Town supervisor Jeremy Wilber proclaims it to be Film Festival Week, with Meira Blaustein. (photo by Laura Revercomb)

The 15th annual Woodstock Film Festival kicks off next Wednesday, October 15 with what promises to be a big blast of a star-studded party at the Woodstock Playhouse, complete with pre-event cocktail party, film screening of East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem, rousing music from Steve Earle and others, plus a full VIP offering for those part of the festival proper or willing to pay for the special privilege.

Between then and a similarly star-studded closing night ceremony at Kingston’s massive BSP theater, where Academy Award-winning actresses Natalie Portman and Jennifer Connelly will be on hand to honor their legendary director Darren Aronofsky with this year’s Maverick Award — and this year’s talented filmmakers find out who won major awards from their works in competition — WFF Executive Director and founder Meira Blaustein says there’ll be plenty to keep film, music, art and cultural buffs of all sorts happy.

“We’ve got parties every night, although only for participants, and many special panels, screenings, and events with tickets still available,” she added, fresh from a ceremony with town officials where the WFF’s impact was proclaimed and celebrated. “Even better, it’s all happening here, in Saugerties, in Kingston…we’ve become quite the original film festival in terms of geographic makeup. And I have the feeling it’s only going to grow.”

Asked about some highlights of top note as the big unspooling fast approaches, Blaustein — like many in and around Woodstock — noted the big coverage the town got in this month’s edition of Vogue, and how that might affect ticket sales this year. She pointed out several highlights of particular note for local audiences.

“The screenwriter Ron Nyswaner should be given a real hero’s welcome back,” she said of the former local resident who played such a role in the WFF’s early days, back when he was basking in the fame his Philadelphia screenplay brought him, and now producer and writer of the hit series Ray Donovan. “His panel discussion with US Weekly editor Bradley Jacobs will be major, plus he’s going to emcee the awards evening for us.”

Also big on the panels front, Blaustein added, was a writer’s event entitled “From Novel To Screen” that’s not only going to bring to town Beasts of the Southern Wild author Lucy Alibar, Tony Kushner of Angels In America, Munich, and Lincoln fame, and Hook creator Malia Scotch-Marmo, but is being presented by the Writers Guild of America.

Try these

As for films for which one should rush to get tickets, the WFF founder noted two special documentaries and two narrative works…as well as the special ‘Despair’ program of shorts, running at the Mountain View Studio on the afternoons of October 17 and 19, which Blaustein describes as “amazing, imaginative, and haunting works” including one piece she first saw while judging a film festival in the distant Faeroe Islands, who will be sending their leading filmmaker to attend the festival.

For documentaries, look out for Stray Dog from Oscar-nominated director and writer Debra Granik, who met its main focus character while shooting her epochal Winter Bone in rural Missouri; and Limited Partnership by Thomas G. Miller, the tale of America’s first legally wed same sex couple and their 40 years struggle to find acceptance…a work “that ended up getting a five minute ovation when first shown in L.A.” earlier this year, according to Blaustein.

In the feature narrative category, the film festival’s head honcho suggested getting tickets for I Believe In Unicorns, from Leah Meyerhoff (who we wrongly IDed as being originally from this area), which she said mixes up harsh realities and one’s need for imagination in a truly original way… a truly original work, in other words. As well as Sacrifice, by Michael Cohn, which Blaustein said could be breaking out like the eighties’ classic River’s Edge, with which it shares an “accident in the woods” plot basis and superb ensemble acting.

Woodstock proclamation

The town of Woodstock hereby declared that the week of October 13-October 19 shall be officially proclaimed “Woodstock Film Festival Week,” according to town supervisor Jeremy Wilber, who lauded the festival for having “brought world-wide honor and distinction to the Town of Woodstock.”

Blaustein reacted with a simple, elegant referencing of another accolade from former resident, actor, author and director Ethan Hawke.

“Among the finest of a dying breed,” she quoted Hawke. “A festival that isn’t trying to sell you anything, but simply and beautifully celebrating the art and craft of filmmaking.”

For more on all things Woodstock Film Festival, which runs Wednesday, October 15-Sunday, October 19, call 679-7165, see www.woodstockfilmfestival.com, or stop by their offices at 13 Rock City Road in the middle of Woodstock.

(Illustration by Will Lytle)

The Woodstock Film Festival (WFF) wound up its 15th annual manifestation on Sunday night, October 19, this year drawing cinephiles from near and far to 11 venues in Woodstock, Rhinebeck, Saugerties, Rosendale and Kingston. Besides the honorees previously announced — director Darren Aronofsky for the Honorary Maverick Award and producer/director/screenwriter/actor Mark Duplass for the brand-new Fiercely Independent Award — the star-studded bash at BSP in Kingston on Saturday night also conferred the Haskell Wexler Award for Best Cinematography on Michael Lavelle for Patrick’s Day. That film’s director, Terry McMahon, took home the Best Narrative Feature laurels as well.

Red Lines, Andrea Kalin and Oliver Lukacs’ profile of two activists in the secular Syrian opposition movement, was named Best Documentary Feature. Debra Solomon’s My Kingdom won for Best Animation. The Diane Seligman Awards for Best Short Narrative, Best Student Short Film and Best Short Documentary went to Iva Gocheva’s Sunday, Kate Tsang’s So You’ve Grown Attached and Tomasz Sliwinski’s Our Course (Nasza Klatwa) respectively. The James Lyons Awards for Best Editing went to Terry McMahon and Emer Reynolds in the Feature Narrative category — again for Patrick’s Day — and to Ali Akbarzadeh and Prichard Smith in the Feature Documentary category for Killswitch. Nathan Silver’s Uncertain Terms copped the Ultra Indie Award, and Caryn Waechter won the Tangerine Entertainment Juice Award for Best Female Feature Director for The Sisterhood of Night.

Two of the most eagerly awaited award announcements don’t come out until after the festival is over and all the ballots counted. The Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature was conferred by happy moviegoers on Sean Mullins’ Amira & Sam, and the Audience Award for Best Documentary Feature on Thomas G. Miller’s Limited Partnership. The interactive component of being able to vote on what you’ve just seen is one of many crowdpleasing facets of WFF, along with the opportunity to direct questions at the filmmakers and actors in the live discussion sessions that follow most screenings.

Happy suburbia?

Local audiences in particular are tickled to see scenes obviously shot in Hudson Valley venues, which were much in evidence this year. The closing-night film, for example, A. J. Edwards’ visually lyrical The Better Angels, set Abraham Lincoln’s boyhood amidst scenery familiar to any who like to hike the Mohonk Preserve or have visited the Ashokan Center. Alexis Gambis’ The Fly Room, depicting the odd relationship between decidedly unfatherly genetics pioneer Calvin Bridges and his precocious daughter Betsey, was shot almost entirely on the Bard College campus, using it as a stand-in for the original Fly Room at Columbia University. Leah Meyerhoff’s I Believe in Unicorns was filmed in Goshen and Campbell Hall, Adrián García Bogliano’s Late Phases in Rhinebeck, Kingston and Woodstock, Lacey Schwartz’s Little White Lie partially in Woodstock and Gene Fischer and Samuel Centore’s Passing Ellenville in…well, Ellenville.

The City of Kingston and its environs, including the Black Creek Preserve in Esopus with its unmistakable footbridge, delighted local viewers at screenings of the abovementioned The Sisterhood of Night, a modern-day retelling of the story of the Salem Witch Trials in which bullying, adolescent cliques and the abuse of social media replace Satanist-sniffing Puritan zealots as the drivers of false accusations and ultimate tragedy. Howls of skeptical laughter went up when a character in the film described Kingston as an “archetype of happy suburbia,” and anyone familiar with the actual demographics of Kingston High School must have felt somewhat baffled by a cast of young actors in which Asian students outnumbered black ones. Clearly, Kingston was discovered as a promising location and made to fit a screenplay written about someplace very different. But it’s fun to see places you know onscreen all the same, and the economic activity that filmmaking generates in our communities is doubtless welcomed by all.

Great directors of tomorrow

Musical performance was, as ever, interwoven with the screenings, filmmaker panels and actor dialogues at WFF 2015. Paul Green and the Internet Trolls entertained attendees at Saturday’s Maverick Awards ceremony at BSP. Roots-rocker Steve Earle joined Israeli singer/songwriter David Broza to perform live after the world-premiere screening of Erez Miller and Henrique Cymerman’s East Jerusalem/West Jerusalem in a WFF preview at the Woodstock Playhouse on Wednesday night. South African jazz legend Hugh Masekela put in an appearance at the Friday-night screening of Michael Lessac’s documentary A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake, also at the Playhouse. And comic Pauly Shore, the subject of a self-directed documentary titled Pauly Shore Stands Alone, performed live on Saturday night at the Colony Café.

All together, 130 films were screened at WFF 2015. Some will resurface in art houses like Upstate Films and the Rosendale Theatre or on public television over the coming year; a few, like the star-powered The Imitation Game reviewed in this week’s Almanac, will find wider theatrical distribution. But many will remain unseen except by the determined cinephile who makes the effort to seek them out, unless and until the lesser-known filmmakers’ careers take off. So if you want to catch the great directors, producers, cinematographers, editors and screen stars of tomorrow on their way up, get yourself into the habit of checking the WFF website, www.woodstockfilmfestival.com, on a regular basis to find out what teasers are being screened locally throughout the rest of the year. And be sure to order your tickets for WFF 2016 early!

Connor Kennedy (photo by Dion Ogust)

Dylan and Hendrix no longer frequent the streets and cafés of Woodstock, but their legacy persists in a town that continues to nurture young musicians. “I live in a place where I’ve been lucky to meet and make music with some of my musical heroes,” said 20-year-old Connor Kennedy, who’s been seeking to carve a name for himself on the local music scene.

The guitarist, singer, and songwriter, along with his band, Minstrel, will be featured every Tuesday in November at Backstage Productions in Kingston. Minstrel will be the house band for Ladies of the Valley, a fundraiser for Family of Woodstock at the Bearsville Theater on Sunday, November 9, backing up Amy Helm, Elizabeth Mitchell, Simi Stone, and others. On the eve of Thanksgiving, they’ll play at Keegan Ales in Kingston, and on Black Friday, they’ll join Mike and Ruthy, Elizabeth Mitchell, Dan Littleton, and others at Levon Helm’s studio, The Barn, in a version of Levon’s famous Rambles. Kennedy even has a radio show on WDST every Monday, “The Indigo Hour.”

Heady stuff for a kid who was born in north Jersey, grew up in Saugerties, and started taking guitar lessons at the age of ten. “I practiced guitar three to five hours a day from the ages of 11 to 15,” he recalled. “And I taught myself keyboard, piano, organ, drums, bass.” At 14, he began to hang out in Woodstock so he could play music in public. “I had gone to an open mic in Saugerties every week, but that was the only kind of live music regularly in Saugerties at that time. Coming to Woodstock, I felt like I found a place I could call home even though I didn’t live here.” He was spending so much time in town that he transferred to the Woodstock Day School at 16. He sat in with Dave Kearny and Ellie Wininger at the Wok n’ Roll, or sometimes with Salted Bones, a band featuring Michael Esposito of Blues Magoos fame, Ted Orr, Joe Bones, and Sal Miccio.

