Mexican-American author Kathleen Alcala explored the indestructible link between a people and their land in her novels and nonfiction work. With a deep interest in the forces of history that shape an individual’s experience and worldview, Kathleen creates characters that reflect the evolution of society as it has changed from traditional to modern. To lend us a unique glimpse of her perspective, Alcala took our stage to discuss the role of archives and historical research in the process of the writer and artist. She was joined onstage by fellow writer Donna Miscolta.

Together, Alcala and Miscolta explored the author as researcher, helping us to understand our connections to history and geography—and how this connection can inform a broader understanding of one’s creative work and the greater social fabric of history. More than just an intellectual exercise or even an emotional or spiritual journey, Alcala and Miscolta invited us to participate in a remarkable conversation that conspires with antiquity to approach timelessness, tying the writer back to history as a whole.

Kathleen Alcala is the author of a short-story collection and three novels set in the Southwest and 19th-century Mexico—as well as her latest book The Deepest Roots: Finding Food and Community on a Pacific Northwest Island.

Donna Miscolta is an author currently based in Seattle whose writing has been featured in over a dozen journals, including Seattle Magazine, America’s Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and others. She is the author of the story collection Hola and Goodbye and the novel When the de la Cruz Family Danced.

This event is curated by Shin Yu Pai, Town Hall Seattle’s 2018 Inside/Out Artist-in-Residence representing the Phinney/Greenwood neighborhoods. Shin Yu is a poet, cross-media artist, and curator for the collaborative global exploration project Atlas Obscura.

Recorded live at Taproot Theatre by Town Hall Seattle on Friday, April 13, 2018. 

Writer Samantha Irby is known for her brazen wit and boldly honest feminist writing from her blog bitches gotta eat, as well as her book We Are Never Meeting In Real Life and her essay work contributing to Nasty Women, a collection of feminist essays on life in Trump’s America—and a discussion recently hosted on Town Hall’s stage earlier this season (where author Samhita Mukhopadhyay hailed Irby as “the funniest writer in the world right now.”)

Irby took our stage to present a reprint of her widely beloved collection of smart, edgy, and unabashedly raunchy personal essays—Meaty. She was joined in conversation with writer Lindy West, author of Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and contributing opinion writer to The New York Times. Irby and West discussed this uproarious collection of essays crafted with the same scathing wit and poignant candor thousands of loyal readers have come to expect from Irby’s notoriously hilarious blog. Join Irby and West and laugh your way through these stories of failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn’s disease, and more.

Samantha Irby is a Chicago writer and comedy juggernaut who writes a blog called bitches gotta eat, in addition to co-hosting The Sunday Night Sex Show, a sex-positive live lit show. She has written two books Meaty and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Lindy West is a Seattle-based writer, editor and performer whose work focuses on pop culture, social justice, humour and body image. She is the founder and editor of I Believe You | It’s Not Your Fault, an advice blog for teens.

Recorded live at University Temple Church by Town Hall Seattle on Wednesday, April 11, 2018. 

How do our bodies retain memory of the events they experience? How can we connect with the emotions and life-altering changes recorded within our physical selves? Local artists Neve Mazique and Nic Masangkay took the stage with Inside/Out Neighborhood Resident Jordan Alam to share original works of prose, movement, and music expressing how personal experiences are held within the body. They presented their narratives of life altering and intensely physical moments—from birth to violence—exploring how these events have impacted these artists physically, and how their bodies still carry changes that impact every encounter with the world.

Neve Mazique, fresh from their stunning one-person show “Bet Ya Ungodly Things” at Gay City Arts, incorporates dance, movement, and storytelling in their pieces. Their work uses magical realism and explores the intersections of living as a disabled black queer person.

Nic Masangkay, who has just released an EP “A Hundred Setting Suns,” creates  music and performance poetry that explores the challenging relationship to their own body as a queer Filipinx femme.

