Cover to Cover Books – PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Celebrates 20 Years of Poetry and Community-Building with a Book Launch for Ghost Town Poetry Volume Three at Art At The Cave on November 8, 2024

October 27, 2024

Ghost Town Poetry Volume Three cover art by anthology editors
Morgan Paige, Christopher Luna, and Toni Lumbrazo Luna

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic

20^th Anniversary Anthology Book Launch

Celebrating Ghost Town Poetry Volume Three

Edited by Christopher Luna, Toni Lumbrazo Luna, and Morgan Paige

4-7 pm

Friday, November 8

Art At The Cave

108 E Evergreen Blvd

Vancouver, WA 98660

https://artatthecave.com

https://printedmattervancouver.com/

Christopher Luna founded Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic in November 2004. The reading began at Ice Cream Renaissance before moving to Cover to Cover Books, Angst Gallery, and Art At The Cave, where it has taken place since 2022.

On Friday, November 8, Art At The Cave will host a book launch party for Ghost Town Poetry Volume Three, featuring poetry from throughout the twenty-year history of the series. Join us at Art At The Cave from 4-7 to purchase a copy of the new book, edited by Christopher Luna, Morgan Paige, and Toni Lumbrazo Luna, who co-hosted the reading from 2007-2020. The book will cost $20. Commemorative T-shirts and stickers will also be available for sale.

Sticker design by Morgan Paige featuring self portrait by Christopher Luna

Christopher, Toni, and Morgan would like to thank everyone who contributed to the Kickstarter campaign as well as all the poets who submitted their work. We would also like to express our deep gratitude to Anne John for her generous donation to the campaign as well as for allowing us to hold the open mic in her space every month. We could not think of a more beautiful venue in which to foster community and hear great poetry. We are also grateful to Mel Sanders of Cover to Cover Books and Leah Jackson of Angst Gallery and Niche Wine Bar for making their spaces available to our community for so many years.

Finally, a big thank you to everyone who has attended Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic over the past two decades. We could not have enjoyed our raucous, three-hour, anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-science, LGBTQ+ friendly, all ages, and uncensored poetry reading without your consistent embodiment of those principles and your willingness to hold the space for everyone who was brave enough to step to the mic.

Please return to Art At The Cave on November 14 for our 20^th Anniversary reading featuring Clark County Poet Laureate Susan Dingle:

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic 20th Anniversary Reading Featuring Clark County Poet Laureate Susan Dingle at Art At The Cave on November 14, 2024

Send an email to printedmattervancouver@gmail.com to receive The Work, Christopher Luna’s monthly newsletter featuring news and events for poets in Vancouver, WA, Portland, OR and surrounding areas.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Herb Stokes at Angst Gallery May 14, 2015

April 12, 2015

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, May 14
Angst Gallery
1015 Main Street
Vancouver, WA 98660
LGBTQ-FRIENDLY, ALL AGES, AND UNCENSORED SINCE 2004

christopherjluna@gmail.com

Herb at GT December 11 2014 by Tiffany — Herb Stokes at Cover to Cover Books in December 2014 Photograph by Tiffany Burba-Schramm

Featuring Herb Stokes: Upon retirement from Swissair New York, Herb Stokes and his artist wife, Marianne, moved to the Intracoastal Waterway in North Carolina. They did the boat and beach scene for several years but after a wonderful summer trip to Portland decided the Northwest would be their home. He took an ongoing creative writing course at Clark College and hasn’t stopped writing since.

From “SALAD FOR TWO”
By Herb Stokes

We sat at a too small table
on a sun washed terrace
overlooking the Mediterranean
drinking wine from pewter goblets.

A blue haze was in the air
and in your eyes.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Eighth Anniversary Potluck January 8, 2015/ Final Reading at Cover to Cover Books before changing locations in February 2015

December 29, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Eighth Anniversary Potluck January 8, 2015

Final Reading at Cover to Cover Books before changing locations in February 2015

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic
Hosted by Christopher Luna and Toni Partington

Potluck at 6pm
Reading at 7pm

Thursday, January 8
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B
(St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic founder Christopher Luna

and Cover to Cover Books owner Mel Sanders

Mel Sanders, who has been keeping the bookstore open late for us since 2007, recently announced that Cover to Cover Books will be closing its doors at the end of January. We are very grateful to Mel for her many years of service to the poetry community and to Northwest writers, and we will miss her and her wonderful bookstore. Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic’s success would not have been possible without her support and her patience.