At 14 and 15, the youngster also volunteered at Levon’s, when the Woodstock icon was still alive and running his near weekly Midnight Rambles. “To play at The Barn — that’s a big dream come true,” said Kennedy. Helm’s daughter, Amy, has been supportive and invites him to perform frequently at The Barn. When she played at a free concert at the Methodist church in Shady this August, Kennedy and two other musicians backed her up on a series of spirituals. “I was so happy Amy asked us to do it,” he remembered. “So often almost every performance is — well, it’s always for the love of doing it, but for that day, we were just there for the people and ourselves. It was really refreshing, just singing the songs we learned from Amy that morning.”

Kennedy’s growth as a performer has been steady and gradual. “I just kept doing what I was doing,” he said. This Halloween’s Pink Floyd concert at the Bearsville Theater came out of a similar show he did with friends in 2011. (Or was it 2010? So long ago, he can’t remember.) The 15- and 16-year-olds were doing Pink Floyd songs on the Bearsville stage, when they looked up to see 400 people in the audience. “It didn’t have anything to do with us — it was about Pink Floyd,” he said, “but we felt like we’d arrived in some way. We met a lot of people and made new connections that we still have. We played Mountain Jam the next year, Bearsville more regularly, and I started writing my own music, which I’m still doing. It’s all happening slowly and naturally. It’s really cool there’s a community here that allows for the growth I’m trying to achieve.”

His band Minstrel now includes drummer Lee Falco, bassist Brandon Morrison, and keyboard player Will Bryant, nephew of Byron Isaacs, Levon’s and now Amy’s bass player. Their musical style, said Kennedy, is hard to classify. “I always say I’m waiting for someone else to tell me what kind of music it is. We all have different tastes. At my core, the songwriting influences are Bob Dylan, George Harrison, classic rock ‘n’ roll stuff as well as folk, blues — everything’s connected.”

“The Indigo Hour” explores those influences. Kennedy is now up to his sixth show, running from 10 p.m. to midnight Mondays at WDST 100.1, as he plays records by both local people and musicians passing through, plus an assortment of blues, soul, jazz. He likes to choose unfamiliar songs by well-known artists. Kennedy spins a lot of vinyl, buying new albums every week. “I like to support those businesses and meet those people,” he commented. “Vinyl is flourishing now. It’s the only aspect of physical music selling that’s increased. I go to Jack’s Rhythms in New Paltz. The owner, John, has been turning me on to new stuff at the store, which I try to translate into the radio show.” He also encourages people to call in to the show and talk to him. For those not up late on a Monday, “The Indigo Hour” can be heard at anytime on the Internet at WDST.com.
When asked about his dreams, Kennedy is modest, bringing the conversation back to Woodstock. “This year alone, I’ve made a big transition into being a singer-songwriter, which is what I’d like to be.” His first record, a collection of songs written over the past few years, is Nothing Lasts: Nothing’s Over, released in 2013. The ultimate goal, he said, is to create music that “represents everything we love about music, that can take people where they want to go. We’re big believers in where we live. We want to see this area flourish and return to what it was in late 60s and 70s, into the 90s as well, when Bearsville Records was kicking and Todd Rundgren was here working — so many great records were made in this town. We’re getting close — people keep moving here. I think the future of Woodstock looks good.”++

To keep up with Connor Kennedy, see his website at http://www.connorkennedy.org.

Maria Todaro in The Barber of Seville. (photo by Violet Snow)

At opening night of the Phoenicia International Festival of the Voice, before flamenco musicians and dancers took the stage, Assemblyman Kevin Cahill announced that the festival was in line for a state grant of $125,000. The Community Capital Assistance funds will be released in 2015.

Now in its fifth year, the music festival has proved its viability to the point of receiving, for the first time, two substantial grants. According to treasurer and Chief Financial Officer Barbara Mellon-Kolb, a grant of $90,000, administered by the New York State Council on the Arts, enabled the festival to pay artists, including the four different orchestras and ensembles backing up performers in styles from Baroque to Latin American. Another $15,000 came from the O’Connor Foundation, a program based in Delaware County for the benefit of local non-profits.

Over five days, two politicians spoke briefly at the start of each evening performance, emphasizing the economic benefits of the festival, which brought an estimated 5000 audience members last year to spend money at local businesses and also provides work for musicians, many of them from our area. In a clever gesture, two of the speakers, State Senator James Seward and Rick Remsnyder of the Ulster County Development Corporation, on their respective nights, conducted the festival orchestra in renditions of the national anthem.

Economics aside, many audience members were heard to marvel at the presence of such skilled and powerful singing voices in the tiny Catskills town. While some residents stayed home to avoid the crowds and traffic, others threw themselves into work as volunteers, with two evenings of ushering, parking guidance, or food service earning them free admission to all the outdoor mainstage events at the Parish Field. Volunteers who helped construct the stage received T-shirts reading, “Build it and they will sing.”

“I never liked opera before,” said a Woodstocker who attended the performance of The Barber of Seville, “but I was curious, so I came, and I loved it.” After two years of high drama on festival Saturday nights, this year’s audience was treated to opera buffa. The style might be compared to Betty Boop meeting Laurel and Hardy in a Shakespeare comedy, with the emotions expressed in topnotch singing voices. Phoenicia resident and festival co-founder Maria Todaro sang Rosina with aplomb, deftly applying her acting skills to the role of a sullen, dreamy, coquettish teenager.

José Todaro, Maria’s father, who had his own show on French TV, gave a performance of Mediterranean popular songs that would not have been out of place in Las Vegas. A showman with a genius for engaging the audience, Todaro also has a formidable tenor voice.

The flamenco show drew a surprisingly large crowd for a Wednesday night, as Argentine performers, backed up by an orchestra, presented an exhilarating El Amor Brujo by Manuel De Falla. The festival’s Spanish theme gave cohesiveness to the five-day event and was echoed in a sublime performance of Spanish Renaissance music at the Catholic church by the 11-member a cappella Cambridge Singers.

Local writer/director/actor Carey Harrison’s new play, The Seven Favorite Maladies of Ludwig van Beethoven, provided a superb vehicle for pianist and festival co-organizer Justin Kolb. In the role of the hypochondriacal and increasingly deaf Beethoven, Kolb played two pieces, the “Appassionata” sonata and the dramatic and often dissonant “Ruins of Athens.” While the play was funny and clever, it seemed a bit thrown-together and under rehearsed, unlike Kolb’s masterful playing. Harrison, as Beethoven’s doctor, provided the vocal component, his mellifluous speaking voice always a pleasure to hear.

I had the privilege of participating in the final performance of the weekend as a member of one of several community choirs that united to sing Misa Criolla, an Argentine folk mass, conducted by Jorge Parodi, artistic director of New York City’s Opera Hispánica. Although I will never be able to sing like the soloists I heard this weekend, I felt blessed to spend time inside a piece of glorious music, with the support of highly talented professionals. Where else but in Phoenicia?

Edie LeFever (photo by Dion Ogust)

In 1963, two young women, Edie LeFever and Eda Crist, noticed that theater productions in Woodstock always involved professionals playing the leads. They decided to create a theater group that would provide a creative outlet for the town’s many talented residents. Wanting to make their organization official, they consulted a lawyer. In his office were two other men, one from the Chamber of Commerce, who told the women that their idea would never work. “We left rather surprised and taken aback,” recalled LeFever, “and we decided we’d better get to work and present something.” The first production of Performing Arts of Woodstock (PAW) was Ionesco’s The Lesson, performed at the Café Espresso.

PAW, the longest continuously running theater group in Woodstock, celebrates its 50th year with an anniversary gala on Saturday, September 7, 4-8 p.m., at Onteora Mountain House in Boiceville. Attendees will enjoy a gourmet dinner, dancing to live music by The Phantoms, and performances of scenes from several past PAW productions.

LeFever, who is now 80 and has served as president of the board for all but a handful of years since 1964, has announced that she will retire from her position in October. She looks back with pride on the roughly 180 plays the group has performed, describing the pieces chosen as “challenging, interesting, demanding. I call what we have done ‘non-commercial fare.’ Not too many people are going to do Genet’s The Maids. We’ve done The Birthday Party by Pinter, Buried Child by Sam Shepard. And lots of original plays.”

Finances have always been problematic, since PAW eschews Agatha Christie plays and other crowd-pleasing, money-making staples of small-town theater. They rely on memberships and fundraising events to stay solvent, as well as grants, including 15 grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, based primarily on PAW’s choice of plays.

Venue is also a challenge. In its early years, PAW actors rehearsed in garages, living rooms, and basements. Performances have been held in churches, at the Woodstock Artists Association, and at the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center. For 40 years, the group used the Town Hall on Tinker Street, where three times a year, they transformed the main room into a theater for several weeks. When the building was renovated in 2012, a petition with over 1000 signatures attested to the desire of audiences to allow PAW to return after the rebuilding. However, it proved impractical to put on plays in what was now a courtroom. “We did one play there, The Columnist,” said LeFever. “Regulations for the justice court are such that all sets and lights and props had to be removed after each weekend of performances.”

The community center, although not ideally equipped, has served as a substitute. The center is next on the schedule of renovation, and this time, PAW has been allowed to give input into the plans. “According to what I’ve been told,” said LeFever, “we should have a gloriously wonderful theater space, with a stage, proscenium, curtain, lighting, and storage. It’s meant to be a multi-use center but with dividers to permit two activities at the same time.”

Meanwhile, they hope to perform at the rustic, unwinterized Byrdcliffe Theater next June and at Mountainview Studio during colder seasons.

In the early years of PAW, several branches were founded: a playwriting unit, a young people’s theater, a chorus, and an international folk dancing group. They performed 21 new plays, including pieces by Bill C. Davis, Charles Dumas, Holly Beye, John Ford Noonan, and others. Fifty-one directors have guided PAW performances, with Nicola Sheara and Warren Kelder directing the most shows. Some actors nurtured by PAW went on to professional careers.

When asked to mention a favorite production, LeFever said, “I remember liking Under Milkwood a lot. It was an ensemble, and the actors also created the sound themselves. If there was rain falling, they would make sound to create the rain falling.”

LeFever’s devotion to theater contrasts with her education in political science, philosophy, and French at Hunter College. “I enjoyed it, but I needed more action,” she mused. Later she flunked out of law school. She was formerly married to John LeFever and had three children, “who I adore,” she said. Another great love is flamenco dancing, which she studied and performed in Woodstock with Mariquita Flores. She still dances, and she directs a theater group for seniors, The Comets of Woodstock, founded by Holly Beye and Ruth Craig in 1985.

LeFever, once busy with acting and directing, has in recent years taken the role of producer, which still gives her plenty of responsibilities. “If I am one leg of PAW, Ann Washington has been the other,” she noted. Washington wears many hats, including those of treasurer and set designer. Board members have thrown themselves into preparations for the anniversary gala, including Jean Fitzpatrick, Lena Adams, Kathy Miller, who will prepare the dinner, and Robert McBroom, manager of Onteora Mountain House. Decor will be designed by Barbara Roefs, and the event chair is Adele Calcavecchio, both board members. Actress Kimberly Kay will MC. Reservations close September 1.

As for PAW’s future, LeFever is confident that the leadership of the group will “continue to be true to its backbone and not to give in to choosing plays and productions in order to make money. We should stay with what our soul is really about. Other people do other things, which is great, there’s a multiplicity of things that can be done. This is our niche and the purpose I stood up for.” 

Performing Arts of Woodstock presents its 50^th Anniversary Gala on Saturday, September 7, 4-8 p.m., at Onteora Mountain House, 96 Piney Point Road, Boiceville. Tickets are $40 and must be reserved online at www.performingartsofwoodstock.org/ or by mail. See website for details or call 845-679-7900.

