SNS | 5-25-24

Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Hollie Hardy & Tomas Moniz

Theme: Feral
(scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday May 25, 2024
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 836 3483 2432

Passcode: 416346

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Author Bios

Hollie Hardy is a writer, educator, and author of Lions Like Us (forthcoming from Red Light Lit Press on June 7th, 2024) and How to Take a Bullet: And Other Survival Poems (Punk Hostage Press, 2014) winner of the Annual Poetry Center Book Award at San Francisco State University. She holds an MFA in Poetry from SFSU, teaches private writing workshops online, and hosts Saturday Night Special: A Virtual Open Mic, originally founded and co-hosted with Tomas Moniz. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published in numerous anthologies and literary journals. She lives in Austin, TX. Learn more at: holliehardy.com

Tomas Moniz is a latinx writer living in East Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway and the LAMBDA. His new novel, All Friends Are Necessary, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books on June 11th, 2024. He teaches at Berkeley City College and the Antioch MFA program. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals:
PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back. Learn more at tomasmoniz.com

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, May 18, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

May Writing Prompt: Feral

adjective: feral
(especially of an animal) wild, untamed, undomesticated, escaped from captivity
or resembling an animal—savage, fierce, unpredictable, untamed

Brainstorm: Neglected garden, tangled fuchsia, feral wind reaching, tasting the hem of your garment, boy next door, teenaged crush, trampled with desire, hair-tearing grief, Texas summer nights, sticky animal aroma, her sharp teeth, this ocean roaring at the feral moon, like a dog abandoned on the median or loping in the back alleys of urban squalor searching for love.

Write a poem (or short prose piece) on or tangential to the theme, or including the word “feral”.

SOME IDEAS:

• Write about a feral animal or a zoo animal or an animal rescue or encounter

• Write about a wild animal heart, feral love, a feral crush

• An animal personified, or person described as animal

• Animal as metaphor

• What else is feral? A city, a garden, a schoolyard, a childhood, a jungle, an outfit, a Taylor Swift fan, a woman you loved, the music you danced to, the tongue of a hummingbird, the possibilities are endless

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement; feel free to interpret loosely or ignore. The following sample poems offer a wildly diverse approach. Enjoy!

NOTE: The SNS writing prompts will soon be integrated into my new subscription service, Praxis Poetry: Weekly Prompts for Poets

FOR INSPIRATION

Summer Story by Mary Oliver

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

For the Feral Splendor That Remains by CA Conrad

She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo

Studies of an Ox’s Heart, c. 1511-13 by Sylvia Legris

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out by Richard Siken

Sanctuary by Donika Kelly

Happy Trigger by Carmen Giménez

Sea Krait, Broom by Amanda Joy

Emerald Spider Between Rose Thorns by Dean Young

Inside-Bird and Outside-Bird by Kim Hyesoon (translated by Don Mee Choi)

Summer by Joanna Fuhrman

James Dean with Pig by Sam Sax

Life Is Beautiful by Dorianne Laux

Allegory by Diane Seuss

NOTE: The SNS writing prompts will soon be integrated into my new subscription service, Praxis Poetry: Weekly Prompts for Poets

SNS | 4-27-24

April is National Poetry Month! Join Saturday Night Special online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Dean Rader & Judy Halebsky

Theme: Fortune Cookie
(scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday April 27, 2024
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 856 5388 5137

Passcode: 852089

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Author Bios

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books, including Works & Days, winner of the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, a Barnes & Noble Review Best Book, and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry, a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, was published in April of 2023 and was named one of ten “mesmerizing” books of modern poetry by Book Riot.  His writing has been supported by fellowships from Princeton University, Harvard University, Headlands Center for the Arts, Art Omi, and the MacDowell Foundation. Rader is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. 
Learn more at deanrader.com

Judy Halebsky is the author of three poetry collections—Sky=Empty, Tree Line,and Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)—and the chapbook Space/Gap/Interval/Distance. Born and raised in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she holds an M.F.A. in English & Creative Writing from Mills College and a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Davis. On fellowships from the Japanese Ministry of Culture, she spent five years living in Japan, where she trained in Butoh dance and Noh theatre. She now directs the low-residency MFA program at Dominican University of California.
Learn more at judyhalebsky.com

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, April 20, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

April Writing Prompt: Fortune Cookie

April is National Poetry Month and many of us are endeavoring to write a poem every day for 30 days! (Some of you are enrolled in my Poetry Challenge getting fresh prompts for inspiration) Let’s have a little fortune cookie fun [in bed]:

Write a poem (or short prose piece) inspired by the fortune cookie.

INCLUDE ONE (OR MORE) OF THE FOLLOWING:

• Adages

• Warnings / Predictions

• Tips / Advice / Instructions

• The words "in bed" at the end of each line or stanza (or some other repeated phrase)

• Confident, assertive, didactic, sarcastic or matter-of-fact tone

• Interpolated lines from a fortune cookie

• [Brackets] with fortune inside

• Made up fortunes (serious or ridiculous)

• Mention of a real or metaphorical fortune cookie

• Second person address (to the reader, as "you")

• A meal eaten alone or with someone else, which includes a fortune cookie

  (and perhaps some setting or narrative details)

Or something else! As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement; feel free to interpret loosely or ignore. Have fun!

FOR INSPIRATION

Fortune [The neighbors will soon spread their confounding potluck before you.] poem by Dobby Gibson

Fortune [There’s only one horizon, yet it can be found] poem by Dobby Gibson

Handy Guide poem by Dean Young

The Moral Kicks In poem by Peter Twal

Cardi B Tells Me about Myself poem by Eboni Hogan 

In Bed poem by Kim Addonizio

Lines For the Fortune Cookies poem by Frank O’Hara 

New Lines for Fortune Cookies poem by James Masao Mitsui

Your Luck Is about to Change poem by Susan Elizabeth Howe

Little God Origami poem by Stefi Weisburd

If You Go to Bed Hungry poem by Angela Narisco Torres 

SNS | 3-30-24

Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Kelechi Ubozoh & Meg Jerit

Theme: The Sauce
(scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday March 30, 2024
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 810 1670 2337

Passcode: 864243

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Author Bios

Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer and mental health advocate. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, she was the first undergraduate published in The New York Times. Her book with LD Green, We’ve Been Too Patient, elevates marginalized voices of lived experience who have endured psychiatric mistreatment. Her work is featured in Argot Magazine, Multiplicity, Essential Truths, sParkle & bLINK, Trauma, Tresses, & Truth, and When We Exhale. She co-hosts the Bay Area reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination. 
Learn more at kelechiubozoh.com. IG: @specialkech

Meg Jerit is a creative nonfiction writer, editor, poet, and author of the commissioned children’s book The Moonies: Journey to the Total Solar Eclipse. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia College, where she wrote her memoir, River Talks, a bildungsroman set in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. In 2022, she attended the Kenyon Review Summer Writing Workshop. Her poetry and prose has appeared in various journals such as, Adelaide: International Literary Magazine, Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, The Commercial Appeal, The Southwestern Review, and forthcoming from Take Heart Publications. She is also the host of Smushed Blueberries, a monthly reading series at Epoch Coffee, in Austin, TX.  megjerit.com IG: @megitate @smushedblueberries

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, March 23, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

March Writing Prompt: The Sauce

The many meanings of “sauce” include zest, zing, juice, confidence, style, salsa, rizz. It’s the slippery goodness that holds things together. It’s not just hot sauce, tomato, bbq, mustard, mayo, peanut, cherry, chocolate, sriracha, and soy—it’s all the sauces. And their metaphors. All the saucy people and things. Like salsa dancing. Sauce can also mean alcohol—like on or off the sauce, sauced.

