Dec 12–Jan 13 Fluent

ARTS | CULTURE | EVENTS

Dec 2012 – Jan 2013 | Vol 1 No 3

Sticks in Hand In Their Environment One Night Stands A Writer’s Life Readers Read A Pattern Language Ears, Eyes & Soul Of Ayres & Carols & Christmas Faire Theater Kids On Fire: Young Actors Theater Lab Fiction Francisco Poetry J M R Harrison Agri:Culture 62 Minutes (Saving the Daylight) Ed:Cetera Gifts That Keep on Giving Coda Mondrian’s Bitch

“Marimba” by Hannah Swindoll

CONTENTS

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Dec 2012–Jan 2013

Sticks in Hand

In Their Environment

One Night Stands The Slant Factory Art Space

A Writer’s Life Listening to the Stones

Letter From The Editor The Language of Art

Ears, Eyes & Soul Of Ayres & Carols & Christmas Faire

Theater Kids On Fire: Young Actors Theater Lab

Fiction Francisco

Poetry J M R Harrison

Agri:Culture 62 Minutes (Saving the Daylight)

Ed:Cetera Gifts That Keep on Giving

Coda Mondrian’s Bitch

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C O N T R I B U T O R S Matt Chelf is a senior at Shepherd University, where he studies English and History. He likes riding his bicycle, taking Polaroids, listening to albums on vinyl and old things in general.

Todd Coyle is a journeyman musician who has performed in and around the Eastern Panhandle of WVa and around the country for over 30 years. He has worked in folk, blues, pop, jazz and country bands as a guitarist, bassist, singer, producer and sound man.

Anne M Cropper is a visual artist working in photography, painting,installations and sculpture. She resides in her hometown, Berryville, Va. Anne is a founding member of the Slant Factory Art Space.

Tom Donlon lives in Shenandoah Junction, WVa. His poems have appeared in Folio, Kestrel, Poet Lore, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and other journals and anthologies. Recognition includes Pushcart Prize nominations and a WV Commission on the Arts fellowship.

Ginny Fite has won national, regional and state journalism awards for her writing. She was the editor of the Gazette Newspapers in Frederick, the Lifestyle editor at the Herald-Mail, and Executive Editor at Phillips Publishing before retiring to Harpers Ferry.

Hope Maxwell-Snyder was born and raised in Colombia, South America. Hope is the author of a play, The Backroom, a novel, Orange Wine, a collection of short stories, Matchmaker, and book of poetry, Chains. She lives in Shepherdstown, WVa, with her family.

Shepherd Ogden lives in Bakerton, WVa. He is the author of five nonfiction books, one novel–memoir and a book of poetry.

His photos and collected poems are at justsopress.typepad.com/facing.

Hannah Swindoll, a senior at Shepherd University, plans on graduating in May with a BFA with a concentration in photography/computer imagery. As a student, Hannah has focused on the use of lighting and perspective.

Bill Tchakirides has been a Broadway producer, commercial food photographer, justice of the peace, font designer and director of a nonprofit arts program. Now, he spends time posting in the blogosphere and hosting two programs on 89.7 WSHC, Shepherd University Radio.

Sheila Vertino is returning to her roots as a freelance writer and journalist, after a career as a magazine editor-in-chief and book and research publisher. Based in Shepherdstown, she describes herself as a culturally curious word nerd.

Christa Mastrangelo Joyce is a poet and teacher, and has taught English and Creative Writing. She is currently teaching yoga and private poetry workshops. Her poetry appears in such journals as Arsenic Lobster, Florida English Journal and Poemeleon.

Ed Zahniser’s poems have appeared in over 100 literary magazines in the U.S. and U.K., 7 anthologies, 3 books and 3 chapbooks. He is co-editor of In Good Company, an anthology of area poets celebrating Shepherdstown’s 250th anniversary.

Ginny Fite..........................................page 8 Shepherdstown Sweet Shop............page 9 The Local Source............................ page 13 The Yellow Brick Bank.................... page 19

DISH.................................................page 31 AHA!...............................................page 36 Bloomery Plantation Distillery......page 45 The Bridge Gallery........................page 45 The Old Opera House...................page 46

A D V E R T I Z E R S

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MAGAZINE

Dec 2012–Jan 2013 | Vol 1 No 3 Nancy McKeithen Editor & Publisher Ginny Fite Managing Editor Sheila Vertino Associate Editor Kathryn Burns Visual Arts Editor Zachary Davis Fiction Editor Tom Donlon Poetry Editor Contributing Editors Shepherd Ogden, Bill Tchakirides, Ed Zahniser Submissions For information on submitting unsolicited fiction, nonfiction and poetry, please see www.fluentmagazine.com/submissions. Please submit events and arts news to submissions@ fluent-magazine.com.

Fluent Magazine is published bimonthly and distributed via email. It is available online at www.fluent-magazine.com.

To subscribe www.fluent-magazine.com/subscribe All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be duplicated or reprinted without permission from the publisher. © 2012 Fluent Magazine

Fluent Magazine is grateful for the support of the Jefferson County Arts and Humanities Alliance (AHA!) through its Community Grants program.

Jefferson County, WVa is a Certified Arts Community.

The Language of Art In October, I spent a Saturday afternoon at the Percussion Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, WVa. It turned out to be the start of a serendipitous path to the finish line of this issue of FLUENT. While I expected to learn more about drumming, I learned about writing and graphic design—my professions—as well, from big band drummer Marty Knepp and internationally recognized marimba soloist and teacher Rebecca Kite.

Knepp, first up, asked the audience of mostly percussionists and drummers to describe elements of drumming in words—“my tools,” I thought. Brighter... thinner... resonance... phrasing... groove.

In the next session, Kite demonstrated on a marimba subtle distinctions in the angle of the mallet as it strikes the bar—and the difference in the sound produced. I heard the difference, and at that moment I realized that her striking mallet to marimba is in theory not unlike a writer crafting an ending to tie back t0 a beginning, or a painter putting a flourish on a brushstroke. And that the language of drumming carries across the arts: a poem that resonates, a writer’s careful phrasing, a painter in the groove.

Leaving the festival, I met Michelle Humphreys, who teaches percussion at Shepherd and performs professionally, and who put the festival together. I asked if I could interview her for a feature in FLUENT. Yes. Fast forward to The Slant Factory Art Space exhibit in November, where Associate Professor of Photography Stephanie Thulin heard me say I needed a photographer to shoot the cover photo. She took the lead, and Hannah Swindoll, a senior photography major, contacted me the next morning. The amazing cover is Hannah’s work.

Inside this issue, you’ll find many voices: that of Michelle Humphreys in “Sticks In Hand,” photographer Frank Robbins as revealed by Sheila Vertino in “In Their Environment” and novelist Karen Robbins in “A Writer’s Life” by Ginny Fite. In “One Night Stands,” Anne Cropper shares the story of a new underground art space that gives voice to artists.

Todd Coyle shares musician Terry Tucker’s voice in “Of Ayres & Carols & Christmas Faire.” Shepherd Ogden directs his voice to the annual autumn dance of time. And Bill Tchakirides speaks with Laura Bakin—and by extension, young thespians—in “Kids On Fire: Young Actors Theater Lab.” They all speak the language of art.

Photo Hannah Swindoll

Nancy McKeithen Editor & Publisher

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EARS, EYES & SOUL

Of Ayres & Carols & Christmas Faire

BY TODD COYLE

Terry Tucker is a musical fixture in the Eastern Panhandle. Along with having songs in the cult film classic “A Clockwork Orange” and fronting local bands such as Tree House, she is an expert on Christmas and holiday music. So after a most whacked year of politics, the prospect of the end of the Mayan calendar and anticipation of the holidays, I turn to my good friend Terry to introduce the season—musically.

refuses. Jesus speaks from inside Mary’s womb and commands the branches to bend down for her and they do. The version I sing is Appalachian; it has such vitality and tells the story without whitewash, coming from the folk tradition in England, which does not shy away from stories of lovers.

FLUENT Your passion for Christmas music is well known, Terry. What is your favorite Christmas piece and why?

TERRY Well, I like to share the story of “Silent Night.” On the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 1818 in a tiny village in the Austrian Alps, the church pipe organ had given out and couldn’t be repaired in time for that evening, so Joseph Mohr, the local Catholic priest wrote verses and Franz Gruber, the church organist, wrote the music to “Silent Night” to be sung with guitar accompaniment for the midnight service.

TERRY My first true love of Christmas carols was “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming,” music by Michael Praetorius, German (1571 – 1621), who also wrote the tune that’s used for “Good King Wenceslas,” another of my favorites. “Lo How a Rose” has syncopation in the rhythm and one minor chord that later changes to major; the words are poetic, lovely imagery: “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming, from tender stem hath sprung, Of Jesse’s lineage coming as men of old have sung. It came a flow’r-et bright, amid the cold of winter when half-spent was the night….”

FLUENT What is the oldest Christmas song you know of?

TERRY Probably “The Cherry Tree Carol,” originally a legend from the Middle Ages. Legends were converted into carols by monks for the common people who were interested to learn of the early life of their Savior.

This was the story of Mary and the date tree, later becoming Mary and the cherry tree. It tells of Mary and Joseph walking through an orchard, every tree laden with fruit, and Mary asks Joseph to pick her some cherries because she’s with child. Joseph shows his anger, doubting the divinity of her pregnancy, and 6|

FLUENT Most holiday songs have a history to them.

What is one that might surprise FLUENT readers?

FLUENT What song do you think best expresses the true meaning of Christmas?

