Next Live Production:

Thursday, May 15, 2007

7:oo p.m. @ The Puyallup Public Library

(Click here for address and directions)

Hosted by Jay Bates

And featuring the following artists: 

Having just completed raised beds for the strawberries and asparagus--it’s finally spring in Northwest Pennsylvania--Philip Terman, as he was struggling with the wheelbarrow across the rutted, post-winter grass, wondered how all this—the afternoon sun, the orange peels in the compost pit, the fact that he’s the only Jew within a forty mile radius--might work their way into a poem. Have any of his three collections of poetry--The House of Sages, Book of the Unbroken Days and, Rabbis of the Air--really captured the essence of those mysteries his poems contemplate: that ancient Jewish culture, and the equally ancient Chinese culture he and his wife, the artist and gardener Christine Hood, inherited when they adopted their two daughters, Miriam and Bella?   Does their homesteading and living in a converted one-room red-brick slate-roofed schoolhouse on thirty acres without a Wal-Mart in sight constitute, in this post-modern wifi cell phone text message world of ours, a quirkiness?  He’d like to think so, as he opens up a jar of the tomato sauce they preserved and shelved last summer.

Elea Carey was born and raised in Memphis, TN, where she attended the same high school as fiction writer Peter Taylor, albeit many years later.  She  will soon graduate from the Rainier Writing Workshop, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Pacific Lutheran University.  Her work has appeared in many journals, most recently in Story Quarterly, where she was anthologized in the collection 18 Lies and 3 Truths along with such notable writers as Rick Bass, Richard Bausch, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lorrie Moore.  She currently lives in a rural area near Poulsbo, WA with her husband, two children, and assortment of farm animals.

Patrick Bradshaw is an independent songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Bainbridge Island, Washington. His music is characterized by its instrumentation: harmonica sweeps, glockenspiel runs, droning guitar lines; as well as its evocative lyrics concerning unrequited love, family, and science.  As a grown-up, he resides on Capitol Hill in Seattle -- armed with a banjo, a beard, and a laptop -- peddling his hand-written music albums at coffee shops and brothels in the Northwest -- and writing epic run-on sentences.  Visit his website at thepasthood.com. 

Plus our standard favorite features:

Name That Book -- This audience-participation trivia contest will challenge your ability to name the titles and authors of three different books with only a short clue about the books history and reading of the book's first sentence. 

As the Publishing World Turns -- Follow this continuing saga of writers in crisis.  Meet our hero Heathcliff Beed, his nemesis Eustace Faulkner, and the woman they both love, Ophelia Payne, and listen to them solve the mystery of the murdered Reader's Digest editor.