This season’s newsletter features: Carnegie Hall, NYPL surprises, a petri dish of emotions and a museum of smells plus pencils, perfumes, and blue, blue, blue…
Image description: Three cyan-blue botanical photograms stand side by side like specimens suspended between science and dream. Pale seaweed-like forms bloom outward in delicate white silhouettes, their branching fronds glowing against the deep blue ground color like underwater constellations or ghostly pressed plants held up to light.
Anna Atkins cyanotypes of British algae, 1843.
As spring draws to a close, so too my time as an NYPL Cullman Center Fellow. I will miss my fellow fellows and my office—though I’ll still be at the library regularly—back to the Vartan Gregorian Study Rooms in July. Of all the wonderful people I met, the most surprising was LAURIE ANDERSON, making my fourteen-year-old self nearly pass out with excitement! Also charming was encountering the dancers in the elevator, twice—the second time I thought to get a picture—as shown in the featured image above, and described at the bottom of this post.
AP Blooms
Aromatica poetica is currently closed to submissions and will reopen July 1. This season’s collection features art, poetry, and stories from the UK, Italy, and the US…
Image description: Circles of color bloom across the page like microscopic worlds, petri dishes, or emotional weather systems made from scraps of painted paper and clipped text. Crayon spirals and collage fragments swirl together in bright greens, pinks, yellows, and blues, giving the piece the feeling of thoughts growing, colliding, and multiplying under a childlike but intensely alive imagination.
“Petri dish Emotions” by Janina Aza Karpinska.
❀ Blue Blades, Blue Times * Poems by Gabriella Garofalo * Cyanotypes by Anna Atkins
❀ “Petri Dish Emotions” & “Eating Emotions” * Art & Poetry * Janina Aza Karpinska
❀ “Fading into Alaska” * Short Story * Tatiana Samokhina
❀ “The Woman in the Perfume Department Asks What I’m Looking For” * Poetry * Annie Przypyszny
❀ Pencil Poems by Mike Lewis-Beck
❀ “Late Shift at the Museum of Smells” * Fiction * Chris Cottom
Image description: Perfume bottles glitter like jewels around a tiny erupting volcano, its lava spilling across a delicate floral plate in theatrical orange fire. The image feels deliciously impossible—part vanity table, part natural disaster—as smoke, molten color, and cut glass turn fragrance into something explosive and elemental.
Made with ChatGPT for “The Woman in the Perfume Department Asks What I’m Looking For.”
Upcoming Events Online and IRL
Look ma, I’m playing Carnegie Hall—kind of! On June 27—Helen Keller’s birthday—the AFB documentary Possibilities will screen in Zankel Hall in one of the most iconic performance spaces in the world. After the screening, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion with Lachi and the director Bill Sarine. The film highlights the diversity in the blind community and features many of us speaking to the legacy of Helen Keller, the progress we’ve made since her death, and the work still to be done. Get your tickets HERE!
Then, on Bastille Day, July 14, fellow blind author Georgina Kleege and I will be in conversation with Mike Marlin, Director of the Sacramento Braille and Talking Book Library, exploring blindness, perception, and how our lived experiences intertwine with our writing and research. This event is part of the Braille Institute’s Summer Reading Program—learn more and register HERE!
Laurie Anderson
Of all the things I thought would happen at the library today, meeting Laurie Anderson – a voice and artistic sensibility I’ve had in my head since I was 14 – was not one of them! I was truly starstruck and bumbled and fumbled and she was so gracious.
I also kind of reverted to my awkward teenage self, and scrunched down into the first photo. Laurie said, “I’m not that short!” So I stood up straight in the second one. That’s right, I got scolded by Laurie Anderson today, ha!
PS – Thanks so much to Benjamin Moser for the introduction – oh and for his brilliant talk too!
Dancers in the Elevator
The first time I encounter the dancers in the elevator I am surprised.
I always take the freight elevator to the second floor of NYPL to get to the Cullman Center, and usually there is no one else or maybe one maintenance or staff with me. This time as the doors open I hear a crowd.
Hello, I say, and am greeted with a cheery in-unison response.
Is there room for me?
Yes, yes, come in, come in!
I step inside. Have I entered the Twilight Zone?
They laugh—in unison. Gratifying and a tiny bit creepy—think Company, the musical.
Oh, you’re the dancers!
We are!
You’ll be dancing right outside my office door.
We’d gotten word that these #lunchDances would be happening around the library.
I step off the elevator on the first floor to let them out. See you later.
Goodbye! Goodbye! Fabulous coat.
Oh thank you.
*
The second time I find the dancers in the elevator I am not surprised.
Ah, you again! This time I’m going to get a picture!
They laugh, slightly perplexed.
I say, ready? And theatrically pushed the button on my Meta Glasses.
Ah! Ah! They laugh and gasp in surprise when they see the light.
Ok, you guys didn’t believe me! Let’s do it again!
And we do!
Oh, I was so excited to get my photo, I forgot to ask you to push 2 for me.
They laugh.
I step off the elevator on the first floor.
We’ll let you know when we’re all out. There are a lot of us.
Yeah, y’all are like a clown car.
They laugh.
Goodbye! Goodbye!
*
I wish I could travel around with a cheerful troop of dancers all the time…