We’ve come full circle! In January 2019 we opened with Tom Barbash’s acclaimed novel The Dakota Winters. This month, we’re back at The Dakota, with Christine S. O’Brien’s secretly dysfunctional family, Lauren Bacall, and meals consisting of blended salads and a handful of almonds, leaving Christine and her brothers exceedingly hungry. Also featuring Jen Palmares Meadows and a reading from her memoir-in-progress, Betting on Brown.
Friday, October 25
At the Auditorium at CLARA, 1425 24th Street, Sacramento
Doors open at 7PM, readings begin at 7:30
A $10 donation is suggested
Readings by Kelley Ogden and Justine Lopez
about Christine S. O’Brien
Christine O’Brien’s memoir, CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing, was hailed as a “page turner” by Booklist and “a 20th Century fairytale” by The New York Times. The daughter of Academy Award-, Emmy Award-, and Golden Globe-winning movie and television producer Edgar J. Scherick, Christine grew up in New York City and Beverly Hills, and has been writing since she was nine years old. She’s the host of the podcast, Good Morning Writing!, and her lyrical essays and short stories have appeared in The Seneca Review and The Slush Pile Magazine, among other publications. She has taught memoir writing at The Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA and was the nonfiction workshop teacher at the Leopardi Writer’s Conference in Recanati, Italy in July 2019. She lives in the Bay area with her husband and two children and teaches at St. Mary’s College
about Jen Palmares Meadows
Jen Palmares Meadows’ essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony Fellow, and a recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. A Sacramento writer, she earned a M.A. in Creative Writing from California State University Sacramento and is currently completing Betting On Brown, an experimental coming-of-age gambling memoir, mixing lyrical prose with card games, recipes, and reportage
About our readers
Kelley Ogden
A frequent reader at Stories on Stage Sacramento, Kelley Ogden is an actress, writer, director and producer, who was most recently seen onstage in the Capital Stage productions of Between Riverside and Crazy and Sweat. In addition to working with Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, Main Street Theatre Works and Theater Galatea, Ogden co-founded KOLT Run Creations, a local fringe theater company. She earned a BFA in performance from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. She will read an excerpt from Christine S. O’Brien’s CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing.
Justine Lopez
Justine Lopez is a Filipino-American actor, comedian, and teacher, born and raised in Sacramento, CA. She studied theatre arts at Cosumnes River College where her acting credits included This is Not What I Ordered, The Chisera, and Dead Man’s Cell Phone. After college she discovered improv comedy. She has studied and performed at ComedySportz Sacramento and Sacramento Comedy Spot, where she now instructs Improv 101 and leads workshops around the Sacramento area. At the Sacramento Comedy Spot she performs in improv troupes such as Lady Business, Anti-Cooperation League, Masters of Rap Improv, and Improv Jazz. During the day, Justine teaches improv as an after-school program at John F. Kennedy High School.
About Stories on Stage Sacramento
For ten years, Stories on Stage Sacramento has brought you the best in literature, read by actors, and this year we’re celebrating this big milestone by returning to our full, ten-event season.
We’re proud of our record, as an all-volunteer, donation-based organization, of bringing the best in literary fiction, read by actors, to a growing Sacramento audience. Our six 2017 events featured work by Steve Almond, Deborah Willis, Josh Barkan, Vanessa Hua, Joshua Mohr, the Los Rios Writers, and Josh Weil, as well as several of Sacramento’s notable emerging writers.
Our 2018 season featured the writers Anne Raeff, Mira T. Lee, Elizabeth Tallent, Bob Sylva, Kirstin Chen, Tommy Orange, Vanessa Hua, Melissa Yancy and Dana Johnson. The dates for our 2018 season are: February 23, April 27, June 29, August 24, and October 26. In addition, our annual showcase featuring the Los Rios Writers will take place on Friday, September 28.
in 2019, we welcome Tom Barbash, Karen E Bender (a National Book Award finalist) Sharma Shields, Janet Fitch, Maggie Shen King and exciting new writers Sarah Stone, Devi Lasker, Fred D’Aguiar, Simeon Mills, Christine O’Brien., and Jen Alandy Trahan. And we’ll welcome back the Los Rios Writers. Plus outstanding work by local writers, and of course the famous Stories on Stage cookies!
Alma is an English major at Sacramento City College and delighted to have her short story, “Oil Smudged Spectacles,” selected to be read at Stories on Stage Sacramento. Creative writing has always been her emotional outlet. “I’ve learned a lot through the written word and hope to share and create the same effect with others
Seth was born and raised in Sacramento, then went back east for college. He lives in New York and holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he works as an admission officer. He is an occasional film critic and is currently at work on a novel. He thanks editor Alison Hinton for including his short story “The Present Progressive” in the machine, the literary magazine of Folsom Lake Community College
Andrey is a former Editor-in-Chief of American River Review. A former resident of Antelope, CA, he’s currently serving in the Peace Corps in Thailand. His short story, “The Prophet of Taco Bell,” appears in the 2019 American River Review
Katherine Bahena-Benitez is a graduating senior at Sacramento State Department of Theatre and Dance. During their time at CSUS, they’ve been part of the following productions: In The Time of the Butterflies as Young Dede, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter and the Starcatcher, and In The Heights as Abuela Claudia. Katherine has also participated in the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, playing the role of Eugenie in The Count of Monte Cristo and Antonio in Twelfth Night. They have worked with Teatro Espejo, a Sacramento Latinx/Chicanx Theatre company, for the past three years, appearing in Electricidad as Ifigenia and Enfrascada as Cat/Marta/Karina. Katherine’s interest for the arts reaches across all areas as they currently advocate for LGBTQ+ people of color through spoken word performance.
