Poetry on Your Pillow? Hotel Vermont, Burlington Writers Workshop Hook Up

The new Hotel Vermont has been winning praise from all quarters for its architecture and décor, cuisine and use of local resources and products, from granite to soap to original art (including the found-wood "painting" by Duncan Johnson pictured at right).

Now, along with that warm blankie from Johnson Woolen Mills, all 125 guest rooms will offer a small book filled with Vermont words. Writing, that is, by members of the Burlington Writers Workshop.

In an announcement today, BWW organizer Peter Biello said, "Our writers get a wider audience, and Hotel Vermont's guests get a pleasurable reading experience. It's a win-win."

It would be especially winning, Biello added, if one of those guests had the power to advance any of the writers' careers.

Regardless of serendipitous "discovery" by a visiting publisher, the writers can at least hope hotel visitors will choose their poetry, stories or essays for bedtime reading.

These pieces — I'm calling them "locavore lit" — will be chosen by staff at Hotel Vermont and and compiled into a modest publication on a quarterly basis, said the announcement.

Hotel Vermont marketing coordinator Tori Carton added, "The arts are an integral part of the Hotel Vermont experience and we hope that our partnership with Burlington Writers Workshop will continue to advance the arts in our community, and give our guests a well-rounded and unique stay in Burlington.”

By the way, a member of the BWW, Michael Freed-Thall, has a fiction story in this week's Winter Reading Issue of Seven Days. You can read "Fort Stockton Blues" here. And here's a glimpse at a past BWW workshop.

 

Leahy Honors Photographer Peter Miller in U.S. Senate

Waterbury photographer Peter Miller has had many well-deserved accolades in his long career. His latest is another honor that few artists can claim: Vermont's senior senator, Patrick Leahy — no slouch behind the lens himself — read a tribute to Miller on November 20 on the Senate floor. 

Leahy's speech, printed here in full, says it all:

Mr. President, for generations, Vermonters have contributed to our national culture, through art, music, film and prose. Peter Miller is one such artist whose impressive work throughout his life as both a photographer and author has showcased Vermont and its residents and enriching us all.

As an amateur photographer, I have followed Peter's work for decades with admiration. From his early beginnings as a U.S. Army photographer to his travels across Europe with Yousuf Karsh, he has channeled his passion and energy into a remarkable art. Over the past 20 years, his unique ability to capture the Vermont spirit has been well documented and his consistent approach to producing authentic depictions of the Vermont way of life is unparalleled. He shuns the commercialization of art and instead creates his work solely to share and promote the values of our small and community-based State. This attitude was evident more than ever when, being honored as the Burlington Free Press' "Vermonter of the Year" in 2006 for his book "Vermont Gathering Places," he frankly said, "I don't shoot for galleries. I shoot for myself and the people I photograph."

Burlington Émigré Ben Aleshire Takes His Poetry to the French Quarter

Ben Aleshire, the former Burlington "poet for hire" who could often be spotted at the downtown Farmers Market, moved to New Orleans last year. He's set up shop at a busy intersection in the French Quarter, selling poems to passersby, and has attracted the attention of that city's press.

The Gambit, New Orleans' alt-weekly, focuses on Aleshire and several other local poets for hire in a recent cover article. Here's a quote from it:

Both [Aleshire] and [fellow poet Tristan] Bennett say they can come up with meaningful work in 10 to 15 minutes. "When people stand there and hug me and weep and tell me they're going to frame it, I think the evidence is there," Aleshire says. "That keeps me doing it. It fuels me when people tell me that this is real."

Gambit photo of Ben Aleshire by Cheryl Gerber.

Vermont Photographer Publishes Book 'For the Birds'

Charlotte photographer P. Brian Machanic has produced an 82-page volume titled This Book Is for the Birds, but of course the book is really for bird lovers.

Machanic notes in a preface that there are some "50-60 million" birders in the United States, that is, obsessed individuals "whose affliction for monitoring things avian is all consumptive, leading to forays afield at ungodly hours, while being viciously attacked by the biting insects which birds are supposed to eat." The author admits he is not one of these people:

I'm more of a bird-watcher sort, which means that I enjoy sleeping in once a month, and stop looking for nighthawks when the thunder and lightning starts. I have only a couple of well-worn bird field guides, the second of which was purchased when I thought I'd lost the first.

