The seventh annual Woodstock Writers Festival opens April 7 with the traditional Thursday night Story Slam, at the Woodstock Music Lab, and proceeds through the afternoon of Sunday, April 10, presenting an assortment of panels, parties, and discussions of the art and business of writing — with plenty of food for thought for readers as well as writers. Friday’s all-day intensive workshops  at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, are followed by the 8 p.m. “Recovery” panel back at the Zena Road Woodstock Music Lab, featuring authors of books that recount hard-earned victories over addiction.

The weekend includes panels on poetry, spirituality, biography, fiction, memoir, and a Saturday night interview with keynote speaker Nancy Jo Sales, author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (Knopf, 2016), an eye-opening account of the social challenges modern girls are facing. Saturday at 4 p.m., the music panel highlights the role of Woodstock in the history of rock music. WDST radio program director Jimmy Buff will lead a discussion with authors Barney Hoskyns, Holly George-Warren, Warren Zanes, and photographer Elliott Landy.

Hoskyns, a British music journalist who has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo, Melody Maker, Spin, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other magazines, is now editor of “Rock’s Backpages,” an online library of pop writing and journalism. He is also the author of a couple dozen books, including the recently released Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock (Da Capo, 2016). He discussed his new book in a phone interview, speaking from his home in London.

No stranger to Woodstock, Hoskyns first came to town in 1991, when he was researching a book on The Band. He liked the vibe so much, he returned in 1996 and lived here for three years. In the process of writing about Todd Rundgren, Tim Hardin, Karen Dalton, and others, said Hoskyns, “I began to get a deeper sense of the Woodstock story. The more stuff there was on the ‘69 festival, the more impetus I had to do justice to something that lasted much longer and involved more people.” He credits Paul Smart’s Rock and Woodstock (Purple Mountain Press, 1994) with planting the seed for Small Town Talk.

Hoskyns has a fascination with scenes, such as the proliferation of musicians in Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, the subject of his 2008 book Hotel California. “I love the idea of special places at special times and why they attract people and what it means that all these people wind up there,” he remarked. “In the case of Woodstock, it was just the right place at the right time. Because of its heritage and history as a country town that was tolerant of non-conformists and bohemians, it served as the perfect place for, above all, Bob Dylan to get away to.”

Dylan was happy to find a place where the locals didn’t know who he was, and he could sit in the Café Espresso without being hassled. Although Hoskyns managed to speak with Van Morrison, he didn’t make much effort to get an interview with Dylan, knowing the megastar was probably out of reach. “I’d be interested to know if he reads the book,” mused Hoskyns. “In some respects, he doesn’t come out of it too well. I’m not someone who thinks Dylan is God, but he’s absolutely fascinating, and he wrote wonderful music there. He was, for a time, happy in Woodstock. He found what he was looking for, a place to raise a family. One thing you can say, he’s been a good dad.”

Hoskyns believes Woodstock saved Dylan’s life. “He was in mortal danger at the time of the motorcycle accident, whatever exactly that was. He was able to put the brakes on, literally — slow down, piece his life back together. Growing up, taking responsibility for his children — that was all important stuff in connection with Woodstock.”

Starmaker Albert Grossman has a major role in the book, which highlights his 22-year reign at the studio and theater complex in Bearsville. Most entertainment managers of that period would have had a country place in the Hamptons, but Hoskyns pointed out, “Albert was not a conventional show biz manager. He was as hip as his artists, or wanted to be — with his long hair, he was not going to the Hamptons. When Milton Glaser turned him onto this estate in Bearsville, it appealed to Albert to be in a place that was pretty left-field, full of crazy artists, some writers, actors, like Lee Marvin.”

Hoskyns finds Grossman an enigmatic character. “He intimidated people by being silent. Maybe we credit Albert with more wiles than we should. He was also shy. Maybe he couldn’t think of anything to say. It’s not unlikely that his silence was interpreted as a bargaining weapon, and he began to realize he could get what he wanted by sitting there and glowering from the other side of the desk.”

The author came to Woodstock in the fall of 2013 to conduct interviews for the book, which includes written snapshots of the current scene, tracing the effects of the ‘60s on present-day musicians. When asked why we’re still mesmerized by Dylan and The Band, Hoskyns replied, “Because the music is so extraordinary and so unique. It really does stand up as a body of work. Out of the association with Dylan, The Band was able to find their own voice and create music that influenced so many people. In terms of pop culture, people like me have looked to Woodstock as a magical place that gave birth to this music. That may be mythology — Van Morrison said so — but his album Moondance is entwined with Woodstock, to me. There’s a woodsy, organic, earthy soulful flavor to so much of this music.”

