FRIDAY, JANUARY 6, 2023, 7 PM – 8 PM
Auntie’s Bookstore
Auntie’s first Friday poetry open mic features Jonathan Potter, author of “Sunrise Hexagrams.” Open mic readers may share up to 3 minutes’ worth of poetry. Open to all ages. Free admission.
“Beautiful publishing and content … I am diving in and finding each page drawing me to the next one.”
“I find myself studying the photograph and getting my own impression, then seeing what you wrote… enjoying it.”
Korrektiv Press poet Mark Anderson at Auntie’s Books in Spokane, Washington, along with fellow authors Karen Mobley and Shawn Vestal.
Mark and other Spokane-area writers were on hand at Auntie’s to promote Small Business Saturday.
Volume 2 of Sunrise Hexagrams is now available where fine books are sold.
Volume 1 of Sunrise Hexagrams is now available where fine books are sold.
Coming soon from Korrektiv Press, a two-volume set of poems and pictures chronicling a year of rising with the sun — by Jonathan Potter
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2022, 2:30 PM – 4 PM
Boots Bakery & Lounge, 24 W. Main St., Spokane, Washington
Come write with former Spokane Poet Laureate Mark Anderson.
Has writer’s block got you down? Have you been plagued by a case of immobile pen since you graduated an MFA ten years ago? Want to write your first poem and you don’t know how? In this drop-in and beginner-friendly workshop series we will be reading great poems and launching into generative writing prompts. It’s important to me that participants will leave having discovered great poems and fresh perspectives on poetry, and having looked at how we can incorporate small bits of meaning into our own writing practices. This is a space for exploration, and for treating each piece of writing like a new adventure. $25 suggested (pay whatever is feasible and sustainable for you)
After more than a decade as a luminous leader in Spokane’s poetry scene, Mark Anderson is celebrating the release of his debut collection, Scarecrow Oracle. The former Spokane Poet Laureate (2017-19), also founder of the weekly Broken Mic series and a frequent publisher of poetry in local anthologies and publications (including the Inlander), has compiled several dozen poems composed in recent years into the 86-page collection. Anderson’s rhythmic, reflective compositions take root in childhood memories, yearnings for love and remembrance, our instinctual fear of death and loss, and wonder at how a single fleeting moment can trigger emotions that rattle us to the core.
— Chey Scott
Design by Thom Caraway
For the book by Mark L. Anderson
Soon to be published by Korrektiv Press
Mark Anderson is the oracle of memory and longing, of hide-a-beds and rusted Chevys. And these poems show him writing with his trademark sense of wonder and humor and place. I really enjoyed this collection.
—Jess Walter, author of The Cold Millions
Mark Anderson’s Scarecrow Oracle (coming soon from Korrektiv Press) opens by “Going Backwards to Where It Starts” and then takes us forward through the speaker’s childhood into his early adulthood, traveling through time as he stays rooted in place–the Spokane Valley, The Empyrean Coffee Shop, the Rockford Fair. The question the speaker is always asking is how to live in a world steeped in loss. Early in the collection, the young speaker asks a dandelion this question, and in response, “it lets go of everything it has ever been.” Towards the end, the older speaker, less stunned now by the dandelion’s quick vanishing, tells us as he performs the ordinary act of making his bed, “I want to be ready to be a ghost or a nothing…./ And when the time comes I part the curtains / and let in the astonishing day.” Anderson’s book translates the silences and fears of childhood and early loss into a series of images that answer, beautifully and without explanation, his difficult question. — Laura Read
When you live inside Mark Anderson’s poems, someone a bit like an oracle speaks to you in almost but not-at-all ordinary speech, you give up sleep for most of your life, death crowds close but the poet bravely writes it away, you feel the terror of a crawl space and the patience of a jellyfish with the “body of a half-sealed / Ziplock bag / flushed down the / grime filled gutter, / inexplicably filled / with life / instead of a sandwich,” and you learn “We came to the Earth to have / feelings.” And you have feelings. It’s an extraordinary place to be. — Kathleen Flenniken
Mark L. Anderson lives and writes in Spokane, Washington. He co-founded the popular Broken Mic spoken word poetry series and has traveled the United States performing at open mics, poetry slams, taverns, coffee shops, and libraries. From 2017 to 2019 he served as Spokane’s poet laureate. Scarecrow Oracle is his first book.
Mark Anderson in the Spokesman-Review