As we approach the second annual Tahoe Literary Festival happening October 10 & 11 in Tahoe City, CA, I'm excited to share the poem I've written in tribute to the community of writers in Tahoe and Truckee.
Last winter I took a workshop at the Sierra Writers Conference presented by a friend of mine, Farnaz Fatema, Poet Laureate Emeritus for Santa Cruz, on writing community poems. One form in particular, the Cento, stood out to me as a fun opportunity for the Truckee Literary Crawl that happened April 5, 2025. This is a traditional form of poem that I've always loved and played with over the years in my own poems and workshops.
The word cento comes from the Latin word for patchwork garment. A cento
is a literary work
collaged entirely from other writers' verses or passages. In their
earliest forms, centos were often composed as tribute. Traditionally, a cento is lines from
poetry, and in shaping this one, I worked with lines from verse and
prose. The creative process is a little bit like putting together a
puzzle.
I reached out to every writer who performed at the Truckee Crawl and asked them if they were open to contributing to a community poem in the form of a Cento.
I asked each of them to submit two lines from work they read at the Truckee Literary Crawl April 5. If one of the
lines feels like it aligns with a theme of Dark Skies,
even better. A line from a poem is just that - not a stanza or a sentence - and
includes the punctuation as well. If the writer read prose, they sent me a
first sentence, and also another sentence of their choice. 
Once
I gathered all the submissions, I chose the lines to include and ordered them in the poem. Traditionally the form is called Cento because it
included 100 lines, each taken from a poem by a different poet, that are
ordered by the poet writing the Cento. An acknowledgement of each
writer quoted in the poem is included as part of the Cento.
I loved creating a community poem that speaks to Truckee's
night skies and our place on the land here in the Sierra. The poem is a
tribute to the growing arts community and the Truckee Lit Crawl that
offers a platform for these voices.
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