Music & Stories to Enchant You!

Saturday, October 1st, 7:00 p.m. 
Dairy Center for the Arts
2590 Walnut Street, Boulder

THE STORY OF MUSIC, STORIES FROM HOME

with

Lauren Pelon & Gary Holthaus

Reservations (required): Call 303-444-7328, Tues.-Fri. 1:00-5:00,
or visit the DCA box office, 2590 Walnut St during the same hours. 

Award winning poet and essayist Gary Holthaus and internationally acclaimed musician Lauren Pelon team up to offer a unique new program called “The Story of Music, Stories from Home.”  Pelon sings in her lovely soprano voice and plays over twenty ancient and modern instruments ranging from lute, lyre, and concertina, to recorders, gemshorn, cornamuse, schreierpfeife, shawm,  pennywhistles, double ocarina, hurdy-gurdy, eagle bone flute, Kiowa courting flute, bowed psaltery, electric wind instrument and MIDI-pedalboard.  Holthaus tells real life stories from his boyhood in Iowa and what he has learned working as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, a wheat packer at Quaker Oats and a hoist operator at Iowa Steel and Iron Works, a retail clerk, teacher, professor and non-profit executive in Massachusetts, Alaska, Colorado, Montana, and Minnesota.  Both the music and the stories celebrate our sense of place, community, and home.

“The Story of Music, Stories from Home” will take place on Saturday, October 1, 7:00 p.m. in the Carsen Theater at the Dairy Center for the Arts.  The program is sponsored by The Stillpoint Center for the Humanities and Community and Picaresque II, a Minnesota non-profit.  It is free and open to the public, but tickets are required, and seating is limited. Reserve your tickets by calling 303-444-7328, Tues.-Fri. 1:00-5:00, or visit the DCA box office, 2590 Walnut Street during the same hours.

Lauren Pelon has performed throughout the U.S. and in China, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Russia, Kazakhstan, Australia, and New Zealand.  She is noted for her versatile use of a diverse array of instruments, but Pelon has also won recognition for her singing voice, and for her compelling compositions and arrangements of music from many countries and cultures. 

Lauren has performed with symphony orchestras, The Philadelphia String Quartet, on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” and at the Russian Institute for the History of the Arts in St. Petersburg, Russia.  She was the recipient of the 2001 “Artist of the Year” award from the Southeast Minnesota Arts Council, and 2010 Artist Initiative Award from the Minnesota State Arts Board. 

 Holthaus has three books of poems, three chapbooks, and three collections of essays, all of them rooted in the earth.  His prose has been cited in “Notable Essays” in 1994 and 1998, and he was a 1990 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship for Poetry.  In 2011 Holthaus was awarded an Original Works Grant from Southeast Minnesota Arts Council to work on a new and selected collection of poems.

His book of essays titled, Learning Native Wisdom: What Traditional Cultures Teach Us about Subsistence, Sustainability, and Spirituality was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 2008.  He worked with the Southeast Minnesota Experiment in Rural Cooperation to write From the Farm to the Table, What All Americans Need To Know about Agriculture, a book on farming also published by Kentucky.  Holthaus has most recently worked on issues of community sustainability with the Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska, and with the Pepperfield Project in Decorah, Iowa.

Together, Holthaus and Pelon have combined talents to create a surprising program of music from around the world and personal stories that will appeal to everyone.

Fall 2010, Charmaine Getz & Dick Kreck

Colorful Colorado Characters and Places was the final event in our 2010 Literary Series. At the beautiful Academy of Chinese Arts,  Charmaine Getz delighted participants with stories from her captivating book, Weird Colorado: Your Travel Guide to Colorado's Local Legends and Best Kept Secrets. If you haven't checked this out yet, you're in for a treat. And it includes a story on Stillpoint!

Dick Kreck spoke about his recent work, Smalldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family, providing more Colorado surprise and intrigue, brought to life by Dick's anecdotes and compelling photographs. Another engaging book for your list.

Stillpoint Center and guests appreciated the warm hospitality provided by the Academy of Chinese Arts.

                                        Charmaine Getz & Dick Kreck responding to questions

Fall Literary Event

Sunday, October 17th, 4:00 - 5:30

Academy of Chinese Martial & Cultural Arts

1750 38th St., Boulder

(between Arapahoe & Walnut on 38th)

Local Authors Read Their Work ~ Colorful Colorado Characters and Places

• Charmaine Getz - Charmaine’s book, Weird Colorado, highlights unusual, wonderful and quirky spots in our state;

• Dick Kreck - Sometimes referred to as Dr. Colorado, Dick will read from his most recent book, Smalldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

The event is free and open to the public. Join us!