Writer, Doula, and Town Hall Resident Jordan Alam shares performance prose pieces, capturing moments of significant transformation—birth, experiences of violence, and life-altering change.

Recorded live at Rainier Arts Center by Town Hall Seattle on March 31, 2018.

Do you have strong feelings about the word “irregardless”? Have you ever tried to define the word “is”? Many of us take dictionaries for granted, and few may realize that the process of writing dictionaries is, in fact, as lively and dynamic as language itself. Kory Stamper took our stage to crack open the complex, obsessive world of lexicography—the practice of making dictionaries—in her book Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Stamper revealed the agonizing decisions about which words to define and how to do it, to the knotty questions of usage in an ever-changing language. She outlined the intricacies of the process, such as why small words are the most difficult to define, how it can take nine months to define a single word, and how our biases about language and pronunciation can have tremendous social influence. In the process she reveals little-known surprises—for example, the fact that “OMG” was first used in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1917. Join Stamper for a delve into the complexities and eccentricities of the English language, and the startlingly rich world of quirky and erudite individuals who quietly shape the way we communicate.

Kory Stamper is a lexicographer (that is, a writer and editor of dictionaries) who spent almost two decades working at Merriam-Webster. She has written and appeared in the “Ask the Editor” video series at Merriam-Webster, and has traveled around the world giving talks and lectures on language and lexicography. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications, including The Washington Post, The Guardian and The New York Times and presents her own writing on her blog at harmlessdrudgery.com.

Recorded live at Seattle University by Town Hall Seattle on Sunday, March 25, 2018. 

Known for the warmth, humor, clarity, and depth of his teachings, Zen teacher Peter Levitt is also the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose. Legendary poet Robert Creeley wrote that Peter Levitt’s poetry “sounds the honor of our common dance.” Town Hall is thrilled to welcome Peter to the stage for an evening sharing his recent works of poetry that explores our connection to the natural world and sing the sacred in the everyday. After the readings, he was joined in conversation with poet Shin Yu Pai, Town Hall’s Inside/Out Neighborhood Resident representing Phinney/Greenwood. Sit in with Peter and Shin Yu for an intimate discussion of the complexities of human relationships and the notion of coming home to ourselves—to who and what we naturally and truly are.

Peter Levitt began his Zen practice in the late sixties in San Francisco, and he received lay entrustment from Zoketsu Norman Fischer, which authorized him to teach in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki-Roshi. He is the founder and guiding teacher of the Salt Spring Zen Circle on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. Peter edited Thich Nhat Hanh’s classic, The Heart of Understanding, and he served as Associate and Translation Editor of Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi. His ten poetry books include Within Within, One Hundred Butterflies, and Bright Root, Dark Root. In addition, he published Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom. His publishing career includes fiction, journalism and literary translations from Chinese, Japanese and Spanish. In 1989, Peter received the prestigious Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry.

Shin Yu Pai is Town Hall Seattle’s 2018 Inside/Out Resident representing the Phinney Greenwood neighborhoods. Shin Yu is a poet, cross-media artist, and curator for the collaborative global exploration project Atlas Obscura. Her poetic origins inform an artistic style that has grown beyond the written word—manifesting in photography, installation and public art, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and sound. She encourages us to reflect upon the essential questions of our own lives, and to explore how we see that interrogation expressed or mirrored around us.

Recorded live at Phinney Center by Town Hall Seattle on Thursday, March 22, 2018. 

Parental Guidance recommended. This recording contains explicit language.

Many music fans consider the Wu-Tang Clan to be hip-hop royalty. But remarkably, none of the founding members have told their story. Town Hall is excited to partner with 206 Zulu to present Raw: My Journey into the Wu-Tang, a history of this seminal hip-hop group by Lamont “U-God” Hawkins, one of the group’s founding members. U-God charts the group’s origins—how, brought up by the streets and bonding over their love of hip-hop, they sought to pursue the impossible: music as their ticket out of the ghetto.

