Richard Retyi and Brian Peters are Ann Arbor Stories, a podcast featuring stories of Ann Arbor’s distant and not so distant past, produced in partnership with the Ann Arbor District Library. Join them at Literati Bookstore for two all new live stories from Ann Arbor’s past, including photos, spoken word and music, as well as a Q&A session with the creators.
Learn more about the podcast and share your own memories of Ann Arbor as well. Check out Ann Arbor stories at aadl.com/annarborstories or visit them on Twitter and Instagram at @annarborstories.
Tickets are $35 dollars, and bundled with a hardcover copy of the book. A Q&A and book-signing will follow the presentation. Please note that this event will not include a musical performance, but a one-of-a-kind oral presentation by one of folk music’s great storytellers.Doors at 6:30.
Skiffle a do-it-yourself music craze with American jazz, blues, folk, and roots influences is a story of jazz pilgrims and blues blowers, Teddy Boys and beatnik girls, coffee-bar bohemians and refugees from the McCarthyite witch hunts. Skiffle is reason the guitar came to the forefront of music in the UK and led directly to the British Invasion of the US charts in the 1960s.
Emerging from the trad-jazz clubs of the early 50s, Skiffle was adopted by the first generation of British teenagers working class kids who grew up during the dreary, post-war rationing years. Before Skiffle, the pop culture was dominated by crooners and mediated by a stuffy BBC. Lonnie Donegan hit the charts in 1956 with a version of Lead Bellys Rock Island Line and soon sales of guitars rocketed from 5,000 to 250,000 a year.
Like punk rock that would flourish two decades later, Skiffle was home grown: all you needed were three guitar chords and you could form a group, with mates playing tea-chest bass and washboard as a rhythm section.
Roots, Radicals & Rockers is the first book to explore the Skiffle phenomenon in depth Billy Braggs meticulously researched and joyous account shows how Skiffle sparked a revolution that shaped pop music as we have come to know it.
Billy Bragg is an English singer-songwriter and left-wing activist. His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, with lyrics that mostly span political or romantic themes. Billys music is heavily centered on bringing about change and getting the younger generation involved in activist causes.
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), $10. 764-5118.
Literati is delighted to be the bookseller for the Chang Lecture on Art and Medicine at the University of Michigan’s Ford Auditorium, which will be delivered by Dr. David Watts.
The process of healing is a mystery that cannot be explained completely by a scientific approach. Analysis will miss the humanistic qualities that are required to address and serve the complexity of the human spirit. If Health Care Professionals are to achieve optimum healing we must attend to both the science and the humanity of health care. Poems and stories provide balance to the provider’s life and move us away from the Cold and Distant Physician into a deeper under-standing of human nature and an affection for the patient and his/her suffering.
David Watts, M.D., is a gastroenterologist and Clinical Professor at the UCSF School of Medicine, a physician writer who has published six books of poetry, four anthologies, and two books of short stories about the complexities of the Doctor-Patient Relationship. He has also written two novels, one a mystery and the other best-selling western. He is a classically trained musician, a TV and radio host, and an NPR commentator. He has taken particular interest in measures to warm the cold and distant physician and is a strong advocate for literature and humanities in the medical school curriculum.
Literati is pleased to welcome Rebecca J. Kinney and Stephen M. Ward for a discussion of their recent books about Detroit and the people who form its heart.
What is the “new Detroit” that everyone keeps talking about? In Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Rebecca J. Kinney reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. She tackles key questions about the future of postindustrial America, and shows how the narratives of Detroit’s history are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness.
Rebecca J. Kinney, who grew up in metropolitan Detroit, is assistant professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.
In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses’ lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward’s book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.
Stephen Ward is associate professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is also a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in Detroit.
The authors will discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? The authors will also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires their fiction.
Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle and various other journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. She works for The College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts and The InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit.
Laura Hulthen Thomas is the author of the short fiction collection, States of Motion, published by Wayne State University Press. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), $10. 764-5118.
Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), $10. 764-5118.
The Hummingbird Global Writers’ Circle is an international reading series started by Dr. Debotri Dhar, CEW Visiting Scholar (2015-17) and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The aim of this literary initiative is to bring writers and communities together in different parts of the world to foster a love of books, to discuss the craft of writing, and to promote creative dialogue and global understanding in small ways. The name was inspired by the tiny hummingbird which builds its home with just a few drops of nectar, a root here, a leaf there, and a little bit of sky.
The Circle’s themed readings by established and emerging writers are free and open to the community. The theme for the first event of the Circle is feminism/ gender, to be held on Monday August 21 (3-5 pm) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The writer-speakers for this session are Linda Gregerson, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Mike Ferro and Debotri Dhar (writer bios below), who will read from their poetry and fiction, followed by conversation /Q&A.
Light refreshments will be served. All members of the community are welcome to attend, however, RSVP is required. If you wish to hear our speakers read from their work, share tips, and engage in conversation, please RSVP to debotri@umich.edu.
