Pat Lynch and Penny Kline
Monday, January 25, 2016 at 7:30 PM
SPC at 1719 25th Street
Host: Bob Stanley
Pat Lynch lives in Sacramento, California. Her essay, “Pulling Forty,” received the top award from the New West Magazine. Some of her short stories appeared in Alimentum, Weber, The Contemporary West, and XX Eccentric, a Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology. Her feature writing and essays have appeared in Sierra Parent Magazine, The Sacramento News and Review, East Sacramento Preservation and other local publications. Her plays have been produced and performed by local colleges and theater groups. She is currently publishing a weekly column, Door to Door, in East Sacramento News and working on a novel.
Pat Lynch’s work is a pleasure, especially if we define pleasure as delivering a world and a sensibility toward it that always rings true. Her most interesting characters are outsiders, people who find ways to live (and sometimes prevail) both inside and on the margins of society. She has a fine ear for their language, and a complicated sympathy for the situations she places them in.
—Stephen Dunn, author of nineteen books of poetry and prose,
including Different Hours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
The collection sparkles…Lynch’s writing is accomplished and her characters real.
—Kirkus Reviews
Pat Lynch’s work, with its astute social consciousness and reporter’s sharp eye, tunes us in: to language with its revelations and betrayals, to subtexts, to nuance, to irony. Her characters engage us emotionally; her stories peel away the layers with humor and great humanity. Lynch is funny the way that Lear’s fool is funny: she tells the truth. She is (as the teenage Dustin Blake would say in “Hand-Me-Downs”) a “hella good” writer.
—Susan Kelly-DeWitt, author of The Fortunate Islands
In one of the marvelous stories in Pat Lynch’s All That Glisters, the narrator says, “We wanted to travel light, carrying only heads filled with wonder.” In another, the narrator says, “I believe that it is my capacity to still feel surprise that keeps me vital.” Wonder and surprise: these are the essential ingredients of Pat Lynch’s fiction. But hers is not the artificial wonder and surprise we find in the work of writers who try to impress us with the flash and dazzle of over-the-top characters, plots, and prose; rather, her wonder and surprise derive from her vital empathy with ordinary men and women, an empathy that allows her to see how, deep down, even those of us who don’t glister can be gold. In this splendid collection, Pat Lynch travels light, and whoever travels with her will be filled with wonder.
—David Jauss, author of Black Maps
and Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories
Penny Kline is the founding artistic director of Ovation Stage and is on the board of the Sacramento Poetry Center. She is also an actor, a playwright and a poet. She was born in Sacramento and lived in Santa Monica, California and New Haven, Connecticut. She has had her own plays produced and has directed over 60 plays. You may have caught her reading poetry at Sacramento Poetry Center, Luna’s, Avid Reader, Davis and Shine. Her poetry has been translated for the 100 Thousand Poets for Change inaugural World Conference she attended in Salerno, Italy in June 2015. Penny is looking forward to the publication of her first full-length poetry book where she will launch it on a European Tour of France, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Kosovo, Macedonia, Greece and Italy.
O Holy Bagmati River, Nepal
Ghats and stairs down to the river are full of countless bodies.
Priests are scarce. Her son is yet to be found. Scores of dead children
wrapped in orange and gold cloth wait in line on the ground for cremation
with relatives praying for their souls in heartbreaking anguish.
A small space is spied along the bank. She follows the men carrying you down
on a stretcher, piling wood on the ground and gently placing your body on top.
Kindling is gathered around your mouth. A man lights a piece of wood and
hands it to her. They depart in haste to help others.
She is left conducting your last rites. She prays, circling your body three times,
clockwise. She prays, lighting the funeral pyre, burning and purifying your body,
offering you to the Gods. She prays, watching as you burn for hours. She prays for
your honorable send-off, taking a holy river-water bath.
She weeps, her tears falling on the deep red flowers of her silk skirt dripping down
to your ashes mixing and swirling with the others. Your ashes attach to her hem where
a few loose threads wave that last farewell in the slow-moving current of the Holy Bagmati
River flowing down to Koshi to mingle with the silt of the impending monsoons.
She weeps, raising her hand to her head pulling off the matching head wrap spreading
it out gently on the river’s surface. She envisions your crushed and splotched body along
with her body mixed in the deep red flowers of the watery reflection. She weeps,
understanding the earthquake took her husband. She weeps, having faith the Gods are
still among us.
Along the bank, Pashupatinath Temple looks down.
She is praying: O Holy Bagmati River, purify me and my people.
