of creative writing, journalism, essay writing, and literature on both coasts and abroad.

Join Linda Watanabe McFerrin, author of Navigating the Divide: Selected Poetry and Prose, and agent Andy Ross in conversation about the relationships between authors and agents.