Things I’ve been doing instead of blogging

It’s been a busy and inspiring coupla months. Here’s a little recap of things I saw and did, starting with the AWP Writers’ Conference in Washington, DC, where I was on a couple of panels, did a reading, and got to sign some books at the Rose Metal Press table. Those are my books on the left side of the sign:

My colleague and friend, David Dodd Lee had a book release and art show at Lang Lab. Here he his reading from his latest Ashbury erasure book, surrounded by his fans and collages:

I was thrilled to have my visual essay, “Empty Nest/Emptiness,” published (in full color!!!) in the latest issue of Passages North. It’s 14 pages, something I made when my daughter left for college:

Speaking of my daughter, I got to see Mamma Mia in Bloomington, IN with her and her bestie for her birthday. The next morning I saw the whole cast and crew in the lobby of my hotel!

Colson Freaking Whitehead came to my campus, Indiana University South Bend, and I got to sit in the almost front row. Here he is talking to Darryl Heller of the Civil Rights Heritage Center:

I invited the comic artists Marnie Galloway and Scott Roberts to visit IU South Bend, and the room was full for their artist talks:

Then the poet Steve Henn came to talk to my classes about his new book by Wolfson Press: Indiana Noble Sad Man of the Year. Here he is showing off his “tour” T-shirt:

Another visual/collage essay published in Quarterly West!

I already blogged about being the guest author at Butler University’s Litfest and doing a workshop for the Indiana Writers Center, which was an honor and a blast.

And over the weekend, Wordman and I headed to Chicago and saw Lambchop at Lincoln Hall:

Then I got to read at Sunday Salon Series with amazing fellow readers and a fabulous crowd. Here’s Howard Axelrod reading:

Got some partial views of the Navy Pier Ferris wheel from the hotel window:

And made it to the Bean for the first time, and took the requisite selfie:

Mexico City Magic

I’m just back from three weeks in Mexico City, where I studied some Spanish, worked on a new project, visited old loves like Leonora Carrington and Frida Kahlo, and found new loves like Lilia Carillo, the painter, and Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god.

Here’s Leonora Carrington’s Cocodrilo on Paseo de la Reforma (and my quick watercolor sketch of it):

I almost didn’t go to Frida’s Casa Azul again (here’s a link to my 2014 visit), but I’m so glad I did:

I love her amazing collection of retablos, amateur paintings made to thank the Virgin of Guadalupe for interceding at life-threatening moments:

These influenced some of her most famous paintings, and the museum juxtaposes small reproductions of her actual paintings with the retablos that inspired them:

At the Museum of Modern Art, I got to see Dos Fridas in person for the first time:

This painting was made after one of her breakups with Diego and represents two sides of herself, one as a comfort to the other. She is dressed in European attire on the left and in her classic Tehuana dress (which Diego preferred) on the right.

In all my times of viewing the painting online, I’d never noticed that the heart on the left is gray and withered:

And I discovered the beautiful abstract paintings of Lilia Carrillo:

We saw an outdoor film at the Monument of the Revolution:

about this guy, Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god:

…who was removed from his original site in Coatlinchan and relocated to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. The film, La Piedra Ausente (The Absent Stone), tells the amazing story of the removal of the stone amidst the town’s protests and its celebrated/contested arrival in Mexico City.

[More Mexico City magic: The night before the film, we went to a birthday dinner for a friend and met a woman named Sandra. After we’d talked for a while, she said, “I made a film; it’s screening tomorrow night at the Monument of the Revolution. You should come!” So we did. It was awesome.]

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At the Palacio Nacional, we saw the journals of the artist Francisco Toledo, which were part of an exhibit of — get this — art that Mexican artists give to the nation as payment for their taxes:

These inspired a couple of my own journal sketches:

I thought I saw a Dirty Dancing sculpture, but it was just a strange sculpture that happened to have an ad for Dirty Dancing, The Musical behind it:

Finally, I should mention that there was a tree hanging in the center of our airbnb apartment building:

Almost Heaven. West Virginia.

I got to spend a few days at West Liberty University last week, giving a reading and lecture, visiting classes, and chatting with students. Thanks especially to Steve Criniti, who invited me, and who organized everything, and who let me sit in on his British Modernism seminar, which happened to be about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and which happened to be the anniversary of her death (though we didn’t figure that out till later). Also thanks to Peter Staffel and his wife, who toured me around Wheeling, and to WLU’s graphic design student Corrine Martin, who created this awesome flyer with Fallingwater perched on a book:

I met all sorts of great faculty and students, but unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of people. Instead, here are a few views from the road. A strange combo of urban and rural along the Ohio River. I kept singing John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads”: Almost heaven, West Virginia…

Photo Challenge: Saturated. Or, My New Book Comes Out In Like 9 Days

This week’s WordPress photo challenge is saturated. And here’s an image that is saturated in color AND dripping with water: the cover of my new book!

