UPCOMING EVENTS

Monday, November 24th at 7:00 pm Spanish Reading Group

The Spanish Reading Group meets on the last Monday of each month at the bookstore. The group is currently reading Luisa Valenzuela's Cambio De Armas.

Paintings in Proust Saturday, November 29th at 7:30pm at the Dance Palace

Eric Karpeles,
author of Paintings in Proust
Showing Powerpoint presentation of images.

A presentation of images from artist Eric Karpeles’s visual guidebook to Prousts’s In Search of Lost Time. Karpeles illuminates the winding corridors of Proust's visually rich, labyrinthine masterpiece. An actor will read passages from Proust’s novel.

Paintings in Proust is a companion guide to a monumental twentieth century work of art. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, one of the most expansive literary creations ever composed, is a vast novel teeming with visual references. Author Eric Karpeles has combined his experiences as painter and writer to create a lavishly illustrated book that illuminates the winding corridors of Proust's singular, labyrinthine masterpiece.

For newcomers to Proust's work, Paintings in Proust functions as a complementary guidebook, providing a firmer ground from which to undertake the task of plunging into a novel famously known for its complexity and its length. At the same time, Paintings in Proust offers further nourishment to the seasoned Proustian reader, whose plate is already extravagantly full.

www.paintingsinproust.com

An article that appeared in the November 2nd New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/arts/design/02kenn.html

Eric is a Bolinas artist and author.

Terry Tempest Williams Sunday December 7th, 4:00 pm at Toby's Feed Barn
Terry Tempest Williams,
reading from and talking about her upcoming book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

She is the author of the environmental classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place as well as An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; and the forthcoming Finding Beauty in a Broken World, which begins in Ravenna, Italy, returns to the American Southwest, and ends in a small town in Rwanda, where she has helped to build a memorial to the victims of the 1994 genocide. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Robert Marshall Award from The Wilderness Society, and Lannan and Guggenheim fellowships. She teaches in the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah.

Terry was one the first writers at the Mesa Refuge Writers Retreat in Point Reyes Station 10 years ago.

$15.00 - A benefit for the West Marin Review

Monday, December 8th Knit Lit Group,
The Knit Lit Group meets on the second Monday of each month to knit and read together. Bring your knitting or other handwork. All skill levels and genders are welcome.

Coleman Barks Wednesday December 10th, 7:00 pm at the Dance Palace
An evening with Coleman Barks,
reading from his upcoming book, Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2000.
Coleman Barks taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. The author of numerous Rumi translations, Barks’s work with Rumi was the subject of an hour-long segment in Bill Moyers's Language of Life series on PBS, and he is a featured poet and translator in Bill Moyers's poetry special, "Fooling with Words."

Tickets - $15.00

A benefit for the West Marin Community Services Food Pantry.

Saturday, December 13th at the Dance Palace, from 9:00am to 4:00pm
Northern California Slow Money Institute
A notable group of forward-looking thinkers has been nurturing a vision to mobilize investors and funders in the service of local food systems and broader social change. Theirs is an effort to "accelerate the transition to a restorative economy and localization." They seek first to invest social venture capital in the slow food movement in order to galvanize the expansion of what is still a very small grower pool and market share.
Their mission:

To promote entrepreneurship that preserves and restores soil fertility, appropriate-scale organic farming and local food communities
To catalyze increases in foundation grant-making and mission-related investing in support of sustainable agriculture and local economies
To incubate next-generation socially responsible investment strategies, integrating principles of carrying capacity, care of the commons, sense of place, diversity and non-violence

This daylong workshop is meant to generate discussion and formulate next steps. Speakers include Woody Tasch, Chair of Slow Money, Michael Dimock, President of Roots of Change Fund, Don Shaffer, President of RSF Social Finance, Jim Cochran, Founder of Swanton Berry Farm, along with local growers from Northern California.

You are invited to join the conversation. $50 covers the cost of lunch.
To register, please contact Michael Bartner at michael@slowmoneyalliance.org.
For a copy of the book call the bookstore.

Monday, December 14th, 7:30 pm Free bookstore event at Toby's Gallery.
Woody Tasch author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered
"Food," the poet Gary Snyder observed, "is the field in which we daily explore our harming of the world." Woody Tasch has a better idea: exploring saving the world through bringing slow food to scale through social venture investing and philanthropy.

Sunday, December 21th at 7:00 pm at the bookstore
Annual Candlelight Winter Solstice Poetry Reading: To Know the Dark
For the last two years, this solstice event has been absolutely magical! Poets are invited to come read their own poems or other poets' work by candlelight on the theme of Wendell Berry's poem "To Know the Dark":

To go to the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Interested in participating? Contact the bookstore.

Writers in the Schools Program
We are in a crisis of literacy. The National Endowment of the Arts reports that 15 -24 year olds spend seven minutes a day on voluntary reading. (The Week 12/7/07) Therefore, it is every community's challenge to sponsor access to good writing so that the young too can be moved, inspired, and guided by the great lights of literature, especially in a time when the values of the enlightenment are being tested. In this spirit, we want to institute a Writers in the School's program in West Marin so that practicing accomplished writers / large minded people can spend time with our kids to model and inspire writing as well as encourage perceptiveness, presence and attention in observing the world. Wallace Stegner noted that literature can enhance life when a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth: In his talks, he said," All a teacher can do is encourage the will to explore plus a few do's and don'ts of voyaging. These observations are recorded in (Italics, please) On the Teaching of Writing published by Dartmouth in 1988. He says: "Writing is not a function of intelligence or application. It is a function of gift. All any teacher can do is work with what is given. But I believe that everyone born should be given the best he is capable of and that many have undeveloped or obscured gifts that, like spores, will grow if they are given waters...Let young people begin with what moves them...and let them discover many things themselves. Through contact, students discover the love and uses of language, "its tools, techniques, strategies and stances and ways of getting at the narrative essence ... or the memorable ness of a poetically honed thought. " We believe that the conversation generated by practitioners and novices will yield enormous rewards, knowing that being touched by an authentic being opens us up and helps us inhabit large rather than small minds, open rather than closed ones. We want our students to claim their birthright, the practice of engaging their awareness, understanding, and take on life through the vehicle of language.

To this end, we propose to solicit applications from Northern California writers for a residency of two months in Point Reyes during which time the writer will give, in the spirit of Stegner, creative and environmental writing classes and workshops to middle school and high school classes in our area: West Marin, Tomales, Stinson -Bolinas, San Geronimo Valley, Tomales High. There will be workshop opportunities for West Marin home schoolers and high school students matriculated elsewhere. We will provide room board and a stipend as well as time to contemplate or actively write. At the end of the program, there will be readings at each of the schools and a West Marin Anthology which we hope will be the first of many. Applications will be available Summer 2008 for a Spring 2009 residency.

To be added to or removed from the Point Reyes Books Events Calendar e-mail list, write to us at books@ptreyesbooks.com

We encourage your feedback and suggestions.

Fragrance-Free Events: Please refrain from wearing perfumes and colognes when attending events in the bookstore so that those who are sensitive to chemicals may also attend.