A&E roundup: Pickens commissioned to create Wortham Center courtyard mural
A few weeks after completing her role as one of the three lead artists on the Asheville Area Arts Council’s downtown Black Lives Matter mural, Jenny Pickens is hard at work on her next endeavor. The Asheville native is the first artist-in-residence for Randy Shull’s and Hedy Fischer’s 22 London studio and exhibition space, and has been commissioned to design and paint a 4-by-24-foot mural for the courtyard of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. In designing the mural, Pickens researched thousands of performances at the Wortham Center and filtered her findings down to images that synthesize over 20 years of programming. She recently began working on the three-panel mural at 22 London and aims to have it completed by the end of August or early September. Shortly thereafter, it will be installed in the courtyard. avl.mx/7y5
Writing range
Among the books by local authors published in August are a pair of decidedly different offerings. Available since Aug. 11, Bee Locke’s Creative Woodburning (avl.mx/7y7) is a visual guide for pyrographers of all levels, featuring 20 step-by-step projects that teach readers the basics, plus advanced techniques like shading, creating realistic fur and adding color. Joining it is Sebastian Matthews’ Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State (avl.mx/7y8), a memoir in essays that finds the author struggling to reconnect with society after three years of recovering at home following injuries from a major car accident. The book, which attempts to capture the polarized condition of the nation 2014-19, will be published on Tuesday, Aug. 25.
Poetry forever grants us leaps and blurs. Sometimes it’s not enough to be where we are. Sometimes we need to be everywhere: present with the lost, held by transient blossoms. Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Deeper breath feels present in the poem’s original uses of punctuation — stanzas, even a last one, ending with a colon. More to come? Always more. Most important, “he’s not gone” floats by itself, the truth a daughter tunes to. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye
Well, mortality’s one of the cloaks you tossed in the bin, as well as sin, I suppose, and all this endless yearning for some divine inspiration. You also tossed forgiveness into the Goodwill box, so casually I’d have thought it was a pair of dirty socks. But there’s another inheritance I guess I ought to thank you for–faith–though it’s worn so thin and ragged it’s nearly diaphanous, like a nylon banner hung out for eons from the roof of the world. You kept all the best stuff for yourself: universal health insurance, archangels, Capuchin monks and Capuchine nuns, eternal life, 4-D sunglasses, that pristine garden with its sagacious fruit and peaceable kingdom. In short, you live in splendor, at least metaphorically, and we human mortals go from thrift store to consignment shop hoping we’ll find some treasure you forgot to hoard.
Red Hen Press Poetry Hour Featured on Spectrum News 1
The Broad Stage and esteemed local publisher Red Hen Press returned on July 16 with an enhanced and compelling Season 2 of Red Hen Press Poetry Hour, moderated by award-winning actor/writer Sandra Tsing Loh. Spectrum News 1 featured the latest event, Finding Truths and Creating Art in Exile, in this recent segment.
Good morning. It’s Friday, August 7, and we’re ending the week with something special: a message from the novelist and journalist Kristen Millares Young, followed by a visual poem that is an excerpt from her debut novel Subduction.
Though Subduction came out April 14—not the best timing for a new work of art to enter the world—it is still getting amazing buzz. It’s a Paris Review staff pick, the Washington Post called “whip-smart,” and Ms. Magazine called it “utterly unique and important.”
Local writers know Kristen as the prose writer-in-residence at Hugo House from 2018 to 2020. Her prize-winning investigations, essays, and reviews appear in the Washington Post, Literary Hub, the Guardian, and elsewhere. And she’s the editor of the forthcoming anthology Seismic, a book from the Seattle City of Literature.
Read more and watch Kristen Millares Young’s message here!
Local Author Julia Koets Talks About Her Recent Memoir
Author Julia Koets, who holds a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, released The Rib Joint: A Memoir in Essays this past November. She joins our contributor (and former classmate) Kelly Blewitt to talk about growing up and coming of age in the South.
These independent Southern California book publishers reveal how they’re handling the pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit earlier this year and stay-at-home orders went into effect in cities worldwide, it left people with more time read, but it also created a slew of dilemmas for the publishing industry.
Release dates for new books were rescheduled. Restrictions on travel and large gatherings lead to the cancellation of in-store events and book festivals. Bookstores closed, their existence hanging in a precarious state as weeks passed as they waited to re-open.
For independent publishers, with smaller budgets and fewer marketing resources at their disposal, it also presented a quandary: How do you let people know your books exist when so much promotion is reliant on in-person events?