Hoskyns was looking forward to returning to town for the writers festival, although he knows not everyone in Woodstock will like some of his portraits of complex personalities, Grossman’s included. “I know some people whose feathers have been ruffled by the book,” he said. “I didn’t set out to hurt anyone’s feelings, but there’s a dark side to the Woodstock story — there’s no use pretending.”

The Woodstock Writers Festival will be held April 7-10. Daytime events will be at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 34 Tinker Street, Woodstock. Evening sessions will be held at the Woodstock Music Lab, 1700 Sawkill Road, Kingston, 4 miles east of Woodstock. For tickets, schedules, and details, see http://www.woodstockwriters.com.

It was Frank Zappa who, when asked to define rock journalism, replied that it was perpetrated by “people who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t speak, for people who can’t read.” Happily, the first third of that definition does not apply to Barney Hoskyns, an Oxford grad who has been investigating rock, pop, folk, soul, and country music, along with their myriad subgenres, crossovers, and double-crossovers, since the 1980s, for such eminent publications as The Guardian, British Vogue, Rolling Stone,

Harper’s Bazaar, and The Times (of London, not Woodstock). He has also penned, if we are still permitted to use that verb in the digital age, well-received books about James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Tom Waits, Led Zep, and The Band, among many other cultural nonpareils. His latest book, about a Catskills hamlet affectionately known to many of us as “the graveyard of living legends,” is currently obtainable at The Golden Notebook, and will most likely be discussed by Hoskyns and his fellow music panelists at the Woodstock Writers Festival on Saturday, April 9 (see accompanying story).

Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock — the first three words (taken from the eponymous song by Bobby Charles) promise gossip, dish, dirty laundry, and shaggy drug stories. The book does not stint on that score, but even the most deliciously nasty anecdotes are related without a trace of malicious glee on the part of the author. On the contrary: Hoskyns has spoken to, or spoken to those who have spoken to, almost everyone who was a player, large or small, on the cosmic-bucolic stage of Woodstock, and his affection for them all is on a par with his scholarship and his love and respect for the music and art they created. Even though much of the material here is old headband, having been treated before by other writers (and by Hoskyns himself), what’s really valuable about Small Town Talk is the way the author has tied the disparate strands together and braided them into a single, intimate, extensively researched, and color-splattered narrative, one that manages to enflesh the legends by giving us the quotidian reality behind them.

For those of us who have been captured by what Elliott Landy calls the “Venus flytrap” that is Woodstock, and have subsequently spent a good chunk of our lives in its meshes, Hoskyns’ book reintroduces us to old friends, long gone or still surviving, on almost every page. Here we find the recently deceased Billy Faier, whose banjo playing once captivated Jack Kerouac, booking the first folk acts for the Cafe Espresso (or Expresso, if you prefer) in the early sixties. Here is Ellen McIlwaine, her mighty pipes bringing down the outdoor house at one of the Sound-Outs (page 108; omitted from the index). And here, in a rather sad cameo, is my old pal, the “scurrilous” Mason Hoffenberg, coauthor (sometimes credited, sometimes not) of the naughty novel Candy, living in alcoholic codependence with The Band’s Richard Manuel in “a house strewn with dog feces.” In fact, so many folks make at least a passing appearance that it comes as a surprise when someone isn’t mentioned — e.g., George Bellows and Philip Guston are noted, but not Milton Avery or Mary Frank; Henry Cowell gets a nod, but not Robert Starer or Peter Schickele.

The binary star around which all these eccentric geniuses, fabled bohemians, and “messed-up children with no direction home” revolve is Albert Grossman and Bob Dylan. If ever two spheres of influence were fated to collide, it was the mysterious young artist from Minnesota and his savvy, ruthless manager. Small Town Talk, the author states in the prologue, is essentially the story of what transpired after Albert and Sally Grossman came to town, and what further transpired after Dylan, Albert’s biggest meal-ticket, followed them up from the city and was ensconced in a cabin owned by the mother of Peter Yarrow (who, with his songmates Paul Stookey and Mary Travers, was also a client of Grossman). How the presence of Dylan and the ambitions of Grossman begat the international music scene that still flourishes in the shadow of Overlook Mountain forms the backbone of Hoskyns’ narrative; it is by far the most in-depth account of the subject that we have had to date.

