By Gary L. Lemons. As we continue this month’s focus on Arts and Healing, our guest editor Gary Lemons shares two poems he wrote, and several visual artworks. “Hopefully they will provide a clear context for the thematic connection for all our stories of art as a critical source for healing in this time of trauma, especially related to mass shootings in the US.”
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By Carlene Cobb. Everybody has a story to tell and perhaps a memoir to write. To help authors better understand how to write, publish, and market their memoirs with greater confidence and success, Kerry Kriseman, St. Petersburg author of Accidental First Lady: on the Front Lines (and Behind the Scenes) of Local Politics approached Maureen McDole, poet and Keep St. Pete Lit founder and executive director to discuss a memoir writing, publishing and marketing workshop…. Read More
By Scott Neumeister. Being a lifelong resident of Hillsborough and Pasco counties, most of my trips to Pinellas have been made possible by bridges. My favorite, aesthetically, is the Courtney Campbell Causeway, but the Gandy and Howard Frankland also hold visual appeal. Yet even beyond their appearance and function, the depth and meaning of what bridges do — empowering connection between two separated things — speaks directly to a way to approach a piece of art… Read More
By Gary L. Lemons. Thematically, the stories in the Arts Coast magazine in June 2022 will center on bringing artists together across differences of creative expression to demonstrate the life-saving power of what I have conceptualized as “community healing through artistic transformation — CHAT.” Considering this focus, the artists’ works included illustrate ways creative practices can act to promote human healing and well-being in mind, body and soul…. Read More
Last year, master sculptor Mark Aeling and St. Petersburg Poet Laureate Helen Pruitt Wallace collaborated on a powerful project in the Warehouse Arts District that remembers 9/11, and how to begin again. On this Memorial Day weekend, Mark and Helen share their thoughts, and all the work behind Rise…. Read More
By Carlene Cobb. One of 11 events offered by the 6th Annual SunLit Literary Festival held April 1–3 and produced by Keep St. Pete Lit was Nature Journaling at Sawgrass Lake Park. The activity was co-hosted by the St. Petersburg Audubon Society and led by Nature Writer Anda Peterson. Peterson’s 18 years’ experience as a writing instructor seemed to imbue her with a magic formula to successfully motivate students to try something new — walking in the woods, then writing, and then sharing their words…. Read More
By Margo Hammond. Have you ever written yourself a postcard? I did — at a workshop last month at the Dalí Museum offered by The Paper Seahorse. You can, too. Just join the second Art of the Postcard – Picasso Style workshop at the museum on May 10 from 6-8 pm. The Paper Seahorse is a stationery store that addresses what its founder, Tona Bell, calls “the digital dilemma” – the fact that these days so many of us are constantly in front of our computers…. Read More
Shan Leah’s debut thriller, Thieves, Beasts & Men, was a Finalist for the 2021 American Fiction Awards, a Finalist for the 2021 Shelf Unbound Awards for Best New Fiction and… Read More
Keep St Pete Lit celebrates the written word with the 6th annual SunLit Literary Festival, coming up April 1-3. The festival “is a confederation of like-minded literary, cultural and civic organizations coordinating their individual efforts for the common goal of advancing the enjoyment of books, reading, writing, and the classic art of letterpress printing.”… Read More
By Margo Hammond. Jack Kerouac would have turned 100 this month, but he’s never really grown old, has he? He died more than a half a century ago at age 47 in St. Petersburg – but, thanks to photographs and the work he left behind, he is fixed in our minds as that young man with a full shock of hair, seated on a poetry stool, reciting poems to jazz in San Francisco…. Read More
