OCT 6, 2009: Poet Barbara Trachtenberg

Barbara Trachtenberg writes:



30 years as teacher and school psychologist have fed my writing. Lately I teach—prisoners (PEN’s Prison Writing Program), immigrants and literacy teachers, elders and students at Boston U and Harvard. I play with visual art, chamber music and travel and am fluent in Spanish learned from students and combi drivers. My best writing experience was at MacDowell Colony. My writing has appeared at Boston City Hall, in Words and Images, Multicultural Review, ArtsEditor, Latin American Anthropology Review, and The NewEnglander (a Yankee publication). My earliest writing—a 19-year-old hitchhiker’s travel memoir, set in early 60s Western Europe and Hungary—was pushed by my wanting to meet Hungarian relatives. I am a member of PEN New England and past member of Boston’s Writers’ Room. My memoir-in-progress of my mother's life in 1938, connects to my first trip to Hungary. My doctorate in literacy, language and cultural studies and masters in counseling psychology, and in English and special education influence my writing too. My favorite nonfiction characters are Ari and Dov and Noa, my sons and granddaughter.

Sept 22 Fiction writer Susan Tepper author of "Deer"

Sept 8 Poet, Journalist Djelloul Marbrook 5PM

Djelloul Marbrook
Literary, cultural and political dialogue


Djelloul Marbrook’s book of poems, Far From Algiers, is the 2007 winner of Kent State University’s Stan and Tom Wick First Book Prize in poetry. It was selected by Prof. Toi Derricotte of the University of Pittsburgh and was released in August 2008, His short story, Artists Hill, won the Literal Latté K. Margaret Grossman Fiction Award in the spring of 2008.

His poetry appeared in Solstice (UK) and Beyond Baroque (California) in 1969. While continuing a lifelong study of poetry, he stopped writing poems until Sept. 11, 2001, when he began walking in Manhattan and writing in an effort to come to terms with the nihilism of the terrorist attacks. Recent poems have been published by The American Poetry Review, Oberon and The Ledge (New York), Perpetuum Mobile and Attic (Maryland), The Country and Abroad (New York) and Arabesques Literary and Cultural Review (Algeria), in which the title poem of his book, Far From Algiers, was first published, and Istanbul Literary Review.

His novella, Alice Miller’s Room, is available at OnlineOriginals.com (UK). A small number of copies of his novella, Saraceno, were printed in 2006 by a Canadian publisher that failed before the book was distributed. A lively trade in used copies of Saraceno continues on the Internet. His fiction has also been published by Prima Materia (New York), Breakfast All Day (UK), and Potomac Review (DC).

He has had a distinguished career as a newspaper reporter and editor. He began studying journalism while in the Navy. When he was discharged he went to work for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island and began writing under the byline Del Marbrook.

He managed a regional bureau for The Journal before moving on to become the metropolitan editor of The Elmira (NY) Star-Gazette, the paper where the Gannett newspaper organization was born. Marbrook ran the Star-Gazette newsroom and began to acquire the production and design experience that would later propel his career.

He moved to The Baltimore Sun as a copy editor, specializing both in makeup and production and Middle Eastern correspondence, an unusual combination that grew from his Arab history studies at Columbia. He was soon offered a job as the Sunday editor of The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal & Sentinel, where he was in charge of features, book reviews and Sunday production.

At The Washington (DC) Star, an evening newspaper, during the Watergate period when The Star and The Washington Post contended for dominance, Marbrook was the Saturday front page editor, specialized in foreign news and edited such syndicated columnists as Mary McGrory.

He was a co-founder of Education Funding News, a biweekly Washington report on federal education news.

In the 1980s Marbrook worked for MediaNews, helping to revitalize six ailing daily newspapers in Ohio and New Jersey.

He has won a number of awards for writing, newspaper design and photography. His career has spanned all the major transitions in modern journalism—from typewriters and teletypes to computers, from hot lead typography to photo-offset and then to the Internet. He writes frequently about Internet journalism (www.djelloulmarbrook.com) and produces a daily blog about literary and cultural affairs. He mentors journalism students around the world for the Student Operated Press.