Hoskyns offers testimony from multiple sources to paint a very nuanced portrait of the two titans and their fraught relationship. We get the good Albert, the one who shared a  “warmth and a delight and a joy and a sense of humor” with his artists, according to Yarrow — and the one whose vision could discern the fully evolved Bob Dylan in the fledgling folk singer Bobby Zimmerman, and who had the wherewithal to hasten that evolution. “There are those who say Albert took advantage of people,” says Yarrow. “I see that as absolutely unfair and inappropriate…I also have very serious questions as to whether Bobby would have emerged as an artist without Albert.”

And then we get the bad Albert — a latter-day Mephistopheles, signing talent to “Faustian pacts,” or secluding them and fostering a near-total dependency on him. “I’m not that much a fan of Albert,” says Ed Sanders, founding Fug and Woodstock’s official poet laureate, “because too many of his artists were junkies, and I think it’s possible he used their addiction as a way of controlling them.” Odetta, in a quote taken from an obituary of her former manager, says that “at one point in my life I could not hear [Grossman’s] name without the hairs on my back standing up.” And a former business associate was so embittered about his years with Grossman as to actually piss on Albert’s grave.

The truth, as always, is never monochromatic. Albert Grossman was an extremely complex character, as is the Bob Dylan of umpteen personas. Regarding their knotty bond, perhaps the “outlaw journalist” Al Aronowitz put it best: “A lot of Albert did in fact turn up in Bob…If I never got a straight answer out of Bob, I never got one out of Albert either. [They] weren’t cut from the same cloth but from the same stone wall.” As Hoskyns demonstrates, and as posterity confirms, despite the bad blood that eventually infected them, each owed the other a great deal.

Although the heart of Hoskyns’ narrative is the love-hate relationship between Dylan and the Baron of Bearsville, Grossman’s other clients — The Band, Janis Joplin, and Paul Butterfield, among them — get ample space, as do the myriad artists drawn to town by Dylan’s nearness and the old art colony’s new mystique. There are minutely detailed accounts on the time spent in Woodstock by Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Tim Hardin,      et al. There is a nuts-and-bolts history of the genesis of the Bearsville resaturant-and-recording studio complex, and an excellent chapter devoted to the uber-idiosyncratic Todd Rundgren, who once told Johanna Hall that the solution to the problem of nuclear waste is to “just shoot it into outer space!” The book concludes with the death of Levon Helm, in 2012, and the tribute paid to him by more than 2,000 attendees at his funeral and by the New York State Legislature renaming Route 375 the Levon Helm Memorial Boulevard — a sign that the spirit of Woodstock’s vibrant music scene, though greatly diminished over the years, still informs the town and its surrounding mountains in the third millennium.

If the book goes into a second printing, it would be nice to see the index, which is often unreliable, get a do-over. And as scrupulous as Hoskyns is, there are many nagging little factual errors to be corrected — e.g., Helm and Rick Danko are not buried in the Artists Cemetery, but in the hamlet’s main cemetery across the street; the “Getaway Lounge” was actually the Getaway Inn; and that prior to coming to town, Chris Zaloom, known locally as Woodstock’s “greatest unknown guitarist,” did not live in a “cold-water flat on the Bowery,” as Hoskyns’ source relates, but on Elizabeth Street, where he and Carol had a nice apartment with hot and cold running water, thank you.

But this is nit-pickery. Simply put, Barney Hoskyns has written the definitive history of Woodstock’s emergence as a world-renowned musical Mecca. Small Town Talk establishes him as the Alf Evers of the town’s pre- and post-festival music scene, and I can think of no higher compliment.

Though the arts-driven culture of Woodstock lends itself to large projects, inspiration for the creation of a mural that is representative of the spirit of Woodstock, set to occupy the eastern and southern walls of Houst, visible from the well-traveled parking lot behind the building, originated far from upstate New York.

Houst & Son Hardware is teaming up with Kathy Anderson and the School for Young Artists in this new artistic endeavor. Plans are in the works for the large mural, a project that is designed showcase the vast creative abilities of the community.

According to Kathy Anderson, who is overseeing the project, the idea came from Jody Bryan, owner of Houst. “She and her husband had gone to Denver, and in this park they have these incredible murals. Jody was taken by the whole effect of the murals and how they were so representative of the community.” Bryan returned, knowing she wanted to bring this same concept to Woodstock.

