Book Launch: Slow Now With Clear Skies by Julene Tripp Weaver

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Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum invites you to celebrate the launch of author Julene Tripp Weaver's latest book Slow Now With Clear Skies. 

Julene will be in conversation with author and returning Folio guest Priscilla Long. Enjoy readings from fellow authors John Burgess, Stephen Jackson and Clare Johnson, and join us for a reception to conclude the evening.

I must/ slow down, touch earth, find/ the smooth stone in my pocket... These lines are at the heart of both Julene Tripp Weaver's poem, "Safe Space," and her necessary poetry collection. Weaver uses images from her own life and the viruses that plague our world to witness suffering. And to acknowledge that all of us have been changed over the Covid years. Everyone lives on a spectrum/ of health and neuroticism, she tells us.

She offers no easy answers to how we might heal in a dangerous world when even our closest relationships might betray us. My mother never enters at the right/ time, even in my dreams, she confides. Yet she writes that all of us can find back doors/ into the body after illness, loss and the hauntings of memory.

In post-pandemic America, this is the book I needed to read. Weaver, an herbalist, knows we and the earth can heal together. Find channels that soothe. ...Send anxiety into the earth. One of these channels is poetry.

Julene Tripp Weaver, a psychotherapist and writer in Seattle, has three prior poetry collections; truth be bold—Serenading Life & Death in the Age of AIDS (Finishing Line Press, 2017), which won the Bisexual Book Award, four Human Relations Indie Book Awards, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards; No Father Can Save Her, (Plain View Press, 2011); and a chapbook, Case Walking: An AIDS Case Manager Wails Her Blues, (Finishing Line Press, 2007). Slow Now with Clear Skies will be available by June. Her poems have appeared in many journals including: HEAL, Autumn Sky Poetry, Oye Drum, Poetry Super Highway, As it Ought To Be, and elsewhere. Recent anthologies include: Rumors Secrets & Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion & Choice, I Sing the Salmon Home, Writing Through the Apocalypse, The Power of the Feminine I: poems from the feminine perspective, Volume 2, and Nerve Cowboy Selected Works 2004-2012.

Priscilla Long's seventh book is Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Coffeetown, 2022). Her two poetry books are Holy Magic (MoonPath Press) and Crossing Over: Poems (University of New Mexico Press). Her awards include a National Magazine Award and ten of her essays have been honored as "notable" in various years of Best Essays. She served as curator for the 2023 Jack Straw Writing Fellows. More at 

Seattle poet John Burgess grew up in upstate New York, worked on a survey crew in Montana, and taught English in Japan. His influences include 70s punk music, Montana bars, and Japanese haiku. He has six books of poetry from Ravenna Press. He’s working on A History of Poetry Comics, and makes DIY zines, which he gives away for free.

Stephen Jackson lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. He was the founder of Seattle small press So Many Birds publishing (SMBp), which produced literary magazines Harness and Future+Present. His poetry appears in a variety of print and online publications, including the

International Human Rights Art Movement anthology, A Human Voice, and Prairie Fire. 

Clare Johnson is a multidisciplinary writer + artist, with fellowships including Jack Straw and Hugo House, and public art including a project about HIV and family in Cal Anderson Park, the originals from which can now be seen at Gay City: Seattle's LGBTQ+ Center. For 15+ years Johnson has also drawn/written on a post-it every night to hold onto something from each ending day, making 5,000+ pieces so far.