Tag Archive | spoken word

Believe You Can – A Virtual Talent Show

believeyoucanflyer

On October 17th, myself and several other blind and visually-impaired performers are taking to the virtual stage to showcase all kinds of talents. There will be singers and musicians and spoken word artists and even, I’m told, a clogging tutorial. I’m not even sure what clogging is, but I’m excited to find out!

For my part of the show, I’ll be reading a prose piece. I’m deciding between two (and both are ones I’ve read at other events). I just have to read both over, pick one, and edit out the swearing. I’m assuming this is a family-friendly audience, while most of my live reading spoken word type stuff has always been among adults.

The event benefits the National Federation of the Blind of Pennsylvania and is part of Meet the Blind Month, which happens yearly every October.

I’m looking forward to sharing my work, and to experiencing the varied talents of the other performers.

Here’s the flyer in link form:
Believe You Can Flyer

And here’s a link for tickets and info:
Believe You Can website

I hope to see you there!

-April

(Overdue) Writing Update: Publication in Aerial

Jul28

screen-shot-2019-07-24-at-11-45-40-pm I was away for a long time, and in that time, I had some writing news and updates that I’m overdue in sharing here.

One of those is that my piece “Living the Dream?” was published in Aerial, the art and literary magazine from OHSU’s School of Medicine.

Knowing that such a magazine existed was one of the many things that drew me to OHSU as a school. I wanted to be somewhere that valued writing and the arts along with all the science-y, clinical-y stuff I love. Since starting school there, I’ve found a good group of people, not only the people who run Aerial, but also a lot of people involved in narrative medicine, humanities in medicine, live storytelling, and so forth.

In fact, this piece came from the final assignment in a Narrative Medicine elective class I took last winter, taught by Dr. Elizabeth Lahti, who is THE narrative medicine, medical humanities person at OHSU. The assignment was to write “25 Things I Know About…” something. The assignment was based on the short story “25 Things I know About My Husband’s Mother” by Louise Aronson from her book A History of the Present Illness. We read this and other stories from this book in our class, and I highly recommend.

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Home, Home Again

Nov29

…and I can definitely say, to quote another band, “what a loooooooong, strange trip it’s been.”

Three weeks and a day of traveling all over the east coast. I went from Philly to Allentown, PA, from there a quick trip up to Albany for a concert, then back to Allentown, then Boston, then Baltimore, then back to Allentown, then to NYC, then to Philly (with a trip from NYC out to Long Island to meet my ride back to Philly). Then yesterday morning, I left Philly for my trek back to Orcas Island, which, all told, took 18 hours.

In a way it was a rock star kind of trip, waking up in all these different cities. So many nights, I had the sensation of coming in or out of sleep and being disoriented, wondering where I was. It was great. Throughout the trip, I slept on couches, in two hotels, in a basement spare room, in a shared twin bed in a dorm room and on a pullout couch. I saw so many friends it was amazing. Not just the ones I stayed with, but friends I saw at concerts, friends who came to my reading in New York City, a friend who I rarely get to see and who is going to Iraq in January. We met for two hours, went out to eat at a brewery, it was the fourth time I’ve seen in the last seven years. I get a little choked up sometimes, just thinking about how precious it is to have these short encounters with people who matter.

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Upcoming Ideas and Opportunities

Aug15

In the last few weeks, a whole bunch of writing-related opportunites have come up.

The first one happened a little over two weeks ago. A woman in my writing group hired me to work on her book. She has a lot of material she’s written over the last few years and needs help organizing it, seeing where there’s overlap, seeing where there’s empty spaces, and getting it into some sort of order. I’ve finished the first read-through of everything she has, and am about to start taking inventory and putting things in order. I have to do that to see where the overlap and empty spaces are, as there’s a huge amount of material. It’s going to be a huge long-term project but I’m really excited about it and enjoying the work.

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