Feb. 18: Walter, Bargen, Eric Praschan, Tiny Attic Productions

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 18, for poetry by Walter Bargen, fiction by Eric Praschan and film by Chelsea Myers and Paul Mossine of Tiny Attic Productions.

WALTER BARGEN

Walter Bargen was Missouri’s first poet laureate. Appointed by Gov. Matt Blunt in 2008, he served in the position until 2010, traveling around the state to share poetry with the masses.

He is the author of 16 books of poetry. His most recent, Trouble Behind Glass Doors, was published in 2013, and his next book, Too Quick for the Living, is set for publication in 2014.

Bargen's work has appeared in more than 100 journals and magazines, including American Literary Review, Missouri Review, American Letters and Commentary, Poetry Northwest, The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal and Prairie Schooner. Bargen is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and winner of the William Rockhill Nelson Award. Other awards include the Quarter After Eight Prose Prize, the St. Louis Poetry Center’s Hanks Prize, and the Chester H. Jones Foundation Prize.

Bargen holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy and a master's degree in education from the University of Missouri. In January 2014 he retired from his position as senior coordinator for MU's Assessment Resource Center after 25 years of service.

ERIC PRASCHAN
Eric Praschan has been writing for more than 20 years, focusing on suspense fiction.  He is the author of the Amazon-bestselling James Women Trilogy, which includes Therapy for Ghosts, Sleepwalking into Darkness and The Reckoning. 

Praschan holds a bachelor's degree in English and a master's degree in theological studies. He has many years of experience in drama, music, teaching, and higher education.

Prashcan lives in Columbia with his wife, Stephanie, and he currently works in the Graduate School at the University of Missouri.

TINY ATTIC PRODUCTIONS
Chelsea Myers and Paul Mossine are the founders of the art, music and film collective Tiny Attic Productions. Their projects include a short documentary about Columbia music venue The Bridge, daily coverage of the True/False Film Festival and promotional videos for the Roots N Blues N BBQ Festival.

Chelsea Myers
First and foremost an artist, Chelsea Myers continuously derives her inspiration from the people she meets through her travels. She worked four jobs for four years to trot the globe like a vagabond queen because she believes the journey will always be better than the destination. Myers has studied video, information technology and advertising at the University of Westminster-London and the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

Paul Mossine
 Paul Mossine's goal is to travel the world doing what he loves: meeting new people, playing music and documenting the world around him. So far his spirit for adventure has taken him to France, South Korea, Mexico and Ukraine. His motto is that it's better to seek forgiveness than to seek permission. Paul studied photojournalism, art and international studies at the University of Missouri.

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

Jan. 21: Nina Furstenau, Lianuska Gutierrez and Drew Resnik

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 21, for creative nonfiction by Nina Furstenau, poetry by Lianuska Gutierrez and photography by Drew Resnik.  

NINA FURSTENAU

Nina Mukerjee Furstenau is a journalist and teacher.  She teaches food and wine writing for the University of Missouri Science and Agriculture Journalism program and the Missouri School of Journalism, and she received the International Regional Magazine Association’s Award for Food Writing in 2009. Her recent books are Savor Missouri: River Hills Food and Wine, celebrating the local flavors of food and wine in Missouri, and Biting Through the Skin: An Indian Kitchen in the Heartland, a memoir in food.

Furstenau earned a master's degree in English/creative writing in 2006 and a bachelor's degree in magazine journalism in 1984, both from the University of Missouri. She was in the Peace Corps in Tunisia from 1984 to 1986 and then began working life as a journalist and publisher/editor of three construction magazines beginning in 1987. She and her husband launched and published these magazines and two others until 2001. Since then, she has published numerous creative nonfiction pieces for journals such as Painted Bride Quarterly and Ploughshares as well as magazines such as Missouri Life. Furstenau was a month-long resident at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, in 2008.

LIANUSKA GUTIERREZ
Lianuska Gutierrez studied at Harvard and Fordham universities, and she is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Missouri. Her work can be found in Eratio Poetry Journal, Counterexample Poetics, Wicked Alice, Corazon Land Review, Yemassee, Gesture, The Prague Revue, Deluge and other journals. She is co-editor of an incipient literary journal called Medusa Talks Back. Her critical work explores excess as a channel to ethicality and also focuses on poetics of both corporeality and of selfhood constituted by the word, i.e. the Lacanian linguistic subject.

