Friday July 22, Story-Telling Night

The Willing Heart- Stories of Love and Laughter
Presented by The Seattle Storytelling Guild and SPLAB
DATE: Friday, July 22 at 7:00 PM

LOCATION:  SPLAB 3651 S. Edmunds, Seattle, WA 98118
In the Columbia Cultural Corner (the former Columbia School). Enter from Edmunds. Off street parking is available and we’re three blocks from the Link Light Rail stop in Columbia City.

Traditional love stories and the real life stories that mirror them are the stuff of Gerald Fierst’s new book The Heart of the Wedding and of his performance piece The Willing Heart.

Fierst, a Civil Celebrant who has officiated at hundreds of weddings, transforms his life experience into road maps of love, using his stories to reveal the vagaries, contradictions, and delights of the willing heart.  One of America’s foremost storytellers.  he has been a featured at the National Storytelling Festival as well as festivals and cultural institutions worldwide.   His performances combine stories and teachings from his own Jewish tradition, world folklore, literary material and original tales.

ABC News called him “A Master Storyteller” and Frank Hentschker, Director of Theater Programming at the Graduate Center of New York called him “An American Master of Ceremonies”

His book has been reviewed “an exciting, valuable book  . . .  His journey with couples restores the beauty and transformational aspects of marriage ceremony.  He plucked the marriage event from its ordinary place of being only public declaration and sharing of taxes and insurance to reveal the power of transformation that draws two people into a circle of love. “

For more information and to contact Fierst go his websites www.geraldfierst.com and www.theheartofthewedding.com or email gerald@geraldfierst.com


PROGRAM:
Magic Matzoh Ball
Silver Tree, Gold Tree
Skywoman’s Basket
The Foolish Prince
Tiger’s Whiskers
Lillian Oppenheim
The Great Big Smelly Small Tooth Dog
A Letter to Harvey Milk

About Splabman

Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
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