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Visitations from the Holy Ordinary: Poetry for NowThis reading takes its title and its premise from Terry Tempest Williams's The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, and from her exploration that grace arrives in the most ordinary circumstances when paying attention. Chelsea Wills (September's artist-in-residence, Kelly Gray, and Marthine Satris will read work made from that kind of attention. The evening is part of the Pond Farm Pottery artist residency's community engagement program, hosted at Russian River Letters and Books.Chelsea Wills is the author of The Home of Milk, Love Letters from the Moon and Teach Me How To. Her writing runs between ethnography, essay, and poetry, made alongside scientists, farmers, and cooks and rooted in food, plants, and places in flux. Her visual work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Lab SF, and SubRosa, and further afield at the London Biennale and Teatro Felipe Carillo Puerto. Chelsea lives in Sonoma County with her two wild children, a collection of olive trees, and is the current resident at Pond Farm Pottery. You can find her at chelseawills.substack.com Kelly Gray's poetry has been featured on The Slowdown Podcast, Poetry Daily, and she's been published in or is forthcoming from Ploughshares, Boulevard, AGNI, ZYZZYVA, Sixth Finch, and Salt Hill Journal, among other places, and she's the author of several collections of poetry. Kelly lives with her daughter in a cabin in the woods in Camp Meeker, and in addition to her four other jobs, teaches poetry to rural folks in rural places while running the west county reading series, Books & Barns.Marthine Satris has published poetry and prose in The Georgia Review, The Santa Clara Review, Antiphony Journal, Ballast Journal, Flyway Journal, and elsewhere. She is the Associate Publisher at Heyday, the nonprofit press in Berkeley, CA, and holds a PhD in English from UCSB. She lives in Oakland and is a frequent contributor to Oakland Review of Books. You can find her on Bluesky at @msatris and Instagram at @m_satris.

Meet 20+ local artists and get an early look at work they’ll be showing during the juried Art Trails Open Studios this October. Wander from Books & Letters through the outdoor patio space, discovering paintings, ceramics and more while meeting the artists and hearing the stories and inspiration behind their work.

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Make a night of it in downtown Guerneville: experience the art, meet some of the creative people who call West County home, then explore the town’s restaurants, bars, shops and nightlife.

It’s an art walk, artist meet-and-greet, and special preview of what you’ll discover when studios across Sonoma County open their doors October 10–11 and 17–18.

Learn more about Art Trails and participating artists by downloading the catalog.

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From light-hearted to heart-breaking, Romancing Normal follows the journey of Drew Carter, a romantic, closeted baby-boomer whose mission is to date gay away by finding a woman who so captivates his heart that his lust for men is obliterated, leaving him free to fulfill The Plan: Great job, beautiful wife, 2.25 kids, white picket fence and Ford Country Squire station wagon. Maybe even a pony. From straight to gay to grey, Drew learns to love himself and fulfills a plan even greater than he'd hoped for, proving that nice guys don't finish last. Growing up gay and closeted in the 1960s, it was beyond my comprehension that my attraction to other men and my intense feelings would ever be acceptable, legally or otherwise. With the advent of two Supreme Court rulings, United States v. Windsor in 2013, and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, my right to marry the love of my life became a legal mandate. Internal and social acceptance would follow, at different velocities. This work of fiction is a love story with (spoiler alert) has a happy ending.

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