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Meet Priscilla Page, dramaturg who worked with Joy Harjo!

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Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page in conversation at Yale University, March 2019.

Priscilla Page was co-editor and contributor to Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and A Circle of Responses. The play was inspired by Harjo’s desire to see Native Americans accurately depicted on the stage, in the face of inaccurate contemporary depictions found in the likes of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Cry, Trojans!, in addition other recent plays. As Mary Kathryn Nagle points out in her introductory essay: “In contrast to the majority of contemporary Native representation onstage, the Native protagonist of Wings does not grunt incoherent sounds, nor does she portray the loss of her Muscogee ancestral homelands as a joke in a modern day rock musical.”

Priscilla Page is a writer, dramaturg, senior lecturer in the Department of Theater and coordinator for the Multicultural Theater Certificate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a member of the Latino Theater Commons and Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). She served as the program curator at New WORLD Theater and managed the Asian American Women Playwrights Archive for five years.

Page’s dramaturgy works include My Bronx, written and performed by Terry Jenoure, sash & trim, written and performed by Djola Branner and directed by award winning actress Laurie Carlos, Changing the Air, written and directed by Ingrid Askew, and Lydia on the Top Floor, also written and performed by Terry Jenoure and directed by Linda McInerney. Page also contributed to widely published playwright Migdalia Cruz’s essay “My World Made Real,” a part of Cruz’s anthology, El Grito Del Bronx. She earned her BA at California State University Hayward, and her MFA in dramaturgy at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Question & Answer with Priscilla Page

Q Tell us about what led you to become a dramaturg?

A I have always loved theater and performance. I took dance classes with my cousins when I was really young and then I was in the choir and in plays in high school. Like many young people, I wanted to move to New York and become an actor. I had big dreams for a while. In college, I chose to have a child and then redirected my path in life. I finished college with an emphasis on costume design and an interest in dramaturgy. Right after college, I was able to work as an intern as dramaturg at UC Santa Barbara where my love for theater research continued to grow. That experience led me to study dramaturgy at UMASS Amherst where I earned my MFA in 2002. There are many facets to dramaturgy and dramaturgs perform a number of different functions that include research, translation, education, audience engagement, and new play development. As a dramaturg, I am most interested in working with writers (playwrights and poets) on new plays/performance texts. Laurie Carlos, my mentor and art-mother, helped forge what is known as the jazz aesthetics in theater and I see her influence on my work clearly. I appreciate theater that blends forms and that pushes creative and political boundaries. Joy’s play does these things and shows the readers a path toward self-actualization and healing.

Q  What do you envision, for the future of Indigenous Theater and Indigenous Performance?

A I envision respect, understanding, and resources. We chose to place Mary Kathryn Nagle’s essay first in the book because she lays out such a clear statement about the absence AND the distortions of Native American people on the American stage that is both historical and ongoing. Native American artists have rich and complex stories to tell. We need audiences to listen and we need resources to cultivate new voices and spaces for Native American writers and performers.

Q How did you come to work on Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, a book about Indigenous Theater?

A I met Joy in 2003 when she performed as part of the Global Women’s History Project at Westfield State College. My dear friend and incredible poet Magdalena Gomez also participated in that event and told me about it. I have loved Joy’s poetry since I first read it as a young woman in college in California in the 1990s. At the time that Joy and I met, I was having a hard time emotionally because my Aunt Linda had passed away and recently. It was sudden and it deeply affected my mother. I wasn’t able to travel home and felt very sad and lonely. I had never seen pictures of Joy but I knew many of her poems: “She Had Some Horses”, “Remember”, “Woman Hanging From the 13th Floor Window”. I expected to be moved by hearing her but what was totally unexpected was how I felt when I saw her. She looks just like my Aunt Linda. I ended up sitting in the back of the room and weeping through the entire reading. When it was over, I couldn’t bring myself to leave the space. In fact, I moved closer to the stage without really wanting to talk to Joy. I only wanted to be close to her as I grieved. I am sure she sensed that something was going on with me because I think I ended up being the only person in the auditorium. I vividly recall Joy sitting next to me and starting a conversation with me. I told her that she looked like my aunt and she simply said, “Tell me about her.” I shared with her that I knew a little about my family’s heritage as Native Americans but that my mom and her siblings were virtually silent about that part of themselves. We come from a very small tribe that endured incredible violence in Northern California, the Wiyot Tribe. Joy knew of this tribe and their history. She had even done work with them and visited their land. I had a copy of her poem “Remember” with me and I asked her to sign it. She wrote, “I hope this poem helps you find your people.”

