THE HOLLYWOOD DREAMCATCHER by Susan Dingle & BROADWAY, BOOZE & A SONG OF LIFE by Maggie Bloomfield
In this one-act play, two long-term recovering women, poets and therapists bring their stories from Broadway and Hollywood to prisons and meetings. Their youthful misadventures, told in poetry and conversation, are at once crazy, hilarious and heartbreaking. The shows reflect on their histories, friendships and how they found their voices in sobriety, with the hope of inspiring others toward recovery and change.
Directed by Andrew Botsford & Rosemary Cline. Tickets $20 RSVPs are encouraged: (631) 287-4377 Saturday, September 24 at 7 PM – 10 PM in EDT
Southampton Cultural Center: 25 Pond Ln, Southampton, NY 11968
Dominican-American Julia Alvarez (b. 1950), novelist, essayist, poet, educator, a prominent critically and commercially successful Latina
“Even I, childless one, intend to write
New Yorker fiction in the Cheever style
but all my stories tell where I came from.”
Family Tree
It’s always a special pleasure to explore the work of those who dance on the hyphen, who don’t quite fit here or there and have to make something new out of their life circumstance. Unique qualities of clarity and color seem to come from the richness inspired by bilingual skills and from that uncomfortable hyphenated place with its singular view. It leads as it must for any observant person to the rigorous exploration of the human condition and of cultural and gender-based stereotypes.
” … definitely, still, there is a glass ceiling in terms of female novelists. If we have a female character, she might be engaging in something monumental but she’s also changing the diapers and doing the cooking, still doing things which get it called a woman’s novel. You know, a man’s novel is universal; a woman’s novel is for women.”
From the hyphen the Dominican-American Julia Alvarez birthed her first gift to us, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents(Algonquin Books, 1991), a semi-autobiographical young adult work followed three years later with In the Time of the Butterflies (Algonquin Books, 1994). The first book gave us the immigrant experience. The second established Julia as a writer who wanted to go a step beyond to bring to light and bare witness to the events – tragic, liberating and inspiring – of las hermanas Mirabal (the sisters Mirabal), known as Las Miraposas, the Butterflies. They were four sisters at the heart of the fight against the rule of the Dominican despot, Rafael Leonidas Truillo. He had three of the four sisters murdered along with some 50,000 other Dominicans and Haitians.
It’s not surprising that Julia Alvarez chose to write about Las Mariposas. She was born in New York in 1950 when her parents first attempted to establish themselves in the U.S., but she lived her early years in the Dominican Republic. She lived there until she was ten years old when her family was forced to leave the country after Julia’s father participated in a failed attempt to overthrow Truillo.
I think that one of the reasons I began as a poet, and poetry was my first love, in English, was because … I especially like cadenced, rhymed poetry, and poetry in English was a way of still speaking Spanish. Because it made language more musical, more cadenced…rhyme, of course, because every other word in Spanish rhymes with an “a” or an “o” ending, so there was a way in which, to me, English poetry was a way to speak Spanish in English.
Over the past twenty-five years, Julia Alvarez prolific pen has poured out fiction for adults and young adults, collections of essays and, of course, poetry. The Woman I Kept to Myself(Algonquin, 2004) is a collection in which she explores her life from the perspective of middle age …
We learn through what we love to love the world —
which might be all that we are here to do.
Meditation
There are seventy-five poems, each composed of three ten-line stanzas, a consistency that has inspired some mixed reviews. I find this style rather sophisticated and it lends cohesiveness to the work, which is certainly a celebration of the quotidian. Sometimes the conclusions are what is to be expected … nothing exciting, just life as usual; something accepted, not fought against. There’s a certain virtue in that.
We make our art
out of ourselves and what we make makes us.
Tom
My cousin Dan and me as kids and probably the last time he was shorter than I am. He stands 6’5′ and I stand around 5’2″ – give or take a bit depending on my shoes.
I was definitely the product you’d expect from the odd and awkward situation in which I grew up and surely I showed little talent, no free thinking and no genius or particular promise. The poem is not good – some youth write profoundly beautiful and wise poetry and young people today are far more savvy than I ever was – but it does illustrate that after fifty years or so writing will improve. We writers often have our doubts, but we are an unrelenting bunch. We write, write, write. We enrich, reform and reframe as if every word of ours will spark more Light in the collective unconscious, which I rather think they do.
Make of Me a Tree
I am young, Lord,
but my heart is true,
Make of me a tree
Make me strong and supple
That when tempests blow,
I shall stand unyielding.
Let me be humble in the
Praise of Your Majesty
And testify to Your greatness.
When rains besiege
Let me be shelter
To those who have not found Your Son,
For
Yes! I am young
but my heart is true:
Make of me a tree.
Amen.
– Jamie Dedes
As for cousin Dan in the photograph (six years younger than me), he was inspired by the poem to paint a lovely “portrait” of a tree. These days it’s Father Dan – Rev. Fr. Daniel S. Sormani, C.S.Sp. – a theologian and professor at Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Dan always showed real promise. Like my son, Richard, and Dan’s brother, Christopher, even as a toddler he was smart and funny. So many of you appreciated Dan’s piece What Have We Done That People Can Pick Up Weapons and Kill?Come March, Dan will be back in the United States. We will get to visit for the first time in forty years.
And, yes!, I did want to become a nun. I was told there would be family background checks and I feared rightly that there were things in my parent’s history that would embarrass my mom. I became a now-and-again wife, a mother, a writer, a poet. No regrets. The life mission is essentially the same though the vehicle of service differs and the actions are grounded in ethics not creed, which is not to imply that the two are necessarily exclusive.
Note: The photograph of the two of us together was taken at a fundraiser our mothers were helping with for the Guild for Exceptional* Children in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York. This remains a worthy effort and worth your time if you happen to live in that area and are looking for a good cause to support.
Poet, Matt Pasca, Raven Wire (Shanti Arts Publishing, 2016)Poet Terri Muss, Over Exposed (JB Stillwater, 2013)
POETRY IN BAY SHORE, LI, NY hosted by Matt Pasca and Terri Muuss – food, fun — OPEN MIC — bring your instruments and your poems.
Saturday, July 9 at 7 PM – 10 PM
Locations: Cyrus Chai & Coffee Company
1 Railroad Plz, Bay Shore, New York
POETRY IN DOWNTOWN BAY SHORE! Join hosts Matt Pasca and Terri Muuss every second Saturday at Cyrus’ for the kind of poetry, coffee, treats and open mic experience you’ve been looking for!!! Our features will move and inspire you with their honesty and scintillating presence. Open mic follows features, so bring your ukulele, cello, double bass, guitar, sonnets, spoken word, villanelles and more!
MAYMAY is the former President of Spit, spoken word poetry club at Hofstra University, and still performs her work passionately and often around the NY area.
BRI ONISHEA is a want-to-be gypsy, ardent lover of words and pursuer of a lifetime of art and learning. More specifically, she is a New York poet, artist, editor, tutor and individual case worker for EPIC. A graduate of SUNY Geneseo, where she co-edited the school’s literary magazine, Bri will be an MSW candidate at Stony Brook University in the fall.
THE HOLLYWOOD DREAMCATCHER by Susan Dingle &
Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 