Read more about how we are handling COVID-19 here!
Poets on Craft: Tina Schumann and Jenna Le
Poets on Craft is a cyberspace for contemporary poets to share their thoughts and ideas on the process of poetry and for students to discover new ways of approaching the writing of poetry. In the face of a pandemic that is both viral and political, it is a resource for strength and creativity, friendship and beauty, love and rejuvenation. It is thus a celebration of the beautiful and eclectic minds of contemporary poets. This series is intended for educational purposes only.
The format is as follows. I emailed poets these questions: “Generally speaking, how do you build a poem? How do you start a poem? How do you move from one line to the next? How do you know when to end a poem?”
With the exception of length requirement, poets are free to respond in whatever manner they find appropriate to their styles and concerns.
Access to Poets on Craft is democratic. Generally speaking, anyone can have free access to these posts. With that said, please consider supporting our poets by clicking on the links in their bios and purchasing their work.
For the second post of this series, we have Tina Schumann and Jenna Le.
Akron native pens story of love, loyalty and friendship
The coming-of-age story of four boys in the High Country of western North Carolina after World War II, “The Falls of the Wyona” is a poignant, lyrical novella by Akron native David Brendan Hopes.
Arden Summers is the narrator but not the main character. In the beginning there are three boys. Arden, his best friend Vince Silvano and new kid Tilden: “We were one person, sometimes.” But then there were four, as another newcomer, Glen, arrived. Instead of the usual mild hazing that new boys had to endure, Glen was immediately accepted when Vince drew him into the group.
A Poet of Found Language Who Finds Her Language in Archives
“One must cross the threshold heart of words,” Susan Howe writes early in her new book, “Concordance,” an appealingly jagged sequence of collage poems. The “threshold heart,” for Howe, is a kind of echo chamber where sound dazzles the inner ear and resonance dances with meaning. To invite us into this complex space, Howe populates the pages of her new book with sliced texts and textures, pasting down items as varied as draft letters, the preface to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “Common Law” and (yes) concordances. These collages invite readers into protracted encounters with scraps. Some of the book’s pages are just glued together slivers of dislodged indexes. This is not to say they are not also delightful.
Howe, a Bollingen Prize-winning poet whose career spans 45 years and whose work has been grouped among the language poets, has an abiding fascination with histories, archives and ghosts. “Concordance” appears alongside a rerelease of Howe’s much-admired 2014 book “Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives,” a critical book of complementary fascinations, scraps and glued-down tatters. To enter either book — one poetry, the other criticism, though in Howe’s hands these cousins share shaggy features — is to suspend oneself in a conversation about meaning, about how texts allow us to find it. “Concordance” requires readers to channel their inner bookworm or hungry archivist, the tender scholar for whom typefaces, fonts, ink stains and marginalia create an ardent flutter. Utility is beside the point. Of what use now the concordance, that elaborate alphabetical list that helps scholars illuminate a word’s frequency in a deeply studied text? To whom and for what is this painstaking and antiquated piece of work useful, especially in the era of Google word clouds and computational linguistic analyses? Howe wants us first to be the kinds of readers who swoon as much for the yellowing paper and the dated stamps as for the content of the letter itself…
Read this New York Times piece by Red Hen author/poet Tess Taylor here!
If you’re looking for some new books to dive into while you’re stuck at home, then you might want to consider some of the many great books by Hispanic authors. For years, Hispanic authors have created engaging stories that weave elements from their history and culture with modern issues that affect people of all ethnicities. But it’s only recently that Hispanic authors have gotten the notoriety and recognition they rightfully deserve.
Previously, a majority of literary gatekeepers, such as publishing houses, agents, and editors were less likely to read works created by Hispanic authors. But as the publishing industry has become more inclusive, it has allowed for more Hispanic authors to be represented on a larger stage. Storytellers have also taken matters into their own hands by self-publishing their works in an effort for their voices to be heard…
See the feature of Felicia Zamora’s poetry collection here, and more books by Hispanic authors to enjoy!
Each month I comb through hundreds of titles to choose the five I list here, and each month I come up with 30 to 50 that are worthy of consideration. I say that not to complain, but to urge you to look further and deeper than the New and Noteworthy promotions wherever you shop for books. Ask a bookseller what they’re reading, take a look at a small press website, support books like these that may never hit a morning show’s book-group recommendations—but just might hit the spot for you.