Frances Archipenko Gray, the elegant longtime Woodstocker who’ll be reading from and signing copies of her new memoir My Life With Alexander Archipenko at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum at 3 p.m. Sunday, December 7, has written one of the more beautiful and effective books about life in this town, and life with, and as an artist, that’s been published for years.

And what a gem this handsome book is, published by the German publishers Hirmer. Richly illustrated, classically designed and crisply edited, it ends up mixing the best of memoir writing — with keen atmospheric detailing and emotionally resonant personal analysis — and an insider’s means of connecting readers to what could have been a lost body of modernist work.

Not, mind you, that Archipenko could ever be lost. Just never brought to life as in these pages.

What Gray does here that may be most miraculous is delve straight into the meat of what makes the narrative here so interesting. It’s like a fairy tale, this story of a Bennington art student in her early twenties, choosing between summer classes with the great abstract painter Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, or with this stocky, do-it-yourself Ukrainian-Greek immigrant in his hand-built home within a damp hillside quarry outside Bearsville. Yet it’s also a great experiential description of the many ways in which Woodstock, and its wider lifestyle inclusive of the City and Europe, can grow on one over time.

“The smell of mothballs when we arrived at Woodstock was reassuring. I can still feel the yellowed newspaper which we gathered off the mattresses, the dampness dispersing as the boards came off the windows and we opened the house to the summer sunshine. Alexander repaired water damage from the winter while I spent time and baking soda trying to sanitize the hopeless fridge,” she writes, catching what it feels like for anyone to return to a summer home. “Alexander always hated to see me cleaning or scrubbing. It didn’t fit with the pedestal he imagined me on. But I was determined.”

The student meets and grows fond of her 68-year old teacher’s deep experiential talents, his hard-won art. He finds in her fresh eyes…and a lover. There’s an invalid wife, much beloved. Great bursts of work and the frustrations of never having the money or fame to reflect one’s sense of self within. She battles with anxieties about the odd tilts and balances her life takes on. Has a breakdown. Gains her own artistic footing. Marries the man and then helps him through his final years.

By the end, her clear eyed vision of everything feels as well-earned as a heroine from the best of modern fiction.

“Eventually I gave birth to four children, each with a different father, but I never remarried. I believed it would be less complicated to raise my children as a single parent,” she admits in a final chapter entitled, “Fifty Years Later.” “The years I spent with Alexander so long ago have still not turned to ash…As I have matured, after briefly navigating my own career as a visual artist, the steady force and the anchor of my being has been my experience of Alexander.”

What great people get shaped herein. And what a strong world, and town, that held and nurtured them during such times of challenge, growth, great beauty, and deep love.

Frances Archipenko Gray talks, reads from her new book, and signs copies of My Life With Alexander Archipenko on Sunday, December 7 at 3 p.m. at the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum, 28 Tinker Street, across from the Village Green. The event is free. For more info call 679-2940 or visit www.woodstockart,org.

Temple (photo by Frank Spinelli)

Rooted in Utopia’s past, Frank Spinelli’s astounding photographic record of “Burning Man” celebrates the planet’s newest art-driven community. In doing so this native Woodstocker reminds us that our most extraordinary (if largely forgotten) contribution to world culture is alive and well in an annual “techno heathen” rebirth. Burning Man: Into a 21st Century Utopia is an other-worldly, sexy, seriously playful delight. Spinelli will appear with copies of the book at the Woodstock Library Forum, 5 p.m. Saturday, December 13 at the Library.

In the summer of 2012, Spinelli was looking for a new project when his nephew serendipitously recommended “Burning Man” as happy hunting ground for remarkable images. In short order Spinelli procured a press pass, outfitted himself with tent and highly specified survival gear, and drove his pick-up truck to one of the most extreme locations in America, The Black Rock Wilderness, of which he writes: “…an inhospitable environment in Northern Nevada that extends due north from the town of Gerlach for one thousand square miles. The annual rainfall in this desert is under eight inches per year. The Playa, an ancient alkaline lake bed, four thousand feet above sea level, is home to nothing except a rare species, the Fairy Shrimp, that can remain dormant for years within the desert’s crust…I have never been in a more inhospitable place in my life, yet many thousands of people live there for a week in August. There are no hotels, electricity, water, or any type of natural shade. In fact, what one can expect is searing daytime heat, cold night air, ferocious wind-driven white-outs that make infinitesimally small bits of alkaline dust airborne…The dust can dry out a person’s skin until it cracks and blisters, while the heat at noon can feel like a hammer hitting you over the head.”

“Burning Man” was born in 1986 on the beach in San Francisco when Jerry James and Larry Harvey constructed a nine foot Moloch made of straw they set aflame on the night of the summer solstice. Some reverentially irreverent chord was struck in this heathen burn causing its annual re-enactment to outgrow the beach, the city, the state — soon to be embraced by the world. Its popularity exploded exponentially, becoming a movement — a libertarian way of looking at life, indeed of taking back a life many Americans have passively allowed to be wrested from them. “Over the years,” Spinelli writes, “the effigy has morphed into a structure more than sixty feet high…I witnessed the burning of the man on a Saturday night, a climax preceded by an elaborate firework display that attracted more than fifty thousand people.” Larry Harvey quickly emerged as a sociologist-shaman chiefly responsible for the effigy and the community of artists and revelers surrounding it. Last year 233 large works — many of them ritually burned — adorned the grounds traversed by attendees in outlandish dress and various states of undress, who returned nightly to approximately a thousand camps intractably interwoven for eight days and nights.

Of the early movement Harvey wrote: “For those of us who marched out into the Black Rock Desert in 1990, there was an underlying irony awaiting us…because there was no context in the desert…we actually became the Establishment…slowly, step-by-step, circumstances drove us to invent a government. Without intending to, we’d stumbled onto the principle of Civic Responsibility.”

Appropriately, Spinelli quotes Harvey extensively, listing and reacting to the ten principles loosely representing “the Burner’s Manifesto.” For instance: “3. Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.” Spinelli: “Since there is no money changing hands at Burning Man, there are fewer ways to demonstrate wealth, and therefore little or no class structure.” And elsewhere: “I cannot remember the last time I walked through the world for a week without a wallet or money. It was probably when I was seven years old.” Of course, there is a price tag attached to this generosity de rigor. The cost of a ticket is $400. Keep in mind, however, that between 20 to 26 million dollars are spent yearly on security, medical facilities, and accompanying “insta-city” infrastructure. On top of that budget, three quarters of all “Burners” do volunteer work which — among dozens of duties — insures the fulfillment of the final dictum: “Leave no trace.” Case in point: “In 2013, there were sixty-eight thousand people at Black Rock City and no garbage cans. The community coined a name for ‘matter out of place: ‘MOOP’.”

Like many other Town of Olive residents, Rejoice Scherry grew up hearing stories about the towns that were uprooted to make way for the Ashokan Reservoir, built to provide New York City residents with drinking water. Now equipped with degrees in museum studies and library science, Scherry has curated an exhibit in the basement of the Olive Free Library, breathing life into local artifacts of that traumatic era, from 1905 to 1914, when the reservoir was built.

At the library, the young archivist, who attended Onteora High School, points to a few bits of rusted metal in a display case, items retrieved from the mud of the reservoir during a drought. “Those are the tender and locomotive from a toy train,” says Scherry. “A child might have lost it while packing up and moving out to make way for the reservoir. That’s the piece in this room that really gets to me.”

The toy train had been tucked away in a corner, and she didn’t notice it when she first visited the basement room, which had become a repository for historical items local residents thought should be displayed, along with overflow from the archives of the Olive Historical Society. For decades, the artifacts have been jumbled together with no story lines or themes to give them coherence.

Earlier this year, Ulster County Clerk Nina Postupack put out a call to area librarians to find a way to make documents from the county archives more accessible to the public. Among the county’s files are the transcripts of court cases related to the reservoir. Katie Scott-Childress, director of the Olive library, felt her museum room would be the ideal venue, and her new library assistant, hired in September, turned out to have the archivist skills to organize an exhibit.

Scherry’s first task was to make an annotated inventory of every object in the room, which she did with the help of Onteora High School senior Dan Bily. Then she perused the library’s collection, the county materials, and archives at the town hall to select items that would illuminate the lives of local people, as well as the workers who came to build the reservoir.

A portrait of Jacob Bishop, the blind miller, hangs on one wall. The prosperity of his mill, says Scherry, was due to his ability to keep it active around the clock. He didn’t need light to do his work, so his employees would run the business during the day, and he would work at night. The mill and covered bridge at Bishop’s Falls were replaced by the reservoir dike.

Attorney Alphonse T. Clearwater represented many displaced families and businesses, helping them to demand fair remuneration for their property from the city, which often undervalued the land. One of the court transcripts on display details Clearwater’s efforts to establish the monetary loss entailed by a ginseng farmer. According to Scherry’s research, in the early 1900s, China purchased $1 million worth of ginseng a year from the Catskills.

Brown’s Station, Samsonville…

An extensive post card collection shows the pre-reservoir landscape and the towns that no longer exist — Brown’s Station, for instance, and the busy centers of such hamlets as West Shokan and Samsonville. Photos document residents of the towns — Winchells, Browns, Bishops — and the workers who came to build the infrastructure, including the aqueduct that still conveys water to New York City. In 1908, almost 2500 workers and their wives and children were housed in a camp of 152 four-room cottages, with its own bakery, hospital, barracks, and later a post office, school, and bank. By the end of the construction period in 1914, the population of workers and families had grown to 25,000.

“We focus a lot on the negative aspects, but there were also positives,” notes Scherry. “Some farmers were happy to move to new, fertile land and get a fresh start. And immigrants who came to work on the reservoir got to have a new life in America — a lot of them stayed in this area.”

Scherry’s next project is to try to assemble the library’s other artifacts into meaningful collections that will contribute to our understanding of the town’s history and genealogy. At the opening of the exhibit on December 6, Postupack and Congressman Chris Gibson were in attendance. During the event, several town residents approached Scherry with photographs and historical information. She hopes to meet with them and include their materials in the collection.

The Olive Free Library is located at 4033 Route 28A, in West Shokan. For hours and other library information, see http://olivefreelibrary.org.

Ars Choralis performs Music in Desperate Times.

Among the eight “Whereases” in the Town of Woodstock resolution to honor the choral group Ars Choralis for its fiftieth year of performances:

“Whereas, Ars Choralis is one of four choruses in the United States recognized for its concerts of peace and social justice by the national periodical Chorus America; and…

“Whereas, Ars Choralis has given free concerts offering hope, solace and compassion during crises and disasters;…”

…therefore, supervisor Jeremy Wilber shall issue a proclamation celebrating the span of the group’s cultural contributions.”

The chorus will kick off its fiftieth year with a free concert on New Year’s Eve at 7 p.m. at the Old Dutch Church in Kingston, reprising their “Messengers of Peace” program. Inspirational songs will be interspersed with the words of peace activists from around the world.

Ars Choralis conductor Barbara Pickhardt mused on the “deep and long perspective” afforded her by 44 years with the choir. Founded as Ars Choralis in 1965, the group had become the Mid-Hudson Madrigal Society by 1969, when Pickhardt began to sing along. Among their performances were a series of Elizabethan feasts at the Beekman Arms in Rhinebeck, the Depuy Canal House in High Falls, and other settings. In 1972, Dr. Richard Olsen, head of the music department at Ulster Country Community College, took over as director and began to shift the focus away from madrigals and toward sacred music of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, while expanding into venues such as Olana and the Maverick Concert Hall. Chorus members also offered programs in local schools.