About the Authors

• Charmaine Getz is a journalist with a zest for the strange, the unusual and the quirky. Weird Colorado gives the scoop about where to find the pleasurable odd attractions -- and the stories behind them -- that the Tourism Bureau doesn't know about and wild Colorado history you didn't learn in school.

• Dick Kreck was born in San Francisco, grew up in Glendale, California, and earned his BA in Journalism from San Francisco State College. He worked as reporter and copy editor at the San Francisco Examiner and the LA Times. Dick joined The Denver Post in 1968 and held various jobs there. He wrote a city column for The Post for 18 years and covered television and radio before he retired from the paper in June 2007.

His books include Colorado's Scenic Railroads (1997); Denver in Flames (2000); Murder at the Brown Palace (2003), which was on the Denver Post best-seller list for 22 weeks; and Anton Woode: The Boy Murderer (2006); and Smalldone: The Untold Story of a Denver Crime Family (2009).

Save the date! Sunday, October 17th

4:00 - 5:30 p.m.

Local Authors Read Their Work ~

A Fall Literary Event

held at the Academy of Chinese Martial & Cultural Arts, 1750 38th St. in Boulder (between Walnut & Arapahoe on 38th).

• Oct. 17th ~ with the theme of Colorful Colorado, Characters & Places, we'll hear from Charmaine Getz, whose book Weird Colorado highlights unusual, wonderful and quirky places in our state;

and Dick Kreck, sometimes referred to as Dr. Colorado, reading from his most recent book, Smalldone The Untold Story of an American Crime Family.

The event is free and open to the public. Do plan to join us!

Venue Change for August 17th

The Stillpoint Center reading, scheduled for 4:00 - 6:00 on August 17th at Healing Tea, is to be at Gindi Cafe instead. 3601 Arapahoe,#181. It's on the southeast corner of the big condo development. (From Healing Tea, it's across Arapahoe and a couple of blocks east.) Plenty of parking and a lovely space.

Join us and hear Jennifer Wert and Tom Gilboy read from their intriguing work.

August 17th Reading - Summer Literary Series

Join us Tuesday afternoon, August 17th, 4:00 - 6:00, at Healing Tea, 3216 Arapahoe, for the third and final reading in Stillpoint Center's Summer Literary Series. (Fall schedule coming soon.) Two more talented local writers will read and discuss their work.

• Tom Gilboy "Bark Mice: The Lion and the Mouse Fable Expanded" - Here the mice have opposable thumbs and the lion is an Irish spirit, a pooka, who is fleeing human pursuers in the contemporary US.

• Jennifer Wert "Pattaya," "Juarez," and "San Sebastian" - Short stories exploring place and culture, Jennifer's traveling the distance between the two, and her place in the larger world.

We hope to see you there!

July 20th Reading at Healing Tea

Our latest Stillpoint reading at Healing Tea was on July 20^th—the prime of summer when nature's radiance pulls us outside our limited self to explore a more expansive consciousness filled with the promise of community.

Outside we heard the roar of thunder followed by a gentle rain and the appearance of numerous rainbows. How auspicious to experience nature while she served as the theme of our gathering. Thirty-five of us centered our bodies via Qi Gong, led by Master Ki, and listened to three fabulous female Colorado writers.

Rachel Weaver offered a

haunting experience of life from the southeast coast of Alaska. Inhabitants finding razor-thin lines between life and death, confronting the necessity of coming to terms with the inevitable. Suspense and poignancy, masterfully interwoven.

Priscilla Stuckey led us to Lopez Island and the "call of the eagle" which guided her to a shift in paradigm from heartbroken Ph.D. researcher to genuine searcher. She emerged with a humbleness that left us with goosebumps as if our being too had been stroked by a feathered being. The gentle waves of awakening resonated with us long after her voice had merged with the sky. We felt the presence of a truly refined soul.

Kate Krautkramer is a

performance artists whose storytelling is brilliant and whose voice truly captured us. Her story snaked and wound our minds from cruelty to hardship and back again until poisonous snakes rattled our souls into a deeper understanding of the nature of relationships. She held us at the tip of her tongue where we remained spellbound. We were both fascinated and terrified about the struggle of farm life. Her singing was like rain during a drought. We are left thirsty for more.

by Carmen Baehr