I share part of this story in the book and with you now because it did help me continue to ask questions and do research; it’s a journey that I am still taking. I also learned from Joy and through my research that my family’s silence was really a form of self-preservation. White settlers intended to completely wipe them out and enacted a series massacres with the most horrific one taking place on Indian Island in Humboldt Bay on February 26, 1860. After that the surviving members went underground, joining other tribes nearby or inter-marrying. My grandmother Lila Keysner was born in 1910 and the word “half-breed” is listed on her birth certificate. Her grandparents would have lived during the time of the massacres. The only detail that I really know is that she lived on a reservation until she married my grandfather Raymond Chavarin, a Mexican man. They lived in Oakland, CA, and had nine children together.

After meeting Joy in 2003, I attended the reading of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light at the Public Theater in 2009. I remember really loving the idea of telling the story of Redbird with poetry and music. It’s the perfect form for Joy because she has led bands over the years and because she often plays her saxophone at her poetry readings. In 2011, I was able to work with my colleague Professor Laura Furlan at UMASS Amherst and we hosted Joy and Larry Mitchell for a short residency that included a performance, a workshop version of “Wings” and the radio interview that I conducted with Joy and Ron Welburn, a leading figure in Native Studies and an expert on jazz. I included parts of that interview in my essay in the book as well. It was after that residency that Joy asked me to work with her on the book project. It actually took us a while and there were some starts and stops with shape of the book and the contributors. I am very happy that we worked with Mary Kathryn Nagle who wrote a strong and compelling essay and that I was able to interview both Randy Reinholz, a Native theater director and producer who I know and admire as well as Rolland Meinholtz who was very generous with his time and his recollections. And the book is stunning! I love the design of it and the inclusion of the production photos.

Photos from a production of Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light.
(Click on the photos to expand.)

Exploring Wild Nights with Emily with Open Me Carefully

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In the recently premiered film, Wild Nights with Emily, directed by Madeleine Olnek, starring Molly Shannon (Emily Dickinson) and Susan Ziegler (Susan Huntington Dickinson), the famous nineteenth-century American poet is brought to life in a new sapphic light.

Based on Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith’s collection, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson, Olnek’s new film brings to the forefront Emily’s previously censured relationship with her sister-in-law, Susan. Departing from Terence Davies’ serious and abstinent film, A Quiet Passion (2016), Olnek partners with Smith to unveil the powerful intimacy of Dickinson’s letters, generating a new portrayal of Emily as someone who “lived on her own terms.”

Since its original publication in 1998 with Paris Press, Open Me Carefully, has struck a chord in the poetry world, compiling into a single volume for the first time, selections from Emily Dickinson’s thirty-six year correspondence to Susan Huntington Dickinson. Martha Nell Smith—who Olnek collaborated with to direct the film—is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, Professor of English, and Founding Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. Ellen Louise Hart is the author of articles featured in The Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Emily Dickinson Journal, An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, The Women’s Review of Books, and The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

To read more, visit your local bookstore or order a copy online with HFS Books.

excerpt from the book:

                                                             Sunday afternoon

So sweet and still, and Thee, Oh Susie, what I need more, to
make my heaven whole?

Sweet Hour, blessed Hour, to carry me with you, and to bring
you back to me, long enough to snatch one kiss, and whisper
Good bye, again.

NYC panel on the artwork and life of Sol LeWitt, May 5th

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Please join biographer and friend to the author, Sol LeWitt; artist, author, and curator Pablo Helguera; and Karen Gunderson artist and colleague of Lewitt, at McNally Jackson bookstore (Prince Street), March 6, at 6PM. Read more about the event here.

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An excerpt relating to Gunderson’s relationship with LeWitt.

During the 1970s, LeWitt split his time between New York and Spoleto. And when he went to Italy it was often with his female companion at the time. The first to follow Wheeler and Conrad-Eybesfeld was a young artist (again, much younger than LeWitt).

Karen Gunderson—like Gene Beery, a native of Racine, Wisconsin—had earned a master’s degree at the University of Iowa and was teaching at Ohio State University (OSU), in Columbus, when she met LeWitt. Her classes included intermedia (she was a pioneer scholar in this new field), art history, and sculpture. As she recalled in an interview in 2014, “It was me and forty men at OSU. I got patted on top of my head or on my ass every day.”

Read more from this excerpt from Sol LeWitt.