Fortunately, the series has found a new home. Beginning in February, we will relocate to Angst Gallery, 1015 Main Street in downtown Vancouver, owned by another tireless champion of the arts, Leah Jackson. Contact christopherjluna@gmail.com or visit printedmattervancouver.com for more information.

Join Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and the Vancouver poetry community as we celebrate eight years of open mic poetry at Cover to Cover Books and bid a fond farewell to our favorite bookstore with one more anniversary potluck and open mic poetry reading. Please bring a dish to share.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Airlie Press Authors Annie Lighthart and Dawn Diez Willis at Cover to Cover Books December 11, 2014

November 27, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver Publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, December 11
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Airlie Press Authors Annie Lighthart and Dawn Diez Willis

Annie Lighthart started writing poetry after her first visit to an Oregon old-growth forest. Since those first strange days, she published her poetry collection, Iron String, with Oregon’s Airlie Press and earned an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. Annie has taught at Boston College, as a poet in the schools, and now teaches poetry workshops through Mountain Writers. She lives in a small green corner of Portland, Oregon.

Dawn Diez Willis’s first book of poetry, Still Life with Judas & Lightning, was released this year by Airlie Press. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and has been the recipient of an Oregon Literary Fellowship. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Southern Poetry Review, Dogwood, Poet Lore, the Oregonian and elsewhere. She offers poetry residencies through Salem Art Association and serves as the one-woman staff of the monthly Oregon State Police Officers’ Association Trooper News. Find more information at http://www.dawndiezwillis.com.

For more information on Airlie Press, visit: http://airliepress.org/

ENOUGH
By Annie Lighthart
From Iron String (Airlie Press, 2013)

Sometimes the birds like the bare branch, and later
the cover of leaves. And so it goes: a day of sun, then two
of rain. We are easy with the world and then can no longer be.
And the space between — what lives there? In the middle
of the in-breath and out — where are we just then?
Is there more than silence between chorus and verse?
Is it a compressed galaxy? A pocket of time? Or perhaps
it is more like the comma, dark little hook
on which many things turn. Sometimes it’s enough
to slip into that darkness and just stand there, looking around.
Third Person Sacred
from Still Life with Judas and Lightning
(Airlie Press, 2013)

Sometimes you know a person’s story,
or a piece of it, one sliver of the muscle
examined for its striations and color.
Sometimes you think of your own story
and it is both familiar and not,
and you must question the details,
the slant, the cant of its little roof and shutters
the home of what you know about yourself,
your people, the city, the schools
and afternoons that made you.
There is someone in your field of vision.
Maybe it is you.
Light spills down on the diorama
and something has brought you here to witness
the holy moment, any moment,
with the gulls overhead like sticks
tossed suddenly skyward and crossing
beneath the biting blueness of the sky.

[POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER] Celebrate a Decade of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic with Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and Featured Reader Peggy Barnett On Saturday, November 22, 2014

October 24, 2014

Due to the severe weather warning issued for Oregon and SW Washington, Cover to Cover owner Mel Sanders has decided to close the bookstore on November 13. Therefore, we are postponing this month’s reading until Saturday, November 22 at 3pm. Please share this news with your friends and contact, and then join us on the 22nd for a celebration of our 10th Anniversary.

In November 2004, Christopher Luna founded what later came to be known as Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic. At the time there were very few poetry events in Vancouver, WA. The series began at Ice Cream Renaissance. He realized that he was filling a need in the community when the shop was packed for the first night of the reading. Today Ghost Town Poetry continues to be a community in which new and emerging writers can share their work in an environment that is fun, safe, and supportive. This month please join us in celebrating ten years of open mic poetry in Vancouver….

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted by Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
and Printed Matter Vancouver founder Toni Partington

3pm
Saturday, November 22
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Peggy Barnett

Peggy Barnett was born in 1945 and grew up in Queens, New York in the 1950’s. She went to Public School 89, Joseph Pulitzer JHS 145, Music and Art High School and graduated from The Cooper Union with a degree in Fine Art. She opened a photography studio in 1968 and became a very successful corporate still-life and portrait photographer. She sold the studio in 2006 and moved north of Seattle to the green fields of Maltby, Washington.

Peggy knows that the Northwest is beautiful, but memories of the past haunt her: the Holocaust, growing up Jewish in an Italian and Irish neighborhood in Queens, the atomic bomb, public school, junior high school, and childhood’s distant happenings arise in her poetry as in a dream. Her mind flits back and forth between the present and the past. The present on the West Coast is always interrupted by the past of the East Coast. Her poetic memoirs On Your Left dwell on the specifics of unending change. For more info, visit http://www.prbarnett.com

My Vagabond Song

“The scarlett of the maples can shake me like
the cry of bugles going by”
A Vagabond Song, Bliss Carmen, 1894

A Macintosh Apple doesn’t travel well
across the country.
It needs to stay home in New England

in the crisp autumn nights that
turn leaves red and gold

in the black soil full of humous
and colonial history

crisp thin skin with
tang and tartness
cut with sugary juices to the snap bite.