Tell us a sauce story; sing us a saucy song; show us your salsa, write us a poem with some sauce in it!

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Write about a “secret sauce,” literal or metaphorical

• Write about something spicy or zesty—a food, an outfit, a date

• Write about “the goodness that holds things together”

• Write about salsa dancing or traditional dance, or the musical side of the sauce

• Write about (a character with) “rizz” (Oxford’s 2023 Word of the Year)

Or something else! As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.

FOR INSPIRATION:

The Sauce, a Spotify playlist, short and saucy, to get you in the mood

Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, poem by Cornelius Eady

Calligraphy Accompanied by the Mood of a Calm but Definitive Sauce, poem by Dick Allen

Harold's Chicken Shack #1, poem by Nate Marshall

My Mouth Hovers Across Your Breasts, poem by Adrienne Rich

Wild Tongue, poem by Rebecca Seiferle

November Philosophers, by Katie Ford

Chinese Silence No. 14, poem by Timothy Yu

Tarragon, Are You a Wild Boar?, poem by Vi Khi Nao

Rats, short prose by Matthew Sweeney

SNS | 2-24-24

Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Roanna Flowers & SG Huerta

Theme: Love (scroll down for writing prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday February 24, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 897 8202 8736

Passcode: 447624

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Author Bios

Roanna Flowers is a comedy writer in Austin, Texas. She has written several award-winning comedic short films, one of which appeared in over 30 festivals world-wide including the Cannes Short Film Corner. Last November, her short story "These Boots. Or The Bitches of Eastwick" appeared in the short story anthology "Mixed Bag of Tricks," a collection of stories by women, about women, published by a woman-owned small press. She is a former student of Amanda Eyre Ward’s, author of "The Jetsetters," and a member of the Writers’ League of Texas. She has a B.A. in English Literature with a specialization in early British Literature and a surprisingly handy minor in Latin. roannaflowers.com

SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer from Dallas. They are the poetry editor of Abode Press and marketing co-director for Split Lip Magazine. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Things We Bring with Us (Headmistress Press) and Last Stop (Defunkt Magazine), and the forthcoming nonfiction chapbook GOOD GRIEF (fifth wheel press 2025). Their work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Honey Literary, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. They live in Central Texas with their partner and two cats. sghuertawriting.com

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, February 17, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

February Writing Prompt:

The theme of love is simple, classic, eternal, and offers a myriad of entry points. There’s romantic love, hungry love, familial love, friendship love, pet love, monster love, lost love, twisted love, unrequited love, self love. There’s new love and seasoned love. Fleeting and forever love.

Tell us a love story; sing us a love song; write us a love poem; compose a love letter.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Write about desire using metaphors about food, eating, or drinking. 

• Write a letter poem to a lover or friend about the terribly urgent, wonderful things you must tell them. 

• Write about your/or a character’s best, worst, or ideal date.

• Write a list poem repeating the word "because" or "reasons"

  because of my love for you____
  because I think of you____
  because you are mine____ 
  reasons I love you____

• Write about lost or unrequited love, about breaking up, missing or remembering someone. 

• Write a love story from the point of view of a mythical creature

• Write a how-to poem or essay about love

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.

FOR INSPIRATION:

Love Sonnet XI, by Pablo Neruda
Having a Coke with You, by Frank O’Hara
The Friend, by Marge Piercy
To Love as Aswang, by Barbara Jane Reyes
What the Living Do, by Marie Howe
A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand, Clifton Gachagua
What I Might Carry in the Small Cave of My Mouth +
How to Write a Love Letter by MK Chavez

Sign up for the February Write-In Workshop

SNS | 1-27-24

Join me online for the first SNS of 2024, an evening of literary performance and open mic reading

Featuring: Maxine Chernoff & Marisa Crawford

Theme: Simultaneity (scroll down for prompt)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday January 27, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 897 8202 8736

Passcode: 447624

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Author Bios

Maxine Chernoff was Dept. Chair and Creative Writing Professor at SFSU. She is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently Light and Clay and Under the Music, both by MadHat Press of Massachusetts. She is winner of the 2009 PEN Translation Award with Paul Hoover for their translation of Hoelderlin and a 2013 NEA Fellow in poetry. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome and in 2013 she was a visiting professor of Creative Writing at Exeter U in England. Also a fiction writer, her story collection Signs of Devotion was one of the 1993 NYT’s books of the year.

Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections The Haunted House, Reversible, and, most recently, DIARY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection (Feminist Press, forthcoming 2024), and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club: Essays & Artwork from Grown-Up Readers. Marisa is co-host of the 90s rock podcast All Our Pretty Songs. She lives in New York.

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, January 20, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

January Writing Prompt:

Simultaneity: the quality of existing or occurring at the same time; happening at once

“What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears.” ~from Anne Carson’s short story “1=1”

For this month’s theme, I was inspired by a recent episode of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, in which the speaker in Carson’s story tries to reconcile going for a swim in a beautiful lake while refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean. I was struck by the universality of this challenge—babies are born while others die, we eat while others starve, we are warm in our homes while others sleep outside, while planes crash and bombs drop, we drink our coffee and read the headlines, while the rich and powerful ruin the world. I think there’s something deeply human in these juxtapositions.

But simultaneity doesn’t require opposites, just concurrence. One can hum in the shower while washing one’s hair, dreaming of pancakes, listening to George Winston. One can invite friends over and they can all talk at once.

So, this is your January challenge, should you choose to accept it: write into the idea of simultaneity.

Tell us a story; sing us a song; write us a poem.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Make a list of “where you were when” moments

• Let more than one thing arrive at once (or in layers) into your poem or story and allow meaning (or its lack) to arise in the juxtaposition—these might be big ideas, or small observations—a child crying, a cardinal on a branch in a snowstorm

• Perhaps begin with dailiness or interiority and then move outward into the world

• If you want to go more speculative/sci-fi, you might consider alternate realities (watch Everything Everywhere All at Once for inspiration)

• Or something else!

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.

FOR INSPIRATION:

Teju Cole Reads Anne Carson on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
The Children poem by Donald Revell
Simultaneously poem by Kimberly Grey
Emotional Intelligence poem by Pimone Triplett

Sign up for the January Write-In Workshop

SNS | 11-25-23

This is it! Don’t miss it! The last SNS of 2023. Join me online in your post-Thanksgiving afterglow, for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading.