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Three Wesleyan University Press Authors Receive 2019 Guggenheim Fellowships

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Congratulations to three Wesleyan University Press authors who have been awarded the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. This year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation chose 168 recipients from 30,000 applicants from the United States and Canada. Guggenheim Fellowships are intended for individuals who have already demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts.

Winners from the Press include:

Ann Cooper Albright

Ann Cooper Albright is Professor and Chair of the Department of Dance at Oberlin College. She is the author of Moving History/Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Wesleyan University Press, 2007), and Engaging Bodies: The Politics and Poetics of Corporeality (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Dance Studies.

Camille Dungy

Camille Dungy is a professor in the English Department at Colorado State University. She is the author of Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award in 2018. She is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

Shane McCrae

Shane McCrae is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University. He is the author of In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018. He is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry.

 

 

 

Chapbooks by Kit and Joseph Reed now available as a set!

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Wesleyan University Press has recreated three enchanting, humorous chapbooks originally produced for friends by the late Kit and Joseph Reed. The books were written by Kit and lavishly illustrated by Joseph.

All three books are now available as a set. 

Thirty Polite Things to Say

          Amusing guide to social etiquette.

The preface reads: “There are times in the lives of us all in which we are at a loss for words. This volume attempts a partial solution.” What follows are thirty things perhaps we shouldn’t say, but often find ourselves uttering.
32 pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7859-4

Dog Truths

          A whimsically serious chapbook about dogs

The chapbook includes absurd graphs, charts, and diagrams that tell the “truth” about various dog breeds—size, attitude, and likability. Dog truths are laid bare here, setting the record straight. Woof.
12pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7860-0

Deaths of the Poets

          A darkly humorous homage to poets and their deaths

Rhyming couplets meet slightly-sardonic etchings in this whimsically dark chapbook chronicling the dramatic ends of some of our most beloved poets.
34 pp. 4 x 6″ Paper, $6.95, 978-0-8195-7858-7

Kit Reed (June 7, 1932–September 24, 2017) was an American author and journalist whose short stories were nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Tiptree Awards. Joseph Reed is Professor Emeritus of Film and American Studies at Wesleyan University.

Also by Kit Reed
The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories
Seven for the Apocalypse
Weird Women, Wired Women

Q & A with Mary Kathryn Nagle on Native Theater and YIPAP

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Mary Kathryn Nagle contributed a powerful original essay to introduce Wesleyan’s new theater volume, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light: A Play by Joy Harjo and a Circle of Responses. Her essay is entitled “Joy Harjo’s Wings: A Revolution on the American Stage.” Nagle explains how negative and demeaning representations of Native people in popular culture are not without consequence to Native people. She writes:

“Redface was purposefully created to tell a false, demeaning story. Redface constitutes a false portrayal of Native people—most often performed by non–Natives wearing a stereotypical ‘native’ costume that bears no relation to actual Native people, our stories, our struggles, or our survival in a country that has attempted to eradicate us. The continued dominant perception that American Indians are the racial stereotypes they see performed on the American stage is devastating to our sovereign rights to define our own identity. Of course, that’s why it was invented.”

Join Joy Harjo & Priscilla Page at the Yale Center for British Art, March 5, 4PM.

Nagle is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She currently serves as executive director of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program (YIPAP)—who are sponsoring Joy Harjo and Priscilla Page’s visit to Yale on Tuesday, March 5th. She is also a partner at Pipestem Law, PC, where she works to protect tribal sovereignty and the inherent right of Indian Nations to protect their women and children from domestic violence and sexual assault. Curious to learn more about YIPAP, I asked Mary Kathryn some questions about the program, and Native theater in general. Here are her answers:

Q. How long has YIPAP been existence? Can you tell me a little about how the department came to be?
A. YIPAP was formed in 2015, following the performance of SLIVER OF A FULL MOON at Yale Law School. Professor Ned Blackhawk noted that several of the Native students were moved and inspired when they witnessed professional Native actors, alongside Native women survivors, sharing Native stories in a play. Because Native people hardly ever see authentic Native people on stage, this one performance was very impactful. Professor Blackhawk wanted to sustain this work and give students exposure to professional Native performing artists, while also assisting with the development of Native artists more broadly in the field. This is the work YIPAP has been dedicated to.

Q. What do you envision for YIPAP, moving forward?
A. We hope to expand our programing and partnerships in order to bring more Native artists to college campuses and tribal communities to work directly with youth.

