Festival Inspires Future Writers

Writers gathered at the Firehouse Arts Center in downtown Pleasanton over the weekend to celebrate the art of writing at the 10th Poetry, Prose & Arts Festival.

People from all over the Bay Area, and from as far as Elk Grove, traveled to Pleasanton to enrich their writing talents at the festival.

“The city and the Pleasanton Cultural Arts Council has put this together for the last 10 years,” said David Wright, program chair and the event co-chair. “Our first poet laureate, Charlene Villella, and several others of us conceived the program and developed the first one.”

Since the festivals inception in 2001, the venue has moved from the Carr America Conference Center to the senior center and to its current location at the Firehouse Arts Center with nearly 90 people registered.

The event features a series of writing workshops for attendees to learn from and explore their writing techniques. Most of the workshops are geared toward either adults or youth, with a few designed for both age groups.

“The speakers and people we hire to do the workshops are specialists in writing,” Wright said.

The keynote speaker selected for this year’s festival was Al Young, an author, professor and poet laureate for California from 2005 to 2008.

Young has taught at universities such as Stanford, U.C. Davis and the University of Michigan.  He is currently teaching at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

“The main thing about him is that he has music in his soul,” Wright said. “That’s the thing that makes him wonderful. He’s got this wonderful booming voice and he’s got music to the core.”

Young spoke about the importance of poetry and writing during his speech.  He also touched on the many experiences he had and how they inspired him.

“Poetry is not text,” Young said. “Writing is not natural. Poetry is a natural human endeavor. It exists in all times and all places and all peoples. And it precedes the printing press, the microphone, all these things that we associate with communication.”

He told the crowd how his second grade teacher taught him that if you see the word "co," it means more than one is involved. “It takes two to co-municate,” he said.

Two of Young’s poems were also recited during his speech, "Away Away Away. What Does It Mean?" and "Tango Good to Go."

“I find it much more interesting to walk away from literature as often as I can and to surrender to experience and just general observation and learning,” Young said.

Pleasanton Mayor Jennifer Hosterman also spoke during the morning of the festival, bringing her hawk with her to the stage.

Hosterman said she brought her hawk so she could read an excerpt from one of her favorite books on falconry and how it pertains to self-actualization.

After the speeches, the workshops were opened for attendees to visit. Some of the sessions included Write Crazy Love Poems, The Secret to Writing a Successful Memoir and The Power of Imagery, Gained in Translation: Screenwriting, Crafting Suspense Fiction and Plotting Your Novel.

“It’s an important event,” said Jim Ott, volunteer and poet laureate for Pleasanton from 2001 to 2003. “It has brought a lot of notoriety for the Tri-Valley.”

In addition to the workshops, there was also a series of poetry contests with $1,200 in prizes.

Ott said the festival took more than 500 volunteer man-hours to coordinate. He said he hopes the attendees find value in working with the workshop leaders.

"If people can’t put in words what they’re feeling and what they think, they’ve lost,” Wright said. “So what we’re hoping to do is to fulfill people and give them a rich avenue for bringing what’s inside of them to the outside. That’s really what it’s about.”