Ask the Oracle at Hotel Sorrento
Will you get that job you’re gunning for?
Should you tell her you love her?
Do you dare disturb the universe?
Who better to answer these questions than Bruce Holbert, David Schmader, and Jane Wong, June’s featured writer-oracles?
All the audience has to do is show up, write questions on sticky notes, and hand them to our mysterious, velvet tuxedo’ed host, poet Johnny Horton, before the show. He’ll pick a number of questions to pose to our team of writer-oracles, who will be all set to solve your worldly problems with prescient passages from their books.
EDIT!
We want to make it easier for you to get to the event after work, so we moved it to 7:30. Feel free to come at 7, get a drink, and write your questions down, and we’ll start officially at 7:30.
Sample
Question: Should I move to a new city soon?
Answer (found by opening Richard Hugo’s Triggering Town to a random page): “The 1944 Italy I remembered brown and gray and lifeless. Every city, every small town reeked.”
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop where he assisted in editing The Iowa Review and held a Teaching Writing Fellowship. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications including The Iowa Review, RiverLit, Other Voices, The Bacon Review, The Antioch Review, and The New York Times.
David Schmader is a writer and performer who’s been living and working in Seattle since 1991. He’s the author of the solo plays Straight, Letter to Axl, and A Short-Term Solution to a Long-Term Problem, which he’s performed in Seattle and around the country. Between 1999 and 2014, Schmader served as a writer, editor, and columnist of Seattle’s Pulitzer-winning newsweekly The Stranger. In his spare time, he’s the world’s foremost authority on the brilliant horribleness of Paul Verhoeven’s stripper drama Showgirls, hosting annotated screenings around the country and supplying the commentary for the bestselling Showgirls DVD. More recently, he’s become a spokesmodel for marijuana, writing the book Weed: The User’s Guide, which will be released this spring by Sasquatch Books.
Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in places such as Best American Poetry 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Third Coast, The Volta, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds a MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches poetry at the University of Washington Bothell and the Hugo House. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016).
Johnny Horton directs the University of Washington’s summer creative writing program in Rome. He’s published poems recently in Poetry Northwest, Notre Dame Review, Cutbank, The Los Angeles Review, Willow Springs, and City of the Broad Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. His poetry manuscript, Vesuvius, After Dark, has recently been a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Anthony Hecht Prize. He’s been the recipient of a Washington Artist Trust GAP grant. He lives in Seattle where he teaches reading and writing at Seattle Central College and Hugo House.
