Valentine’s Day at Orcas Center | Let’s talk about love

||| FROM DEBRA LEE BABCOCK |||

On Valentine’s Day, at Orcas Center, for a long evening, cuddled up together in the Madrona Room on couches and chairs around the fireplace. Let’s drink hot cider, eat snacks and listen to what great poets, writers, and thinkers have had to say on the subject. Let’s not keep it to fancy
dinner, chocolates and roses, this year, let’s be inspired. On the day on our calendar that people designate as the day to celebrate love, let’s move beyond romantic love, to our deep longing and instinctive knowing of something vaster than that, and our need to grow our capacity to offer and receive it.

Let’s stay up late, on a Wednesday night, maybe nod off a bit before actually leaving to go to bed, have a Valentine’s Day to remember and fill the longing in our souls to love. Wear your jammies if you want, no one will mind…

This year’s 2024 WA state inter-island ferry Writer in Residence, and Orcas’s first WIR, Debra Lee Babcock, and well-known and loved local poet, writer and publisher Jill McCabe Johnson, are cooking up a an evening to savor and remember. Jill McCabe Johnson is the author of the
poetry collections, Revolutions We’d Hoped We’d Outgrown, shortlisted for the Clara Johnson Award in Women’s Literature, Diary of the One Swelling Sea, winner of a Nautilus Award, and Pendulum, finalist in the Rane Arroyo Prize. Jill is Editor-in-Chief of Wandering Aengus
Press jillmccabejohnson.com.

The evening will be free and un-ticketed, by donation, 7-10.

Bring your own mug and something yummy and easy to share if you like. We’ll provide hot cider, and tea, or bring a thermos for your own preference.