DREW RESNIK

Drew’s photography experience goes back many years to some undergraduate college courses. With his father’s old Petri 35mm film camera he began making images, and photography became part of his creative arsenal, which included painting, sculpture, and music. In 2004, Drew founded Lakeside Studio Photo. Lakeside Studio became a working portrait, fashion and fine-art studio, and he was one of the original artists involved in the Orr Street Studios venture. In 2009 he began concentrating solely on fine-art landscape photography. Since that time he has produced commissioned pieces in Columbia and Jefferson City hospitals, businesses and homes. The most current two years have been spent focused completely on film photography, using both antique and current analog equipment, as well as learning film-developing techniques. It is this passion for the organic nature of film emulsions and development chemistries, combined with his personal perspective, that is at the heart of his work.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Dec. 17: Marlene Lee, Khem K. Aryal and Danielle Langdon

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 17, for fiction by Marlene Lee, fiction by Khem K. Aryal and graphic design by Danielle Langdon.  

Photo by Don Shrubshell/Columbia Daily Tribune

MARLENE LEE
When she’s not reading, playing the piano, or studying French with Antoine, Marlene Lee holds down a table at the Lakota Coffee House in Columbia, little city of writers, confronting blank pages during business hours and postponing the inevitable with another cup of coffee.

Before writing full time, she carted her stenotype machine from place to place in a moveable feast of court reporting. Before court reporting she taught high school, children’s special education, freshman and sophomore college English, and vocational school classes in stenotype theory. Always and in-between, she was writing short stories and novels.

Two of Marlene Lee’s books were published by Holland House in 2013: The Absent Woman and a collection of short stories called Rebecca’s Road.

Three Blind Mice, a collection of three mystery novellas, will be published spring of 2014 under the Grey Cells Press imprint, and Limestone Wall, a novel, in fall of the same year, by Holland House Books.

KHEM K. ARYAL
Khem K. Aryal is the author of Epic Teashop (Vajra Books, Kathmandu, 2009) and Kathmandu Saga And Other Poems (Society of Nepali Writers in English, Nepal, 2004). His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Qwerty Magazine, Poydras Review, Of Nepalese Clay, The Kathmandu Post, etc.. A PhD candidate in creative writing (fiction) and composition at the University of Missouri, he is currently working on a collection of short stories, The Displaced, and a novel, Outsiders in Indonesia.

DANIELLE LANGDON
A highly motivated person who is inexplicably drawn to dancing, Danielle Langdon graduated manga cum laude from Ursinus College in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in media communications studies and dance. Successively she travelled abroad before returning to Princeton, NJ, to work for an architectural design firm, HDR Inc. Danielle is currently working toward her master's degree in graphic design at the University of Missouri. Her greatest design accomplishment to date is the redesign of the MU Libraries website, which will be completed in 2014. Danielle’s greatest geek accomplishment to date is the completion of her seventh scrapbook.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Nov. 19: Chad Simpson, Scott Garson, Bonnie Chasteen

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 19, for fiction by Chad Simpson, fiction by Scott Garson and paintings by Bonnie Chasteen.

SCOTT GARSON
Scott Garson is the author of Is That You, John Wayne?, a collection of stories, and American Gymnopedies, a book of microfictions. His fiction has won awards from Playboy, The Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation and Dzanc Books, and he has work in or coming from Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Hobart, Conjunctions, New York Tyrant and other publications. He edits the Pushcart-Prize-winning journal of very short fiction Wigleaf.

CHAD SIMPSON
Chad Simpson is the author of Tell Everyone I Said Hi, is the winner of the 2012 John Simmons Short Fiction Award and has been published by the University of Iowa Press. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Rumpus, American Short Fiction and New Stories from the Midwest 2012, among other publications. He is the recipient of awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Illinois Arts Council. He lives in Monmouth, Illinois, and is an associate professor of English at Knox College.

BONNIE CHASTEEN
Bonnie Chasteen grew up in a little mill town west of Asheville, North Carolina, where she spent summers helping her family raise vegetables and butcher chickens. She showed an early talent for drawing and painting but turned to literature and writing in high school. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from UNC-Charlotte and an master's degree in creative writing from Purdue University. While she has worked with words most of her life (she is an editor with the Missouri Department of Conservation), she has always sought out courses, workshops and tutorials with local artists wherever she has lived. Locally, she has studied with or painted alongside Naomi Sugino, Jane Mudd, Frank Stack, Byron Smith and Gloria Gaus, among other artists. In her paintings and drawings, she looks for a fresh, expressive view of the ordinary, whether it is the human face, people at work, landscapes, or still lifes. Her drawings, pastels and paintings have appeared in the Frame Garden Gallery in Livingston, Montana, and in the Bingham Gallery on the University of Missouri campus. Her first solo show is currently on exhibit in the gallery at Orr Street Studios.

