Summer literary events - here's where to find your people

 Hi Writers!

I'm collaborating with the Melhop Gallery to offer a new art-based workshop. Ekphrasis comes from the definition “Description” in Greek. Traditionally, an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the writer may amplify and expand its meaning.Poems and writing in any genre can be informed by visual art, architecture, film, music, and live performance.

“It is as if there is a circuit or feedback loop between the poem—the poem as act of composition, revision, and/or construction—and the art object. … So that when one composes they may be aware of many layers of meditation between themselves and some communion with the work of art.” – Thom Donovan, Harriet  Blog

Join us at the Melhop Gallery in Zephyr Cove on the evening of June 22nd, a Wednesday, to explore the exhibit and to let the art be your guide for new writing!

The gallery is a woman-owned business with a mission to introduce and support practicing artists who are creating art with ethical and conceptual substance. The gallery works with architects and designers helping collectors refine their art collections while helping to build a thriving arts community in Nevada and nearby California.

In addition to exhibiting solo exhibitions of represented artists, Melhop Gallery also exhibits curated group exhibitions that include invited artists as well as those represented.
The gallery is open by appointment, contact hello@melhopgallery.com or keep an eye on social media @melhopgallery7077 and website www.melhopgallery.com for open days.

Here's some approaches to discovering how art can guide your own writing:

• Your writing can be about or for the art as an object
• Your writing can engage with the art or a character within the art
• Your writing can embody the process of the art
• Your writing can help you understand or see in a way you haven't seen before
• Your writing can reflect upon the moment of encounter with the art
• Your writing can contemplate the materials of the art object
• Your writing can imagine what extends beyond the borders of the art

We'll have beverages and snacks, too, so come a bit early to tour the gallery before the workshop begins.

Finally, Tangled Roots Writing is in person in downtown Truckee for playful Monday night creative writing workshop pop ups continuing with four workshops over this summer. These are welcoming generative writing sessions with tea and chocolate in my living room and garden when the weather cooperates.

Do you have a book length writing project or manuscript (novel or memoir) that you want to revise for publication? Join the Master Revision Workshop meeting monthly on Zoom beginning again in September after our summer break.
 

I'm so excited to schedule another Literary Submission Garden Party! We will share the latest news in the world of publishing in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Reassess your goals or set publishing goals for the first time in your writing life. Learn new tips for finding venues to submit your poetry, stories, and essays. Gain the confidence to send your work out into the world and meet other writers in our community.

Please read my blog for more information on the latest workshops with Tangled Roots Writing, or call me at 530-386-3901 to brainstorm about your writing goals. I would love to help you reach them.

Happy writing!
Karen Terrey

An Ekphrastic Writing Workshop June 22nd "From the wall to the page: making story and poetry from art"

Join us for an evening of deeper reflection on the current show in a playful and generative creative writing workshop “From the wall to the page: making story and poetry from art” June 22^nd at 6 – 7:30 pm.

The MELHOP GALLERY º7077 is a woman-owned business with a mission to introduce and support practicing artists who are creating art with ethical and conceptual substance. The gallery works with architects and designers helping collectors refine their art collections while helping to build a thriving arts community in Nevada and nearby California.

This past Saturday evening, two concurrent shows opened at the gallery. A solo exhibit, "American Snapshot", of paintings and drawings by artist Kelly Popoff explores snapshots as "a reference to try to capture the essence of American life – with emphasis on family, memory and socio-psychological dynamics."

In addition to exhibiting solo exhibitions of represented artists, Melhop Gallery also exhibits curated group exhibitions that include invited artists as well as those represented. What I love about the artists is that all of them are teachers as well of their medium. As Frances Melhop, the gallery owner and curator pointed out at the opening last Saturday evening, this engagement pushes these artists to stay present on the ground with current and new students and the practicalities of making new art.

"No Such Place" is an exhibition of invited artists playfully exploring non-traditional approaches to the landscape genre:  

"After these last strange years of internalization, absence from friends and excursions, living more and more through the screen, these are contemporary artists thinking about our surroundings, exploring landscapes of the imagination or no-such-places, where the mind, heart and eye can rest or dream…"

In this creative writing workshop, we will talk about how writers can respond to visual art as inspiration for new writing in poetry and prose. What is happening in this artwork? What story is being told? How does this artwork connect with you personally? As a storyteller or a poet, you’ll discover new methods to understanding art as well as new jumpstarts for art-inspired (ekphrastic) writing. 

Arrive early on June 22nd if you’d like to view the show with snacks and beverages before the workshop. We will begin at 6 pm with a short discussion with insights into the art of Kelly Popoff and the other artists in the show, and then sit down to write from a fun series of writing prompts. This is a supportive, playful, and generative workshop for creatives of all art mediums and all levels of experience.

