The Legendary Deena Metzger in Santa Cruz
Celebrating the publication of LA VIEJA & reissue of WHAT DINAH THOUGHT
Dear Friends,
I’m thrilled to host my beloved friend and teacher Deena Metzger in Santa Cruz on Sunday, March 16, 2025, 3:00-4:30 pm, for a literary reading in honor of the publication of her latest novel LA VIEJA: A Journal of Fire and the re-issue of WHAT DINAH THOUGHT. There will be refreshments and book signing to follow.
This will be Deena’s first live public reading since before the Pandemic. If you are in the San Francisco or Monterey Bay area, please join us!
You can find more information and tickets HERE.
I invited Deena to Santa Cruz to honor the publication of these two books because each one is brilliant, and because taken together they offer a window into two of the seminal issues of our times—destruction of our mother Earth, and the story of Palestinian people on ancient land.
La Vieja: A Journal of Fire is about an old woman living in a fire lookout in the Sierra Mountains, as she bears unstinting and mysterious witness to ongoing environmental devastation and the interlocking lives of humans, trees and animals.
What Dinah Thought features a Palestinian activist & Jewish American woman as they confront the ancient biblical story of Dinah and Shechem, and the story of crimes committed in the name of faith, and wounds that echo to this day.
As it happens, What Dinah Thought is the first novel by Deena I read. It was 1989, and I had only recently joined one of her writing groups in Topanga Canyon, CA. Just 31 years old, I was recovering from an auto accident that had ruptured two lumbar discs in my lower back. Deena still remembers the special pillow I used to carry around with me when I first showed up at her door.
What does a young woman do when faced with the magical and unforgettable force of Deena Metzger? I looked upon her in wonder. In those early months I dreamed of an earthquake happening while we were in class. It was not hard to interpret the great foundational shift that meeting this life-long teacher represented.
Deena Metzger is the great mentor and teacher of my life, the one who would, and did, change everything. That we are now white-haired girlfriends is a gift beyond belief. Recently when I turned 67, Deena, who is almost ninety, said with a grin, “Now that’s some years!” What a great compliment.
All those years ago when we first met, I was well on my way to becoming an academic writer, university professor with a Ph.D. in History and all that jazz. In the enforced stillness required as my back healed from the auto accident, I had discovered an entirely different, achingly true poetic self within. I wrote to Stanford University to relinquish my Ph.D. scholarship, and set my sights into the vast unknown.
Not long after, I met Deena.
It was at a literary reading at the L.A. Woman’s Building, when a well-known silver-haired woman read her earthy, lyrical poems. Afterward I pulled together my courage and approached her to inquire about the writing groups she taught. There was a waiting list, she told me, but I should call this number and leave my name. It would take another six months, but in early 1989 I received a spot. Deena Metzger was known as a rebel writer, poet, teacher, therapist, and feminist who stood up for academic and artistic freedom. I joined a group with a dozen writers that met at her home in Topanga Canyon.
I’d had brilliant college professors who had read my work with care, but Deena Metzger was the first purely creative artist I’d ever known. In her presence, I felt changed, shorn of pretense. She lived in a cottage at the top of a canyon road, and as I entered the gate I walked past a signpost with “Peace” in multiple languages. Walls lined with books, American Poetry Review lying open in her bathroom, a modern image of Kuan Yin, the East Asian goddess of compassion, on the wall, original drawings and artistic photographs tacked up and framed.
In the circle that night I was stunned to discover we were expected to write together, right there in her house, and then to read aloud what we wrote. But I did write, and I read to the circle, and the effect was immediate and exhilarating. Late the night of my first class I drove away from her house, winding down the easy mountain road, and felt something drift off from me and into the ethers. To this day I do not know what it was, but I felt it leave. I slept the entire next day, from exhaustion and relief. I was making a leap into the unknown, a voice not predicated on anything that came before—something, Deena said, that came from the wild.
Deena taught me that when we listen to that voice—a voice both inner and outer, a voice within the earth herself—that wild and true voice, sacred and whispered, unplanned and unvarnished, the real truth of our lives, when we listen long enough to that voice and honor it enough to write it down, we are changed at a cellular level. I had embarked upon the life of a writer, with Deena and the writers I met through her as companions. I became someone who experiences the world twice, through regularly practicing the exhilarating act of getting it down on the page. As many readers of this newsletter know, there is nothing like it.
That was 36 years ago. As I was starting out on this new path, I read Deena’s What Dinah Thought. I took in each page as if mesmerized. The language, the many exotic worlds, the decision of the author to explore the story of her ancestral namesake Dinah, and to take on the wound of that ancestral story—and then to write a love story right into that wound—I was dazzled, and still am.
I read La Vieja: A Journal of Fire in 2021, in manuscript form. And I was dazzled yet again, and still am. I remember closing the book with the unshakeable sense that it had not only been essentially written or narrated by an ancient old woman living in a fire lookout in the Sierra Mountains, who was both a fictional character and somehow real, who had visited Deena’s soul and psyche—but on a more foundational level had been brought into existence by a great Bear La Vieja encounters in the mountains. And yet again, as humans are witnessing horrific crimes done to the Earth by our own species, in one of Deena’s novels an unexpected love story brings us into an entirely new, lyrical song of hope in the midst of destruction.
I hope you are able to hear Deena read live on Sunday, March 16 from these mighty works of literature. Happily, for those who can’t join us, the reading will be videotaped, and we will share that as soon as it is available.
Please see more about these two books here. You can learn more about Deena Metzger’s extraordinary work at her website. And if you have not yet discovered her Substack essays, don’t miss them.
In this time of epoch-changing transformation, both politically and with the upheavals of the climate catastrophe, I am grateful to call in the voice of one of our wisest elders.
Blessings, and I will see you on March 16!
Carolyn