What Machanic is afflicted with, however, is "a penchant for spending hours and hours at a time waiting for that perfect shot" — that is, with his camera. (The detail at right is from "House Wren.") The right photograph, he imagines, might catapult him into "the Bird Watchers' Hall of Fame and allow me to generously dip into the multi-billion-dollar industry devoted to supplying every imaginable need of the birding world."

'Pages in the Pub' Returns to Norwich, and Hardwick

Two Lisas — Christie and Cadow — are behind the Book Jam Blog, whose mission is to promote books, libraries and independent bookstores. Not content with exercising their literary passsion solely in cyberspace, they also created Pages in the Pub, which is an evening out to share beverages and book talk. And to benefit local libraries. I first wrote about the event for Seven Days last December.

Oh, and the event isn't really in a bar. In the case of the event at 7 p.m. tonight, Christie and Cadow (pictured here, left and right) will proffer the booze at the Norwich Inn. A $10 donation will go toward the Norwich Public Library.

Presenters tonight will be from the library, the Norwich Bookstore and the community.

The Lisas will branch out to Hardwick on Tuesday, December 3, bringing Pages by the Pub to the Galaxy Bookshop. Presenters there will be from that shop and the Jeudevine Memorial Library, along with a "special guest from the Northeast Kingdom."

Sure, it's fun for book lovers to get together for lit chats, but how do these events benefit indie bookstores? Glad you asked. Quite simply, they sell books — $500 to $1000 worth of books, Christie writes. For a small bookstore, that's the equivalent of a good Saturday during holiday season, she suggests.

As Christie told Seven Days last year, "We do as much as we possibly can to sell books outside the store."

If you can't make Pages in the Pub, visit the book blog for reviews and interviews, lit news, and ideas about what to read next — or what to give this holiday season.

 

 

Solve Jim Rader's Word Puzzle to Win $100

Are you a puzzle fiend? Want to put your puzzling brain to work for some cold, hard cash?

On Saturday, November 30, at noon on the dot, Vermont's own Jim Rader — creator of the Quip-Find word puzzle — will post a special puzzle on the Quip-Find blog. The first person to submit the correct solution wins $100, plus autographed copies of both Quip-Find books. 

Sounds simple, right?

Be warned: These puzzles are tough. Best to get some practice in before the big day. Head over to blog.quipfind.com to learn the basics and solve some of the puzzles posted there.

The contest is in celebration of the second anniversary of Rader's first book of Quip-Finds, Never Play Leapfrog With a Unicorn. It also marks the first anniversary of his second book, When Eating an Elephant.

Rader will sign those books and give a puzzle-solving demonstration at Burlington's Peace and Justice Center on Wednesday, December 11, at 5:30 p.m.

You can read more about the origins of the Quip-Find puzzle here.

Good luck!

A Review: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home the Musical

This review was contributed by former Seven Days associate editor Ruth Horowitz, who now lives in Providence, R.I. She and her husband, David Christensen, recently headed to Manhattan to see Fun Home the Musical, at the Public Theater off-Broadway. It is based on Fun Home, the graphic memoir, written/drawn by Vermont-based cartoonist Alison Bechdel. This originally appeared in Ruth's blog, Giving Up the Ghost.

David and I took a quick trip to New York last weekend to see Fun Home, the incredible musical based on Alison Bechdel’s incredible 2006 graphic memoir about her closeted gay father’s suicide not long after she came out as a lesbian.

Alison was writing Fun Home at the same time that I began to write my novel. We swapped drafts. She commiserated with me when I faltered (I’m still fussing with my book), and our whole family celebrated with her as she finished her project — to much acclaim.

The “best of” lists, the interviews, the awards — all that success made sense to me. But when Alison told me someone had optioned the rights to turn Fun Home into a musical, I wasn’t convinced. That is, I thought it was the most ridiculous idea I’d ever heard. The book is so intricately crafted, and makes such rich use of the graphic-novel format, the rhymes and ironies and reiterations between words and pictures so perfectly expressing the narrative’s conflicted point of view — how could that possibly translate to the stage?

