Archive for August, 2015
Harry Hunsicker: First Hearings at The Wild Detectives
The Grid
First Hearings: Harry Hunsicker
Where: The Wild Detectives
When: September 24, 7 pm
Hosted by: Charles Dee Mitchell
The Grid (Thomas & Mercer; August 2015)
A former federal law enforcement contractor with a somewhat spotty record, Jon Cantrell has seen—and done—just about everything. Now he’s a sheriff, keeping the peace in small-town Texas. He thought that he’d finally settled into a quiet, less-complicated life—until his deputy gets himself murdered. Soon Cantrell’s search for the killer points to an online-dating site designed for extramarital affairs and to a woman who may have been the unfortunate deputy’s last date.
Meanwhile, someone is staging a series of seemingly random attacks on the regional power grid, and Cantrell is reluctantly pulled back into the federal fray when he accepts an off-the-books assignment to uncover the culprit. With the power company and the feds impatient for an arrest—and clues in his deputy’s case pointing to something more sinister—Cantrell must run parallel, conflicting investigations. But will he find what he’s looking for? Or is he about to take a fall?
Harry Hunsicker is a novelist and former executive vice-president of the Mystery Writers of America. His work has been short-listed for both the Shamus and Thriller Awards. Hunsicker’s story “West of Nowhere,” originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, was selected for inclusion in the anthology,The Best American Mystery Stories 2011. His sixth novel, The Grid, will be published in August 2015 by Thomas & Mercer.
Zach Dodson @ Wild Detectives
When: Tuesday, October 19, 7 pm
What: First Hearings
Hosted by Charles Dee Mitchell
Photo by Jonathan Crawford
Zach Dodson is a book designer particularly interested in visual narrative. He has designed books for many independent presses, most notably featherproof books, which he founded in Chicago in 2005.
Texan Zachary Thomas is the author and illustrator of Bats of the Republic, an illuminated novel due from Doubleday in 2015. Zach Plague wrote and designed the hybrid image/text boring boring boring boring boring boring boring in 2008. Neither should be contacted, as they exist only speculatively.
Professor Zachary Dodson teaches courses on hybrid narrative and storytelling atAalto University in Helsinki, Finland. He is available for guest lectures or workshops on book design, visual narrative or publishing.
Dallas Poetry Slam at Heroes
WordSpace Features on 3rd Fridays, Details TBA
Hosted by acclaimed mega award winning SlamMasters
RockBaby and GNO
Dallas Poetry Slam at Heroes
WordSpace Features on 3rd Fridays, Details TBA
Hosted by acclaimed mega award winning SlamMasters
RockBaby and GNO
Dallas Poetry Slam at Heroes
WordSpace Features on 3rd Fridays, Details TBA
Hosted by acclaimed mega award winning SlamMasters
RockBaby and GNO
Dallas Poetry Slam at Heroes
WordSpace Features on 3rd Fridays, Details TBA
Hosted by acclaimed mega award winning SlamMasters
RockBaby and GNO
Dallas Poetry Slam @ Heroes
WordSpace Features on 3rd Fridays, Details TBA
Hosted by acclaimed mega award winning SlamMasters
RockBaby and GNO
ArtSpeak: Dennis Gonzalez The Doctrine of Heiromancy & YELLS AT EEL
When: October 24
What: ArtSpeak
Where: 409 A, N. Tyler St, Oak Cliff
FREE!
Wordspace and Mighty Fine Arts present “The Doctrine of Heiromancy-Works on Paper” a one night only pop up show featuring new work by Dennis Gonzalez and a performance by Yells at Eels
Everyman’s Poet: Martha Heimberg on Ted Kooser
When: Thursday, April 14, 7 pm
Salon: Private Residence, RSVP wordspace@wordspace.us
What: Everyman’s Poet: Ted Kooser’s Down-to-Earth Poems, Essays and Surprising Musical Verse
Bonus: Lisa Huffaker performs
Refreshments made possible by Ben E. Keith
Critic and everyday painter Martha Heimberg and poet, mezzo soprano, guitarist and joyful artist Lisa Huffaker lead an evening of reading and exploring the work of poet and essayist Ted Kooser, Nebraska-born Pulitzer Prize Winner (Shadows and Delights) and 2004 US Poet Laureate.
Kooser’s diction, drawn from everyday speech, never makes an allusion that a smart, unbookish reader won’t grasp. Many of his short poems are about perception itself, the signs of human habitation, and the uncertainty of human knowledge.
An insurance executive at Lincoln Benefit Life Company for 30 years, Kooser lives on acreage outside Lincoln, and now teaches classes in “Poetry Repair” at the University of Nebraska. He wakes at 4:30 a.m. and begins to write. When he’s not writing and teaching, he paints. At 76, he has won every American prize in poetry and non-fiction. The poems are short, sweet and wow!
Kooser received a Grammy as a librettist in 2015. Nine poems from his book Winter Morning Walks were set to music by Maria Schneider and sung by Dawn Upshaw. The CD swept the awards in contemporary classical music.
7:00 p.m. Wine and bread
7:30-7:50 p.m. Martha talks about Ted’s Winter Morning Walks
7:50-8:15 p.m. Lisa plays guitar and sings some melodies she made up to match Ted’s poems from Shadows and Delights
8:15 p.m. More singing in the wilderness of old East Dallas until 9:00 p.m.
New Transcendentalism: Martha Heimberg on H is for Hawk
When: Thursday, December 3
Salon: Private Residence, RSVP: wordspace@wordspace
Refreshments made possible by Ben E. Keith and Spiral Diner!
Blood Sport: Helen McDonald’s H is for Hawk
Critic Martha Heimberg places Helen Walker’s H is For Hawk in the feral and vivid tradition of literary nature writing, from Thoreau and Emerson in America’s great Romantic tradition to the Scottish naturalist John Muir’s passionate environmentalism and Barbara Kingsolver’s nature-rich fiction.
H is For Hawk is a brilliant and fierce memoir by Cambridge lecturer, poet and naturalist. It won every major science and essay-writing award in Britain and America in 2014. As the New Yorker critic wrote: “Had there been an award for the best new book that defies every genre, I imagine it would have won that, too.”
When McDonald’s beloved father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, she’d never before been tempted to train a goshawk, the most belligerent and vicious flying predator of them all. Then she did. She purchased and raised a goshawk, because, in her wild grief, she equated the creature’s feral and fierce temperament to her own.
Part myth, part memoir, part lit-crit and falconry history, the work is innovative, invigorating and “so good it draws blood,” says Dwight Garner in the New York Times.
Is there a falconer in the house?
