About six years ago, artist/teacher/community activist Todd Brown astounded me at his workshop, “The Art Of Not Knowing.” It was my first-ever art class.

After a few preliminaries, Todd said something that changed my life. It was like receiving enlightenment from a zen master. His words hit me right between the eyes:

Forget about making a picture. You don’t know how. You don’t know how to do anything. So don’t try. Instead, just concentrate on processing a surface. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

White, disabled, and genderqueer, Eli Clare happily lives in the Green Mountains of Vermont where he writes and proudly claims a penchant for rabble-rousing. He has written a book of essays, Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (South End Press, 1999, 2009), a collection of poetry, The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion (Homofactus Press, 2007), and has been published in many periodicals and anthologies.

Eli speaks, teaches, and facilitates all over the United States and Canada at conferences, community events, and colleges about disability, queer and trans identities, and social justice. Among other pursuits, he has walked across the United States for peace, coordinated a rape prevention program, and helped organize the first ever Queerness and Disability Conference. When he’s not writing or on the road, you can find him reading, hiking, camping, riding his recumbent trike, or otherwise having fun adventures.

I know Eli through Rebekah Edwards, a Queer/Gender Studies professor at Mills College. Two years ago, Dr. Edwards taught The Marrow’s Telling: Words in Motion and asked Eli to come to class and speak with us. The book is beautiful, and Eli is a magnificent speaker and activist. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, you would end up with some good stories. Of that I am certain. You’d probably have much better stories than the ones you’re telling now.

I mean, you’re dragging your body through time… through this world. You are faced with Control* constantly. Physics. Gravity. Culture. Rules. You’re constantly faced with things telling you “No.” You have capacities: mental, physical, musical, computational… all that shit. Do we use our capacities to fight Control? Uh uh. Most of us get a reasonable haircut and spend all of our time also telling ourselves “No.” We use our minds and our bodies to build even bigger walls than the ones we already have around us. Even worse, we try to keep each other penned in mediocrity. All in the name of avoiding conflict. Mediocrity needs no help, it’s doing fine. Quit helping it.

The first order of business is to stop avoiding conflict. Read the rest of this entry »

Is there anybody in America who is not plagued with ambivalent feelings this time of year? Religion, family, politics, hope, war & peace, guilt, memory, guilt, disappointment, guilt: all the hot buttons are on trigger every December. For an artist, hot buttons are opportunities. My reaction is to load them into a metaphorical gatling gun and shoot them at my muse to see what bleeds.

That’s rather a gruesome image, I’m afraid. But the holidays can be a rather gruesome time. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Steven Cramer is the author of four poetry collections: The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (1987), The World Book (1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (1997), and Goodbye to the Orchard (2004), which won the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

Steven’s poems and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly; as well as in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poets and The POETRY Anthology, 1912–2002.

Steven has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Tufts University. Recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he currently directs the Low-Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge. More information about his work can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many ways to punk the muse. Last week, I talked about visiting specialty bookstores. Visiting places of all sorts—bookstores, museums, caverns, mountains, river rapids, foreign lands—is perhaps the most time-honored muse-punking device imaginable. Few writers or artists fail to travel. And those that stay put (consider Vermeer or Emily Dickinson) distinguish themselves with exceptionally deep interior travel.

Interior travel. Now that is something worth thinking about. Read the rest of this entry »

Traci Brimhall is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (forthcoming from W.W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award.

Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review Online, FIELD, Indiana Review and Southern Review. She is a former Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a current Emerging Writer Fellow at The Writer’s Center. She has also received scholarships and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the Disquiet International Literary Program.

She holds degrees from Florida State University and Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she teaches creative writing at Western Michigan University where she is a doctoral candidate and a King/​Chávez/​Parks Fellow. She also serves as Poetry Editor for Third Coast and Editor at Large for Loaded Bicycle. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I caught the initial explanation of ITCH: Investing in the Creative Hunch.

Founder Todd Brown calls it “a pilot initiative of a new form of social-cultural networking. Connecting projects in theater, dance, music, literature, and visual art, the ITCH creates opportunities for the general public to participate in the behind-the-scenes of artistic production while increasing social networking opportunities in real time and space.”

Tonight, Brown and other project leaders will meet for a potluck discussion about the idea, overviews on some of the works-in-progress, and a casual meet and greet. You can read a profile and find out more info about the meeting here, but below are some soundbytes I particularly like: Read the rest of this entry »

On Mon Dec 12 at 9am a group of people from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade are meeting at the Civic Center BART station entrance (above ground – UN Plaza), then to West Oakland and on to the port for the Occupy Movement’s attempt at a West Coast Port Shutdown. The call to march begins as early as 5:30a, from West Oakland BART. More (and up-to-date) information can be found at the website. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some hours this week browsing Fields Book Store on Polk. Founded in 1932 by George Fields, a devotee of Gurdjieff, the store for many years now has specialized in the field of metaphysics and the occult. It has one of the widest (and weirdest) collections in this area you will ever find.

I love this stuff. Scientists report that when we think about religious and occult matters, it stimulates certain parts of our brain that can induce mystical experiences, perhaps something like getting high on marijuana. Read the rest of this entry »

(Evan Karp)

I made it to City Arts & Lectures for the first time this past week to see Miranda July in conversation with her longtime friend Julia Bryan-Wilson, and I’d like to share some of the things I heard. For those of you who don’t know (you probably know), Miranda is one of my favorite artists; if you don’t know why you should click here, here, here, here, and it’s not too late to go here.

“Yes, I wanted the solution to my script,” she said, “but also sort of to life in general, and it seemed better to talk with strangers than to just keep spinning in my own head and my sort of fictional world.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

As The Storming Bohemian I have written a fair amount over the last couple of years about creative consciousness lost and found.

No one gets into The Garden of Making for free. No one is guaranteed safe passage. And often we find ourselves outside the gate. It feels sometimes like the childhood game of chutes and ladders. One misstep and down we slide. Then we have to find another ladder and on we go, up and down through the long afternoon until the final descent into the undiscovered twilight from which no traveler returns alive. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve said this so many times and in so many ways now, and this book says it very exuberantly, that influence is understated or concealed when it needn’t be, or that I’m the sum of my cultural responsiveness… Read the rest of this entry »