Read Our Annual Report
may wilde readings: sherry and scott morrow
We welcome you to the May edition of the Wilde Readings Series with Sherry Audette Morrow and Scott D. Morrow. The event is hosted Ann Bracken. Join us at the Columbia Art Center (Columbia Art Center 6100 Foreland Garth Columbia, MD 21045) on Tuesday, May 9th at 7 pm. Please spread the word – bring your friends, family, and students.
We encourage you to participate in the open mic. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time/two poems. Sign up in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center, or when you arrive. The number is 410-730-0075. Light refreshments will be served. Books by both featured authors and open mic readers will be available for sale.
Below, get to know Sherry and Scott!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Sherry: Since my parents’ passings, they most often show up in my writing.
Scott: I’ve never thought about people in my life showing up in my writing. I think my father frequently works his way into my scripts, as he was such a talented character actor that I imagine him in certain roles while writing them (some of which he actually performed).
Where is your favorite place to write?
Sherry: Since we’ve had road work going on outside my house for the past eight months, I am grateful to the Baltimore County Public Library in Parkville for providing a quiet place to work.
Scott: I’m still searching for my favorite place to write. I like going on “writing dates” with my wife, Sherry, where we hang out for hours at a coffee shop, library, or anywhere away from home distractions to work on our writing.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Sherry: I do a lot of thinking before words appear on the page. Themes and phrases and individual words fill many of my hours and much of my brain space. When it is time to write, a cup of tea is a necessity; a package of Twizzlers is an added bonus.
Scott: My most effective “pre-writing ritual” is thinking about my writing beforehand to get into “writing mode.”
Who always gets a first read?
Sherry: My husband, Scott Morrow, is always my first audience. He has been since we were in grade school together. Because we write so differently, he is the ideal first reader to identify what works for a wide readership, while also understanding the history behind my prose and poetry. He’s also a great proofreader.
Scott: My wife, Sherry, is always the first to read my work!
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Sherry: The first multiple-read book that comes to mind is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Love In the Time of Cholera” for his brilliant, lyrical sentence construction. I would also reread anything by Alice Hoffman, Thomas Hardy, Joyce Carol Oates, John Gardner, and Natasha Trethewey.
Scott: I actually have trouble reading books because I’m a proofreader and am easily distracted by sentence structure, verb tense, punctuation, etc. As a script-/screenplay writer, I love watching movies. Some movies I can watch over and over are “The Princess Bride,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” and “The Truman Show.”
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Sherry: So many memorable readings come to mind: Natasha Trethewey at the Baltimore Museum of Art; Alice Hoffman at the Seattle Public Library; John Gardner (not the detective novelist, the author of “The Sunlight Dialogues,” “Grendel,” “October Light,” and “Nickel Mountain” among others) at California State University, Northridge in the early 1980s shortly before his death; Alice Walker at Barnes & Noble in Northern Virginia; Terry Prachett, also at Barnes & Noble in Northern Virginia shortly before his dementia diagnosis.
Scott: Terry Pratchett in Northern Virginia.
Scott D. Morrow is a Baltimore-based scriptwriter, musician, lyricist, and composer. He has received two Individual Artist Awards in scriptwriting from the Maryland State Arts Council, and his one-act play, “Mr. Mahler Finds a Dollar,” won Baltimore’s Artscape98 one-act play contest. He has also written screenplays, musicals, and radio skits. His short films, “Abduction: A Love Story” and “Telekinesis for Beginners,” were premiered at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival.
Writer, editor, and occasional poet Sherry Audette Morrow loves writing dates with her husband; pages actually get written. Sherry has been finishing a novel that makes readers laugh — quite different for her — plus writing poetry that makes even her uncomfortable. Her work has appeared in Chesapeake Life and Baltimore magazines, New Lines from the Old Line State anthology, and Threads magazine, among others. She has been founding editor of Scribble and an MWA past president.
an invitation to your first (or 264th) poetry reading
by Laura Yoo
I know that poetry has a reputation for being “highfalutin” and hoity toity. I know that some poems are hard and they seem utterly unreadable or unknowable. As I have confessed elsewhere before, even as an English major in college, I avoided taking the required poetry class until the very last semester.
But hear me out. Not all poetry is scary. I promise. Lots of poems are very readable and knowable. Often, poems tell stories, sometime really gritty, raw, and real stories about being human. They tell stories, whether they are fictionalized or based on the poet’s life, about how people live, exist, survive, love, and die. Different people turn to poetry looking for different things, and I turn to poetry for their poignant, particular storytelling.