Featuring: S.C. Says & Jeffrey Bryant

Theme: Reflection

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday November 25, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 861 3916 9297

Passcode: 730944

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Author Bios

Andre Bradford, a.k.a. S.C. Says, is an Austin-based slam poet who has been performing slam poetry since 2013. He's toured and featured at venues and universities across the country, and his work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Write About Now, The Edge radio, The Culture Trip, and Blavity. He is a two time Austin Poetry Slam Champion, the 2022 Texas Grand Slam Champion, and is the author of the poetry collection Golden Brown Skin. He also once popped a bag of popcorn without burning a single kernel, which is arguably one of his greatest achievements. His poetry covers a gamut of topics ranging from being mixed race, to social justice, to mental health awareness, to never settling in relationships. Slam poetry is an art form he loves due to its raw vulnerability and its ability to cultivate transparency and dialogues into many different walks of life.
Learn more at: scsayspoetry.com

Jeffrey Bryant is a queer poet/writer who lives in Los Angeles. He has been or will be published in the Los Angeles Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Poetic Diversity, the New Verse News, Poetrysuperhighway.com, and in the forthcoming November issue of Synchroniciti Magazine. His work has also appeared in the anthologies The Coiled Serpent from Tia Chucha Press; the 2020 Altadena Literary Review from Shabda Press; Shadowplay Literary Journal from the University of Arkansas and Sparring with Beatnik Ghosts from Mystic Boxing Commission Press.

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Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, November 18, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

November Writing Prompt:

As the year winds down and folds inward, towards food, friends and family, leaves turn to gold, days are shorter and colder—it’s a good time for gratitude, rest and reflection. What has this year meant to you? This life? Where are you going? Where have you been? This month’s theme of REFLECTION invites a multitude of interpretations.

Tell us a story; sing us a song; write us a poem.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Reflection as contemplation, as serious thought. Reflect inward on the self, or outward on the world. What matters? What have you learned or achieved? What do you long for? What are you surprised about? What is one good thing? One regret?

• Reflection as self-portrait or ars poetica

• Reflection as mirror— moonlight reflecting in river, cityscape reflecting sky; music reflecting a generation, children reflecting our best and our worst, war in the Middle East reflected in violence in the U.S., but also illuminating our humanity

• Reflection as social commentary on literal reflection—how do we see ourselves clearly in a time when image is so profuse, so filtered and polished?

• Perhaps try a palindrome or mirror poem—forms that repeat in reverse midway through or repeat across two columns like a Rorschach (see Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey poems below for examples of each)

• The truth is, most writing is reflective in some way, so this theme is wide open. To find your own way in, perhaps start by journaling or brainstorming about the year, then expand out, moving backwards or forward in time until you find a subject that speaks to this moment of reflection or an important past reflection or epiphany.

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.

FOR INSPIRATION:

Mirror poem by Rita Dove
Myth poem by Natasha Trethewey
Reflections poem by Yusef Komunyakaa
Reflections on the Ruin of the Asylum at Saint-Rémy poem by Priscilla Atkins
I Make Promises Before I Dream poem by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Mirrored flash fiction by Jennifer Hudak
Mirror poem by Silvia Plath

Sign up for the November Write-In Workshop

SNS | 10-28-23

Join us online for the 13th Annual SNS Halloween Reading & Costume Party!

Featuring: Jan Steckel & E.C. Barrett

Theme: Monsters & Ghosts

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday October 28, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 840 9660 9338

Passcode: 564897

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Author Bios

Jan Steckel’s debut fiction collection Ghosts and Oceans was released this month on Zeitgeist Press. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her poetry book Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her creative prose and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus and elsewhere. She lives in Oakland, California.
Get your copy of Ghosts and Oceans at:
https://www.zeitgeist-press.com/index.php/product/ghosts-and-oceans/
Or, for a signed copy, send $24 via PayPal @Jansteckel or Venmo @Jan-Steckel

E.C. Barrett (they/she) writes folk horror, fabulism, and dark speculative fiction. They are, or have been, an academic, journalist, bookseller, editor, critic, and linocut artist. A Clarion West graduate, E.C. has words in Baffling Magazine, Split Lip, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere, and she serves as the book reviews editor for Reckoning. E.C. is queer, neurodivergent, and enjoys more maker hobbies than is entirely practical. ecbarrett.com

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October Writing Prompt:

For the 13th Annual Saturday Night Special Halloween Open Mic, we’re taking up some classic, spooky themes: Monsters & Ghosts.

Tell us a story; sing us a song; write us a poem.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• What defines a monster? What monsters have you known? What monsters have you been? Were they real or imagined?

• Think: evil, demons, zombies, vampires, sirens, witches, werewolves, ghosts, predators, clowns, the circus, the horsemen of the apocalypse, blood-thirsty or benign creatures, Bigfoot, fairies, mutants, psychopaths, politicians, parents, screaming children, bullies, bosses, exes, oppressors, societal cruelties, false fears, monsters in masquerade, the misunderstood…

• What is grotesque? Unthinkable?

• What are you afraid of? How is that fear literalized?

• Think: things in the woods, under the bed, outside the window, inside the house, in the past, in your dreams.

• Think: pool drains, sharks, heights, blood, poison, ants, failure, the sun, disfigurement, dying alone

• Think: fire, flood, earthquakes, war, death, prejudice, injustice, grief, silence

• Have you ever seen a ghost? An apparition? Experienced the supernatural? Or know someone who has? What happened?

• In what ways are legacies, generational pain, memories, photos, even DNA kinds of ghosts?

• Consider: palimpsest as ghost, the way a city builds on the bones of the past.

• Think: haunted house, graveyard, poltergeist, possession, exorcism, bumps in the night

• Whom have you lost? What would you say to their ghost?

• What’s your best, craziest, strangest, or scariest Halloween story? Make a poem or flash story of it (3 minutes or less!)

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.

FOR INSPIRATION:

The Hitman short short fiction by T. C. Boyle
Pumpkins flash fiction by Francine Prose
The Anatomy of Desire flash fiction by John L’Heureux
Jane Goodall and Bruce Springsteen Contemplate their Childlessness poem by John Dudek
All Souls poem by Michael Collier
Windigo poem by Louise Erdrich
Ghost poem by Cynthia Huntington
Field of Skulls poem by Mary Karr
Monster in the Lake poem by Martín Espada
Monster poem by Jason Irwin
The Witch Has Told You a Story poem by Ava Leavell Haymon

No Write-In this month!
Join me in Oakland, CA for Half Century Salon live in person on Friday, October 20!