Specific ideas began to emerge when Anderson and Bryan held a brainstorming meeting, calling on community members to discuss what they would like to see the mural portray visually, as well as thematically. Attendees of the meeting, ranging from children to adults and artists to business owners, unanimously agreed on the image of a tree to represent the town. This tree, based on an ancient one located in Magic Meadow, would also act as a mind map: “The trunk would represent Woodstock and the big branches coming off would represent the larger categories in our community, like the arts. Then the arts would have branches off of there that would be music, theater, dance, poetry, writing, and visual arts,” said Anderson. Other branches could include topics like religion and the natural world, with the tree’s roots representing the town’s rich cultural history.

This concept is taken still further by considering the array of possibilities presented by community involvement. The painting of the tree is only the first phase: it will then be divided into a grid, and community members “can create an image that will fit with the bigger image in terms of light and dark, and at the same time, they can add color. They can have their own unique spot on the tree on whatever branch they identify with,” said Anderson. When the different prints are added onto the wall, the tree will still be visible underneath the personalized creations.

Finally, there is the technological phase. QR codes — similar to barcodes in that one may scan them to be linked to additional digital information — will be added to the building. “If you want to know what an image is about, you hold up your phone to the QR, go to the website, and you’ll be able to find whatever information that contributor wants to have about their particular image,” said Anderson.

This project, if approved by the Town of Woodstock and the Commission for Civic Design (CCD), will move swiftly forward. Though Anderson explained that there would not be a deadline, her vision is to “get this done before it gets too cold again.” Bryan and Anderson are also hopeful that the community will come together to cover the cost of the mural. Much of the money will be generated by contributors making their stamps on the tree, but there are also plans to create a Kickstarter campaign. “Houst is going to provide the scaffolding and prime the walls so that we can do the painting,” added Anderson.

Despite the detailed plans for the execution of the mural, there is still one key component missing: the image of the tree. This is why Anderson will be hosting an Artist’s Enclave on Sunday, April 17 at 1 p.m. at the School for Young Artists. She requests that attendees bring along photographs or sketches of trees to submit.

Just as the mural is essentially a tribute to the Woodstock community, Anderson and Bryan want the process to be equally driven by Woodstockers. They will be looking for volunteers to help with the painting, as well as other phases of the project. The students at the School for Young Artists will also aid with the painting, and Anderson urges other youth in the community to get involved: “The whole thrust of this is that it’s an expression of community.”

If you would like to receive updates on the progress of the Houst mural project, email schoolforyoungartists@gmail.com. Kathy Anderson’s Artist’s Enclave will be located at 31 Wittenberg Road in Bearsville.

Cindy Cashdollar (photo by Dion Ogust)

Cindy Cashdollar grew up in Woodstock. It’s an old local name. Her great-uncle Albert Cashdollar was town supervisor, 1932-1943, and the family ran Locust Grove Dairy.

She played Dobro with everyone in town during the 1970s and 80s, and we all watched, awestruck, as her talent swiftly grew, along with the demand for her sublime musical touch. After touring with the John Herald Band, her restless musical quest took her to Nashville in 1992 and then, a few months later to Austin, where she expanded her instrumental prowess to steel and lap steel guitars and performed on the road with the Western Swing band Asleep at the Wheel for more than eight years. Afterward, the names of those who sought her out and hired her to add fire and sweetness to their music are lifted out of the record books: Ryan Adams, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Levon Helm, Dave Alvin, Rod Stewart, Albert Lee, Marcia Ball, Jorma Kaukonen, Leon Redbone, BeauSoleil, Daniel Lanois, Redd Volkaert, Peter Rowan…and on and on. A quintessential sideperson, she’s done work with Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton and The Dixie Chicks, won five Grammy Awards and was inducted into the Texas Steel Guitar Hall Of Fame in 2011 (the first female to be inducted), and The Texas Music Hall Of Fame in 2012.

About a year ago, she moved back home…

So what the hell are you doing here?

It’s so nice that I have not asked myself that since I moved back. It’s a place that you miss. When I moved to Nashville in 1992, I said what the hell am I doing here? And six months later when I moved to Austin to work with Asleep at the Wheel, there were many times I asked myself, what the hell are you doing here? But not since I moved back here.

I missed it.

Austin was getting very overcrowded, very expensive. The cool factor, the music venues, the vintage music stores, were leaving there, disappearing…Austin Vintage Guitar, some great breakfast taco trailers that I lived on every morning, gone. Priced out and knocked down. Austin Vintage guitar, the Heart of Texas Music, a wonderful amplifier repair shop, vintage clothing store it was all in a little mall, completely obliterated to make room for condo, town hall, multi-use buildings. I saw a lot of changes there since 1992.

So it’s great to be back. It’s nice to go to the market and run into people you know. Go to the post office and say hi.

