A Reading of Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings by Myriam Gurba

Prof. Brent Armendinger and Prof. Melissa Chadburn’s SRX course ENGL 035 “Community Literary Practices” explores the role of community practices in the creation, publication, distribution, and sustenance of literature in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles regions. As such, students will examine, and sometimes participate in, the work of various community initiatives, literary organizations, independent bookstores, small presses, journals, and authors. Through readings, discussions, field trips and volunteer work outside of class, and their own creative writing, students will engage with the intersections between literary practice and community.

Myriam Gurba is a writer and activist. Her first book, the short story collection Dahlia Season, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. O, the Oprah Magazine ranked her true-crime memoir Mean as one of the “Best LGBTQ Books of All Time.” Her recent essay collection Creep: Accusations and Confessions was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for Criticism, and won the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Nonfiction. She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vox, and Paris Review.

This event will showcase an intersectional and social responsibility-centered Los Angeles Latinx poet and activist to the Pitzer and broader 5C community—particularly highlighting her most recent book Poppy State: A Labyrinth of Plants and a Story of Beginnings. In Poppy State, California plants serve as structural anchors in a wildly inventive work of narrative nonfiction that is part botanical criticism, part personal storytelling, and part study of place. The reader is invited to commune with California with Gurba as their guide, ushered through a compendium of anecdotes, reminiscences, utterances, lists, incantations, newspaper articles, and other ephemera.

Through the stories of these plants she comes to a new understanding of what occurs in the cultivation of a soul. Gurba learns if she can care for her body as she does her plants, her soul can thrive—like the California poppy on her kitchen windowsill. And through walks in the Angeles National Forest, she visits oaks, crows, elderberries, and sycamores, while foraging for acorns, flowers, and berries to adorn her altar at home.

This event was supported by the Teaching, Learning, and Campus Life Committee.

_{All are welcome to attend.}