Friday: Reading for the Flood ...

Gallery, that is. I'll be joining three other poets there, at 109 Roberts Street, near (as you might have surmised) the river this Friday night to celebrate the season - for me, that's the Solstice and the beginning of the Sun's return. Ordinarily I probably wouldn't just post the Gallery's press release, but my desktop computer is down (and out; new mainboard required), so here it is:

On Friday, December 22, 2006, at 7:00pm The Flood Fine Art Center in the River District, will host the first in an ongoing series of poetry readings. Four local poets: Jeff Davis, Josh Flaccavento, David Hopes, and Audrey Hope Rinehart will each read in a round robin format.

Jeff Davis is a board member of the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center. His poems have appeared in Lillabulero, Iron, Asheville Poetry Review, and Nantahala Review. NatureS, his selected poems, appeared from New Native Press in 2006. His weblog is at http://www.naturespoetry.blogspot.com.[and here you are]

Josh earns a living as a free lance writer. His work has appeared in Western Carolina Business Journal, the Hendersonville Times-News , Ghetto Blaster and the DownTown . His creative work has been published in The Emerson Review and Ampersand. He recently won the 2006 Revoluticon short story contest and was co-editor of the recent anthology The Lake of the Dead Sessions.

Audrey Hope Rinehart, a WNC native, has been a featured poet at the local reading series "Fresh Air" and "Velcro." She recently co-edited the literary anthology, The Lake of the Dead Sessions. Rinehart completed her first manuscript, The Prophetess Speaks of Death, a collection of poems, earlier this year.

David Hopes's new book of poetry, A Dream of Adonis, is due from Pecan Grove Press early in 2007. He has brought out two volumes of nature essays, A Sense of the Morning and Bird Songs of the Mesozoic, and his memoir, A Childhood in the Milky Way, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and the national Book Award. In February he heads off to Palm Springs for the premiere of his prize-winning play, Ann Livia, Lucky in Her Bridges.

This inaugural poetry reading will serve as a fundraising event for the Flood Fine Arts Center, a not-for-profit venue in the historic Phil Mechanic Studios located on the French Broad River immediately north of the Riverlink Bridge at 109 Roberts Street. Since it opened earlier this year, the Flood Fine Arts Center has featured paintings and sculpture by both national and international artists, including artists Habib Kheradyar from Los Angeles and Hague Williams who divides his time between Chicago and Prague. Most recently exhibiting is renowned artist Lorraine Walsh who has exhibited in Cuba and in Germany. In addition, Flood Fine Arts Center is active in art education for adults and children, including special projects with at-risk kids. The Center hopes to kick off its planned Artists In Residency Program this upcoming season.

Flood Gallery Fine Arts Center is located at 109 Roberts Street in the River Arts District of Asheville North Carolina. For more information, please contact Mark Prudowsky at info@floodgallery.org or call 828-776-8438.

Should be fun. I've read before with David, and have heard Hope read several times, most recently at the farewell party for Jaye Bartell. Don't know Josh's work, but am looking forward to hearing it.

All ears open, all around, now.

(A hat-tip to MAIN's calendar of upcoming events.)

The Play's the Thing

Poets have been tempted by the theater ever since Thespis, Greek singer of dithyrambs, donned his masks and dared to portray, as an actor, characters outside the chorus, thus, the determining legend has it, creating drama. The story is no doubt more complex; neolithic shamans portrayed animal spirits and wore masks, and ancient religions involved the elements of what we would call dramatic performance. But there’s no doubt that since his era, some 534 years BCE, some of the best of the west’s poets have felt the pull of the stage, the power of language in character, and the mask it provides.

This month two of Asheville’s most interesting young writers, Chall Gray and Devin Walsh, continue that long procession and make their leap to the stage: July 14 they open four original one act plays at 35 Below. Two of the plays are theirs, and the other two are by local poets; David Hopes penned one and Jaye Bartell the other. Gray says his and Walsh’s goal is to create a theater company different from others in the area, many of which provide fine performances, and to “show people that there’s also great playwriting” in town.

Gray and Walsh got to know one another at a meeting of the Asheville chapter of Toastmasters International, the non-profit that helps people of all backgrounds become, as they say, better and more confident speakers. Walsh’s dad had been a member for twenty-five years, so he’d grown up with the organization, and found for himself that its practice helped when he had to address the public. He and Gray were both writers and both active in creating literary publications, Metabolism for Walsh, an online and published “literary salon for the intellectually curious,” funded by UNCA, and Blue Elephant, which Gray helped create at AB Tech. While Walsh had published fiction and flash fiction (he and Gray both have had work up at the Flasheville site, he felt stymied when it came to playwriting. “Then”, he says, “Chall stepped in.” By last spring they had created Metabolism Productions and undertaken the development of the project that hits the boards on the 14th.

The plays … well, don’t be thinking Tennessee Williams, be thinking more along the lines of Samuel Beckett, but (if the work of Walsh’s that I’ve heard is any guide) funnier. His “Rochester and Pennyboil” has two middle-aged playwrights drinking and bemoaning their failures, with “vocabularies unleashed and lots of elevated wordplay”. Gray’s “Love from A to Z” is a love story in, of course, twenty-six parts. Hopes’ “Piss”, a “quirky, funny play,” Walsh says, features five characters “extensively versed in art history” in conversation. Jaye Bartell’s “Recalling Paradise” features a man who videotapes himself when he’s sleeping just to make sure he still exists in that state, and the dreams he has as he sleeps of two women without mirrors trying to convey to one another what they look like.

All the plays are fully cast, but as of a week ago Gray and Walsh were still interested in hearing from folks with theater experience, especially on the technical side; you can write them at metabolismproductions@gmail.com.

Metabolism plans to stage three productions a year; their second offering, now in the planning stage, should hit the boards in early November. It will feature plays by women playwrights.

Time will tell if these works catch the conscience of the king, or of the age, but I’ll wish all involved a good “break a leg” (that’s a way to appease the spirit of Thespis, who still lurks behind the scenes, they say, creating mischief), and see them on the stage.


When: July 14, 15, 8 pm, July 16 2:00 pm. July 20, 21, 22 8 pm, July 23, 2:00 pm.

Tickets can be prepurchased at ACT Box Office, Malaprops, and The Reader's Corner beginning Monday, July 3. Chall says "Seating is limited so we recommend that people get tickets early."

Admission: $5 for students, $10 for the public otherwise.

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Updated with corrected show times. And I made Devin a poet; he claims not to be one.
Updated also to fix the link to Metabolism.

This post appeared in somewhat different form in Rapid River Magazine's July issue.