Q. What would you like to say about “Native Theater” as a concept? Misconceptions? Relevancy? How long it’s actually been around? How is it different than Non-Native theater?
A. I think the biggest misconception today about Native theater is that somehow our stories do not appeal or are not relevant to non-Natives. Powerful stories are powerful stories. Good stories are good stories. Just like the stories of ALL of the other communities that comprise the United States today, our stories are universal in their humanity and always relevant to the issues everyone faces today.

Nagle has authored numerous briefs in federal appellate courts, including the United States Supreme Court. She studied theater and social justice at Georgetown University as an undergraduate student, and received her JD from Tulane University Law School, where she graduated summa cum laude and received the John Minor Wisdom Award. She is a frequent speaker at law schools and symposia across the country. Her articles have been published in law review journals including the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Yale Law Journal (online forum), Tulsa Law Review, and Tulane Law Review, among others. Nagle is an alum of the 2012 Public Theater Emerging Writers Group, where she developed her play Manahatta in Public Studio (May 2014). Productions include Miss Lead  (Amerinda, 59E59, January 2014) and Fairly Traceable  (Native Voices at the Autry, March 2017). Upcoming productions include Arena Stage’s world premiere of Sovereignty, Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s world premiere of Manahatta, and others.

Announcing “Oxota”

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Experimental Poetic Fiction Modeled on Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin

“It is a deep pleasure to reopen this book, a book of estrangement, of fragmentation, of scattered light and scattered speech, of bridges of sense cast over waters of foreignness. Oxota records a trusting encounter between two poetries across cultural difference unimaginable today.” —Eugene Ostashevsky, editor of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment

 

Between 1983 and 1991 author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, often staying with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. She decided to write a novel reflecting her experiences of literary and lived life in Leningrad and Moscow, and cognizant of a general sense that the Russian novel is stereotypically “long,” she determined that hers would be “short.” The result is an experimental novel whose structure (284 chapters, each 14 lines long) pays homage to Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (generally regarded to be the first Russian novel: a verse novel composed in 14-line stanzas). Oxota (which means variously “huntress,” “hunt,” and “desire” in Russian) is a novel in which contexts, rather than contents, are kept in the foreground.

LYN HEJINIAN is a poet, essayist, teacher and translator. She is John F. Hotchkis professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley

March 5, 2019
292 pp. 6 x 8″
Paperback, $18.95 978-0-8195-7876-1

The 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference

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Hosted by the Hemispheric Caribbean Studies program at University of Miami, October 4-6, 2018, the 37th annual West Indian Literature Conference, sponsored by PEN America, was a commemoration of Caribbean studies’ and history past. A key event of this year’s conference was a memorial performance of Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip at Historic Virginia Key Beach, remembering the 150 Africans drowned in November 1781, by order of the captain of the slave ship Zong.

M. NourbeSe Philip is a poet, essayist, novelist and playwright who was born in Tobago and now lives in Toronto. She practiced law in Toronto for seven years before deciding to write fulltime. Philip has published four books of poetry, two novels, four collections of essays, and two plays. She was awarded a Pushcart Prize (1981), the Casa de las Americas Prize (Cuba, 1988), the Tradewinds Collective Prize (1988), and was made a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (1990). In 2015 Wesleyan published the first U.S. edition of She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Break—first published in Cuba as winner of the Casa de las Americas Prize.

A Celebration of Lorenzo Thomas

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In late October a celebration of the late poet Lorenzo Thomas was organized at the Poetry Project on St. Marks.The event featured readings of his work by A.L. Nielsen, Charles Bernstein, Erica Hunt, Tracie Morris, and other contemporary poets in celebration of Thomas’ legacy and forthcoming poetry collection, The Collected Poems of Lorenzo Thomas, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Laura Vrana.

Afro-Caribbean poet Lorenzo Thomas was born in Panama in 1944 and relocated to Queens, New York, in 1948. Recognized for his contributions to the Umbra workshop and the proceeding Black Arts Movement of Harlem, he published ten collections of poetry in his lifetime, including Chances Are Few (1979), The Bathers (1981), and Dancing on Main Street (2004). He was the editor of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry (2000), which received the honor of Choice Outstanding Academic Book for the year. After graduating from Queens College in 1971, Thomas served in the United States’ Navy (1971–1973) and later became a professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, in 1984. He passed away in 2005, in Houston.

Recordings from the event can be found on YouTube.
Part I
Part II

#NationalMapleSyrupDay

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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: