Dec. 15: Lise Saffran | Dareth Goettemoeller

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 15, for essays by Lise Saffran and art therapy with Dareth Goettemoeller.

LISE SAFFRAN 

Lise Saffran’s novel Juno's Daughters was published by Penguin/Plume in 2011, and her fiction and nonfiction works have appeared in a variety of literary and academic journals, including Poets and Writers, Orion, Academic Medicine and Medical Humanities. Saffran is a graduate of both the School of Public Health at UNC (now the Gillings School of Global Public Health) and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her creative work explores the essential question at the heart of public health: How do we balance our need for autonomy with the responsibilities of community life?

She will read an excerpt from a collection of essays-in-progress titled Safe in These Bodies.


DARETH GOETTEMOELLER

Dareth Ann Goettemoeller is a resident artist at Orr Street Studios and an art therapist with a master's degree in art therapy from Emporia State University in Kansas. 

 

Goettemoeller has been running art therapy groups in Columbia for the 10 years. She specializes in working with adults and loves watching childlike joy bubble up from a room of stressed adults as she guides them in healing art activities. 

All art activities are healing, but there is a special magic that happens when working with a trained art therapist. As we enter the winter holiday season, she will guide us in developing skills for coping and healing through art.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

NO NOVEMBER EVENT

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions will not convene in November. Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 15, for our next event.

Svetlana Grobman

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 20, for memoir by Svetlana Grobman + local art.

SVETLANA GROBMAN

Svetlana Grobman is a Jewish immigrant from Russia who was born in Moscow in 1951. She moved to the United States in 1990. While living in Russia, Grobman was an engineer and an editor for the Soviet Encyclopedia. Now, she is a librarian and freelance writer living in Columbia, Missouri.

Grobman has published articles and personal stories in a variety of places, including the Christian Science Monitor, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Rural Missouri, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. The Education of a Traitor: A Memoir of Growing Up in Cold War Russia is Grobman’s first book, and she is currently working on her second. To learn more about Svetlana’s experiences in Russia and the U.S., subscribe to her blog at http://svetlanagrobman.com.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Chris Teeter | Jennifer Wiggs | Brett Cottrell

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, for fiction by Brett Cotrell and paintings by Chris Teeter and Jennifer Wiggs.


About Abstraction, featuring work by Chris Teeter and Jennifer Wiggs, is showing in the Mildred M. Cox Gallery at William Woods University, through Sept. 27.


CHRIS TEETER

Chris Teeter began his career as a visual artist with representational drawing and plein air painting. Afterward, for 10 years, he was involved almost completely with creating sculpture in steel or various media, including the doors at Orr Street Studios and many other sculptures. During the past three years he has returned to painting. This change in media is a change in form only, since the content of his artistic  pursuits has always revolved around his interest in abstraction.

“I love how abstraction is, in varying degrees, without reference to representation and the external world and therefore presents itself somewhat enigmatically. The viewer is asked to think and perceive non-verbally, in effect, to jump from the familiar to the unfamiliar and participate in the final act of perception and understanding internally.”

JENNIFER WIGGS

Jennifer Ann Wiggs has a BFA from Indiana University and an MFA from Washington University, and she has taught art at the Art Department of the University of Missouri.

She is a member of the Watercolor USA Honor Society, and her award-winning work has been shown in Watercolor USA, the Living Artist’s Magazine, the Missouri Watercolor National, the National Exhibition of American Watercolor at the Taos New Mexico Museum, and the River Market Regional Exhibition in Kansas City.

Artist statement: The channel between realism and abstraction is rich territory for invention. These latest gouache paintings explore abstraction using sophisticated color relationships and simple shapes.


BRETT COTTRELL

Brett Cottrell was born and bred in Las Vegas. His writings blend religious and political satire with whimsical, action-packed absurdity. He’s been a bartender, a drummer in a rock-and-roll band, a legislative intern and an attorney. He studied political theory at Boise State University and graduated from the George Washington University Law School. Cottrell lives in Columbia, Missouri, with his wife and their opinionated dog, Tico.

The End of the World Is Rye

What would you do for the perfect sandwich? Kill? Die? Well, if you were a rogue angel, you might just cause the Apocalypse. And it looks like that's just what he's about to do when he lands in a polygamist cult in Utah. So, now it's up to the rest of God's divine posse, including Jesus and Lucifer, to save all of existence from certain destruction. In his debut novel, Brett Cottrell takes you on a provocative, celestial roller coaster ride that will have you laughing on the edge of your seat all the way to the gates of Hell.


Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Keija Parssinen | Ann Breidenbach

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 21, for fiction by Keija Parssinen and creative nonfiction by Ann Breidenbach.

KEIJA PARSSINEN

Keija Parssinen attended Princeton University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow. Her debut novel, The Ruins of Us, was published in the US, the UK, Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Italy and around the Middle East, and it was long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize. Her second novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, was just released by Harper Books and was named a Must-Read by Ploughshares, Bustle, Bookish, Pop Sugar, Style Bistro and more. Her work has appeared in the Lonely Planet travel-writing anthologies, Five Chapters, the New Delta Review, Salon, Marie Claire and elsewhere.

ANN BREIDENBACH

Ann Breidenbach earned her MFA from the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. Her memoir-in-progress, I Love You, Is That Okay?, is the story of motherhood lost and motherhood found. She takes her readers through her experience as a 19-year-old facing the heartbreaking decision of whether to give her baby up for adoption or to raise him on her own. Her personal story of motherhood and adoption is published in the newly released book Listen to Your Mother: What She Said Then, What We’re Saying Now. 


Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Gladys Swan | Amy Meyer

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 17, for fiction and art by Gladys Swan and paintings by Amy Meyer.

Gladys Swan at work.

GLADYS SWAN


Gladys Swan is both a writer and a painter. She has published two previous novels and seven collections of short fiction.

Her Carnival Quintet is now being published by Kiwai Media in Paris.The first novel of the series, Carnival for the Gods, was originally published in the Vintage Contemporaries Series. The other novels follow the adventures of those characters. She created the cover art for the novels.

Carnival of the Gods cover art.

Swan's short fiction appears in anthologies and literary magazines such as the Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Shenandoah and the Ohio Review.  

She has earned the Prairie Schooner’s Lawrence Foundation Prize for Fiction, a Tate Prize for Poetry from the Sewanee Review, and multiple fellowships for residencies and retreats in both the visual arts and in writing. She was awarded one of the first Open Fellowships from the Lilly Endowment, for a study of Inuit art and mythology. 

Her Western epic, A Dark Gamble, was published by Serving House Books in 2015.




AMY MEYER

Amy Meyer studied art at University of Central Missouri and Indiana State University and earned her degree in painting and drawing from Columbia College.

She has had the privilege of having her work featured on CNN Online, on Les Bourgeois Artisan Wine labels and in Lake Lifestyles magazine. Her work can be found in private and corporate collections, including those of Water for Elephants author Sara Gruen, Houser-Millard, Inc. and Family, Hope and Recovery, Inc.

"My foray into the world of working with only color, texture and composition was not intentional. It developed over time. Having primarily been a representational artist, I find it challenging to explain a certain piece from this body of work. There really is no correct explanation. As I work, the painting evolves over time, beginning with no real plan, but primarily the intrigue of working with color and texture. Composition comes as the work progresses, layer by layer, which can be days or months from the time it began. My goal, if I were to have one, would be to create work that stands on its own, intriguing the viewer with the complex yet simple marriage of color, composition and texture."

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

YuMin Ye | T'Keyah Thomas | Citizen Jane Filmmakers Camp

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 17, for young-adult fiction by YuMin Ye, poetry by T'Keyah Thomas and work by young filmmakers from the Citizen Jane Filmmakers Camp.

YUMIN YE

YuMin Ye is a freelance writer with a bachelor's degree in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short story “Team Bonding” won honorable mention in the 2007 Seventeen Magazine Fiction Contest, and she won a finalist award from the St. Louis Publishers Association for her manuscript Oil in the Wok. She is the Columbia young-adult fiction examiner for Examiner.com and currently resides in Columbia, Missouri.

