While TPC provided support and an event location blog page for any community that wanted to organize an event, it was entirely up to that community to determine what their particular expression would be. It’s a global movement, but it’s local—inclusive yet decentralized—but documentation is crucial. Event founder Michael Rothenberg writes on the 100 Thousand Poets for Change website:

Each local organization determines what it wants to focus on, something broad like, peace, sustainability, justice, equality, or more specific causes like Health Care, or Freedom of Speech, or local environmental or social concerns that need attention in your particular area right now, etc. Organizations will then come up with a mission statement/manifesto that describes who they are and what they think and care about. When the whole event has taken place all the mission statements can be collected from around the world and, I hope, worked together into a grand statement of 100 Thousand Poets for Change.

All documentation from Saturday will be on the 100TPC.org website, and will be archived by Stanford University, in recognition of 100 TPC as the largest poetry reading in history.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs
Annual Conference and Bookfair
Washington, D.C. : February 2-5, 2011

Terrain.org / Hawk & Handsaw Booth at Bookfair
Booth 509

Meet Terrain.org editors Simmons Buntin, Joshua Foster, and Patrick Burns, as well as Hawk & Handsaw editor and Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles, and learn more about these award-winning journals that focus on culture, environment, and sustainability.

Panel
Recovery as Discovery: Rethinking Nature Writing

• Thursday, February 3 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Palladian Ballroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Alison Hawthorne Deming joins Tom Montgomery-Fate, David Gessner, Gretchen Legler, John Price, and Kathleen Dean Moore

Panel
What Do Writers Do All Day? Articulating Our Work in the Profession

• Thursday, February 3 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Coolidge, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles joins James Engelhardt, Stephanie Vanderslice, Christine Stewart-Nunez, and J.D. Schraffenberger

Panel
The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World

• Thursday, February 3 : 4:30-5:45 p.m.
• Hampton Boardroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Lauret Savoy joins Elmaz Abinader, Faith Adiele, Fred Arroyo, Debra Kang Dean, and Nikky Finney

Panel
Who Makes the Best Student? Growing Your Program with Nontraditional Majors

• Friday, February 4 : Noon – 1:15 p.m.
• Coolidge, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins Patricia Clark, Sean Prentiss, and Joe Wilkins

Panel
The Language of Conservation, sponsored by Poets House

• Friday, February 4 : 1:30 – 2:45 p.m.
• Regency Ballroom, Omni Shoreham
• Terrain.org editorial board member Alison Hawthorne Deming joins Mark Doty, Sandra Alcosser, Joseph Bruchac, and Pattiann Rogers

Panel
Environmental Writing in the Age of Global Climate Change, sponsored by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

• Friday, February 4 : 3 – 4:15 p.m.
• Virginia C, Marriott Wardman Park
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins Terrain.org editorial board member Kathryn Miles, plus Sheryl St. Germain, Paul Bogard, and Janine DeBaise

Reading
Salmon Poetry 30th Anniversary Reading and Book Launch

• Friday, February 4 : 8 – 10 p.m.
• Pigment Art Studio
  1848 Columbia Road Northwest
  Washington, D.C
• Terrain.org editor-in-chief Simmons Buntin joins fellow Salmon poets Andrea Cohen, Allan Peterson, Kevin Higgins, Susan Millar DuMars, Alan Jude Moore, Patrick Chapman, Drucilla Wall, Eamonn Wall, Mike Begnal, Patrick Hicks, Stephen Powers, Drew Blanchard, Philip Fried, and John Fitzgerald; hosted by Terrain.org editorial board member and Salmon Poetry publisher Jessie Lendennie