So, I want to invite you to HoCoPoLitSo’s Nightbird event on April 27th with poet Noah Arhm Choi, the inaugural winner of HoCoPoLitSo’s Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize in 2021, and hear their stories.
In Cut to Bloom, Choi’s poems tell stories about family, umma (mom) and appa (dad), hurt, violence, love, language, self discovery, and names. This one about forgiveness stays with me:
Yes, it’s a story about “queer Asian Girls” but it’s also about mothers, daughters, weddings, love, and forgiveness – all things that many of us can relate to.
How about these lines about being worthy?
Most days, it is hard to remember
I am worthy to be loved, even without
the right answer, the right joke,
the right moment.
And yet, here is my wife,
trying to tell me
a story around her toothbrush,
bragging about me to her parents,
bringing my favorite dessert home, as if
I could still be an unpredictable ending
that she wants to see unfold.
Haven’t we questioned our worthiness? Haven’t we also been loved in this way too – or have craved for such love? Is this not a story that many of us are familiar with?
When asked what they are working on after Cut to Bloom, Choi said this:
I’m working on a 2nd poetry manuscript that has been orbiting around my father’s death in 2020, my divorce, and finally coming out as transgender and beginning to transition. Sometimes I wonder what will be the thread that ties all of these subjects together. Today that thread is a look at what it means to start over and again, how grief brings out truth even if its unbearable, how much life can change in unexpected ways when one claims themself.
Are these – starting over, grief, life changing in unexpected ways, claiming oneself – not the stuff of our stories?
What I am trying to say is that you should come out to hear Noah Arhm Choi “unfold” their stories on stage on Thursday, April 27th at Monteabaro Hall at Howard Community College. Get your tickets right here. If you are a student (HCPSS high school or HCC), it’s free!
Whether this is your first poetry reading or your 264th poetry reading, you are all welcome to “poetry of belonging.”
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom (Write Bloody Publishing) the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock and others. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Associate Director of DEI at a school in New York City. Jeanann Verlee, the author of Prey, noted “Cut to Bloom is neither delicate nor tidy. This immense work both elucidates and complicates ethnic, generational, and gender violence, examining women who fight for their humanity against those who seek to silence―indeed, erase―them.”
Wilde Readings with Martin Malone, Katy Giebenhain, Alan Bogage
We welcome you to the April edition of the Wilde Readings Series with the hosts of The Ragged Edge, Martin Malone, Katy Giebenhain, and Alan Bogage. The event is hosted Laura Shovan. Join us at the Columbia Art Center (Columbia Art Center 6100 Foreland Garth Columbia, MD 21045) on Tuesday, April 11th 7-8:30 PM. Please spread the word – bring your friends, family, and students.
We encourage you to participate in the open mic. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time/two poems. Sign up in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center, or when you arrive. The number is 410-730-0075. Light refreshments will be served. Books by both featured authors and open mic readers will be available for sale.
Get to know our featured authors Martin, Katy, and Alan!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Alan: Grandfather.
Martin: My poems don’t tend to be about specific people very often. Many of them draw from mythology and mythic characters – the Norse wolf Fenris, Odysseus, Aztec gods and myths. Or they are about things I have seen – observations of everyday events – a woman in the car in front of me putting on make-up while she drove, looking at the skin on the backs of my old worn hands, walking on streets familiar or new, fishing the Gallatin River in Montana; traveler tales – the shock of seeing things for the first time and attempting to capture the memory and the emotion of that event – Cuzco, Florence, New York City; visual stimuli – photos-artistic or everyday or journalistic or old family snapshots, or paintings or sculpture.
Katy: Images and circumstances reappear more than specific people. My brother has a consistent, indirect influence on my perspective when I write. I have not thought about this question before. It might be my father. His stories of growing up on a dairy farm have a way of popping up in unlikely associations in my poems.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Alan: Dining room table. I know, how boring.
Martin: While I only have access to this space one month a year- from mid-June to mid-July, the screened porch of the house we rent in Maine faces the Penobscot Bay. When I get up at sunrise and sit at that table with the day’s first coffee, that is ideal. Eagles and cormorants hunting and the small birds of everyday life all dart by. Clouds float along changing shapes and changing the morning light and fishing boats going out and already returning make this an hour of quiet and wonder that is hard to beat for concentration, and just pure ahhh. The rest of the year, I either write in my home office, where my laptop is, and with the advantage of nearness to my own library, or in a comfortable sunny chair in our living room.