He retired in 1987 to write poetry and fiction and now lives in the mid-Hudson Valley and Manhattan with his wife, Marilyn

Aug 18, 2009 Poet Fred Marchant

My guest Aug 18, 2009 5PM poet FRED MARCHANT


Fred Marchant is editor of the Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947, from Graywolf Press. He is also the author of four books of poetry, most recently The Looking House from Graywolf Press. His other collections include: Tipping Point winner of the 1993 Washington Prize from The Word Works, Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000) and House on Water, House in Air: New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press (Dublin, Ireland), 2002). He is also the co-translator (with Nguyen Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard a collection of poetry by the contemporary Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa. This collection—an important historical document in itself—will be published by the Ho Chi Minh Museum in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.

Dr. Marchant teaches at Suffolk University, in Boston, Massachusetts, where he is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program as well as the founder of the Suffolk University Poetry Center. He is also a longtime teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass-Boston, and teaches in its annual Writer's Conference. He has been a member of the Executive Board of PEN New England, where he was the Chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, where he founded, among other activities, the PEN New England writing workshop at Northampton County House of Correction. He also teaches in the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conferences. Dr. Marchant has been a recipient of fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Yaddo Foundation, and the McDowell Colony. (/P)

D.A. Boucher "The Butcher"

Aug 11 5PM





D. A. Boucher,aka The Butcher, has been a regular at open-mike
poetry events throughout New England for years. He founded The Collective,
a troupe of poets, actors, comedians, musicians, and performance artists that
shook up Boston with performances that shattered political, cultural and
artistic boundaries. He has published a chapbook, Uncle Gay Dave, and is
best known and loved for Penguins, a poignant and profound commentary
on ecological catastrophes in Antarctica, the decline of the New England
seafaring tradition, and fluctuations in price structures in the illicit
cannibis market.

July 21 Poet, Playwright, Composer Elizabeth Swados

My guest July 21 5PM will be poet Elizabeth Swados ( This will be a one hour special edition of "Poet to Poet" (5 to 6PM)) After the show Swados will be reading at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge at 7PM in Harvard Square with Bert Stern and Mark Pawlak.







Liz's newest book of poetry, "The One and Only Human Galaxy," ( Hanging Loose Press) has just been released.


Elizabeth Swados is the author of three novels, two non-fiction books, a book of poetry, and nine children's books. A renowned musician, director, and composer, she has received five Tony-award nominations and three Obie awards for her theatrical productions both on and off Broadway. She lives in New York City.




Biography:
Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international smash hit Runaways, Elizabeth Swados has composed, written, and directed for over 30 years. Some of her works include the Obie Award winning Trilogy at La Mama, Alice at the Palace with Meryl Streep at the New York Shakespeare Theater Festival, Groundhog, which was optioned by Milos Forman for a film, and a wide variety of Biblical musical adaptations. Her work has been performed on Broadway, off-Broadway, at La Mama, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, and locations all over the world. She has also composed highly acclaimed dance scores for well-known choreographers in the US, Europe and South America.

Ms. Swados has been creating issue-oriented theater with young people for her entire career. This work has culminated in a theatrical extravaganza for New York University, The Reality Show, about the trials and tribulations of college in New York City. The piece uses rock and roll, dance and edgy humor and was performed last summer by NYU students at Madison Square Garden.

Recent productions include Atonement, a theatrical oratorio presented by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, an adaptation of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk at NYU/Tisch, Spider Operas at PS122 (with Mabou Mines), Political Subversities, a political revue that has been presented in two Culture Project festivals as well as at Joe's Pub, and a workshop of Dance of Desire, a translation of Lorca’s Yerma by Caridad Svich. Her opera KASPAR HAUSER: a foundling’s opera enjoyed a seven week run at The Flea theater in TriBeCa. She recently wrapped a new children's CD, Everyone is Different, in conjunction with Forward Face. The CD is circulating in schools around the country.

