Blake More

A 1987 graduate of UCLA and a lifetime member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, Blake More is an artist with many creative voices and expressions, poetry being her first obsession, though her work spans the spectrum: from book, magazine, poetry and playwriting to performance art, dance and yogic trapeze; from teaching poetry, video and drama to theatrical costume design, functional mixed media art/life pieces, assemblage sculpture and wildly painted poetry art cars (including Eartha Karr, a 1978 Mercedes that runs on Bio Diesel (www.snakelyone.com/EARTHA/done.htm).

Blake is the author of three full length books; New Age Anonymous: 12 Steps for the Recovering New Ager, The Photon Energy Diet, and How To Heal Your Headache Naturally) and five books of poetry: Lingua Franca, Late-Eve(all) Woman In Paradise, I Scribble, Therefore I Am, postcards from the sun, and godmeat. Blake's work has also appeared in magazines and journals worldwide , including Utne Reader, Yoga Journal, Alternative Medicine Digest, Japan International Journal, Nippon View, Tokyo Today, and Tokyo Time Out. Similarly, her poetry has been wildly published and anthologized.

Her original solo performance pieces and ensemble plays have appeared on streets and stages in New York, Tokyo, San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Los Angeles, Marin, Sonoma, and the Mendocino coast. She has collaborated with a diverse range of creative organizations, including the Oakland East Bay Symphony, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Bay Area Video Coalition, Awate Productions, The Marsh Theater, The Arena Theater, Gualala Arts, California Poets In The schools, Laughing Squid, KZYX Radio, KTDE Radio, KPOO Radio, SF Liberation Radio, Point Arena Pirate Radio, and Radio Amsterdam.

She coordinates the monthly poetry series in Point Arena, as well as the Poetry & Jazz event for the Redwood Whale & Jazz festival. As a teacher, Blake works part-time as a poet teacher and Mendocino County Area Coordinator for California Poets in the Schools; in addition, she receives private and public grant funding to guide high school students in the creation and production of original plays, videos, artwork, and poetry anthologies. She also designs costumes for the San Francisco Mime Troupe Youth Theater Project, and is the creative director of The Arena Technology Center, the city of Point Arena's arts and technology center. She has sat on several non-profit arts and education boards, including the CITYARTS Gallery Board (www.cityarts.ws) and California Poets In the Schools Executive Board (www.cpits.org). She is a member of the Oddfellows Fraternal Society.

Currently, Blake lives in the tree, ocean, and character-lined pastures of the not-so lost Mendocino coast. Her newest book godmeat (Beatitude Press, January 2008), is a collection of poetry, prose and color artwork and includes a poem movie compilation DVD. To learn more about godmeat, go to www.godmeat.com. To explore Blake's many other creative endeavors, please go to her website, www.snakelyone.com.

Crawdad Nelson was born in Fort Bragg and grew up on Tunnel Hill. He attended local schools where he specialized in journalism and forestry, two interests which would eventually coalesce in a series of late 80s/early 90s articles in the Anderson Valley Advertiser and a series of interviews for the New Settler Interview, whereupon he developed a reputation for telling it like he sees it. This led, during his greenchain days, to a series of heated discussions with other millworkers who saw it differently. These forays into politics and philosophy come from a long family tradition: his relatives were not only prodigal timber workers but politically aware and active during a number of historical periods important in the timber and redwood regions, from early-days socialist party organizing efforts to fraternal disputes during the 1946-49 Redwood Strike. In the 1980s, his father, Don Nelson, was Financial Secretary and Business Agent for the International Woodworkers of America local in Fort Bragg, #3-469. In fact, Nelson himself worked for Georgia-Pacific between 1978 and 1985, leaving only when he suffered a workplace injury.

For the next fifteen years, he lived in Humboldt County, and there he edited and published a small "working class cultural and literary review", The Steelhead Special, which published interviews, current-events articles, poetry, fiction and miscellany of interest to most residents of the North Coast area. The magazine was published in Willits and Lakeport and distributed worldwide, with an emphasis on coastal locations, libraries and cafes.

He moved to Sacramento in 2003 and now participates in the local poetry community as well as contributes articles and essays to the Sacramento News & Review. He has also been a history major at Sacramento City College during much of this time. In April 2008 he was a presenter at the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Reserach Symposium and Leland Stanford Jr. University. He has also won a number of other scholarships and awards while a student. He intends to complete his education at UC Davis within the next few years. He works as an English tutor in addition to his journalistic work.

In a departure from its usual thumbnail-sized Poems-for-All editions, the 24th Street Irregular Press has published this chapbook of Crawdad Nelson's longer work. His gentle observations of the natural world are coupled with a Zen-like desire to quiet the mind and a realistic approach to the difficulty of doing so. The opening poem, "Conditions," exemplifies this with the repeated actions of a "Buddha nature" seeking the unknowable, only to find it in the search. In the prose poem, "Drunk," Nelson uses the form to examine every aspect of inebriation: "I was drunk. Good and proper drunk. Antidisestablishmentarianism drunk. Drunk as a duck. Drunk as a truckload of dynamite." He also returns to the natural world for solace, as in "Encounters With White Owls": "We can look up / but we can't break / away-