ART IS A SPIRITUAL ACT AND A HUMAN RIGHT
Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, under the leadership of Mary Volmer, is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed within and sponsored by Orinda Community Church.
Please join us each month for our 2nd SundaY READING SERIES
Coming up at Alta Mesa Center for the Arts…
Trip the Lines Fantastic: Composing Poems That Dance
led by Tod Edgerton
Sunday November 2nd - 4pm PT
Zoom
RSVP HERE
Free your line…and the rest will follow! In this writing workshop we will discuss examples of “field composition” poetry to explore how it liberates the line from the margins to explode the page. Field composition choreographs the movement of your lines and your readers’ eyes for a dynamic poetic form that takes the reading and writing experience to a whole other level, adding new visual and kinetic elements to your poems and even opening multiple reading possibilities.
Michael Tod Edgerton (he/they) is a Queer girlie-boy poet of lyrically fluid gender and genre alike. Author of Vitreous Hide (Lavender Ink), Tod’s poems have appeared in Boston Review (annual contest winner), Denver Quarterly, EOAGH, Interim, New American Writing, Posit, Sonora Review, VOLT, and other journals. Tod holds an MFA from Brown, a PhD from UGA, and has received fellowships from Bread Loaf and MacDowell. He serves on the poetry-editing teams of Conjunctions and Seneca Review, where he is also Book Reviews Editor. You’ll find him swishing along the streets of San Francisco and online at MTodEdge.com. You can read about and contribute to his ongoing participatory text-collage project at WhatMostVividly.com.
Mission
We believe that art is a spiritual act and a human right. Contained within that sentence are our two primary goals: a) to provide a place for artists to engage in the spiritual aspects of their art and for spiritual seekers to use art to deepen and discover new avenues of spiritual experience; b) to provide a place where people from diverse traditions, artistic practices, and economic realities come together in community.
From experience we know that art can bridge the divisions, substantive and arbitrary, that divide us. We come together not only to practice and teach the arts, but to celebrate and learn from our differences and to foster lively and respectful interdisciplinary dialogues. We seek unity in diversity. We welcome professional artists, writers and musicians, experienced amateurs, hobbyists, mystics and seekers young and old. Wherever you are on your artistic and spiritual journey, whoever you are, we welcome you.