SNS | 06-24-23
Featuring: Miah Jeffra & Amber Flame
Theme: The Rainbow
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday June 24, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)
Online Event
Free Admission
Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List
The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to
3 MINUTES MAX
Join Event on Zoom
Meeting ID: 834 5519 1875
Passcode: 325168
iPhone one-tap (US Toll):
+1 253 205 0468 US
Author Bios
Miah Jeffra is the author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the novel American Gospel. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, storySouth, DIAGRAM, jubilat and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing and decolonial studies at Santa Clara University.
Learn more and buy books at miahjeffra.com
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, and more. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. As the singer-songwriter front of her band, Last of the RedHot Mamas, Flame brings raunchy wordplay, constant hustle and heartbreaking love of the blues to contemporary issues of self-care, racial injustice, apocalypse survival, ethical non-monogamy, and post-church spirituality. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame’s second book of poetry, apocrifa, launched May 2023 from Red Hen Press. Amber Flame is a queer Black dandy mama who falls hard for a jumpsuit and some fresh kicks.
The SNS Write-In Returns this Month!
LET’S WRITE TOGETHER!
Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, June 17, for the SNS Write-In, a generative online workshop.
June Writing Prompt:
The rainbow represents inclusivity. It celebrates our diversity, our differences and how whatever our stripe or color, we are all beautifully human, deserving of celebration and freedom to be ourselves. The rainbow also means hope, love, and friendship.
In a climate of violence and political backlash against the LGBTQ+ community, the values represented by the rainbow are as urgent and imperative as ever. So, in honor of Pride Month, the SNS (always optional) theme this month is: The Rainbow.
SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:
Write about identity, gender, sexuality, love, sex, relationships, a celebration of self-acceptance, or discrimination, stereotypes, family or social pressures. Or write about current politics around these issues. Or a personal experience of Pride—a parade or bar or drag show or dance party you attended, a historical event or tragedy you witnessed or were affected by, a law or teaching by a school or church that impacted you, something that shaped your understanding as an adult or child. A comment that hurt or healed. This might be your own experience or something you witnessed as a friend or a conversation you had.
Or
If all this feels too personal or political, you are welcome to write into more general representations of the rainbow introduced above—hope, love, friendship, diversity, inclusivity, freedom, beauty, etc. Try to ground your writing in a specific detail, image, moment or story.
Or
Be literal! Write about the time you saw a double rainbow on a camping trip or with your family at Disneyworld, or how you used to decorate your locker with rainbow stickers and believe in leprechauns and fairies, or that rainbow-after-the-storm feeling that came after an emotional breakthrough.
Or
Let color itself be your muse. Pick a specific color to explore or write into each color of the rainbow. Paint with words.
Or something else! The sky is the limit, as they say.
FOR INSPIRATION:
“An American Poem,” by Eileen Myles
”Summer,” by Chen Chen
”The Mortician in San Francisco,” by Randall Mann
”Lisp,” by Sam Sax
”A Litany for Survival,” by Audrey Lorde
”At Last the New Arriving,” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
”Double Rainbow,” by Ravi Shankar
”Colors of the Comanche Flag,” by Sy Hoahwah
”Colors Passing through Us,” by Marge Piercy
“Pride Inside,” Selected Shorts podcast hosted by Meg Wolitzer