Katy: Hmmm, I don’t have a particular favorite.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Alan: I put on ECM label jazz – Eberhard Weber, Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny.
Martin: Waking with the lines already coming is a great start. Sometimes that means grabbing the bedside notebook and retreating to the bathroom so as not to wake my wife. If it is late enough to get up – at least 5, I can go to the kitchen, make coffee and perhaps toast, and write at the dining room table watching the eastern sky’s first red bar and then the brightening sky. If I’m not starting with dream lines, I choose poets to read to put my mind in the right frame. For my current large project – a poem cycle of Aztec and Spanish monologues about the fateful 16th century meeting of two worlds, I often start by reading Aztec or other indigenous poets. There are many more than most people realize. Otherwise, depending on what I have in mind to write about, I may pull down Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Williams, or whoever seems most helpful.
Katy: I start on paper (notebooks, legal pads, sticky notes, envelopes, paper scraps by the cutting board, the edges of a newspaper article – yes I still like hardcopy newspapers – cheers).
Who always gets a first read?
Alan: Friends
Martin: My first reader is always my wife, Jane, who I know is biased but has a keen eye, especially for a word or phrase that doesn’t work. She works through every early draft before anyone else sees anything. Before the more critical reactions of workshops, her sympathetic reading is the best place to start, without getting discouraged too early. She has my abiding gratitude.
Katy: Often my husband. He is good at zeroing in on parts that are not clear.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Alan: Beloved, Great Expectations, One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Martin: Once again because of my current Aztec-Spanish project, I have been rereading different translations of the Iliad, from Pope’s 18 th century rhyming couplets to the whole slew of recent ones. My favorite for the language continues to be Robert Fagles. But there are so many good ones, each with a different tone. I can’t say I have read all of each one. But contrasting the various books and stanzas is always fascinating. While I have gone back and reread (just once) Pynchon’s earliest novels – The Crying of Lot 49, and V, and William Gibson’s earliest cyberpunk – Burning Chrome, Mona Lisa Overdrive, generally rather than whole books, I find myself returning to short pieces – like Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s short stories or Borges’ fables, and to poems from favorite poets – Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Pablo Neruda’s odes, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Gary Snyder, and the guilty pleasure of Sharon Olds’ Odes.
Katy: Geography of the Forehead by Ron Koertge and Copperhead Cane by Jim Wayne Miller with German translations by Thomas Dorsett.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Alan: Allen Ginsberg, Archibald MacLeish.
Martin: The biannual Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark NJ has been the most overwhelmingly powerful poetry event I have ever attended. My first visit in 2016 opened with a reading in the big hall (NJ Performing Arts Center – NJPAC) by the festival’s top poets, including Gary Snyder, Billy Collins, Martin Espada, Anne Waldman, Li-Young Li, and I am sure others I have forgotten. It genuinely brought me to tears. Every festival since then has been a wondrous three days. Nothing else I have ever been a part of has been as magical.
Katy: This is tricky. Many come to mind. I really enjoyed a reading that the Welsh poet Tony Curtis and his wife Margaret gave in Pennsylvania several years ago at “A Dylan Thomas Evening.” It was magical to hear them on this side of the Atlantic.
Alan Bogage is a retired librarian living in Westminster, Md. He has worked for Carroll Community College, American University, Howard County (Md.) Public Library, and Robert Morris College. He has facilitated (with others) a number of poetry readings including the Carroll County Arts Council and most recently, First Friday at the Ragged Edge (Gettysburg, Pa). His poems have appeared in Gently Strength Quarterly, Backbone Mountain Review, and the anthology Out of the Mouths of Men.
Katy Giebenhain is the author of Sharps Cabaret (Mercer University Press). Poems and prose have appeared in New Welsh Review, The Arkansas Review, The Examined Life Journal, PoetryXHunger, Bridge Eight, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, BMJ Medical Humanities Blog and elsewhere. Her luddite blog is Big Pharma and the Barkeep at www.katygiebenhain.com. She co-hosts a coffeehouse poetry series with Alan Bogage and Mary Malone.
Martin Malone’s poems have appeared in a number of little magazines, including Dream International Quarterly, Scribble, Seminary Ridge Review, Pennsylvania Bards Against Hunger 2018, Backbone Mountain Review, CentraLit, the Pennsylvania Poetry Society 2021 Anthology, and are forthcoming in the Maryland Literary Review. He is one of the organizers of Gettysburg’s First Friday Poetry Series. He was a professor of sociology and anthropology for 31 years at Mount Saint Mary’s University. His chapbook, Simple Gifts, was published in 2014. He lives in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Jane.
