Wife, Just Let Go : November 2017

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Our New York book launch of "Wife, Just Let Go," at The Players on Monday, October 30, 2017, was another success with a room filled with friends and old and new acquaintenances. A private, social club, The Players was founded in New York City by Edwin Booth, the noted 19th-century Shakespearean actor. Huge thanks to Ann Vellis, who facilitated the event Many thanks to Stephen Friedland - aka - Brute Force and to others for their assistance, along with those who came and and bought the book. "Wife, Just Let Go,” the title of the book, are my husband's last written words before he passed away from Alzheimer's, words that resonate and remind me how "letting go" is ultimately a sure way towards freedom and peace.

Brute Force introducing Diana Saltoon

Diana Saltoon Bio

Diana Saltoon has traveled extensively, studied yoga, and in the 1970s developed a program that dealt with modern stress. Her interest in Zen led to a study of Chado, The Way of Tea, as a Zen art and received a certificate of Chamei from the Urasenke School in Kyoto, Japan. Diana became a teacher at the Portland Wakai Tea Association in Oregon before moving with her husband, Robert Briggs, to New York in 2011. They returned to Portland, Oregon, in 2014. A member of Zen communities in Oregon and New York, Diana continues to give presentations, classes and workshops on the Zen Art of Tea. She is the author of Tea and Ceremony: Experiencing Tranquility (2004), The Common Book of Consciousness (1990), and Four Hands: Green Gulch Poems (1987).

Robert Briggs Bio

Robert Briggs attended Auburn and Columbia Universities and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He became a partner in The San Francisco Book Company in 1972 and in 1973 founded Robert Briggs Associates, a group of West Coast consultants to writers and small publishers. The Association was involved in a variety of nonfiction publications including Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd, Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, Kenneth R. Pelletier’s classic book on stress, as well as works by Joseph Campbell, Stanislav Grof, Colin Wilson, and Theodore Roszak. Briggs is also the author of The American Emergency: A Search for Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Materialism, 1986, and Ruined Time: the 1950s and the Beat, 2006. Ruined Time is a cultural autobiography of the Great Depression, World War II and the 1950s. This book sparked various multimedia projects including Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons, reads written and read by Robert Briggs and accompanied by jazz musicians in performances in Portland, OR. CDs were produced that include Poetry in the 1950s (1999), Someone Said No(2003), My Own Atom Bomb (2005), The Beat Goes On(2008), Love in America (2009) and The Beat Revealed (2011). Robert Briggs was involved in early West Coast jazz and poetry scenes where he performed in San Francisco’s Jazz Cellar. To Briggs, “Jazz is to music, what poetry is to knowing.”

Zen, Alzheimer's, and Love

Tuesday, November 14, 2017