Once Pickhardt began directing the choir in 1977, she gradually broadened the musical range, from early chant to gospel to contemporary experimental. In the late 80s, the name Ars Choralis was restored, and the group went on to perform themed concerts such as “Music in Desperate Times: Remembering the Women’s Orchestra of Birkenau,” about women who survived the Holocaust by playing in an orchestra. The chorus performed the “Carmina Burana” among the stone artistry of Opus 40, and they created a piece called “Wings of Hope,” the story of the Berlin Airlift, with the help of swing dancers, a big band, and the words of Airlift personnel.

“What our chorus is known for right now is the overarching idea of human harmony,” said Pickhardt. “It’s about who we are as human beings. It’s important that these stories go on and open up a little bit of consciousness, get people to live their lives a little differently.”

Raised in northern Minnesota, Pickhardt recalls that music was always a part of her life. “I took piano lessons, although we lived in poverty, which didn’t seem like poverty, because I had wonderful parents and a community of people who cared for each other. I was lucky to go to college at a time when girls from my lower class didn’t necessarily go to college. I did my Masters degree in my fifties on the East Coat. I look at all of the things I’ve been handed all my life, and I feel just plain lucky.”

As a singer, she lives in awe of the way a disparate group of people can come into vocal harmony. “Somehow we’re all experiencing those same sound waves, and we’re creating part of it. There’s a moment when you know everything’s right that’s worth more than anything else — that moment you know something beautiful is happening — not the music, which can be beautiful or can be hard and driving, but the experience.”

Conducting is a different process. “It goes back to the seed of the idea,” said Pickhardt, who may work on a project for a year, or in the case of “Desperate Times,” ten years. As the different pieces of a concert get pulled together, it’s not until at or near the end that she gets the sense of success. “There is an indescribable understanding that ‘this is working.’ I see it in the faces of the people I’m conducting, and I feel it in the audience. When we did ‘Desperate Times’ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, there were over 1100 people. For an hour and 45 minutes, there was not a sound in the audience, no rustling — just stillness. We knew they were captivated.”

When that concert ended, she had to turn around and light a candle for all the people who had ever suffered at the hands of another human being. Before she was able to speak, she had wipe away the tears that were rolling down her cheeks. That kind of transport, she said, is rare. “Sometimes when I’m conducting, it feels mechanical. Other times it feels like I’m not doing anything, like something else is conducting.”

“Messengers of Peace” is a program that has been reinvented several times as a response to large-scale crises such as the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, the earthquake in Haiti, the Pacific tsunami. “It’s a free concert, but people are inclined to give something,” said Pickhardt. “Everything given this time will go to Helping Hands Soup Kitchen in Kingston.”

The concert will include music by Mendelssohn, the Shaker hymn “Bow Down Low,” Pink Floyd’s “On the Turning Away,” and other pieces. Members of the chorus, several young people, and volunteer supreme Victoria Langling will read quotes from recent Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Dalai Lama, Walt Whitman, and others. One of the singers, who has a one-year-old son, will open the performance with Eve Merriman’s line, “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, ‘Mother, what was war?’”

The 50th anniversary year will be celebrated with concerts highlighting the history of Ars Choralis, including a revival of “Desperate Times,” presented April 24 and 25. The Historical Society of Woodstock will host “Merry Madrigals in May,” on May 23, featuring roving minstrels and an Ars Choralis anniversary display in the museum. Mozart’s “Requiem” will be performed at Maverick on June 13 and 14, and December will see the the 20th Annual Welcome Yule concert.

In reflecting on the message of the Ars Choralis projects, Pickhardt remarked, “I think we all want something better for generations to come, to figure out how to get along. We know it’s hard. We get stuck, and it’s hard to pull out of it — but it’s possible.”++

Ars Choralis will present “Messengers of Peace,” a New Year’s Eve Free Peace Concert, on Wednesday, December 31, at 7 p.m. at Old Dutch Church, 272 Wall Street, Kingston. Inspirational spoken words will be illuminated by music performed by the chorus, two cellists, piano, oboe and percussion. The concert will be narrated by members of Ars Choralis and special guest Victoria Langling. Free-will donations will go to the Helping Hands Soup Kitchen in their entirety.

Tasso Zapanti (photo by Dion Ogust)

“When I first began to write music,” recalls Tasso Zapanti, sitting in the living room of his Bearsville house, “it was such a great satisfaction to put emotions into sound and then be able to play them back. It was the late 70s, early 80s, and technology was taking off, the early years of Apple, Commodore 68, Atari — they gave you the option to put the sound through synthesizers, record it, and play all the parts back immediately.”

Zapanti went from playing in high school bands to training in classical music at City College of New York, where he discovered that his forte was composing film scores. Having scored several films, including the docudrama Proud, which stars Ossie Davis, and Hangin’ With the Homeboys with John Leguizamo, he has lately turned to composing for dance. Zapanti’s recently released CD, Reflections Upon, demonstrates the lyricism and electronic inventiveness that his work is known for.

“Even when I played in punk and rock bands,” he says, “people said the music sounded like theme songs.” He started scoring student films in college and delighted in what he calls “expressing visuals with music.” College schoolmate Joseph B. Vásquez used Zapanti’s music for his films The Bronx War in 1989 and Hangin’ With the Homeboys, which won critical acclaim when it was released by New Line Cinema in 1991.

Proud tells the story of a black naval crew in World War II, when black servicemen were forbidden to fight on the front lines. Their ship was thrown into battle, and the sailors’ courageous actions were overlooked by history until 1994, when three crew members were finally honored for their service. Released to mixed critical reception in 2004, the film is shown widely each year during Black History Month in February, keeping Zapanti’s music in the ears of audience. He continues to receive royalties from cable TV and showings in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Zapanti has enjoyed writing for dancers who choreograph pieces to his music and perform in Tribeca. “I would love to get my music in the repertory of a dance company,” he remarked. “I like being part of a collective. I like how it becomes more operatic. You can make a bigger statement.”

He finds Woodstock an ideal location for a musician with multidisciplinary leanings. “My wife and I chose to have a house in Woodstock because there are always photo exhibitions, art, classical music, rock, theater, dance. It constantly feeds my soul and inspiration.”

The Bearsville house, with its cathedral ceiling and expansive view of fields, has a grand piano in the living room. So does his one-bedroom apartment in New York City. “Every day I have to do music,” he says. “My mobile studio, the computer, moves around, but I need a piano to draft ideas. At times I call it a healthy addiction, but it also has to do with the artist’s fire burning within that needs to come out somehow. That energy’s constantly inside me — I have to create.”

If those sentiments have a Mediterranean ring, it’s because Zapanti was born in Greece and came to the U.S. at the age of 12. He grew up in the Greek community of Astoria, Queens. Although he doesn’t listen to Greek music these days, some people hear a Greek influence in his compositions. “There’s a progression of chords that comes naturally,” says Zapanti, who received an ASCAP/Gershwin award in composition, presented by Morton Gould, in the late 1980s.

Zapanti’s taste centers on classical music, and he cites Stravinsky as favorite. “He wrote a lot of ballet music, which evokes visuals. I like the sounds he created from the orchestra, how the instruments dance together.” He also likes Schönberg and expressiveness of Chopin, with his variations in tempo.

Among composers of film scores, Zapanti resonates with the Italian Ennio Morricone, who wrote the theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and the Greek Vangelis, whose score for Chariots of Fire won an Oscar. “Vangelis combines electronic textures with classical instruments — which is right where I am right now.”

The new CD begins with “A Night in New York,” originally entitled “Bearsville Blues,” since Zapanti wrote it while gazing out his upstate window. However, the rhythms seemed more suited to an urban ambiance, and a Youtube video uses the piece as a soundtrack to a tour of New York after dark, with Zapanti as tour guide.

Most tracks on the CD bring in professional musicians to supply instrumental riffs, including guitarist Spiros Exaras, who has backed up Mariah Carey, saxophonist Alex Foster (Mingus Big Band,

Saturday Night Live Band), and percussionist Steve Thornton (Miles Davis, Michael Jackson). A piece called “Nine White Horses” features velvety, wordless vocals by soprano Lorelei McBroom (Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart),

Zapanti is currently putting the finishing touches on his next album, “Elysium,” to be followed by “Cinematic Plateau,” a compilation of his music from several films. Another project in the works is writing music for a documentary produced by “Right To Be Free/Africa.” Zapanti and his wife, Jeannine, are sponsors of two African children, through a friend whose program is devoted to saving kids from slave labor. “He brought me to an award-winning actress in Ghana doing a documentary on slave labor,” says Zapanti. “Fishermen with families can’t support their kids and are having to sell kids to support the rest of the family. I’ll be doing the score for that film.”

As a follow-up to “A Night in New York,” he’s currently considering choreographers for a video in which dancers in white will perform a drama against a backdrop of nighttime New York.

Clearly, there are many ways to feed creative fire.

Tasso Zapanti’s CD Reflections Upon is available from iTunes, Amazon, CD Baby, Spotify, and Rhapsody.

Susan Saxman (photo by Dion Ogust)

Since the appearance of the January 23 New York Post article on Suzan Saxman’s memoir, The Reluctant Psychic, which comes out this weekend from St. Martin’s Press, the Woodstock shop owner has received hundreds of calls for readings. But as the book title implies, she’s not eager to acquire clients.

“I’m happy my story is out there,” says Saxman, who toned down her appearance for the Post photographer, dyeing her hair black. Now it’s back to blue. She strokes the cat on her lap and leans forward, dark eyes snapping with intensity. “I want to give people this message — that the dead are around us, and everyone is psychic. You don’t need to go to anyone to talk to them. You can talk to your dead mother while sitting in your own living room.”

Saxman and her co-author, Perdita Finn, have shaped a compelling narrative of the psychic’s lonely childhood, extraordinary adventures, and visions of the afterworld that give comfort — or sometimes warning — to the living. The Golden Notebook will sponsor a launch event and book-signing at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts on Saturday, January 31, at 6 p.m.

“I’m not sure that I am, in fact, a psychic,” muses Saxman, who isn’t good at picking horses and refused, when asked by Vanity Fair, to predict this year’s Oscar winners. “My thing is communicating with people on the other side.” But the communications are quite specific, as when she told her co-author, at their first meeting, that Finn’s dead mother’s name was Patricia, Finn’s daughter was named after her, and the mother had appeared to Saxman with a fluffy white cat in her lap. Finn replied that her daughter’s middle name was indeed Patricia, and that her mother Patricia’s beloved white Persian cat had died during the woman’s bout with cancer.

“Suzan taught me the intense reality of the other realm,” says Finn, “not as metaphor, idea, or archetype, but that the dead are right here, right now. Things change, form changes, but love doesn’t. That knowledge is so liberating. If people knew what Suzan knows about reincarnation and the dead, it would change the world.”

Saxman believes it was her isolated childhood and an early illness with high fever that initially provoked her visions of the other realm. “I think they both spurred something in my head. My mother was having an affair with a homeless man, and my father was always in front of the TV. No one paid attention to me, and when they did, they were scared of me and said, ‘Why don’t you just be normal?’” From the man in a black hat who appeared at the foot of her bed every night to the visions of her mother as a child, throwing a conch shell at her sister’s head, the family didn’t want to know what was going on in Suzan’s mind.

The homeless man, Steve, would arrive in a green Renault as her father drove off to work, also in a green Renault, and Suzan would be the lookout, hiding Steve in her closet if her father returned home unexpectedly. Not your typical upbringing. “I never had a friend over, never went to a party,” Saxman remembers. “I fell into books and lived in a whole other world. I didn’t feel like I belonged anywhere until I came to Woodstock.”