Meet Chrissy Stegman — 2022 Second Place Winner of the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Contest
In 2021, Howard County Poetry and Literature Society launched the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize in honor of its founding member, Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Now in its second year, contest judges evaluated many submissions from poets in ten states and three countries for mechanics and technique, clarity, style/music for our contemporary age, imagery/sensory power, and emotional resonance. They noted in “Blue Irises” the creative use of form, the original approach to this poignant subject, the resonant voice of the speaker, and the powerful tension of the poem’s arc.
Tell us about your poem “Blue Irises” How did it come about? What sparked or inspired it?
I received my annual postcard in the mail from GBMC hospital, asking for donations to the NICU. It reminded me.
My youngest son was born early and via emergency c-section. When he arrived, he was whisked away to the NICU.
The poem came from this experience and from the despair I felt at being in the NICU to nurse him or see him whenever they allowed me but also, the other babies sometimes didn’t survive. It was a devastating juxtaposition, living in that space of life and death. It stayed with me.
What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
That’s a difficult question for me to answer. I suppose it would be the hours I spent in various libraries as a child. Reading saved me so many times, supported me, gave me strength. The power was evident. Language can do that — it reminds me of a passage from The Bow and the Lyre (Octavio Paz): Man is a being who has created himself in creating a language. By means of the word, man is a metaphor of himself.
As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
My mascot would be pure crystalline silence. I have four school-aged kids in the home (one adult child out in the world) and it’s challenging to find the space and quiet to write and work things out. If not silence, then all of Rocky Mount and Ferrum, VA and the blackberry brambles there, the train tracks, and the cemetery. The Blue Ridge mountains? Take me home. Country roads.
Tell us about a writer or a book that you return to over and over for inspiration.
It’s always Elizabeth Bishop, Rilke, Harryette Mullen, Camus, Anne Carson, Theodore Roethke, Mark Strand, Larkin … I mean, it’s impossible to pick only one writer or book. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is gorgeous.
What are you working on next and where can we find you?
Currently, I’m taking an advanced masterclass at the 92NY Unterberg Poetry Center, New York. I’m also working on a book of poems that offers an interactive quality for the reader and finishing up my first chapbook. I have two poems coming out in March (Gone Lawn) and May (Blue Heron Review) so 2023 is off to a great start.
I can be found on IG: thegoosefaerie and Twitter: @pimpledrose
Hear poet Chrissy Stegman read “Blue Irises”
Poetries of Belonging — HoCoPoLitSo’s 15th Annual Blackbird Poetry Festival
Noah Arhm Choi headlines the Blackbird Poetry Festival to be held on April 27, 2023, at Howard Community College (HCC). The festival is a day devoted to verse, with a student workshop, readings, and HCC Poetry Ambassadors. The afternoon Sunbird Reading features Choi, Regie Cabico, local authors, and Howard Community College faculty and students. This free daytime event starts at 2:30 p.m. in the Rouse Community Foundation Building room 400 (RCF 400). The Nightbird program, in the Horowitz Center’s Monteabaro Hall, begins at 7:30 p.m. The evening features an introduction by Regie Cabico, a reading by Noah Arhm Choi, a reception and book signing. Nightbird tickets, $20 (HCC students free). If you need help with your order, the Horowitz Center Box Office (443.518.1500) has limited phone hours to answer your questions. Tickets for Nightbird can be found through this link: https://ci.ovationtix.com/32275/production/1156148.
Noah Arhm Choi is the author of Cut to Bloom (Write Bloody Publishing) the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Prize. They received a MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and their work appears in Barrow Street, Blackbird, The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Split this Rock and others. Noah was shortlisted for the Poetry International Prize and received the 2021 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize, alongside fellowships from Kundiman, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and Associate Director of DEI at a school in New York City. Jeanann Verlee, the author of Prey, noted “Cut to Bloom is neither delicate nor tidy. This immense work both elucidates and complicates ethnic, generational, and gender violence, examining women who fight for their humanity against those who seek to silence―indeed, erase―them.”
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won The Nuyorican Poets Cafe GrandSlam and later taking top prizes in three National Poetry Slams. Television credits include 2 seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, NPR’s Snap Judgement and MTV’s Free Your Mind. He is the lead teaching artist for Poetry Out Loud and has recorded several videos for the National Endowment for the Arts and Poetry Foundation.
