June 30, 2013: Silver Birch Press Author Philippa Mayall at Skylight Books, L.A.

Silver Birch Press is honored to celebrate the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Phillipa Mayall, with a reading and book signing by the author at Los Angeles’s acclaimed Skylight Books on June 30, 2013. We invite our Southern California readers (and authors!) to join Silver Birch Press and Philippa Mayall for this event. 

WHERE: Skylight Books

LOCATION: 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90027

WEBSITE: skylightbooks.com

PHONE: 323-660-1175

EVENT INFORMATION: Philippa Mayall Reading

WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013

TIME: 5 p.m.

 

Starcrosser’s Cut, play by Joseph Tepperman — 2 more performances

Southern California residents have two more chances to see STARCROSSER’S CUT, a play based on the saga of astronaut Lisa Nowak (the diaper-wearing woman scorned out for revenge).

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: Inspired by astronaut Lisa Nowak‘s 2007 arrest for the attempted murder of a romantic rival, Starcrosserʼs Cut is a cassette symphony in the tradition of Krapp’s Last Tape. Loosely based on the real-life transcript of Nowak’s police interview after her arrest, a character known only as “Lisa” listens to the playback, reenacts her interview with the detective, and attempts to rerecord it all. Through a labyrinth of tape edits and revisions within revisions, the play looks at the “crimes that can’t keep uncommitted”  — those beyond guilt. From jail cell to Space Shuttle, the mystery that emerges is not whether Lisa did it — it’s whether a crime can cease to be a crime, or can just cease to be.

Running time: 90 minutes
Written and directed by Joseph Tepperman
Music by David Dominique
Featuring Shawn Lockie & Tom Colitt
With musicians Leah Harmon, Sammi Lee,
Heather Lockie, and Alexander Noice

REMAINING PERFORMANCES:
Saturday, June 15 @ 8pm
Sunday, June 16 @ 4pm

TICKETS:
$18, general admission; $12, students/seniors

PURCHASE TICKETS: soneofsemele.org

LOCATION:
Son of Semele Theater
3301 Beverly Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90004
213-351-3507

I caught STARCROSSER’S CUT yesterday (6/13) to a standing-room-only house, the result of rave reviews and feature articles for the show in The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today, LA Weekly, and LA Stage Times. (Congrats to the publicist Diana Wyenn for all the press. Find her at dianawyennpr@gmail.com.)

Watching the stage depiction of Lisa Nowak (played with bravura intensity and commitment by Shawn Lockie), I thought back to my days in an all-girl Catholic high school — and the range of human behavior, from girls always in trouble to perfect girls. The most interesting thing that happened during my four years at the school occurred when brilliant Jeannie B. (A+, honor roll, student council president, etc., etc.,) went into a rage when she learned that one of our teachers Mr. C was marrying another teacher Miss D. Yes, Jeannie B. was in luv with Mr. C and cried and carried on about that #*!@ Miss D. Who knew?

So with this personal set-piece as an emotional entry into STARCROSSER’S CUT, I had no problem understanding why super-achiever Lisa Nowak flipped when she learned that her boyfriend Bill was dumping her for younger, blonder Colleen. As the poet William Congreve reminded us way back in the 17th century, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

I won’t try to summarize Lisa Nowak‘s crimes — the story is too complex to boil down into a few flip paragraphs. But if you’d like to know more, check out “Lust in Space,” an insightful article by S.C. Gwynne in one of my favorite magazines — Texas Monthly. 

STARCROSSER’S CUT makes frequent references to the constellation Cassiopeia, drawing a parallel with Nowak, as astronaut. In Greek mythology, Queen Cassiopeia was placed in the sky as a punishment for boasting that her daughter Andromeda was more beautiful than the Nereids — and is now forced to wheel around the North Celestial Pole on her throne, spending half of her time clinging to it so she does not fall off. The throne/space shuttle analogy is played out to poetic effect, often with images of the constellation projected onto the stage and actors.

Original music by David Dominique — played live by Leah Harmon (accordion), Sammi Lee (flute), Heather Lockie (viola), and Alexander Noice (guitar) — takes us into the mind, jumbled thought processes, and roller coaster emotions of Lisa Nowak as she struggles to give an account of her actions during an interview with an Orlando, Florida, detective (Tom Colitt in a sincere, natural performance that flowed like a virtuoso jazz solo — a joy to witness).

If you have a chance, So Cal residents, catch STARCROSSER’S CUT — highly recommended.

Philippa Mayall at Skylight Books, L.A., June 30, 2013

Silver Birch Press is honored to celebrate the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Phillipa Mayall, with a reading and book signing by the author at Los Angeles’s acclaimed Skylight Books on June 30, 2013. We invite our Southern California readers (and authors!) to join Silver Birch Press and Philippa Mayall for this event. 

WHERE: Skylight Books

LOCATION: 1818 N. Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 90027

WEBSITE: skylightbooks.com

PHONE: 323-660-1175

EVENT INFORMATION: Philippa Mayall Reading

WHEN: Sunday, June 30, 2013

TIME: 5 p.m.

AUTOGRAPHED COPIES: If you’d like to order an autographed copy of PHOENIX by Philippa Mayall, please send an email to silver@silverbirchpress.com and we’ll reserve a book for you at Skylight.