TERRY To me, the ones that sing of generosity, kindness, justice, unconditional love. One of my long-standing favorites is “Good King Wenceslas” (Praetorius’ music again with words by John Mason Neale, 1853, British envoy to Sweden), because it’s the story of Good King Wenzel of Bohemia (Czechoslovakia) from 928 – 935, who was celebrated for his many kind acts for the poor.

FLUENT You did a Christmas CD a couple of years ago. Tell us about that. Why did you choose the songs you recorded?

TERRY I’ve been collecting Christmas carols for years — discovering new ones, arranging old ones.

And I had played and sung my favorites for and with Ardyth Gilbertson for enough years that we

Terry Tucker at the One World Club, Greenwich, London, where time begins.

decided to record them. We chose ones that move our hearts and souls the most, and they happen to be mostly medieval, modal, ancient, so we called our CD “Ancient Ayres & Carols for Christmas.” Some of the songs come from pagan traditions — “The Holly and the Ivy” is one of these. One of our favorites, “Green Grow’th the Holly,” may have been written by King Henry VIII. The words tell of the changing seasons, the theme being that life never dies.

In addition to those carols, the CD includes a Spanish carol, “Fum, Fum, Fum,” a French, “Patapan” and a Latin Gregorian-style chant, “Hodie” from Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols.” One of our favorites, “Masters in This Hall,” is an old French carol tune with 19th century English words.

“Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day” has to do with being born, dancing into this world. The word “carol” originally meant “to dance.”

Isn’t that great?

FLUENT If you could spend Christmas anywhere, where would it be and why?

TERRY England or anywhere in Great Britain, because I lived there for many years and the holiday is not as focused on buying and exchanging gifts as we are [in this country]. Also, the Brits sing carols in pubs, with or without instruments; great harmonies, lusty singing and good cheer, so you sing a lot more carols a lot more often than we do here.

FLUENT What is the strangest Christmas tradition you know of, and what music is associated with it?

TERRY I have a book of Christmas customs and carols—there are so many and all are interesting—but here’s one you may already be familiar with. Legend says that a student from Queen’s College, Oxford, England, was walking in the forest on Christmas Day, studying his Aristotle when he was attacked by a boar.

The student defended himself by thrusting the book in the boar’s mouth. That day, as a celebration, the boar’s head, with an apple in its mouth, was served at the college. The custom is followed in some American colleges. “The Boar’s Head Carol” is a great one with a chorus sung in Latin.

FLUENT You spend a lot of time in England. What’s the difference between English and American Christmas music?

TERRY English Christmas music is more traditional, and you’re apt to hear carols that are very old and go straight to your heart. There are mummer’s plays with dancing and singing still performed by Morris teams to bring in the new year. Here, the popular songs are for me a little too cute, clever or shallow. Then there’s cocktail-lounge carols that are for soloists to sing, but not so much for groups of people to sing and harmonize. Having said that, I must add that some of my musician friends around here have written some beautiful and moving solstice and winter carols.

FLUENT Are you doing any Christmas performances this year?

TERRY Yes, an evening of carols celebrating Christmas and the winter solstice is planned for Sunday, |7

December 16th at the Shepherdstown Train Station.

There will be a potluck starting at 6:00, and the music will start at 7:00. It will be a candlelit, sitting-on-thefloor-on-cushions, acoustic music evening, free admission and BYOB. Ardyth Gilbertson and I will be performing, also Laura First, Lisa Lafferty, Andrea Hines, Betty Jo Rockwell and others not yet confirmed.

FLUENT Are there any Christmas myths that you could clear up for us?

TERRY Our Santa Claus is based on St. Nicholas, the medieval Father Christmas, born at Patara in Asia Minor in the fourth century. His parents were devout Christians, very wealthy and died leaving great riches when Nicholas was a young man. He decided to give away his money wherever he saw there was a need for it. He was devout, attended church every day and became bishop of Myra. During his lifetime, Nicholas performed many miracles and became the patron saint of sailors, merchants, travelers, the poor and humble, unmarried girls, prostitutes, pawnbrokers and children.

The story that turned Nicholas into our Father Christmas involved a poor man and his three daughters. They couldn’t afford food or clothing

or dowries for the girls to find husbands. Nicholas overheard their lamenting while passing their house, and he went back at night and tossed one bag of gold through a window of the eldest girl’s room which landed in her stocking hanging up by the fireplace.

Now the eldest girl had a dowry and was soon married. This happened two more times, and the last time he dropped the bag through the chimney because it was winter and all the windows were closed.

This one landed in a stocking, too. When the father watched for him and followed him on the last visit, Nicholas persuaded him to tell no one.

So, he is the secret provider of gifts, he comes at night not wanting to be seen and delivers presents to those who deserve them. He is said to have used a disguise of red robe and long whiskers. Medieval people copied him by giving one another gifts not on Christmas Day, but on December 6, Nicholas’ feast day. Three bags of gold, a symbol of giving, became associated with pawnbrokers, and pawnbrokers on Lombard Street in London adopted three gold bags or balls as their symbol. The custom has stuck to this day.

Find out more about Terry at www.terrytucker.net. fluent

“Poetry is the way we witness. Poems are the marks we leave. Poems say: we were here.”

In this collection of poems, Ginny Fite notices everything.

THE PEARL FISHER is available for sale at the Washington Street Artists’ Cooperative in Charles Town, WVa and online from Amazon.

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A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander “I really like the humanist and organic approach of this book. It covers the human experience with architecture from the very personal to the relationships between towns in a cluster. It is filled with situations and transactions with the architecture in which humans live. Typical chapters (more like “cubicles,” or virtual spaces with dimension) are titled “a balcony over the street” and “a cozy seat under the stairs”; “sequence of sitting spaces” and “light on two sides.” A Pattern Language is encyclopedic in that one doesn’t sit down and read it cover to cover. The book is dense and highly organized, but the titles are not those ordinarily associated with a table of contents. It takes quite some dedication to grasp the organization, but every opening reveals something delicious.

Alexander and his team of students derive the experience of architecture from the human experience, and relate it to the table and the town and the city. Some of the construction and commentary feels mildly pedantic, but, after all, the book is a really well organized piece of cooperative writing genius. It is worth the high price. It is an excellent gift for a young or old architect or designer. To me, it is a lifetime book.”

—Bradley Sanders, Artist (at right)

Photo: Aundrea Humphreys, factoryBstudio

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THEATER

Kids On Fire: Young Actors Theater Lab

BY BILL TCHAKIRIDES

Laura Richards Bakin—actor, director, teacher, producer, manager and a founder of Shepherdstown’s Full Circle Theatre—has brought a new and exceptional theater experience to Shepherdstown: the Young Actors Theater Lab (YATL). With nearly 30 years of experience in the performing arts, Laura brings a strong foundation to YATL. She’s written over a dozen plays for children, directed over 50 plays and musicals with young actors, and conducted countless workshops, seminars and private classes.

Before settling in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia with her family, Laura was an administrator at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. for eight years, and artistic and managing director of the Rhapsodic Theater Company in NorthernVirginia. She shares the story of YATL with FLUENT.

FLUENT Laura, please tell me how YATL came about and share the scope of YATL’s program.

BAKIN Our first show [at Full Circle Theatre Company, FCTC] opened in the fall of 2007. In the spring of 2008, I started our first program for young actors. By the time Full Circle moved into its own space in October 2008, we were working with a group that more than filled the available lobby space as we waited for the auditorium to be finished. The programming for children grew over the years to the point that we began to see it as a separate entity, a viable and vibrant sister to the adult theater company of FCTC. Working with youth wasn't part of everyone's initial vision of FCTC, but it’s long been a passion of mine. Particularly in this age when everyone is plugged

Puppetry Camp, one of several camps that YATL offers each summer, is for childre ages 5 through 9. Here, children are playing with a Chinese dragon puppet they are creating. Photos Full Circle Theatre | Young Actors Theater Lab

in, it breaks my heart that so many children have never been exposed to live theater. And the dramatic arts have so much to offer. They’re part of our heritage, our culture, and they’re a vital means of expression and a tool for change. If we don't reach young voices, we lose the opportunity to include their expression of the human experience into the tapestry we weave. If we don't foster creativity and artistic vision in our young, we risk having no artists in generations to come.

So, YATL was born not only to give young people the opportunity to learn unique skills and all that goes with being part of a theater company, but to bring them in as audience members, as playwrights, as student directors, to touch their lives with the power and magic of the performing arts. And from a more pragmatic perspective, if we want to have more of the

community engaged in our theater programs, a great way to do that is to train the young in our community to be our future actors and technicians!

FLUENT Shepherdstown has become known as a “theater town.” Along with Full Circle, we have as local performance groups Shepherd University's Communications Department, Goose Route Dance Theater and of course, the monumental Contemporary American Theater Festival. In a town with so much activity for adult performers and an adult audience, does this make it easier and more desirable to work with the area’s young people?

BAKIN When I began running programs for young actors, there was — and continues to be — tremendous

Theater Immersion Camp has been so successful that YATL is breaking it into two camps for next summer — one for children 8 – 12 and one for children 13 – 18. This photo was taken just after their final performance of Peter Pan.

Young Actors Theater Lab, a part of the Full Circle Theatre 113 S Princess St, Shepherdstown, WV 25443 304.876.1350 | www.myYATL.com The Velveteen Rabbit Director: Devan Whitacre December 14 – 23 Thursday /Friday 7:00 pm Saturday/Sunday 2:00 pm

with our young actors and technicians. They can email us at info@myyatl.com if they'd like to join the fun!

FLUENT How do you promote YATL programs?

