Four Seasons in the Truckee Cultural District: a feature article in Muse Magazine

photo: Scott Thompson, Scott Shots Photography

If you have friends and family coming to visit Truckee this year, what can you tell them about the fun inspiring cultural events happening year-round? I tried to answer this question in this feature article in Muse Magazine, our county-wide guide to arts and culture. 

People are drawn to Truckee for our historic downtown, unique locally crafted artisan shops, beautiful mountain setting and funky vibe. Whether you are a longtime resident or visiting Truckee for the first time, there are many seasonal adventures awaiting. Here is an insider's guide. 

"Stroll the historic district and wander into Mountain Arts Collective, Gallery 5830 and Riverside Studios featuring local artisans. For the warmest view of the tree lighting, head upstairs to the rustic Truckee Tavern for craft cocktails. Gin lovers favor the Bee’s Knees.

For a quieter morning in nature, rent some cross country skis or snowshoes and find groomed and ungroomed trails winding through the forest and along the snowy beaches of Donner Memorial State Park. If you want more groomed trails, Tahoe Donner Cross Country spans more than 2,800 acres. The Adventure Center fire pits are a local favorite, lining the back porch and surrounded by Adirondack chairs.

You can warm up back in town at The Carriage House in the magical patio behind RMU. This is a gathering spot for locals to play board games inside or circle the fire pits under strings of lights outside. Sundays feature exceptional Bloody Marys. Order hearty meals at the bar such as sauteed Brussel sprouts with maple syrup or tomato soup with grilled cheese. 

Afterward, walk just a few storefronts down the street to Piper J Gallery, where you can find world-class mountain modern art in a quaint old-house setting."

You can read the insider's guide to cultural events in Spring, Summer and Fall here.

 

 

A shining expanse of stars over Truckee: the Dark Skies initiative and Muse Magazine

 I'm happy to share a featured story I wrote for Muse Magazine, Nevada County's art magazine. 

"Shining Light on Dark Skies Above Nevada County: A New Initiative"

When I lived in the Rocky Mountains high on the Western slope of Colorado, I was thirty years younger than I am now. Many nights I would venture out to walk for miles in the dark with my Border Collie beneath a shining expanse of stars. One could get dizzy looking up at the white froth of the milky way spilling out above. 

Now when I walk my dog at nighttime along the streets of Truckee, I look up to seek the Big Dipper, and in December, my birthday month, Orion’s bright belt hanging above our downtown lit up for the holidays. Occasionally, I’ll see a bear wandering beneath the stars alongside me. While time and geography create change in our lives, the night sky is a record of both familiar certainty and the vast unknown, of seasonal change and astronomical phenomena.

Why is our view of the night sky—stars and planets and moons—so moving? What is significant about access, nightly, to our relevance within this solar system, this galaxy? And what would we be missing if, when we walked in the quiet dark of our neighborhoods, we could view above only a pale unmarked screen reflecting back the electric lights of human development?

You can read the rest of the article here. Muse is a guide to local art and culture in Nevada County. Look for a copy of this glossy beautiful magazine in galleries, at the airport, and in theaters and many artsy venues around our county.

 

An idea from the Surealists for revising poems - from Shadows on the Snow Part 2

Last Monday night a group of poets gathered to read poems and explore how to find guidance to write our own new poems. And then how to re-enter a draft and discover what might have been hidden from you in your writing process, until now? 

Here's one technique I've played with to discover the heart of a poem in revision. Sometimes the poem branches into two poems.

“I’d propose that…intense involvement in rich, descriptive speech also creates another subject,

which is the character of the perceiver. It’s a kind of perceptual signature, a record of a way of an individual way of seeing. This is one of the central things which poetry is: a vessel of

individuality, a distillation of the way one person experiences the world, knows herself in time

and in place.” - Mark Doty, “Speaking in Figures,” Poets.org

Automatic writing: Surrealism originated in the late 1910s and early '20s as a literary movement that experimented with a new mode of expression called automatic writing, or automatism, which sought to release the unbridled imagination of the subconscious, influenced by the psychological theories and dream studies of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the political ideas of Karl Marx (1818–1883). Using Freudian methods of free association, their poetry and prose drew upon the private world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising, unexpected imagery. The cerebral and irrational tenets of Surrealism find their ancestry in the clever and whimsical disregard for tradition fostered by Dadaism a decade earlier.

Prompt: Write an antonymic translation of your poem draft. Notice how the process requires you to define each word as you mean it before you then have to choose from an impossibility an opposite word. What words are the hardest to translate? What do you discover about what your poem is about through this translation?

Antonymic Translation – write the opposite of each of the nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs OR by each general idea. For example:

·       To be or not to be: that is the question

·       To not be and to be: this was an answer

·       We had more important things to worry about than suicide

A Display of Mackerel (by Mark Doty - just the first few sentences)

 

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

 

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales'

radiant sections

 

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

 

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

 

think sun on gasoline.

Here is my translation of the first few sentences of Mark Doty's amazing poem A Display of Mackerel:

Antonymic Translation (my own)

I stand myself a column

Under fire, foot nor navel,

Not an inch of matte dark-

Solid, a lighted hole

Undivided, and skin

Invisibled

Not any indication

Of my making.

Gravity, dirt,

Inward: know tubor,

Domestic celery

Bulb buried within itself,

Know moon and cheese.

 

Explore your poem by listing some images that stand out from your antonymic translation or your poem you have written. What are the possibilities they create?

·       Study these details you have written. “…they aren't "neutral," though they might pretend to be, but instead suggest a point of view, a stance toward what is being seen”

·       Inquire what this stance or place of viewing within an image or world could be?

Shadows on the Snow: what is a winter poem?

In tonight's poetry workshop, we asked each other what is a winter poem? We read many poems with themes that seem winter-ish. We questioned assumptions of winter meanings. We wrote new things that will become poems as they grow. Next week we will review techniques to play with the content in different forms, maybe long lines or short lines, maybe by addressing some wintery force, or by asking can winter shield us from what we know is coming over the horizon?

Read this winter poem by Hayden Carruth for inspiration in your own writing. 

Prompt: Can you describe a moment of your own experience that contains the duality of safety and imminent threat, the comfort of a murmuring fire and the suffering you know continues?

The Curtain By Hayden Carruth

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.

We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.

But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window

We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,

We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees

So graceful. In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost

With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,

We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time. “Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet

Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom

Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months

Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale. In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs

In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives

Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.

We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.

For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives—for instance,

The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,

Covered with sores, unable to speak. But of course we see the child every day,

We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.

No, the index cannot close. And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never

Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,

Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,

May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.

Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.