Last year on my birthday
Kathy sent me
in an envelope
some Macintosh seeds
from an apple she had just eaten.

The smell of woodsmoke
down Frost’s country road
thick in mudtime

past orchards getting smaller
as they are everywhere.

I want to feel it’s dark red roundness
warm in my palm
so I can put my head down
and smell it
and go home.
Peggy Barnett, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC Featuring Risa Denenberg September 11, 2014

August 21, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver Publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, September 11
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Risa Denenberg:

Risa Denenberg is an aging hippie living a solitary life in Sequim on the Olympic Peninsula. She earns her keep as a nurse practitioner, having worked for many years in end-of-life care and more recently in chronic pain management. She is a moderator at The Gazebo, an online poetry board; reviews poetry for the American Journal of Nursing; and is an editor at Headmistress Press, dedicated to publishing lesbian poetry. She has three chapbooks, what we owe each other (The Lives You Touch Publications, http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Denenberg.html 2013); In My Exam Room (The Lives You Touch Publications, http://www.thelivesyoutouch.com/touchjournal/Publications/Denenberg2.html 2014); and blinded by clouds (Hyacinth Girls Press, 2014); and a full length book, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, http://www.amazon.com/Mean-Distance-Sun-Risa-Denenberg/dp/0615839665 2013). For more info, please visit: http://risadenaday.wordpress.com/

Metanoia Lost

I speak god language
because people die
and god is the tongue of death.

Death stopped time, left me behind
my father with the small pot of raspberry jam
he ate with a spoon.

My story-line is a birth, a tooth-
ache, a marriage, a broken wrist, a custody war,
a death by fire.

It’s no different than yours—
a flash-memory in the shower,
a bruise without details.

Life offers tautologies—there is no god
but god. Have I ever considered conversion
or even slight faith?

There was no metanoia the day
I fell from grace and lost my name on the road.
Lost is an actual place, you know.

Risa Denenberg

http://vimeo.com/92423501

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Brittany Baldwin and Leah Noble Davidson Thursday, August 14, 2014

July 11, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver Publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, August 14
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004

Featuring Brittany Baldwin and Leah Noble Davidson:

Brittany Baldwin lives by a creek in rural Oregon with a dog, cat and some chickens. She has cooked professionally for 20 years and written poems since she was a child. She prefers the woods to anything else.

Leah Noble Davidson in action

Leah Noble Davidson has enthusiasm up the wahoo. Her debut book, Poetic Scientifica (published through University of Hell Press), was Powell’s 3rd bestselling small press book of last year, and she currently produces Portland’s Moth StorySLAM. If you would like to see an example of Leah reading her work, take a look at Tiffany Burba-Schramm’s video from the Independent Publishing Resource Center on March 28, 2014: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ECXlm8I-zSg&autoplay=1

Square Nails
By Brittany Baldwin

I promised I wouldn’t write about us
to myself

even as I was watching you point your finger into the
door of your truck as it idled in the drive for the last time

you were saying something about
wanting your half of the money for the house

and I was watching how square your nails were,
trying to capture the corners of your hands and thinking
of all we did for each other all those days

all of the building as these hands came together

and they would never hold the other again

there would be a passing of money

inside a bank on a gray day

and then forever

Have
By Leah Noble Davidson

The depression begins with you fingering hand towels you can’t afford in a store you’ll never remember the name of because you’re consumed with how they remind you of the ones you dried the dishes with when you quit working to stay home with the baby while he started his career at the job that you got for him so he wouldn’t have to work nights at the bookstore, pretended to be him, wrote the résumé and answered the emails. You researched how to ace an interview, picked out and ironed his clothes.

He could buy you these towels if you hadn’t left because he threw you across the kitchen floor, told you how much you owed him, but that money is for flowers now, for a woman much prettier than you, someone he’s learned to be thankful for.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Willa Schneberg, Thursday, July 10, 2014

June 16, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, July 10
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004

Featuring Willa Schenberg, author of Rending the Garment:

Willa Schneberg has authored five poetry collections: In The Margins of The World (recipient of the Oregon Book Award in Poetry), Box Poems, Storytelling In Cambodia, the letterpress chapbook The Books of Esther (produced in conjunction with her interdisciplinary exhibit at the Oregon Jewish Museum, Fall 2012), and the recently released Rending the Garment (Mudfish/Box Turtle Press). Rending the Garment is a narrative tapestry encompassing persona poems, prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera. This series of linked poems explores the life and times of one Jewish family. Willa lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. For more info visit http://www.threewayconversation.org.

