![]() He couldn’t breathe, barely managed to call 911 from his Portland studio before he suffered a cardiac arrest. A mutual friend - jazz musician David Ornette Cherry - suffered a medical emergency. We planned to cook simple meals together, drink good wine, catch up on stories about our lives, plan collaborative projects, and, at the end of the weekend, drive the 70 miles to the Crow Reservation to spend some daylight hours at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, then travel the final stretch to the Wyoming ranch and our official residency.Īt the last moment, life tectonics shifted. Susan rented us a car and a two-bedroom Airbnb bungalow in Billings. Perhaps some time away would open a way to re-focus, to pick up the thread of my own writing life.Īs a way to jumpstart our adventure, Susan and I schemed a rendezvous, picking a town on the map that neither of us knew at all - Billings, Montana - simply because it had an airport and decent airfares from Los Angeles, for me, and from Portland, Oregon, for Susan. Luckily, I had been granted a writing residency that fall at an arts colony on a ranch outside of Sheridan, Wyoming, and Susan - my soul sister-in-art - had been awarded a residency there as well. I was past the tearful stage, but I was still heart-torn, grieving. Now I was untethered from the satisfactions of my job and as well, from the scaffold of responsibilities that had, for so many years, structured the rhythms of my life. One evening, during his sound check, Cornel West pulled me aside to say, “You know, don’t you, that this space is sanctified?” I did. ![]() At our last event, Nelson Mandela’s granddaughter read from her grandfather’s just-published prison letters. ![]() Sebald, Margaret Atwood, Adam Zagajewski, Ursula LeGuin - all presented their work on our stage over the years. Hundreds of literary luminaries - Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, W. They came to hear local poets read Walt Whitman translated into Farsi and Spanish to celebrate novelists like Colson Whitehead and his re-imagining of the Underground Railroad, to learn from naturalists like Terry Tempest Williams, primatologists like Frans de Waal. The events at Central Library, the hearth of the city, were free homeless patrons sat next to lawyers and teachers and students to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about religion or Ta-Nehesi Coates discuss reparations. It was a job I’d loved, that had drawn on my love of literature and my delight at convening people from across Los Angeles to engage with the issues of the day, to ask questions of innovative thinkers, to practice agreeing and disagreeing in a public forum. Just six weeks before, I’d been fired from my job of 25 years. If I lived in a traditional society, I’d have been standing on the threshold of the hut listening as a priest beat drums and stirred strong potions, a state the anthropologists call liminality. One era of my life had ended, and the next had not yet begun. My disorientation went beyond the geo-gravitational. In the moment my eyes opened, I lost my connection to those essentials that are, as Proust assures his readers, held fast by our psyches during sleep: “he sequence of the hours, the order of the years, and the worlds.” The hazy proportions of the room gave no clue curtains blocked the winter light. I did not know east from west, up from down, where I’d find a floor to take the weight of my body. Refreshments will be provided please bring sack lunches.ġ1am–noon: Jillian Lauren and Rebecca Walker keynoteġ2:15–1:30pm: Women who pitch: freelancing in digital ageġ:45–2:45: Lunchtime keynote with writer/producers Lisa Kudrow & Robin Schiffģ–4:15pm: How to Build a Writing CommunityĤ:30–5.45pm: Writing without Pity: Disability, Illness, & our Bodiesĥ:45–6pm: BinderCon Themed Flash Fiction Activityġ1–12:15pm: Space Invaders: Writing Genre for Screenġ2:30–1:45pm: Writing cultural identity panelģ:15–4:30pm: Being a writer while having a lifeĦ:45–8pm: After party at the Iron Horse.I WOKE UP around 5:00 a.m., disoriented in an unfamiliar bed. PLUS a live reading and Q&A with NYT-bestselling author Laura Munson. Missoula writers! Can't make it to BinderCon LA? Come meet fellow women and gender non-conforming writers in your community, at a free livestream of BinderCon generously sponsored by the Harnisch Foundation.
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