Cartwheels on the Sky

This episode features Dan Roberts is a poet, artist, and radio producer living in the redwood forest of Mendocino County for 45 years. He was born in Oakland, went to high school in Berkeley, and graduated from UC Davis in 1970 in Creative Writing and Modern European Literature. He read poetry in Davis, Sacramento and Berkeley from the late 1960’s on. He produced the Wild Sage Poetry radio program on KZYX for ten years, has taught as a California Poet in The Schools for over 30 years, and has published two chapbooks of poetry, “Hunting For The Sun At Night” (1989) and “Heresies” (1991). His paintings and photographs have been exhibited around N California since the 1970s. He currently produces an internationally syndicated radio program, “The Shortwave Report,” as well as music/poetry (RhythmRunningRiver) and national award-winning youth programs (YouthSpeaksOut!) on KZYX. He has raised 3 children while developing a homestead in the mountains NW of Willits.

Find out more about Dan Roberts at his website: http://outfarpress.com/

This show originally aired on Saturday, October 10 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala -- on the web at kgua.org.

This episode features Albion poet Karen Lewis. Karen Lewis lives between Salmon Creek and the Navarro River on unceded ancestral land of the Pomo people. Her work navigates themes of migration, war, peace, love, loss, ecology, and motherhood. Her new chapbook PEACE MAPS explores these territories, and is available through Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino or from Finishing Line Press. Karen holds an MFA from Antioch-Los Angeles and has taught with California Poets in the Schools and the Arts Council of Mendocino County. When she’s not writing, she’s tending garden and orchard, foraging in the forest, or scavenging local beaches to remove plastic debris. https://www.wordjourneys.org/

This show originally aired live on Saturday, October 3 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala -- on the web at kgua.org.

This episode features poet Theresa Whitehill.  California poet, letterpress printer, and graphic designer Theresa Whitehill served as Poet Laureate for the city of Ukiah from 2009 through 2011 and has been involved her entire career in the production of poetry readings and literary events. Her interrelated focus on literary and graphic arts came out of her study of book arts at Mills College in the early 1980s. Since 1984 she has lived in Mendocino County, where she is well-known to local poetry audiences.

Her collections of poetry include A Grammar of Longing (2009) and A Natural History of Mill Towns (1993), both published by Pygmy Forest Press. Saudades, her culinary poetry collection on which she collaborated with chef and author Shannon Hughes was commissioned and published by Stags’ Leap Winery in 2003. Her poetry and letterpress broadsides are in numerous fine press collections, including the Getty Center for the Arts, the John Hay Library of Brown University, and the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Discover more about Theresa on her website: http://www.coloredhorse.com/Poetry/

This show origially aired Saturday, September 26 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala - on the web at kgua.org.

This episode features Kirk Lumpkin, a poet, spoken word & performance artist, lyricist, and environmentalist. Since moving to Mendocino County in 2016 he has become a California state certified Naturalist; a singer in a community choir, the Emandal Chorale; and a Board member of the Willits Environmental Center.

Before moving to Mendocino County he worked at the Ecology Center in for over 20 years and was according to the Bay Area Poets Seasonal Review: “ . . . an important part of the Bay Area (and beyond) poetry scene for years, hosting readings in San Francisco and Berkeley, helping to facilitate the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival [with Poetry Flash & former U.S. Poet Laureate, Robert Hass], and hosting open mikes at Burning Man.…”

He has most recently been published in the anthology Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and in Poem In Your Pocket (Berkeley Public Library). More about Kirk can be found at his website:  https://www.kirklumpkin.com/

This show originally aired live on Saturday, September 5 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala, kgua.org

This episode features Ukiah Poet Jabez Churchill. Former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, Jabez W., Bill, Churchill first started submitting poetry for publication in 1979, became a member of the Ina Coolbrith Poertry Circle in Berkekey, maintaining this affiliation to date. He has been a poet teacher with California Poets in the Schools since 1998, and teaches poetry at Mendocino Co, Juvenile Hall.

As a bilingual poet, he writes in English and Spanish, and he has toured Spain and Cuba with a contingency of Bay Area poets. He has also been widely featured around Mendocino County, Berkeley, San Francisco, L.A. and Vancouver B.C.

