This First Saturday Free Writing Workshop, PIE Reading and Open Mic is also the official book launch reading for 2 just published poetry collections from World Enough Writers: Reverence by Thomas A. Thomas and Stir by Christopher J. Jarmick.
Workshop 4:24 pm -- Thomas leads the writing workshop – Fallen Leaves and Late Blossoms: writing with nature in Autumn
Featured Reading 6:15 pm – Chris and Thomas read from Stir and Reverence plus Open Mic.
Please join us to listen or participate. Thanks for sharing this announcement.
Bios
Thomas A. Thomas, born in Illinois to a medical doctor mother and a ballet dancer father, spent a lot of time off by himself in the woods, prairies, and fields, day and night, in all seasons.
Thomas found his way to the honors program at the University of Michigan, where he completed a bachelor’s degree of his own design. At UM, he studied with Donald Hall, Gregory Orr, and workshopped some poems with Robert Bly. He won Minor and Major Hopwood Awards in Poetry, and his poem “Approaching Here” was choreographed and performed at UM.
Thomas also got a dream job as Detroit Correspondent for a rock ’n’ roll and jazz magazine out of St. Louis, called Concert News, interviewing members of many bands of the 1970s.
After a couple of years of madness in New York City, he found his way to the Pacific Northwest, where he has made his home since 1981. He is now delighted to be a board member for the Olympia Poetry Network and to be active in numerous online poetry and photography groups.
His poems, photos, and videos appear in print and online, most recently in MacQueen’s Quinterly and FemAsia Magazine, as well as in Verse Daily, Gyroscope Review, Blue Heron Review, Cirque Journal, Vox Populi Sphere, and The Banyan Review. He has been included in numerous anthologies in English and in translation to Spanish, Serbian, and Bengali. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for individual poems since 2022, and his collection My Heart Is Not Asleep, June 2024, was a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards, 2025.
Reverence is a collection of poems in regards to the the broad experience of Thomas’ life, before, during, and after losing his wife to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease.
Christopher J. Jarmick was raised in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and Poughkeepsie, New York. He was a Los Angeles-based producer/screenwriter, editor, and director of PBS documentaries, music videos, and nationally syndicated TV programs including Hard Copy, Personalities, and Entertainment Tonight. Several of the documentaries he worked on received awards.
He relocated to the Pacific Northwest (in 1994), worked as a radio producer, and began curating readings and special events in 1998. For over eight years he worked as a financial advisor. He has also been a freelance writer-journalist and technical writer and editor. He was president of PEN-USA, Northwest. He has owned BookTree—Kirkland, Washington’s only independent bookstore—since 2016.
His latest full-length collection of poetry is Stir (World Enough Writers, 2026). Previous poetry collections include Not Aloud (MoonPath Press, 2015), Ignition (2010), Poems for the Working Class (chapbook) and the novel, The Glass Cocoon. Several of his poems have been published in literary magazines, newspapers, in anthologies, and online. He also has written extensively about film in print and online. He is one of the founder of Western Washington Poets Network . org a website dedicated to listing regularly scheduled poetry related events from the Canadian to Oregon border and (roughly) west of the Cascades (over 90 listings). When in Kirkland, visit his bookstore, BookTree. Thanks for supporting independent bookstores. If you must buy online use Bookshop.org—they help indie bookstores.
'Stir' explores what stirs us up: relationships, love, memories, family, death, politics, pop culture, and religion. Some poems go into the forest, some into the past, some into dreams, some go Hollywood, and many poems reveal in unexpected ways. There are a few genre-bending poems, and a couple dozen of his signature "Poem Starters" too.