WILLA’S HAIRS

After my sweatshirt comes out of the dryer
I find one on the sleeve.
Driving home from the mountains
one has attached to my ski pants.
When we awaken in the morning
one clings to my chest.
I wonder… after she is gone,
could my green-eyed one be made again
from a single long white hair.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Emily Pittman Newberry Thursday, June 12, 2014

June 3, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, June 12
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Emily Pittman Newberry:

Emily Pittman Newberry is a performance poet living in Portland, Oregon. She is fascinated by the way we dance with vulnerability as our lives intersect, and by how the rich diversity of life and the many paths we take somehow seem to lead us all home. OneSpirit Press published her two books of poetry, Butterfly A Rose and Nature Speaking, Naturally, a collaboration with artist Adelaide Beeman-White. An artist book featuring her poetry and the work of Portland artist Shu-Ju Wang will be released soon. Her website is www.wizense.com.

Grumbling
by Emily Pittman Newberry

I don’t like winter.

This matted cover
crunches underfoot.

This ice-choked stream
freezes ripples into dead stories.

This memory of yellow,
now withered, brown,
cracks rather than bends.

This wind I shiver against.

Until spring when I plant
the next seed.

Remember the winter
I needed,
to be reborn.

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Daniel Skach-Mills May 8, 2014

April 18, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC
Hosted By Clark County Poet Laureate Christopher Luna
And Printed Matter Vancouver publisher Toni Partington

7pm
Thursday, May 8
Cover to Cover Books
6300 NE St. James Rd., Suite 104B (St. James & Minnehaha)
Vancouver, WA 98663

LGBTQ-friendly, all ages, and uncensored since 2004
printedmattervancouver.com

Featuring Daniel Skach-Mills:

Daniel Skach-Mills is an award-winning poet, author, and a former Trappist monk. His poetry has been published in journals and anthologies ranging from Sufi magazine and The Journal of Daoist Philosophy and Practice to The Christian Science Monitor and Sojourners. Daniel’s books include: The Tao of Now (listed as one of the “150 outstanding Oregon poetry books” for Oregon’s 2009 sesquicentennial); The Hut Beneath the Pine: Tea Poems (a finalist for the 2012 Oregon Book Award); and In This Forest of Monks (a double finalist in both the Poetry and Spirituality categories of the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, and lauded as “a powerful work that touches, delights, and amazes” by the judge of the 21st annual Writer’s Digest Book Awards). Manzou (a Chinese farewell that literally means: walk slowly) was published in January 2014. A docent for Lan Su Chinese Garden since 2005, Daniel lives with his partner of 21 years in Portland, Oregon.

Listening To The Waterfall
I Remember The Abbey Bell

Where in the waterfall’s cascading cadence
can you detect past or future?
Where in an ocean wave’s ebb and flow
can you glimpse a single mistake?
Snow embraces everything it touches.
Plum blossoms fall wherever wind decides.
Slowing down, you catch up to what I’m saying.
Speeding up, you fall behind.
The human world can drive you crazy
if you let it. Be like a bell,
that fills the air with clarity
by emptying itself
of its own sound.

—from Manzou
by Daniel Skach-Mills

PRINTED MATTER VANCOUVER

we write because we must

Tag: Cover to Cover Books

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Celebrates 20 Years of Poetry and Community-Building with a Book Launch for Ghost Town Poetry Volume Three at Art At The Cave on November 8, 2024

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Herb Stokes at Angst Gallery May 14, 2015

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Eighth Anniversary Potluck January 8, 2015/ Final Reading at Cover to Cover Books before changing locations in February 2015

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Airlie Press Authors Annie Lighthart and Dawn Diez Willis at Cover to Cover Books December 11, 2014

[POSTPONED DUE TO WEATHER] Celebrate a Decade of Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic with Christopher Luna, Toni Partington, and Featured Reader Peggy Barnett On Saturday, November 22, 2014

GHOST TOWN POETRY OPEN MIC Featuring Risa Denenberg September 11, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Brittany Baldwin and Leah Noble Davidson Thursday, August 14, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Willa Schneberg, Thursday, July 10, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Emily Pittman Newberry Thursday, June 12, 2014

Ghost Town Poetry Open Mic Featuring Daniel Skach-Mills May 8, 2014