POSTER Elvin Reyes

support among kids and their families for our work because there has always been a need locally for more opportunities for youth in the performing arts. But this is not unique to our area; there are comparatively few children’s theaters throughout our country.

My dream has been to offer youth the chance to engage in the performing arts not just for a handful of weeks in the summer, as is typical of children's programming, but to give them chances all year round and in a variety of ways that are meaningful, that inspire growth and that have the capacity to change lives. From the feedback I’ve been given, I think we’re on the right track.

FLUENT How do adults get involved on the volunteer or staff level, or just get their kids involved?

BAKIN Our Web site, www.MyYATL.com, gives information about our current programming. There are always new things in the works, and so interested people should sign up for our newsletters and friend us on Facebook. We welcome adults who love to work 12 |

BAKIN We depend a great deal on getting the word out through our website and newsletters, through Facebook and, really, through word of mouth, through our actors and our audiences. We have had some great coverage in the newspapers, and that’s good. But promotion is a weakness here.

After every show we hear someone exclaim, “Wow! This was fantastic! I had no idea you all were here until [plug in a name] was in your show!” We clearly need to improve on that score. One group I’m particularly trying to reach now is our children in the deaf community, who have even fewer opportunities to fully experience live theater. Our second Friday performance of every production has a sign interpreter. I really want to reach all of our children!

FLUENT As a nonprofit, funding is likely very important to keep everything going. How do you raise money?

BAKIN FCTC has always suffered from a lack of grant writers and committed development specialists.

I’m trying to remedy that with YATL. I’m working on some grant applications for our next season and some exciting projects we’ve got under our belt, but we cannot possibly grow without the fundraising that is necessary for a non-profit to survive. I have a couple of fundraisers in mind, but it’s just not my strength.

Working with young artists is my strength! fluent

Emma Warburton has been with YATL since the first class was offered. Above, Emma in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

Photo Scott Miller

“YATL is a place where kids can come to learn about the theater, and participate in shows.

“I like that it’s a safe environment, where you don’t have to worry about there being anything inappropriate for kids. It’s also a lot of fun! You build new friendships, and play games and become better, stronger actors. It can be hard work, but no matter how much work, it’s always worth it.

“I’ve learned from YATL that even if the kids have no past theater history, they can still be amazing actors (or techies), and they never would have discovered their newfound talents and love for the theater if it wasn’t for YATL.”

—Emma Warburton | 13

Sticks In Hand

By Nancy McKeithen

M

ichelle Humphreys always knew she wanted to be a drummer. Or a tennis star. Not a tennis player, not a coach, a star.

Though still a part of her life, tennis plays second string to drumming. She is first a percussionist, teacher and performer. Each week, she settles into Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for two jampacked days of teaching percussion at Shepherd University — lessons, percussion techniques courses, percussion ensemble, recitals, performance.

For Humphreys, what has become her career began in grade school. After a false start when her school band director handed her a certificate to get a flute despite her request for drums because “they had plenty of boys” — and three weeks of torturing noise out of the instrument — she quit. But a year later her family moved to Salisbury, Maryland, and she to a new school where “they didn’t have enough boys and I got in. I got drums!”

She smiles, broadly. It is her signature.

When one of the drummers in the band, Kenny, showed her how to play a basic beat on a drum set in the eighth grade, she was hooked. At 15, living near the beach and “about a million nightclubs,” she started playing drum set in bands professionally — with approval from her parents as long as her GPA stayed high.

But the other side to being a drummer — being a percussionist — wasn’t far away. “On Saturday nights when my friends were out having a great time, I was in the basement literally with ‘Love Boat’ and ‘Fantasy Island’ and on my practice pad, memorizing rudiments and working on technique,” she says. “I loved it, I still do.”

If you didn’t know Michelle Humphreys is a musician, you might suspect it from her speech — the highs and lows in volume, the pauses and phrasing, the Photo left Julia Pearson | Other photos provided by Michelle Humphreys.

Michelle Humphreys in her element: percussionist left, drummer above.

precision. The way she occasionally clips a word like a stacatto.

From Drummer to Percussionist Knowing the rudiments—think of them as 26 snippets of code for drum — along with being a really good drummer and having what she calls a “native intelligence about rhythm” got her into Towson University and the music major she had her mind set on, even though she had never had a private teacher or more than a couple of lessons. And she had never learned to read melodic and harmonic music. “I could read a two-mallet melody, that was it,” she admits.

Going after and getting something she wants seems to be a habit with Humphreys. She also earned a Master of Music degree from the Eastman School of Music and the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the University of Maryland.

Before Eastman, she played in nightclubs and gigged, but while there she played all classical music.

“I finished and felt very fulfilled, but I also felt like I was missing a part of myself,” she says.

Humphreys returned to Baltimore and soon joined an eight-piece, all-woman R&B band, and played drum set for several years. Then the flip-flop. “I toggled back and forth, like a dysfunctional two-party system,” she says, between drum set and classical. | 15

“On a human level, I like the It was while working for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (BSO) in its Arts Excel! program under Mitchell Korn, who developed the program, that she “broke the code.” She was putting together curriculumbased programs to teach curriculum subjects, like math and science and English, to kids using music as a vehicle.

“Something got unlocked — being around Korn and listening to his philosophies,” she recalls. She realized that she needed to take down the firewall between herself as a drum set player and herself as a percussionist. “I needed to start listening to the bass section of an orchestra like I would watch the fingers of and listen to an electric bass player in a funk band.”

She realized they weren’t separate art forms, and her classical career took off.

The Performing Side of Percussion Now is a busy time for her: “…Messiah after Messiah after Messiah in Washington and Baltimore, and that’s fun,” says Humphreys about the nine performances in the first three weeks of December. “I play about 11 minutes of the entire piece, so I really know those 11 minutes well, and the conductors I work with allow me a long creative leash for those 11 minutes, those final moments of beauty and spirituality.”

Bach’s Mass in B Minor is high on her list of favorite pieces to play. This year she will play it with the Washington Bach Consort, with Reilly Lewis. Her anticipation fills the room. “He does it from memory and brings so much excitement to it… feels like being [she hesitates here] in a really good sports car being driven by a really good driver.”

For the other side of performing — unwinding after a concert — she has a routine. The first 45 minutes, she breaks down gear, changes out of formal attire and loads the car — a part she used to hate with every gig, but finds more contemplative now that she has a pair of very special baroque tympani that she loves.

The “pit” at Versailles with Opera Lafayette / 2012 —thunder sheet, wind machine, tambour.

16 |

interaction… with the people, with the students, with colleagues when you’re on stage and the conductors, those moments when you’re in that magical space where you’re dealing with the stuff of music, where any words are okay to use, and it’s okay to take risks. It plays out in rehearsals, in lessons and on stage. It plays out in so many different ways.”

—Michelle Humphreys

She settles into a post-performance buzz for the trip home, from New York or Philadelphia or Washington. Maybe works over a passage or ending that she wishes she could have one more try for. “The drive home is all about reliving it,” she says. And it’s the only time in her life that she’s not listening to music in her car.

Most of the works she’s always wanted to play, she’s gotten the chance to play once. If she has a favorite concert performance — other than the one she is doing at the moment — it’s chamber orchestra,

with one player per part. “The intense interaction and responsibility, the opportunity for creativity and expression and for risk-taking is so much greater there than in orchestral music,” says Humphreys. She doesn’t enjoy the “glaring, microscopic examination” of a solo performance. “I didn’t become a drummer so that I could play solo. I want to be in the back of the band.”

. . .And the Teaching Side She likes to be in the classroom as well. For Humphreys, teaching and performing are roughly a

In the pit at the Baltimore Opera Company performance of Turandot. Humphreys says, “The longer I play, the more fun I have when I play.” And the more she’s learned how to channel what could be called nervousness into energy. When the physical sensations — ­ pounding heart, “adrenalin brain state” — start, she asks herself: “Do you really want to play or sit here and be a head case?” The answer is a given. She calls it a “slingshot” that snaps her out of nervousness. It’s a coping mechanism she shares with her students. “It’s about the music,” she tells them. “Separate yourself from it and pour all that into making the music as beautiful as you can. It’s not about you anymore.”

50-50 split. Like performing in a small, intimate group, teaching gives her the chance for the interaction she enjoys, the community. It lets her share the lessons she has learned in the process of becoming the percussionist she is, with her students.

Like being flexible and keeping an open mind.

“Think about all the instruments we play, all the the ideas a conductor might have about the way those instruments might or could sound,” she suggests.

“Throw that into a calculator and you’re going to come up with a very big number.”

Or what to do when drumsticks hit the floor or go flying across a stage.

That did in fact happen recently at the senior recital of one of her Shepherd students, who has studied with Humphreys since she was a freshman.

The moment was testament to both the student’s exceptional talent and superb preparation and Humphreys’ skill as a teacher. One went on playing without hesitation.

The other stood—at the back of the room— confident, proud as a parent, trusting her student. fluent

Humphreys is principal percussionist with Opera Lafayette. Other current performing affiliations include Washington Bach Consort, National Cathedral Baroque Orchestra, Handel Choir of Baltimore, Tempesta di Mare, Chesapeake Orchestra at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the Washington Bach Sinfonia and the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra.

Her upcoming performance schedule includes: December 7 – 9 Messiah at Washington National Cathedral January 11 + 12 Folger Consort “Paris: Music for the City of Light” Opera Lafayette Felician David’s opera “Lalla Roukh,” Jan 26 Kennedy Center/Jan 31 Rose Theater at Lincoln Center March 9 Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra at Shepherd University March 17 Messiah with Tempesta di Mare in Philadelphia April 28 Washington Bach Consort B Minor Mass June 3–15 National Music Festival, Chestertown, MD Website: www.percussionpro.com

Here, Humphreys plays with the Two Rivers Chamber Orchestra in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. The sticks and mallets are from her personal collection, which numbers around 130 pairs.