U-God was joined onstage by Dr. Daudi Abe, Seattle-based professor and historian who has written about race, culture, and hip-hop for over 20 years. Dr. Abe interviewed U-God as he recounts stories of how he met and befriended those who would eventually form the Clan’s core: RZA, GZA, Method Man, Raekwon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Inspectah Deck, Ghostface Killah, and Masta Killa. Join U-God and Dr. Abe for hip-hop revelations as U-God shared his journey from the streets of Brooklyn to some of the biggest stages around the world, and captured in vivid detail the making of one of the most influential music acts in American music history.

Born Lamont Jody Hawkins, U-God is an American rapper and hip-hop artist and one of the founding members of the legendary Wu-Tang Clan. A native New Yorker, Raw is his first book.

Dr. Daudi Abe is a Seattle-based professor, writer, and historian who has taught and written about culture, race, gender, education, communication, hip-hop, and sports for over 20 years. His work has been published in The Stranger, Crosscut, and The Seattle Times; and he has appeared on national media such as MSNBC and The Tavis Smiley Show. His forthcoming book is Emerald Street: A History of Hip-Hop in Seattle.

Recorded live at Washington Hall from Town Hall Seattle on Saturday, March 17, 2018.

Former Town Hall Programing Director Katy Sewall and children’s author and travel writer Tiffany Parks invite you to a special live installment of The Bittersweet Life podcast. The episode centers on Tiffany Parks’ new book for young readers Midnight in the Piazza, an all-ages adventure following a young girl in Rome racing to solve a centuries-old unsolved mystery and navigate a world of unscrupulous ambassadors, tricky tutors, and international art thieves!

The Bittersweet Life podcast explores the streets and culture of Rome and the wonder and frustration of living as an expat or repat, contrasting the hosts’ two very different points of view on the bitter dolce vita. Sit in with Sewall and Parks for a live recording of The Bittersweet Life, as these two stellar hosts trade insights about Rome, uproarious personal stories, and previews of Parks’ exciting new family-friendly mystery thriller!

Katy Sewall is a radio producer and host, as well as a journalist and a podcast consultant. She has worked at KUOW Public Radio, NPR Seattle, since 2003—spending nine of those years as the Lead Producer (and occasional host) of “Weekday” with Steve Scher. She has also worked with RadioLab and A Prairie Home Companion. She’s the creator and editor of The Bittersweet Life podcast, which she’s been co-hosting with Tiffany parks since 2014.    

Tiffany Parks is a writer. She heads the editorial department at Where Rome magazine and with the Eternal City as her muse, she has just completed Midnight in the Piazza, an art mystery for young readers set in Rome. In her spare time, she shares her passion for Rome’s history on her blog The Pines of Rome and takes tourists on private walking tours.

Recorded live at Greenwood Senior Center by Town Hall Seattle on Friday, March 16, 2018.

Visitors to the Seattle Art Museum can’t miss John Grade’s largest sculpture to date: an enormous wooden structure in the shape of a tree, over a hundred feet long and hanging from the lobby ceiling. Grade has made his mark on the Pacific Northwest with art that recreates—and coexists with—the natural world. He has assembled large teams of helpers to build structures that are then intended to degrade and return to the environment, such as his wooden tower at MOHAI which is taller than the building, weighs 11,000 pounds, and took 10,000 hours to assemble. Explore images of John’s work, and find out what drives him to take on such colossal projects.

John Grade works with his studio team to create large-scale site-specific immersive sculptural installations inspired by changing geology and ecology in the natural world. Impermanence is central to his work, along with kinetics and relationships between the natural world and architecture. John is the recipient of the 2010 Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Tiffany Foundation Award, three Andy Warhol Foundation Grant Awards, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants, the 2011 Arlene Schnitzer Prize from the Portland Art Museum, and the 2013 Arts Innovator Award from Artist Trust.

