Studio Channel Islands Art Center –  with its renowned Blackboard Gallery and award-winning exhibits – is a longtime community leader in supporting the visual arts in Ventura County and Southern California, and we are strengthening our community ties to the literary arts. The organization is now home to the Ventura County Poetry Festival and “Poetry in the Gallery”, Camarillo’s only recurring open-mic event.

We have just launched a new monthly gathering called “Writers in the Gallery”, a place to experiment with new ways to expand the world of literature, along with our personal and professional writing skills. It’s a grand vision: A relaxed and intimate setting, surrounded by spectacular art, to converse and share our knowledge in the style of the artist and writer salons of the late 1800s and early 1900s.  Writers from all persuasions, beginning or advanced, are welcome: Fiction, nonfiction, poetic prose, memoir, poetry, journaling, storytelling, and other writing genres.

Each month will be hosted by different members of our informal group. Some will guide us through unique experiential writing exercises, others will offer their writing and publishing expertise, and special guests from our local literary community will share their wisdom and woes. We’ll even have some special presentations on the neuroscience of poetic communication and how to break into the New York publishing world.

Our guest host for the evening of February 5^th will be Jennifer Jones (artist, writer, psychotherapist)  who will guide us through a variation of Jung’s Active Imagination technique where we will pair up in front of one of the artworks in the gallery to converse with the art and to transform our experience into a brief story or poem – an original form of archetypal writing.