Ms. Swados has published novels, non-fiction books, children's books and poetry to great acclaim, and received the Ken Award for her book My Depression. Her theater textbook, At Play: Teaching Teenagers Theater, was published by Faber & Faber in June 2006. A new book of poetry, The One and Only Human Galaxy, will be published by Hanging Loose Press in Spring 2009. Awards: Five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards, Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Grant, Helen Hayes Award, Lila Acheson Wallace Grant, PEN Citation, and others. Most recently Ms. Swados received a special grant to record musical selections from her years of work.

Poet Zvi Sesling July 14 5PM

Zvi Sesling



Zvi A. Sesling has had poems published in the Voices Israel Anthology, Midstream, Ship of Fools, The Chaffin Journal, Poetica, Ibbetson Street, Illya’s Honey, Wavelength, Asphodel, Saranac Review, New Delta Review, Main Channel Voices and Hazmat Review, Ibbetson Street among others. In 2007 he received First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and was selected to read his poetry at New England/Pen in 2008 by Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish. He is the founder of the Muddy River Poetry Review.


SAMPLE POEMS:



Boredom

He was drumming his fingers, raising
First the forefinger, then the middle,
Ring and pinkie, and dropping them
Rapidly to create a drumming sound,
Repetitious and as boring as he was
Bored, the only sound in the room
The incessant rat-a-tat-tat of the fingers
Matching the vacant look in his eyes, the
Falling of his face like a melting ice cream
Cone, his left ear cocked slightly upward
To hear a sound that would break the
Boredom, free him from the classroom
For Wanda Bowers, English teacher, Ret.
University City (MO) High School


Feet Last

Some leaves are blushing red,
others are smiling yellow at the

long winter sleep ahead, brown
leaves are ready to be buried while

trees, embarrassed by their nakedness,
await their snow white dresses and

the new green gown that spring brings.
As the trees shed summer, people begin

to cover themselves for winter. First jackets,
then coats, hats and gloves. Boots follow



Her Smile

I can hear her smiles in waves across
miles of telephone wires bringing

her voice and that smile unseen to warm
a cold room like a flame reaching outward

against the chill or lighting a darkened room
like a lamp touched with electric life. Her

voice and smile arouses my drowning spirit as
if she'd tossed a raft into a sea of boredom
For Susan J. Dechter


Licorice

The snake is on the kitchen counter making its
way toward me. Deception: it is a licorice stick

and instead of a smooth body it is twisted and
instead of biting me, I bite it, my front teeth cutting

through like two cleavers about to engage in battle.
Licorice, you see, is the human mind, it can be twisted

yet remain cheery like a dream, or hard like a nightmare
Like nations it can be sliced into pieces or heated and

stuck together, fractures forever separating the pieces
the way our minds are detached from each other.


* From "Cyclamens and Swords Magazine"

July 27, 2009: Paul De Fazio author of PROS AND CONS

PROS and CONS by Paul De Fazio, Michael DeFazio.



PROS and CONS by Paul De Fazio, Michael DeFazio. (High-Pitched Hum Publishing 321 15th St. North Jacksonville Beach, Florida 32250)

* trade or soft cover book is available at www.faze2publishing.com or ordered through local book store for $17.95 (hard cover is sold out).





The suspense novel Pros and Cons by Paul DeFazio and Michael DeFazio has all the earmarks of an action/thriller movie. There is ample sex, and violence, enough to keep a rating board fully occupied and preoccupied. It concerns a Boston police detective Joe Milano and his cousin Frank, a Boston corrections officer, and their lethal clash with Dominican drug dealers. Paul DeFazio has extensive backgrounds in law enforcement, and this evidenced in the use all the criminal justice jargon, and the very off-the-cuff, and tough dialogue. In this novel you get in a lot of places you have no business being in: in the nefarious head of a drug dealer and enforcer, a Dominican brothel, the dank despair of a Boston prison. Don’t look for profound insights into the human condition, literary allusions, and language flush with metaphor.

