
registration required
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Mystery Making
Join on EventbritePre-registration is required: Free on Eventbrite
In this fun, fast-paced improv game sponsored by Mystery Writers of America–New England, mystery authors Kate Flora, Tilia Klebenov Jacobs, Dale Phillips, Clea Simon, Sarah Smith, Leslie Wheeler, and Carolyn Marie Wilkins will construct a brand new mystery using suggestions from the audience. This session will be introduced by Robin Young, host of Here & Now on 90.9 WBUR.
FREE; pre-registration required on Eventbrite
Two Italian Gals Walk Into a Bookstore: Creating a Community for Italian American Writers in Boston
Come hear the hosts of Boston’s Italian American Writers Association Reading Series, Julia Lisella and Jennifer Martelli, exchange poems round-robin style. Before the pandemic, they hosted lively open mics, featured readers, and annual salons at I Am Books in Boston's North End, creating a real community for Italian American writers and lovers of Italian culture. They welcomed both new and established writers to their monthly readings. In March 2020, without skipping a beat, they moved to an online format, joining forces with their sister organization, IAWA New York, over Zoom, but they are looking forward to live events in Boston soon. You can be part of it! Join in a fun game to help discover IAWA’s next live home!
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required
Face Your Fears and Find Your Treasure
Join us for an evening about the perils and rewards of facing and embracing fear, as authors Sandra A. Miller and Erica Ferencik share tales from their own dark woods. There will be a brief exploration exercise to make everyone a little braver, and some inspiration to lead you onto your own path to discovery and treasure. In fact, one lucky participant will even leave with some loot. Erica spent a month in the depths of the Amazon rainforest, researching her novel Into the Jungle. Sandra details a life of treasure hunting and foreign adventures in her memoir, Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure. They are both very brave.
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required
Bloomsday with The Here Comes Everybody Players
Join on EventbritePre-registration is required: Free on Eventbrite
Starlight Square (Mainstage), 84 Bishop Allen Drive
The Here Comes Everybody Players is a Boston-based theater group primarily involved in interpreting the works of James Joyce for stage and street. Get ready for Bloomsday on June 16 with the Here Comes Everybody Players’ unique take on Ulysses and other Joyce favorites! This session will be introduced by Robin Young, host of Here & Now on 90.9 WBUR.
FREE; pre-registration required on Eventbrite
The Art of (Writing About) Reading
Bibliomemoir has been described by Joyce Carol Oates as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.” Put another way, bibliomemoir approaches critical analysis from a personal perspective, removing the glaze of pretension so often found in conventional criticism, and instead examining the act of reading and interpretation as closely as it examines the text itself. In this panel, four writers (Kim Adrian, Adam Colman, Alden Jones, and Kim McLarin) of creative critical texts on books by James Baldwin, Cheryl Strayed, Ben Lerner, and Karl Ove Knausgaard discuss their work and this wonderfully elastic, exploratory genre.
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required
Conversations with Art: Ekphrastic Writing in Graffiti Alley
Art urges us to look more closely at the world around us, and at ourselves. In Central Square’s Graffiti Alley, there’s an ever changing gallery of portraits and messages from local artists. In this generative writing workshop with poets Alexis Ivy and Heather Nelson, participants will choose an image to have a “conversation” with. Each writer will be given prompts and questions in order to interact with their image. After having this dialogue with art, writers can pick eight of their favorite lines and arrange them into a working draft of an ekphrastic poem, to share with each other and the community.
FREE; pre-registration required
Broad Universe Rapid-Fire Reading
Local members of Broad Universe, an organization for female and under-privileged gender authors of speculative fiction, present their signature Rapid Fire Reading with authors E. C. Ambrose, Anne E. G. Nydam, Clea Simon, and Sarah Smith! Four authors, eight minutes each--anything could happen!
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required
GrownUp StoryTime
GrownUp StoryTime is a session of funny, heartwarming, crazy, amazing stories read aloud. They take short stories (fact, fiction, and everything in between) written by the community, give them to local performers, and funny, heartwarming, exciting storytelling magic ensues.
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required
Silence, Madness, Secrets, and Apologies: A Night with Tell-All
Join on EventbritePre-registration is required: Free on Eventbrite
Tell-All Boston, Boston’s only live-on-stage literary reading series dedicated to the craft of memoir and personal essay, presents an irreverent reading from four debut authors—Michelle Bowdler, Molly Howes, E. Dolores Johnson, and Sebastian Stuart—emceed by actress and memoirist Alicia Googins. This session will be introduced by Robin Young, host of Here & Now on 90.9 WBUR.
FREE; pre-registration required on Eventbrite
Voices: South Asian Immigrant Stories
"Voices" is a storytelling show (in the tradition of The Moth) that brings true stories from South Asian immigrants (and their descendants) to the community every other year. Produced by the Bengali theater group “Off kendrik,” a wide-ranging set of tales of social bloopers, emotional scars, cultural isolation, and verbal blunders thins the border between the South Asian diaspora and American life. For this event, five tellers will share short, true stories from their lives as immigrants in America. If time permits, there may also be an open mic for audience members to share their own.
$15; includes complimentary snacks (drinks available for purchase); pre-registration required