Liliane’s Balcony comes out on Oct. 7 and is now available for pre-order. I would be really grateful if you ordered it. Free shipping, man. Direct from the publisher. They’ll have it in your hands in a little over a week.

Publisher’s Description:

Liliane’s Balcony is a multi-voiced novella-in-flash set at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Built for Pittsburgh merchants E.J. and Liliane Kaufmann in 1935, the house is as much a character as it is a setting. One September night in 1952, Liliane Kaufmann—tired of her husband’s infidelities—overdoses on pain pills in her bedroom. From there, Liliane’s Balcony alternates Mrs. Kaufmann’s mostly true story with the fictional narratives of four modern-day tourists who arrive at the historic home in the midst of their own personal crises, all of which culminate on Mrs. Kaufmann’s over-sized, cantilevered balcony. With its ghosts, motorcycles, portraits, Vikings, failed relationships, and many layered voices, Kelcey Parker’s Liliane’s Balcony is as dizzying and intricately beautiful as the architectural wonder in which it is set.

A Shot of Metaxa in the Morning, or Weekly Photo Challenge: Foreshadow

This week’s wordpress photo challenge theme is Foreshadow, which is something we writers try to do with subtlety and symmetry, and perhaps with a bit of surprise.

This setting of my photo-story is Okolicne, Slovakia – a beautiful town surrounded by the High Tatras Mountains near the border of Poland – in the summer of 2012. I am standing in the kitchen of an ancestral home, of sorts, with a relative who speaks no English, but with whom I communicate via smiles, nods, and frequent (like, really frequent) shots of Slivovitz and Metaxa.

It is approximately 8:00 a.m. – an hour that finds the rest of the world up-and-at-em but finds me semi-coherent if not still totally asleep, especially on a Sunday morning – and Josef pours me a shot of Metaxa. We toast one another: Na zdravie!

Why are we drinking a shot at 8 a.m. on a Sunday, and what might this moment foreshadow?

A trip to church, of course. After a short walk, we arrive at the church of Sv. Peter z Alkantara where my Slovak great-grandmother was baptized more than one hundred years ago. I take a seat next to Josef, and mass begins.

So, technically, the foreshadowing is the fact that it’s Sunday morning and I’m even awake.

The Bohemian Bone Church

F. Rint refers to František Rint who was put in charge of arranging all the bones.

This week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is UNIQUE, and what is more unique than a church decorated with the bones of 40,000-70,000 people? (Actually, lots of other bloggers have some equally unique photos, so you should check them out.)

My version of unique is the Sedlec Ossuary, aka The Bone Church, which happens to have been my destination when I spotted the young Czech lovers from last week’s photo challenge (Love at 16:28).

The story goes that in the 13th century, the abbot of the church went to the Holy Land and brought back some Holy Soil that he sprinkled in the church cemetery. Suddenly, everyone was dying to be buried there! A century later, the Black Death was invented so that lots of people could die all at once. When people still continued to live, the Hussite Wars came along to try to finish the job. The little cemetery got too filled up, so a half-blind monk was assigned the task of unburying people. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

But what to do with stacks of unburied people? Turn them into chandeliers and shields, of course!

This chandelier has all of the human bones in it.

Looks like a normal church from the outside!

Love at 16:28

I haven’t done a WordPress weekly photo challenge in a while, but how I can I resist this week’s topic: Love.

Last summer I went with classmates from my Czech language class on a day trip to Kutna Hora, an hour or two outside of Prague. To get to town from the train station, we had to take a bus through a run-down neighborhood of panelaks, those Soviet apartment structures that dominate the landscape of Eastern Europe.

A young Czech couple got on the bus, completely absorbed in one another, and I was so struck by these strangers that I secretly snapped a photo.

It’s hard to tell in the photo above, but the time was 16:28 (or 4:28 p.m. to us Americans), and that was my favorite accidental detail of the photo, that this moment of young love – fleeting as it may be – was marked in time. Later I made this small sketch with paint and pen.

Who knows if they are still in love? But they were in love at 16:28, and perhaps that is enough for a lifetime.

My 2012 in Pictures

In 2012, my theme was Live Lovely. And it was a full, lovely year.

I put together this photo collage as part of WordPress’s weekly photo challenge (from, you know, last week), and now that I’m finished I feel like this post gets dangerously close to the sort of blogging I try to avoid: the “here’s a record of my boring life” sort of blog. But pictures are fun, and these are the least boring parts of my year. Hover over for captions.

