Press Release For Immediate Release Date: August 28, 2024 Contact: Kristen Caven - 510-338-5206 "The Dirndl Diaspora" Brings Fashion and Culture to Oaktoberfest Oakland, CA – This year’s Oaktoberfest beer festival in the Dimond District will feature more campy cultural fun and fashion through the lens of Kristen Caven’s animated play, The Dirndl Diaspora. "Dirndl Day" Events include a dirndl fashion show, a polka “brawl”, ...

Every Man, Woman and Child (& Every Living Soul): The Original Musical Presentation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came out on December 10th, 2022 the 75th Anniversary of the UDHR.... ...with my name on the cover! I had the honor of telling the story of this groundbreaking community musical project by composer Merrill Collin's in the book. I met her ten years after ...

Writers in the Woods For nearly two years now, I've served as the California Writer's Club Writer in Residence at Joaquin Miller Park. I've driven the five minutes from my house up the hill almost a hundred times, seeking meditation and bird song and inspiration and exercise and time to write. I've written three or four dozen blog posts about my adventures there, interacting with ...

The Winning Family is back in print, with a fresh new energy and a fresh new voice: mine! I am now the narrator of my mom's memoir/self-help book. After 35 years, it finally felt safe to put myself into a book about my family. My mother built her career around this book. It helped shape the national narrative around parenting, teaching people how to create ...

Maybe you've heard about the ill-concieved merger, um AGGRESSIVE CORPORATE ACQUISITION of Mills College? I've been working with various groups in the Mills Rebel Alliance to fight this insult and injury to women's rights, LBGTQIA protection, cultural arts and women's history, since the first lie came out in March, 2021: "We're broke." On July 1, 2022, Mills ceased to exist, becoming a campus for an ...

Check out my new story in the California Literary Review (page 36). Here's the back story! It all started as a writing game called "Storied Stories" in one of my Covid Zoom writer's groups, To Live and Write in Alameda (which became To Live And Write...Wherever You Are in the great Reconfiguration of 2020). Writing coach and teacher Bronwyn Emery imagined a Craftsman house in ...

There was this cat who used to hang out in our yard. When we had a dog, she'd chase that cat. When she died, the cat would sit on her grave. Every day. My husband was sure the cat was evil. But he's a dog person. I'm a cat person. My best friend growing up was a gray cat named Greeneyes. I'd had a cat ...

Inspired by a poster I saw at a protest (whoever thought of it is a genius), I once intended to create and syndicate an ongoing cartoon panel with an environmental theme. When it took me six months to create the first three editions, I realized I could never output one a week. Still, these three are still relevant, thirty years later. You can even see ...

This month, the Mills College administration announced it's pulling the plug on this historic college, my 2nd alma mater, in favor of an Institute for Women's Leadership. Just as in the 1990 student strike, students and alumnae are going, "whaaa?" and "hells no!" They are asking for ideas from the community to envision and shape a new Mills. Here's my response. I am so glad ...

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"I'd invite you in for a minute but.. (lengthy explanation of who I've seen and what I don't know)." "I'd like to hang out but... (lengthy explanation of who I've seen and what I don't know)." "I'd give you a hug but..." The long explanations and hyper-vigilance are getting stressful. Almost as stressful as self-isolation. With the holidays around the corner, I was wondering why ...

My ancestors are either bursting with pride or rolling in their graves. My animated (storyboarded) play, The Dirndl Diaspora, is getting great reviews! This 90-minute animated/storyboarded feature-length film was written as a play + fashion show for Oaktoberfest, but 2020 decided we couldn't have live theater, so I upshifted the whimsy. This story, about a seamstress with a dream to enliven a tradition to reflect a ...

Please share this event with parents in your community! Kids are back to school (sort of)—a great time for parents to tune up their own skills! Join me for a Saturday Night Stuck-at-Home Survival social for parents: Peaceful Parenting in Stressful Times A Zoom class for parents seeking greater family ease, connection, and mental/emotional health with Kristen Caven featuring Dr. Louise Hart Authors of The ...

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