Peyton does watercolor demo Saturday at Fireweed Gallery
Watercolor artist Jan Peyton does a demonstration from 2-4:30 p.m. Saturday at Fireweed Gallery. She will show techniques like wet-on-wet painting and how to add pigment to wet areas to create a translucent effect. The demonstration is free.
Peyton also displays her work at Fireweed Gallery.
Saulitis ‘Becoming Earth’ book makes PEN Literary Award list
PEN America has named Eva Saulitis’ “Becoming Earth” (Boreal Books / Red Hen Press) to the longlist for the $10,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
One of 10 books listed, “Becoming Earth” is a collection of essays on wildness, cancer and dying written by Saulitis before she died of breast cancer in January 2016. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye, the keynote speaker at the 2013 Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, called “Becoming Earth” a “most astonishing, unflinchingly honest book.”
By the time she died at age 52, Saulitis had written five books of poetry and nonfiction, four of them written in the five years after she got her cancer diagnosis in 2010. She wrote her first book, “Leaving Resurrection,” in 2008. Her other works are “Many Ways to Say It,” 2012; “Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas,” 2013; “Prayer in Wind,” 2015, and “Becoming Earth.”
Saulitis taught at almost every Kachemak Bay Writers Conference from its start in 2002, missing only 2013 because of illness. She also taught writing and poetry at the Kachemak Bay Campus.
PEN America, a national association of writers, editors, and poets, presents awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translation. Other writers on the essay longlist include Teju Cole, Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Solomon.
Finalists for the award will be announced in January and the winners in February.
Artist offers winter classes
Artist Lynn Marie Naden offers three months of art classes for ages 16 and older in January, February and March of 2017. Classes are held 12:30-4 p.m. Saturdays at her studio off Bear Creek Drive. In January, she teaches collage and painting, in February, relief clay tiles and basic mold making, and in March, paper making and felting. The fee is $300 for all three months or $150 a month, space available. The cost of materials is not included, but will be no more than $50 a month. For more information or to sign up or get a gift certificate, call or text Naden at 907-299-0446. A deposit of $50 reserves a space in class.