Part of you had wanted to come back here, but you were afraid that you couldn’t get the work.

Well, I did love Austin after I got over the initial shock of working with Asleep at the Wheel, just assimilating to everything new.

But, yes, there was a fear of me not getting as much work here. Even with all the growth in Austin, it is still very much a live music scene. So when I was not on the road, I had a lot of studio work there, and local gigs. I played a Wednesday night residency there with the same band for five years, Johnny Nicholas and Hell Bent, at the Saxon Pub. And played there with James Hand and a lot of different acts…and the Continental Club, I played there every Saturday with Red Volkaert, played Happy Hour there when I was in town.

The one thing about moving back to Woodstock, it’s not like that, it’s too small and it does not have the thriving music scene it once did. But there’s still incredible music happening here, and wonderful studios, I’m discovering. And there’s still an airport that’s easy to get to. It’s great, it’s just different, that’s all.

Who are you playing with these days?

Well, roadwise, I did a duo tour with (slide guitar master) Sonny Landreth about a month and a half ago, and we’re doing another one in the fall. And I’ve got some dates with Dave Alvin in August…I’m doing a guitar festival, Copper Mountain Colorado, going out there myself as a guest artist to sit in with John Jorgenson’s band, and a workshop. Locally, I’ve been playing with so many great people here, Amy Helm, Zach Djininkian, Happy Traum, John Sebastian…and there’s a show on April 20 at Levon’s Barn with Amy and Brandon Morrison and Lee Falco, local people, and with friends of mine from Austin I played with in a group called Texas Guitar Women — which is Marcia Ball, and Carolyn Wonderland and Shelley King. So we’re merging it together and calling it the Woodstock Lone Stars.

And then there’s the April 16 benefit for the Woodstock School of Art with Jay Ungar, Molly Mason and Tony Trischka and others, the annual Swing and Shine, which was the very first gig I had when I moved back here last year.

And I’m doing my own CD, too. Slide Show, which came out long ago, had many different artists, and this will, too, maybe not as many. I think the only repeats are Sonny Landreth and Marcia Ball, who won’t be singing but playing piano. This one will have more original instrumentals and so far, most of the recording was done in Austin before I left. In Austin I recorded with the house band at Antone’s, the famous blues club, which I had been playing at on Monday nights. Omar Kent Dykes, of Omar and the Howlers, is doing a vocal, Derek O’Brien on guitar; Ray Benson (of Asleep at the Wheel) is on a track, and Johnny Nicholas and Hell Bent…that’s more a mixture of blues and, I hate to use the term, Americana. But it will be a variety of music I like to play on a variety of slide guitars.

So now I’m hoping to finish it up. I was on the road with Albert Lee all last summer, and the last track we recorded was with Albert Lee and the band. So now I gotta keep moving forward.

What’s the difference in the music being played in Austin these days and the music you find here, in New York?

I think Austin certainly has more, what I call the Honky Tonk scene, the Dale Watsons, Red Volkaert, playing music that would almost sound like a 1950s juke box. There just seems to be a lot more of what I would call vintage country music in Austin and blues, a lot more blues. But surprisingly, no bluegrass. I was surprised when I moved there that bluegrass was a nonexistent scene. I remember hearing and playing more bluegrass when I was here. But, you know, I think that’s the main difference.

But there are a lot more venues, so you are exposed to a wider variety of music there. I’m not saying that that music does not exist in this area, there a blues jam at the Falcon in Marlboro, and there’s the bluegrass you have at the Harmony on Thursdays…

I love playing with my brother Russell and the Lustre Kings, rockabilly and a mix of that stuff, cause it was all a hybrid, western country, rockabilly, swing, rock, it all kind of meshed together.

Did you have much of a background in that before you got to Texas?

Actually very little. I had just started dabbling on steel before I left. But what I heard at the Watering Troff before I left on those great Sunday afternoon Jamborees…that was great for country and bluegrass…there was that. And Western Swing, I’d hear the Dixie Doughboys play or Fiddle Fever. And a neighbor of mine gave me all his Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys records. So that was my so called background for Western Swing. Rockabilly, no, I hadn’t played any before I left here in 92.

Getting to Austin and working with Asleep at the Wheel for eight and a half years and other groups after that…got me more ensconced in that music.

How about approaching somebody else’s music, do you take much time to learn it?