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in their environment

By Sheila Vertino One thing about photographer Frank Robbins: He insists on a challenge.

“If there’s a beautiful scene and everybody’s making a postcard picture in the same place, I’m not going to take it. Ever.

“I want to take the photograph that no one else takes. Maybe [other photographers] are scared, they don’t have the skills, they have doubts — whatever it is, that’s the photograph that I want to take.”

Lately, the need for a challenge has led Robbins to what he calls “environmental portraits” — capturing a person in his or her element. Subjects have ranged from tattoo artists and a fur trapper to potters and graphic designers, each shown at work.

“Putting them in their environment and making it some kind of a powerful or interesting composition is tough,” explains Robbins. “And then, [you have] to make them look good also, so you are really doing three things.”

Scouting the Environment Robbins first visits his subjects where they work, taking snapshots which he will review later. “I scout to see their environment because that’s what I’m going to

Left In this technically difficult portrait of Joy Bridy, Robbins successfully captures two light sources — on the side of her face and from the fire in the kiln behind her. Above For his portrait of Rebecca Grace Jones, Robbins goes high-key, repeating the bright white setting and pose of Jones’s own portrait of her father.

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put in the background, to juxtapose them in their environment. And that’s really a tall order, to make the composition pleasing.”

In his studio, Robbins studies the snapshots on his computer as a way to stimulate a vision for how the person and the background will come together in the portrait. “That’s when I get creative. I hardly ever see it right away, but once in a while it just jumps out.”

The scouting session has the added benefit of relaxing Robbins’ subjects, and beginning to form a relationship and sense of trust. “I get to know them, they get to know me, and if it clicks, it’s a dance. The communication after a while goes back and forth and gets faster and faster, and more facile as we go,” Robbins notes.

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Good Faces Everywhere As anyone who has ever had their portrait taken can attest, the process can be anxiety producing. “I know that, and so I am careful, and sometimes delicate, depending on their personality,” says Robbins, whose goal is to have people like how they look in his photographs.

Robbins believes that “There are good faces everywhere. People are confused about that. They think you have to be Hollywood-pretty to be photogenic. I’m not even sure what that means. I’ve seen good-looking people who get in front of a camera and it’s awful from the start. And then I’ve seen people who aren’t Hollywood-pretty and are photogenic. They can tell you who they really are, and it just comes through.”

Robbins considers his ability to control flash as integral to his signature style.

He uses studio lighting or flash, even outside, to give dimension and detail to his images. “Flash is very effective in doing portraits because it’s hard to control natural light. It’s coming from one direction and there’s nothing you can do about it. If I put somebody in their environment, I can’t always get the right [natural] light unless I wait several hours for it.” With artificial light, Robbins can control both the direction and the intensity of the light. And It’s easier on his subjects: Flash takes only 1/500th of a second — so fast that people usually don’t blink.

Mastering lighting took Robbins, who is not formally trained, years of experimentation and study, including total-immersion week-long workshops at Winona School of Professional Photography in Chicago.

Along with his inspired lighting, Robbins is also known for painstaking postproduction editing of each image, which can take up to a full day (in addition

Far left The lighting and detail of this portrait draw the eye to the spark shower at the anvil, and portray Dan Tokar as a man of action and precision. Below Explaining the term “environmental portraits,” Robbins says of Jared Scheerer, “He’s a graphic artist who lives in Photoshop all the time. So I shot Photoshop with him in it.”

Below Hostile and preferring to keep things on a first-name-only basis, Jason and Antonio’s portrait gets the point across, at the Slow Pokes Tattoo Parlor. Far right Using Doug Kinnett’s strong features to full advantage, Robbins posed Kinnett in front of one of the artist’s colorful geometrically abstracted landscapes.

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to the two to two-and-a-half days it takes to set up, shoot and complete the images). Robbins admits that working on a computer “doesn’t save me any time over working in the dark room, but it does allow me to do more complex things.”

As he savors the completion of his most recent series of environmental portraits, Robbins isn’t sure what he might tackle next. Unlike some artists, he claims, “I’m not obsessive about it at all. Might do more, might not.”

But that doesn’t mean he won’t be thinking about a new challenge. Maybe a series set at the racetrack, with the jockeys and trainers. Maybe portraits of the denizens of the area’s strip clubs. Maybe something historical, like the living descendants of the original settlers of the Panhandle area.

By spring, Robbins will probably decide who he wants to photograph. And how to set the bar a bit higher for himself. fluent

Photos Frank Robbins

Go For the Big Fish “Photography is a lot like fishing.

Sometimes you get ’em, sometimes you don’t. Personally, I go for the big ones. I don’t want these little minnows. Snapshots are the little minnows. Those [portraits] are big fish right there.

Something that you put on the wall, and you’re proud of it, and people look at it and say something. Those are the big fish.”

—Frank Robbins

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ONENIGHTSTANDS

The Slant Factory Art Space, Charles Town’s First Underground Arts Venue

In January 2012 three seniors of Shepherd University’s Contemporary Arts and Theater Program began the hunt for an empty building to host their Capstone exhibit just four months away. Students Joshua Hawkins, Anne Cropper and Jessica Oberdick were searching for a space they could make their own.

“We wanted absolute control over the exhibit.

Being told we couldn’t make a nail hole here or there wasn’t an option. Josh and I were branching out from our normal mediums to create installation works and Jessica’s paintings are pretty large” said Cropper, “so we were looking for something unfinished that we could transform to fit our needs.”

The first floor of the the old Ford garage was up for rent when Hawkins first contacted owner Bill Senseney, but it was the second floor “storage space” with exposed brick and lofty ceilings that the students made an offer on. In true artistic fashion, barter followed. In exchange for general cleaning, upgrading the space for safety and making repairs to severely water-damaged walls, the students obtained their dream space.

“Sweeping, sweeping and more sweeping” was Oberdick’s response when asked about the labor of transforming storage space into art space. Once the area was cleared of everything from lumber to an old Volvo engine, the students spent their spring break spackling, sanding, building, and painting walls and ceilings. They built a knee wall around the stairs, installed a handrail… and swept.

But the building had more than just dirt and grime; there was also history.

Built in the early 1930s, it served as Jefferson County’s first Ford dealership and garage — fully equipped with 26 |

From this.... Renovations in early 2012 have given way to multiple group exhibitions.

an automobile-size elevator and a reverse buttress that allowed room for cars to drive into the space. In the ’70s, the building served as a Microfilm factory. While the downstairs has served various functions, such as a dance studio and now the Adult Learning Center, the upstairs remained empty throughout the ’90s and until now.

Transforming the building into gallery space was as much of an accomplishment to the students as simultaneously creating their artwork for the group show “Relic.” The one-night-only event brought crowds from the surrounding area. As Shepherd University professors praised Senseney for his kindness and support in working with the students, Senseney jokingly reminded them that he, too, was their age once. That night, Hawkins, Cropper and Oberdick confirmed they wanted to continue cultivating the art space.

The Slant Factory Art Space now serves as studio space to Shepherd graduates and hosts monthly shows March through November. In September The Slant Factory hosted the first-ever exhibit for the artists’

By Anne M Cropper

The Slant Factory Art Space was born in April 2012 and is led by a trio of recent Shepherd University graduates: Anne Cropper, Joshua Hawkins and Jessica Oberdick. The Slant Factory features one-night juried and non-juried exhibitions March through November.

202 East Liberty St, Charles Town, West Virginia 304.312.0566 http://slantfactory.tumblr.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/slantfactory

To this.... Gallery goers enjoy paintings by Five Foot Assassins member Stephon Hummer at the September exhibit.

group Five Foot Assassins. The group comprises Shepherd alumni and current students; their work can be found at www.5ftassassins.tumblr.com. In October The Slant Factory co-founders hosted an unjuried show of work from local artists and those affiliated with Shepherd. “We’re hoping to expand and receive submissions from any artist looking to get exhibition experience,” said Cropper.

“We use a lot of social networking to get word out to the public of what we are doing. Our funding is out of pocket, so we ask for donations and small submission fees from the artists. We also have some cool t-shirts and other Slant gear for sale at every show.”

The appropriately named “Feast” was the first of Slant’s juried shows and the last exhibit until spring.

The Slant Factory operates as an underground space, so keep your eyes peeled for their subtle signage above the entryway at 202 E Liberty Street in Charles Town. The three co-founders encourage you to “like” them on Facebook under The Slant Factory Art Space to keep up to date with upcoming shows, news and photos. fluent Photos The Slant Factory

A Writer’s Life. . .

By Ginny Fite Karen Robbins, the novelist, always knew what she wanted to be when she grew up.

She wanted to be in advertising.

Robbins was so intent on following her dream that she left her Pittsburgh hometown to attend West Virginia University where the degree in journalism and advertising she wanted was offered. That tells you something about her. After graduating, in a few hard-working hops she went from promotions director for WV Public Television to director of advertising for PBS to VP of advertising and promotions for a well-known DC firm, to an ad agency that fired her on Christmas Eve on the verge of the 1981 recession.

Her solution to unemployment was to listen to what businesses knee deep in a recession had to say.

They didn’t have a full-time job but they wanted this project promoted, that ad created, the other event publicized. She had a mortgage and bills to pay. She did the math and created her own advertising and public relations agency in 1983. Her first client was the Broadcasting Industry Council, then the Washington Opera and she was off.

