Mary Mackey & B. Henderson SPC Reading
PresentsMary Mackey and Brad Henderson
Mon. Aug. 4, 2008 at 7:30 PM
HQ for the Arts
1719 25th Street
Mary Mackey was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is related through her father's family to Mark Twain. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. From 1989 to 1992 she served of Chair of PEN American Center, West. Currently, she is a professor of English and Writer in Residence at California State University, Sacramento.
Mary Mackey taught me fiction writing at Sac State. I remember reading two of her books which feature horses and their roles in the old European world. As a teacher she emphasized the importance of research, and she was very encouraging when she compared my short stories on roaches to Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis". Can you imagine how I felt! I never, however, got to know her poetic side, so I look forward to hearing her read her poetry. Come join us and meet Mary mackey the poet.
Her published works include 11 novels and 5 books of poetry and have sold over a million and a half copies. They have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Finnish. While her poetry has mainly centered around the traditional lyric themes of love, death, and nature, her novels have ranged from the Midwestern United States to Neolithic Europe, from comedy to tragedy. A screenwriter as well as a novelist, she has sold feature scripts to Warner Brothers as well as to various independent film companies. John Korty directed the filming of her original screenplay Silence which starred the late Will Geer and which won several awards.
She has lectured at many places including Harvard and the Smithsonian. Additionally, she has contributed to such diverse print and on-line publications as The Chiron Review, Redbook, and Salon. She also writes comedy under the pen name "Kate Clemens".
Her latest collection of poems is entitled Breaking the Fever from Marsh Hawk Press
"The poetry in Breaking the Fever offers truths both personal & political, visions both actual and imaginatively broad. Ranging in setting from her childhood Indianapolis to a Brazilian favela, in subject from ecological tragedy to marital passion to the thoughts of a thoroughly contemporary Leda, Mary Mackey's crisp-edged perceptions are set down in this new collection of poems with a sensuous, compassionate, and utterly unflinching eye." Jane Hirshfield author of Given Sugar, Given Salt
Brad Henderson/Beau Hamel is a veteran neo-cowboy poet who teaches in the university writing program at UC Davis. As Beau Hamel he is the great-great-grandson of Henry "Hartman" Hamel, one of California's premier pioneer cattlemen. Beau grew up riding horses, herding cattle, and bucking hay on ranches in the Sacramento and Modoc valleys. His first book Drums: A Novel achieved brief notoriety among rock music aficionados and also an endorsement from Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum. He is also co-author of a collection of poems Split Stock (John Natsoulas Press 2006) with Andy Jones. He also co-hosts the Bistro 33 reading series in Davis. His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including Squaw Valley Review, Dominion Review, the Southern California Anthology, Hayden's Ferry Review, California Quarterly, the Great American Pinup (online), and others.
secret cowgirls
you remember them in triangle
makeup mirrors--fields too small
for whole body & face
enough to see the radius of curve
from cleavage, the arc of hips
in jeans, or the glistening of eyes
that know animals on the range
& a longing to gussy up
for a Saturday dance & maybe boys
from the city--they wait
w/out shame for love
because nature is not good to question
too often they have seen it kill
before a thing had a piper's chance
& this ain't gonna happen to them
the evening outside Goggle's cattle ranch
the house "t"-ed at the north end
& i could choose either the left or the right
room, 'cuz both were empty & decorated
for guests. 5,000 acres was my mother's dad's--
blond range in the San Joaquin hills
"Goggle" raised bulls for breeding sperm
hay for feed & cows for calves
i was sent there every summer
to the heat & lessons of scale
one kick from an animal & you
could be dead, the language of the hired men
full of acid & fun, stories about fights
& all the women they had done
this, back when, anything about
hairy pussies thrilled. as i lay
in bed those oak-scented nights
tired from man's work as a soft city boy
my thoughts wondered--ky-yippy-yi
yay--to peach curve gals
i'd seen in town & the buzzing rhythms
of crickets & frogs
thru my open window (& most clear now)
the lowing of cattle, queered by phlegm
what spirited these beasts
their throats' herd song--some wary bovine
prey instinct?
i knew, they knew, beyond the fields
human minds were hunting them
Coming Up at SPC:
August 11 [Emmanuel]: Brad Buchanan and Wendy Carlisle
August 14 {Thursday} [Rebecca]: Dan Guerra, Alex Stephens, Mary Rosenberry and Paul Roundtree
August 18 [Rebecca]: Nancy Wallace & Melen Lunn
August 25 [Tim]: Ann Keniston and June Saraceno
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