SNS | 09-30-23

Featuring: Rick Lupert & Julian Matthews

Theme: How to Change the World
(Annual 100Thousand Poets for Change Event)

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday September 30, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 828 7608 4004

Passcode: 608683

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Author Bios

Rick Lupert has been involved with poetry in Los Angeles since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2017 Ted Slade Award, and the 2014 Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center Distinguished Service Award, a three time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a Best of the Net nominee. He served as a co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets for 2 years, and created Poetry Super Highway. Rick hosted the weekly Cobalt Cafe reading for almost 21 years which has lived on as a weekly Zoom series since early 2020. His spoken word album "Rick Lupert Live and Dead" featured 25 studio and live tracks. He’s authored 27 collections of poetry, including “The Low Country Shvitz,” “I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii,” “The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express,” and “God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion” (Ain’t Got No Press) and edited the anthologies “A Poet’s Siddur,” “Ekphrastia Gone Wild,” “A Poet’s Haggadah” and the noir anthology “The Night Goes on All Night.” He also writes and draws (with Brendan Constantine) the daily web comic “Cat and Banana” and writes a Jewish poetry column for JewishJournal.com. He has been lucky enough to read his poetry all over the world. Find him here:
poetrysuperhighway.com
jewishpoetry.net
facebook.com/rickpoet
catandbanana.com

Julian Matthews is a poet from Malaysia of mixed-minorities who is published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and Borderless Journal, among others. He stumbled onto poetry by accident six years ago at a writing workshop. That happy accident has turned into a rabid compulsion. He is still extricating himself from the crash. Welcome to his recovery. If you wish to support his practice, please Paypal him at trinetizen@gmail.com or send him Wordle answers at linktr.ee/julianmatthews

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Write with Friends! Register for the Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, September 23, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop.

Write-In Details/ Sign Up

September Writing Prompt:

Since its inception in 2011, Saturday Night Special has participated annually in 100Thousand Poets for Change, a global literary event “to promote peace, sustainability, and justice, and call for serious social, environmental, and political change.”

This year, SNS’s September reading is dedicated to 100TPC’s late founder, Michael Rothenberg, who passed away late last year. Our theme is “How to Change the World.”

Tell us a story; sing us a song; write us a poem.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Write a poem for peace, or a response to Dorothy Oger’s viral poem, written in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, “I shall stand for love.” (See short TEDx Talk below for inspiration.)

• Consider what needs changing in the world. (This is your beauty queen question.) Make a list. Think big and also small. Be specific—plastic in a hot ocean, war in Ukraine, oppression of women in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and other countries, burning musical instruments in Afghanistan, racism, fascism, homophobia, slave labor, homelessness, hunger, climate change, censorship, misinformation, autocracy, disease, Trump running around free in the world. There’s so much to choose from.

• Don’t be daunted by the bigness of the challenge. It’s okay to choose small things for change—more holding hands, fewer cars, cheaper arugula, removal of an ugly billboard you pass on the way to work, better pay for poets, a clean kitchen, a new sweater, cooler weather in which to wear said sweater, etc. What are the small things that would change your world?

• You are welcome to be super serious here—world changing is serious business—but it’s also also okay to be funny or ironic or playful in your approach to the theme.

• A question: Can poetry change the world? Has it? How so?

• You might also consider ways that you have already changed or been changed by the world, or by writing. What are the personal moments or decisions that have changed your life? What national or international events have you lived through that impacted both you and the world? The Cold War, 9/11, COVID, the invention of the internet, the iPhone, AI, the death of Sinead O’Connor…

• Imagine a future in which the world is vastly different in some way. This might be utopian or dystopian. Or neither.

• Maybe this is a how-to poem. Maybe not.

As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement.

FOR INSPIRATION:

Let’s Change the World One Poem at a Time, TEDx Talk, by Dorothy Oger and her poem “I shall stand for love”
Change the World, blog post by Eleni Sikelianos
Love in a Time of Climate Change, poem by Craig Santos Perez
Think, Think, poem by Tara Betts
He Said Turn Here, poem by Dean Young
If I Were in Charge of the World, poem by Judith Viorst
Making Peace, poem by Denise Levertov
I Look at the World, poem by Langston Hughes
Peace Walk, poem by William E. Stafford
What Shall We Tell Our Children? An Addenda, 1973, by Margaret Burroughs

SNS | 08-26-23

Featuring: Vanessa Rochelle Lewis & Jim Trainer

Theme: Lies

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday August 26, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 890 9261 3781

Passcode: 374317

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Author Bios

Vanessa Rochelle Lewis, MFA, is a Queer, Fat, Black, Femme performer, facilitator, educator, writer, activist, healer, and joyful weirdo. Lewis has been a writer and managing editor for Everyday Feminism and Black Girl Dangerous; an instructor at multiple Bay Area community colleagues; the Artist-Facilitator In Residence for the Young Women Freedom Center; and a core team member for Creating Freedom Movements. She is currently the Director of Programming for the Positive Results Center, an organization that addresses trauma and prevents violence within marginalized communities. Lewis founded Reclaim UGLY: Uplift Glorify Love Yourself – And Create A World Where Others Can As Well, which has hosted conferences, teach-ins, and healing workshops.

Visit Vanessa’s Website: reclaimugly.org
Preorder Reclaiming Ugly! A Radically Joyful Guide to Unlearn Oppression and Uplift, Glorify, and Love Yourself: from Penguin Random House
Patreon: @VanessaRochelleLewis
IG: @Black.Woman.Blooming
FB: Facebook.com/subversivepedagogies


Jim Trainer  contributes to Substack, served as columnist for Into The Void and blogged at Going For the Throat for over a decade. Trainer publishes one letterpressed collection every year through Yellow Lark Press. STRIDE is his 8th book.  As a progenitor of Stand UpTragedy™ he performs regularly throughout the world.

Jim’s website: jimtrainer.net
Jim’s Substack: jimtrainer.substack.com
Wastebook:  JimTrainerCommunicator
IG: @goingforthethroat

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Write with Friends! Register for the Write-In!

LET’S WORK ON THE SNS THEME TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, August 19, for the SNS Write-In, a generative online workshop.

Write In Details/ Sign Up

August Writing Prompt:

~Tell me lies; tell me sweet little lies…(Fleetwood Mac)

Who lied to you? Your mother? Your father? The media? The culture? Your teachers, your history books, your peers, your president, your lover, your mirror, yourself?

What was the mean little lie you told yourself? Or the lie you pretended was true?The tiny lie you justified. Who else have you lied to? Because you were being nice, or in denial, or covering up guilt or shame, or having some fun with fiction.

As writers, how can we tell lies in order to reveal an “emotional truth”?

Why do we talk about “lies” as plural and “the truth” as singular?

This month at SNS, you are invited to tell us lies! Or write about a lie, or replace the lies with truths. Tell us a story; write us a poem; sing us a song.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

• Make a list of lies, general or specific, personal or political, private or public.

• Consider different kinds of lies—small lies, big lies, white lies, plagiarism, perjury, advertising, lies of omission, or betrayal, of compassion or treason.

• Use the old ice breaker “two truths and a lie” as a writing prompt.

• Think about the lies you’ve told and been told. Excavate the reasons, find the truth.

• Pick one or more lies to write about. Use lots of juicy details!

Or

• Write something completely or partially made up! Be playful. Change directions, change your story, double back, change your mind.

Or

Something else! As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement.

