Book Launch: Wandering in Bali

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Wandering in Bali: A Tropical Paradise Discovered with Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Joanna Biggar

Saturday, June 9th, 2012 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera ||www.bookpassage.com

Come to Bali in Corte Madera!

Wine, music, stories and other treats …

The word Bali conjures images of lush tropical beaches and coastlines, mysterious temples, gracious people, their transporting music and rice fields of impossible green.

But this paradisiacal Indonesian island isn’t all goddesses and frangipani. In addition to the beauty, this group of writers (www.wanderlandwriters.com) also found the humor—and the terror—of the place. Computer crashes, marauding monkeys, international paranoia, flesh-eating fish and even a few zombies also found their way into the stories collected here. (more…)

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Book Launch: Kirby Surprise

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind with Kirby Surprise

 

Dr. Kirby Surprise

Saturday, May 12, 2012 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera|| 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Wondering how to make things happen?

Kirby Surprise has written a fascinating new book, Synchronicity: The Art of Coincidence, Choice, and Unlocking Your Mind, about the way individuals perceive reality and the science behind it.  He writes about meaningful synchronistic experiences and how an individual can actually influence their happening. The experience of meaningful coincidences is universal. They are reported by people of every culture, every belief system, and every time period. Synchronicity examines the evidence for the human influence on the meaningfulness of events, and the way the modern computational model of the mind predicts how we create meaning. (more…)

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Book Launch: Chana Wilson

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH: Riding Fury Home: A Memoir with Chana Wilson

 

Chana Wilson
Chana Wilson

Saturday, April 14 , 2012 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

We’re delighted to host the debut of Chana Wilson‘s new memoir, Riding Fury Home: A Memoir.  Riding Fury Home is Chana’s new book about her tenuous relationship with her mother. Chana’s mom was sent to a mental institution when Chana was a young girl and treated for her lesbianism, which they attempted to “cure.”  Her dramatic new memoir traces her life from her youth to the women’s movement in 1970s and beyond.

Riding Fury Home received a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

“From the horrors of her childhood in 1950s New Jersey to the liberating discovering of her sexual identity decades later, psychotherapist Wilson’s memoir is as heartbreaking as it is uplifting. During (more…)

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Book Launch: Stan Goldberg

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers with Stan Goldberg, Ph.D.

 

Stan Goldberg

Saturday, March 10, 2012 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

We’d like to invite all those who live in the San Francisco Bay Area to join us in celebrating the release of Stan Goldberg’s new book Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers. The party, sponsored by Left Coast Writers®, will be at one of  the Bay Area’s premier bookstores, Book Passages in Corte Madera on March 10th at 7:00pm.

There will be a conversation about caregiving with generous amounts of champagne and wine, very appealing home-made appetizers, and if he practices enough, some Native American flute and Shakahachi (Japanese bamboo flute) interludes entwined within caregiving stories. And of course, a little bit of reading from the book and some conversation with Stan.

Anybody who is a caregiver now will greatly benefit from attending, and those who are not will learn what to do should they become one.

Stan is a cancer survivor, hospice volunteer Pathways Home Care and Hospice, husband, father, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, and devotee of the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and Native American Flute. In 2009 he was named by the Hospice Volunteer Association “Volunteer of the Year.”

For more than 25 years Stan taught, provided therapy, researched, and published in the areas of learning, change, loss, and end of life issues. He has published seven books, written numerous articles and delivered more than 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Asia. His last book Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness, Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life, received six national and international awards.
His books have been translated into Chinese, Indonesian, and Portuguese. Currently, He writes, consults on issues of change, and offers training to hospices and caregiver groups.

“Statistics show that at least once in almost everyone’s life, they will become a caregiver. Though an estimated 35 million currently provide care for someone terminally or chronically ill, those who accept this responsibility often feel as alone as if they were in a frightening foreign land. Whether visiting occasionally or caregiving 24/7, they are brushing up against life’s sharpest point.”

—Stan Goldberg, Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers

Stan has received glowing endorsements for his new book Leaning Into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers from Diane Gray of the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation, Andy Miller of Livestrong, The Lance Armstrong Foundation, and Gloria C. Horsley of the Open To Hope Foundation.

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Ferry Plaza Book Launch: Judith Horstman

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why and Who We Love with Judith Horstman

Judith_Horstman
Judith Horstman

Monday, March 12, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

On Monday night we’ll be celebrating the publication of The Scientific American Book of Love, Sex, and the Brain: The Neuroscience of How, When, Why and Who We Love, a new look on the necessity of love by Judith Horstman.

