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.

 

Dispatch 121613 From 'Overheard on Church Street'

He’ll probably be dead by the time we get there for Christmas, so that’ll be interesting.

— Young woman on cellphone

 

I’m the kind of motherfucker that goes all night, bitches!

—  Man yelling alone

 

One intrepid Burlington resident has been compiling random heard-on-the-street comments in a tumblr blog aptly called Overheard on Church Street since 2010. Now, every Monday, the blogger is sharing a couple of snippets with Live Culture. You can read more at the OOCS archive. Submissions are also welcome.

Dispatch 120913 From 'Overheard on Church Street'

 

Yeah, it’s like this in every place. Fucking crazy. Not for nothing, but if I were a terrorist, this is where I’d be.

—   Two men in line at Starbucks

Black Friday? Yeah, right. Ain’t nothing black in Vermont.

—   Two young men

 

One intrepid Burlington resident has been compiling random heard-on-the-street comments in a tumblr blog aptly called Overheard on Church Street since 2010. Now, every Monday, the blogger is sharing a couple of snippets with Live Culture. You can read more at the OOCS archive. Submissions are also welcome.

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.

Dispatch 120213 From 'Overheard on Church Street'

Just another chocolate-chip-size taste of Burlington, from the Overheard on Church Street tumblr:

Oh hey, Bill. I didn’t even recognize you in that suit and all. What’re you, going to court or something?
— Woman to older man

What’re we, in fuckin California or Vermont?
— Two men

One intrepid Burlington resident has been compiling random heard-on-the-street comments in a tumblr blog aptly called Overheard on Church Street since 2010. Now, every Monday, the blogger is sharing a couple of snippets with Live Culture. You can read more at the OOCS archive. Submissions are also welcome.

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."

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!

Seth Jarvis Makes the Theater Scene With New Series

Like live theater? Seth Jarvis has got a "play group" for you! The Burlington actor and playwright hasn't been sitting on his thumbs since his former employer, the late, great Waterfront Video, closed in May. (That's Jarvis, left, with Chris LaPointe at the store.) He's gotten married, for one thing. And for another, he's cooked up a monthly theater event called Playmakers.

Consisting of a directed reading and up to three "cold readings by local writers," Playmakers launches at 7:30 tonight, November 4 — "by the nature of bookings it will always be on a Monday," Jarvis says — at the Off Center for the Dramatic Arts in Burlington.

"I'm hoping once we begin, people will come forward and join in," he says. And by people he means "new playwrights, and actors and directors who've wanted to try their hand at writing."

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.