Emma Crowe

ecrowe19

Beowulf. Readings. Beer.

September 9, 2013
Event Date: 
Thursday, September 26, 2013 – 6:00pm – 8:00pm
Location: 
High Horse

Break out the beer and mead! As part of the Amherst Poetry Festival (Sept. 20-27), The Common has partnered with the Emily Dickinson Museum and Amherst Business Improvement District to bring you a night of Beowulf, readings, and beer at the High Horse upstairs pool hall on Thursday, September 26 from 6-8pm. From 6-7pm, contributors and friends of The Common will read poetry and fiction inspired by the epic poem. Then, from 7-8pm, UMass English Professor Stephen Harris will discuss Beowulf with epic readings in English and Old English to the beat of a drum. Indulge your inner medievalist and join us for a night that will “fill Heorot with head-clearing voice, / gladdening that great rally of Geats and Danes.”

Featuring readings by The Common contributors Brad Leithauser and Naila Moreira.

beowulf_0913_brbflyer

Beowulf. Readings. Beer.
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Browning

Browning

September 4, 2013

By JACOB SCHEPERS

 

A handmade dress passed down

from your mother finds space

in the cedar chest at the foot

of the bed. The chest, a relic

of your father’s, bore a new

Browning
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From Place to Place: The Portrait Photography of Lauri Lyons

From Place to Place: The Portrait Photography of Lauri Lyons

August 9, 2013

Artist: LAURI LYONS 

Curated by Alicia Lubowski-Jahn

man selling newspapers

Although the photographer Lauri Lyons calls New York home, she is ever on the move through her creative projects. Her current body of work spans Africa, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and the United States, and has connected the globe through African diaspora and identity formation themes. Often pictures and languages within her portrait photography evoke origins that are both ancestral and geographic. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the photojournalism magazine NOMADS, which is also dedicated to the peripatetic state. 

From Place to Place: The Portrait Photography of Lauri Lyons
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Brooklyn Book Festival: ABC Trivia

August 8, 2013
Event Date: 
Wednesday, September 18, 2013 – 7:00pm
Location: 
61 Local

CLMP & Huffington Post Books present ABC Trivia, co-hosted by One Story & Tin House, sponsored by The Common. Join us at 61 Local for a fun-filled evening of facts and prizes!

Image of craft beers at 61 Local via Flick Creative Commons user DowntownTraveler.com

Brooklyn Book Festival: ABC Trivia
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Clinging to a Tree on Christmas

Clinging to a Tree on Christmas

August 7, 2013

By BRICE PARTICELLI

I’m forty feet above the ground hanging, onto a palm frond for my life, and Batiota wants me to go higher. He motions for me to take my foot from the palm’s trunk and place it on the fronds above. I hesitate and give him a look that must be something between, What am I doing up here? and Why are you trying to kill me? Palm fronds grow green from the top, but whither and fall from below, so all I can see to step on is a dying frond, connected by nothing more than a thin, brown-red scar.

Clinging to a Tree on Christmas
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Deluge

Deluge

July 31, 2013

By KEANE SHUM

I got caught in a deluge the other night, and when it hit me, it hit me just like that, italicized, like the rain was coming down so hard even the words to describe it were soaked and falling to the ground. I was in the back streets of Sheung Wan, an old part of town on the outskirts of Central that rests against the side of a hill. Steep stone staircases run up and down and through the area, and on a sunny Sunday morning you can play snakes and ladders with the past, sliding down to a street of antique stores that sell Bruce Lee posters from the 60s and twin-lens reflex cameras from the 30s, or climbing up to peek inside the few Edwardian mansions that remain, the once proud homes not of colonial officials, but of the Chinese compradors who even then—or maybe especially then—had a thing about putting the white man in his place.

Deluge
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The Cave

The Cave

July 24, 2013

By DREW CALVERT

On my final day in Malaysia I visited the Great Cave near the town of Niah, site of the oldest human remains in all of Southeast Asia.  To get there, I took a bus from Miri, a city not far from the Brunei border, which brought me close to the main entrance of an unceremonious national park.  At the museum, I glanced through photos of Englishmen joylessly separating ceramic from bone, and I studied brochures on the local economy, which runs on bird’s nests and guano.  Then I walked through a rainforest thick with cicadas until I reached the mouth of the cave, which looked like a secret airport hangar or a decommissioned gateway to hell.  Armed with a flashlight and an outdated map, I followed a mossy path through the darkness and breathed in the prehistoric funk.  By sunset, I found myself back at the entrance, where swiftlets and bats converged on each other in a giant black cloud above my head. 

The Cave
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Boston Book Festival

July 19, 2013
Event Date:
Saturday, October 19, 2013 (All day)
Location: 
Copley Square, Boston, MA

The Common will be attending the Boston Book Festival in October! Come see us there.

The Boston Book Festival is New England’s largest annual literary event. 2012’s Boston Book Festival featured more than 125 presenters and dozens of sessions for kids and adults,.  The BBF also boasted a bustling street fair, workshops for aspiring authors, an outdoor music stage, and more!  For more info on this year’s event, see www.bostonbookfest.org

Image of the cast of The Wire, from “The Art of the Wire,” the opening event of last year’s Boston Book Festival.  Courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons user bradalmanac.

Boston Book Festival
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