For more than forty-five years, HoCoPoLitSo has nurtured a love and respect for the diversity of contemporary literary arts in Howard County. The society sponsors literary readings and writers-in-residence outreach programs, produces The Writing Life (a writer-to-writer talk show), and partners with other cultural arts organizations to support the arts in Howard County, Maryland. More information is available at http://www.hocopolitso.org.
HoCoPoLitSo receives funding from the Howard County Arts Council through a grant from Howard County government; Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland; the Community Foundation of Howard County; Dr. Lillian Bauder; and individual contributors.
Wilde Readers of February: Melvin Brown and Anthony Moll
We welcome you to our February edition of the Wilde Readings Series with Melvin Brown and Anthony Moll, hosted By Linda Joy Burke. Join us at the Columbia Art Center (Columbia Art Center 6100 Foreland Garth Columbia, MD 21045) on Tuesday, February 14th 7-9 PM. Please spread the word – bring your friends, family, and students.
We encourage you to participate in the open mic. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time/two poems. Sign up in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center, or when you arrive. The number is 410-730-0075. Light refreshments will be served. Books by both featured authors and open mic readers will be available for sale.
Get to know our authors Melvin and Anthony below!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
MB: My grandmother.
AM: I write a lot about chosen family, which means so much to Queer folks who are severed from their biological family. That includes my partner and our closest friends, but also exes and partners of partners. In my most recent collection, it also includes my dog, Chickpea.
Where is your favorite place to write?
MB: My study or kitchen.
AM: Most of my writing happens on my couch, but a few times a year, a small group of my close friends and I will take short retreats to either beach towns in the winter or cabins in the other seasons. We’re dedicated to be writing and nothing else until dinner, then we can stop to share, eat, and generally be in community together. It’s a really delicious balance of productivity and being social.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
MB: No.
AM: I don’t know if counts as ritual, but most of the time I spend generating ideas, outlining, and sometimes even drafting, is when I am walking around my neighborhood in Baltimore. Those ideas all rest in the Notes app of my phone (the digital equivalent of the writers notebook), until I have some time to craft them into something worthwhile.
Who always gets a first read?
MB: My friend and Poet Peter J. Harris.
AM: My partner is always my alpha reader, because she’s an voracious, brilliant reader who can also speak to me candidly about what’s working and what isn’t. Then it goes to my writing group for beta, and they are a skilled group of writers who can really look at the work-in-progress from every angle. Every one of them has played a part in helping my books come together.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
MB: Do Lord Remember Me by Julius Lester.
AM: About a Mountain by John D’Agata. I know he’s a bit of a controversial figure, but I really love the way he blends research and lyrical prose in that work. I also love the mythology that has come to surround the book!
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
MB: Can’t remember.
AM: A few years before she passed, Toni Morrison read in Santa Cruz, and Angela Davis provided the introduction. I think it was the only time I’ve ever been truly starstruck, and the energy that night was as if whole audience knew we were in the presence of some of the most brilliant minds of our era.
Melvin Brown
Melvin E. Brown is an American poet, educator, editor, and lyricist. He was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. Brown was the longest-serving editor of Chicory, a magazine published by the Enoch Pratt Free Library. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the author of two collections of poetry, In the First Place and Blue Notes and Blessing Songs.
Anthony Moll
Anthony Moll is a Queer poet, essayist and educator. Their work has appeared in Hobart, Little Patuxent Review, Poet Lore, jubilat and more. Anthony is a PhD Candidate in English and holds an MFA in creative writing & publishing arts. Their debut memoir, Out of Step, won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and the 2017 Non/Fiction Prize. Their latest collection of poems, You Cannot Save Here, won the 2022 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize. Their work has also been recognized with the Adele V. Holden Prize for Creative Excellence, the Bill Knott Poetry Prize, inclusion on the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List, and a Best of Net nomination.
Colm Tóibín and Maureen Dowd headline HoCoPoLitSo’s 45th Annual Irish Evening
7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 18, 2023
Smith Theater – Howard Community College
HoCoPoLitSo’s 45th annual Irish Evening of Music and Poetry on Saturday, February 18, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. presents Where Journalism Meets Literature: A Conversation with Colm Tóibín and Maureen Dowd. Tóibín and Dowd will explore the crossroads between journalism and literature and read from their recent works. The evening also features music by Poor Man’s Gambit and Ireland’s new Ambassador to the U.S, Geraldine Byrne Nason, has been invited.