FOR INSPIRATION:

“White Lies,“ poem by Natasha Trethewey
”Two Truths and a Lie,” poem by Hajjar Baban
”Lies and Longing,” poem by Linda Gregg
”Lies Told Honestly,” poem by Sahar Khraibani
”More Lies,” poem by Karin Gottshall
”The Lies of Sleeping Dogs: A Fable,” poem by Susan Dwyer
”Bakery of Lies,” poem by Judith Askew
“How to Tell a True War Story,” short story by Tim O’Brien from his book, The Things They Carried

SNS | 07-29-23

Featuring: Anhvu Buchanan & Kimberly Reyes

Theme: Erasure

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday July 29, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 857 5010 5806

Passcode: 360894

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Author Bios

Anhvu Buchanan is the author of The Disordered (sunnyoutside press), Backhanded Compliments & Other Ways to Say I Love You (Works on Paper Press) and just releasedfrom ELJ Editions, his latest book: The Peeling of a Name.  He was the recipient of a James D. Phelan Award and an Individual Artists Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. He currently teaches in San Francisco and can be found online at anhvubuchanan.com.  
Buy his latest book here: https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781942004578/the-peeling-of-a-name.aspx

Kimberly Reyes is the author of the recently released poetry collection vanishing point (Omnidawn 2023), and the collections Running to Stand Still (Omnidawn 2019) and Warning Coloration (dancing girl press 2018). Her nonfiction book of essays Life During Wartime (Fourteen Hills 2019) won the 2018 Michael Rubin Book Award. Her work is featured in various international outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Associated Press, Entertainment Weekly, Time.com, The Best American Poetry blog, poets.org, and many more. Reyes has also received numerous fellowships including from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Program, CantoMundo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshops, and other places. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln and she writes about identity, ecology, sexuality, and Cillian Murphy.
Learn more and buy her books here: kimberlyreyes.online

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The SNS Write-In Returns this Month!

LET’S WRITE TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, July 22, for the SNS Write-In, a generative online workshop.

Write In Details/ Sign Up

July Writing Prompt:

To erase is to remove, delete, scratch out, black out, white out, exterminate, nullify, silence, or forget.

Erasure can be literal, as a coffee stain, delete key, snow storm, remodel, drought, forest fire, or murder—the genocide of Indigenous Americans—or it can be less tangible—the erasure of Black history from curriculum, the banning of books, gentrification, the silencing of truth through lies or omissions, the loss of agency or identity through denial of a name, language, media coverage, cultural practice, etc. 

This month at SNS, you are invited to write into the theme of “Erasure.”

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

Consider the personal, things you have erased (accidentally or deliberately), denied yourself, ignored, pushed down, forgotten, gotten over, filtered out; or things that have been taken from you—a name, a pronoun, a history, a family, a home, an opportunity, a right. How have you (been) silenced, discredited, ignored, or oppressed? What have you blocked out or silently witnessed? How can you work to undo erasure by writing/righting the narrative?

Or 

Write about partial erasure. Think palimpsest. Think layers. Appropriation, graffiti. That which persists and remains. The past peeking through the weeds of the present like abandoned trolley tracks.

 Or

Try erasure as form:

Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of “found poetry” wherein the writer takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. Erasure poetry may be used as a means of collaboration, creating a new text from an old one and thereby starting a dialogue between the two, or as a means of confrontation, a challenge to a pre-existing text.

Or

Consider erasure within your own poem. Add caesura, white space or [ ] or strikethroughs to emphasize what is missing, what’s been left out or erased.

Or

Something else! As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement.

FOR INSPIRATION:

Pilgrim poem by Megan Snyder-Camp
Dear— poem by Donika Kelly
Erasure in Three Acts: An Essay by Muriel Leung
Erasure of Girlhood The Slow Down 5-minute podcast, with poem by Sarah María Medina.
Or read it yourself here. (Please Note: There’s a trigger warning for this poem).
Four erasure poems by Katrina Roberts
Newspaper blackout poems & process videos by Austin Kleon
Declarations erasure poem read by the author, former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith
The Mannequin short fiction + erasure prompt by Sarah Barkat
Lessons in Erasure micro fiction by Jack Barker-Clark
The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure essay by Solmaz Sharif
Redeclarations.com interactive project by Halim Madi, in which participants create digital erasures from the Declaration of Independence.

SNS | 06-24-23

Featuring: Miah Jeffra & Amber Flame

Theme: The Rainbow

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday June 24, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

---

Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 834 5519 1875

Passcode: 325168

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+1 253 205 0468 US

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Author Bios

Miah Jeffra is the author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, storySouth, DIAGRAM, jubilat and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing and decolonial studies at Santa Clara University.
Learn more and buy books at miahjeffra.com

Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. As the singer-songwriter front of her band, Last of the RedHot Mamas, Flame brings raunchy wordplay, constant hustle and heartbreaking love of the blues to contemporary issues of self-care, racial injustice, apocalypse survival, ethical non-monogamy, and post-church spirituality. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame’s second book of poetry, apocrifa, launched May 2023 from Red Hen Press. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.

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The SNS Write-In Returns this Month!

LET’S WRITE TOGETHER!

Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, June 17, for the SNS Write-In, a generative online workshop.

Write In Details/ Sign Up

June Writing Prompt:

The rainbow represents inclusivity. It celebrates our diversity, our differences and how whatever our stripe or color, we are all beautifully human, deserving of celebration and freedom to be ourselves. The rainbow also means hope, love, and friendship.

In a climate of violence and political backlash against the LGBTQ+ community, the values represented by the rainbow are as urgent and imperative as ever. So, in honor of Pride Month, the SNS (always optional) theme this month is:  The Rainbow.

SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:

Write about identity, gender, sexuality, love, sex, relationships, a celebration of self-acceptance, or discrimination, stereotypes, family or social pressures. Or write about current politics around these issues. Or a personal experience of Pride—a parade or bar or drag show or dance party you attended, a historical event or tragedy you witnessed or were affected by, a law or teaching by a school or church that impacted you, something that shaped your understanding as an adult or child. A comment that hurt or healed. This might be your own experience or something you witnessed as a friend or a conversation you had.

Or

If all this feels too personal or political, you are welcome to write into more general representations of the rainbow introduced above—hope, love, friendship, diversity, inclusivity, freedom, beauty, etc. Try to ground your writing in a specific detail, image, moment or story.

Or

Be literal! Write about the time you saw a double rainbow on a camping trip or with your family at Disneyworld, or how you used to decorate your locker with rainbow stickers and believe in leprechauns and fairies, or that rainbow-after-the-storm feeling that came after an emotional breakthrough.

Or

Let color itself be your muse. Pick a specific color to explore or write into each color of the rainbow. Paint with words.

Or something else! The sky is the limit, as they say.

FOR INSPIRATION:

“An American Poem,” by Eileen Myles
”Summer,” by Chen Chen
”The Mortician in San Francisco,” by Randall Mann
”Lisp,” by Sam Sax
”A Litany for Survival,” by Audrey Lorde
”At Last the New Arriving,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
”Double Rainbow,” by Ravi Shankar
”Colors of the Comanche Flag,” by Sy Hoahwah
”Colors Passing through Us,” by Marge Piercy

“Pride Inside,” Selected Shorts podcast hosted by Meg Wolitzer

SNS | 05-27-23

Featuring: Keenan Norris & Propaganda Poet

Theme: The Future

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday May 27, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

May Writing Prompt:

"The future is made of the same stuff as the present," wrote French philosopher Simone Weil. Do you agree? This month at SNS, your mission is to write into the future.

