Sandra Gail Lambert

Remembrance: Elegy and Celebration

Something in the theme of Remembrance: Elegy and Celebration and with a time limit of just one minute - those are the parameters for those of us participating in the Friday Night Reading at the Other Words Conference in St. Augustine this weekend. 

Which means that all of us together, in one evening, will form a whole piece of writing.  It makes me think of Tibetan sand painting mandalas that are destroyed upon completion - a meditation on impermanence.  (Except this is not Tibet so there are plans for You Tube.) 

Or in literary terms, we'll end up with a type of RENGA or alternating accretive verse (with prose).  I'm making a couple of selections - my fictional little girl sitting on the baby graves of her siblings, a memoir moment of my mother in Hospice, the death, in my novel, of the last saber-toothed cat.  I'll read the one that seems to fit with this moment we'll be creating.

Florida Writers' Festival 2011

Amy Hempel, D.A. Powell, Laura Kasischke, David Berman, and Kevin Young are all reading, presenting craft talks, and mingling at receptions here in Gainesville this weekend beginning tomorrow, Thursday.  Here's the full schedule for the Florida Writers' Festival.  

For sure, I'll show up on Friday night to hear Amy Hempel and D.A. Powell.  The readings begin at 8pm at the Ustler Hall Atrium near the University of Florida stadium.   

Saturday Night Fun in St. Augustine - Come hear me read.

Well, me along with Karen McElmurray, Georgia Banks-Martin, Shobha Sharma, Kimmy Van Kooten, and Anne Martin Fletcher.  Even if you haven't been able to make it to that day's Women Writing Retreat, come to this final, free, and open to the public event at Anastasia Books (81 King St).  Seven pm.     

I'm either reading fiction about a hot-flashing lesbian in relationship trouble or an essay about rolling in the mud of Payne's Prairie.  But then there's that short, short piece about morphine and my mother.  I promise, I'll have it figured out by Saturday night.         

 

Preparing For a Reading

Yikes.  First of all this means I have to go look at the novel.  Which my agent has sent out to publishers.  Which means I might find too-late-to-correct, horrendous errors.  So, I'm avoiding this by trying to identify a few self-contained, perfect length, dramatic excerpts - without looking.  I figure that way I'll limit my exposure to possible shame and panic.  

So far I'm thinking the chapter where the woman born without legs learns to swim from manatees - the writing is sort of pretty in that part.  Or maybe the cynical clerk in the Silver Springs gift shop selling alligator mugs made in China - I think it's funny, people like funny, right? Or, for a completely different mood, the death scene of the saber-toothed cat?  Dangnabbit, I'm going to have to just hold my breath and open that file. 

Come to the Larimer Arts Center in Palatka on Sunday, May 15th at 3pm to see if I've survived.   

 

      

"The Efficacies of Pears," "Lessons on Killing," "The Memory of a River," and Ekphrasitc Poetry

 
My second reading in May will be on Sunday, May 15th at the Larimer Arts Center in Palatka from three to five in the afternoon.  And this one has a great line-up. 

Anne Martin Fletcher is a retired Air Force pilot working on a memoir, Kimmy Van Kooten, the seventh child of sixteen and the mother of eleven, is a poet in search of "a bit of silence, in some little nook," and Glenda Bailey-Mershon is a fiction writer, poet, and organizer of The Janes Stories Press Foundation whose mission is to "encourage diverse women's voices in publishing." And then there's me.  I'll be reading from my novel. 

So drive on over to Palatka for "Life Lessons: Writers on Growing Up, Growing Older, and Growing Better."  Events like this just don't happen.  My thanks to Create!, The Arts Council of Greater Palatka, The Florida Janes Circle, Glenda Bailey-Mershon, and Christy Sheffield Sanford. 

My First Reading in May

 
A year ago in May my mother died.  She didn't always remember that I was a writer and when she did, often saw it as a rival for her time.  "What are you doing today, dear?"  "I'm writing, Mother."  "Aren't you done with that yet?"  So it means a lot that my first May reading, on the 10th, is for the residents at The Village, the Gainesville retirement community she lived in.  I'm taking it as a sort of post-passing support.  

The real-life, right now support comes from Mary Cox, my friend who still lives at the Village.  She read my essay about Paynes Prairie ("Rolling in the Mud") in The Alaska Quarterly Review, showed it to the activities director, and the activities director set me up on their program schedule.  There will be an accompanying slide show of my photos of the Prairie and large-print copies of the essay so the hard of hearing can follow along - my first multi-media presentation.