General in person admission is $45 and a livestream viewing option is $20.
In-person event tickets: https://ci.ovationtix.com/32275/production/1142555?performanceId=11188584
Livestream tickets: https://ci.ovationtix.com/32275/production/1142556?performanceId=11188582
Colm Tóibín has been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize and received the 2021 David Cohen Prize for Literature, a lifetime achievement award. In his most recent novel, The Magician, Tóibín explores the heart and mind of a writer, Thomas Mann, whose life is driven by a need to belong and the anguish of illicit desire, in a stunning marriage of research and imagination. Oprah Daily noted the “dazzling, epic family saga set across a half-century spanning World War I, the rise of Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War that is a feat of literary sorcery in its own right.” Tóibín, an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet, has a book of essays, A Guest at the Feast, scheduled for release in January 2023.
Maureen Dowd, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist, writes about American politics, popular culture, and international affairs. The winner of the two Pulitzer Prizes- one in 1999 for distinguished commentary and the other in 1992 for national reporting, Dowd was born in Washington, D.C and previously worked for the Washington Star. She is the author of three New York Times best sellers: Bushworld: Enter at Your Own Risk (2004); Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (2005) and The Year of Voting Dangerously: The Derangement of American Politics (2016).
The evening program begins at 7:30 p.m. Irish beverages, snacks and books will be offered for sale beginning at 7 p.m. and during intermission. A book sale and signing follows the reading and discussion. After intermission, Poor Man’s Gambit will play traditional Irish music, with fiddle, button accordion, guitar, bodhran, and bouzouki.
wilde readers: lisa lynn biggar and tara elliott
Please join the January Wilde Readings featuring authors Lisa Lynn Biggar and Tara Elliott on Tuesday January 10, 2023 at 7 pm on Zoom! This event will be hosted by Ann Bracken, Linda Joy Burke, and Laura Shovan.
Register in advance for this webinar: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_q_stx5aXRqS6X8jXGPmc0A
For details about the event, please visit: https://www.facebook.com/events/1188834605044789
Get to know the featured authors Lisa and Tara below!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
LLB: My grandmother, my dad’s mom, who had a dairy farm in northeast, PA with my grandfather. I spent most of my summers there growing up, and my grandmother and I were incredibly close. I’d help her with all the barn chores, bailing hay, weeding the vegetable garden. . . I just completed a novella-in-flash titled Unpasteurized in which she is the thread that binds, just like she held all our family together all those years. She had five boys and a girl who died when she was only 10 hours old. She always said I was that lost baby.
TE: My parents. I lost my dad when I was 24 to cancer and my mother in 2019 to dementia. Writing has allowed me to grieve their loss.
Where is your favorite place to write?
LLB: I have a beautiful writing studio upstairs in my home that my husband built for me. But that has become more of my Zoom studio. I do a lot of Zoom tutoring for The Gunston School, a private high school in Centreville, and also for Chesapeake College. If I spend too much time up there I get a bit claustrophobic, so now I tend to write more downstairs on the couch in my living room with a view of my wooded back yard, or in the car (as a passenger).
TE: Outside–either late at night or before the world awakens. I need nature and the silence to see what rises to the surface.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
LLB: I read a few paragraphs of Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. I love his lyrical writing with those seemingly endless sentences.
TE: No, but I keep the following on my desk to remind me of things that have become important to my writing… A core of stone from when I visited a gold mine in Colorado. A piece of cotton that Le Hinton gave me when I attended his reading for his book, “Sing Silence. A river stone given to me my a dear friend who is no longer with us. Bits of sea shells worn smooth by the ocean. A pinecone. All of these natural objects remind me to go deeper than I think is necessary, that interconnection is vital, and that revision is what makes things beautiful, even when broken. The spiral found in the end of the pinecone reminds me of the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence–a pattern found in nature that resurfaces again and again in my poems.
Who always gets a first read?
LLB: My husband, Don, who is my biggest fan and greatest critic, and my writing friend, Dan Crawley. Dan is considered a master of flash fiction and has a novella-in-flash out published by Ad Hoc Fiction, Straight Down the Road, which I highly recommend. He also has an exceptional short story collection out published by Cowboy Jamboree Press, The Wind, It Swirls.
TE: My desk drawer. I’ve learned that separating myself from my writing helps me to clearly see what needs to be revised.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
LLB: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. The interlude where the house is personified especially mesmerizes me.