Karen Robbins also met her husband in ’83, in a bar in Rehoboth Beach. It was love at first sight, a romance novel in its own right. “It was a great year,” she says, grinning.

She grins a lot. She looks straight at you. She’s completely in control of her story.

That year laid the groundwork for the many good years that followed while the other thing Robbins always wanted to be waited for her to catch up to it.

Robbins loved advertising, the team effort, the creative people, driving toward a deadline, the measureable success. “It was a fun career,” Robbins says. “I can’t think of anything else I’d have rather done, except [she pauses for effect] being a medicine woman.” She grins again, slyly this time.

Even before she closed the agency in 2000 and she and her husband moved to Ireland to live in a seaside village called Strandhill in County Sligo, the Neolithic stones at Stonehenge and New Grange, in England, Ireland, Brittany and France had been calling to her.

The couple focused their vacations around visiting the ancient sites. Those rings of stones, those cairns with pots and beads, those powerful emanations of prehistory that have resonated for thousands of people spoke to her. She became a stone chaser.

“The first time I saw Stonehenge, I got the idea for the story,” she says of the story that would become the novel The Stonehenge Scrolls by K. P. Robbins.

The carving of Myrddin, one of the main characters in The Stonehenge Scrolls, was made by Michael Quirke of Sligo, Ireland, where Robbins lived when she wrote the first draft of her novel.

Photos Frank Robbins

The Stonehenge Scrolls, a novel by K.P. Robbins Genre: Historical Mainstream Fiction Pages: 131, Price: $5.50 Available as an e-book from: Amazon or www.thestonehengescrolls.com

The only question was how to write it. She had never taken a course in creative writing, but that wasn’t going to stop her. She listened to tapes, took a few seminars, and employed that same no-nonsense aim-shoot-practice approach she employed in making a name for herself in advertising.

“I’m a believer in the notion that you only get good after 10,000 hours,” she says.

Essentially, although she barely admits to this, the characters of her emerging historical fiction were speaking to her, telling her the story. Robbins responded by writing each main character in the first person in his or her own voice, from each individual point of view. Gwyr, Ogwyn, Myrddin took on their own life. Then Robbins thought there should be some kind of wrapper for the story, perhaps a blog to give the story a modern grounding. Maybe the story needed a modern character, like an archaeologist commenting on the scrolls that reveal the lives of the early nomadic monument builders. “You try to layer things going on in fiction,” she says. The result is a lean but intricate first novel that may remind readers of Clan of the Cave Bear.

TheStonhengeScrolls.com, the website for the novel, says the story is about this: “…ancient scrolls unearthed near Dublin reveal the secrets of Stonehenge and an archaeologist blogs about their meaning ... Based on known archaeological discoveries, The Stonehenge Scrolls spins a tale that could just possibly be true.” You’ll have to read the novel to discover if it is about something more.

Karen Robbins is nothing if not persistent. But she is also talented.

Sometime in the fall of 2009 the book was finished. Then there was the matter of pitching it to get it published. “Odds never stopped me before in my life,” says the first female VP at the Mutual Broadcasting network in Washington, D.C. Robbins realized that she needed some publishing credits for her cover letter so she wrote a few short stories, workshopped her fiction in writers groups, entered some contests in Writers Digest, Shepherd University’s Anthology of Appalachian Writer’s, The Washington Post, and before you could say Carrowmore, Carrowkeel, she was published. And she was just beginning to scratch the writing itch. She now has

. . .listening to the stones

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Karen Robbins surrounds herself with photographs, stacks of books, research files, inspirational quotes and compelling images to keep her company during the solitary hours of writing in her home office.

eight stories grounded in West Virginia that might make a nice short story collection.

Robbins has a powerful endorsement for her persistence: a quote by Isaac Asimov taped to her computer screen.

You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer.

You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success—but only if you persist.

She believes in that message. It took 63 tries, sending out her query letter and excerpts of the novel, to find an agent. It took another year for the agent to find a publisher. And then there was the year of revision, and editing, and galley proofing. Now she’s working with Studio 105 in Shepherdstown to promote her novel.

With her first novel out of the way, Robbins finished a memoir of the year she and her husband spent in Ireland, (the memoir is the best thing she’s done, she says) and the first draft of a second novel about five women in a networking group. And, yes, she’s beginning her research on another historical novel focused on the California mission period.

She isn’t doing this for money. She estimates she’s made $60 in the last 10 years writing fiction. “Writing gives me something to do in my old age. I don’t play golf,” she quips.

But a peek into her writing room, with its photographs of family, a flip chart of ideas, a few stacks of other people’s books, overflowing files, inspirational quotes and compelling images made by her husband, Frank Robbins, and some impossible to set aside gifts indicates that something else is going on here. Karen Robbins is pouring her heart out in words.

She is in the grip of forces more powerful even than her will. Like her redheaded heroine, she is building her own monument.

“Things coming together, to me that’s what creativity is. You draw from sources and make a new thing.” fluent 30 |

Photo Ginny Fite

K.P. Robbins On Writing Once you are working a story, stay in touch with it. Don’t let it get cold.

Natalie Goldberg’s tapes and Writers’ Digest books are useful.

Know how you want the book to end.

Things change as you get to know your characters.

Don’t be insulted if an editor asks you to change something.

You cannot judge your own work; you have no perspective.

There’s no one right way.

You have to write what you’re interested in, what you’re passionate about.

It’s not about the money.

Maybe the last thing you’ve done is always the best thing you’ve done.

The hardest thing about writing is the solitary nature of it.

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FICTION

Francisco

BY MATT CHELF

It was snowing, and whenever a truck pulled into the lot the loading dock would light up bright so I had to shield my eyes. The night had slowed down, most of the inbound drivers had come, Francisco and I moved their freight to outbound and then they were gone into the dark towards Charleston, New York, Richmond and beyond. Francisco and I were waiting for the last of the late nighters when Rocky pulled in and backed his truck on gate seventeen.

Rocky was in it for the long haul, he told me and Francisco, driving west to all the way to Indianapolis tonight. He was ex marines, a restless man with crooked teeth and crazy eyes and talked to you like you were insane, saying, “Hah! What? Oh I see…wait,” or “Hartsock? Been all over this damn place and never seen a Hartsock! Where do you people come from?

I’m going there looking for Hartsocks,” and then he’d shake my hand, jump off the dock and leap up into his rig and take off. Rocky was a man who needed something to do, and what kills the time better than rushing across America in an eighteen wheeler?

All the drivers were men like Rocky, killing time before getting back on the road. As they waited they liked to bullshit around the blue desk and flirt with Bonnie in the office and horse around like young men on the dock. Truck drivers are lonely people, I learned.

Always driving from city to city with their work, but really they’re just wandering about like homeless men, and I like that about truck drivers. Rocky was always telling me I should drive the truck, but I don’t like trucks, and I don’t like loud noises and I don’t like machines so I don’t want to drive the truck. Francisco was thinking about driving but he didn’t want to leave home. “My son is having problems,” he told me as we stood on the edge of the dock freezing to death. “He gets in trouble and makes bad grades. I spoke with his teacher….”

He and his wife had three boys and two girls, all young. I couldn’t imagine. Francisco was this huge jolly 32 |

man with a big round belly and had “love” and “hate” tattooed across his knuckles, and on summer days his white shirt would get soaked in sweat and I could see the tattoos across his back in black lettering, but when I asked he wouldn’t show them to me. Instead he lifted the front of his shirt and outlined with his big red finger the scars of bullet holes on his chest.

Francisco was young, though I never thought to ask how young. He told me about hiding from the cops in his uncle’s corn field and getting beat up in gang fights, and he told me about the civil war in El Salvador. All he said about the war was that it was bad and I knew it was from how he straightened up and his eyes got big.

I don’t know how he got to America. He never told me and I never asked. I wanted to put the question to him casually as we stood there in the cold and night and watched the snow fall as we waited for those last and final trucks, wherever they were. Would he have told me if I asked? I don’t know, and somehow I’m glad I didn’t ask.

In the early afternoons, when the dock was dead and it was just he and I and the Morrison trailers came and went like slow clouds, we rushed to break all the trailers weighing us down and afterwards we’d laze on the edge of the dock between two sad pillars of cinderblock and soak up the last of the sunshine before the drivers poured in from every direction. Work was slow, terribly slow those colder days. I wondered how long this would keep up before we became irrelevant, expendable. The sun was already setting behind a factory.

Francisco lit a cigarette. He pointed to a house in the distance, beyond the gravel lot, past the barbed wire fence, after the Southern Pacific rail. The house was tall, the paneling brown, the roof climbed up rapidly as if trying to escape being slammed between a smoke shop and a do-it-yourself car wash. “My friend used to live there,” Francisco said.

His drinking buddy Garcia lived in that house, in the attic that had a big glass window. Garcia used to play guitar for a metal band that played bars and pubs up and down the East Coast and all across the south. He met Francisco in an Atlanta bar called Guadalajara and Garcia told Francisco his half-brother owned a brick mill where Garcia worked when his band wasn’t on the road.

His brother was hiring. Francisco moved his family up here in a Dodge conversion van. Garcia’s brother sold out to a corporation and the factory shipped overseas.

“That was a while ago,” Francisco said. We sat quietly.

And I wanted to know: what happened to Garcia? and when I asked Francisco shrugged his shoulders.

After the layoff Garcia went on tour and never came back. The landlord tossed Garcia’s stuff on the curb and Francisco fought through a crowd of vultures to salvage Garcia’s last guitar, a polished, black Fender

with curved edges that reflected light. Francisco stashed the guitar in the back of his closet because he loved Garcia but didn’t like Garcia’s band. The anger in Garcia’s music reminded him of the ugly parts of El Salvador. He preferred the music they played at night in the streets of San Salvador that made women want to dance, the music that made the dancing, with its fire and throws and lanterns, under the stars as full of color as the flowers in the sun.