In her third enthralling book about the brain, Judith Horstman takes us on a lively tour of our most important sex and love organ and the whole smorgasbord of our many kinds of love—from the bonding of parent and child to the passion of erotic love, the affectionate love of companionship, the role of animals in our lives, and the love of God.

“This wonderful and accessible book will definitely make you rethink what you thought you knew about love. It does an outstanding job making a tremendous amount of data about such an important topic easy and fun to understand.”
—Andrew Newberg, MD, director of research, Myrna Brind Center for Integrative Medicine, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital; coauthor, How God Changes Your Brain

Judith Horstman is an award-winning journalist who writes about health and medicine for doctors as well as the general public. She has been a Washington correspondent, a journalism professor, a Fulbright scholar, and has written and edited in just about any medium including newspapers, newsletters, special health publications, radio, video, the Internet, annual reports and books.

We hope you’ll join us!

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Ferry Plaza Book Party: Left Coast Writers on Romance

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK PARTY: Left Coast Writers on Romance that is out of this world!

heartblack_sMonday, February 13th, 6pm
Book Passage || Ferry Plaza
San Francisco || www.bookpassage.com

Did you miss our Lovefest?

Don’t worry; you can still come out and celebrate the Big Day with Left Coast Writers©!  On Monday at Book Passage in the Ferry Plaza some of our members will share stories about love, sex and romance that is quite literally out of this world.  The readers will be Debbie Goelz, (more…)

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LCW Pre-Valentines Day Lovefest

LEFT COAST WRITERS PRE-VALENTINE’S DAY EVENT: Party for the day of the heart, with a few heart-felt readings as well!

Hot Flashes 2 Cover

Saturday, February 11th|| 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera ||www.bookpassage.com

Join us for the ultimate pre-Valentine’s Day party. Hot Flashes editors Linda Watanabe McFerrin and Laurie McAndish King and a host of past contributors (Claire Savage, Kunal Mukherjee, Saul Isler, Marianne Betterly, and more) will serve up wine, chocolate, romance-inducing gifts and some super-sultry works of literature just in time for the special day. Single or paired or in a big group, we want you to come and enjoy the love-ly vibe!

About Hot Flashes:
We confess, we’re on a mission. We think that the pleasures of being human and “in the flesh” get short shrift in our daily lives. Too often, in our culture, a natural captivation with the senses and their allure is suppressed, closeted, twisted, and this isn’t healthy at all. So, we want to present an unadulterated and avidly expressed lust for the sensual and all its permutations. This collection isn’t about anger and rebellion. It’s about love-about a good old erotic hankering for everything hot and steamy, warm and juicy, tasty, fragrant, visually exciting and vibration-filled. It’s about quickies: flash fiction, non-fiction and poetry guaranteed to raise a reader’s temperature in a way that is positively hormonal. These sexy short stories and poems demonstrate how simple it is to find pleasure almost anywhere when we are willing to slow down and attend to our feelings, our memories, and our senses.

Linda Watanabe McFerrin has been traveling since she was two and writing about it since she was six. She is a contributor to numerous literary journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and online publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Modern Bride, San Francisco Bride, Bay Nature, various Travelers’ Tales anthologies, and Salon.com. A popular speaker and panelist and an award-winning writer, she has authored two poetry collections, a novel and a short story collection, and has edited four books, including a northern California guidebook and a travel anthology. Linda has served as an NEA panelist and past judge for the San Francisco Literary Awards, the Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence and the Kiriyama Prize, and is founder and President of Left Coast Writers®, LLC.

Laurie McAndish King is a travel writer whose essays have been published in anthologies such as 30 Days in Italy, The Thong Also Rises, and the award-winning The Kindness of Strangers. Her work has also been published in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and aired on KUSF radio. Laurie’s adventurous spirit has led her to chase lemurs through the mountains of Madagascar, study medicinal plants in the jungles of Brazil, track lions on foot-without a gun-in Botswana, study with an urban shaman in San Francisco, and trap and band raptors in the Marin Headlands. Laurie earned her master’s degree in Internet-based education and publishes an online newsletter for travel writers. She is an officer and board member of Bay Area Travel Writers, and indulges her passions for travel and natural history as often as she possibly can.

