Migrations

According to Fennica Gehrman, the music company in Helsinki that produces Kortekangas' work: 

Olli Kortekangas’s Migrations for male choir, soloist and orchestra is to be given its first performance on 4 February 2016, in Minneapolis. Furher performances are scheduled for 5 and 6 February. A commission from the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä, it will be recorded by BIS Records, coupled with Sibelius’s Finlandia and Kullervo. The soloist with the YL Male Voice Choir will be Lilli Paasikivi. Migrations celebrates the 150^th anniversary of the Finnish migration to North America. The text is by Sheila Packa, and it tells tales of migration through themes of identity, transformation and hope.

Migrations is the second sizeable commission Kortekangas has received from the United States; the first, Seven Songs for Planet Earth, was premiered by the Washington Choral Society in 2011. This can next be heard in Minesota on 23 April, in a performance by the Masterworks Chorale of Augsburg College conducted by Peter Hendrickson.

Feb 4-6, 2016 The Minnesota Orchestra will perform "Migrations" composed by Olli Kortekangas (and text by Sheila Packa)

Here is a link to the program notes:
http://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/showcase/97-program-notes-migrations-kullervo-finlandia

For more information about this new music, see
http://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/about/learn-more/press-room/1335-vanska-conducts-kullervo

Tickets:
http://www.minnesotaorchestra.org/buy/tickets/browse-calendar/eventdetail/502/-/vaenskae-conducts-kullervo#.VqUDJpMrJZ0

Louise Glück

The book Wild Iris by Louise Glück is a brilliant collection of poems.  Inside are persona poems, told from the perspective of poppies, violets, etc.  Some of the poems are matins, or prayers.  It is as if Glück is throwing her voice.  There are prayers, and sometimes there is a creator who replies. The effect is stereophonic, the voices from low to high, from earth to gardener to sky.

More information:  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/louise-gl%C3%BCck

Article about her work: http://www.thenation.com/article/writing-without-mattress-louise-glueck/

Invisible Forces

Henry Ace Knight describes Diaz's fiction writing in this way: "His work concerns diaspora, belonging and exclusion, race, masculinity, and privilege..." In their interview, Junot Diáz said:

I, for one, don’t think it’s possible for anyone as an individual to be liberated from the larger forces that overwhelmingly control our lives. Like how does one simply excuse themselves from class, from race, from gender? You can say that you’re excused from them but of course these forces will work on you in spite of the fact that you’re bowing out. I think that what interests me as an artist is the way that these invisible forces press down on our lives. I’m interested in how history has this spooky quantum effect on people. How history, even when we run from it, even when we disavow it, even when we forget it, is like some very strange dark-eyed dog. It always finds its way back to us. Not to say that this is the way the world works, but it’s what brings me to the page.

To read the entire interview, see http://www.asymptotejournal.com/interview/an-interview-junot-diaz/

Poetry & Spirit

No matter what your spiritual practice, poetry can deepen it.

Articles:

Hirshfield, Jane. "Spiritual Poetry."  Poetry Foundation.  June 28, 2006.  Web. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178390

Maitreyabandu.  "Thirteen Ways of Making Poetry a Spiritual Practice." Magma Journal.  c2013.  England.  http://magmapoetry.com/archive/magma-51/articles/13-ways-of-making-poetry-a-spiritual-practice/



These articles by Sheila Packa explore sacred texts and poetry. Each has links to source materials. The Poetry and Spirit Group @ UUCD for the Interfaith Group (2014).  The participants read selected sacred text(s) at each session and these were followed by writing exercises.

The Forms of Grief - Kaddish, Eulogy, Elegy, Requiem, and Poetry of Witness
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/forms-of-grief.html

Psalms, Laments, & Lamentations

https://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-abc-of-grief.html#more

Walt Whitman and Dharma - Bhagavad Gita
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/dharma-and-poetry.html

The Language of the Mystics - The Cloud of Unknowing, Mechthild von Magdeburg
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/poetry-language-of-mystics.html

Emily Dickinson: Poetry and Spirit - Emily's poems are based on a hymn structure
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/considering-emily-poetry-and.html

Carl Jung and Spirit of the Depth: Gnosticism and Art
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/spirit-of-depth.html

Poetry and the Spirit - Diving for the Pearl
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/01/poetry-and-spirit.html

Thunder of New Wings - New Beginnings and Margarite Porete - The Mirror of Simple Souls
http://sheilapacka.blogspot.com/2014/02/thunder-of-new-wings.html

Writers on Writing

Doris Lessing: “Whatever you are meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.”

Jayne Anne Phillips: "Writers focus perpetually on the half seen, and we live in the dim or glorious shadows of partially apprehended shapes. We could bill ourselves as perceptually challenged — given that we live two lives at once, segueing from one to the other with some distress — but we accept, long before we publish, the outlaw's mantle. We occupy a kind of border country, focused on the details that speak to us."

William H. Gass: “For me, the short story is not a character sketch, a mouse trap, an epiphany, a slice of suburban life. It is the flowering of a symbol center. It is a poem grafted onto sturdier stock.”

Natalie Diaz: “My friend and I call grief the beautiful terrible because it is a wound that opens you but also shows you the miracles of what is inside you. Rather than try to escape my griefs, I’m trying to recognize them as a wildness I can submerge myself in, to be washed clean by the very thing that aches me so deeply. To give my grief to a beloved’s body, to take her grief into my body, to rearrange ourselves with it and become both more and less of one another and of our own selves—this is a lucky thing.”  See poem: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/grief-work

February 2016 Borealis Writing Workshop

In Hibbing, Borealis has invited me to do a workshop February 13, 2016 from 1:00 - 4:00 pm.