We talked, or rather, I listened, until we had to get back to work, until it got good and dark, and cold, and the freezing wind crossed through the open gates and cut into my heavy coveralls like a knife. Francisco disappeared in the turning of orange fork trucks, in the glare on the glossy floor. I focused on the job. And the big light above the blue desk came on and the outside became some vague memory draped in shadow, padded in snow.

Photo Shepherd Ogden

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FICTION continued

To hide from the cold I liked to sneak into the kitchen and make myself hot cocoa, the packaged kind that comes with the little processed marshmallows that melt away and make the froth taste holy. I’d take my sweet time sipping slowly by the window that overlooked the dock and think about my situation. Francisco would always have hot cocoa in the cup holder of his fork truck. Him cruising around the dock in rush hour sipping hot cocoa—it was a sight. Francisco drinking anything other than water or hard liquor was unimaginable. Then Carl and Francisco were bullshitting around the blue desk about women and alcohol, drinking hot cocoa. I had to ask where the hot chocolate came from. And that’s how I got hooked.

Carl said to me, “Hey buddy, I got a job for you,” and I followed him across the dock, where he opened his trailer. He was carrying a shipment of lingerie catalogs and several skids had split open on the road and the magazines were scattered across the trailer. He wanted my help cleaning up the mess and repairing the damage and of course I’d help.

I hopped on the forks and pulled the boxes of lingerie magazines onto the dock and all the drivers wanted to stand around and gawk at the magazines like filthy old men and give Carl a hard time. Carl told them to beat it. He shooed them away like unwanted cats. He asked me if I knew how to take shrink wrap off a skid. I said no. It was like a girl’s skirt, he said as he knelt down. You just grab at the bottom and lift up. I blushed and laughed, and he laughed because I laughed and we stacked the lingerie magazines in the box, ran around the skids with shrink wrap, wrapping the boxes three, four and five times and sent the shipment down the road to wherever with a sad farewell. But something about Carl began to bother me. I was new in the city and I didn’t know any women anymore so his advice made me miss home. I thought hot cocoa would help but that made it worse.

I threw my cup away.

And I couldn’t shake feeling lost in the big city. As I broke Morrison trailers with Carl, I glanced between flights out to the lot at the big buildings, at the big dark sky full of stars I couldn’t see for all the city lights, and I must’ve been gazing because Carl said, 34 |

“What’s wrong with you?” He asked me if a little girl had me upset all of a sudden. He said she could never leave me and I was alright. He wanted to know what she was like, if I was going to marry her, where we would live, how many kids we’d have, how I’d support us, etc. He hopped off the forklift, pulled his wallet out and showed me his old lady. From then on I kept my distance from Carl.

When I caught Francisco stuffing his gloves and back-belt in his sardine can locker I wanted to tell him about Carl, but I thought better of it and I told him Carl and I broke a trailer of Playboys. And Francisco said, “You should see the Playboys in El Salvador.” That made me curious, and when I got back to my room that night I Googled El Salvadorian Playboy but it really wasn’t any different from American pornography.

I had dumped so many rubber trash barrels full of two-by-fours, nails, dust, dirt and tobacco spit into the great big dumpster that a huge, mangled pile of dock life was taking form in the trash and threatened to overflow and spill into the lot and take the whole damn world over. I stood watching for the headlights of the next truck to come down Ford Street before I would return to my garbage shift. The gravel lot was a void where no light landed and in the distance I could see the bright windows of the shanty houses, of Garcia’s attic, and the street lights spaced along the chain-link fence and the graffiti smeared on the Southern Pacific rail illuminated by those street lights.

The lot was so different at night, strange and amorphous, chaos waiting for the hand of a creator to reach out and sculpt with loving hands. I thought about home and all the friends I used to know, the childhood I had, my adolescence, my folks, and I told myself going my own way was the right thing. It was lonely sometimes, but I was free and I had dreams. I just needed time before I found friends amongst my peers, before Francisco became my family and this city my home. I wondered how Francisco felt when he left El Salvador. I wondered how he learned English.

It occurred to me I had never once heard him speak Spanish. More questions came to mind, so many questions needing to be asked. And the scars on his

chest? I closed my eyes, and like I was staring out a window watching, three men approach Francisco at the bus stop and leave him in a pool of blood.

Francisco found me there, waiting. He threw a snowball at me and I hit him back. He said come on.

Stan had a big job for us. Stan had his clipboard in hand, his pen behind his ear and he was looking back and forth. He told Francisco to find a lift. There wasn’t one. Stan called someone over and took their truck.

Stan told us to follow him. Rocky had just come back from Indianapolis with a load of Building America and Carl was on his way from Charleston with another trailer of Building America. Both were heading north to New York to the same construction company and Stan wanted both shipments on one trailer.

In Rocky’s trailer, two single files of dusty shrinkwrapped brick took up the entire floor. I kicked one.

I tried to push it. The bill of lading said each skid weighed one ton. You couldn’t stack them on loading racks and you couldn’t stack them on each other.

And the skids weren’t wide enough to ride without sliding. I didn’t know what Stan expected us to do but Francisco had a plan. I was on the forks and he on the floor. Francisco said, “Find the trailer where they are going and I’ll meet you there.”

In the New York trailer Francisco propped a pallet against the wall, he wanted the Building America tight against the pallet, and he gave me the thumbs up when it was good. He wanted it like that on both sides, with a gap between the two skids of brick that Francisco filled with two more pallets so they’d stay put. Then Francisco found the thickest, toughest sheets of long plywood and laid two at a time across the top of the pallets, creating a makeshift rack, while back at the first trailer I pulled another skid out, turned it sideways with my blades, and went into it from the long side and loaded the skid on that upper tier. Two fit in perfectly up top. The squeeze was so airtight I had to lift my forks up and go in just right as I held my breath, afraid I’d drive my forks right through the wall. I thought the plywood would break under two tons but Francisco said it would hold. Francisco stood two more sheets of plywood up straight to make a wall so nothing could jump forward if Rocky made a sudden stop on the road.

The job took us all night. We were the last ones on the dock. We turned one trailer of Building America into two. We admired our work. We stood on the edge of the dock and watched Rocky take off down Ford Street towards New York waving his hat out the window. We were silent. Francisco said to me, “Good job, my friend.” He sat down and lit a cigarette. He was beat.

At first we talked about nothing serious, just how tired we were and how late it was. And we still had another job ahead of us: closing gates. I told Francisco to get out of here, that I had it, even though I hated closing gates at night. It was a lonely job. I just wanted to do one last thing before I went to sleep. But Francisco wanted to talk first. He had something to tell me, a story about this grand festival in El Salvador.

For a week everyone was drunk—dumb drunk, laughing-into-the-arms-of-a-stranger drunk, cryingon-a-street-corner drunk and then forget-all-about-it drunk. For a week all of San Salvador shed its old skin.

People poured in from the country and expatriates returned from abroad. Bands played on the streets and the vendors moved their wares into rickety shacks on the sidewalk. The flag was draped on all the buildings.

Francisco and his brothers were making money stealing hats. They roamed, robbed and had each other’s back. But Francisco only had an eye for the special hats. They shone like black beacons in a crowd of all the colors. He followed the beacon from street to street, stalking, waiting for the moment and then he stole the hat, but with this guy in a Hawaiian shirt something unusual happened: The crowd dispersed, the music stopped, the women screamed.

They fought in the street and Francisco ended up winning. He held his prize way in the air, his friends were nowhere to be seen, and then he saw the man’s police badge on the pavement. Six cops took Francisco into an alley. They broke his bones and ripped his shirt away. They dumped him on the edge of San Salvador, where the music was screeching vultures and where his enemies made their home. He hid in a dumpster until night fell and then he made his way through the alleys like a ravenous dog. And all the while I felt his | 35

FICTION continued

story culminating into one, transcendent point that explained everything: Is this when you were shot, I asked. And Francisco smiled wanly and said, no, my friend, that was much later.

He tossed his burnt cigarette into the snowy lot and told me goodnight, see you tomorrow. I sat until the white door closed behind him. So that was Francisco, I thought as I closed gates. El Salvador stayed on my mind. The cold became colder and the few colors on the dock stood out to me like a light bulb burned inside them. My footsteps echoed. The fork trucks stood humming, the dock murmured and no one was around but me. I flipped the switch on the big light, clocked out as fast as I could and rushed out of the building like someone was chasing me.

An award came from New York some days later when Stan and the other managers went away to

the National Conference and the assistant regional manager, this old foagie with a fat face, was left to manage the dock. It was almost Christmas. The man handed me an envelope. I was confused, I thought no, I thought this was a polite way of firing me but when I read the special company card and the hand-written letter from the New York men that said Francisco and I were something special for that Building America trailer, I asked the assistant manager twice if Francisco got the same award. He did. Francisco gave me a big high five when he walked on the dock.

For all our excitement, the next few days were very slow, somberly slow. The drivers said this always happens around Christmas, which didn’t make sense to me because people are always shopping online for Christmas. They shrugged. Francisco gave me my Christmas present early: It was Garcia’s guitar. I said I couldn’t accept it, and Francisco said, but you have to.

PHoTo: © MArk MuSE, 2012 - An AHA MEMbEr

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36 |

Cellular Memory Your voice floats back to me like Charlie Parker playing smooth and low in the moonlight.

