Events
River Writing is for everyone and we'd love to welcome you to the table. If the $40 tuition presents a barrier to your participation, please request sliding scale. If you'd like to dive in a bit deeper, consider joining a multi-week series. Click here to see our current schedule.
2 Hours @ the Table with Karen in Moab!
Monday, September 25th 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
In-Person at MARC ( Moab Arts & Recreation Center)
Everyone Welcome! (16+)
Limited to 8 Participants
About Karen
Our Collective Capacity to Mobilize Love: A Discussion with Terry Tempest Williams and Eli Nixon
Join us for a discussion with author Terry Tempest Williams and Eli Nixon, author and illustrator of BLOODTIDE- A New Holiday in Homage To Horseshoe Crabs
Wednesday, September 27th. From 6-7:30 pm MST/ 8-9:30 EST
Free Registration, open until 4 pm MST/ 6 pm EST on 9/27/23, the day of our conversation.
Everyone is welcome!
Meeting on Zoom. (You will receive the link via email one hour before.)
About Terry Tempest Williams:
Terry Tempest Williams is a writer who speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are matters of justice. Her environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, has introduced untold numbers of readers to the vibrant bird life and ecology of Great Salt Lake. She is currently the writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School. In her recent opinion piece for the New York Times, I'm Haunted by What I Have Seen at Great Salt Lake, Terry proclaims the lake's personhood and expresses her faith in our "collective capacity to mobilize our love" on her behalf.
About Eli Nixon:
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of drawings, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They're a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.
Eli is a parent of a teen, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI, and a member of Direct Action for Rights and Equality, The Public's Devised Theater Working Group, The New Georges Jam, and brotherdykes unlimited. Eli and 300 Modern Humans (ages 0.3-83) recently "finished" a 450-million-year timeline of flora and fauna (mostly out of recyclables) in 9 months of asynchronous but collaborative organism building workshops. Now Eli is basking in intertidal naturedrag, flotilla scheming and amatuer flag dancing/ engaging in the legislative season...
About the book:
"Bloodtide gifts us a river to wander down where we can drift away from the bullshit... a holiday that rewilds us towards a life-affirming way of being in the world. And more than a holiday, Bloodtide extends us a glitch to enter that predates the trauma of all that clouds our imaginations." - brontë velez, Creative Director, Lead to Life
"It's hard to write about Eli Nixon's book because it's a book about fumbling into embodied relation and words are just a jump-off to living. It's about what you can do in a weekend with geologic time. It's a tender score for beautifully imperfect -- and transformative -- work... in the form of a series of proposals, invitations, and field notes... There is a crinkly poetry to Bloodtide, repurposed poetry, the poetry of wild rebirth snatched from the recycling bin. Words I thought I knew cast shadows that turn them into other beings entirely. Humble is an important word in this book, and so is impossible, and so is cardboard. ..It's a box full of wild objects, and the wild space between them. It's might-y -- might like "could be" not like brute force. It expands, has expanded me. I gasped a few times and my nose twitches with the smell -- the "rutty musk of the freer beasts within us." It is radical, it is wise, it is alive." -Agnes Borinsky, writer & theater-maker, author of Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 and Sasha Masha
2 Hours @ the Table with Karen 9/28/23
Thursday, September 28th with 6:00 pm-8:00 pm MST
Meeting on Zoom
Everyone Welcome! (16+)
Limited to 8 Participants
About Karen
Making Waves for Great Salt Lake on 10/14 & 10/15 with Eli Nixon
Making Waves for Great Salt Lake with Artist & BLOODTIDE author Eli Nixon & Artist Sarah May
Let's make our love for the lake visible with cardbooard transformation, bird puppets, & cyanotypes.
Saturday, October 14th & Sunday, October 15th noon-4pm each day!
Join us for one of both days.
At the Jordan River Nature Center: 1125 West 3300 South Salt Lake 84119
Everyone of any age is welcome! Spanish Interpretation provided.
Registration is FREE but required to help us prepare materials.
This event is made possible in partnership with Utah Humanities as part of the annual Utah Humanities Book Festival.