At a paranormal circle led by an Episcopal priest, she met David Saxman, who invited her to a Renaissance festival. As a member of the Society of Creative Anachronism, David wore a cape and tights to the event, where Suzan impulsively offered to take the place of the missing gypsy fortune teller, despite having no experience as a reader. As each customer sat down, words poured spontaneously from her mouth, describing to complete strangers their dead spouses and relatives with eerie precision. Her memoir recounts a conversation:

“Paul. Paul doesn’t want to be in your house anymore. He’s ashamed. He says he’s got to go.”

        The woman was white. “How do you know that? You can’t know that. That’s my brother-in-law. He’s dead. His ashes are in an urn in my living room.”

“He doesn’t want to be there.”
“He was an awful drunk.”
“He just wants to go. Find a place for him to go.”

Thus her career as a psychic began. At subsequent festivals, long lines of customers came to sit before her and hear what the dead had to say. Saxman often feels overwhelmed by the needs of the people who come to her and the intensity of interactions with the dead. “I’m full of self-doubt,” she admits. “I don’t have the confidence to feel worthy of giving advice. I don’t even drive a car. I don’t feel capable of doing what’s expected of me. But when I sit down at a table, I can do it.”

She married David, and they moved from New Jersey to Woodstock after visiting on a whim. She was eager to get away from the people pursuing her for readings, and the unusual characters she met in Woodstock made her feel right at home. She recalls walking down the street one day and hearing a bush say hello. “It was a Biblical moment. I didn’t realize it was Rocky,” the drifter who had befriended much of Woodstock. “He was a tiny man with a tutu on. He said, ‘You’re so beautiful. Will you marry me?’ I almost said yes. I belong in this town.”

Suzan and David opened The White Gryphon, a store that sells punk and Gothic clothing. “I changed my name, as I do every decade,” Suzan says. “I took the name of my cat, Fiona, thinking people wouldn’t be able to find me. But I put up a sign saying I would do animal psychic readings.”

Always an animal lover, Suzan found animal readings much simpler than ones for humans. She advised the owner if the pet’s food needed changing or explained that the dog didn’t like the new cat. But she’d also deliver such messages as, “This animal is missing a dark-haired man that doesn’t come around any more.” The owner would say, “That’s Uncle John. He died.” Pretty soon, she was back in the business of reading for people.

Suzan has never advertised, since word of mouth brings in more clients than she can handle. Telling her story in print is more important to her than doing readings. She hopes the book will convey an anti-bullying message, urging people to be accepting of others’ differences. “Every day, kids ganged up around me, threatened me, threw my lunch away,” she says. “Something about me terrified them.”

Finn sees Suzan’s talents as “ways of knowing and being that are discredited in our society, but they’re often the most powerful and important. The emphasis of the book is on how to deal with strange gifts and accept yourself. It’s a good book for Woodstock.”

The Reluctant Psychic will go on sale at the Golden Notebook Bookstore, 29 Tinker Street, Woodstock on Saturday, January 31. At 6 p.m., Suzan Saxman will read and sign copies of her book at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street. Saxman, Perdita Finn, and spiritual teacher Clark Strand will conduct a workshop on darkness, the dead, and the black madonna at Mirabai Books in Woodstock on Tuesday, March 24. See http://www.mirabai.com/ for details.

(Photo by Dion Ogust)

It’s nice to sit and do nothing,” says Katherine Burger as she’s having her portrait painted at the Woodstock Library. “It’s so meditative. And Claire is very entertaining.”

“I’m telling her my life story,” laughs Claire Lambe, the Irish-born artist who is in the process of painting Woodstock residents for her project “Community.” Each Friday through June, she’ll be painting at the library, and Woodstockers are invited to sign up for a chance at being recorded in paint. “I want to create a picture of Woodstock in 2015,” explains Lambe, “so I need all ages, genders, and ethnicities.”

At the same time, she’ll be using photos to paint residents of Clonmel, her birthplace in Ireland. A joint exhibit of paintings from her two hometowns will be held in Clonmel in August. She notes on her website, “I see the combination of the paintings as being one piece where the sum of all the paintings together make an impact that they cannot make alone, just as a community or a nation is stronger than the individuals that make it up.” Lambe finds it significant that Clonmel, about the size of Kingston, is about the same distance from Dublin as Kingston and Woodstock are from Manhattan.

Anyone interested in sitting for a Woodstock portrait must be willing to sit for at least two to three hours, with breaks every 20 minutes. Exceptions will be made for the very young and the very old who are unable to sit still for long, in which case, Lambe will paint from photos. However, she says there is a quality to painting from life that is missing when a photo is the primary basis for the work.

“A photo gives a frozen quality,” she observes. “A painting from life captures the essence of a moment. You’re not coloring something in. It’s just you and the person you’re painting, the paint, and the brushes.” She will take a photo of each subject to block out the initial structure of the painting at home and put on finishing touches, saving time for the sitters.

Lambe’s work extends to murals, mixed media paintings, and installations, and she writes art criticism for Roll magazine. She teaches portrait painting at the Woodstock School of Art and drew live portraits on the street in Europe as an undergraduate at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin. She was in her early twenties, with a three-year-old daughter, when she went to Rome to meet a well-connected friend who never showed up. “I had to make some money, so I started doing pencil drawings and caricatures of passersby on the Spanish Steps,” she recalls. When that endeavor wasn’t yielding much cash, she took the advice of some boys at the Colosseum and hopped a boat to the island of Sardinia.

“Kids on the ferry took me to their village and became my agents. They brought me to housing estates and to the bank. I drew all the people at the bank, in the vault.” Later, she had success doing street portraits in Greece, where she also learned the art of entertaining her subjects. A batch of memorized nursery rhymes came in handy for getting children to sit relatively still.

More recently, Lambe has created detailed live portraits of actors to publicize plays written and directed by her husband, Carey Harrison. Her first poster for his acting company, the Woodstock Players, featured Harrison himself in the lead role of the magician in Magus. As he sat for the portrait, she remembers, “He kept falling asleep. It worked out well because it made him look sinister.”

The current project has been stirring in Lambe’s mind for two years, since she started monitoring the open studio sessions at the School of Art. “Open studio is not life drawing of a nude model,” she points out. “And it’s what I want to do here, painting people as they are, in whatever they’re wearing.”

Observers are welcome to stop by the library and watch a painting take shape in the corner of the art books section. The books make an appropriate setting and are useful for helping the subject maintain position. “My point of focus is the spine of that Jackson Pollock book,” comments Burger, also an artist, specializing in collage. At the library, Lambe paints in acrylic rather than oils, so there’s no odor.

She cautions that sitters must be prepared for a truthful rendering. Anyone expecting wrinkles to be airbrushed from an aging face will be disappointed. She cited an elderly woman, back in Greece, who was unhappy with her portrait. Lambe’s Greek wasn’t proficient, and she didn’t understand the problem until the woman pointed to the sample self-portrait of the 24-year-old and said, “Like this!”

What Lambe likes best about doing live portraits is the potential for sending the artist “into the zone. Another level of seeing comes into play. You start to see colors that aren’t obvious, reflecting off the ceiling and the clothes, under the skin. Various pulses start to come, and everything goes out of your head. That’s when I know I’m off to the races.”++

Claire Lambe paints portraits, now through June, on Friday afternoons at the Woodstock Library, 5 Library Lane. Prospective subjects may sign up for a portrait session by speaking to a librarian or by contacting Lambe through her website, http://www.clairelambe.net. Some sittings may be held on Saturdays to accommodate people with full-time jobs. In order to obtain a cross-section of characteristics, not all those who apply will be accepted. She’s especially seeking sitters in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, as well as people of non-Caucasian ethnicity.

Robert Wyatt

When I invited Robert B. Wyatt, formerly an editor at Avon, Dell, Ballantine, and St. Martin’s, to speak at a panel on traditional publishing versus self-publishing, I assumed he would advise the audience on the merits of working to get an agent and a publishing contract. Instead, he was eager to discuss the opportunities that modern technology gives authors to find new ways of publishing their work.

Wyatt is currently improvising formats for his own book, Adventures of a House and Its Books, a collection of tales about authors and characters inhabiting the 20,000-volume collection in his Woodstock home. The book’s initial offering will be a serialization through the Phoenicia Library, to be introduced through a launch event at the library at 4 p.m. Wednesday, March 4. Wyatt will present snippets of the work, aimed at entertaining both adults and children, along with his out-of-the-box vision of the new world of publishing technology for writers.

Here’s the catch. Until future editions of the book appear, possibly in online, audio, ebook, and print versions, the only way you can read Adventures will be while sitting at the Phoenicia Library, where a new chapter will appear twice a week. The text will be printed in large type on 8-1/2 x 11 pages, and back chapters will be available to read. Wyatt was inspired by the tradition of Charles Dickens, whose novels were serialized in monthly chapters that were published in London, attracting crowds to the New York piers for the arrival of each new issue.

I talked with Wyatt at his Woodstock house, surrounded by those thousands of books, mostly fiction, and guarded by Amanuensis A. Bear, an eight-foot-tall wood sculpture who stands on the front deck, dispensing opinionated advice to the author.

In an essay about your career, you describe your arrival in New York City from your hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, in 1962, saying you were driven by a “subtle combination of ignorance and curiosity.” How did you make the transition to New York?

In Oklahoma, I had read the Saturday Review and The New York Times, given to me by my piano teacher. I tore out ads I liked and put them up in my room, since I wanted to go into advertising — it was the time of Mad Men — or else publishing. My whole life was movies and reading. I had also been a weather reporter and obituary writer for the Tulsa Daily World while attending the University of Tulsa. I was dirt stupid when I arrived in New York.

Once there, you went from working at the Doubleday bookstore to four decades as an editor for top publishing houses. You edited early books from authors including Anita Diamant, Douglas Preston, Russell Banks, Marianne Wiggins, Reinaldo Arenas, Norma Fox Mazer, Katherine Neville. What has changed in the business that makes you see the big publishers as less useful for writers today?

The traditional publishers don’t really serve writers. They don’t have the distribution means they once had, and the review media has shrunk. Publishers used to set up author tours to bookstores, especially chains, but now we don’t have some of the big chains.

Yet the big publishers claim to be still making money.

Very few authors, except for established authors or celebrities, have a chance as a writer. Times are changing. Culture has changed. Books are disposable. There’s a bunch of bestsellers, people read them and then get rid of them. People aren’t building libraries. I’m amazed to go into the home of a publishing person to see how few books they have. Why be in a business where you don’t like what you make?

What about your own collection? Have you read most of your books?

Of course not, it’s a library. Does a librarian read every book in a library? You have a thought and you can go to a book, and you’ve got it right here. Take my current infatuation with the late 19th century. I may read a Frank Stockton novel, and that leads to another and another. That leads to Little Pilgrimages Among the Men Who Have Written Famous Books, which has short bios of writers of that period, and that leads to someone else. I also like thinking about the way books looked. You start looking through the library at the bindings, if you’re a real book person.

How did you come to write Adventures of a House and Its Books?

I’d written two books I’d published and two that have not been published. They were all about things I knew. Jam and the Box was about bookselling. A longish novel about movies set in Belize involves my interest in movies. I started thinking that books had always been stable. But with the Internet, mutability became possible. I would write a book that could be changed in all sorts of ways on the Internet.

