Carolyn Brigit Flynn
The legendary novelist, poet and community healer Deena Metzger
will offer 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
Two seminal books addressing environmental justice and peace
La Vieja -- An old woman living in a fire lookout in the Sierra Mountains bears witness to ongoing environmental devastation and the interlocking lives of humans, trees and animals.
What Dinah Thought -- A Palestinian activist & Jewish American woman 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.
JOIN US...
Sunday, March 16, 2025
3:00 - 4:30 pm PST
Book signing & refreshments to follow
Resource Center for Nonviolence
612 Ocean Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Emceed by Carolyn Brigit Flynn
$15 per person
TICKETS REQUIRED TO RESERVE YOUR SPOT
Deena Metzger’s magical new novel LA VIEJA: A JOURNAL OF FIRE blurs the boundaries between human consciousness and animal consciousness, of imagination and reality.
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Metzger first began to receive “inexplicable communications” from La Vieja during the pandemic, and over time it became clear that the old woman was a seer, seemingly real, but spirit-like, who had taken permanent residence in a fire lookout tower in the Sierra Mountains of California.Two other characters emerged from this contact: Lucas and Léonie, a doctor and a librarian/stonemason who meet and fall in love, and retreat to a forest world--as their story becomes entwined with the world of La Vieja in a lyrical and surprising overlapping of realities.
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La Vieja: A Journal of Fire is a recording of the process of living with the constant threat of the destruction of the natural world. And yet, it finds hope by making new connections that lead us toward a liberation from human domination, toward renewal and a vision of the future, where humans and the natural world are integral parts of a whole, intermingling and interdependent.
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“A breath-taking, breath-making miracle of a book.”
—Ariel Dorfman, author of "Death and the Maiden" & The Compensation Bureau
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WHAT DINAH THOUGHT is Deena Metzger's brilliant 1989 novel, which was re-issued in November, 2023.
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Dina Z, a Jewish-American filmmaker, visits the Palestinian West Bank to document the lives people who dwell in that ancient land. She falls in love with a Palestinian activist -- and sees him and his people in ways that were not available to her until the ancient Biblical story of Dinah and Shechem is revived through their meeting.
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The original motivation for the novel was to challenge the ancient story from Genesis that Jacob and Leah's daughter, Dinah, who was loved by a "heathen,” had been ravished which caused her brothers to avenge her honor by slaying him on their wedding night.
This story, which is still unacknowledged, is at the ancient core of the intergenerational conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA, the story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made. Metzger believes that retelling the ancient story in a new way, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence.
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“Here is a book whose moments nearly stop the heart with their beauty, a strange and haunted text, one that all but escapes the words that Metzger sets down.”
– Daniel Berrigan, author of To Dwell in Peace and Prison Poems
Deena Metzger is the author of many books, including the novels La Vieja: A Journal of Fire (2022); A Rain of Night Birds (2017), La Negra y Blanca (2012 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature), Feral, Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief Into Vision: A Council; Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; What Dinah Thought; Tree: Essays and Pieces; The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take the War Out of Them; and Writing For Your Life. Visit her website and her Substack essays at https://deenametzger.substack.com/.
The Resource Center for Nonviolence is an education, training, and community center serving people from all racial and ethnic communities. They write: "We connect ourselves to histories of resistance and current struggles around the US and the world. We learn skills to grow our capacities and organize with others. We give voice to impacts of violence. We experience and learn impacts of racism, colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, capitalism. We voice stories of resistance and resilience. We commit to antiracism and nonviolence as methods to transform people, policies, institutions, and cultures."
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