If I can. Usually I’ll ask them if they feel comfortable sending me the tracks…I like to listen to the lyrics, see what the song is all about, or ask people, are you sending me a track that has all the instruments? Because I always think, how can I best blend with these other instruments, are they going to have a high guitar on it or a horn, or how I can complement what’s going on in that sense. Then I’ll listen to it to pick out what instrument I have in my arsenal to sound best with that certain song. So yeah, it’s nice to have the luxury to learn it beforehand and it also makes it faster, and cheaper, to overdub your part.

But there were lots of times in Austin when I’d get called, oh, we have a client, can you come by and throw some lap steel on there? And you’re walking into a situation where you haven’t heard the song, you don’t know the client. So that’s when I’d just load the car up with a bunch of different instruments, just in case.

The memoir panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. (photo by Dion Ogust)

In a weekend-long celebration of writers and readers, the seventh annual Woodstock Writers Festival saw a greater turnout than ever before. Panels were diverse, ranging in topic from poetry, music, fiction, and memoir, to discussions about addiction, recovery, and the societal effects of the digital age. There was something for everyone: music lovers and fiction readers alike found themselves among excited and receptive audiences.

For the first time, the evening events took place outside the center of town. Michael Lang and Paul Green, co-directors of the Woodstock Music Lab, lent their space to the Festival’s iconic Story Slam, as well as the Recovery panel, two cocktail parties, and a Saturday night keynote event. Martha Frankel, director of the Writers Festival, was delighted at the massive turnout at these events, which was largely due to the cafetorium — a space that functions as a cafeteria and an auditorium. “That room holds three hundred people, twice as much as the Kleinert,” she said.

Frankel attributed much of this year’s success to the inclusion of topics relevant to Woodstock and the world today. “You wake up in the morning and you read the paper. It’s all about opiate addiction. Then you get up in the morning and it’s all about the internet. I feel like that was fortuitous,” she said. Indeed, the addition of topics like drug addiction struck a chord with Woodstockers hit hard by the recent deaths of community members. “The Recovery Panel on Friday night — there were three hundred people there, and we talked about addiction and recovery in a way that we have not,” Frankel said.

Big changes lie ahead. Starting next year, the Writers Festival is changing its name to the Woodstock Book Festival. “I’ve known [the name] was wrong since the beginning,” said Frankel. “I’ll say to people, ‘Oh, you should come to the music panel, you love music,’ and they’ll say, ‘Oh no, I’m not a writer.’” Essentially, the Festival is for book lovers, and Frankel believes that the name change will bring in those who do not identify as writers, but readers.

As usual, many of the panels included legends in their specific fields. For instance, Elliot Landy, who captured iconic photographs of The Band, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and others, spoke on the Music panel, and Ed Sanders, poet, biographer, and musician, was a part of the Biography panel. Other panelists included best-selling authors, poets, and journalists, each able to offer their expertise and discuss craft, inspiration, and personal experience.

At its core, this year’s Festival was largely a study in empathy: the kind felt by humans for other humans, by readers for complex and flawed characters, or even empathy gained after a lifetime of emotional disconnection. “There is such joy here,” observed Frankel, noting that despite the sadness of certain events, what pervaded was a feeling of interconnectedness. Each panel served as a reminder that empathy and the search for understanding is what ties individuals together, and that reading and writing is, most of all, an attempt to find the humanity in everyone.

Jamie Brickhouse, Tracey Helton Mitchell and Kevin Sessums
on the recovery panel at the Woodstock Writers Festival. (photo by Dion Ogust)

With a heroin epidemic increasingly devouring the young, Woodstock Writers Festival director Martha Frankel looked for help in a Recovery Panel during this year’s 7th annual gathering.

Frankel, herself, opened up the April 8 evening with a few words about addiction and hope.

“Years ago I read Richard Price’s Clockers. He was talking about what happened in Weehawken, New Jersey when crack and cocaine came in and sort of decimated the neighborhood. One cop looked at another and he said, ‘Yeah, addiction, it’s a self-cleaning oven,’ and my heart broke because I knew what side of that equation I stood on and I stood there for a long time. And then one day I fell into the other side.”

But Frankel, a recovered addict herself, offered another side. “I think there is so much hope in our community and we don’t hear it,” she said. “All we hear about is overdoses and addiction and death and I want to say that for me there is so much hope and I want to share it.”

Frankel introduced the three panelists.

Kevin Sessums, crowned the Celebrity Journalist, always looked at life as a narrative. Kevin wrote for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and eventually ended up working for Vanity Fair where he interviewed Madonna, Hugh Jackman, Jessica Lange, Courtney Love, John Travolta and Sharon Stone. “I Left It On the Mountain: A Memoir” (St. Martin’s Press), is the story of Sessums’ descent into crystal meth addiction and wild careless sex. Growing up in Forest, Mississippi, a little town of about 3,000 people. “I was born a writer,” he wrote. “I don’t know if you are born a writer as you’re born gay or writing was something I honed early in life to survive.”