What I know best is the house I live in. At first, the house was a character. It spoke, had opinions, was in conflict with the books, jealous of the books, but I didn’t think that worked very well, so I brought in what was coming out of the books, the authors and characters. An important rule was that the authors had to be physically dead, but they were alive all the time in the house, along with the characters they’d created. I liked the idea of Louisa May Alcott being here and being mystified by books with color pictures of authors on the cover. When Walt Whitman came to visit, he was surprised to see so many books about himself.

Can you talk more about the mutability available with the Internet?

There’s a chapter in which Hervey White comes out of my TV and sets up a party on the back deck with Woodstockers of the 1930s. I decided that episode was too parochial if I wanted to get people outside Woodstock to enjoy the story. So there’s a version where bears come out of the TV set, the bears from the painting on my shower curtain, “The Bear Dance” by William Holbrook Beard.

So on the Internet, you’d put in your zip code to help you select the Woodstock version or the general version?

I don’t know. I’ll be working out the details for the rest of my life. I think this is a fundamental change in book-making. We’ve always worked toward the perfect text. Then you put out a book and that’s it. But with new technology, your book will not be the same book five years from now. One of the problems with traditional publishers is they want a certain kind of book so they can market it, and they tailor it to that. But an author has their own way of working, and their creativity shouldn’t be inhibited. Publishers want the reader to know this is a reading experience just as good as one they had with Stephen King or John Grisham, not necessarily the unique voice of someone new.

Why did you choose the Phoenicia Library for your exclusive launch?

The symbol of the library is a bear reading in an Adirondack chair, and Amanuensis A. Bear is the symbol of my house. The library was destroyed by fire, and the builder who did the reconstruction, Wyatt Roberts, happens to be named for me. His father, Thom Roberts, built my house. And I like the idea of celebrating the reborn library with the birth of this book about a home library and its inhabitants.

Robert B. Wyatt will present readings from and stories about Adventures of a House and Its Books, a work of fiction, at the Phoenicia Library, 48 Main Street, Phoenicia, on Wednesday, March 4, at 4 p.m. All ages are invited.

Carl Eric Lindin, Early Spring Woodstock, ca. 1930, oil on canvas

Since assuming the Executive Directorship of the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum in September, Neil Trager has heard a distant drum roll heralding an event others are hardly aware of but, as an old hand at the game, he knows is just around the corner. In only four years it will be a century since five painters representing a cross section of popular, if ‘oft opposing, styles became the founding fathers of a fighting ground first called The Woodstock Artists Association. As the town’s dim memory of that early harvest struggles to regain clarity, Trager has taken a somewhat radical route in stripping away his responsibilities until he is now — first and foremost — the steward of the legacy that is WAAM.

The most conservative of those original founders, John Carlson (who would inherit directorship of The Art Student League’s Summer Program here), upheld the virtues of plein aire oil painting with canvasses which hold up remarkably to this day. A second founder and one-time student of Carlson’s, Frank Swift Chase, would take a small step towards modernism with Impressionistic brushstrokes. Leading the radicals, founder number three Andrew Dasburg, was considered Woodstock’s eloquent firebrand. Upon his returning to town from Paris in 1911 (where he’d met both Cezanne and Matisse) Dasburg preached the revolutionary gospel of Cubism and fourth founder Henry McFee  fell under its spell. Final and eldest founder, Carl Eric Lindin, from Byrdcliffe’s early days, fell stylistically somewhere between such extremes. It was these men who literally sold shares at $50 apiece, creating the company which built the gallery wherein each agreed to disagree. Yet they tolerated one another to begin with…most of the time — partly because each believed the verdict of art history would rule in his favor, and partly to “give free and equal expression to the ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ elements because [we] believe a strong difference of opinions is a sign of health and an omen of long life for the colony.” This, from the original preamble of bi-laws of the WAA. Needless to say that  same friction exists at what is today known as WAAM, though the struggle is as much between living artists and dead ones as between representational and abstract work.

Just outside the Towbin Wing at the 28 Tinker Street facility, works by these original founders (together with the essential 1926 map by Marg and Rudolf Wetterau establishing exactly which artists lived where) set the tone of rediscovery Trager seeks in WAAM: Creating Spirit Of Place, the show currently on display (it opened February 7) that will remain up until June 8.

To help accomplish this goal he resorts to a logical if not altogether common strategy:  inviting those who’ve run WAAM for years to step from the shadows to introduce a few personal favorites from the permanent collection. The result is a quiet riot — and a most welcome one. This is the first time in a while, however, that a new exhibition hasn’t relied heavily upon work borrowed from other institutions, and one unfortunate reality emerging from this investigation of the core collection makes obvious the fact that the Artists Association doesn’t own many works by the town’s best artists. For instance the founders, themselves, are somewhat scantily collected. In the case of a Bellows or a Guston this makes sense because such works are expensive (even if WAAM could hope to have been gifted a bit more generously.) The especially hurtful part is that this incredibly important institution doesn’t own enough of Woodstock’s many “better than good” artists, either. Nevertheless, numerous marvelous surprises released from safekeeping for the first time in a long time, take proud position beside several long-familiar friends.

The most obvious success in the show is the “modern wall” curated by Carl Van Brunt who is WAAM’s Gallery Director, usually responsible for showing the work of Woodstock’s living artists. His selection consists of four sparely arranged geometric, abstract and semi-abstract paintings on a dark gray background. Specifically, Abstract (c.1950) by the too often-over-looked Reginald Wilson, a dazzling Geometric Abstraction (1950) by Rolph Scarlett, another colorful, highly-designed August Evening (c.’80) by Anne Helioff, and commanding the center, a grand Sentinel (1969) by Grace Greenwood (the older, often over-shadowed sister of Marion). Collectively the four works positively pop and sing, the wall comes alive, and a collaborative fifth work is achieved.

Long-time wizard of the darkroom, Ben Caswell, has dipped into WAAM’s photography collection and culled some remarkable images — for instance a classic portrait by an unknown photographer of the extraordinary painter Arnold Wiltz at work.  Also, a photo montage of three images in two mediums (which just so happen to include his own monumental profile) by our ever-adventurous Konrad Cramer. Unfortunately, this image leaves us enviously recalling the vast majority of such pioneer works bequeathed by his daughter Aileen to the George Eastman House in Rochester. Ouch!

Who, besides poets, likes the local poetry scene? Years ago, Mikhail Horowitz warned me, “The smaller the pie, the sharper the knives.” Oh, I’ve gotten compliments, but the slights are what I remember. The poet who’d reviewed my first book with kind words accepted the second to say, “Nice cover!” and handed it right back. Always a smile. And a sugary “Good luck!” It has made me regret my Waspy training in politeness.

Once upon a time poets in Woodstock knew how to fight. It was 1923, when the arts colony was in its heyday. Greenwich Village bohemians swam nude in the Sawkill. Young poets and painters walked the country lanes with the democratic swagger of Walt Whitman. Hard cider solved the inconvenience of Prohibition. Rivalries flourished with manly abandon.

The showdown began in Little Italy when several dozen young writers, some of whom had recently returned from tours of the European avant-garde, gathered at a restaurant to plan their assault on the literary establishment, or more specifically to figure out what to do about two floundering literary magazines, Broom and Secession, which they’d launched abroad and brought home to New York.

Called by Malcolm Cowley, the meeting attracted Hart Crane, who soon drank too much, Glenway Westcott, and Matthew Josephson. (Among the no shows from their circle who’d go on to major careers were William Carlos Williams, e.e. Cummings, and Jean Toomer.) Another absentee was Gorham Munson convalescing in Woodstock. He’d founded Secession in Vienna as a rival to Broom and viewed Malcolm Cowley and others as young rubes from America who’d been easily seduced by the dashing nonsense of Dada, a charge to which Cowley might happily have pled guilty.

In his memoir, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s, Cowley recalled his hope of doing Dada in New York. “We planned, for example, to hire a theater some afternoon and give a literary entertainment, with violent and profane attacks on the most famous contemporary writers, courts-martial of the more prominent critics, burlesques of Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, Paul Rosenfeld and others — all this interspersed with card tricks, solos on the jew’s harp, meaningless dialogues and whatever else would show our contempt for the audience and the sanctity of American letters.”

Mathew Josephson

But first there was the problem of the forthcoming issue Broom sitting in Mathew Josephson’s apartment in sorry shape. Munson felt no sympathy. He’d met Josephson a few years earlier though their mutual friend, Hart Crane, and hadn’t been impressed. “I met a rather stiff young man, narrow in his interests, brittle in his thinking, and at moments charmingly pompous in his speech,” Munson wrote in his memoir, The Awakening Twenties: A Memoir-History of a Literary Period. Nonetheless, he later recruited Josephson to be an editor for Secession, which proved to be a grievous mistake.

In Cowley’s telling: “I had known of a quarrel between them, based on a conflict of personalities: Munson was wax-mustached and a little solemn, while Josephson was addicted to practical jokes that weren’t always funny to the victim.” After “Munson had accepted a very long and bad romantic poem” for the magazine, Josephson, as the editor, “had omitted all but the last two lines.”

We might snicker, but Munson never overcame his offense. To Cowley’s Little Italy gathering he sent a letter. “I had come to regard Josephson as a literary opportunist, an example of last minuteism, a kind of stage player of the arts — to adapt a phrase of Nietzsche. I emphasized these things and called him an intellectual faker — fighting words, they turned out to be.”

Cowley read the letter to his assembled drinkers and would be Dadaists. “Because his feelings were intense, Munson was betrayed into using a pompous style,” Cowley recalled. “His rhetoric was as noble as Cicero’s; his phrases scanned; I have the impression that his statement was written more in blank verse than in prose. I began to read it seriously to my audience, but halfway through I was overcome by my sense of absurdity and began to declaim it like a blue-jawed actor reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy. The effect was unfortunate.” Drunken Hart Crane rose in defense of his friend Munson. Glenway Wescott marched out. The “apprentice gangsters” at the next tables told the young bohemians to shut up.

Josephson must have taken delight in being denounced in such elevated terms. As he later wrote in his own memoir of the period, Life Among the Surrealists, Munson charged “that I was a low, cunning, self-seeking, and dishonest character, a ‘fakir’ as a writer…Any movement of the American vanguard ‘must part from Josephson else Munson and his allies would shun it like the plague.’ Midway in the reading of this long-winded manifesto, written with studied effort and with pompous rhetorical flourishes, Malcolm was overcome by its sense of the absurd…and began to declaim it in the manner of a ham actor reciting Shakespeare.”

Josephson decided to take action. A friend had advised, “There’s no use discussing things with the man, I would give him a good thrashing.”

“I had heard rumors of his coming,” Munson later reported, “But dismissed the reports as only bluster…I was mistaken. Here he was knocking at the door, after traveling 100 miles to avenge himself…I had some guests for tea, when Josephson burst in shouting for battle.”

Josephson insisted that Munson started it. “It was he wanted to ‘parley’ with me. As I really disliked this business of fisticuffs and wished to get it over with, I became all the angrier.”

Bethany Ides in her living room. (photo by Violet Snow)

In Bloomington, near Kingston, in a 19th-century brick house, artist, writer, and scholar Bethany Ides is organizing a performance project that she describes as “a political and communitarian proposition as well as an art form,” adding, “I take direction from Mister Rogers.”

Ides has taught courses in literary and critical theory, theology, art history, and text-as-art at Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, Bard College, and other institutions. While she is devoted to teaching, her true passion is to gather people in a wide-ranging creative process that has recently migrated from New York City to the Catskills.

