Lit Crawl Seattle

Inspired by strange women and surreal storytellers like Aimee Bender, Alissa Nutting, and Catherynne M. Valente, Kate dreamed of creating a platform to showcase voices of the peculiar. Surreal Storytelling with Strange Women was born August 2018. At each Surreal Storytelling event, four women take the stage to provide an evocative evening seeping with poetry, prose, and personal anecdotes. The setting is soft, yet severe. Demanding, magical, bewitching. Kate strives to shine the light not only on established authors but emerging writers as well.  www.surrealstorytelling.com

About the Artists

Kate Berwanger is a short fiction writer and literary event producer in Seattle. Her passion lies in tactile storytelling and curating atmospheric literary affairs with a focus on women writers and the LGBTQ community. She is the proud founder of Assembly Open Mic for literary works in progress and Surreal Storytelling with Strange Women. www.kateberwanger.com.

Ellen Meny lives in Seattle, Washington. She writes weird fantasy, horror and sci-fi. She began her illustrious career writing Pokémon fanfiction in middle school, and hasn’t graduated much past that. Her muse is her hamster, Peachy Keen. She has work in Aether/Ichor, the Papeachu Review and the short story anthology Five Minutes at Hotel Stormcove. Head to her website at www.ellenmeny.com to see more of her work.

A storyteller from St. Louis, MO, Jalayna Carter studied literature and journalism in the Midwest before moving to Seattle and pursuing nonprofit communications. The 2018 Jack Straw Writers Fellow and Artist Trust GAP recipient is fascinated by experimental poetic perspectives and deconstructing the taboo. Her work has appeared in Dryland, Puerto Del Sol, Reality Beach, the 2Leaf Press anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered, and the 2018 Jack Straw Writers Anthology, among other publications. Her work lives at JalaynaCarter.com.

Vivian Hua (華婷婷) is a writer, filmmaker, and organizer with semi-nomadic tendencies. As the Executive Director of Northwest Film Forum in Seattle, a Co-Founder of the civil rights film series, The Seventh Art Stand, and Editor-in-Chief of the interdisciplinary arts publication, REDEFINE, much of her work unifies her metaphysical interests with her belief that art can positively transform the self and society. Her narrative short film, Searching Skies–which touches on the controversial topic of Syrian refugee resettlement in the United States–was released in 2018. She is currently writing a comedic webseries and researching national efforts to preserve cultural space.

Born in the throes of the frigid chill on a Monday in November in Maine, Kate Bernatche was weathered for severity since the beginning. Her writing mirrors the hard and soft parts of human existence. Always having a fondness for words, she's started (and rarely ended) countless notebooks, poems, short stories and potential novellas. With a voracious hunger to delve into human living and the psyche, Kate writes to dissect and present characters, intending to encompass the ever evolving notion of singular life.