Stretch your imagination 200 years ahead, or five years, or to tomorrow. Compare to today, or the past, or imagine it newly. You could write speculative fiction, or take on the voice of a fortune teller, a tarot card reader, a newscaster, Nostradamus himself, or write a personal self-reflection or wishlist poem of your most exciting goals. Or think about a younger you, what you thought your future would be like. Does it measure up? How has life surprised you in the present of your former future?

Is your vision of the future apocalyptic or utopian? How does technology, science, medicine, religion, politics burgeon newly (or remain the same) in the future? Consider all the technological advances that have occurred in your own lifetime or your parents’. Think of wars fought, diseases cured, all the information (and misinformation) in the world readily available in a hand-held computer/ phone/ camera/ cookbook/ chess board/ radio/newspaper/ mailbox/ et al.

Are humans kinder and more accepting of each other in the future? Or more divided? Do we still have animals? What about global warming? Genetics? Aliens? Zombies?! AI? Self-driving cars? Space travel? Where will you be in 10 or 20 years? What will you be wearing? What will life be like? What will you miss?

FOR INSPIRATION:

“Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?” poem by Tracy K. Smith (from her award-winning collection Life on Mars)

“The Future,” poem by Neal Bowers

“The Future,” poem by Sandra Lim

“Are We Not Men,” fiction by T. C. Boyle (I read this years ago in The New Yorker and still think of it)

NOTE: Sorry, no pre-SNS Write-In this month. I’m going camping! But I’ll be home to host SNS, and we can write together again next month. " Please check back for details.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

---

Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 811 9345 5762

Passcode: 666166

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+17193594580,,81193455762# US

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Author Bios

Keenan Norris’s latest novel is The Confession of Copeland Cane, the winner of the 2022 Northern California Book Award. Keenan teaches English and creative writing at San Jose State University. His essays have received the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award and Folio: Eddie Award. Earlier this year he published the biblio-memoir Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings.
Learn more and buy books at: KeenanNorris.com

PropagandaPoet (Bear Wolf) is a Shawnee Gypsy Jew social justice humanist making his triumphant return to California. He sees tattoos as physical manifestations of emotional scars and lost count of his somewhere around twenty. His works include an array of poetry, music, performance and teaching at the collegiate level, including creating and curating the Hearing Marginalized Voices Through Poetry series. Word Tornadoes is his second book of poetry following on the footsteps of his debut book 2020 D//Vision.

Support and follow at these links:
https://linktr.ee/changelingstudios
https://ko-fi.com/cs420/shop
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXmu-aq8RjxzPutvgneIarQ
IG: @changelingstudios420

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SNS | 04-29-23

Featuring: Linda Ravenswood
& Jeannine Hall Gailey

Theme: Hybrid

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday April 29, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

April Writing Prompt:

Happy National Poetry Month! Your free April SNS Writing Prompt is “HYBRID.” 

This word simply means combining or mixing two different things to make something new, and applies to a vast range of topics from ligers and tigons and unicorns and animal-headed humans, to hybrid cars and GMOs and pink-lady-cherry-lemon trees, and coffee-quinoa cocktails (ew, what? no.), to the pandemic adaptions of hybrid work and learning environments, to hybrid cultures experienced by some immigrant and interracial families.

Another example of hybridity is the portmanteau—mash-up words like “brunch” and “spork” and “mockumentary.” 

In terms of literature, there are many hybrid forms—mixed-medium and mixed-genre creations—letter and collage poems, ekphrasis, collaborative art/dance/writing projects, poems or stories incorporating multiple languages, maps, music, lists, diagrams, photographs, or other visual or sensory elements, or combining old and new, traditional and experimental forms, like broken sonnets, or Jericho Brown’s duplex form, anything that straddles the line between poetry and prose, like flash fiction and prose poetry, or any 2-thing-mashup! 

Your invitation: Get creative! Be experimental! Mix and “mash” things together. Write about something hybrid. Or write/create something hybrid. 

FOR INSPIRATION:

Here’s a sample from “Testaments Scratched into a Water Station Barrel” hybrid poems by Eduardo C. Corral, from his collection Guillotine.

Here’s a duplex by Jericho Brown, from his Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection, The Tradition.

NOTE: No Write-In this month. (I’m going on a much-needed vacation!) But I’ll be back to host SNS and we can write together again next month.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

---

Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 841 8860 5302

Passcode: 483253

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+17193594580,,84188605302# US

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Author Bios

LINDA RAVENSWOOD is an award-winning poet, performance artist, and founding Editor-in-Chief of The Los Angeles Press. She a winner of the Oxford Poetry Prize, the Edwin Markham Poetry Prize selected by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and the 2023 Arthur Smith Prize from Madville Press. Her hybrid poetry collection Cantadora – Letters from California was released in January 2023 from Eyewear London/Black Spring Press Group. Other current and forthcoming publications include The Stan Poems (Pedestrian Press, 2022), A Poem Is a House (forthcoming from Flowersong Press 2023), The 500 – The End of Conquest (Alternating Currents Press, 2024), and If We Never Meet Again: A Pandemic Diary (X Artists’ Books, 2024). Ravenswood is also the founder of the poet laureate program in Glendale, California and introduces the Poets Café on KPFK in LA on Wednesdays at 2:00p.m. Find her at The Los Angeles Press www.thelosangelespress.com

Buy Cantadora —Letters from California here: https://www.amazon.com/Cantadora-Letters-California-Linda-Ravenswood/dp/1913606244

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and is the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the newly released Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Ploughshares. 

Find her at: https://webbish6.com/

Get a signed copy of Flare Corona here: https://webbish6.com/books/flare-corona/

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SNS | 03-25-23

Featuring: Nicole Callihan & Unmesh Mohitkar

Theme: Rupture

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday March 25, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

March Writing Prompt:

I recently bought Jenny Xie’s book, The Rupture Tense, to teach in my Contemporary Poets & Poetry workshop and before I even read this amazing collection, I fell for the word “rupture.” Its versatility and violence; its brutal, catalytic change.

To break. To shatter warningless. A glass table exploding in slow motion. To breach. To disturb. To disrupt. An alien bursting from a stomach like a surprise from a cake. Harmony collision. An unwanted memory. Engorged river. Protestors infenestrating buildings through ruptured glass. Bombed cities. Broken silence.  

For your prompt this month, think burst pipes and flooded banks; think derailed trains and ruptured relationships; think explosions and popped balloons or tendons, organs spilling and borders breached. Even thunder, laughter, or a sneeze can rupture. Think egg shells and ruined yolks. Fissure. Puncture. Erupt. And then, perhaps...repair. Think wabi-sabi and kintsugi. Think make-up sex.

Or play with form. How can you rupture the narrative? The sentence? The line? The page? Language and tense! Disrupt the normative syntax! Word mutiny! Dismember and rebuild! Consider how breaking something can provide a new way to revise, a new way to create.