An event billed as an opera, entitled Transient’s Theme, was presented at the Knockdown Center in Queens last fall, based largely on group improvisations conducted in Bloomington, with groups of artists riffing on themes from prisons to hospitals to encampments. “Almost-Although” was a two-month summer retreat in Shandaken, attended by a rotating group of artists, writers, musicians, scholars and activists from across the country. She is now bringing together creative upstate residents in a slowly evolving project called Deathbeds, which will result in a series of 22-minute videos. “Upstate there isn’t this scarcity of time and space,” said Ides. “That’s why I need to be doing this here and now. It can’t happen in the city.”

The brick house she is renting has a back yard graced by black walnut trees, with the Rondout Creek beyond. Despite two feet of snow on the ground, early participants have begun two Deathbeds installations. One is made of snow, smoothed out like a bed, with a drift mounded at the head. The other consists of six mats laid flush in two rows. Since the design process has barely begun, it’s too soon to say what the piece is about.

“We’re just starting,” Ides explained. “We’re working on a theme song and an opening sequence that will be tacked onto the beginning of each episode. We’re doing a lot of drawing and talking together, and we have lists of running ideas. You bring your own subject that you want to explore, and the video will come about through a conversation. Thinking about deathbeds is a way of thinking about immediacy, about anticipating expiration, so it’s really a symbol for what is at stake.” She does not plan to post the resultant videos online but hopes to show them in venues familiar to participants of the project, places where they already meet for work or enjoyment, like coffee shops and bars and living rooms, as well as in more standard art and academic settings.

Although Ides’ work is guided by the writings of contemporary philosophers, including Jean-Luc Nancy, Lauren Berlant, and Fred Moten, her basic model is the operas of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood TV shows for children that ran from 1963 to 2001. Within the Neighborhood that Rogers created, there was a Neighborhood of Make-Believe in which characters would devise each opera together, discussing roles and plot in a collaborative process that helped them deal with life problems. “It was a community ritual,” said Ides, “an expression of communitas, which Victor Turner describes as a period that’s in a kind of no-time, where everyone’s roles, necessary for a community to run, get thrown up in the air and switched around. It’s not so much non-hierarchical as anti-hierarchal — the body of the community becomes inhospitable to hierarchical roles. And the audience is invited to enter into the ritual.” Operas in the Neighborhood revolved around themes as various as bubbles, jealousy, and seat belts.

For her group projects, Ides provides a skeletal structure, sometimes a topic, usually a few simple rules. I was involved in last summer’s “Almost-Although,” where participants took turns leading a daily “Composition,” an exercise that might involve movement, translation, mapping, radio broadcasting, or any other medium the leader wished to explore. Ides incorporated her interest in roles, encouraging each person to adopt three roles from a list she provided: actor, interviewer, teacher, archivist, for example. The exercises were playful, the outcomes fresh, and bonds were formed among the participants.

I led two Compositions, a metaphysical nature walk and an ancestor workshop. Both ventures have had subsequent incarnations in other venues, such as “festival of fundraising rituals” for Ides, who needed the cash after renting the retreat cabins, since she did not charge the attendees. In fact, although tickets to her recent opera-within-the-opera were available for purchase, she is reluctant to charge for any of the group work because she doesn’t want the form of collaboration to be constrained by financial considerations.

“How do people feel really free to create when there’s the bottom line?” she asked. “I’m against commodifying people’s input.” To help figure out how to pay the bills, she’s established an advisory board and formed an organization, Doors Unlimited, with the tag line “a center for investigative operatics.” The board is helping her apply for grants and brainstorming other money-making ideas, most of which Ides resists. “I don’t want to ignore money — that’s silly,” she sighed. “But I do want to use the fact that money is a problem to invent as many ways as possible to work with that problem. Or work against the problem. Our festival of fundraising rituals was built to be the most ineffective fundraiser of all time, and it succeeded. We made $222.28.”

This summer she wants to hold another kind of retreat, hosting two or three week-long sessions at which a dozen people will live and work together in a think-tank atmosphere. Ides envisions a mix of thinkers and makers representing a wide range of ages. She hopes that use of a site, or more than one site, will be donated.

Ides is keeping her day job, teaching at colleges, but she doesn’t see why being the catalyst for group process shouldn’t be her main occupation. “It’s not making money,” she observed, “but it’s what I want to be accountable for. Being a mother doesn’t make any money either.”

Meanwhile, upstate residents are welcome to attend the weekly potlucks at Bloomington, where brainstorming sessions for Deathbeds continue in the living room, which is strewn with art supplies, knickknacks, bird cages, books, and other tools of Ides’ quirky trade. Inquiries are welcome and should be directed to limitless.openings@gmail.com.

Martha Frankel welcomes the writers. (photo by Dion Ogust)

As usual, the Woodstock Writers Festival begins its sixth year with the ever-popular story slam competition on the evening of Thursday, March 19, and ends on Sunday, March 22, with the signature panel Memoir-A-Go-Go, reflecting organizer Martha Frankel’s passion for the form. In between, an assortment of workshops, panels, readings, and interviews feature published writers of all kinds, including Chris Stein of the pop group “Blondie,” novelist Jane Smiley, memoirist Abigail Thomas, and many more.

Bestselling novelist and Woodstock resident Gail Godwin will participate in the panel “Tales of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated: Publishing is Alive,” scheduled for Saturday March 20, 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts. Publishing professionals and authors will discuss how technology has altered the business in recent years, why it persists despite incursions from self-publishing, and tips on what it takes to get published in the modern world.

The long view will come from Godwin, whose book Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir (Bloomsbury, January 2015) discusses her nearly five decades of authorship, mapping the changes in publishing and relating stories of her teachers and colleagues, including Kurt Vonnegut and John Irving. At the other end of the career spectrum, thriller writer Jenny Milchman will talk about her own drive to be published, and how she succeeded after eleven years of determined struggle. Top editor Nan Gatewood Satter will moderate the panel, which also includes Mary Cummings, vice president and editorial director of digital publisher Diversion Books; Sara Carder, editorial director of the Penguin Random House imprint Jeremy P. Tarcher; and literary agent Ned Leavitt.

When asked if she’s nostalgic for the old days of publishing, Godwin, author of such literary novels as The Good Husband, Unfinished Desires, and Evensong, replied, “I’m not nostalgic, but I do feel relieved that I was as fortunate as I was under the circumstances. I’m not sure, given the kind of work I do, and the kind of introverted personality I have, that I could have done as well in this environment.”

The challenge of the modern world for writers, she feels, is how to balance between the private time needed for writing and the demands of building an Internet presence. While Godwin is not on Twitter or Facebook, she does have a website to interface with readers. “How much time do I give to the excess of information out there,” she mused, “and how much to absolutely honorable, frightening solitude? I think it was John Updike who said if he knew he had to go to the dentist in a week, he was building toward that, and it was affecting his work. I’m building toward this panel, which I think is going to be best panel I’ve ever been on.”

Godwin praised Satter, who she said is well-prepared and has “put on paper for us what our best gifts are to give to an audience. I’m the wise old grey eminence, and I’m going to talk about the element of fear in today’s publishing, which I write about in my book.”

Her advice to aspiring authors is to put the emphasis on the writing. “There are so many people out there who want to write, who write little blogs about wanting to write. But if you care about writing and think it’s your vocation, you do that first, then you go out and seek an audience. That quiet, deep time is so important. Go for that deep, deep well.”

Godwin’s first publication came through Knopf scouts who visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1958, looking for new talent, when she was a student there. A sharply contrasting route to publication greeted Milchman, whose third thriller, As Night Falls, will be out from Random House in June. Despite the temptation to bypass the gatekeepers and print her own books, Milchman pursued legacy publishing for eleven years without making a penny. “Why did I do that?” she asked. “If traditional publishing is not as good as the new shiny alternative, if it’s a dying industry, why would I stay in it so long if there’s another option? Granted, there are problems, but there’s wisdom accumulated in the publishing industry. We throw that away at our peril.”

Leavitt, who will provide the agent’s perspective, looks forward to a panel that will give an overview of the business. “Some of the panelists represent the old guard who know the history of publishing,” he said. “Our experiences are parallel in terms of the people we knew in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, before Amazon and digital books.” He’s interested in the contrast to be provided by Milchman, who is “attuned to opportunities that exist for her and for writers who might not make it to traditional publishers. Everyone would like to go the traditional route, but you have some people who are pretty vociferous about other opportunities.”

As an agent, he welcomes the alternatives. “It’s a relief to know that if I can’t place a book, I can say to the author that there’s another option that’s realistically priced.”

The Woodstock Writers Festival will be held Thursday, March 18, through Sunday, March 22. Most panels will take place at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock, while workshops, parties, and a breakfast discussion will occur elsewhere. For a complete schedule of events, locations, and tickets, see http://www.woodstockwriters.com.

Biography panel at Woodstock Writers Festival. (photo by Dion Ogust)

No individual could attend every single one of the workshops, panels, interviews, and parties at last weekend’s sixth annual Woodstock Writers Festival — except possibly indefatigable festival organizer Martha Frankel, who keeps close tabs on every aspect of her baby. I made it to five events, not including the Story Slam competition, which was won by talented local writer Desirée O’Clair, with Kathleen Harris and Verna Gillis coming in second and third.

Following are memorable quotes from the panels and interviews I witnessed.

Will Hermes of Rolling Stone talked with musician and photographer Chris Stein, a founding member of the pop band Blondie. With photos projected overhead from Stein’s new book about the New York City scene of the late 1970s and the creation of the Debbie Harry persona, Stein reminisced about famous people he knew.

Stein, looking at a photo of Debbie with sleek punk rocker Joan Jett: Some girls have been recreating this photo on Instagram.

Hermes: You were friends with William Burroughs, right?

Stein: Yes, Bill and I were very close. We were both on methadone at the same time.

The panel on the state of publishing today featured industry pros and two writers. Bestselling author Gail Godwin read a passage from her new book Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir, discussing how publishing changed when corporations bought the companies from their book-loving founders and successors.

Literary agent Ned Leavitt: When I was a young editor at Simon & Schuster, it was bought by Gulf + Western. We called them Engulf + Devour.

Godwin: My book Unfinished Dreams was originally called The Red Nun. The publisher didn’t like it. Too many people had grown up being hit with rulers by nuns.

Sara Carder, a Penguin Random House editor, on making acquisition decisions: All I have is my intuition. I look at what comes in, commit to my authors, and hope I can support them. The relationship between editors and authors is sacred.

Jenny Milchman, who pitched eight thrillers over eleven years before getting a contract with Random House, and then spent eleven months on the road doing readings: I walked this close to trying to do something nimble and creative, make a micropress and print my books through Lightning Source. But without an advance, I would’ve had to mortgage my house to do my book tour.

Mary Cummings of Diversion Books, an up-and-coming digital publisher: Writers get overwhelmed about being on social media to promote their books. We tell them, “Play to your strengths. Do what you’re already doing, just do it a little more.”

On the fiction panel, authors discussed what made them writers.

Poet and thriller writer Stephen Dobyns: I’ve always said that writing is a type of functional madness. You sit staring at a typewriter, later a screen, writing something down, and reading it over and over and over. As Joseph Heller used to say, “I go to the beach, and I look around, and I wonder — why aren’t all these people at home working on their novels?”

Ann Hood, author of six novels and a memoir: From the age of four, I wanted to live inside a book. I was an English major in college, so when I graduated, I became a stewardess. I went straight from TWA to being a writer. My mother used to send me applications to work at the Post Office, even after I had written several books. At the Post Office, you get a pension and 30 days’ vacation.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley, who has just completed a trilogy: I gave each of my characters a temperament and sent them out in the world. I played God — I gave them free will. I fell in love and argued with them. Now I’m done with them. I need to go torture some other characters.