This novel makes no pretense towards being a high literary work. This is a straight-no-chaser example of genre writing. It is formulaic, cinematic, and in your face. In this book you might find out more than you want to know about sex hobbyists, but then again …you seem to linger on that page, now don’t you, pal? And Boston-area residents will like all the local references: Roxbury, Mass. General Hospital, the dirty water of the Charles River, and other settings in the land of the Bean and the Cod, the Cabot, and the Lodge. This book is a quick summer read, and it goes down as smoothly as that umbrella drink you will be sipping on, on some sun-drenched beach.

June 23 2009 5PM Paul Stone Interviews Poet to Poet Host Doug Holder

June 23, 5PM Paul Stone Interviews Doug Holder Well folks, in this show we turn the tables. Paul Stone author of "Or So It Seems," and "How to Train a Rock" interviews Doug Holder, the host of the said show and the author of "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel," and "From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers." Stone, a novelist, will question Holder, the poet, and Holder may throw a few sucker punches... I mean... questions his way as well....

June 16, 2009 Tim Horvath author of "Circulation"

6/16/2009 My guest will be Tim Horvath author of:

Circulation
a novella by Tim Horvath


REVIEWS
“... Horvath uses his fiction to expose the tension between reality and fantasy in modern life. The uncertainty between where one begins and the other ends is used to explore the ever changing way in which we as a people define and record the facts. In questing after the facts, Circulation gives the reader a chart to navigate a reality clearly inherited, but less clearly defined."
—NewPages

“The casual reader and the bibliophile will love this book. It traces these men’s lives through their obsession with books and arcania. ... Highly recommended."
—Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

"It is a story about coming to understand who your father is and in the process discovering how you truly feel about yourself. It is a book filled with symbolic gestures and storytelling, but at its core it is filled with heart."
—What to Wear During an Orange Alert?

BLURBS
“‘Eminently mullworthy,’ Tim Horvath’s Circulation is a glittering performance of the narrative imagination, an elegy for books and libraries as we have heretofore known them, and a profound meditation on death, family, language, and the limits of human knowledge—all this disguised as a contemporary parable, a book of modest length.”
—David Huddle, author of The Story of a Million Years and La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl


“Tim Horvath is a writer of encyclopedic knowledge, generous wit, and a master of the artful digression. Circulation is, to borrow from its very pages, ‘marvelous, intricate, globetrotting.’ Horvath writes with great compassion and an embracing love for the world and all traveling in it.”
—Alexander Parsons, author of Leaving Disneyland and In the Shadows of the Sun

BACK COVER
Reading Tim Horvath’s novella Circulation, one imagines what it might be like to go spelunking with Jorge Luis Borges or to shelve books with Scheherazade. In this swirling ode to maps, dreams, and the redemptive power of fiction, the stories proliferate vertiginously. At their emotional core is the quest of the main character, a humble librarian, to understand both his father and himself

May 26 2009 Poet Wendy Mnookin

May 26 2009 5PM Poet Wendy Mnookin:



"I am a poet living in Newton, Massachusetts. I received my BA from Radcliffe College and my MFA in Writing from Vermont College. My latest book, THE MOON MAKES ITS OWN PLEA was published by BOA Editions in 2008. My other collections are WHAT HE TOOK, TO GET HERE, and GUENEVER SPEAKS.

I teach poetry at Emerson College in Boston and at Grub Street, a non-profit Boston writing center. I have taught poetry at Boston College, to children in schools throughout the Boston area, and in workshops around the country.

In THE MOON MAKES ITS OWN PLEA I explore the idea of self and how that self is strengthened and abraded by relationships. The poems coalesce around the condition of mortality--not a specific death, although these also occur, but the state of being mortal.

In WHAT HE TOOK I revisit the death of my father in a car accident when I was two. I move from the accident itself to my efforts to understand the loss and how it has shaped my adult life.

TO GET HERE explores loss of a different kind: the inability to save those we love. In this book, I look at our family's struggle to come to terms with my son's drug addiction.