Gary Faigin is a leading proponent of realist painting in the Northwest. His book The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression has sold over 175,000 copies, been translated into eight languages and been reprinted 24 times. In 2014 Seattle’s Frye Museum hosted a retrospective exhibition on his work, and he currently holds a seat on the board of directors at the Cascadia Museum of Art in Edmonds, WA.

Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Gage Academy of Art. Recorded live at Impact Hub by Town Hall Seattle on Wednesday, February 28, 2018.

Many consider sprouts, tofu, yogurt, brown rice, and whole-grain bread to be health-food standbys, but how did these foods gain their reputation as such ubiquitous healthy choices? In his book Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, food writer Jonathan Kauffman traces the colorful origins of once unconventional foods—and the diverse fringe movements, charismatic gurus, and counterculture elements that brought them to the mainstream. He returned us to the 1960s and 70s to tell the story of how a coterie of unusual men and women embraced an alternative lifestyle that would ultimately change how modern Americans eat. Joining Kauffman as an interlocutor is Seattle-based James Beard Award winning food writer Rebekah Denn.

Kauffman and Denn delve into more than half a century of food history, from the mystical rock-and-roll cult known as the Source Family and its legendary vegetarian restaurant in Hollywood, to the Diggers’ brown bread in the Summer of Love, to the rise of the co-op and the origins of the organic food craze. Kauffman revealed how today’s quotidian whole-foods staples were introduced and eventually became part of our diets. Join Kauffman and Denn for a comprehensive history of hippie food’s journey from niche oddity to an honored staple of health-focused cuisine across the country.

Jonathan Kauffman is a line cook turned journalist, and an International Association of Culinary Professionals and James Beard Award–winning staff writer at the San Francisco Chronicle. He served as the restaurant critic at the East Bay Express, Seattle Weekly, and SF Weekly for more than a decade, and has contributed regularly to San Francisco magazine, Lucky Peach, and Wine & Spirits. His articles have also been anthologized in several editions of Best Food Writing.

Rebekah Denn is a Seattle-based two-time James Beard Award winning food writer. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Seattle Times, Seattle Magazine, and Seattle Business Magazine, and has been a guest on KIRO and KUOW discussing food-related topics on the locally produced NPR programs The Record, Weekday, KUOW Presents, and Sound Focus. In 2014 she curated “Edible City,” a comprehensive 5,000-square-foot exhibit on Seattle and food at the Museum of History and Industry.

Recorded live at Westside School by Town Hall Seattle on Tuesday, February 27, 2018. 

A generation on the move, a country on the brink, and a young author’s search to find out how we got here. Shaun Scott presented a cultural history of the United States in his book Millennials and the Moments That Made Us: A Cultural History of the U.S. from 1982-Present, lending us insight into the factors that have shaped the development of the Millennial image and outlook. He was joined onstage by freelance writer and curator of exhibitions Minh Nguyen to share a relatable pop culture history that critiques the late-capitalist status quo the Millennial generation inherited. Scott took us on a tour of the music, films, books, TV shows, technology, and numerous other factors that have defined this emerging wave of leaders and workers. Join Scott and Nguyen for a timely modern portrait of our nation as seen through the eyes of the largest, most diverse, and most disprivileged generation in American history.

Shaun Scott is a Seattle-based writer and filmmaker. His work has appeared in Jacobin Magazine, Quartz, and Sports Illustrated. He is a columnist for City Arts Magazine, where writes the semi-weekly thread “Faded Signs,” a reflection on the popular culture of late capitalism. 

Minh Nguyen is a freelance writer, curator of exhibitions and programs, and former Town Hall Artist-in-Residence. She has collaborated with Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Arts and Lectures, and The Alice Gallery, and her writing has appeared in periodicals such as Seattle Weekly, AQNB, and Art in America. 

Recorded live at Rainier Arts Center by Town Hall Seattle on Saturday, February 24, 2018.