The Jewel Box Poets Sunday Reading Series is going prose for the month of March.
Though it’s not a permanent switch, series organizer Jenifer Lawrence said she thought it would be interesting to mix it up.
“And I hope the audience agrees,” she said
Two small but established Washington authors, one born in Port Angeles, the other currently residing in Seattle will headline what the Series calls its first annual edition of prose.
Browne will be sitting down with Puget Sound small press authors and literary pros Tamara Kaye Sellman and Ellie Mathews and readers at 3 p.m., March 18 at the Jewel Box Theatre in Poulsbo.
Mathews is the granddaughter of Robert Cushman Murphy — an early 20th century realistic writer. In 1912 he published “Logbook for Grace,” a book about his trek to the arctic in search of a species that no human eyes had ever witnessed and documented at that time — the penguin. Armed with scientific insight as well as gritty tales about life on deck of a whaling ship, the novel has proven itself as one of Murphy’s most famous works.
Mathews revisits and resurrects her grandfather’s story in her book: “Ambassador to the Penguins: A Naturalist’s Year Aboard a Yankee Whaleship,” — published in 2003 by David R. Goodwin Publishers.
The depiction — which can be found online at longitudebooks.com — is said to have won the 2007 prize for children’s literature by the Milkweed Editions, an independent literary company out of Minneapolis, Minn. The information is not yet posted on Milkweed’s Web site though.
Sellman, the other author on the bill for Sunday’s Poet Series Switch, is at the head of a few of her own online literary companies. She is editor for the online community Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism; she is also director for the literary services agency Writer’s Rainbow.
On the direct authoring end, she caught attention in November 2006 when she competed in the National Novel Writing Month Challenge, in which contestants enter the most compelling story they can write between Nov. 1 and 31. Though it didn’t win, Sellman’s novel developed as a forestry fantasy inspired by conversations she’d had with her children five years before.
Sellman has published small articles, short stories and more both in the states and internationally since 2000. Most recently she entered three of her works for the Pushcat Prize out of Wanscot New York, which honors the best of the small presses and now she’s coming to Poulsbo.
“We may do this again in November, which is National Novel Writing Month,” Lawrence said of the poetry gone prose injection.
But next month is National Poetry Month so the Jewel Box Sunday series will be back to its lyrical self with two Washington state poets — physician Peter Pereira and teacher Alice Derry.
