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…
In this 2-week series, discover the transformative power of “Poetry as Medicine" on your journey of self-care. This course provides a creative, reflective, community-held space to recharge and reconnect to the depth of feeling in your interior world. Each week, the session will begin with a close reading of 2 poems curated for that week’s theme. After thought-provoking group discussion of each poem, we will have a short generative writing time based on prompts from the readings with the option to share what you wrote.
You will gain the experience of unpacking the symbolic meaning and associative feelings that poems convey, as well as learning how experiencing poetry in community from multiple perspectives can help process emotions, reduce stress, and help build your toolkit for radical resilience while fostering connection with others. This course is not about trying to decipher what the poet was writing about, it's about how each poem makes you feel and why.
Don’t miss this opportunity to join a supportive community of peers and discover the healing power of poetry to inspire you! Spaces are limited to 15 attendees — register now to reserve your spot!
You can attend one session or both!
The price for each session is on a sliding scale: $35-$75.
Audrey T. Williams is a poet, storyteller, and literary healing artist. She is a Southern Black American woman with Indo-Burmese heritage and the Founder of Ancestral Futures: Literary Arts for Liberation.
Audrey is a PhD student in Depth Psychology (Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco-Psychologies) at Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her work centers creative writing as an expressive arts healing framework that braids eco-feminist ancestral medicine, somatics, and transformative literary arts into a single embodied liberation practice.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in magazines such as Lightspeed, FIYAH, Space & Time, and beyond. She is a freelance correspondent for the Bay Area News Group and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Audrey has three books currently under contract.
She believes in the power of poetry as medicine, and that the healing path to individual and collective liberation is one we are meant to walk together in community. Learn more at audreyTwilliams.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.