Julia Stein as Featured Poet on June 22, 2014 at Bolton Hall Museum

We are thrilled to welcome Julia Stein as Featured Poet on June 22, 2014 (4:30 p.m.) at the Bolton Hall Museum in Tujunga. The reading will include two open mike segments and the featured poet's presentation will be followed by a reception.  We pass George Harris's Hat (the builder of the Bolton Hall Museum) to collect donations for the Little Landers Historical Society, suggested amount $3, for the upkeep of the Museum.

JULIA STEIN

Julia Stein’s seventh book of poetry What Were They Like? was published March 2013. In the last two years she edited two books of poetry: Every Day is an Act of Resistance: Selected Poems of Carol Tarlen by the brilliant S.F. poet Carol Tarlen who died in 2004 and Walking Through a River of Fire: 100 Years of Triangle fire Poetry. Stein is the 2011 Joe Hill Poetry Award winner. She has worked on an oral history project interviewing pioneers of the San Fernando Valley including children who grew up in Sunland-Tujunga to pioneer families 1900-1920.

AFTER THE FIRE STORM 

  We hiked into the burnt-black Simi hills,

headed past a forest of black shrubs,

saw tiny green buds beginning to grow,

stopped at the sandstone rock quarry where

the foundation stones of Los Angeles were dug,

climbed up footholds of the rock wall to the top

to see four leeching ponds cut into sandstone

where Chumash women leeched the acid out of acorns,

yes, we could learn from them how to cut into stone

and leach acid out of plants to get the hidden nourishment.

We walked up to the stone ruins of the stagecoach house,

saw blackened weeds in the middle of stone cisterns,

started hiking up the brown-stone devil’s slide where

once a stagecoach route cut across the hills;  now

we can learn to find the path through the stony land.

We saw against the black ash a green weed

with stinking yellow lemon gourds--the calabash.

Yes, we need to be green weeds and lemon gourds

stinking up the blackness of this city, saying we can

grow again, making this city a good green place.

HAWLEY AND JUSTUS READING IN MAY 2014

Photos from the reading are now available on the Picasa Web Album.

https://picasaweb.google.com/Maja.Trochimczyk/VillagePoetsHawleyAndJustusMay2014