I drew a rhinoceros!

Daughter in Little Women living the dream of having two guys dueling for her.

Trip with the fam to Ohiopyle, PA. Cucumber Falls

Daughter and me.

Trip to NYC for letterpress workshop.

I learned letterpress in NYC!

Ask-Me Guide at Fallingwater!

I lost both of my grandparents. Here they are in NJ in the early 1940s.

Grandparents’ memorial at their lagoon house in NJ.

Saw Pearl Jam in Prague. Oh yes.

Praha! Took a Czech language class.

Saw The Boss in Prague. Oh yes

Met my Slovak relatives at family home!

Fall sabbatical. Art journal.

A Gallery of Green Art. Can you guess the artists?

Once again it’s time for the Weekly Photo Challenge. This week’s theme: GREEN.  Since my photography is not really meant to speak for itself, here’s a Gallery of Green Art with a quiz. See if you can match the artist and/or relevant information to each of the images.

1. Van Gogh close-up at Chicago Art Institute
2. Some dude in flip-flops (at the John Lennon wall in Prague)
3. Monet close-up at Chicago Art Institute
4. NOT Monet (but could have inspired him). Taken in Czech Republic.
5. British people, who think anything can be made pretty and weird, even cannons!
6. Hans Christian Andersen (and me!). Technically he’s the subject, not the artist. Copenhagen
7. Me imitating Alfred Henry Maurer
8. Collaboration between Frank Stella and Santiago Calatrava hanging in building designed by Mies van der Rohe (yes!)
9. Unknown Art Nouveau artist, but maybe Alphonse Mucha, since it’s at an absinthe bar in Prague.
10. Frank Lloyd Wright
11. John Cage (okay, well, my winnings at a John Cage exhibit at DOX museum in Prague)

(If you REALLY need the answers, post a comment in which you beg for them. Be convincing.)

Alone in a Czech Town

How to get lost in the Czech Republic

I’m liking the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenges. Every picture tells a story, don’t it. This week’s theme is Foreign, which is what I was this summer.

I spent the month of July in Prague studying the Czech language. I was the only American in a class mostly full of Russians, and I never knew whether they were speaking to the teacher in Russian or in Czech. One of them, a college student named Svetlana, drove most of us crazy by constantly scratching the air with her overlong fingernails and calling out, “Mám otázka! Mám otázka!” (I have a question!)

The other students were from France, Germany, and Japan, trying to learn Czech, their third (or 4th) language, via English, their second language. But none of the Russians spoke English, and they made up two-thirds of the class, so we were really learning Czech through some combination of Czech and Russian, which stirred up some serious Cold War feelings within me. (That was a joke. Sort of.)

Alone in Česká Skalice

While in the Czech Republic, I wanted to go to Česká Skalice, a two-hour train ride from Prague, and the town where Božena Němcová grew up and got married. And where, in fact it was Rok Boženy Němcové: The Year of Božena Němcová, who died 150 years earlier. It’s a small town in the Czech countryside, and I was pretty sure no one would speak English, so it wasn’t until the fourth and final week of language study that I felt bold enough to venture there on my own. I skipped a day of class and bought a train ticket. And pretty much immediately got lost.

Already lost.

I wanted to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to get me back to the train station.

I saw more posters than people.

At last I met two cyclists, a couple who had stopped to check their maps, and I used my three-and-a-half weeks of Czech to ask them “Nevite, kde je Muzeum Boženy Němcové?” But no, they did not know where it was. I showed them my map, and asked, “Kde jsme?” (Where are we?) But they didn’t know that either.

I consulted the Tourist Map from 1966.

Then, in what felt like a perfectly literary moment, I found an older woman in her garage painting a chair. It felt like a literary moment because here I was, seeking the author of the famous Czech book, Babička (The Grandmother), which was set in this very town, and here before me was a grandmotherly figure who might be able to help me. So of course I said the first thing that came to mind: “Mám otázka!”

But it worked! I understood as she pointed tady (there) and then doleva (turn left) and then doleva again, and then na prava (it’s on the right). I understood that it would take about deset minut (10 minutes). And I made it.

Made it!

But perhaps the best part was when I returned to class the next day. I hadn’t told anyone that I’d be gone, and when we started class with our conversation practice, one of the Russians, Evgeny, started the discussion by asking where I’d been the day before. He said: “Stýská se mi po Kelcey.” I missed Kelcey.

And I realized I’d missed them too.

Evgeny is third from the left in the back. Svetlana was probably outside smoking.