Book Signing
Bloom, by Simmons B. Buntin

• Friday, February 4 : 10 – 11 a.m.
• Bookfair, Salmon Poetry Table, E26

~~~

Check back, as we’ll add and update events as we learn about them!

Monday Nov.1st, 8pm FREE!

THE ELECTROSENSE OF PADDLEFISH: a multimedia piece on Water in the American West
Charles Lindsay and David Rothenberg

Frederick Loewe Theater, 35 West 4th St. NY, NY
(between Washington Sq. Park E. and Greene Street.)

Why did Floyd Dominy draw the instructions for how to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam on a napkin? It was his greatest creation as director of the US Bureau of Land Management. What did he know about the evils of damming the West?

This is the premiere of a live multimedia performance interpreting the complex environmental, political and social issues involving water and the Western United States.  From the frontier days to 21st century silicon valley, water has been a lifeblood, transforming the western half of our nation from desert and wilderness into a booming region requiring vast quantities of this precious liquid resource — which westerners will stop at nothing to get.

Music:  Lindsay’s pristine and processed field recordings, live electric cello and Moog guitar. Rothenberg on clarinets and overtone flutes, live explorations of found sounds and words depicting the strange struggle of water to fight back against those who would try to control it.

Video: From May through August, 2010 Lindsay traveled the west capturing video of all things affected by water. Locations included Las Vegas, Fort Peck, Mono Lake, The Hoover Dam, Idaho’s ‘Craters of the Moon’ National Monument and Silver Creek Preserve. He shot Yellowstone Park’s geysers and forest fire remnants, Paddlefish snagging, The Mermaid Bar in Great Falls, the open pit copper mine in Butte, which is the United States largest Super Fund site. He shot Noah’s Ark at a Creationist Dinosaur Museum, industrial irrigation, an abandoned depression era farm, water coolers and truck stops and 75 million year old ocean beds.

The remixed video projection is structured in eight parts for a forty minute improvised performance. You might find out what happened to that napkin, as well as just how them leviathan paddlefish find those water fleas.

Charles Lindsay, video, moog guitar, electric cello, electronics
David Rothenberg, clarinets, electronics
Chen Serfaty + Liron Unreich, video editing and production

This is the closing event of Ear to the Earth, an annual festival of sound and music devoted to the environment, which is sponsored by the Electronic Music Foundation.

Maggie Payne and Andrea Polli are also appearing in this concert.

Further resources:

http://www.emfproductions.org/upcomingevents1011/nyu_pplr.html

http://www.eartotheearth.org
http://www.charleslindsay.com
http://www.davidrothenberg.net

Here’s what’s going on for Terrain.org:

Table at Bookfair

Join us at Exhibit Hall A, H9 from Thursday through Saturday. We’ll be right next to the table for Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, and we’re also dedicating a corner of the Terrain.org table to The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts.

Wild Lives / Raucous Pens: Readings from Terrain.org and Hawk & Handsaw

Join us Thursday evening, April 8, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. (reception with free beer/wine begins at 7:30 p.m.) for a joint reading held at the Tivoli at Auraria Campus (Adirondacks Room).  Facilitated by Hawk & Handsaw editor Kathryn Miles and Terrain.org editor Simmons Buntin, the reading features Patrick Burns, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Scott Elliott, James Engelhardt, Suzanne Frischkorn, Andrew Gottlieb, Luisa Igloria, John T. Price, Ben Quick, Suzanne Roberts, Jeffrey Thomson, and Arianne Zwartjes. View flyer, with walking directions.

We hope to see you in Denver!

Here’s what’s going on for us:

Table at Bookfair

Join us at Exhibit Hall A, H9 from Thursday through Saturday. We’ll be right next to the table for Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, and we’re also dedicating a corner of the Terrain.org table to The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts, a great little literary bird journal that wasn’t able to get a table of its own.

Wild Lives / Raucous Pens: Readings from Terrain.org and Hawk & Handsaw

Join us Thursday evening, April 8, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. for a joint reading held at the Tivoli at Auraria Campus (Adirondacks Room).  Facilitated by Hawk & Handsaw editor Kathryn Miles and Terrain.org editor Simmons Buntin, the reading features Patrick Burns, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Scott Elliott, James Engelhardt, Suzanne Frischkorn, Andrew Gottlieb, Luisa Igloria, John T. Price, Ben Quick, Suzanne Roberts, Jeffrey Thomson, and Arianne Zwartjes.

We hope to see you in Denver!

Scheduled writers include Mark Bahti, Betty Barr, Byrd Baylor, Elizabeth Bernays, Joel Bernstein, J.P.S. Brown, Stephen Cox, Philip Caputo, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Elizabeth Gunn, Lynn Hassler, Juanita Havill, Mike Hayes, Fenton Johnson, Ken Lamberton, Susan Lowell, Gregory McNamee, Tom Miller, Gary Paul Nabhan, Margaret Regan, Richard Shelton, Stephen Strom, and Janet Winans.

For more information, visit http://www.patagoniapubliclibrary.org/?p=874.

The view from the Wildbranch Writing Workshop: Craftsbury Common.

It seems to me that there are really two types of writer’s events — writing workshops and conferences about writing, the latter usually including a bookfair, publishers’ exhibits, or the like.