Driving a Ryder Truck at the same time he was going to Julliard, Sessums confesses, “I was both Ellie May and Jethro all rolled into one.” With Sessums’ sense of humor and charming personality, his celebrity interviews developed into friendships.

Walking the Camino De Santiago (the Way of St. James), a 500 mile walk that mirrors one of the great Christian pilgrimages through Spain, was the first step Sessums took to save his life. In “I Left It On the Mountain” he talks about the journey in Spain. “…the walk was proving to myself that I could function without drugs for a month.” But even after completing the 500 hundred mile walk Sessums used meth again the week he returned to the states. “The walk wasn’t about getting sober in the moment of the walk…as I look at the narrative arc of my life, it was the beginning of my sobriety…When you walk the Camino, you think okay, I’m going to walk over 500 miles, I’m going to do this in a month, I’m going to get to the end, I have accomplished something, and what you don’t realize, and no one tells you, is when you get to the end you realize you’ve just started the Camino.”

Sessums knew he was hitting the wall when he started injecting crystal meth and going on several binges a month lasting three or four days each. “Part of my addiction was being addicted to the redemption of being good to yourself, eating well and building yourself back up, so then you could kick the stool out from under yourself. You are not only addicted to the use of drugs, you also become addicted to the redemption of yourself. It’s a way of life.”

At one time Sessums’ friends and family were planning an intervention. “When you’re an addict it’s not about friends abandoning you it’s about you abandoning friends. It’s like you become shut off from everyone, you live in the darkness, you live the life of an addict. You don’t want to be around people.”

Sessums finally became sober four years ago in New York City and likes the long term sobriety of Alcoholics Anonymous. “I got sober in the rooms in New York City. There is a special sort of New Yorker who sits in those meetings and talks and I get a lot out of every meeting that I go to. I sit in those rooms and I say, these are my people.” The rooms saved me.” Kevin is currently working on a play based on his first book, Mississippi Sissy for the New York Theater Workshop.

Tracey Helton Mitchell’s addiction was to heroin. “I experimented with acid and smoking pot and stuff like that when I was a teenager but I didn’t get into harder drugs until I was 19 or 20.” On mainlining heroin for the first time — “I had shot pills a few times. Heroin was a little different than it is now because it was very hard to get so you had to drive to some urban center either New York, Philadelphia or Chicago to get it. My friends would drive to New York to get it so it was something that you couldn’t do very often. It was kind of like cheesecake, something that you can’t have all the time but it’s nice to have once in a while.” Helton Mitchell’s The Big Fix: Hope After Heroin (Seal Press), released last month is a poignant tale of surviving heroin addiction. “Like many Americans, my road to addiction started with a trip to a medical professional. At 17, I got my first taste of opioids after my wisdom teeth were extracted. I had a lot of friends whose parents had leftover drugs in the medicine cabinet. They would just grab them and the parents wouldn’t even notice they were gone. Then I went to heroin a year later. Those white pills, they seemed like magic. I remember all the troubles of the world slowly melting away into a pool of euphoria.”

That’s the way it always feels the first time. Addicts often chase that feeling of how it feels “the first time” for years, until death, jail or recovery. In Helton Mitchell’s case it would be eight years of hell chasing that initial feeling. “I saw some people that were loaded yesterday [in Woodstock]. I was kind of surprised down on the main drag.”

In 1999 Helton Mitchell was featured in the HBO Documentary Black Tar Heroin: The Dark End of the Street. The film depicted the lives of five young heroin addicts and how narcotics were destroying their lives. “I didn’t even realize that opioids were seriously addictive. The first time I went through withdrawal I had stayed up for four days and had a binge on morphine pills and all of a sudden I had the worst case of the flu that I ever had. I was all cramped up in the bed, sweaty, and then I had begged my friend to suffocate me and he said, ‘Bitch, you’re just kicking.’ What is kicking? I didn’t even know what it was,” she said. You’re going to be fine, her friend told her, just give it a couple more days…

Helton Mitchell quit cold turkey, a bunch of times “It just never lasted.” Helton Mitchell was always drawn back to that feeling of euphoria until she finally quit using dope in February of 1998 because of fear of dying. “Knowing that you are going to die alone in some hotel room…I had no idea at the time my parents would never know what happened to me. I would just be a Jane Doe with a toe tag or somebody would murder me.”

