Approach with footfalls soft as a kitten’s nose. Art is the delicate process of making craters. To breathe upon them adds carbon dioxide to the equation. It is a stone age tradition that drinks fresh blood. It is the sum of all shadows that cast a human. Do not be obvious, oblivious, obedient, observable, objective. Be obscure, obnoxious, obstructive, observant, obscene. We will bring the hammocks for the revolution. Align your nightlight through any means necessary. This water fountain is bitter.
Did you deny your bruises? Then we’re ready.
Kelsey Castaneda, Bailey Pittenger, and Sarah Snider will read their poetry and prose on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, at the Hospitality Room of Reckers on Notre Dame’s campus. The reading begins at 7:30 PM. It is free and open to the public.
Kelsey Castaneda received her Bachelor of Arts in 2014 from Georgetown College, where she studied English and Classics. She spent a summer studying Creative Writing in Prague, and a semester at Oxford studying Shakespeare and Ovid. Most recently she took a gap year and taught English in Slovakia through the Fulbright Program. For three years, Kelsey was the Student Editor of Georgetown College’s literary magazine, the Georgetown Review, and her poem You Are Constellations was published in the magazine’s very last issue for spring 2015. She dreams of becoming a Greek siren with her own personal chorus of cats.
Bailey Pittenger studied English with focuses in Women’s and Gender Studies and Creative Writing as an undergraduate at Wake Forest University. She continued her studies at Wake Forest University for a Master’s degree in English, in which she focused her thesis studies on techniques of experimental form used by contemporary Caribbean and Caribbean-American writers and a creative manuscript of science fiction stories inspired by Old English elegies. She will be introduced by Abby Burns (one of our new Prosers) and introduce Sarah. Have you ever woke up in the middle of the night, to the eternal question, “What is Bailey’s thesis project?” Now you can find out.
Sarah Snider graduated from Yeshiva University with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and minors in History and Women’s Studies in January 2012. Since then, she has worked in a variety of nonprofit jobs in areas including disaster relief, community outreach, volunteer coordination, feminist advocacy, university student activities, and Holocaust survivor outreach. Sarah will be reading a creative nonfiction piece about living and breathing within the sub-subculture of American Orthodox Judaism. Her work covers issues surrounding gender, family, religion, and culture, but attempts to do so with a desperate insertion of humor and in a pleasantly fragmented fashion. Sometimes she insists that she writes fiction also, just to remind herself that she still can.
Come as you are. You do not need to be alright. Bring everyone including your shovel. That is not an order. Everything will become a halation.
-Moon