An Immersive Evening with Becca Tarnas

Live Event Program

Friday, February 10th, 2023

Saturday, February 11th: Don’t miss our companion Depth Workshop: Sparking Active Imagination through Jung’s Red Book

Presenter: Becca Tarnas

Becca Tarnas, Ph.D., is a scholar, artist, and editor of Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. She received her doctorate in Philosophy and Religion from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), with her dissertation titled The Back of Beyond: The Red Books of C.G. Jung and J.R.R. Tolkien. Her research interests include depth psychology, archetypal studies, literature, philosophy, and the ecological imagination. She teaches at both Pacifica Graduate Institute and CIIS, and is the author of the book Journey to the Imaginal Realm: A Reader’s Guide to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

Learn more about Becca on her website

Live Music: Cecilia Hone

Cecilia Hone is a classically trained pianist, teacher, and music producer from Utah. She received her Bachelor and Master of Music degrees with an Emphasis in Piano Performance and Pedagogy from Brigham Young University, and now teaches and produces music from her home based studio in Orem. She has a passion for all musical genres and enjoys composing and arranging music that incorporates classical techniques into modern styles.

Learn more about Cecilia on YouTube or follow her on Instagram

Featured Artist: Lizzie Wenger

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Lizzie Wenger has long been captivated by the colorful, fragile, and unique landscapes of the southwest. After her father’s passing when she was 12, Lizzie began to explore grieving and healing with the outdoors serving as a guide. Climbing, canyoneering, biking, and skiing were some of the activities that empowered her throughout this period, and continue to do so.

In her twenties, Lizzie’s perspective on western landscapes is playful, colorful, and inviting. Her work is intended to inspire connectivity between people and places. Her “psychedelic cubist” style has been developing for many years as she navigates different ways to see the world around her.

Explore and purchase Lizzie’s work on her website

Opening Poet: Lisa Bickmore

Lisa Bickmore is the author of three books of poems. The second, flicker (2016), won the 2014 Antivenom Prize from Elixir Press. She won the 2015 Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize for the poem ‘Eidolon,’ which appears in her third collection, Ephemerist (2017, Red Mountain Press). She is the founder and publisher of the new independent nonprofit Lightscatter Press (lightscatterpress.org). In July 2022, she was named the Poet Laureate for the state of Utah.

Follow Lisa on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter

Featured Books:

Limited copies of Lisa’s books are available for sale tonight at the books table, and she will be signing copies after the program.

The future

Imagine a shore, says the clairvoyant, when I ask

about the future. Imagine a river emptying itself

into the sea. It’s dusk, she goes on, but light enough

that you can see the river moving out, its direction sure.

I can see it, in fact I’ve been there recently. Overhead,

terns wheel and cry. I walk downshore, where the sea

moves in, the salt giving it greater weight. I watch

the sun fall, its theater of blaze. I’ve come to her

to ask about the future, by what measure we might

predict or calibrate it. I’ve come to believe

that everything depends on knowing, so when

she replies, Imagine you’re flying across an ocean

from one continent to another, I’m impatient,

but I do it, depart the shore, see myself at a window

that frames nothing but sky upon more sky, and in

my mind, we’re in it and of it and above it, somehow

—l even hear the voice of the cabin attendant

intone in the unlikely event of an emergency landing,

and outside the imagined window, the firmament

dissolves into blue mist, diffracted light: I look again,

and the clouds fissure into a sheet of ice, floes

adrift, more and more water. I want to believe

in a better ending, to believe that we tilt toward hope.

The coins to pay her clink in my pocket. I should not

have asked so directly. I should have asked, is there

meaning or beauty still to be made of this world?

Even though I think I know the answer: yes and no,

the sea roars in salt and the river meets it,

its sediments suspended and dazzling.

The inexorable silt the river carries makes

and undoes this estuary. When the harbor seal

bobs up to inspect me, that’s the now and also

the future: we are momentary peers, investigating

one another, as I disturb his habitat. When I

paint the future, it is luminous but with a wash

of gray, and when I spell out its sentence, it is

an anagram for insurmountable. That’s not

quite right: the anagram is made of reckoning.

I say to the clairvoyant, The world is on fire,

which is not a question, and she replies, but the world

has always burned. This answers nothing, though

I know it is a kind of truth, yet devoid

of the particulars that lend a divination

its requisite weight. The world is burning now, I say:

I know this blaze has history, and that I

must learn it. She doesn’t need to repeat

herself: this wreck of an old fishing boat

in the estuary mud is the past. It is

falling apart, now and for years to come.