Opposing Forces: In Stories & Forms

Hibbing is the location of a three way continental divide. Waters flow toward the Mississippi River, Hudson Bay, and the St Lawrence Seaway (Lake Superior and the Great Lakes).   At this workshop, we will take our cue from the landscape and consider opposing directions.  Participants will do guided writing exercises to develop short narratives (poems or prose).  We will also talk about forms or narrative strategies that enhance a story.

To register, contact Borealis.  Georgia Andria 952-426-8533 or email glandria@yahoo.com

The Sparkling Trail

"When creating a manuscript, I often assemble a constellation of books.  My own is born under these auspices. The other writers chosen for their sensibility, language, topic, and skills are like aunts in the fairytale who come to bless the newborn."

According to Wikipedia, de Kerangal's celebrated novel, Birth of a Bridge [Naissance d'un pont, 2010]', presents a literary saga of a handful of men and women who are charged with building a bridge somewhere in a mythical California. Birth of a Bridge was short-listed for the Prix Goncourt, and awarded the Prix Médicis and has been translated into several languages worldwide.

Mend the Living [Réparer les vivants, 2014] has also won several prizes including the Prix Orange du Livre and the Grand prix RTL du livre. Mend the Living was recently adapted for the stage at the theatre festival in Avignon, receiving rave reviews for its intimate look at the realities and philosophical questioning around organ donation.

Maylis de Kerangal was interviewed by Jessica Moore, her translator, for Bombsite (Arts) Magazine.
http://bombmagazine.org/article/95631124/maylis-de-kerangal  They discussed the way that a writer explores a story under the influence of a chosen few texts.  Jessica Moore says, "Books are shapers of our inner landscape. We are composed of the texts that have passed through us, leaving that sparkling trail..." and de Kerangal responds:

I write from all these books, and also through them. This is not at all something that overshadows a voice of my own. On the contrary, it’s through all these books that I love that I’ve been able to find something that is my own. I try to formalize this approach a little by gathering a collection around me as I begin a novel.

I don’t know if many authors do this, but one of the great movements of the beginning of a book for me is to summon these influences, to go in search of them. I put myself under their influence. And putting together the disparate collection of texts that will accompany me is already an act of writing. All kinds of books and printed matter: Mrs. Dalloway for instance, or poetry, scientific texts, articles from newspapers, novels. They aren’t on the same subject—the heart, for example, in Réparer—but they are texts with which I establish echoes, resonances. I compare this to getting together with a group of friends for a big bank robbery, a language hold-up. I already have my collection for the next book.

The interview explores de Kerangal's writing process and is a conversation about translation. Translation, de Kerangal says, is like listening to her music that is played upon a different instrument than the original. This is a wonderful analogy, as it evokes the process of composition and performance, and it reassures that although the translated is not exact, the interpretation can be beautiful.

Barry Lopez

The writer Barry Lopez has long provided deep insight into the natural world, human interaction with wildlife. This excerpt is about place, language and seeing. It's in Granta Magazine, Dec 2015:

If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind. 

As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.

READ the entire essay: http://granta.com/invitation/

Nobel Lecture by Svetlana Alexievich

No one captures a human voice as well as Russian/Ukrainen writer Svetlana Alexievich. This is an excerpt from her speech, "On the Battle Lost."   

So what is it that I do? I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul. The everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits, or disdains. I work with missing history. I am often told, even now, that what I write isn't literature, it's a document. What is literature today? Who can answer that question? We live faster than ever before. Content ruptures form. Breaks and changes it. Everything overflows its banks: music, painting – even words in documents escape the boundaries of the document. There are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other. Witnessеs are not impartial. In telling a story, humans create, they wrestle time like a sculptor does marble. They are actors and creators. 

I'm interested in little people. The little, great people, is how I would put it, because suffering expands people. In my books these people tell their own, little histories, and big history is told along the way. We haven't had time to comprehend what already has and is still happening to us, we just need to say it. To begin with, we must at least articulate what happened. We are afraid of doing that, we're not up to coping with our past. In Dostoevsky's Demons, Shatov says to Stavrogin at the beginning of their conversation: "We are two creatures who have met in boundless infinity ... for the last time in the world. So drop that tone and speak like a human being. At least once, speak with a human voice."

Read the entire lecture at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/alexievich-lecture_en.html

Twin Ports Arts Express Workshop

Lisa McKhann of Project Lulu

NEW workshop: 2016 Twin Ports ARTS Express 

art play for any body touched by cancer 

(patient, survivor, spouse, family, caregiver, or friend)

3 Mondays

January 11, 18, and 25, 2016 5:30 to 8 pm at On the Rocks Art Studio in Canal Park, Duluth

with teaching artists:

Elizabeth Kuth, painter; Sheila Packa, poet; Lisa McKhann, dancer; Joellyn Rock, digital artist

Note: you need not have any prior experience with art or writing - simply a willingness to play!

and some participants who are interested will be able to create experimental digital art and video at UMD's new Motion and Media Access Disciplines Lab (MMAD Lab).   

$20 registration fee, space is limited.  

This workshop is presented by Project Lulu 
For full information visit:          -      
http://www.projectlulu.org/

To register - call or email Lisa McKhann 218-349-9121 or  lisa@projectlulu.org