The biggest and perhaps best known example of the conference about writing is the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) annual conference and bookfair, which usually draws at least 5,000 people.  The panels cover a very wide range of writing topics.  For example, I chaired a panel at the NYC AWP conference in early 2008 on “the future of environmental essay.”  Large conferences such as these are excellent venues for attending panels of very well-known writers and visiting (and being overwhelmed by) publishers’ booths.  I can’t recall the number of exhibitors at the bookfair, but it must be well over 400, I bet.  In New York in 2008 and Denver in 2010, the journal I edit — Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments — did/will have a table.  Visiting tables/booths and talking with editorial staff (and sometimes contributors) is the best way to learn about the publication short of actually purchasing it (or, in our case, visiting it online).  Like smaller writer’s conferences, it’s not a venue for submitting work, but rather for identifying publications you’re interested in submitting your work to (whether individual literary journals or book publishers), talking with the editors to get a sense of what they’re interested in for upcoming issues, and rubbing elbows with other inquring writers.

Smaller conferences are not so overwhelming, and often provide a more intimate experience and opportunity for connecting even further with an editor.  I think of this summer’s Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) biennial conference in Victoria, BC.  With perhaps 400 attendees, the panels are smaller and last longer, the panels and events are tailored in this case to a specific set of literature — environmental literature and literary ecocriticism — and there are more opportunities for networking, especially with editors and contributors.  The exhibitor can be much smaller; there were perhaps ten or twelve exhibitors at ASLE, Terrain.org among them.

At both settings, readings are offered.  In the case of AWP, they’re offered both as part of the program and outside of the official event — dozens of them nightly, it seems.  For example, in Denver in April 2010, Terrain.org is teaming up with Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing to host a reading not affiliated with AWP but which, we hope, will draw fans of those publications and people interested in place-based literature — even as it will conflict with one of AWP’s big poetry readings.  At ASLE, on the other hand, it seemed appropriate not to schedule an off-site reading but rather to attend the two or three scheduled evening readings.

At the other end of the spectrum, though still related of course, are writing workshops.  Staying in the environmental literature genre, I think here of the Wildbranch Writing Workshop held over a week each summer in northern Vermont.  While one or two journals may be represented — Orion magazine (the Orion Society) is the primary sponsor, so always participates, and sometimes editors of other journals attend either as speakers or students (that was my experience in the summer of 2007) — there is little opportunity for editorial interaction unless it’s part of the workshop.  At Wildbranch, however, that opportunity is a distinct and important part of the overall workshop experience: the year I attended, Orion’s editor-in-chief Chip Blake agreed to read every participant’s submission and provide individual feedback.  That’s not common, I think, but is certainly valuable.  What also isn’t common except at workshops like Wildbranch is the ability for students to meet with and really hang out with the instructors.  I had the good fortune of spending time with Scott Russell Sanders and Sandra Steingraber, two writers/activists whose work I much admire.  I’ve kept in touch with both of them.  It’s true that as an editor myself I may have more opportunity to maintain our contact, but that the opportunity is there in the first place is pretty special.  I doubt you dine at every meal with your instructor and other participants, including sponsoring magazine editors, at most workshops.  But every writing workshop has some unique opportunity, I’d wager, and I suspect all of them develop a sense of community among the students that may continue well after the workshop.

So is there value in either or both of these approaches — the writer’s conference versus the writing workshop?  Definitely.  At the conference, the writer receives broad exposure to publications and access to an array of panels across genres but doesn’t receive instruction.  The opportunities to meet publishers at booths/tables are many.  At the workshop, the writer receives individual (small group, really) instruction and usually may sit on a few panels offered when the instructor-led workshops are not in session.  Exposure to publishers and editors is limited, though.  It’s really a question of what the writer is after.  For me personally, they all offer benefits, but I can only go to so many larger writer’s conferences like AWP, especially if I’m not one of the presenters.  And I could only attend a writing workshop (mainly due to cost and, at a full week often, time off) every now and then.  But Wildbranch for me was incredibly beneficial and affirming.  And the ASLE conference, held every other year, is an event I plan not to miss if I can help it.  I don’t feel much community at AWP because of its vast size, but I definitely do at ASLE and Wildbranch.

We’ve just added an image gallery and mp3 of the full reading at the new Terrain.org Events section of the website.

We had a great turnout, and thank the Poetry Center and Center for Biological Diversity for sponsoring the event, the readers for such wonderful performances, and the audience. View the image gallery and listen to the full performance now.

When the draft for Vietnam was in full swing, my father volunteered not because he believed in the war or lusted for battle, but because he couldn’t avoid the draft. He knew if he volunteered, he would get a better assignment, and if he survived, his life afterward would be more stable. A risky reason to enlist, but it is also common thinking among women who serve: the desire for training, for education, for opportunity and stability. Much like many women who serve today, his enlistment launched three decades of silence in his family. The first time I remember him mentioning Vietnam was in my late teens. We were in twining lines waiting for flu shots, staying together until we were divided, men to the left, women to the right. He stood just off my shoulder, and as we neared the split, he asked, “Are you squeamish about needles?”