GUENEVER SPEAKS is a cycle of persona poems about the woman at the center of the Arthurian legend. Malory's MORTE D'ARTHUR leaves much unsaid about Guenever, whose voice speaks in these poems.

My poems have been published in journals, online publications, and anthologies. New work appears in The Greensboro Review, the Harvard Review, Pool, Prairie Schooner, and Runes.

My poems have won prizes from various journals, including The Comstock Review, The Kansas Quarterly and New Millennium Writings. I received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and WHAT HE TOOK won the 2002 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club."

May 19 Poet Jeffrey Thomson

Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including Birdwatching in Wartime (Carnegie Mellon 2009) and Renovation (Carnegie Mellon 2005). Also forthcoming is a an anthology of emerging poets: From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great co-edited with Camille Dungy and Matt O’Donnell (Persea Books, 2009). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Arts Commission, and, most recently, was named the 2008 Individual Arts Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Maine Arts Commission. He is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington. His website is www.jeffreythomson.com.

May 12 2009 An Sokolovska : Social Scientist/Activist/Writer

May 12 2009


My guest will be An Sokolvska. I meet many interesting people from my perch at the Sherman Cafe in Union Square in Somerville. One such person is An Sokolvska. An is a social scientist, trained at Boston University and Brandeis University. She has taught at Brandeis University and other area institutions. An has posed and written about some interesting questions. The one that caught my interest while we munched on our scones and read our morning New York Times was: "Why do men and women have difficulties with each other?" Though this is simply put the question is hardly facile. Literature has certainly addressed this burning question over the years. We will touch on these and other issues on Poet to Poet.

Poet Philip Burnham, Jr. April 28 2009

April 28, 2009


Philip Burnham, Jr.


My poetry captures ordinary and extraordinary moments: history from the perspective of a teacher-scholar and traveler; the poignancy of family life; growth, loss, and remembrance; the mysteries of the universe; the seasonal transformations of the natural world around us and the wonder of new love.

I have published three books of poetry, My Neighbor Adam (2003), Sailing from Boston (2003), and Housekeeping (2005). A fourth book, A Careful Scattering, will be published in 2007. My poems have appeared in various magazines and journals such as Margie, Lyric, and Atlanta Review.

In addition to the Porter Square Bookstore I have given readings at Passim, Fireside at Cambridge Cohousing, Wordsworth in Cambridge, Borders in Boston, and the Forsyth Chapel at Forest Hills.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Night Watch, Amsterdam
A stroopwafel moon
Wafer in the mouth
Of the night, a white
Ruff collar of lace
On a black gowned sky,
A searchlight dancing
In the Prinsengracht,
An "O"pening to
Evade the SS
At two a.m as
The moon pauses on
Westerkerk steeple,
An inverted point
Of exclamation,
Of rendezvous for
The ghosts of Rembrandt
Van Rijn and Anne Frank.
What will the warty
Moon-faced old man say
To Abraham's child?
Have we both survived
In our self-portraits?
Curiosity
Grows queues of tourists
Climbing the steep stairs
Within our buildings,
Will they wonder at
This moon, as round as
June, bells from the kerk
That chime the silence
With their rhymes as we
Assume our night watch?

- Philip E. Burnham, Jr.

Poet and bon vivant Steve Glines April 14 2009 5PM

My guest:

April 14, 2009: Steve Glines, in addition to being the editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, is an essayist, journalist, storyteller, occasional poet and bon vivant. His motto is, “The best is barely good enough.” Steve has published six books, only one of which might be considered even remotely “literary,” a travelogue about Fiji. He has been published in Ibbetson Review, the Belmont Citizen, the Littleton Independent, Unix Review, Technology Review and the Boston Globe among others. He has never been published in the Paris Review, the AntiochReview, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic Monthly and the Kenyon Review. To these awesome credentials it should be added that he has never received a McArthur Award nor been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Still, for some reason, people like what he writes and, on occasion, even pay him for it.

