Kelseyville >> The seventh event of the Poet Laureate Reading Series takes place Friday featuring the work of Lake County poet laureate emeritus Elaine Watt.
The reading, which begins at 6:30 p.m., will take place at the Riviera Common Grounds Coffee House at 9736 Soda Bay Road in Kelseyville. It will also feature guest poet Sama Morningstar and a guest musician Clare Hedin.
The eight-month series is held on the second Friday of each month through April and showcases local poetry by presenting each of Lake County’s eight poets laureate in sequence, along with a guest poet and musician. Admission is a $5 suggested donation.
The poet laureate is an official appointment by a government or conferring institution for the purpose of promoting poetry in that jurisdiction. These appointments occur from local to national levels.
In Lake County, the two-year position began in 1998 with the appointment of Jim Lyle. In 2012, Watt was selected as the seventh poet laureate of Lake County.
Originally from Chicago, Watt has been writing since she was 15, and has an entire bookcase of journals to show for it. In college, she was so obsessed with poetry that she used to stop while biking to class to jot down poems in her notebook, frequently making her late.
During her two years in the Peace Corps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where she taught villagers how to raise fish in hand-dug ponds, she sent home 9 pounds of letters. In 1991, after the Peace Corps, she wrote her first novel, “When Lions Revolt,” about the Simba Rebellion in the 1960s in the Congo.
Watt began her second book after attending Burning Man in 2000. “A Falcon in the Desert” is Watt’s memoir about her experiences at the week-long festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Watt was seven years into a Ph.D. program in economics at the University of California, Berkeley, but, after Burning Man, she realized that she wanted to be a writer.
“I was on track to become a professor,” Watt said, “but, after meeting and being inspired by the artists who created the raw and gritty art of Burning Man, I realized that the scholarly life wasn’t for me.”
Within two years, she had finished A Falcon in the Desert, quit her Ph.D. program, left her marriage and moved to Harbin Hot Springs, where she became the accounting manager.
Watt has lived at Harbin for 13 years. She has finished two other memoirs: “A Three-Stick Fire” about her experiences in Zaire and “I Thought You Liked Me” about her dysfunctional childhood. She is in the progress of completing “Another Betrayal” about her difficulties in high school.
“I enjoy writing memoir,” Watt said, “because it helps me explore the mysterious and, at times, nearly inexplicable forces which ripple through my life.”
Watt has also written two screenplays: “The Pelt” about a sea lion/human shape-shifter and the screenplay adaptation of “I Thought You Liked Me.” She is nearly done with the screenplay adaptation of Another Betrayal. In addition, she is finishing writing the third book of a science fiction trilogy, “The Purple Disk Series.” Her writing goal for this year is to publish her memoir about her childhood and her poetry manuscript.
Watt has studied writing poetry with Ishmael Reed, Diane di Prima and Clive Matson. She is a co-editor of Harbin’s monthly literary newsletter, Cynefin, and has twice been guest editor of Clive Matson’s quarterly literary newsletter, The Scribbler.
She competes in the Berkeley and Oakland Poetry Slams and has qualified for the finals of the Oakland Poetry Slam in May.
“Writing slam poetry in a three-minute, spoken-word format, to be performed in front of a raucous, enthusiastic audience, makes me hone in on the precise word and exact image to convey an emotion within the time limit,” Watt said. “It’s great training and it’s also a whole lot of fun.”
She has received a Lake County Behavioral Health Prevention and Early Intervention Mini Grant to teach teenage girls in Lower Lake how to write and perform spoken word poetry, starting this April. Information about the workshop, which is called Speak Up/Speak Out, is available by contacting the Harbor on Main Youth Resource Center in Lower Lake.
Casey Carney is the current poet laureate of Lake County.
