OTHER VOICES WOMEN'S READING SERIES
Friday, Oct. 10, 7 p.m.Biblio Bookstore
222 E. Congress St.
624-8222
The cozy Biblio Bookstore is located across from the bustling Ronstadt Center. The cozy downtown store has been the living room for the monthly series for about a year now and was started by Liza Porter, a poet and fiction writer, who wanted to see women featured at the microphone.
"There had been a women's reading series a few years before," said Porter in a recent e-mail. "It was the first place I felt comfortable reading my poems in public, and I wanted to make a place like that available for other women again."
Though the series was started to celebrate spoken-word artists, poets and musicians of the female persuasion, the October installment may be noticeably different.
"There will be a different feel this week," said Biblio owner Maggie Golston. "There will be more of a focus on the frontier and the West."
Only the best were chosen to highlight this topic. Susan Cummins Miller, a California native turned Tucsonan, is one of the featured readers. In 2000, she edited A Sweet, Separate Intimacy: Women Writers of the American Frontier, 1800-1922, an anthology of 34 writers who published during the settlement years of the American frontier. The anthology features essays, short stories and poetry, as well as journals and letters, all of which lend insight into the roles women played in the settlement of the wild West.
Miller is joined by local author Wynne Brown, whose first, just-published book, More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Arizona Women, introduces readers to 12 women of pioneer Arizona. (A review is available at www.tucsonweekly.com.) Her collection of biographies showcases the previously untold stories of women in Arizona history.
After the featured reading there's an open mic. Don't be shy, you wild women of the West.
