Introducing Sky Stage! Eckleburg Reading Series with Lindsay Lusby and Rae Bryant on 9.22.16 @ 7pm, 59 S. Carroll St., Frederick MD

Sky Stage 9.22.16

Frederick Arts Council and Eckleburg are excited to announce the Sky Stage Eco-Urban Reading Series, a new literary arts initiative in Frederick, MD. Heather Clark’s Sky Stage, framed by historic stone walls, will include an open-air theater that will seat an audience of 140 people among trees.  Sky Stage is an eco-urban art installation hosting local events: music, literature readings, performances and more. Our first literary reading is September 22, 2016 from 7 to 9 pm, featuring poets/authors, Lindsay Lusby and Rae Bryant, as well as an Open Mic session. Come join us!

 

Featured Readers

Lindsay LusbyLINDSAY LUSBY is the author of the chapbook Imago (dancing girl press, 2014) and winner of the 2015 Fairy Tale Review Award in Poetry, judged by Joyelle McSweeney. Her poems have appeared most recently in North Dakota Quarterly, Tinderbox Poetry Journal,  Third Point Press, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House at Washington College, where she serves as assistant editor for the Literary House Press and managing editor for Cherry Tree. Read more at lindsaylusby.com.

Rae Bryant, ContributorRAE BRYANT is the author of the short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals (Patasola Press). Her stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in print and online at The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. She has won prizes and fellowships from Johns Hopkins, Aspen Writers Foundation, VCCA and Whidbey Writers. Rae earned a Masters in Writing from Hopkins where she continues to teach creative writing She is the founding editor of The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and Director of The Eckleburg Workshops. She is represented by Jennifer Carlson with Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. Read more at raebryant.com.

 

About Heather Clark

Heather Clark

In her artwork, HEATHER CLARK builds systems that critique our current world predicament. Her work plays on what she calls cultural neurosis: the human tendency to over-consume, over-build, over-groom, etc. in lieu of direct physical exertion to ensure survival.  She views this as a misdirected attempt to satisfy basic primal urges for shelter, food, and clothing in a society where actions are grossly amplified because one gallon of gasoline equals five hundred hours of human work output.

Heather’s work and perspective have evolved from her background in green redevelopment and ecology, and most recently from her life in exurbia, where she has lived and worked for the last four years.  She is embedded in a landscape that feeds on cultural neurosis.  Meadows, forests, and farms transitioning to tract homes and cul de sacs have become her muse.  As an inhabitant of exurbia, Heather is both complicit and trapped in the consumption economy and its byproducts – climate change, inequality, unhealthiness, boredom.

Here, the uncanny valley, which is usually discussed in relation to artificial intelligence, appears to Heather in the industrially designed and generated vernacular; she works with her hands, in defiance.  She dissects infrastructure, places, and the meaning of the built environment and its relation to nature.   Her work becomes a metaphor for the greater ills of a consumption based society.  It is within this landscape that Heather attempts to reveal the messiness that lies beneath over-constructing the perfect life and the near impossibility of escape.

Heather’s work and life has led her to believe that greater satisfaction can be achieved through physical proximity to meeting one’s basic needs – building with one’s hands, using one’s body, growing one’s own food. She yearns to reinvent how we live, using art, architecture and public interventions to catalyze built environments that power themselves, cleanse themselves, transform waste, provide wildlife habitat, produce food, and deeply satisfy inhabitants.

Heather holds a Master of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, and a Bachelor of Science from Cornell University, summa cum laude, in Environmental Science and Community Planning, a self-designed major.  Heather founded Biome Studio.  As principal of Biome Studio, Heather previously designed and developed green affordable housing.  Attempting to lead the path toward zero-energy buildings and neighborhoods, she oversaw the largest deep energy retrofit in the U.S., converted historic mills into green affordable housing, and installed over one megawatt of solar pv on 2,300 low-income apartments.  Heather is also an environmental activist, creating the Play-In for Climate Action, a family-oriented climate change protest held in 2014 and replicated many times since by Moms Clean Air Force.

 

ECKLEBURG EVENT | Rue de Fleurus Salon

rue284On Tuesday night, fans, staff, and writers for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review gathered at the KGB Bar in New York City for a night of literature and camaraderie. Posters of socialist propaganda, some written in Cyrillic, hung on the walls of the one-room bar where we mingled on the second floor of the19th century brownstone in East Village. The room was once a gathering place for Ukrainian socialists in the first half of the 20th century. Now, since 1993, it’s where authors and lovers of literature congregate to listen to emerging or established writers read from their works. The room could have been called the “Red Room,” given its history, current ambiance, and the colors on the wall. But, more appropriately, it’s the KGB Bar, where writers converge and rally behind their own.

The one-room bar had its few ceiling lights turned on to their brightest setting, which illuminated the space as a veiled lamp might a bohemian’s den. Deep crimson curtains covered several windows on one wall. One billowing red curtain let in dusky light behind the speaker’s podium. The bartender poured drinks, and people greeted each other with excitement—and, we’ll admit it, a bit of geeky glee—for the words that would soon fill the room. At 7 pm, the KGB Bar opened its doors for another literary reading, and by 7:15 pm, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Luna Luna, and Fiction Circus – with special guest Cris Mazza – launched that night’s literary bash and riotous good time!

Eckleburg’s own Rae Bryant opened the reading hour with a dark tale about skinning a catfish. Her words were followed by those of Miracle Jones who engaged the crowd with a satirical tale about T.J. Maxx. Cris Mazza then read an excerpt from her newly released memoir about relationships, sexual dysfunction, and what it means to be a woman, Something Wrong with Her. Lisa Marie Basile concluded the reading hour with two emotionally raw and outstanding poems focusing on sexual abuse.

A place for writers and for writing is what The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review is. And it found a kindred spirit in the KGB Bar and its patrons.

And yes, that’s one hell of a grainy photo. It’s hard to take a picture of such awesomeness! (Plus, as mentioned earlier, the bar’s lighting was deliciously crimson and focused on the excitement coming from the podium!)

 

Left to Right: Vipra Ghimire, Lisa Marie Basile, Joe DiPonio, Rae Bryant, Cris Mazza, Justin Miracle Jones, and Lisa Dulin
Left to Right: Vipra Ghimire, Lisa Marie Basile, Joe DiPonio, Rae Bryant, Cris Mazza, Justin Miracle Jones, and Lisa Dulin

 

Rue de Fleurus Salon & Reading Series | New York in April

 

rue-de-fleurusRue de Fleurus began in 2013 by Eckleburg so we could hang out with the authors, artists and musicians we love. Come join us. You might fall in love, too.

The Rue de Fleurus Salon began in 2012, New York City, at Brazenhead Bookstore, owned by the always hospitable, Michael Seidenberg. Brazenhead is our favorite NY book haunt and has been featured in The New Inquiry, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review and The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. Since 2012, Rue has been held at many more iconic venues: Club Passim in Cambridge, KGB in NYC, The Foundry Gallery in DC and The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

View the current Rue de Fleurus schedule