My Calendar

Events in October 2019

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September 29, 2019
September 30, 2019
October 1, 2019
October 2, 2019
October 3, 2019
October 4, 2019
October 5, 2019
October 6, 2019
October 7, 2019
October 8, 2019(1 event)

7:00 pm: SPECIAL CONVERSATIONS AT THE CULVER WITH SUSAN STRAIGHT


October 8, 2019

Join local literary luminary Susan Straight in conversation with Inlandia's Cati Porter on her moving new memoir, In the Country of Women. While this event is free, RSVP is required through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/a-conversation-with-susan-straight-in-the-country-of-women-tickets-72742497769

What is it like to dwell "in the country of women"?

NPR calls Susan Straight's new memoir "a chronicle honoring the strength and resilience of six generations of women."

The L.A. Times says, "[h]er vibrant pages are filled with people of churned-together blood culled from scattered immigrants and native peoples, indomitable women and their babies. Yet they never succumb."

Newsday calls it, "a book about survival, motherhood, and love, and it’s as big and messy and beautiful as all of these things."

The New York Times goes further to declare it ".. an ode to the entire multiracial, transnational tribe she claims as her own."

From the publisher:

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.

In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight—and eventually her three daughters—heard for decades the stories of Dwayne’s female ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men.

Straight’s mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Susan’s family, too, reflects the hardship and resilience of women pushing onward—from Switzerland, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.

Susan Straight writes, "To understand my daughters and their sisterhood, you have to know the women, and sisters, who came before."

Susan Straight has published eight novels, including Highwire Moon, Between Heaven and Here, and A Million Nightingales. She has been a Finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Magazine Award. She is the recipient of the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story, the O. Henry Prize, The Lannan Prize for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Granta, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Harper’s, and other journals. Her work has been translated into Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Romanian, Swedish, and Russian. She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, where she lives with her family.This event is presented in partnership with UCR Arts and UCR Center for Ideas and Society. It is free and open to the public. Refreshments and book signing to follow. Book sales are on a first come, first served basis and limited to the first fifty paid RSVPs.

October 9, 2019
October 10, 2019
October 11, 2019
October 12, 2019(1 event)

9:00 am: THE 2019 HIGH DESERT BOOK FESTIVAL


October 12, 2019

Don't miss the 2019 High Desert Book Festival happening on Saturday, October 12th, starting at 9am! Meet authors, hear poetry readings and more. For more information visit the Official Event Page or go to highdesertbookfest.org.
***This is a sponsored partner event
October 13, 2019
October 14, 2019
October 15, 2019
October 16, 2019
October 17, 2019
October 18, 2019
October 19, 2019(2 events)

1:00 pm: 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION OF 'NO PLACE FOR A PURTIAN'


October 19, 2019

On October 19 at 1 pm, please join Inlandia Institute for a special ten year anniversary celebration of the launch of the anthology No Place for a Puritan: Literature of California’s Deserts. Admission is $10. Museum members and Inlandia members at the supporting level free with card. RSVP via Eventbrite for a chance to win a signed copy of No Place for a Puritan!

This event is in concert with a special pop up exhibition, The Silver Lining Celebration of our Treasured Deserts, commemorating the 25th anniversary of the California Desert Protection Act coordinated by Voice Media in partnership with the Conservation Lands Foundation and the San Bernardino County Museum. The museum is located at 2024 Orange Tree Lane, Redlands.

No Place for a Puritan was compiled and edited by Ruth Nolan and published under the Inlandia imprint by Heyday in 2009, and celebrates our southern California desert landscape.

Feared and romanticized throughout the ages, the desert has a hold on our imagination that is never more evident than in the literature it has inspired. From Mary Austin’s meditations in The Land of Little Rain to Joan Didion’s acerbic cast of characters in Play It As It Lays, the desert’s seemingly barren landscapes have provided rich ground for writers to explore.

These explorations were collected for the first time in No Place for a Puritan. In this anthology are stories that thrill, frighten, sadden, and inspire: a man foolishly and arrogantly collecting live rattlesnakes; a lone woman striving to make a home in a remote desert canyon; a drug-addled journalist’s drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; a Japanese American family coping with incarceration during World War II; and one man’s developing friendship with General Patton in a military training camp.

There are tales of spiritual and scientific discoveries and of the cities blossoming in the farthest corners of the California desert. Including the works of local writers—Susan Straight, Gayle Brandeis, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ruth Nolan, and others—as well as household names such as John Steinbeck, Aldous Huxley, Hunter S. Thompson, Jon Krakauer, Rebecca Solnit, and Barry Lopez, No Place for a Puritan is a collection that disturbs and enchants.