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Book Launch: Lindy Hough

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Wild Horses, Wild Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1971-2010 with Lindy Hough

 

Lindy Hough
Lindy Hough

Saturday, January 14, 2012 || 7pm Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr. Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

“Through vivid details, Hough gives us snapshots of people—close family and friends, sometimes complete strangers; often the strangers are treated as though they are long lost friends, often those closest to her are seen as if for the first time. As a major poet, Lindy Hough demonstrates that memory, language, and personal history are the true sources of inspiration for contemporary living.”
—Cecil Brown, author of I, Stagolee

Poets and writers, we hope you will join Berkeley poet Lindy Hough for a sweeping journey through four decades of writing, as she reads poems collected from four earlier books and twenty new poems. Following a trajectory from the early seventies to the present, this New and Selected Poems gives a generous overview of Hough’s intellectual world as it probes themes of inner life reflected in artistic roots and process (including the work of visual artists), spiritual development, materialism and capitalism, and the workings of desire in relationship: love, family, motherhood and children, parents, the individual in the world.

Lindy Hough is the author of five books of poetry and non-fiction, including Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior: Faces of Mars and Shiva in the Crisis of Human Survival, a collection of anti-nuclear pieces, and the upcoming Wondrous Child: The Joys and Challenges of Grandparenting. She cofounded Berkeley’s North Atlantic Books in the mid-seventies, and was Publisher and Editorial Director for many years. She lives in Berkeley, California.

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Book Launch: Thanasis Maskaleris

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Thanasis Maskaleris, Translator and Editor of The Terrestrial Gospel of Nikos Kazantzakis:  Will the Humans Be Saviors of the Earth?

 

Thanasis Maskaleris

Saturday, December 10, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

“Every man (human being) has his own circle made up of things, trees, animals, humans, ideas—and he is duty-bound to save this circle. He, and no one else. If he does not save it, he cannot be saved.”

—NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS

Please join us as we celebrate the planet to which we owe so much and the work of two Greek authors who are its advocates: Nikos Kazantzakis, author of Zorba the Greek, and “the Green Greek” poet Thanasis Maskaleris.

We will be serving wine and Greek delicacies and enjoying selections from The Terrestrial Gospel of Nikos Kazantzakis: Will the Humans Be Saviors of the Earth? an anthology of passages—hymns to Gaia—selected from various books by Kazantzakis, centering on Nature and the workers of the soil, translated and edited by Thanasis Maskaleris. This powerful and poetic work raises environmental awareness and calls us to compassionate action toward saving our planet.

So come and celebrate with our earth loving, tree hugging tribe and share in this moving ode to our planet.

“This ‘terrestrial gospel’ is just the kind of bracing slap the world needs, a reminder from a great writer about what’s real and vital.”
—Bill McKibben Founder, 350.org, Author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

“Kazantzakis’s stentorian message needs to be hear far and wide,
as we persist in our sometimes mindless assaults on our fragile plane.”
—Dr. Leonidas Perakis, Scientist, Writer

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Book Launch: Robbi Sommers Bryant

LEFT COAST WRITERS BOOK LAUNCH:  Robbi Sommers Bryant, Author of The Beautiful Evil

 

Robbi Sommers Bryant
Robbi Sommers Bryant

Saturday, November 12, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage-Corte Madera || 51 Tamal Vista Dr.
Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Do you believe in fairy tales? Well, the little devils wreak havoc in Robbi Sommers Bryant’s thriller, The Beautiful Evil

Constance Sartone Jaconson never recovered from the sudden death of her father when she was only five. Devastated by her husband’s death and the scandal that ensues, Constance’s mother, Madeline, does little to comfort her scared and lonely daughter. With nowhere to turn, Constance protects herself by closing by off her emotions. Through vivid dreams and daytime visions, Constance’s father calls to her from a horse-drawn stage coach. These visions help Constance cope with her humdrum life and failing marriage. But things are about to change.

On a business with her husband, she purchases an antique Greek vase. Upon opening it, a stream of purple light hisses from the vase, and a tribe of wasp-like creatures pour out. One of the creatures shape-shifts into a ravishing fairy and offers Constance a way out. Desperate to feel anything, Constance listens to the fairy’s advise. But as her confidence grows, she begins to make all the wrong decisions, catapulting her into a web of lies and deceit. As her life spins future and further out of control, Constance soon finds herself staring into the abyss, forced to make one final heart-wrenching decision.

A rollercoaster ride into the chaos of a personal hell, The Beautiful Evil, is a captivating, psychological thriller that will keep you questioning reality until the final ultimate act.

Sex. Crime. Deceit. Murder.

… And wine.  So do come, and bring your pals.

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