The address is 210 Elks Point Road, Zephyr Cove, NV, 89448.

Finding Inspiration in the Spontaneous Community Created within Literary Gatherings: Mountain Words Literary Festival, Crested Butte, CO

"Perhaps we are all here to trace and collect words, to sow meaning; we collect that thing which people discard as ordinary and bring it to a page of life where it can flourish and be the map of human struggle and therefore an instruction as to how we can all survive. " - Aaron a. Abeyta

I jumped in my car a bit last minute a week ago to drive 16 hours across Nevada and Utah to participate in an exciting new gathering of writers. The Mountain Words Literary Festival is a multi-day literary celebration at nine-thousand feet, featuring readings, workshops, kids' events, parties, panel discussions, live theater, and more. Over four days, I joined other writers, film makers, scientists and artists beginning at 9 am to stretch our imaginations and hands in a shared community at the architecturally striking Arts Center in downtown Crested Butte, CO.

Thursday morning early I found a seat with a view of the valley looking north towards Mt. Crested Butte peak for Nuha Fariha's workshop, "Better Together: Creative Collaboration". Fariha is the Fiction Editor of the New Delta Review.

I finished Thursday morning with a dive into the concepts of status and stasis, exploring where we stand in our writing. This workshop applied the concepts of playwriting by Keith Johnston in Impro for Storytellers. Dr. Paul Edwards, a retired professor of Communication Arts of from Western Colorado University and playwrite/director at the Crested Butte Community Theater, guided us through a discussion of how status actions motivate a character in a scene. I wrote some dialogue and felt a prick of Ahha!

So much inspiration here in the varied writers, teachers, panels, and workshops! More details will emerge in blog posts over the next few weeks. I just want to mention one particular writer and teacher who was awarded on Friday night the Karen Chamberlain Award for “ outstanding service to poetry in Colorado, a long history of building communities of poets & providing inspiration to us all by developing a body of powerful work”. Aaron Abeyto is a poet, novelist, teacher, and the mayor of his hometown, Antonito, Colorado. He read for us an open letter he's published in praise of books. His passion and obvious love and care for other human beings shone from his face as he read this letter. I bought his novel Rise, Do Not Be Afraid, and can't wait to become more familiar with his poetry!

 

Imag[In]ing America: a exhibit of photography by Jennifer Garza-Cuen at Melhop Gallery in Zephyr Cove

 

After wandering alone from photograph to photograph, taking in the staged details, trying to observe with a level of specificity worthy of this photographer’s eye, at last I’m overwhelmed. The images make me uncomfortable. I cannot passively observe. I must feel and respond. The subjects stare at me as if saying, judge me if you will but don’t look away from me.

I sit in a pale wooden chair in the front room before nine square photographs on the wall ahead of me. Behind me the windows are paned in rectangles and the sun is projecting the shadows of clouds onto the floor, as if they float on the surface of water.

To my right, a large photograph captures the black-green rippled water of a pond and the white body of a young woman floating naked, eyes closed, mouth open, auburn hair wrapping around her tricep. On my left, a girl stands alone in a wide rural empty road that curves behind her, like her curling hair, like the curving boa wrapped in her wrists and draping down to tip under the hem of her dress. The girl stares straight at me. 

I’m a poet, and I felt intimidated when Jennifer asked me to write a response essay for her solo show at the Melhop gallery. I’ve known Jennifer Garza-Cuen for many years while we participated together in the Reno Art Salon with a vibrant group of artists of diverse mediums. "I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing," wrote John Cage in his book Silence. As a literary artist I love collaborating with visual artists, seeing through fresh interdisciplinary lenses each other’s work.  I think what poets and photographers share with their viewers is the question, what does it mean? In my own experience as a poet and teacher, people read a poem or listen to a poem and then look up wide-eyed and anxious that they must now be able to answer that question. I don’t know what Jennifer’s photographs mean. 

I’ve always been guided by this idea that a poem is not complete without its reader. The poet, the speaker, and the reader collaborate in a created social space. In these photographs, I feel the presence of the photographer, the subject, and myself. Maybe in photographs of people, we always experience the illicitness of the voyeur. In these photographs, most of the subjects look brazenly at me. Not back at me. They are looking at me first, hand and fingers poised arrogantly with a cigarette. I imagine they have already considered why they are being photographed, and why they want to be in this photograph.

If I look closely, I see my own reflection in these photos I've taken, within the social space of the scene. The poet Myung Mi Kim in Commons wrote, "The poem may be said...to mobilize the notion of our responsibility to one another in a social space." These photographs loudly protest any attempt to step away from my complicity.