Praise for No Place for a Puritan:

“With voices as varied and untamed, as resilient and beautiful, as the landscape itself, this anthology maps another misunderstood and too often overlooked region of our state.”–Alex Espinoza, author of Still Water Saints

Participating authors:

For 20 years Caryn Davidson worked in the education branch of Joshua Tree National Park, where she presented environmental education programs to students K-12, both in the classroom and in the park. She was the park liaison for the Artist-in-Residence program from its inception in 2006, until its demise in 2016. Recently she served as the director of education for Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in Morongo Valley, part of the new Sand to Snow National Monument. She holds a master’s degree in French Language and Literature from UCLA, and worked for the French Consulate in Los Angeles before moving to the desert in 1987. Free-lance translation and interpretation bolstered her income during impecunious times in graduate school. Caryn’s work has been published in The Stone, L.A. Weekly, GEO, Interpretive Writing, Phantom Seed, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California; The Pacific Crest Trailside Reader, Picasso: Creator and Destroyer; Spillway, LAICA Journal, and several other magazines and journals. She has lived in Joshua Tree for 31 years.

Michael Madrigal is a member of the Cahuilla Band of Indians from the Cahuilla Indian Reservation located near Anza, California. He has been a lay administrator at St. Joseph Mission at the Soboba Indian Reservation for the past 25 years. He is currently entering the Graduate studies program in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Riverside, concentrating in American Indian Studies. Growing up on the reservation Michael had the opportunity to learn about his tribal traditions from many elders including Katherine Saubel, Alvino Siva, Robert Levi, and Uncle Billy Mesa. Keeping vibrant the indigenous spiritual traditions of southern Califrornia tribes is one of his life vocations. Michael has also been president of the Native American Land Conservancy for the last ten years. The primary goal of the conservancy is to care for and preserve sacred landscapes for present and future generations, thereby honoring the ancient and ongoing relationship between Indigenous peoples and the land.

Ruth Nolan, former wildland firefighter for the BLM California Desert District and fierce California desert conservationist, is the editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Books) and co-editor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager,) which won a poetry book finalist award in the 2018 Eric Hoffer Independent Publishing Awards. Her short story, “Palimpsest,” published in LA Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press), was nominated for a 2016 PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and also received an Honorable Mention Award in Sequestrum Magazine’s 2016 Editor’s Reprint contest. Her poetry collection Badwater placed as a finalist in the 2018 Hilary Gravendyk poetry book contest and she’s the author of the poetry book Ruby Mountain (Finishing Line Press) also won a 2017 California Writers Residency Award for her work on the community-inclusive Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California book project. She is professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert.

Rebecca K. O’Connor is Development Director at Rivers & Lands Conservancy, a falconer and an author. She has published reference books, pet owner’s manuals, novels and a memoir. Her falconry memoir, LIFTwas published by Red Hen Press. Essays of her writing have been published in Los Angeles Times Magazine (in its West incarnation), South Dakota Review, Iron Horse Review and divide. He work has also been included in New California Writing 2011 and 2012. O’Connor’s most recent novel is We Were Wilder,a post-apocalyptic wilderness journey.

7:00 pm: PHILOSOPHY MAGIC AND CRITICAL THINKING WORKSHOP


October 19, 2019

Join Cafe Con Libros Press on October 19th for the Philosophy Magic and Critical Thinking Workshop: Creating Conversation Through New Perspectives. This event starts at 7pm and will take place at Cafe Con Libros Press, located at 280 W. 2nd St, Pomona, CA 91766. Email cafeconlibrospress@gmail.com for more information.

****This is a sponsored partner event

October 20, 2019
October 21, 2019
October 22, 2019
October 23, 2019
October 24, 2019
October 25, 2019(1 event)

6:00 pm: THE EQUILUX: OPEN MICS FOURTH FRIDAY AT THE CORONA PUBLIC LIBRARY


October 25, 2019

Join the Corona Public Library for a night of open mics happening the fourth Friday of every month! Acoustic, spoken word, acapella, poetry, freestyle, performance art and comedy are accepted.

Performances may be on any subject and in any style or genre but must be appropriate for a broad audience. Feel free to bring art pieces for display. Art supplies will be provided for the duration of the event. Light refreshments will be provided as well.

Child care will be provided for children that are potty-trained. Open to adults 18+. The library is located at 650 S Main St, Corona, CA 92882. They can be contacted at (951) 736-2381. Visit the City of Corona website for more information.

October 26, 2019
October 27, 2019
October 28, 2019
October 29, 2019
October 30, 2019
October 31, 2019
November 1, 2019
November 2, 2019