I was skeptical. But also intrigued. So naturally, when I had a chance to attend an early “lab” performance of the play in progress, I bought tickets, and David and I Megabussed it down to New York to see the show.

That was a strange experience. But not for the reasons I had anticipated. The set featured a meticulous replica of Alison’s Bolton studio, a room I had been in lots of times, but not since David and I moved out of state, a few years earlier. I couldn’t stop staring at it. Actor Beth Malone’s portrayal of the adult Alison was so spot-on, with so many gestures and postures and inflections that were just right, I couldn’t stop noticing the few she got wrong. And I was so curious about which parts of the book the play would leave in, I couldn’t stop thinking of the parts it left out.   

Even with all those personal distractions, lots of parts of the play blew me away — the performances, the songs, some achingly poignant scenes. But as a whole, it felt disjointed, uneven, off balance.

 Fun Home is a coming-out story, a coming-of-age story, a family story, a story about growing up in a funeral home, and a story about coming to terms with the past. It’s also a story about the necessary and dangerous business of turning our lives into stories — necessary because storytelling helps us make sense of events; dangerous because how can we know if the stories we tell ourselves accurately convey the facts, or are just the version we want to be true?

Green Mountain "Geek" Seeks Funds for a Military SF Anthology

War is serious business — and so is war-themed science fiction. Your mind may be leaping to the movie version of Starship Troopers. But the genre doesn't have to be, writes Andrew Liptak, all about "bug hunts and unabashed jingoism."

You may know Liptak as the local guy behind Geek Mountain State. The holder of an MA in military history from Norwich University, he's written about science fiction for Kirkus Reviews, io9 and other publications. Now he's coediting an anthology of military SF called War Stories, which its Kickstarter page describes thus:

It's a look at the people ordered into impossible situations, asked to do the unthinkable, and those unable to escape from hell. It's stories of courage under fire, and about the difficulties in making decisions that we normally would never make. It's about what happens when the shooting stops, and before any trigger is ever pulled.

In other words, the kinds of issues that real soldiers face — in SF settings.

New Tunes: "Island I Would," Nyiko Beguin

The last we heard from local songwriter Nyiko Beguin he was fronting a promising indie-folk outfit called Whales & Wolves. That band's 2012 release, Up to the Ground, though rough around the edges, was a solid step forward from its 2009 debut, Green and Gray. The record showcased ambitious, if somewhat schizophrenic, arrangements and hinted at a talented songwriter in the making.

Recently, Beguin has been working as a solo artist. He's currently chipping away at a new EP, Always Always, slated for release next year — provided his crowdfunding campaign hits its mark. The five-song EP will be released on vinyl and is accompanied by an art book featuring compositions by some 15 national artists.

Beguin has made the first single from that EP, "Island I Would" available for public consumption. Bathed in dreamy synth that explodes into dramatic hooks, the dynamic, danceable cut suggests Beguin has come into his own. (Bonus points for the crafty use of steel drum. Nice touch.)

Check out that single below. To hear more from Beguin, you can drop by the BCA Center on Friday, November 1, when he plays a Kickstarter launch party with Mixtape Party and Sasquatch BTV. 

 

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins Coming to Vermont

Like President Obama, Billy Collins has the distinction of being a two-termer. Happily for Mr. Collins, his job as U.S. poet laureate did not require making decisions such as whether to bomb Syria, or getting along with Congress. No, Billy Collins had only to concern himself with the matter of poetry.

And the man is on a mission to bring verse to the people. His recent stint of filling in for Garrison Keillor on "Writer's Almanac" on public radio may well have brought him more listeners than ever. But in Vermont, it is Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, a book Collins edited, that is getting all the attention.

That's because it is the 2013 selection for Vermont Reads, a statewide literary program available to nonprofit communities and organizations courtesy of the Vermont Humanities Council. In celebration of the program's 10th anniversary, the council decided to focus on poetry.

What's more, it's bringing Billy Collins himself to Vermont this fall.