RSVP - Slow Lightning Birthday Bash
Join us for an afternoon of Live Music, Poetry, Champagne & Cake
Includes readings from Bill Ratner, Shawna Casey, Ryan Cutrona, Darrell Larson, and Guy Zimmerman.
Hosted by Peggy Dobreer.
Music by Don Preston and Putter Smith.
Excerpt from documentary “The Coyote Cycle” created by Guy Zimmerman and Bradford L. Cooper, narrated by actor Ed Harris on the life and poetry of Murray Mednick.
RSVP with donation
RSVP without donation
Red Hen Press
November 16, 3-5pm
1540 Lincoln Ave, Pasadena
Order your books below and receive your copy at the Slow Lightning Lit Birthday Bash event
Superbly crafted storytelling by a 9x MOTH StorySLAM champ. Bill Ratner’ stories are poems of humor, elegy, childhood adventure, and deep adult insight. A book of remembering, forgetting, reinventing, and re-mythologizing the world with a bright lightness of heart, blended with the delicate detail of fine China, and the cold truth-telling of a rambunctious toddler or finally, repentant man.
Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake offers us two aspects of poet Bill Ratner. Part 1, “Youth,” is a memoir in fragments, recalling a boy’s upstanding Midwestern family who, one by one, die. The poems remain faithful to the child’s perspective as he strives to make sense of these losses. In part 2, “Age,” Ratner observes the world of his adulthood, weaving the sublime, the ridiculous, and the unpredicted into a thrill ride that unhinges logic and leaves us with an expanded sense of possibilities. — Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn
“Murray Mednick’s Living Poetry is both a startling debut and a culminating distillation of a life that could not have yielded anything other than these dauntingly memorable poems. All of the greatest dramatists wrote their plays either as verse or prose poetry, but Mednick’s poems stand apart from his extraordinary plays as a summit few others have attained. A sternly exultant, street-level ferocity encapsulates his poems within a clairvoyant wisdom that is second to none. “The owl of Minerva flies at dusk.” Any readers who find themselves caught in the throes of regret or wistfulness will find their longed-for succor in the visionary candor of Mednick’s indomitable poems.”
–Bill Mohr, Editor, Poet, Headwaters of Nirvana
The 3rd Anthology from Slow Lightning Lit, this volume titled SLANT, edited by Peggy Dobreer and Jeremy Ra is a collection of 18 small portfolios from writers exploring themes of identity, sexuality, fidelity, country, death, existential loss, and mythic reflection. These are poems of inquiry. They include practiced wisdom, surprising confessions, whimsy, poignant irony, and distinct, distilled private moments.
From different levels of experience with poetry, these poets have all hit career highs in their respective fields that humble and inspire their fans and students. Nationally known writers such as: poet Esther Cohen (The Book Doctor); novelist Janet Fitch (Chimes of a Lost Cathedral, White Oleander); playwright Murray Mednick (Obie Award Winning Playwright, The Deer Kill, The Coyote Cycle, Fedunn, Mayakowski & Stalin); voice actor, poet Bill Ratner (9 x MOTH StorySLAMM Winner, Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake); and editor, poet Peggy Dobreer (In the Lake of Your Bones, Forbidden Plums, founder of Slow Lightning Lit).
As Man Is To God is a single meditative poem on the difficult filming of Werner Herzog’s 1982 masterpiece of obstinacy Fitzcarraldo, from a writer who knows something about persistence.
Author Andrew Nicholls began as a songwriter, forming the Toronto band Nobby Clegg and the Civilians with co-writer Darrell Vickers, after the radio success of their grim home-recorded single My Old Man. The team wrote for sitcoms and radio in Canada, and had twelve one-act plays produced, before moving to Hollywood in their twenties to work in television. They staffed Don Adams’ sitcom Check It Out, and wrote for Love Boat and for Joan Rivers, Rodney Dangerfield and George Carlin before landing on NBC’s Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, where they became head writers in 1988, earning four Emmy nominations.