Eric has performed all across the United States and Europe. Sacramento theatregoers have seen him most recently at Capital Stage and KOLT Run productions, in roles as diverse as Henry V, Macbeth, Biff in Death of a Salesman, Prospero, Shylock, Pale in Burn This and Barry Champlain in Talk Radio. He was Artistic Director of the Quantum Theatre Company in Los Angeles and the founder of Resurrection Theatre here in Sacramento.
Diane Kallas lives at Muir Commons CoHousing Community in Davis where she has learned to cook meals for 70 people and how to weed an orchard. She could be writing a collection of short stories where every one begins with “I can’t believe what happened to my neighbor this week,” but instead she spends her time nursing several aged cats, and working as a hospital-to-home teacher for critically ill K-12 students. A former technical writer and amateur upholsterer, she has a Master’s degree in Literature and a Juris Doctor, neither of which have really led to steady employment. She has been published in Caketrain and the Boston Literary Magazine, and has had a flash piece read at Stories on Stage Sacramento. 
Krystle will be reading “They Told Us Not To Say This” by Jenn Alandy Trahan. A Bay-area based stage and screen actor, Krystle’s 
Returning to Stories on Stage Sacramento to read Diane Kallas’ “Spud” is Sacramento actor Ruby Sketchley. She’s familiar to Sacramento theatergoers for her appear;ances at Sacramento Theatre Company, Capital Stage, Big Idea Theatre, KOLT, and MSTW. She’s also performed as an 1850’s tour guide in Old Sacramento. Ruby is a former company member of Big Idea Theatre and a former board member of the Capital Film Arts Alliance. She and her husband own Tiny Octopus Productions, which produced the award winning documentary In The Parlor. 
Allyson Finn has appeared in short films from the Art Institute of Sacramento and as an Elf in Morgan and the Magical Christmas Train, and as the reader for the Stories on Stage/Community of Writers event featuring the novelist Janet Fitch. She’ll be seen at a variety of venues this spring, including Freefall Stage (4 Deaths and a Wedding,) EMH Productions (Fragile Things) and ComedySportz. When not stepping into the spotlight, Allyson consults and coaches business clients through her home based business, Business Mastery by Finn.
Yuri Tajiri‘s past favorite roles have included the Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show (Green Valley Theatre) and Linda in Evil Dead The Musical (Sutter Street Theatre). Yuri holds a BA in Theatre Arts from CSU Sacramento and works as a photographer and model when not onstage.
This month at Stories on Stage Sacramento, we are thrilled to welcome Josh Weil, called “one of the most gifted writers of his generation” by Colu
Appearing with Josh will be Peggi Wood. Peggi is known to Stories on Stage Sacramento attendees as our casting director, and now you’ll meet her as a lyric and powerful writer. We’re excited to debut her new short story “A Viewing,” which will be read by Ethan Ireland.
Blair Leatherwood counts more than a dozen literary journeys in his many readings at Stories on Stage Sacramento – including sojourns through the Cold War, Chinese restaurants, forest fires, Sasquatch land, and most recently the cutthroat world of competitive poker. He has over forty years of experience in the theater, in addition to numerous film and commercial credits. He recently worked on Spike Lee’s “Livin’ Da Dream”, a segment of the NBA 2K16 video game. He also has years of experience with the Standardized Patient program at UCD Medical Center and is one of the audio describers for blind and visually impaired patrons of California Musical Theatre.
with sixteen years as a working professional in both performance and technical roles. The son of noted “lit noi”author Patrick Ireland, Ethan is a writer & director of several short films, and has worked as a voice actor and a performer for both stage and screen since 1995. Most recently he appeared in EMH’s productions of After Hours and An Almost Perfect Person. He has also performed at Now Hear This: A Story and Music Performance Series produced by Atim Udoffia.
When Joshua Mohr was thirty-eight, doctors discovered a hole in his heart, which explained the three strokes he’d sustained – but not the out-of-control-drinking, the drug use, the failed marriages and the tangled, stop-and-go-life. Surgery, getting clean, and the memoir Sirens followed. This month, we’re featuring non-fiction at Stories on Stage Sacramento, and we’re excited to welcome Josh and bring you a reading from Sirens, a complex and compelling tale which The Rumpus called “poetic, touching, inspiring and deeply empathetic.”
love, in all its dark and varied aspects. Among her many glowing reviews is this from Alice Munro about Willis’ first collection, Vanishing, and Other Stories – “the emotional range and depth of these stories, the clarity and deftness is astonishing.” Called “a major new voice in Canadian fiction” by the Toronto Star, Willis gained a US publisher with her second collection, The Dark and Other Love Stories, published by WW Norton in February 2017, and simultaneously in Canada by Penguin Random House. Her fiction has appeared in The Walrus, The Virginia Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Lucky Peach, and Zoetrope. Vanishing and Other Stories was named one of the best books of 2010 by NPR, was selected as one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2009, and was nominated for the Governor General’s Award. Willis lives in Calgary, Canada
Short story writer and essayist Steve Almond is the award-winning author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, most recently the New York Times bestseller Against Football:One Man’s Reluctant Manifesto. His short stories have appeared in the Best American and Pushcart anthologies, and he has published more than 150 stories in magazines such as Tin House, Playboy, Zoetrope, and Ploughshares. His story “Donkey Greedy, Donkey Gets Punched” was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2010 and has been optioned for film. His journalism has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. Almond co-hosts the podcast Dear Sugar Radio with Cheryl Strayed. He lives outside Boston with his wife and his children, and is a frequent teacher at Grub Street in Boston and the Tin House Writer’s Conference. Almond’s appearance in Sacramento will include a writing workshop.
Stories on Stage Sacramento 