Events

#NationalMapleSyrupDay

As the wind’s blowing outside, the first snow falls, and the winter solstice approaches, it’s time to crack open a bottle of maple syrup for those cold winter mornings.

Written in celebration of the sweet nectar, Maple Sugaring: Keeping It Real in New England by David K. Leff is a maple history and recipe book you don’t want to miss out on.

An essayist, poet, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, David K. Leff is an expert on maple tapping in New England.

The book trailer can be found below:

More Than Just A Dance

The excitement surrounding Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done (a MoMA exhibit running through Feb. 3, 2019) brings to mind some phenomenal Wesleyan books—new and old—that feature artists who are in the exhibit.

Trisha Brown, one of the founders of the Judson Theater, was an American choreographer and dancer who helped birth the postmodern dance movement. Brown, amongst other artists, challenged traditional understandings of choreography by employing new compositional methods that stripped dance of its theatrical conventions and instead implemented everyday gestures from domestic and urban spaces. Brown has created over one hundred dances, six operas, one ballet, and a significant body of graphic works.

In Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art, art historian Susan Rosenberg emphasizes how boundary-defying Brown’s work really was through personalized interviews with Brown and colleagues whom she has eternally inspired. By outlining the formation of Brown’s artistic principles and utilizing her archives, Rosenberg eloquently demonstrates why the late choreographer was the first woman choreographer to receive the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship “Genius Award”.

 

Anna Halprin is a legendary pioneer for postmodern dance as well. She taught and led workshops and classes at the Judson Dance Theater. In fact, Trisha Brown was one of her students. In her forthcoming book Making Dances that Matter: Resources for Community Creativity, Halprin demonstrates how dance can be a powerful tool for healing, learning, and mobilizing change.

She gives insight into her personal philosophy and past experiences as well as step-by-step processes to create unifying dances such as the “The Planetary Dance” and “Circle the Earth.” These two dances continue to be performed around the world.

 

Deborah Hay is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and teacher working in the field of postmodern dance and one of the founding members of the Judson Dance Theater. Her work focuses on large-scale dance projects involving untrained dancers, fragmented and choreographed music accompaniment, and the execution of ordinary movement patterns performed under stressful conditions. She is the artistic director of the Deborah Hay Dance Company, based in Austin, Texas.

My Body, The Buddhist is a guide into Hay’s choreographic techniques, a gloss on her philosophy of the body (which shares much with Buddhism), and an extraordinary artist’s primer. The book is composed of nineteen short chapters each an example of what Susan Foster calls Hay’s “daily attentiveness to the body’s articulateness.”

We are pleased to announce that Wesleyan is re-issuing Using the Sky, A Dance, by Deborah Hay, in fall 2019.

 

Sally Banes

Sally Banes is a remarkable dance critic, historian, and writer. Drawing on the postmodern perspective and concerns that informed her groundbreaking Terpsichore in Sneakers, Sally Bane’s Writing Dancing documents the background and development of avant-garde and popular dance, analyzing individual artists, performances, and entire dance movements.

 

John Cage

John Milton Cage Jr. was an American composer and music theorist. He became notorious for indeterminacy in music and non-standard use of musical instruments as well as for being one of the leading figures during the post-war avant-garde.

Silence, by John Cage

Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Laura Kuhn

John Cage Was, photographs of James Klosty
with comments by a variety of artists and performers.

Wesleyan has published a variety of books by Cage.

 

 

A New Rendition of John Cage’s “Musicircus”

Join students in Music 109 “Introduction to Experimental Music” and the greater Wesleyan community December 6, 2018 at 3:15pm in Crowell Concert Hall, to experience the newest rendition of John Cage’s Musicircus, continuing since its first “happening” took place in 1967 at the University of Illinois.

This eclectic performance—also known as a “happening”—rests within John Cage’s mode of anarchist experimental music. Musicircus has been described as: “Everything at once and all together”. The performance is intended to highlight the instantaneous collaboration of soloists and ensembles as they create music simultaneously with no score, no parts, nor anything specified but the concept itself. Cage went on to describe the concept in “Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) Continued 1967”, featured in his second book, A Year from Monday:

 

Focusing on the social nature of artistic creation, the performance was originally intended by Cage to last five hours in accordance with its premiere in 196 which Cage described as “a lively, noisy, and wildly successful social, as well as musical, event”. Other mentions of John Cage’s Musicircus are featured in The Selected Letters of John Cage, edited by Lisa Kuhn. Both of these books, along with other collections of John Cage’s letters, lectures, and essays can be ordered through your favorite bookseller.

#NationalFrenchToastDay

Are you ready to get those griddles cooking? It’s National French Toast Day and at Wesleyan University Press, we’re celebrating with one of our favorite diners.


Irish Soda Bread French Toast and recipe found on pages 74-75 of Breakfast at O’Rourke’s.

Breakfast at O’Rourke’s: New Cuisine from a Classic American Diner by Brian O’Rourke is an innovative recipe book straight from the heart of Middletown, CT’s favorite hometown diner. Including four French Toast recipes, it’s time to get your butter, eggs, and sugar in a mixing bowl and bread slices ready.

The book trailer can be found below:

Celebrating Wallace Stevens – 23rd Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash

Looking for poetry to snuggle up with as the days grow shorter and temperatures dip? Want to read more Connecticut poets? Pick up Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, edited by Dennis Barone, featuring Robinson Jeffers, Susan Howe, Richard Wilbur, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Wallace Stevens.

A fan of Stevens’ poetry? Head over to the Hartford Public Library for the twenty-third annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash!

Saturday, November 3, 2018, 2:00pm
Center for Contemporary Culture
Hartford Public Library
suggested donation: $10

Featuring: Cole Swensen, presenting “Perhaps the Truth Depends”

A reception of wine and hors d’oeuvres, book signing, birthday cake, and champagne will be available.

Evie Shockley honored with Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Congratulations to Evie Shockley!

Her book, semiautomatic, is the winner of the 2018 Hurston/Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award for Poetry.
In the words of the judges: “Despite the ugliness of the violence around us, she has written a collection of poems that both chronicles it and decries it, all while offering us the beauty of her lines.”

More about the awards, from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation:

The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation announced the winners and finalists of the 2018 Legacy Awards and paid tribute to two pioneers in the Black literary community: Poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, best known for For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf; and Charles Henry Rowell, long-time editor and creator of the literary journal Callaloo.

Marita Golden, co-founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, presented the North Star Award—the foundation’s highest honor for career accomplishment and inspiration to the writing community to Dr. Shange; due to health issues, Dr. Shange was unable to attend, but her sister, playwright Ifa Bayeza accepted the award. Two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Natasha Trethewey presented Dr. Rowell with the Madam C.J. Walker award in recognition of his life-long dedication to uplifting the Black cultural experience.

More than 200 literary stars, readers and representatives of the publishing industry, media, arts, politics, and academia attended the event on Friday, October 19 in Washington, DC. Award-winning journalist Derek McGinty served as Master of Ceremony and Khadijah Ali-Coleman, playwright, poet and singer/songwriter, delivered a musical tribute to Zora Neale Hurston, one of the foundation’s namesakes. The highlight of the evening was the naming of the winners of the juried awards for books by Black authors published in 2017 in the categories of debut novel, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Read more about the Hurston/Wright Foundation. 

 

#NationalBetterBreakfastMonth and #NationalPancakeDay

It’s September: a month for back-to-school, changing of the seasons, and breakfast! Nationally recognized as Better Breakfast Month, September is the perfect time to get your breakfast morning routine into shape. In addition to this, September 26th is National Pancake Day. Thankfully, Wesleyan University Press has a little inspiration to get you started.


Napoleon Pancakes and recipe found on pages 53-55 of Breakfast at O’Rourke’s.

Breakfast at O’Rourke’s: New Cuisine from a Classic American Diner by Brian O’Rourke is the perfect morning pick-me-up recipe book inspired by Irish-American and down-home diner specials found at O’Rourke’s Diner in Middletown, CT. Recipes include omelets, pancakes, French toasts, eggs, quiches and more!

The book trailer can be found below:

For those who are more of maple lovers, Maple Sugaring: Keeping It Real in New England by David K. Leff can help satisfy your sweet tooth with a multitude of maple-inspired recipes.

Vizenor on silent communication, puppets, and Dummy Trout

From the novel Native Tributes, by Gerald Vizenor:

Dummy Trout surprised me that spring afternoon at the Blue Ravens Exhibition. She raised two brazen hand puppets, the seductive Ice Woman on one hand, and the wily Niinag Trickster on the other, and with jerky gestures the rough and ready puppets roused the native stories of winter enticements and erotic teases.

The puppets distracted the spectators at the exhibition of abstract watercolors and sidetracked the portrayals of native veterans and blue ravens mounted at the Ogema Train Station on the White Earth Reservation. The station agent provided the platform for the exhibition, and winced at the mere sight of the hand puppets. He shunned the crude wooden creatures and praised the scenes of fractured soldiers and blue ravens, an original native style of totemic fauvism by Aloysius Hudon Beaulieu.

The puppets were a trace of trickster stories.

Dummy was clever and braved desire and mockery as a mute for more than thirty years with the ironic motion of hand puppets. Miraculously she survived a firestorm on her eighteenth birthday, walked in uneven circles for three days, mimed the moods of heartache, and never voiced another name, word, or song. She grieved, teased, and snickered forever in silence. Nookaa, her only lover, and hundreds of other natives were burned to white ashes and forgotten in the history of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894.

Dummy stowed a fistful of ash in a Mason jar.

We recently asked Gerald Vizenor, author of , to tell us a little more about his interest in hand puppets and why he used puppets so prominently in this latest book. This was his response.

Some people gesture with their hands and fingers as they speak, and these people are the hand talkers. I am fascinated by the hand gestures of direction, or scenes in stories. They pinch words, praise words, smooth, and reverse words with the turn of a finger. Some of my relatives were hand talkers, and the gestures are not the same but remind me of the moves of hand puppets. My first interest in hand puppets started with native dolls in museums, made of straw and cloth, and the stories that went along with the figures.  

Later, as a soldier in Japan, I was inspired with the great Bunraku puppets. These puppets were visionary, transformation characters in traditional scenes, and the puppets created an incredible sense of presence through gestures, sound and story. The Bunraku puppets are not controlled with strings, but with the hands of a master, and the gestures and costumes are elaborate and traditional. The string and hand puppets are more common around the world, especially in Europe, and some puppet moves are more innovative than others. The Guignol is a famous hand puppet in France.  

I am interested in any manner or style of puppets, the creative motion of fingers and figures to convey emotion, and convince the audience that there is a spiritual association between humans and puppets, something similar to a totemic association. Puppets are not the mere imitation of human gestures, but rather the spiritual motion, or natural motion that creates a sense of presence.

Laura Hall, my wife, and I twice attended an international puppet festival that is held every other year in France. The brilliant imagination of amateurs and master puppeteers from around the world create great puppet shows at the Festival Mondial des Théâtres de Marionnettes in Charleville-Mézières, France. My interest in puppets took another turn with the appreciation of the flea market hand puppets made with found objects, buttons, thimbles, plastics, tin cans, brushes, and bones. I was moved by the creative power of the hand puppets made with discarded material by the Paul Klee, the expressionist and surrealist artist. He created marvelous hand puppet creatures to amuse his son, but not as works of art.  

Dummy Trout, the silent puppeteer in two of my recent historical novels, was an actual native person, and she was a marvelous hand talker. Her facial expressions and hand gestures almost created the sense of a puppet. Dummy, a wicked nickname because she apparently spoke a very early version of either Cree or the Anishinaabe language, and natives teased the manner of her speech since they did not understand the words. The only real dummies were the crude nicknamers. Dummy lived on the White Earth Reservation in a tiny cabin, and teased me with delightful hand talk. She died alone about fifty years ago. I imagined her hand talks as a hand puppet, and then created a similar character that carves the heads and hands of hand puppets from fallen birch trees.  

Most of the hand puppets in my novels have polished heads and hands carved from wood, and resemble notable figures, such as Léon Blum, Gertrude Stein, Adolf Hitler, and Guillaume Apollinaire. And in the same novels one character creates hand puppets with trash and debris, a bone, vegetable, or a rusty cigarette tin such as the hand puppet President Herbert Hoover in Native Tributes.

I have imagined hand puppets as visionary figures with a sense of presence in theatres, and in literary scenes of my historical novels. Carved and debris hand puppets appear as characters in two of my recent novels, Native Tributes, and Satie on the Seine: Letters to the Heirs of the Fur Trade. My hand puppets play crucial roles in literary scenes during the Nazi Occupation of Paris.      

There are no birth certificates, photographs, or other documents about the woman who inspired Gerald Vizenor’s puppets. Nonetheless, Vizenor is sure that “‘Dummy’ probably arrived at the White Earth Reservation in the thirties, because the first stories about her seem to go back to the early forties.” “Dummy” was remembered by Sharon Enjady-Mitchell Anwaachigekwe, along with other members of a large ceremonial and adopted family. 


Gerald Vizenor will be at the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, Wednesday, September 26th at 7pm. He will read from his new historical novel, Native Tributes. In this sequel to Blue Ravens, Vizenor maintains his masterly perception of oral stories, creating a dynamic literary tribute to his community and  relatives, who have become visionary artists during the Great Depression. Book signing at Birchbark Books (2115 W 21st St.) to follow the reading. More information about the event can be found here.