April 2, 2009: Special Feature! / Doo Wop to Hip Hop : Conversation between Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson

April 2, 7PM



Doo Wop to Hip Hop ( A special production of "Poet to Poet Writer to Writer")



An Evening of Conversation with poets

Major Jackson and Afaa Michael Weaver


Moderator

Gloria Mindock, Editor and Publisher
Cervana Barva Press


Major Jackson
Associate Professor
University of Vermont


Afaa Michael Weaver
Alumnae Professor of English
Simmons College


Producer
Doug Holder
"Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer"
Ibbetson Press
The Somerville News



( Major Jackson)

( Afaa Michael Weaver)





Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be filmed in Somerville, Mass.




Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV.

( Somerville, Mass.)

The Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” poettopoetwritertowriter.blogspot.com will sponsor a public discussion featuring renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson on April 2, 2009 7PM ( Poetry Month).

Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious PUSHCART PRIZE (2008) for his poem “American Income,” published in POETRY magazine and in his collection "Plum Flower Dance" ( U/Pitt Press.)

Henry Louis Gates, historian and professor at Harvard University writes of Weaver:

"Afaa Michael Weaver is one of the most significant poets writing today. With its blend of Chinese spiritualism and American groundedness, his poetry presents the reader (and the listener, for his body of work is meant to be read aloud) with challenging questions about identity, about how physicality and spirit act together or counteract each other to shape who we are in the world. His attention to the way language works is rare, and the effects of that attention on his poetry are distinctive and expansive."




Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered.' His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road, Poetry, Triquarterly, among other literary journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Last year, he served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.





In a public chat in the SCAT television studios in Somerville, titled "Two Generations of Black Male Poets, moderated by Gloria Mindock,these two poets share the experience of their lives as blackmen who came of age in large American cities: Baltimore and Philadelphia.

They will discuss the music, visual art, and literature that were influential in their times, from The Temptations to Grandmaster Flash and Chuck D, from Ron Milnerto Susan Lori Parks, and more. They will share intimate moments in their lives and some of their own work as well as that of poets they know and admire in an evening setting in the burgeoning artistic community north of Cambridge to be recorded in front of the live audience. The program's producer is Doug Holder, the host of "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer" an interview show that airs on SCAT every Tuesday afternoon.

March 10 Tim Devin founder of " i left this here for you to read"

March 10 5PM Tim Devin "i left this here for you to read"






"i left this here for you to read"
About this magazine
Each month or so, we release a new issue of "i left this here for you to read." We then leave them in public places (such as on park benches, on buses, in airports and dentists' offices...) for anyone to take--free of charge.
So far , we've distributed our magazine in about 35 cities in the US and Canada. We only print about 50 copies of each issue, and don't reprint any past issues. Sorry, we can't mail you any copies--we only send them to contributors.

This project was started by Tim Devin, but now involves more than 100 people. Click here to see who's a part of it.

Email us at i.left.this.here@gmail.com

We also have a facebook group page, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Tim is also the founder of "the history of somerville 2010-2100" find out more about this unusual guy!

March 3, 2009: Novelist Paul Stone

My Guest will be Paul Stone author of "Or So It Seems"



On The Road To Writing My Novel



For twelve years I was engaged in a solitary process that resulted in the publication of my first novel, “Or So It Seems”. Now, less than a year after its publication, I’m out in the world introducing this book to legions of total strangers.

Funny how the universe spins its web.

When I began writing the novel, I was lost and confused and not at all interested in writing a spiritually framed novel. My marriage had broken up, I was bitter and angry, and struggling to construct a life as a single parent of three wonderful but highly vulnerable children. And so, not surprisingly, the novel that took shape was bitter, angry and focused mainly on blame and payback.

But a funny thing happened on the road to payback.

As many of you know, we are each of us walking two paths on our life’s journey. On the first path we encounter our day-to-day struggles, our deeply held desires, our careers, our family lives, our likes, dislikes, quirks and ambitions. The second path, which you could call our spiritual journey, takes us on a much longer and far more obscure expedition. I’ll leave it to someone more knowledgeable than me to explain where that journey originates or where it is taking us, but its main characteristic is that it calls to and enlivens our deepest and truest selves.