John Rechy Reviews PHOENIX by Philippa Mayall

“This powerful memoir immediately establishes itself as the work of a highly talented young writer. In a voice that is strong, unsparing, never judgmental, Mayall traces her years-long journey as a young woman to find escape out of the entrapping mean streets of Los Angeles, a separated world invisible to all but its denizens. She does this with unflinching honesty and authenticity. She knows what it’s like to wake up into the harsh sunlight in a Venice Beach parking lot, cramped in an old car with other outcasts. She conveys the urgency for chemical surcease that leads her into dangerous streets, dark alleys; surcease no matter if bought by a sordid paid encounter. A punishing dawn at times finds her still searching for that illusive escape.

Through all this, Mayall is able to find poignancy and humor. She finds it in the drug recovery meetings she haunts in search of vagrant camaraderie. She finds it—and introduces the reader to a cast of memorable fellow exiles–in a rigidly ruled rehabilitation institution.

This is a memorable book — beautifully and even lyrically written. At times it is melancholy, at times hopeful, at times shocking, but it is always moving. At times it is even exuberant with the sense of a life lived determined to survive.” JOHN RECHY. author of CITY OF NIGHT and THE MIRACULOUS DAY OF AMALIA GOMEZ

PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall, is available at Amazon.com.

New Release: PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall

Silver Birch Press is pleased to announce the release of PHOENIX, a memoir by Philippa Mayall — a book that renowned writer John Rechy, author of CITY OF NIGHT, has called “Memorable…powerful…and beautifully written.”

BOOK DESCRIPTION: PHOENIX begins on a tragic night in Manchester, United Kingdom, when a house fire destroys the author’s life as she knows it. Philippa (Flip) flees the scene, devoured by guilt — and later leaps into a synthetic existence of mind-altering drugs and alcohol. Her desperate urge to escape takes her six thousand miles from home to Los Angeles. But Flip discovers her feelings came with her, and soothes them with even more potent drugs offered by a new friend. She ends up homeless, living in a car with two other people and two cats, and a new flame is ignited within her. After a violent confrontation with her friends, Flip is forced to enter a drug rehab so she isn’t sleeping on the streets. This is the beginning of her real and most courageous escape.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Philippa Mayall was born into her own gritty northern drama in Manchester, United Kingdom, in 1973. Her penchant for writing was discovered by her mother at an early age. She kept switching the lights on to write down nuggets of sentences and phrases she thought of in the night and didn’t want to forget. This made her very unpopular with her brother who shared the room (they remain good friends today). She moved to Los Angeles in 2000 and her time in America is enormously influential on her writing, as are her roots in Manchester. After realizing her real dream of wanting to write about her experiences, she moved back to England, where she studied for a Masters in Creative Writing at Kingston University. PHOENIX is her first book. In the future, she hopes to write more. Philippa currently lives in Los Angeles, California.

PHOENIX is available at Amazon.com.

Henry Miller, Anais Nin & Barbara Kraft

I recently spoke with Barbara Kraft (pictured at right at Alias Books in Los Angeles) about her memoir  Anais Nin: The Last Days — peppering her with questions about the iconic Nin. Kraft mentioned that after Nin’s death in 1977, she was invited to meet Henry Miller — then in his 80s and living in Pacific Palisades (located to the west of Los Angeles).

Miller and Nin had had a storied relationship in Paris during the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, “Although Miller had little or no money that first year in Paris [1930],  things began to change with the meeting of Anais Nin who…would go on to pay his entire way through the 1930s…Nin became his lover and financed the first printing of The Tropic of Cancer in 1934.”

It was amazing that Barbara Kraft had befriended not one, but two literary giants during their final years. Her memoir tells Nin’s story with depth of feeling and telling detail. Now Kraft is considering writing about her experiences with Miller — including her front-row seat at his frequent dinner parties for artistic and literary figures during the late 1970s and delivering some of the over 1500 letters Miller wrote to his “twilight muse” Brenda Venus. To this, I gave a decided, “Yes! Yes! Yes.” I want to read that book!

Anais Nin: The Last Days is available as an ebook on Kindle and a range of additional formats. Find it on Amazon.com here.

Anais Nin: The Last Days by Barbara Kraft

A few days ago, I visited Alias Books East, in L.A’.s Atwater Village, and was privileged to hear Barbara Kraft read from her memoir Anais Nin: The Last Days. Set in the 1970s, Kraft’s book pulls back the veil on the ethereal and mysterious Nin during her final years when she lived in L.A.’s Silverlake area with Rupert Pole.

Through a series of fortunate events, Kraft became Nin’s writing student in 1974, and during the next few years visited the renowned diarist once a week for mentoring, instruction, and fellowship. Over time, Kraft became Nin’s closes confidante, learning intimate details of her mentor’s history and relationships.In 1975, Nin was diagnosed with cancer and spent the next two years fighting the disease — with Kraft often at her side, both in Silverlake and at hospitals.

During the reading, as I sat with approximately 20 people listening to Kraft read her account of Nin’s cancer fight, her words were so vivid and moving  that we were all there, living the experience with her once again. Kraft’s writing is brilliant — both lucid and lyrical — bringing to life one of the most elusive and influential figures in 20th Century literature.  Highly recommended!

Anais Nin: The Last Days is currently available exclusively as an ebook. Find it on Amazon.com here for just $5.38!