Feel free to interpret the prompt any way you choose or to ignore it entirely. Sign up below to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches at this month's open mic.

Want to work on the prompt together?

Join me the week before SNS (on Saturday afternoon, March 18) for the Saturday Night Special Write-In! Details/ sign up here.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

---

Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 868 7267 5637

Passcode: 172727

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+17193594580,,86872675637# US

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Author Bio

Nicole Callihan’s This Strange Garment was released this month by Terrapin Books. Her other books include SuperLoop and the poetry chapbooks The Deeply Flawed Human, Downtown, and ELSEWHERE (with Zoë Ryder White), as well as a novella, The Couples. Her work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, The American Poetry Review, and as a Poem-a-Day selection from the Academy of American Poets. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com.
Get your copy of This Strange Garment here: https://www.terrapinbooks.com/store/p55/garment.html

Unmesh Mohitkar is a performance poet and spoken word artist from Pune, India. He is the author of the poetry collections, Light Shadow Life: The Missing Verse of the Soul and most recently Let’s Un-Mesh Life. He has featured at multiple international open mics and spoken word events, including the Singapore and San Jose Poetry Festival, Phynncabulary, Put it in the Chat, Word is Write, Time to Arrive, Cobalt poets and The Nuyorican Poets Cafe Online. Unmesh writes in three languages (English, Hindi, Marathi) and is a globetrotter who has visited twenty-two countries. He hosts his own open mic Let’s UN-Mesh Life every Saturday at 9pm IST, 10:30am EST.
Learn more: https://linktr.ee/UnmeshMohitkar
His latest book, Let’s Un-Mesh Life is available now: https://a.co/d/9vE0Glm

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SNS | 02-25-23

Featuring: Ali Lanzetta & Truong Tran

Theme: Light Switch

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday February 25, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for spring. As I write this, I’m hiding out with family, hours from home, where a frozen tree came crashing, snapping the power line to our house. Across town, thousands more trees lay in icy ruins as Austonians huddle in the dark. Waiting for the lights to switch back on.

This month at SNS we’re leaning into the light. Bring me your sunshine! There are so many ways to think about a light switch, from the beginning of the universe, to the changing of the seasons where light slides newly through trees, the times of day that simmer and glow in transition, a wisp of sun settling in eyelashes, your childhood flashlight under the covers, the antique lamp’s snap into brightness, the way light teases the tips of waves, the first windows to blink awake on a hillside, captured fireflies in a jar, the spark of new love, the poet’s epiphany. Let there be light!

Want to work on the prompt together? Join me the week before SNS (on Saturday, February 18) for the first ever Saturday Night Special Write-In! Details/ sign up here.

Feel free to interpret the prompt any way you choose or to ignore it entirely. Sign up below to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches at this month's open mic.

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The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 829 5578 8503

Passcode: 700511

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+16694449171,,82955788503# US

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Author Bios

Ali Lanzetta is a writer, educator, artist, musician, and bookseller who lives between trees, sleeps under a blanket of books, and has a soft spot for giraffes, whose hearts are over two feet long. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Verse, Switchback, Eleven Eleven, Flock, Panapoly, Gertrude, and elsewhere. Her debut book, marmalade, a collection of prose poetry and flash narrative nonfiction, is scheduled for release in March 2023 from Spuyten Duyvil Press. ali studied creative writing and teaching on the enchanted electric hilltops of San Francisco, but eventually set sail from the city to live, love, and practice the literary arts in a Vermont valley filled with birds. You can find out more about ali and her work at alilanzetta.com.
Preorder her book here: https://www.spuytenduyvil.net/marmalade.html

Truong Tran is a Vietnamese-American poet, visual artist, and teacher. He is an author of eight collections of poetry, most recently, Book of the Other (Kaya Press, 2021), as well as an artist book, and a children's book. As a visual artist Tran is best known for mixed media pieces and light installations. His work is in private collections, and has been featured in solo gallery shows as well as museum exhibitions across the Bay Area. As a teacher, Truong Tran has over twenty years experience as a professor of Creative Writing to both graduates and undergraduates, and has mentored thousands in the community.
truong-tran.com

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SNS | 01-28-23

Featuring: Toni Mirosevich & Arisa White

Theme: Long Dark Night

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday January 28, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

This month at SNS, on the last Saturday of January, in the heart of midwinter, we celebrate “the long dark night,” with blackouts and snow, existential woe and holidays behind us, at the end of a (maybe/semi) sober January, with resolutions made and (maybe) broken, the smell of wood smoke welcome (or warning), winter invites us to turn inward, to hibernate and reflect, to make soup, write, and reset, to recommit to goals, and reconnect to the people and things that matter, to rest and rejuvenate. Consider, perhaps, the soul in search of fresh faith after a period of darkness, rejection, illness, failure, ennui—what lifts us up, nourishes and inspires, what light persists through the long dark night?

Want to work on the prompt together? Join me the week before SNS (on Saturday, Jan 21) for the first ever Saturday Night Special Write-In! Details/ sign up here.

Feel free to interpret the prompt any way you choose or to ignore it entirely. Sign up below to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches at this month's open mic.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 845 4394 5181

Passcode: 832676

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+13462487799,,84543945181# US

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Author Bios

Toni Mirosevich was raised in a Croatian-American fishing family in Everett, Washington. In Spell Heaven, her linked story collection recently released from Counterpoint Press, a lesbian couple moves to a coast town and unexpectedly finds a sense of belonging with a group of outsiders. Mirosevich is also the author of Pink Harvest, winner of the First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction, and five books of poetry. Her cross-genre writings have been widely anthologized and her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals. A professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University for many years, she currently resides with her wife in Pacifica, California.
Buy her book here: counterpointpress.com/books/spell-heaven
Learn more: tonimirosevich.com

Arisa White is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. Most recently, she is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Her poetry is widely published and her collections have been nominated for an NAACP Image Award, Lambda Literary Award, and have won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, Maine Literary Award, Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and Golden Crown Literary Award. Currently, in development with composer Jessica Jones, Arisa is working on Post Pardon: The Opera. arisawhite.com

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SNS | 11-26-22

Featuring: Jennifer Lewis & Zomkhonto

Theme: Recover

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday November 26, 2022
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

Join me on Saturday after Thanksgiving for the last SNS of 2022

As we bask in the afterglow of too much food, friends and family, football and politics, and reflect on the closing year, for your November writing challenge, I invite you to consider the idea of RECOVERY, in any of its many senses.   

To RECOVER is to "return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength; to regain control or possession of (something stolen or lost); to make up for."

From what have you recovered or are you still recovering from? This could be a small triumph, like recovering a lost $20 in the pocket of last year's coat, or you could be recovering from an injury or the loss of a friend, a heartbreak, the economic downturn, or a bout with Covid (in many ways we're all still trying to recover from the pandemic), some of us have recovered from depression, rejection, addictions or hangovers, even writer's block. What is the spark that gives us the hope to fight for our own recovery? How can we lift ourselves and each other up?  

