Born on a cotton farm in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, Rebecca Wells comes from a culture where story telling is as essential and as rich as gumbo.  As Rebecca puts it, “I came from loud, funny people who would fight over who got to read the latest volume of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books.  When my novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood became a bestseller, I couldn’t help but think of how I used to get confused that both books and milk could be condensed.  This confounded me as a girl and still does.”

Rebecca’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, about mothers and daughters, female friendships, alcoholism, and spirituality, was on the #1 NY Times Bestseller list for over a year, winner of the American Booksellers Award, and short-listed for the Orange Prize.  The book launched a host of “Ya-Ya” clubs worldwide, as well as a host of books about girlfriends, and was made into a feature film by Warner Brothers. Her novel has been translated into 28 languages, has sold over 6 million copies, and continues to be one of the most beloved novels about women written in the 20th century.

Rebecca Wells’ other best-selling novels include Little Altars Everywhere (winner of the Western States Book Award) and Ya-Yas in Bloom.  Her stand-alone novel, The Crowning Glory of Calla Lily Ponder introduced an entirely new set of characters, from the magical Louisiana town of Le Clair.

An accomplished actress and playwright, Rebecca has toured her one-woman show Splittin’ Hairs throughout the country, including Bush, Alaska.  In her play Gloria Duplex, called “one of the glories of the decade” by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Rebecca developed and performed the title role of an erotic dancer in the French Quarter who sees the face of God in the mirror ball above her dance floor.

A graduate of Louisiana State University, Rebecca studied Tibetan Buddhism and creative writing at the Naropa Institute.  She studied acting in New York City, and performed off Broadway. She has been a guest artist, teaching writing and acting at University of Idaho, University of California at Santa Cruz, Washington State University, and Antioch University.  She has been a waitress at Yellowstone National Park, worked as an actress in regional theaters across the country, and hired out as a fortune-telling gypsy for sorority reunions.

Rebecca comments, “I was sprung from the jail of Southern Ladyhood with the help of Janis Joplin, Yellowstone National Park, and Our Lady of Guadalupe.”

Rebecca lives on an island in Puget Sound in Washington State where she writes, hikes, reads, dances, and is a student of trees.  She is available for one-on-one coaching sessions on the The Soul of Character.  She looks forward to resuming performance of her one-woman show, “Divine Daughter of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood”, once the virus burns out and the world is safe enough. Rebecca is at work on a new book.

ABOUT SAMUEL SPURRIER

Samuel Spurrier is a fiber artist, pattern maker, and botanical dyer living in Bainbridge Island, Washington. He studied pattern making at Apparel Arts in Oakland, California and apprenticed under botanical dyer Monica Medeiros. His love of nature and flowers comes from his childhood in upstate South Carolina. There, his grandmother Frankie showed him the joy of color found in blooms and his grandfather Big Sam instilled a reverence for nature that comes through in his art.

Spurrier grows and forages all the botanicals used in his work on Bainbridge Island. Specializing in eco-printing, a sustainable natural dyeing technique that permanently transfers the pigments and tannins of the flower and leaf directly to the fabric, he incorporates his love of gardening and his passion for textiles to create work that pulls the viewer into a world all its own. Clothing, embroidered tapestries, and artist’s books made from his dyed fabric all explore themes of our connection to nature and our place in the universe. His aim is to capture the fleeting beauty of the blooms of summer—a season on the Island that is brilliant but brief.

Follow Samuel here: @samuelalltheflowers

ABOUT PATRICIA ORELLANA

Patricia (Patti) Orellana’s journey into the art world started at a very young age in Jersey City, NJ, with endless drawings on walls and coloring her patent leather shoes, much to her mother’s frustration. She lived two brief years in Medellin, Colombia as a young child, an experience that would influence her and her work once back in the United States.

She earned her B.F.A from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, which is where she also had the opportunity to study Art Therapy. She was able to see first hand the power of art in healing through Art Therapy internships in Manhattan and New Jersey. Patti relocated to the Pacific Northwest in 1992 and worked in the graphic arts for local corporations. She completed the EDGE Program through the Artist Trust and she continues to grow in the local arts community. Patti is an artist who currently resides and works on Bainbridge Island.

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Joe Lumarda was EVP and COO of the California Community Foundation. Prior to that, he served as an independent director for Capital Research and Management Company’s endowment funds, portfolios designed for nonprofit organization. Joe served in the US Navy for 8 years, holds an executive MBA from Drucker School of Management at Claremond Graduate University, and a bachelor’s from Saint John’s Seminary College.

In addition to her many years with Capital Group in leadership, Anne Gifford Ewing has worked in private legal practice in Los Angeles, and is recognized as a certified specialist in estate planning, trust and probate law by the California Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California. She received her JD from the University of California College of Law, San Francisco and MA and BA from Stanford University.

Both Joe and Anne serve on various boards of organizations in California and represent estate planning, trust and probate, and nonprofit organizations with esteem.

The narrative threads of Carletta Carrington Wilson’s literary and visual works merge mirroring the melding of language and form. Encountering cloth as a constellation, as a geographical expanse and translator of time, Wilson explores the potential and possibility of engaging with fabric and its fabrication in unexpected ways.

The Pacific Northwest’s moody skies, mountain ranges, and bodies of water are integral to her artistic practice. It is here that her work has rooted itself, has ascended and descended, has formed structures upon which eye + hand, mouth/tongue/mind conjoin to create text & images reaching across realms of time. Her work is sited in and linked to the act of imagining and re-imagining a history in which multitudes of individuals found themselves without the means to transmit the meaning of their journey through the beauty and brutality of life. She uses history as canvas, an eye, camera lens, brush stroke, sculpting tool, pen, and thread.

Wilson’s poems, artist’s books, and artworks and can be found in local, regional, and national collections. She is the author of Poem of Stone and Bone: The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days.

Learn more: https://carlettacarringtonwilson.com