Efforts to maintain composure and poise can sometimes backfire, especially when those practices are learned responses for surviving traumatic experiences and childhoods. In an effort to bring a whole body consciousness to my poetics and my life, I’ve started shifting how I write poetry. Less editing and overthinking–and more flow! This sermon is a poetry reading which reflects that evolution.

Our guest today is Stella Beratlis. Stella is the author of Dust Bowl Venus (2021) and Alkali Sink, a 2016 nominee for the Northern California Book Award. Her writing has appeared in Harbor Review, California Quarterly, Penumbra, Quercus Review, San Joaquin Magazine, Bluegrass Breakdown, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed and California Fire and Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology. Stella was Modesto’s poet laureate from 2016-2020 and works as a faculty librarian at Modesto Junior College.

Topics: Monthly Theme: Delight