T'KEYAH THOMAS
T'Keyah Thomas doesn't like to talk about herself, so she tells stories instead. Using tools that tickle the tongue, TK has been writing for the stage since the age of 12. Currently living in Columbia, Missouri, she is the co-host of ONE MIC, a monthly open mic series for poetry at The Tiger Hotel. She'll be a filmmaker one day.

CAMP CITIZEN JANE
Camp Citizen Jane began in 2011 in collaboration with Stephens College and Columbia Public Schools as a way to provide access to the tools of filmmaking for young women ages 12-17. Taking place on the Stephens campus in the month of June, Camp CJ consists of a two-week session on “Basic Filmmaking and Media Literacy” and a two-week session on “Advanced Filmmaking.” Working with Stephens film students, participants learn lighting, sound, camera, storytelling and editing and create a short documentary, a short fiction film, PSAs for the Citizen Jane Film Festival and a short film that is designed to be submitted to “Gimme Truth” of the True/False Film Festival.


Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Join us the third Tuesday evening of each month during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Brian Mahieu | Rick Skwiot

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 20, for fiction by Rick Skwiot and paintings by Brian Mahieu.


BRIAN MAHIEU

Brian Mahieu has been a plein air landscape painter since 1987. That year, he traveled to Paris, France and lived in the Latin Quarter for one month. Seeing the Impressionist masterpieces, Monet's gardens at Giverny and the French countryside, which reminded him of Missouri, created the impetus to paint en plein air exclusively. The primary motif of his work has been the Missouri River Valley at dusk with an emphasis on capturing the mood and atmosphere of the landscape. While he was studying at Columbia College, Mahieu's painting professor, the late Sidney Larson, encouraged him to paint outside directly from nature and to develop his painterly technique.

Mahieu earned a bachelor's degree in fine arts from Columbia College in 1989. From graduation until 2000 Brian maintained his fine art gallery Mahieu Fine Art (originally Atelier Mahieu) at 918 E. Broadway in Columbia, Missouri. He was also a founding member of Dauphine Gallery and à la campagne and was hired to start the Rocheport Gallery and served as its original curator. Currently Mahieu is curator and director of the not-for-profit Art House in Fulton, Missouri, where he exhibits regularly.

Mahieu has exhibited nationally, including the cities of New York, Carmel and Santa Cruz. Brian's paintings are in public and private collections throughout the United States, Europe the United Kingdom and Australia, including the contemporary artist collection of the State Historical Society of Missouri. The largest public collection of Mahieu's work is at the World Aquarium in St Louis.

In addition to painting full time, from 1992—2009 he operated one of the largest daylily breeding programs in the world creating and introducing 144 new daylily varieties into commerce. Brian and his husband Tom Harris live in Fulton with their two retired racing greyhounds and various foster greyhounds.


RICK SKWIOT

Former journalist Rick Skwiot is the author of three previous novels—the Hemingway First Novel Award winner Death in Mexico, the Willa Cather Fiction Prize finalist Sleeping With Pancho Villa, and Key West Story — as well as two memoirs: the critically-acclaimed Christmas at Long Lake: A Childhood Memory and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico: Memoir of a Sensual Quest for Spiritual Healing. He also works as a feature writer, book doctor and editor. From St. Louis, he currently resides in Key West.

About Skwiot's novel, Fail

Disgraced African American St. Louis Police Lieutenant Carlo Gabriel wants fiercely to return to the headquarters hierarchy from which he has been exiled to the city’s tough North Side. All he needs do is track down the missing husband of the mayor’s vivacious press secretary. Instead he unwittingly and unwillingly unearths a morass of corruption, educational malpractice and greed that consigns thousands of at-risk youths to the mean streets of America’s erstwhile murder capital. Worse, it’s the kind of information that could get a cop killed.

Fighting for life and his honor, Gabriel makes chilling discoveries that ultimately lead to a life-threatening and life-changing decision—a choice that could affect not only his own future but also that of the city and its top leaders.