Literati is exited to host poet Elizabeth Schmuhl, an RC Creative Writing alum, who will be reading from her new collection Premonitions. Keith Taylor will give an introduction to the reading and lead a Q&A discussion aftewards.
About Premonitions:
Visceral and brimming with vitality, the poems in Premonitions reverberate with the voice of a woman on a secluded farm, confronting her emotional and physical isolation. Drawing on her own experience as a daughter of a third-generation fruit farmer, Elizabeth Schmuhl gives readers a fresh and powerful perspective on what it means to be alive.
Layering one upon another, the poems blur boundaries and create a volatile state out of which the remarkable and unexpected occur. Embracing chaos, change, and unpredictability, these poems are energetically charged and infused with succinct, imagistic language. They reach beyond the constraints assigned to the female form and examine a place where time, the body, sexuality, and the natural world are not fixed. At times surreal, at others painfully real, the poems in Premonitions are the expression of a human life that merges and melds with the world around it, acting and reacting, loving and despairing, disintegrating and rebuilding. The speaker travels fluidly between strata of the natural world and her own body. Adding to the complexity of her poems, Schmuhl creates additional layers of meaning as the poems and their titles relate to the author’s synesthesia, a sensory phenomenon through which letters and numbers are experienced as colors and emotions.
Premonitions will turn the reader inward, encouraging the examination of the small details of life and a growing acceptance of the perpetual turmoil and uncertainty of existence despite our own desire to find a firm footing. This volume will be prized by lovers of contemporary poetry and literature alike.
Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Keith Taylor has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Ken Mikolowski taught poetry at the RC for many years.
This local poet reads from Love Dream with Television, her debut collection, written in Tucson, Arizona, that “wonders through the ways in which television, film, advertising, sporting events, and celebrity culture weave their ways into our lived experiences,” says Ensor. “Tucson and its queers have pushed me to be more in my body, more in conversation with place and spirit and alchemy.” Signing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
Talk by environmental journalist Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a New York City policy advisor who wrote Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet.
5:30 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre (4th floor). Free. 936-3518
Talk by local novelist Lillian Li.
6-8 p.m., AADL Downtown multipurpose rm. Free. 327-4200
The Robertson Lecture is an endowed annual event of the LSA Residential College, and is a lasting gift of the first Dean of the RC, James Robertson. The lecturer is traditionally a notable alumna/us of the RC, someone impacting their chosen field(s) in ways congruent with the philosophy of the College. The 2018 Robertson Lecture will be delivered at the Keene Theater in East Quadrangle on October 19th by Nancy Blum, class of ’85, a Brooklyn-based artist who is known for her public art commissions and works on paper. In addition to graduating from the RC with majors in Psychology and Women’s Studies, she received an MSW from the U-M School of Social work and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her current work is installed primarily out of the gallery, not separated from the street but integrated into it, with a particular interest in sites of transit in cities and within hospital settings. Her recent commissions include medicinal wildflower windows at the San Francisco General Hospital acute care unit; large, graceful birds in flights of migration/immigration integrated into three light-rail stations in Minneapolis/St. Paul; and over-sized yellow flower sculptures sprouting from a rainwater filtration green space at a bus loop outside Philadelphia.
In her Robertson lecture, Nancy will share anecdotes about these and other works, and take us behind the scenes of her in-progress installation at the 28th Street 6 Train station in NYC. She’ll explore how her multiple interests take root in public art, and she’ll give us a sense for how she forged her own path as an artist – a journey, she says, that began at the Residential College, notably thanks to mentoring from her ceramics professor, Susan Crowell.
Following the Lecture, please join us for a reception for the artist at the RC Art Gallery, located on the first floor of East Quadrangle. Refreshments will be served. An exhibit of Nancy’s drawings will be on display at the same gallery through November 9th, (M-F 10am-5pm, free admission).
Participants write, direct, and perform their show in 24 hours from scratch), Performance. Free, but pay what you can.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Phillip Crymble and Sarah Messer who will be sharing with us some of their latest work.
About Not Even Laughter:
A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and canisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose ideas and visions and have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience together in this formidable debut.
Phillip Crymble is a disabled writer and scholar living in Atlantic Canada. A SSHRC doctoral fellow at UNB Fredericton, he holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in The New York Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Hollins Critic, The Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Ireland Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. In 2016, Not Even Laughter, his first full-length collection, was a finalist for both the New Brunswick Book Award and the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s J.M. Abraham Prize.
Poet and Nonfiction writer, Sarah Messer, has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the NEA, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Bunting) at Harvard. She is the author of four books: a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), a book of translations, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press) and two poetry books, Bandit Letters (New Issues), and Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among others. For many years she taught as an Associate Professor in the MFA/BFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In 2010, Messer co-founded One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently she teaches Creative Writing in the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is a cheese maker at White Lotus Farms.
Irina Khutsieva is RC Artist in Residence.
The theater world in Russia is lively as ever, with a range of styles and interests represented by innovative and original work. But that world is also under significant threat as the Russian state puts increasing pressure on theaters and especially directors. The substance of the great art of theater is communication, respect, reverence, and an unflagging belief in humanity. Theater thrives on humanity the way flowers feed on soil, sun, and water. It in turn produces the conditions for humanity to grow. Theater produces and nurtures community and brings people together. In her lecture, Irina Khutsieva will expound on the relationship between theater, state and society in today’s Russia.
Irina Khutsieva is a stage director and acting instructor in Moscow, Russia. Trained at “GITIS,” the Russian Academy of Theatrical Art, she has more than 30 years of experience in Russian theater. She now directs her own studio theater, the Chamber Theater, Moscow, founded in 2004. Khutsieva has staged more than 50 plays in Russia, Germany, and the U.S. She has worked at one of Russia’s most distinguished theater academies – the Shchepkin Higher Theatre Institute, associated with the State Academic Maly Theatre of Russia. She also has extensive experience teaching college drama majors. A specialist and practitioner of the Stanislavski Method, she incorporates the principles and traditions of Russian psychological theater and has also developed her own staging and teaching methods. In recent years, she has directed a major gala performance shown on Russian national TV and has run workshops for professional actors in regional towns throughout Russia.
U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies Consciousness Next! Series presents Dr. Julia Mossbridge, whose recent book The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life (with Theresa Cheung) was published on October 16.
The presentation will feature examples of precognitive experiences—where an individual has knowledge about the future that s/he could not have obtained via “normal” channels—and will cover what makes a precognition something other than coincidence. Dr. Julia Mossbridge, who contends that receiving accurate information about future events is neither unscientific nor uncommon, will explain how the scientific evidence for precognition, combined with what we know about consciousness and the nature of time, makes precognition a reasonable phenomenon to investigate further through research and application.
Mossbridge is a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a visiting scholar at Northwestern University in the Department of Psychology. Her book Transcendent Mind, published by the American Psychological Association in 2017, is one of the first academic books to examine paranormal experiences (nonlocal, physically transcendent dimensions of consciousness). Her research focus is precognition and its ramifications for creativity and healing, the time-consciousness relationship, and further capacities of consciousness that are coherent with an emergent, more integral conception of mind.
The U-M Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies (PCCS) is directed by music professor and consciousness theorist Ed Sarath. It brings together colleagues from a wide range of fields to explore creativity and its underpinnings in consciousness and ramifications thereof for emergent models of education, spirituality, sustainability, social justice, and peace.
The PCCS Consciousness Next! series examines a range of phenomena and ideas that unite cutting-edge scientific research and age-old spiritual wisdom.