Well, without over-stretching the comparison, this novel of mine, “Or So It Seems”, also traveled two roads in its journey to fullness, publication and, yes, self-discovery.

The point of divergence, where one road ended and another began, occurred after seven years. Truth is, I thought I had finished the novel, thought it was done. But after reviewing it, an agent suggested it needed more narrative tension. If I’m honest, it was a well-written, essentially dull tale of a man putting his life together again after divorce. I understood what the agent meant and sat down to create some suspense and tension by reordering a few elements in the plot.

A funny thing happened when I sat down at my computer, however.

The moment I started my rewrite, it was as if a voice sounded inside my head, telling me “Now you are going to write the novel you were supposed to write.” And then began another spiritual journey. Suddenly this kaleidoscope of new ideas, themes and characters started populating my simple storyline; as if by magic, my tale of one man’s divorce became a complex and humorous metaphor for everyman’s spiritual odyssey. Suddenly, my straightforward, linearly-told story became a rich, multilayered plot. And if you think I was excited or pleased, you’re not even close. I was scared to death. Had all that work, I worried—over seven years worth—been for nothing? It was frightening to think of revisiting my novel at that late date, but then again, some of those new ideas, characters and themes were so interesting, so playful, and so much more relevant to my life’s journey than anything I had written before…

Well, as it turned out, the new elements blended beautifully with the old and eventually, five years later, I found myself the author of a multi-leveled, humorous, surprisingly charming and intensely compelling novel. What one reviewer called, “A Rollicking Spiritual Page-Turner.” What I describe as ‘part odyssey, part oddball adventure and totally fantastic.’

If there’s a theme to “Or So It Seems” it clearly relates to perceptions of reality. How we’re so often distracted by what we see as the drama of our lives, that we rarely notice how that drama fits into our larger spiritual journey. Much the way I, in starting a novel about my divorce, failed to see that I had really begun a voyage of discovery, a journey that would lead towards something much larger and far more interesting than the tale of angst, bitterness and blame that had originally inspired me.

Or so it seems.

My Guest: Feb 17 Poet Rebecca Schumejda 5PM

My Guest: Feb 17 Poet Rebecca Schumejda









"Currently, I live in New York's scenic Hudson Valley with my husband and our daughter. I write and teach English and US History at an alternative high school. I was born and raised on Long Island. I moved around, but ended up back in New York, this time landlocked, my view mountains instead of waves. I received my BA in English from SUNY New Paltz and my MA in Poetics and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

My poetry has appeared here and there over the years. My new collection Falling Forward is upcoming from sunnyoutside press. In addition, sunnyoustide published my chapbook Dream Big, Work Harder in November of 2006 and my poem "Logic" on a postcard. In 2001, Green Bean Press published my chapbook The Tear Duct of The Storm. What seems to be a lifetime ago, I co-edited a small press zine, reuben's kincaid. "

Feb 10, 2009--- Poet Elizabeth Kirschner

Poet, lyricist, I have published three volumes of poetry, Twenty Colors, Postal Routes and Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees, all with Carnegie-Mellon University Press. My chapbook, The Red Dragon, was published by Permafrost, and My Life as a Doll was published by Autumn House Press.

As a lyricist, I have collaborated with many composers both here and abroad. Most notably, I set my own poetry, not a translation, to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Now titled The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons it had its world premiere in Vienna in fall ’05 followed by an American debut here in Boston. A CD of this music featuring soprano Jean Danton and pianist Thomas Stumpf was released from Albany Records in Spring ’07. The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons has been published by Musik Fabrik. A score can be ordered at http://www.classicalmusicnow.com/Kirschner.html.

I have taught at prominent universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Boston Universities and most recently at Boston College, where I taught in varying degree from 1990-2007

In the mid through late 80's, I worked at schools, K-12, all over New Hampshire through the Arts-in-Education program. I also presented residencies through Very Special Arts.

All my books and the CD are available at www.amazon.com