TE: I return again and again to many books but “The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton”, edited by Kevin Young and Michael Glaser, is one that I regularly revisit. Lucille was my professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in the early 90’s. Every time I encounter her poems, I seem to find something new that I didn’t notice earlier, whether its the way she ended a line, a sound, an image, a connection, or a message I was not ready to receive. Although she passed away in 2010, to say that she is still teaching is an understatement.
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
LLB: Oh so many, but I would have to say Dorothy Allison at a book festival in Flagstaff, AZ. She read from her recently published book then, Bastard Out of Carolina. Her words were so raw, and she was so authentic of a person. She laid it out bare.
TE: Li-Young Lee. Lee’s reading was incredibly intimate and spiritual, something I try to emulate in my own readings.
Lisa Lynn Biggar received her MFA in Fiction from Vermont College and is currently marketing a short story cycle set on the eastern shore of Maryland. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals including Main Street Rag, Bluestem Magazine, The Minnesota Review, Kentucky Review, The Delmarva Review and Superstition Review. She’s the fiction editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-owns and operates a cut flower farm in Maryland with her husband and three cats.
Tara A. Elliott’s poems have appeared in TAOS Journal of International Poetry & Art, The American Journal of Poetry, and Ninth Letter, among others. President of the Eastern Shore Writers Association, she is also the founder and director of Salisbury Poetry Week and co-chair of the annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. A recent winner of Maryland State Arts Council’s Independent Artist Award, she has work forthcoming in Cimarron Review.
wilde readers of december: noa baum & tara hart
On December 13th at 7 pm, join us at the Columbia Art Center for the December Wilde Readings, featuring storyteller Noa Baum and poet Tara Hart. The event will be hosted by Ann Bracken, Linda Joy Burke, and Laura Shovan. We encourage you to participate in the open mic. Please prepare no more than five minutes of performance time/two poems. Sign up in advance by calling the Columbia Arts Center, or when you arrive. The number is 410-730-0075.
Here is what Noa and Tara had to say to our favorite six questions!
Who is the person in your life (past or present) that shows up most often in your writing?
Noa: My mother and grandmothers probably.
Tara: My late daughter Tessa is either explicitly or implicitly, in her absence, in most of my poems.
Where is your favorite place to write?
Noa: I am primarily a spoken word artist so the writing is a tool to support my speaking. I don’t have a favorite place.
Tara: I have been composing most poems during my morning walks in the woods near my house. My dog Buddha loves walking early and long, which is good for me as well, and I find lines coming to me on the paths. I used to wait to get home to write them down, but sadly they would have dissolved. Now I use the “voice memos” app on my phone to capture lines and ideas as they arise, and then I find little pockets of time to listen to those memos and transcribe them, writing and shaping as I listen. The places I write depend on what pocket of time I’m seizing — at my desk at work or at home, in a journal I keep in my car. Sometimes I make the time to write for a longer stretch — a sort of mini-retreat — and I will take my laptop or journal somewhere neutral like a library or coffee shop, where I don’t feel the pull of other tasks.
Do you have any consistent pre-writing rituals?
Noa: I start by speaking and telling the story several times to different listeners before I write it down.
Tara: Before everything, there is reading. Reading others’ poetry is my best pre-writing ritual, whether that is curled up with their books, surfing poets.org, or listening to Padraig O’Tuama’s “Poetry Unbound” podcast. Others’ poems are like the rows of prayer candles in a church, from which I find light for my own intentions.
Who always gets a first read?
Noa: I have several storytelling friends that I work with on new material. I always read it aloud.
Tara: No one person. I’m always grateful that I shared a poem with my father in which I sought to imagine his most difficult days just before I was born — when he lost his best friend and was losing his mother. It was one of the very few times that I saw him cry. My mother finds a lot of comfort in the loss of her granddaughter in my chapbook. These days, I tend to keep my poems close; most of them are just for me. My daughter Bella seems to enjoy reading the ones I’ve published in my chapbook that are about her. If I’m sending them out into the world, an audience at a reading will hear them first, or an editor or contest judge will the first to see them. Years ago I was part of a lovely group of writers who met regularly to share our work: I miss that and hope that in a less busy season of our lives we will resume.
What is a book you’ve read more than twice (and would read again)?
Noa: One Hundred Year of solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Tara: Orlando by Virginia Woolf
What is the most memorable reading you have attended?
Noa: David Whyte at the Psycotherapy Networker Conference.
