Diane Frank reads from her new novel, Mermaids and Musicians, wherein a virtuoso violinist falls madly in love with a mermaid, but can he deal with loving a woman who isn’t completely human? And can their love travel through time? The novel begins on Signal Mountain in Tennessee and migrates to the coast of Northern California. As a poet and musician, Diane reveals what it takes to become a musician, what music means to those who play it, and what music gives to the world.

“One of the best ways to learn about humans is to listen to their songs.” Every chapter in Mermaids and Musicians sings. With exquisite language, Diane Frank weaves joy and heartbreak, community and loneliness, surrealism and realism into a novel of hope. This delectable book uproots readers from the Appalachian Mountains and transports them to the Pacific coast, following the dreams of various characters, all of them artists and musicians, all believers that this wild, precious earth is worth saving. Frank delights in every color and sound, every magical moment we sometimes forget as we traverse from childhood into adults. This is a book I would devour first, then go back and luxuriate in the second, third, and subsequent readings. A must-read for anyone who longs to return to a world of compassion and beauty.
— KB Ballentine, author of Spirit of Wild

Diane has published eight books of poems, three novels, and a photo memoir of her 400 mile trek in the Nepal Himalayas. While Listening to the Enigma Variations: New and Selected Poems won the 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry. She is also editor of three bestselling anthologies: Fog and Light: San Francisco through the Eyes of the Poets Who Live Here; Pandemic Puzzle Poems; and River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century. She teaches Poetry, Fiction and Memoir Workshops at San Francisco State University and Dominican University in the OLLI program and played cello with the Golden Gate Symphony for 18 years and collaborated with Matt Arnerich to create an orchestral suite based on her poem, “Tree of Life.”

Joining Diane on the program is poet Janet Popesco Archibald, reading poems from her recent chapbook, “Opera is Life,”  interspersed with short musical pieces on oboe and English Horn. Janet, a native San Franciscan who found both poetry and the oboe as a youngster at Portola Junior High (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School), returned to poetry after retiring in 2023 from a 32-year career with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra as Solo English Horn and Oboe.

Janet continues to write poetry and to perform on oboe and English horn with the Lowell Ensemble, an adventurous and flexible chamber music group that evolved out of the Lowell Trio, which Janet and two fellow Lowell High School alumna formed in 2009. Along with Janet, the Ensemble’s core members today are current and former San Francisco Opera Orchestra members Vicky Ehrlich, cello; Paul Ehrlich, viola; and Karen Hutchinson, piano. Of these, only Janet went to Lowell, and they live in various spots around the Bay Area, performing as the Lowell Ensemble throughout the region in nontraditional venues (including driveways during the 2020 pandemic). Martinez, on the Carquinez Strait, is the Ensemble’s home base, where it has performed regularly from the start, first at Armando’s, a long-running music club, and now at the Martinez Campbell Theater. The Lowell Ensemble is known and loved for its varied instrumentation and eclectic repertoire, playing its own arrangements of folk, film and popular music along with classical pieces in a wide variety of settings, and for its generosity in offering its performances to benefit a wide variety of causes. They’ll be playing a fun and festive holiday program to benefit the Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project at the bookshop on Wednesday, December 10th!