I chuckled. “No, are you?”

To my surprise he gave the smallest shudder and said, as our lines split apart, “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person, but for some reason needles still give me the creeps.”

He didn’t speak of his service even as I considered joining myself, except to say that a commission was better than enlistment and that serving as a woman was not easy. Choosing to remain a civilian isn’t something I regret; in fact, it is a luxury for which I am thankful, but it was pressing on my mind as I sat down, Saturday evening in Tucson, Ariz., for the performance of Coming in Hot.

The stageplay is an adaptation of selections from the Kore Press anthology, Powder: Writing by Women in the Military, from Vietnam to Iraq, which collects the work of nineteen women who served in the U.S. military in a variety of roles. Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain, the co-editors, admit that they “went into the project with the idea that this work would contribute to the chorus of opposition to the war in Iraq . . . We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any bias and agenda.” It was, nonetheless, this agenda, bias, and perspective that made me wonder if the adapted work would be solely anti-war, primarily a piece of activism, especially given that the work was produced by Kore Press and directed by Bowden.

What the audience witnessed was a well-balanced collection of monologues composed into a one-woman show featuring Jeanmarie Simpson (original score by accompanist Vicki Brown on strings and pedals, with recorded voice talents of Donald Paul Stockton and Kaylene Torregrossa). Before I go any further, I would like to applaud Simpson. While her performance wasn’t flawless, she was also presented with a nearly impossible task in portraying 14 distinct characters in 80 minutes, without costume change; she did so successfully — laudably — using her voice, her mannerisms, and her versatility as an actress, but at times the variety of accents necessary to distinguish so many women became less convincing.

It is troubling that the adaption and direction called for Simpson to do so in the first place. The message or point of the play could have been narrowed, refined, or, in the alternative, the number of monologues could have been reduced (19 contributions became 14 characters, and an even greater number of segments given the recurring appearance of Charlotte Brock’s character in Mortuary Affairs). Characters could have been conflated without much loss of narrative effect and without forcing Simpson to stretch to distinguish them; as one audience member said immediately after the performance, “There were too many stories. It was too much, and it didn’t say enough.”

That said, despite missed light cues, despite a few stuttered lines and awkward moments involving her blocking, Simpson brought life to characters within the simplicity of an otherwise stark production. The set consisted only of one chair and one table — more of an operating table, clinical and spare — which was primarily used for the Mortuary Affairs scenes in which Brock’s character stood over it as if looking down on a body. The lighting consisted of only a few overhead fixtures at various angles with the exception of one water effect and one flashlight held by a crew member. What felt strange, to me, was the balance the director struck between the one-woman show format — meant to emphasize character and message — and the use of recorded voice segments to supplement Simpson’s work. In addition, it was confusing that at first the recorded voices were only used for the male voice of a boot camp instructor, then a female voice for the character Simpson was portraying silently on stage, and finally that same female voice switched to a male role. While I don’t agree with one audience member’s assessment that it would have been better to focus on a very small number of stories — four being the number she mentioned — it did feel inconsistent to rely on the one-actor model while supplementing and distracting from her performance in a variety of ways.

The original score by Vicki Brown was a perfect accompaniment to the monologues. Brown used the same themes and structure each time Simpson returned to the recurring character of Charlotte Brock in the mortuary. At other times, her music set the heartbeat of the scene, calling its pace; at every moment, she took the pain and the challenge of Brock’s writing (and Simpson’s portrayal) to a higher level.

These recurring scenes pulled me in the most and made me think — again, as I often have before — of my father’s offhand comment. “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person.” Brock says something very similar about “the contents of the bags” that Mortuary Affairs handled, especially in one harrowing scene in which the deceased is little more than “a head, a hand, and an arm.”

What Simpson, Bowden, and Cain attempted to do in the adaptation and performance was no easy task — to tell these stories and to grant these women their individual voices when their silence has been so pervasive. What perhaps made the sections by Brock so powerful was that she, too, was trying to give someone a voice, both herself in the world in which she found herself surrounded, but also the dead who lay upon that table.

About the Blogger

Jennifer McStotts is the daughter, niece, and ex-wife of United States Marines, as well as a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in Future Anterior, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, and by Preservation Books.