He is a single dad, but his sons now have wives and children of their own, so now he is the grandfather of five! He is an avid water person and he sails San Francisco Bay and swims with pinnapeds wherever and whenever they pop up to say hi. He wants listeners to know that he has a deep connection to the south coast of Mendocino as his great-great grandparents, John and Carrie Johnson arrived in Pt. Arena on a Norwegian lumber schooner from Oslo in the 1850’s.

This show originally aired Saturday, August 29 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala, on the web at kgua.org

This episode features the reigning Ukiah Poet Laureate Roberta Werndinger. Roberta Werdinger is a Zen priestess, poet, writer and editor. From 1995 to 2006 she studied Zen Buddhism at Green Gulch Farm and Tassajara Mountain Center. In 2006 she was head student, and left the monastery to pursue the path of writing.

She has a long-term professional association with Berkeley-based writer, artist, and activist Kaz Tanahashi, for whom she edits and conducts research. She has also taught English at Mendocino College and at Dharma Realm Buddist University. Since 2010, she has served as a freelance writer and publicist for several area nonprofits, including the Grace Hudson Museum and the Ukiah Symphony. Her writing activities have included essays for the Redwood Coast Review and poetry for the online journal Leaping Clear. She hosted the show “Maps & Legends” on KZYX from 2009 to 2016, highlighting the presence of wisdom teachings in modern music. She is also a member of Northern California Book Reviewers, reading for poetry and creative nonfiction.

She is currently at work on a memoir, titled “The One Road.” It details the migration of her family across the Atlantic and her own migration West, as well as all the migrations–internal and external– that the human race is currently undertaking.

This show originally aired Saturday, August 22 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala, kgua.org

This episode features Fort Bragg, CA poet Toni Bernbaum. Toni declares herself “a bandit of a poet” — Steeling the right to claim herself worthy of giving readings, accepting the blessing of being born with a poet’s soul, she embraces Mary Oliver as she proclaims her self to just let the *“soft fur of her body love what it loves.”  Without a writing degree or teaching credit or a long list of publications, not even a chapbook, she shares that her love of language, the element of surprise and self discovery and the timelessness of writing and its revelations, are what drives her credentials.

She has been fortunate, over the years, to study ways to ride the muse in workshops with Dorianne Laux, Joe Millar, Ellen Bass and Marie Howe so she knows a good horse when she sees one. She has sometimes seen her words on the page, in an obscure journal in North Carolina, a Shamanic publication, Sacred Reflections, no longer in print and a while back, had a poem published in the online New Millennium Writings that garnered her an honorable mention.  Her work has also been read by poets performing in the traveling poetry show, Rumi’s Caravan.

She has been honored to be a featured reader at poetry events in Mendocino and Point Arena. She especially enjoys offering her poems at a yearly event, Kaleidoscope, sponsored by Spirit House Center for Healing in Fort Bragg, a non-profit she facilitates and founded with her partner Ron Nadeau. Spirit House is where most of her creativity is expressed, in dedicating herself to healing and providing those who are drawn there a wider access to the wisdom within their own hearts.

This show originally aired Saturday, August 15 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala kgua.org

You can find out more about Toni here.

This interview features award-winning Ukiah poet Armand Brint. Holding an MFA in creative writing and English, Armand has devoted his life to teaching and writing poetry. Widely published in literary journals, he is also the author of four, soon to be five, volumes of poetry, as well as a book on writing poetry called, “Bringing Poems to Life: 16 Keys to Make Your Poems Sing.”

Amand was the City of Ukiah’s first Poet Laureate and served on the Poet Laureate Committee for a total of seven years; he is also a founding member of the Ukiahaiku Festival, which has been a beacon for writers in Mendocino and beyond for 17 years.

A popular reader in Mendocino County, Armand is the recipient of several poetry awards including a Jane Reichhold International Haiku Prize. As you will see, Armand Brint’s poems are soulful incantations to the sorrows and joys inherent in human relationships. Funny and humane, fueled by the poet’s elegant imagination, they take us on a journey that is simultaneously meditative and down to earth.

This show originally aired on Saturday, August 8 on KGUA FM 88.3 Gualala, kgua.org