WAMC radio personality Joe Donahue interviewed Abigail Thomas, whose memoir What Happens Next and How to Like It was just named Book of the Week by People Magazine.

Thomas: When you’re writing memoir, you have to figure out what story you’re telling and leave out what will distract from the story. [Otherwise] you’ll have a broth with tusks sticking out of it.

Donahue: In the book, you talk about boredom. You say you were bored reading On the Road.

Thomas: Kerouac sent his laundry home to his mother. What is this On the Road shit? There’s no irony anywhere in the book. It was the fifties. When did irony get born?

Donahue: The Reagan Administration. Here was a guy who acted with a chimp and then became President.

Thomas, in answer to an audience member’s question about writer’s block: Not being able to write is like being a cat whose whiskers have been cut off. You can’t feel where you are.

At the festival’s closing event, a memoir panel, Martha Frankel gave advice on how to recover memories: Describe a color or a smell or a taste. The word “meatloaf” can lead into 20 pages.

Paul Butterfield

On April 18, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, finally gaining a posterity that’s long overdue, according to the leader’s son, Gabriel Butterfield. “I’ve been fighting for it for a long time,” said Gabe, who was born in Chicago and was four years old when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band played the Woodstock Festival. “I’ve been back and forth with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, educating people about the pinnacle my dad played in music history.” Gabe and his wife, Elizabeth, who both reside in Woodstock, will fly out to Cleveland, and among the film clips they will screen in the ceremony is TV footage from the 1986 induction of Muddy Waters. Waters was introduced by Paul Butterfield — a piece of celluloid history that points to the seminal role played by Butterfield in popularizing the Chicago blues and integrating the music into rock and roll. This occurred both through the electric blues of his band, which became a major force in rock music, and his own blistering harmonica playing, a quintessential ingredient. Through that came the subsequent resurrection of careers of the great bluesmen of Chicago, some of whom played with him.

“There’s not a blues book that talks about a black artist that doesn’t mention Paul Butterfield,” said Gabe. “When B.B. King went onto Johnny Carson, he said ‘if were not for Paul Butterfield, I wouldn’t be here today.’ Blues writer Dick Waterman said that basically what your father did was he bridged the gap.”

Paul Butterfield, who resided in Woodstock in the 1970s and early 1980s, was born and raised in the Hyde Park area of Chicago and studied flute before hanging out in clubs on the South Side of Chicago and getting hooked on the blues. As recounted in John Milward’s book Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ‘N’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues), Butterfield and his two musician friends Nick Gravenites and Elvin Bishop, fellow students at the University of Chicago, became converts to the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and other blues greats just as the popularity of the blues was fading among black audiences. The young musicians began playing in the clubs, attracting whites as well as blacks, and when the Paul Butterfield Blues Band was formed, it featured Sam Lay on drums and Jerome Arnold on bass, both of whom had played with Howlin’ Wolf; it was the first integrated blues band. In 1965, after guitarist Mike Bloomfield joined the band, it produced its eponymously titled first record, and from the first groove Butterfield’s harp blew into the signature tune, “Born in Chicago,” they were off and running, delivering, as Milward describes it, an “exhilarating shot of Chicago blues with solo space filled by Butterfield’s full-bodied harmonica and Bloomfield’s soulfully shamanist guitar.”

The band was a headliner at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, and its electric blues — a festival first — so mesmerized another headliner, Bob Dylan, that he recruited the band (without Butterfield) to back him in the electrified performance that changed folk-rock history. The “virtuosic instrumental jams” of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s second album, East-West, recorded the next year, was also influential, inspiring young musicians to pick up and move forward with the seemingly ancient ageless fury of the music.

Butterfield spent much of his life on the road performing, eventually expanding the horn section of his band. In 1967, after Bloomfield had left the band, he recorded The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, another seminal work, using Bugsy Maugh on bass, Phil Wilson on drims, Gene Dinwiddie on tenor sax, David Sanborn on alto sax and Keith Johnson on trumpet, along with Bishop on guitar and original member Mark Naftalin on Keyboards. That was followed by another record, In My Own Dream, both albums moving toward R&B and paving the way for horns in the rock world.

In the early 1970s, he settled in Woodstock, after, as with so many others, being brought to the area by his manager Albert Grossman. Butterfield’s relationship with Grossman dated back to his days in Chicago, where Grossman, formerly a steel worker, owned a bar, according to Gabe. “Albert got him to leave Electra (Records) in 1970 and he signed with Bearsville Records in 1971,” he said. The Butterfield Band played at the Woodstock Festival — they were featured on the album, though not in the film.

Paul Butterfield formed another band, Better Days, and after it broke up, toured with Rick Danko. He did many recording sessions, including playing harmonica on Muddy Waters Woodstock Album, orchestrated by Levon Helm in his barn, and he also performed in The Last Waltz, the celebratory concert of The Band’s last performance filmed by Martin Scorsese. He moved to California in 1984, cut his last record in 1986, and died of peritonitis at age 44 in 1987.

To further ensure his father’s legacy, Gabriel is also working on a film about Paul Butterfield. He’s been collecting interviews and stories since 2004, and having enlisted Emmy Award winning filmmaker John Anderson onto the project, is confident it will be finished this fall. The film, which will include footage never before seen, is the first authorized biopic of Butterfield. It will shed light on his formation as an artist, chronicling his “creative and intense” side as a teenager, said Gabe. Paul’s flute playing helped him develop the “circular breathing” technique that enabled him to sustain a note, according to Gabe. At age 14, “he was sneaking down to the clubs with my mother.” Once he discovered the harmonica, his devotion to the instrument was total: “He used to go out on Promontory Point” — a point of land protruding into Lake Michigan — “and play every day.”

Gabriel, who grew up in Seattle, spent some time on the road with his father when he was a teenager. “I learned how to sleep at Winterland behind an amp in front of 8,000 people,” he said, referring to Bill Graham’s famous San Francisco concert hall. Music has always been in his blood — he plays the drums — and to raise money for the film, three years ago he put together a tribute concert at the Bearsville Theater featuring songs of his father performed by a band organized by Conan O’Brien sidekick Jimmy Vivino and including numerous local players, many of whom had played with Paul back in the day.

While living with him in Woodstock, Gabe recalls how his father and fellow musicians would come home wired after a show and take up instruments lying around the house and play. “Before my father died he planned to put the family band together and was working on a European tour,” he said. “He was excited about it.” And though Butterfield was known as being somewhat aloof, totally absorbed in his music, “he was a very good dad and very protective. When he was around my brother and me, he loved us really nice.”

Shauna Kanter (photo by Dion Ogust)

Renovations have begun on Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Theater, thanks to a private donation made to Shauna Kanter’s VOICETheatre company, which is looking forward to using the building as its upstate base, but to also be shared with other performance groups. The addition of air conditioning, heat, and insulation will make the small theater comfortable in summer and extend its use to spring and fall seasons for the first time since it was built as part of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, over a century ago.

“This was a generous donation,” said Jeremy Adams, executive director of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, which owns and administers the Byrdcliffe properties. Although he declined to disclose the amount of the gift, he called it “pretty significant for an organization of our size. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse. There will be so much more opportunity for local theater troupes and other community events.”

The opportunity is key for VOICETheatre, which was founded in 1988 and has toured extensively in the U.S., France, Germany, Palestine, Israel, and the U.K., performing a range of plays, from classics to cutting-edge pieces written and directed by Kanter, often with political themes. In recent years, the economics of New York City theater had relegated the company’s regional performances to a series of venues in Woodstock and a church basement in the West Village. Last year, the church decided it would no longer host theater, and Kanter told one of her donors in Woodstock how upset she was to lose the space.

The woman suggested basing her company at Byrcliffe, where the group had performed previously, but Kanter explained that the lack of heat in the building limited its use to the summer. “We can fix that,” the anonymous donor replied, and the renovation strategy was launched.

When other fans found out about the project, said Kanter, “They came on board without my even asking. They said, ‘I will give you money. I want to see this happen.’ It was a tumbleweed experience — when you have some success, others recognize the momentum.”

It took eight months of negotiation for VOICETheatre and the Woodstock Guild to hammer out an agreement on their collaboration. The Guild still owns the building and plans to make it available for use from April through December, shutting down in the winter months when maintenance expenses are high and audiences scanty. Kanter praised Adams for having the vision to see the project through. “A lot of people would’ve said it’s too difficult, and would’ve given up, but he was right there with me.”

The Guild is taking the opportunity to make needed repairs. Along with the stage and seating area, the stage-left dressing room will be insulated, heated, and air conditioned. Adjustments at the rear of the performance area will allow actors to cross backstage without having to go outside the theater. Now that the two organizations are in partnership, they plan to apply for funds to make further changes next year, weatherizing the lobby and the stage-right dressing room as well.

Having a solid base will enable VOICETheatre to gradually expand its local offerings. This summer, there will be only one production, Our Country’s Good, based on a Thomas Keneally novel about a play performed by prisoners in one of the first penal colonies in Australia. The show opens in July. Committed, as ever, to educational outreach, Kanter is setting up scene-based workshops in local schools to address the problem of bullying.

A three-week theater camp for high school students is planned for next summer. Despite local opportunities for children and teens to perform at New York Conservatory for the Arts, Paul Green Rock Academy, and the New Genesis Productions Shakespeare program, Kanter finds a gap. “There are kids who want to act but don’t want to do musicals, rock, or Shakespeare, and there are kids whose families don’t have the money for those great offerings. We’re going to offer scholarships.”

Next year, Kanter hopes to produce two plays, and three the following year. She looks forward to doing her spring reading series at the theater instead of having to seek other venues. Other performance companies will still have access, and the Guild is working on a strategic plan that may include implementing its own programming in the space, said Adams.

This summer, the lobby will display memorabilia from the different theater, dance, and opera companies that have performed at Byrdcliffe. “So far we have lots from River Arts,” said Kanter. “More is welcome. We want to include posters, props, photos, pieces of scenery that folks have saved from previous shows. All are welcome to be included.” The exhibit is being curated by artist Any Cote. In the future, Kanter hopes local artists will curate exhibits that visually illustrate the themes of the productions.

Musing on the service the renovated theater will provide, Kanter said, “I grew up in the theater. My dad worked on Broadway many times. I trained as an actor, then started directing. What’s happened is that I’ve been pushed out of New York City. It’s happened to thousands of people. You can stay in the city and have a home, but it’s got to be in a church basement.” She recalled the days where there were 50 shows on Broadway each year, in theaters that have been torn down and replaced with Starbucks or clothing boutiques. “At one time, the city was the only place to be if you were going to work in the theater. Now, because of the economic reality, I see that for my students there, most of their energy goes into paying the rent. By 40 or 45, if you haven’t made it big, life is extremely difficult. Woodstock has come up with the answer.”

Being based upstate, Kanter believes, will also enhance the quality of theatrical work. Instead of two or three weeks of rehearsal, she will be able to afford five weeks. She will also be able to hire Equity actors from New York City and the local area, as well as paying some non-Equity actors. She remarked, “This change is big for us.”

With actors coming up from New York City to perform, hosts are being sought to house performers for a night or two during the theatrical season. To offer a room, to provide material for the historical Byrdcliffe Theater exhibit, or to make a donation to next year’s renovation fund, contact Shauna Kanter at skantervt@yahoo.com. For more information on VOICETheatre, see http://www.voicetheatre.org. To learn more about the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, visit http://www.woodstockguild.org.