from the Assistant Director:
The other day F said to me, “Puppeteering is one of those things that sustains itself sheerly by the folks who practice it. I mean, non-musicians go see music all the time but I don’t ever hear anyone say, "man, I wish there was a good puppet show somewhere this weekend.”
Malcolm Gladwell, in The Tipping Point, says that social phenomena function just like epidemics where some people are simply more important than others. Economists, he says, call this the 80/20 Principle. “In any given situation roughly 80 percent of the “work” will be done by 20 percent of the participants…twenty percent of motorists cause 80 percent of the accidents…twenty percent of beer drinkers drink 80 percent of the beer.” Almost everyone I know is a brilliant writer doing the endless work of being alive. FR’s character, Abelard, has given me perspective at a time when all I can see are the bugs I’m sure are at my feet.
Last night I met a woman in a sleeveless dress with approximately 20 visible tattoos and neither of us could remember the author of Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit. Simultaneously we pulled out our phones because who can stand that level of vulnerability anymore. It’s like welcoming someone into your home and then realizing that the only furniture you have left is a door. According to James Pennebaker in The Secret Life of Pronouns, using the personal pronoun “I” more often than your counterpart in any given conversation indicates not only a level of self consciousness but also a power imbalance. The woman with the tattoos (one of which was Leviticus 19:28) said she wasn’t going to model for a friend’s fashion-show because she preferred to be more anonymous than that. There is a line between responsibility and obligation. A line between revision and repair.
If there was a boy whose mother had cancer and that boy wanted to stop the cancer by cleaning the house but instead of cleaning the house he would wash the walls but instead of washing the walls he would wash only one wall and the other walls, the same walls they had thrown shadows on for years, would those walls become mirrors, and would the mother hate the boy, and would she ever stop seeing only what was living inside her, and would the boy always be ashamed in the presence of others, and would the boy be always a boy, and would he always be swallowing the light?
I am, admittedly, struggling with forgiveness in a way that I have never struggled before. I volunteer with a prison abolition group because I believe we punish people for things they didn’t do, and because punishment is another way to say other, and because we isolate people who actually need contact, and because, as the preacher used to say, There but for the grace of god, go I. And yet, community is a commitment to attention. Anger is its own special hell. Is there a line between shame and guilt? A line between abuse and neglect?
A few weeks ago a puppeteer on NPR said he still has his grandfather’s puppets and he takes them out every so often. I woke up this morning and saw a picture of myself on Facebook and thought, I want to live that guy’s life. Melissa Tolbert was a 19 year old white girl who lived in Tennessee who told her husband, it up to us, as Christians, to save all of the non-christians – to convert them. We turn our I’s into characters hoping they will tell us new stories. How many different ways can we find to do the same thing over and over again? Kathy Couch says, objects are people too. I ask every I I see, what does it mean to be real?
- TC Tolbert, Assistant Director
Community Connections
Poetry Off the Page, UA Poetry Center May 18-20
More visceral than conceptual, this year’s symposium will gather poets for whom the stage and all of its demands, such as voice, projection, sound effects, lighting, body movement, acting, props, and image, all help create a new syntactic breadth for the poetic *voice.* These writers press into new territories in theater, song, film/video, dance, recitation, digital arts, sculpture, book arts and more. Many will be performing, in many cases, original never-seen-before work for the Poetry Center.
Read Between the Bars fundraiser at La Cocina
Tuesday, June 12 6-10pm
Read Between the Bars is turning five in 2012! The RBtB collective was founded in 2007 in response to the growing rate of incarceration in Arizona and a grossly inadequate commitment to providing educational resources to prisoners. RBtB’s vision is to get free books directly into the hands of prisoners as a way to provide comfort in a harsh prison environment and awaken new areas of interest that can help prisoners, both now and after release from prison.
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What's the Word?
FUNDRAISER
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WORKSHOPS
5/11-5/13: Short Prose Forms: a writing weekend w/Rebecca Brown
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EVENTS
5/5: Melissa Buckheit
Noctilucent Book Release w/ Rebecca Seiferle
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5/6: Lamplight Reading
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5/12: Short Prose Forms Reading and Book Signing w/ Rebecca Brown and Kate Bernheimer
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5/16: Edge Reading w/Kaia Chesney, Hypnotic Dance Crew,
and Tucson Youth Poetry Slam
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5/17: Trickhouse Live Special Event with Amaranth Borsuk, Jessica Moore, Michael Rerick, Algae and Tentacles, The Destroyer, & friends from the ether!
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5/25: Curiosity Symposium on the topic Time Alignment
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5/29: Trickhouse Live w/Sarah Gonzales, Serena Tang, and Michael Rerick
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6/3: Lamplight Reading
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6/13: Edge Reading w/Debby Jo Blank, Lisa M. Cole, and Jessica Langan-Peck
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7/1: Lamplight Reading
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7/18: Edge Reading w/Elizabeth Brown, Sarah Kortemeier, and Lawrence Lenhart
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ONGOING
Trickhouse Live: An Integrative Arts and Performance Series
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Read Betwen the Bars
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