Roberta Werdinger Featured At Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz
On Thursday, October 17, at 7:30pm The Third Thursday Poetry & Jazz Reading Series will feature Ukiah poet Roberta Werdinger. The reading will take place at the Arena Market Cafe in Point Arena and will begin with live improv jazz and an open mic with jazz improv; the reading will conclude with more live improv jazz.
A poet, priestess, dancer, editor and essayist, Roberta Werdinger was born and raised in suburban Chicago, the middle child of a middle-class Jewish family. Her mother was a teacher in the Chicago public school system and her father was an electrical engineer. Born in then-Poland (now Ukraine), her father survived two concentration camps and lost numerous close relatives before immigrating to the U. S. in 1948. Most of his remaining family members went to Israel, where she spent her junior year in high school in a remote location in the Negev desert.
Walking the desert's vast and empty spaces kindled a love of the natural world and out-of-the-way places; wandering the Old City of Jerusalem, crisscrossing between Palestinian and Jewish neighborhoods, gave her a love of culture and world traditions, especially as it was exposed and enriched by an "other." She has since, in what could fairly be named a flight from suburbia, sought out either the great cities of the world—from New Orleans to New Delhi, Edinburgh to San Francisco, Chicago to Istanbul—or its great wild spaces, with her base always being the hills and valleys of rural Northern California.
Drawn to interdisciplinary approaches and seeking to engage body and mind in her intellectual pursuits, Werdinger studied at the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University and earned her B.A. in 1981. She later earned her M.A. in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, studying with poets Stan Rice and Frances Mayes, among others. Early poems of hers were published in the University's literary magazine, Transfer, as well as in the Bay Area-based journal Yellow Silk.
In 1988, upon the death of her partner of ten years, Werdinger relocated to a cabin in Rancho Navarro, Anderson Valley for a year. It was her first time driving dirt roads and changing propane bottles; in between, she wrote a long cycle of poems, called "Barley." She received the Academy of American Poets Award at San Francisco State University for two of the poems in that collection.
During this period, Werdinger began studying Zen Buddhism and the arts of Japan, which she was drawn to ever since she encountered a perfectly made ceramic vase at the Art Institute of Chicago in her childhood. Soon she was regularly attending meditation retreats, studying first with Bill Kwong-Roshi at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center. In 1995, after attending the 50th year reunion of the liberation of the camp in which her father was incarcerated, she went to live at Tassajara, a training monastery founded by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. Once again, she was in a remote area exploring new territory. She lived at either Tassajara or Green Gulch Farm, two of the three campuses owned by San Francisco Zen Center, from 1995 to 2006. In that time, she worked as kitchen manager, treasurer, and assistant to her teacher, Tenshin Reb Anderson. She was ordained by Tenshin Roshi in 2000.
In 2006, she left Zen Center to pursue the path of writing. Relocating to the Ukiah Valley area, she lived and worked for three years at Mariposa Center in the hills west of town. During this time, she frequently commuted to San Francisco to study poetry with legendary Beat poet and feminist icon Diane di Prima.
From 2009 to 2016, she hosted the radio show "Maps & Legends" on KZYX, a show that delved into rock and roll's rich history and amazingly diverse present. She has a long-term professional association with Berkeley-based writer, artist, and activist Kaz Tanahashi, for whom she edits and conducts research. She has also taught English at Mendocino College and at Dharma Realm Buddhist University. Since 2010, she has served as a freelance writer and publicist for several area nonprofits, including the Grace Hudson Museum and the Ukiah Symphony. Her writing activities have included essays for the Redwood Coast Review and poetry for the online journal Leaping Clear. She is currently at work on a memoir, tentatively titled "The One Road." It details the migration of her family across the Atlantic and her own migration West, as well as all the migrations--internal and external—that the human race is currently undertaking.