Feel free to interpret this prompt any way you choose or to ignore it entirely. Sign up below to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches at this month's open mic.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 812 2917 6407
Passcode: 755207

iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+13462487799,,81229176407# US

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Author Bios

Jennifer Lewis is a writer, editor, and the publisher of Red Light Lit. Her debut short story collection, The New Low, was recently released in 2022, by Nomadic Press, where her short story, "New Low," was the winner of the Bindle Award. In 2020, she won the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction award for "Put a Teat in It." She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 2015. She teaches at The Writing Salon in San Francisco. Buy her book here: https://www.nomadicpress.org/store/p/thenewlow

Mbonisi Zikhali was born in Makokoba, in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. His spoken-word/storytelling name is Zomkhonto, which happens to be his bloodline’s totem. He is a spoken-word artist, story-teller, arts educator, youth mentor, qualified community services worker, grassroots community organizer and mental wellness advocate. He considers himself an afro-empath, and is driven to ensure that people find joy and healing in the power of words and story-telling. Some of the recent publications he has appeared in include winner of Off Topic Publishing's August 2022 Poetry Contest, Best New African Poets 2019 Anthology by Mwanaka Media and Publishing, Ipikai Poetry Journal’s inaugural and second edition (initiative of the Zimbabwe Poets Society) among others. His work was recently showcased at the World Poetry Slam Championships’ spoken word video presentations (September 26-30, 2022) in Brussels, Belgium. He is the current President of Artcite Windsor Inc (Canada)’s Board of Directors.
Check out a digital broadside of his work here: https://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/cobalt/092722.pdf

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SNS | 10-29-22

Featuring: Sara Biel & Fraser Johnson

Theme: Trick!

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday October 29, 2022
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

It's decorative gourd season AND the 12th annual SNS Halloween Reading is happening on the last Saturday of October! Let's get festive. Wear a costume, or a hat, wig, mask, paint your face if you're feeling spicy.

Our theme this month is: TRICK. Think: mirage, disguise, card tricks, trick-or-treating, pranks, sex workers, gymnastics, sugar cereal, dog training, con artists, mistaken identity, a trick of the light. Or whatever you want.

Sign up to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches on our optional theme.

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 823 2213 0882
Passcode: 939981

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:
https://peralta-edu.zoom.us/j/82322130882?pwd=K0RDWWlWbVFqTFJLRW5UUlJwSDNhUT09

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)

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Author Bios

Sara Biel, a poet, visual artist and social worker living in Oakland, CA, coedits the Colossus Press anthology series. Her poems have been published in sPARKLE & bLINK; Button Eye Review, and Beyond Words: She won honorable mention in the Streetlight 2021 poetry contest. Her chapbook Prescribed Burn will be published in 2023 by Finishing Line Press. She sees the creative process as a medium for change, healing and building community.

Fraser Johnson is the author of the newly released memoire, "WTF are Boundaries: Good Times, Bad Times, and Narcissistic Abuse." He lives in Toronto, Ontario, where he is visited by his young adult sons, two of the best people he has ever known. Outside of writing, Fraser loves nature; an avid outdoorsman, he has led camping and outdoor experiences for groups as well as designed and developed camping gear.

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SNS | 9-24-22

Featuring: Valerie Sopher & Steven Gray

Theme: The Blues

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday September 24, 2022
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

In honor of this month’s musical poet features, Steven Gray & Valerie Sopher, we’re celebrating The Blues—whether that means music, or something lyrical, or the color of your childhood bathroom, ocean and sky, the worst flavor of M&M, your favorite jeans, the “something blue” from your wedding, your sad post-pandemic life, your Covid Blues, the time you saw Taj Mahal live at Yoshi’s, your ekphrastic take on Picasso’s Blue Period, your jealous tribute to Maggie Nelson’s “Bluets”—let (the) BLUE(s) inspire you this month.

Sign up to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches about the burning at this month's open mic.

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 813 9445 7915

Passcode: 980124

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81394457915?pwd=MUhxQU9maWtDVWRzOVpJNkoySVh2dz09

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+13462487799,,81394457915# US or +16694449171,,81394457915# US

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX

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Author Bios

Valerie Sopher s a singing quilter from the San Francisco Bay Area who found her poetic voice during the pandemic. She did so with much help from Hollie Hardy and her San Francisco Creative Writing Institute classes. She has had some success in getting her poems out into the world, many of which were written from prompts in Hollie’s classes. Her work has appeared in Canary, Caustic Frolic, Slant, Prometheus Dreaming, Science Write Now and will soon appear in River Mouth Review and Quiet Diamonds - the Orchard Street Press Poetry Contest 2022. She was the grand prize winner in the Wingless Dreamer Dawn of the day contest.

Steven Gray is a poet and musician celebrating the new release of his album, Exile:
https://stevengray.bandcamp.com/album/exile

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SNS | 8-27-22

Featuring: Heidi Kasa & T.A. Niles

Theme: Opposites

Hosted By: Hollie Hardy

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Saturday, August 27, 2022
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)

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Online Event
Free Admission

When I was in college at SFSU studying creative writing, I took a class with the fabulous Nona Caspers. One day she started her lecture by holding up a potted plant she had brought for this purpose. "Write like this pink flower!" she commanded. Then she raised her other fist above her head, "Write like this rusty railroad spike!" I never forgot her lesson on "beauty and its opposite," how opposites can help us better understand truth.

This month at SNS, you are invited to explore the idea of opposites in your writing—day and night, hot and cold, love and indifference, acceptance and rejection, kindness vs malevolence, young vs old, virtue vs sin, truth and lies, red and blue, beauty and its opposite, or any other polarization of your choosing.

Sign up to share your poems, stories, songs, dances, or short comedy sketches about the burning at this month's open mic.

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Join Event on Zoom

Meeting ID: 963 5543 3334

Password: 135019

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android:
https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/96355433334?pwd=ZEhSeU52THhiNnVZQXlzVklJSFVXUT09#success

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+13462487799,96355433334# or +12532158782,96355433334#

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Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List

The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX

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Author Bios

Heidi Kasa writes weird fiction that sometimes gives people chills. She is also a poet, though lately her poems are more like political rants. Her work has been a finalist for a Black Lawrence Press award and shortlisted for a Fractured Lit award. Kasa’s fiction chapbook, Split, is due out from Monday Night Press in August 2022. She edits nonfiction and is learning how to take good care of native Texas flowers and plants.

Buy Split here: https://www.mondaynightpress.com/split/
Find more of Kasa's work here: www.heidikasa.com

T.A. Niles is
just a crude dude spillin'
in a world that's illin'
spinnin' turnin' so fast it's burnin'
trailin smoke so thick and noxious
it can choke the righteous
into coughing up the platitudes
of the multitudes....

He’s throwin’ down on Fear
like it stole sump’n
embracing Truth
like an imaginary lover
coaxing, cajoling
but never coercing
Authenticity
from Plasticity’s clutches…

Can ya feel im?
Do you care to?
If so, you can find more of his expressions on his
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQuUXZENe-u4D0TZn1x01ew
And his blog: https://tapoetexpress.blogspot.com/

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