Schedule for the day:
Noon: Welcome and Instructions
12:30-2 pm: Cyanotypes with Sarah May
Noon-3:30 pm: Cardboard transformation with Eli Nixon
3:30-4 pm: We’ll parade our art along the river to make a joyous offering to the water!
Further Details:
Bring an instrument if you like to make music. Our parade will need a band!
Gender neutral bathrooms are available at the nature center.
We will provide snacks and water. You are welcome to bring a sack lunch if you like.
BLOODTIDE book talk with Author Eli Nixon: Holiday Actiivation on behalf of Great Salt Lake
An evening with Eli Nixon, author and illustrator of BLOODTIDE- A New Holiday in Homage To Horseshoe Crabs
Join Eli for a suitcase theater holiday proposal show, a few tunes from brilliant local highschool band 'Shapes Named Soap', a chance to singalong to some crabaoke (altered lyric power ballads about crabs) and engage in low-stakes drawing prompts and Q & A (or Q and more Q!) about how we can fortify local efforts to protect Great Salt Lake as inspired by DIY homage to our ancient coastal ancestor. All ages and abilities welcome with an especially vigorous invitation to those in the LGBTQ+ community and anyone organizing for racial/climate justice.
Sunday, October 15th. From 6:00-8:00 pm in the studio behind Survivor Wellness House at 59 S 1100 E in Salt Lake City (Parking is available across the street in the diagonal parking on the west side of 1100 E, or in Holy Cross Hospital’s parking lot. Please note: the street parking directly in front of the houses requires a parking permit.)
Free, no registration required. Everyone is welcome! This event is made possible in partnership with Utah Humanities as part of the annual Utah Humanities Book Festival.
About Eli Nixon:
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They are a settler-descended transqueer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of drawings, puppets, pageants, parades, suitcase theaters, and low-tech public spectaculah. Eli collaborates with activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They're a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.
Eli is a parent of a teen, an organizer with Showing Up for Racial Justice-RI, and a member of Direct Action for Rights and Equality, The Public's Devised Theater Working Group, The New Georges Jam, and brotherdykes unlimited. Eli and 300 Modern Humans (ages 0.3-83) recently "finished" a 450-million-year timeline of flora and fauna (mostly out of recyclables) in 9 months of asynchronous but collaborative organism building workshops. Now Eli is basking in intertidal naturedrag, flotilla scheming and amatuer flag dancing/ engaging in the legislative season...
About the book:
"Bloodtide gifts us a river to wander down where we can drift away from the bullshit... a holiday that rewilds us towards a life-affirming way of being in the world. And more than a holiday, Bloodtide extends us a glitch to enter that predates the trauma of all that clouds our imaginations." - brontë velez, Creative Director, Lead to Life
"It's hard to write about Eli Nixon's book because it's a book about fumbling into embodied relation and words are just a jump-off to living. It's about what you can do in a weekend with geologic time. It's a tender score for beautifully imperfect -- and transformative -- work... in the form of a series of proposals, invitations, and field notes... There is a crinkly poetry to Bloodtide, repurposed poetry, the poetry of wild rebirth snatched from the recycling bin. Words I thought I knew cast shadows that turn them into other beings entirely. Humble is an important word in this book, and so is impossible, and so is cardboard. ..It's a box full of wild objects, and the wild space between them. It's might-y -- might like "could be" not like brute force. It expands, has expanded me. I gasped a few times and my nose twitches with the smell -- the "rutty musk of the freer beasts within us." It is radical, it is wise, it is alive." -Agnes Borinsky, writer & theater-maker, author of Brief Chronicle, Books 6-8 and Sasha Masha
2 Hours @ the Table with Karen 10/17/23
Tuesday, October 17th 6:00 pm-8:00 pm MST
Meeting on Zoom
Everyone Welcome! (16+)
Limited to 8 Participants
About Karen
2 Hours @ the Table with Beatrice 10/19/23
Thursday, October 19th from 6:00 pm-8:00 pm MST
Meeting on Zoom
Everyone Welcome! (16+)
Limited to 8 Participants
About Beatrice