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Art-A-Whirl is a BIG arts and music festival that takes place in art studios, bars, breweries, parking lots, and other venues across Northeast Minneapolis on the third weekend of May. It hails itself as "the largest open studio tour in the country." It's a traffic-clogger.
I have attended many times as a fan of the art, the music, the food, the mass gathering and people-watching, including one year when dark clouds and winds during a tornado watch had us scouting the closest shelters, wondering if the bar whose parking lot we were in had a basement we all could squeeze into—which would have made it the second time I had to seek refuge from a tornado in a bar's basement—but we were lucky: no funnel dropped.
This year I was asked to read for the marathon HOWL reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House. The Wolf House is literally a house made top to bottom, front to back, into/of various mediums of visual and tactile art. It's also an Airbnb, so you can stay there. Bella Luna Studios is curation project of writer Annette Schiebout, who invited me to read.
The nature of a marathon reading is that you don't have much time at the mic. Trying to say all I hope to say about A Northern Spring was off the table. Also, the day before the reading, I was the basement running on the treadmill and listening to the Science Friday on NPR, a segment of which focused on crow roosts. The title of the segment, "What To Do When 500-1,000 Crows Roost In Your Neighborhood" pretty much explains the focus. I'm something of a bird aficionado—have been since I was a kid and learned to identify all of the waterfowl that would come through along the Mississippi Flyway—and have a fondness for crows, who a palm reader long ago said was one of my spirit animals (I wrote a poetry collection called Bird~Brain). I also have experience with a crow roost of this size from my time as a student in Mankato, Minn. Listening to the segment, I thought of a particular poem I wrote one summer about that downtown Mankato crow roost. It's called "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and appears in a book of mine—my previous poetry collection—called We're the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. Science Friday host Ira Flatow asked listeners to send in stories about crows and roosts. I sent my poem, dreaming that it would be posted on the SciFri website, which to date hasn't happened (I keep checking).
So for my five to seven minute set, I decided I'd read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and tell the SciFri story and of my hopes. I read a couple poems from A Northern Spring and mixed in a one or so minute spiel on its gist and arc. Then I had to split and get to St. Paul for a mixer with other new, newish, or soon-to-become citizens of Luxembourg who live in Twin Cities, of which I am one, via ancestry. You have to travel to Luxembourg City to declare your citizenship, presenting a lineage of documents—marriage, birth, and death certificates—that step by step trace you back to an ancestor in Luxembourg, which for me was a great, great grandfather. I received my official declaration of citizenship last December and am traveling back this summer to get my Luxembourg passport. When my publisher needed a FAST FACT for a social media post, this was it.
PHOTOS: Left, me with my arms up as I tell the story of the Mankato crow roost and get ready to read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," shoeless, as you have to be to walk on the art that graces so many of the floors of the Wolf House; right, social media promotional material for the Art-A-Whirl reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House.
I have attended many times as a fan of the art, the music, the food, the mass gathering and people-watching, including one year when dark clouds and winds during a tornado watch had us scouting the closest shelters, wondering if the bar whose parking lot we were in had a basement we all could squeeze into—which would have made it the second time I had to seek refuge from a tornado in a bar's basement—but we were lucky: no funnel dropped.
This year I was asked to read for the marathon HOWL reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House. The Wolf House is literally a house made top to bottom, front to back, into/of various mediums of visual and tactile art. It's also an Airbnb, so you can stay there. Bella Luna Studios is curation project of writer Annette Schiebout, who invited me to read.
The nature of a marathon reading is that you don't have much time at the mic. Trying to say all I hope to say about A Northern Spring was off the table. Also, the day before the reading, I was the basement running on the treadmill and listening to the Science Friday on NPR, a segment of which focused on crow roosts. The title of the segment, "What To Do When 500-1,000 Crows Roost In Your Neighborhood" pretty much explains the focus. I'm something of a bird aficionado—have been since I was a kid and learned to identify all of the waterfowl that would come through along the Mississippi Flyway—and have a fondness for crows, who a palm reader long ago said was one of my spirit animals (I wrote a poetry collection called Bird~Brain). I also have experience with a crow roost of this size from my time as a student in Mankato, Minn. Listening to the segment, I thought of a particular poem I wrote one summer about that downtown Mankato crow roost. It's called "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and appears in a book of mine—my previous poetry collection—called We're the Flownover. We Come From Flyoverland. Science Friday host Ira Flatow asked listeners to send in stories about crows and roosts. I sent my poem, dreaming that it would be posted on the SciFri website, which to date hasn't happened (I keep checking).
So for my five to seven minute set, I decided I'd read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass" and tell the SciFri story and of my hopes. I read a couple poems from A Northern Spring and mixed in a one or so minute spiel on its gist and arc. Then I had to split and get to St. Paul for a mixer with other new, newish, or soon-to-become citizens of Luxembourg who live in Twin Cities, of which I am one, via ancestry. You have to travel to Luxembourg City to declare your citizenship, presenting a lineage of documents—marriage, birth, and death certificates—that step by step trace you back to an ancestor in Luxembourg, which for me was a great, great grandfather. I received my official declaration of citizenship last December and am traveling back this summer to get my Luxembourg passport. When my publisher needed a FAST FACT for a social media post, this was it.
PHOTOS: Left, me with my arms up as I tell the story of the Mankato crow roost and get ready to read "There are mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," shoeless, as you have to be to walk on the art that graces so many of the floors of the Wolf House; right, social media promotional material for the Art-A-Whirl reading at Bella Luna Studios at the Wolf House.
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