One of my all-time favorite quotes is: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.” What makes you come alive? Who are you? What change do you see yourself walking toward right now? Are you heading somewhere you actually want to go?
Reading at Oblong Books on Tuesday, March 27: The novel, like much of this SUNY-New Paltz professor’s work, has a Gothic flavor, including a Victorian-era insane asylum inspired in part by the Hudson River State Hospital in Poughkeepsie.
What sets the Blackboard Bistro apart from other dining places is that the staff generating the goodwill there are in large part people with intellectual or developmental disabilities. Blackboard Bistro is owned and operated by the private, nonprofit agency Arc of Ulster-Greene.
Speakers include columnists E.J. Dionne Jr. and Bobby Herbert, documentarian Lynn Novick and journalist Jeff Greenfield.
From the look of the Woodstock Arts Association & Museum’s new exhibits opening this weekend, with receptions set for March 24, abstraction’s back in town…if it ever really left.
If you’re wondering what happened to Anthony Heaney and Emily Sherry and their sumptuous sandwiches, they’ve moved down to the Woodstock Golf Club.
March 22-25: Author panels, readings, parties, workshops and more.
As numerous successful shoot-em-up video games and films have demonstrated, zombies rank with Nazis and bipedal aliens as acceptable, non-controversial targets for simulated massacres. Zombies are already dead, so it’s not really killing… right?
Friday, March 16: Part-time Bard College professor Gaiman is back in the Hudson Valley after showrunning the new TV mini-series Good Omens in the UK and South Africa. John Cameron Mitchell wrote, directed and starred in the cult rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. He recently directed a film based on Neil Gaiman’s short story “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” which stars Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning. It’s due for general release in May.
Saturday, March 24: “An Evening with Colm Tóibín” should be a treat. His novels are quiet and intense, but in person, Tóibín is warm and gregarious, cracking jokes and telling stories, able to speak at length and with insight about both the sublime possibilities of fiction and the nitty-gritty of the writing process.