#NationalWaffleDay

Happy National Waffle Day! While the United States differs from other countries celebrating this day, National Waffle Day here can be just as scrumptious, if not more with a few toppings.


Recipe for Quick Maple Fudge, found on page 172 of Maple Sugaring.

Fortunately for readers, Maple Sugaring: Keeping It Real in New England by David K. Leff (Wesleyan, 2015) can provide a bit of inspiration for the most popular waffle topping: maple fudge.

An essayist, poet, and former deputy commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection, David K. Leff is an expert on what makes waffles in New England so great: the syrup on top.

The book trailer can be found below:

Heading Outdoors in Connecticut Summer

The flowers are blossoming, grass growing greener by the day, and sunrise is before 5:30am; it’s summer in Connecticut and at Wesleyan University Press, we’re celebrating with some of our favorite outdoors books and field guides.

 

Why not kick of your summer with an excursion on foot—whether it be a leisurely stroll or vigorous hike? The newly redesigned 20th edition of The Connecticut Walk Book by Connecticut Forest and Park Association (CFPA) is now available to inspire and guide you through your summer jaunts.

Every summer, CFPA offers local hikes and other events. Most are free. Here are this season’s events:

June 2-3, 2018 (All Day): CT Trails Day – LARGEST National Trails Day in the nation; Celebration of 50th anniversary of the National Trail System, follow on Twitter with #CTTrailsDay FREE

June 3, 2018 (9:00am): 2017 Goodwin Forest Trail Run 10k/30k, $20-33 registration fee

June 12, 2018 (10:00am-12:30pm): June Senior Walk at CFPA, FREE

June 13 & 14, 2018 (10:00am-12:30pm & 12:00pm-2:30pm): Senior Walks at Hampton, FREE

July 10, 2018 (10:00am-12:00pm): July Senior Walk at CFPA, FREE

August 14, 2018 (10:00am-12:00pm): August Senior Walk at CFPA, FREE

September 11, 2018 (10:00am-12:00pm): September Senior Walk at CFPA, FREE

 

With its release coinciding with National Geographic’s #YearOfTheBird,  look to the skies for Birding in Connecticut, by Frank Gallo, will help those of you looking to the skies to capture

Some local birding and #YearoftheBird events to watch out for:

June 3, 2018 (9am-1pm): First Sunday Bird Walk at Greenwich Point Park (Every first Sunday) FREE

June 3, 2018 (10am-11:30am): Connecticut Bird Atlas – Training Workshop, Audubon Center, Southbury, CT, FREE

June 5, 2018 (7:30pm-9pm): “Saving Seabirds” at National Geographic Campus, Gilbert H. Grosvenor Auditorium, 1600 M St NW, Washington, D.C. 20036, $25 admission

June 9-10, 2018: Summer Bird Count; various locations (Hartford, New Haven, Greenwich); Every weekend of June, FREE

June 30, 2018 (11am-1pm): Audubon Greenwich – LGBT – Let’s Go Birding Together!, Pride Month birding event, $5 Audubon members, $8 non-members

August 25, 2018 (7:30pm-9pm): Creatures of the Night… Hike! at the New Canaan Nature Center, FREE

 

Following the flow of the river, and the trout, fishermen and would-be fishermen might consider picking up a copy of Fly Fishing in Connecticut: A Beginner’s Guide by Kevin Murphy.

Why not brush up on your fishing skills at one of these fun events?

May 26-June 15, 2018: 2018 CT Fishing Tournament/Derby; various locations

June 2, 2018 (5am-3:30pm): Bass-A-Palooza, Norwalk, CT (registration for fishers has passed)

June 16, 2018 (12pm-4:30pm): Hooks for Heroes Fishing Tournament, Stamford, CT, $35 admission (registration for fishers has passed)

July 15-24, 2018: Three Belles Outfitters Trifecta Challenge Kayak Tournament, Niantic, CT, $100 registration

August 4-5 & 11-12, 2018: The Federal Bass Federation of Connecticut (CT-TBF) 2-Day Events

 

 

After hiking the trails, fishing, or birdwatching, one can delve into Connecticut’s multitude of small towns and rural structures in Hidden In Plain Sight: A Deep Traveler Explores Connecticut by Hartford Courant essayist, David K. Leff and look to the night sky with Under the Dark Sky: Life int he Thames River Basin by Steven G. Smith.