It’s a memory that slides silk over my arms, drapes itself over my shoulders and chest; And so I did. I now owned Garcia’s guitar and I didn’t even know the first chord.

I promised I’d learn. With the guitar in my hands I promised I was going to go on tour and never come back. I bought a book, I learned the chords and I reread the paragraphs that confused me. I played every day. I was excited about guitar. I caught the rhythm and I was getting better all the time. I ended up making friends, and I met a girl and I was starting to think about studying music at college.

But that next night, the night after Francisco gave me Garcia’s guitar, I was thinking about what to do for him, with no luck. After we sent the last truck on its way and were closing gates and stacking pallets, the assistant regional manager pulled Francisco and me off to the side. “Fellas,” he said, “Economy’s bad, business is slowing down in the cold season. Headquarters says to let go all dock hands, and well, that’s what I’ve got to do. Sorry boys. Happy holidays!” Francisco shook the man’s hand and thanked him. I shook his hand but said nothing. The man gripped me on the shoulder, he was firm, almost reassuring, and then he sauntered back to the office drumming his clipboard against his leg.

Sure, we had expected this for some time, rumors had spread amongst the drivers and it was no secret Francisco and I would be the first to go, but I felt the dock sweep from underneath me like someone hit me from behind. Francisco said come on. We walked, I lost in my head, and he threw his gloves in the trash barrel and it made a big noise that startled me. He reached his hand out and said, “It has been an honor, my friend.”

He said more. He wanted me to walk with him, snow and ice crunching beneath our boots, talking along the way like we had hard work tomorrow. He sat in his old gray Mazda truck with the door hanging open and drank from a two-liter of Pepsi. He shook my hand again and told me to use my skills, to find a job, to stay out of trouble and it took three cranks for the Mazda to start and he turned onto Ford Street, wailing on his horn through the green light. That was December 23, 2007, the last time I saw Francisco. fluent

a low, aching vibration that quivers in my belly, the feel of you still bound tightly to my body.

All our goodbyes make no difference on a night like now—the air is misty with rain, steam rises off the pavement, mingles with smells of iron, damp earth, and the sweetness of Mimosa blooms.

A girl and a boy, maybe 17, are sitting near me, their hands are clasped and she’s studying his face with her fingers. When he leans in close to her ear to speak, her look turns dreamy, her body melting as if she wants to curl herself into him. Perhaps she’s thinking that he’s perfect for her, wants his kisses with her forever. Maybe these two will stay together. Probably not. But it’s no matter.

Parts of her body will never forget him.

So on a night like this one, sometime a long time from now, quite suddenly her palm will blaze with heat as if his hand is pressed there; she’ll recall the whisper of his voice, and time will wind backwards.

Her chest will open into some warm and vibrating memory, like a sax has curled around her.

And she won’t be able to figure out why but suddenly she’ll feel like she’s being lifted up and carried away by a song that is beautiful and sad, and she’ll know, she’ll never again replicate this song.

Christa Mastrangelo Joyce Christa Mastrangelo Joyce’s “Cellular Memory” appeared in Reunion Journal.

POETRY

J. M. R. (Janet) Harrison lives in Harpers Ferry, WVa with her husband

and two cats. After training and working in a scientific field for 13 years, she returned to her first love and avocation: poetry. She has studied at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Md and through the brief residency program of Spalding University. She is currently the guest poetry host for the Winners and Losers radio show on 89.7 WSHC, Shepherdstown, Monday mornings 7:30–9:00 am (www.897wshc.org). Her poems have been published in Antietam Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and elsewhere, including two anthologies: the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Vol. II and Wild Sweet Notes II.

Poet’s Block

Sign

Lesson From A Wayside Angel

The page is blank, cumulus-white like bleached sheets flapping in a mild breeze, unsullied as any maiden given to dragon, later rescued by knight, crisp like the starched collar of an unworn dress shirt, pale as the ballerina’s skirt on opening night of Swan Lake, glaring like omission or error or the blink of a lighthouse sweeping over a ghostly clipper ship just offshore.

Suppose, after a missed turning on an unmarked trail, with the sun so low the shadows of trees obscure the faint path, suppose, then, you find it: a tumbled pyre so recently alight embers still glow.

Suppose, by some instinct, you still, and silently watch ashes stir to no wind, then an improbable wing, no, two, and the downy chick first squawks, flapping, nearly topples backward, but maturing as you watch, finds its song. Wings flare, blaze in the first downstroke, and then you earthbound under the shattered sky, more alone than ever,

Believe me or no, I tell you one dangling, gray day on the far side of a sharp bend in a forest path, I met the hazel-eyed angel-of-the-deep-woods.

Mystery hunched and huddled under fluffed, tawny wings— how the vision lingers on my inner eye!

The page is patient, is expectant.

Encumbrances of Angels With all eternity to ponder the nature and cost of freedom, even an angel might prefer the rasp of sand between the toes to the ethereal tug of cosmic tides, choose the angularity of starfish over the symmetry of stars, desire—whatever the penalty— the lash of wind-driven rain on a back unburdened of wings.

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could you tell anyone?

After, would you believe the phoenix, yourself, when back among sidewalks, traffic lights, and courtesy?

Would you envy and pursue almost any flying thing—mosquito, moth, sparrow, maple seed?

Would the world seem paltry, after, or jostled by possibilities?

Silently she smoothed the streambank clay and traced a luminous map, detailed beyond memory.

Choosing a blueveined stone, she placed it gently near a tree, then smiled.

“You are not here,” she said, “Although you think you are.

You are with me.”

By now the wild, quick-eyed birds have feasted on the crumbs I rationed— crumbs that could have eased my hunger— crumbs I sacrificed to lead me home.

I fear my way is blocked, lost.

But bread transformed is jubilation and song.

Within, the hidden harmony rouses and lures me along songlines sensed only a single, measured beat at a time.

My Tale There’s a witch in these woods, and the birds have swallowed my breadcrumbs.

Beauty’s Prince

for the Brothers Grimm

Prodigals Passage

for F.T. Clark

That kiss awakened him as well; briefly he forgot to breathe.

Worlds spun and he nearly swooned like some skittish, blushing schoolgirl.

He mourned as the bright-visioned newborn wonder in her eyes clouded with memory, cleared with purpose.

He shuddered, fearing at first, the stunning power sprung from her hundred year immersion in the strict tutelage of dreams.

This prince, this mild crusader, fell freely into love with the wisest, most perilous woman in half a hundred realms.

Maybe leaving is necessary, wandering is required.

Maybe even only by accident do leaf shadows and mottled sunlight strike a reminiscent chord, enticing you to linger, to rent, in a nearby town, a room from a widow.

Her smile unfroze time.

They wed. It was expected.

To honor her long night, she chose the crow for her emblem and granted her realm a new motto: The dark is light enough.

Together they pruned the briars, hacking a broad path through without uprooting them.

The disarmed spindle was exhibited in a glass case along the grand entryway.

Their children, born with secret knowledge, never woke with night terrors.

And if their further deeds are lost to the worlds of men, tales are borne forth daily by generations of crows on their dark arrogance of surging wings.

“Encumbrances” was originally published in Loch Raven Review; an earlier version of “My Tale” was originally published in Antietam Review and Wild Sweet Notes II; and “Prodigal’s Passage” was originally published in Antietam Review and Wild Sweet Notes II.

Slowly strangers begin to smile.

The waitress in the doughnut shop learns you take your coffee black.

Time passes.

You feed a neighbor’s cat so that he might go to his grandson’s wedding.

He says thank you.

You say you’re welcome.

The word echoes in your mind until, with a start, you realize: you, too, are welcome.

Home has besieged you, and you have yielded.

Someone else is wearing the cloak.

The ring is locked in a box.

Unneeded, the fatted calf romps near his mother.

For you are standing speechless, barefoot, amidst such bounty...

Home has forgiven you every misstep, each wrong turning, the blindness, the blundering, so relieved finally to have rescued you from yourself.

One glass slipper has rubbed a blister on my heel— the other I’ve lost.

I fell asleep among brambles and a toad kissed me.

My hair is long and tangled, matted with straw half-spun into gold.

Something is wrong with this apple.

I am trapped between once upon a time and happily ever after.

Send help.

Sooty Angels Sprawled In Darkness

for John O’Dell Scavengers— on a rare break from their arduous duties.

They work the shadows like a pickpocket at Marti Gras, snatching endangered scraps and memories from inattention and neglect.

What they find, they hold.

As they hunt, they mark their trails with clues and ciphers, then set traps and deadfalls to ambush the unwary.

Their minds are vast and numinous junkyards.

They sing me riddling lullabies and then infest my dreams.

Every dawn and dusk, they gossip of my secrets, but in tones so sly and hushed I hear only tantalizing fragments.

| 39

AGRI:CULTURE

62 Minutes (Saving the Daylight)

BY SHEPHERD OGDEN

1:59 am—November 4, 2012: It’s time for a change.

I’m not talking politics here; I’m talking time itself.

One minute from now, in a bit of human alchemy, an hour of life will be created out of nothing. But make no mistake: Moments from now, the sun, currently shining over Shanghai, will not stop in the sky, the waning moon will not pause, nor will Orion lay low on the eastern horizon even a moment longer. While we can change our clocks, we cannot change the season.

The idea of Daylight Saving Time goes back at least to 1784 when the U.S. envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, calculated that French shopkeepers could save a million francs a year just by resetting their clocks. I suppose we shouldn’t ask why they couldn’t just adjust their business hours seasonally; it seems that we humans have an appetite for group delusion.

Following the French revolution they even developed a clock based on the metric system!