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

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Oct. 15: Anne-Marie Thompson, Lauren Fath, Katherine Koch

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 15, for poetry by Anne-Marie Thompson, creative nonfiction by Lauren Fath and paintings by Katherine Koch.

ANNE-MARIE THOMPSON

Anne-Marie Thompson teaches at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. Her first book, Audiation, won the 2013 Donald Justice Prize. Recent work appears in Birmingham Poetry Review, Southeast Review, Southwest Review, Iron Horse Literary Review and other journals. She holds an MFA in poetry from Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor of music in piano performance from Texas Christian University.

LAUREN FATH

Lauren Fath is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Missouri, where she holds the Creative Writing Program Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Post Road, First Inkling and the South Loop Review, is forthcoming in poemmemoirstory and has received a Pushcart Prize nomination.

KATHERINE KOCH


Katherine Koch, a Brooklyn-based visual artist and educator, earned a master's degree in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts. She has shown her paintings extensively in the United States and in Europe, most notably in solo and group exhibitions with the Arlene Bujese Gallery (East Hampton, NY) and the Benton Gallery (Southampton, NY). Her work has been commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts, and she has won residencies at the Byrdcliffe Artists Colony in Woodstock, NY, and the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville, Va. She has worked collaboratively with writers, musicians and theater artists.

Koch has taught visual arts in a wide range of media (including murals, artists’ books, art history studies and community-based projects) to underserved students in New York City schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and New York City Ballet and has developed multi-year residencies at schools outside the city. She has also taught studio art and art history at William Paterson University and at Eugene Lang College.

She is currently writing a memoir about growing up surrounded by New York School poets and artists in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions Sept. 24: Steve Schroeder, Jill Orr, Scott McMahon

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions at Orr Street Studios is back!

This semester we're combining visual arts and literary arts into one big monthly multisensory extravaganza: two readings, one art talk, Q-and-A sessions and, of course, an intermission with wine.

Join us at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24, for the first installment of the fall 2013 season of Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions at Orr Street Studios. We'll showcase creative nonfiction by Jill Orr, poetry by Steve Schroeder and photography by Scott McMahon.

Steve Schroeder
Steven D. Schroeder’s second book is The Royal Nonesuch (Spark Wheel Press, 2013), and his first book was Torched Verse Ends. His poetry is available from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Journal, Barrow Street, and Verse Daily. Pieces have also appeared by invitation in city parks, public transportation, and business waiting rooms. He edits the online poetry journal Anti-, serves as co-curator for Observable Readings and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.

Jill Orr
Jill Orr is a writer and stay-at-home mother of two. In her pre-mommy days, she graduated from the University of Missouri with a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in social work -- but wishes she had gotten her PhD in What's For Dinner and How to Get Bubblegum out of the Carpet. Might have served her better. She writes a parenting column for Columbia Home magazine and personal essays on her blog, An Exercise in Narcissism. She is also writes romantic comedy novels that she hopes will one day sell and eliminate the need for her ever to get a real job again.

Scott McMahon

The Letters Project

Scott McMahon earned an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and a BFA in photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. He recently completed an artist-in-residence program at Border Art Residency in La Union, N.M. His work has been published in Pinhole Photography, Rediscovering a Historic Technique by Eric Renner, The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes by Christopher James and the forthcoming book Anthotype – The Darkroom in your Garden by Malin Fabbri. Scott shows his work nationally and internationally and teaches classes and workshops on historic photographic processes. He is currently an assistant professor of art at Columbia College.

Orr Street Studios is located at 106 Orr St. in downtown Columbia, Mo. Join us monthly on Tuesday evenings during the academic year for literary readings and visual-arts presentations.

Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions is on hiatus for the summer. Join us in September when we merge the two series (potentially tearing a hole in the space–time continuum) into one big monthly literary/visual arts extravaganza!

Tuesday, Sept. 10

Orr Street Studios will host a special event for the Daniel Boone Regional Library's One Read community reading program. The 2013 selection is The Ruins of Us by Columbia's own Keija Parssinen!

Tuesday, Sept. 24

We'll kick off the fall 2013 Hearing Voices/Seeing Visions series with our first hybrid Voices/Visions event. Prepare to be wowed.