Tara: I have the incredible good fortune to attend so many wonderful readings in my work with HoCoPoLitSo, but I can say my most vivid emotional memory is of Patricia Smith’s 2013 visit, when HoCoPoLitSo hosted her as part of the Columbia Festival of the Arts. Smith read her suite of poems about Hurricane Katrina, “Blood Dazzler,” as the Sage String Quartet played Wynton Marsalis’ “At the Octoroon Balls.” It was beyond moving — it was transcendent. It felt like everything that we imagine great literature can do for the human spirit: connect us, enlarge us, make us better people for that encounter.
About the authors:
The Washington Post describes Noa Baum as someone who “spreads cultural truths that eclipse geopolitical boundaries…”. Israeli born, Noa is an internationally acclaimed storyteller, author, and coach focusing on the power of storytelling to heal across divides of identity and build peace. She is the author of the award-winning memoir A Land Twice Promised and a new picture book How the Birds Became Friends.
Tara Hart, Ph.D., was awarded a 2011 Pushcart Prize for Poetry and has a chapbook entitled The Colors of Absence. Other places her poems appear include the anthology to linger on hot coals: collected poetic works from grieving women writers. She is a professor and chair of humanities at Howard Community College, and co-chair of the Board of Directors of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society (HoCoPoLitSo).
Recommended Reading: Student Neal Goturi Takes a Look at Popular Cherry Castle Anthology Where We Stand.
As the popular anthology Where We Stand, Poems of Black Resilience is available for sale again, we share student Neal Goturi’s review of a reading held this summer to promote the first printing of the anthology. Neal is a sophomore at River Hill High School and he has recently begun serving as a Bauder Youth Advisor on the board of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society.
“I can not praise and recommend
Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience enough.”
Last summer, I went to the reading of the poetry anthology, Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience, in the Lucille Clifton Reading Room of Busboys and Poets, the popular restaurant in Downtown Columbia that has a performance space on the second floor. It was the first reading I had ever attended; I was excited to take a break from the more conventional avenues of consuming literature and branch out.
Where We Stand has its roots in a group of socially conscious poets and artists coming together to process the outcomes of the 2016 election and the impending doom of America’s ethos. By the end of production, one understood that editors Enzo Sirloin, Melanie Henderson, and Truth Thomas have put together a must-read collection . It features nearly 30 authors, and a number of poems from each. Powerful photographs partition the book into four parts: Watch for Black Lives, The District Line, The Breathing Fence, and Black Joy Matters.
The evening’s first reader was Joseph Ross, opening with his lines from the anthology:
There is an essential difference
(“Cross, Hood, Noose An American History Lesson”, Ross, Where We Stand, 16)
between wood and flame.
It is a gap wide enough
for the Pledge of Allegiance
to walk through laughing.
Remember to not let the base
burn so the cross can stand
for as long as needed…
[In the following clip, Ross reads his poem, “If Mamie Till was the Mother of God,” at the Busboys & Poets event. The powerful poem, not featured in the anthology, won the Enoch Pratt Free Library / Little Patuxent Review Poetry Contest in 2012.]
His poetry commanded attention and set the tone for the night. As the night went on, the speakers read through selected poems — the air kept quiet and was foreboding. Each story told by verse was so heavy that I felt like I needed to take a moment to process it — a break from the cacophony of injustice presented. The person sitting next to me agreed.
Later, as I was walking out, I realized the irony of the situation. We desired something inaccessible to the artists who had just presented: a break. Be it from tragic stories, blind angels, or clipped wings. After only a glimpse of the potency of American venom, the recess from reality requested is out of sight to those most inundated. That is something so foul that no gilded sentiment or sentence can do it justice; it lies beyond a formation of words.
I’ve recently become more aware of my privilege and the privilege present in my community. Columbia is always serene on summer evenings. It is a sheltered and affluent suburban enclave. This lends itself to the vast majority of residents enjoying a level of cognitive dissonance to the obstacles myriads of Americans face. The poets who performed on July 8th brought black experiences into the spotlight and celebrated them; they shortened the empathetic gap between.
I can not praise and recommend Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience enough. It is raw, essential, and uniquely comforting. While I was writing this post, the anthology quickly sold out online. If you looked, you could find the odd copy at places like Busboys and Poets. Its publisher, Cherry Castle Publishing has just issued a second printing of the anthology. To order a copy, visit their website cherrycastlepublishing.com
Where We Stand, Poems of Black Resilience quickly sold out of its first printing. As of November 25, this popular and important anthology is available again. Visit CherryCastlePublishing.com to get yourself and everyone you know copies.
HoCoPoLitSo 