The first clocks — whose antiquity is not precisely known but date back at least 5000 years — actually used the passage of the sun (sundials) or the flow of water (clepsydrae, or water clocks) to measure time.

Even at that point a distinction was introduced: time on a sundial is related directly to the location of the

dial and is truly fluid, while a water clock (how much more fluid can you get?) operated by measuring the flow of water into units (think of those tacky little cranes that tip-top as they fill) and using a full cup to tip a lever, advance a gear and thus track time.

Some time, some centuries ago, we broke the flow of life into chunks to better coordinate the busy-ness of society (industrializing time), just as we broke the vastness of the Earth into fields and farms, cities and towns (industrializing space). Since then, we have been living a shared illusion: that what our measures tell us is the thing itself. In land, the mechanism was “enclosure,” and in time the mechanism was “escapement,” which is the mechanism by which a flow is turned into a series of repeatable events. I can’t help but wonder about the irony of that term, when now so many of us dream of escape from the tyranny of mechanical time.

A clock made in Revolutionary France, showing the 10-hour metric clock.

Photo left Wikipedia | Other photos Shepherd Ogden

At heart, we all know that some times creep while others rush, yet we seem to hold a belief that this rigid, abstract clock time is real. We insist on tinkering with it, moving it an hour forward in spring, back in fall, as if it mattered no more, no less than, say, jet-lag. What are our bodies trying to tell us, these last few weeks, when we drag ourselves out of the sack in the cold dark?

Then suddenly, overnight, all is changed; we rise again with the dawn (or at least I do). Are we not diurnal still, merely 10,000 years into the social experiment that is humanity? I can tell you that the dairyman in his barn heeds not the clock as he tends his herd. The cows have their own time — the daily cycle that ebbs and flows with the ecliptic. It doesn’t really matter to him what the clock says — except to coordinate his affairs with the world off the farm — because for him, when the cows come in to be milked, it is milking time. The sweep or click of the minute-hand means nothing on the face of that.

Yes, within moments, the hour will change, and the sixty-two minutes between 1:59 and 2:01 tonight — that stretched, alchemical hour — will add much to the profit of the tavern keeper! And I will work right through it, grateful for the opportunity.

Of course I am working on a laptop, and I know that, so many seconds to the fore (they decrease as I type), its synchronized time in the control bar will reset — unlike the clock on the wall, the social time we have all agreed upon, the twice-turned annual fiction of time within which most of us now live, and from which my extra hour would flow. fluent

Elegy for My Grandfather Who Died in a City Surrounded by Mountains

He was light reflected on snow, a handful of emeralds in the mouth, high cheekbones shaped as Chibcha clouds. He was rain, a hotel room in Paris, legs that walked through the wilderness for miles. Soft and hard like the seed of the mamoncillo fruit covered in bitter-sweet pulp. Long after his body forgot to speak the language of desire, poems bloomed under his hat.

In his room, a window, brandy, Vallejo, candles, and Daedalus’s wings, traded for two pounds of coffee in Damascus.

The year he watched the world from his soft bed, I danced flamenco for him.

In those days, I was still a spider, all arms and legs, all making thread for silk webs.

Hope Maxwell Snyder Hope Maxwell Snyder’s “Elegy for My Grandfather Who Died in a City Surrounded by Mountains” appeared in The Comstock Review and In Good Company: Poets Celebrate Shepherdstown’s 250th Anniversary.

Check out and bookmark the Events Calendar on the FLUENT Web site for poetry readings, and other regional arts and cultural events.

| 41

ED:CETERA

Gifts That Keep on Giving

BY ED ZAHNISER

Recently I came across listings for The Alternate Christmas Catalog on the Internet. The full title is worthy of the 1700s or 1800s: The Alternate Christmas Catalogue and More Life-Supporting Ways to Celebrate Hanukkah, Birthdays, Weddings, Funerals and Other People Events — A Celebrative Life-Style for Human Justice and World Peace. That’s a lot for 128 letter-size pages.

On Amazon the catalog, regardless of edition, now lists for $51.98 from three book vendors. The Apparel-Sapa.com site — vending fashion wear and luxury jewelry, no less—also offers it at that price. The original publishers would be chagrined at that price tag. No one was in it for the money. They were in it to divert money from commercial “stuff ” to gifts that created or supported community and promoted justice and peace, including ecological peace with the planet.

That was 1974. Those still aren’t bad ideas.

Five people are listed as authors. I am listed either as editor or with Vicky Reeves as “creators.” Neither is correct. What I recall is that Vicky got me into it, and I merely contributed an article. I was no doubt suggesting that people support small literary presses, probably including the poets’ press that I was heavily involved in then.

Vicky designed the cover. She was a devotee of activist artist Sister Corita Kent (1918–1986), who was known for bold typography, vivid colors, and wideranging quotations, from the Bible to the Beatles.

Kent’s work was exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., earlier this year.

I didn’t know it then, but Vicky’s full name is evidently Mercedes Naveiro Vicky Reeves. She was a member of an order of nuns living their lives in the world, working regular jobs — this was 1974. As I recall, her order had a group house near The Catholic University of America, off Michigan Avenue, NW. Vicky and I both worked at The Wilderness Society in Washington, D.C. then.

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According to the archive of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, at least by the 4th edition the title was more inclusive: The Alternative Celebrations Catalog. The page count had risen to about 280.

Reliving the catalog brings to remembrance some of my father’s alternate gift giving when my siblings and I were not so young. (He died when I was 18 years old and my oldest sibling was 26). One year when we were otherwise well beyond the “toys” stage, he gave each of us siblings a toy for Christmas.

At least part of his message seemed to be that we should not take the commercial aspect of Christmas too seriously at the expense of enjoying a child-like — but not childish — celebration of a long-ago birthday.

Admittedly, even then the scholarly consensus put that date of birth in April. Most Christian holy days were so-placed in the calendar to co-opt pagan festivals.

My father was very much against guns and militarism. One year for my birthday, I wanted nothing so much as a cap pistol like a couple of my friends had.

It eroded the fun of playing cowboys and Indians, for me, when I was the only one still using a stick for an imagined weapon. So what did I get that birthday?

A girl doll. Maybe it was a comment about (human) nature versus nurture. Go figure.

My father’s biggest coup came the Christmas that he gave each of us “the gift that keeps on giving.” This must be partly understood in light of the fact that, like many males, I am told, Christmas had to be down to the very wire before he even started shopping. “The gift that keeps on giving” turned out to be library books! Each of us received a gift-wrapped book, tailored to our interests, from the local public library.

Receiving a library book for Christmas was even more striking for the fact that we opened those gifts in a living room whose bookcase shelved 2,000 volumes of poetry and drama. My father was born in 1906 in rural

Pennsylvania and his childhood had been lived substantially off the money economy. He compensated, as an adult, by amassing books. He was such an avid consumer of secondhand books that, at George Friend’s Book Shop, Mr. Friend would give me a free book — he even knew my interests — to occupy me so my father could shop longer. (My mother revolted when he wanted to “shelve” books atop the refrigerator!)

Many alternative giving strategies are just waiting for you. If you are a member of a faith community, check their resources. The Presbyterian Church USA, for example, offers an alternative giftgiving brochure for its disaster relief programs, which support compassion rather than consumerism.

As we continue recovering from the recent economic nosedive, a good strategy is to support local merchants and local artists and artisans by simply shopping locally. A particular plus is that you save fuel and delve more intimately into your community’s cultural life. In the Eastern Panhandle you could give gifts of support or memberships in the Jefferson, Berkeley and Morgan counties’ arts councils.

Image Vicky Reeves

Alternative Gifts International expands your outreach. You can give the gift to “do” such things as dig a well, provide medicine or save a coral reef right from your nearest mailbox. If you’re more entrepreneurial, you can even host a local market to promote alternate gift-giving, or get your school, business, service club or senior center to offer a local market. Download a “how-to” guide at www.altgifts.org.

Does the fair trade movement float your boat?

Your gifts can support it through international products vetted to benefit artisans and farmers and other growers in developing nations. Fair trade promotes businesses and development projects based on dialogue, transparency and respect. The movement works to create greater equity in international trading, It also works to ensure children’s rights and cultivate environmental stewardship. Find out more at www.fairtradefederation.org/ht/d/Home/pid/175.

Heifer International is a well-known program for donating animals that stand-in for repeated infusions of temporary aid overseas. In 1944 an Indiana farmer decided that people in Europe needed “a cow, not a cup” after World War II had created economic havoc. Cows could produce milk to replace the need for temporary aid. The group now works with communities to end hunger and poverty and to care for the planet. Now it’s not just about cows, but about 30 animal species, including goats, geese, guinea pigs, bees, silkworms and water buffalo.

But all need is by no means at some far-flung distance. You can honor someone with a donation to a favorite area charity, local library, Rescue Mission, Women’s Center, community ministry or arts council.

You can buy and donate local poets’ and photographers’ books that are missing from local library collections.

You can thrill your loved-one by making your own greeting card, with personalized artwork and message.

Use your imagination! That can be a gift in itself — to you and to the recipient. fluent | 43

CODA

“Mondrian’s Bitch,” Clifden, Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, by Frank Robbins

44 |

A toast is always in style.

Join us for the holidays!

Bloomery Plantation Distillery 16357 Charles Town Rd, Charles Town, WV 11–8 Fri & Sat • www.bestlimoncello.com • 304 725-3036

The Bridge Fine Art & Framing Gallery Holiday Exhibit Through January 6. Framing Specials Throughout December.

8566 Shepherdstown Pike, Shepherdstown WV 25443 Fine Art, Ceramics, Photography & Custom Framing | 45