Kaaren Whitney: Turning Of The Year--And Turning A New Global Leaf

Tomorrow night's Open Mic speaker is Kaaren Whitney, a UK-based homeopath, who returns this month each year to the Connecticut from which she originally hails, sharing her most recent poetry and observations on the alternating tensions and acts of tenderness defining our associations with one another and the natural world.

Protected behind the furious media competition as to whether the terminal degradation of the biosphere will be irreversible in some twelve years, can be technologically remediated in thirty, is irreversible right now (or is even happening at all), lies a seemingly collective, half-conscious unwillingness to acknowledge the only fruitful responses that are as time-tested as they are unavoidable to any outcome—adaptation and reciprocity.

Kaaren's 2016 collaboration with photographer Jim Nind, The Turning Of the Year: A Book for 8 Seasons (Solstice-Equinox Press), marking the annual times honoring celestial shifts and ancient celebrations, is part of an ouvre which serenely, yet firmly draws attention to the interplay between these neglected perspectives and the dominant ones of obsessive appropriation and indifference.  

This weekend’s Typhoon Hagibis striking Japan is just the latest consequence of this current disregard for the wilderness beyond a collective solipsistic idea of a worthwhile reality, having struck Fukushima Prefecture--site of the world's largest ongoing nuclear disaster, which has been killing life in the Pacific for eight years.

Complementing her homeopathic practice in Suffolk, Kaaren has also constructed her own Labyrinth and walks this as a form of meditation, enhancing what she brings to several ritual groups.  In addition to taking part in three area poetry groups, Karen has appeared at the Halesworth Fringe Festival and has participated in poetry events as far as Australia. 

Catch up on some of her past appearances in Stamford here, here and here.

Hosted by Frank Chambers, Barnes & Noble Open Mic meets the second Monday, each month in the movie/music section on the main floor of the Stamford bookstore at 7:15 pm. For more information and directions, contact:

Barnes & Noble

100 Greyrock Place, Suite H009

Stamford, Ct 06901

 203-323-1248

Terry M. Dugan: Dancing With (And Through) Adversity & Injustice

Medical researcher and writer of poetry/prose that places human-scale attention to the daunting social costs of war, violence and AIDS, Terry M. Dugan will be speaking tomorrow at PoemAlley to share her experiences as a journalist, a researcher in the 1980s at Bellevue Hosptial's Pediatric AIDS Clinic and as a lifelong social justice activist. Terry will also read material from her latest chapbook, I'm the Reason All the Kids Are Dead (Moonstone Arts Center).

As she explains below on the June 5 segment of "One On One With Vin Dacquino", Reason's title is inspired by the role of current political polarization in the failure of adults to address school gun violence throughout the United States:

Tapping the interplay between creativity and passionate advocacy (causing her dismissal from the University of Texas' graduate program, where she nonetheless earned three MAs), Terry tells past PA guest John F. McMullen on the Johnmac Radio Show of how, as a child, she began practically "(writing) before she could read" and went on to contribute to a wide range of publications, including Inkwell, New Verse News, Women's Study Quarterly, the Bellevue Literary Review and the 2007 anthology Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose On HIV/AIDS From the Black Diaspora, edited by Randall Horton, M.L. Hunter, Becky Thompson and Haki Madhubuti (Third World Press, 2007).

Her academic appearances at the Ford Foundation, Oxford University addressing human rights and AIDS in Africa, and at the Social Science Research Council on research methodology, have been complemented by invitations to read fiction and poetry at the United Nations, Hudson Valley Writers Center, the Bowery Poetry Club and Fordham University.

The piece below, which ran in A&U magazine on March 28, 2018, relates Terry's faith in the sustaining power of artistic expression against the darkness of suffering and uncertainty:

Why We Dance

Because we do the electric slide into the clinic to the tune of crying babies.

Because every day we fox trot in and out of intensive care.

Because we breakdance after rounds while waiting for lab reports.

Because we waltz into patients' rooms waving their sheet music.

Because we're sick of doing the hokey pokey with hospital administrators.

Because we tell strangers what we do and they shimmy away from us.

Because we square dance while death calls out partner changes.

The Fantastic And The Felial: A Speculative Evening With Edward Ahern

An accomplished editor, poet, writer of literary and speculative fiction, Edward Ahern's readings this evening at PoemAlley will place chief attention to what he humorously calls that "affection focus and money drain", his five grandchildren, for whom he wrote The Witch Made Me Do It (Gypsy Shadow Publishing Company), a 2015 collection of fairy and folk tales crafted with a contemporary beat.

Amassing more than 200 published poems, short stories and four novels since first putting pen to paper at age sixty-seven, Ed is sure to have plenty more from which to draw upon, like the 25 eerie and light-hearted stories of Capricious Visions (Lulu, 2016), a fantasy collection, and C.P. Dunphey's Year'sBest Transhuman SF 2017 Anthology, Volume 1 (Gehenna & Hinnom Books, 2017), among others.

Accumulating numerous awards along the way, his work has appeared in ten countries and (with reprints), 195 publications, with several pieces available for recorded listening on Audible.

Besides sharing and critiquing work in numerous writing groups, including the Fairfield Scribes and the Poets' Salon, Ed's exacting eye comes from serving as member of the review board for the online genre magazine Bewildering Stories, where he oversees five editors, and has contributed to Primal Elements (OWS Ink, 2018), a poetry anthology built around the Four Elements, and the locale-themed fantasy/science fiction anthology from Bards and Sages Publishing, 2016's The Great Tome of Fantastic and Wondrous Places (Volume III, The Great Tomes series), an e-book edited by Calvin Demmer.

Ed applied a degree in journalism from the University of Illinois to a stint as a reporter for the Providence Journal and has served in a wide range of positions and organizations, from Navy diver/bomb disarmer anf intelligence officer stationed in Germany and Japan, to working both for a Canada-based paper manufacturer and the same company that owns the New England Patriots.