What's Happening

Jazz and photos: exploring the beats

jazz and beats

The Kerouac Project of Orlando, in conjunction with United Arts, is proud to present Jazz and Photos: Exploring the Beats.

Join us for a festive opening reception on Friday, August 14th from 7:30pm to 10:00pm at Credo in College Park. We will be unveiling a collection of black-and-white photos by Chris Felver and Mellon Tytell, depicting some of Kerouac’s contemporaries, various beat personalities through the years.

Strange Angels, featuring Mark Piszczek, Doug Matthews, and Ed Krout will be playing original jazz throughout the evening. At 8:00, Keith Bollum of Bellamy Road will be giving us an introductory presentation regarding the photographs. There is a $5 suggested door donation, and beer and wine will be available.

The photos will stay on exhibit at Credo through mid-September.

The Kerouac Project of Orlando is supported by United Arts of Central Florida, host of power2give.org/centralflorida and the collaborative Campaign for the Arts.

Celebrations

Next Door to the Dead – poems by Kathleen Driskell

Next Door to the Dead

The narrator in Next Door to the Dead has moved with her family into an old church, where they’ll make their home beside a graveyard they’ve been told has been “full up long ago.” We find this to be not quite true, as new graves are added to the old, and all become a source of fascination to the poet next door.

In “Markers,” Kathleen Driskell writes of watching a father bury his daughter’s ashes while she hangs laundry on the line “to make it sweet in the first balmy sweep of spring.”

Rarely macabre, sometimes funny, often bittersweet, and sometimes plain old sweet – in the best sense of the word, like spring’s freshening breeze – this collection is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in its ability to make the reader care about the characters– some living, some dead– who inhabit this cemetery and these poems. Wilder’s character, Emily, asks the Stage Manager, at the end of his play, whether anyone truly understands the value of life while they are living it, and he answers, “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”

Next Door to the Dead shows us that poet Kathleen Driskell understands the value of living, some. And we walk away from this collection valuing life a bit more, too, from remembering that, for all of us, it will someday end.

Driskell-Kathleen-staff-page

Kathleen Driskell is associate editor of the Louisville Review and professor of creative writing at Spalding University, where she also helps direct the low-residency MFA in Writing program. She is the author of numerous books and collections, including Laughing Sickness and Seed across Snow.

What's Happening

Bakersfield Mist at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater

OrlandoShakespeare

The Orlando Shakespeare Theater, in Partnership with UCF, presents an original staging of Bakersfield Mist from October 14 – November 15, 2015. Winner of the 2012 Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play and inspired by a true story, the colorful comic drama will be presented in the Goldman Theater. Tickets to Bakersfield Mist ($11 – $46) are available now by calling (407) 447-1700 ext. 1, visiting www.orlandoshakes.org, or in person at the John and Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center (812 East Rollins Street).