Heavy Lifting Listening Tour: 4th Anniversary of CZU Lightning Complex Fire
Artist Felicia Rice and Poet Theresa Whitehill are hosting The Heavy Lifting Listening Tour, a program to honor the 4-year anniversary of the devastating CZU Lightning Complex Fire. The program will take place in the Felton Branch Library Community Room on Saturday, August 24 from 2 to 4pm. The event is free and open to the public.
Felicia is an artist, letterpress printer, publisher, and educator. With one foot firmly planted in the 19th century and the other in the 21st, she utilizes letterpress and digital technologies to produce limited edition artists books, prints, and broadsides in collaboration with visual and performing artists, writers, and philosophers. Work from the Press has been included in exhibitions from Mexico City to Japan and New York. Her books are held in collections worldwide and she has been the recipient of many awards and grants from the NEA to the French Ministry of Culture. In December 2018 Rice was featured in the award-winning PBS Craft in America series in their episode, “Visionaries.” Felicia’s letterpress shop at her Bonny Doon home was destroyed in the CZU fires. She moved to Mendocino County and reestablished Moving Parts Press there. movingpartspress.com
Theresa is a California-born poet and letterpress artist, who has been involved throughout her career in the production of poetry events and a commitment to cultural projects that address the connection between poetics and the land. Born in Sacramento and raised in Marin County, Whitehill’s interrelated focus on literary and book arts came out of her studies with poet William Everson at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1970s and at Mills College in the Book Art program in the early 1980s. Since 1984 she has lived in Mendocino County. She is a former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, and a co-founder of the Watershed Poetry Mendocino festival. theresawhitehill.com
The August 2020 CZU Lightning Comples fires burned over 86,000 acres and destroyed 1,490 buildings including over 900 single family homes according to Cal Fire. To date, fewer than 100 homes have been rebuilt.
This introduction to the Heavy Lifting project opens with a display of Felicia Rice’s artists’ book and the experimental film, On Heavy Lifting, followed by a conversation between poet Theresa Whitehill and the audience, in which she alternates reading her poems with an invitation for audience members to share their own work or stories in response. The activities aspire to offer opportunities for healing and dreaming through dialogue.
The tour kicked off in February 2023 in Ukiah and has occurred monthly in communities impacted by fire throughout northern California. The project explores a range of responses to loss as it considers what might lie beyond these difficult times, from creating space to name the darkness as the first stage of recovery from grief to building strength to tackle the unending work ahead.
In Felton, the event will mark the 4th anniversary of the CZU Lightning Complex Fire which devastated our Santa Cruz Mountain communities of friends, families, and neighbors, including Felicia’s Bonny Doon neighborhood. The public is invited to join this commemoration of loss and celebration of community and resilience.
Santa Cruz Public Libraries is hosting the event. For more information, visit https://santacruzpl.libcal.com/event/12542943
If You Go
Heavy Lifting Listening Tour: 4th Anniversary of CZU Lightning Complex Fire
Felton Branch Library
Community Room
6121 Gushee Street, Felton
Saturday August 24 from 2 to 4 pm
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