Getting arrested in 1998 was a blessing in disguise for Helton Mitchell. In violation of probation her plan was to ask the courts to put her into rehab instead of a prison. “The flip side of that is if there would have been treatment options available to me I would have taken them. A lot of people now get on Suboxone or residential treatment. At the time there was none of that. You either kicked at home or you went to a Methadone Clinic.”

She looks back. “Recovery is a lot of different things to a lot of different people.” She explains that you don’t necessarily get sober by what works for somebody else. “Find what works for you. Don’t necessarily do what we do. Your recovery has to be something that you take with you.”

Since her arrest Helton Mitchell has been clean for 18 years. She went from being a junkie who was “living in alleyways, eating out of dumpsters and shooting up in the soles of my feet, living like a feral animal,” to being a loving wife and mother of three children living happily in San Francisco. Helton Mitchell continues to travel and lecture about her recovery and keeps a recovery blog where she answers questions regularly. She also runs a Naloxone Program out of her house that has saved one 171 lives to date. She earned her Bachelors of Business Administration and Masters of Public Administration, by entering school through the ex-offender’s program. She is also a Certified Addiction Specialist and Supervisor as well as the Treasurer of her local PTA.

Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex and my Mother, (St. Martin’s Press), is Jamie Brickhouse’s chronicle on his recovery. “I didn’t write a self-help book; I wrote a self-hurt book that ends hopefully. I certainly knew that this was the kind of book that could help people but that is not why I wrote it,” Brickhouse confesses. “I have found that it is a hugely rewarding and gratifying experience when people have told me that it helped them.”

Brickhouse’s book focuses on his destructive relationship with his mother, “Mama Jean, a cross between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.” The relationship between Jamie and his mother is what propelled his journey. “Mama Jean, my mother, played a big role in my life and this is why the book is about the story about my alcoholism and my relationship with her which is an addictive relationship. They say that you can’t get sober for someone else, you have to do it for yourself ultimately and I believe that.”

Mama Jean was responsible for Jamie’s sobriety as well as his reason for drinking. “My mother was always this huge force in my life, she was this over the top Texas woman with big hair, always camera ready, and she scared the shit out of me, but she loved me extraordinarily like a cashmere blanket in August.”

Brickhouse’s book opens with his attempting suicide, a distant cry for help. Learning that Mama Jean is on the way to visit him he panics. “If she didn’t know about it, I could have swept it under the rug and kept going, but I knew that if she knew about it I would have to face her and having to face her was facing me, and facing it.” Mama Jean wound up sending Brickhouse to rehab and paid for it as well. “I never told her that I relapsed after rehab” says Brickhouse. “It wouldn’t have mattered anyway since Mama Jean loses her mind,” as Brickhouse puts it, “with Lewy Body Dementia.” He talks about going down to visit his mother in Texas for the first time after his sobriety. “I was struggling. I had about seven months sober but I was having a hard time. I don’t think that she even knew me on that visit. At one point she looked at me and said, ‘Oh with your pretty red hair, you almost remind me of…and then she trailed off,” Brickhouse remembers. “Then as I was leaving she grabbed my arm and she started shaking her finger at me the way that she used to do when she was really angry ‘You’ve been drinking.’ Who would blame me for drinking now that my mother has lost her mind,” he rationalizes. Brickhouse though was determined to stay sober. “If you can’t stay sober for yourself, do it for her.” Brickhouse did in fact stay sober and “I ultimately did it for myself…That was the last big push that I needed to get me over the hump.”

Brickhouse, clean and sober travels around the country now lecturing and promoting his book.

Frankel’s stunning panel of three former addicts who got over “the hump’ and are all clean and sober today offered redemption stories. All with different addictions, alcohol, crystal meth and heroin, they all have in common one thing — they all proudly carry hope with them and lived to tell their tails.

Pierre Bensusan

“I am thrilled to play finally in Woodstock after all those years. I am looking forward to it. I feel great about coming to America. This is my second home,” says the extraordinary finger style guitarist Pierre Bensusan. To say that Bensusan is a master of the guitar is like saying Albert Einstein was good at math. When guitarist and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Larry Campbell tells you, “this guy is something else. He is just amazing,” you listen.

Bensusan will perform at St. Gregory’s A-Frame Church on Route 212, just east of Woodstock’s main hamlet, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 30.

He was born in Oran, French Algeria in 1957 moved to Paris when he was four. He started playing piano at the age of seven. “I started music with classical piano and moved on to the guitar. I taught myself, I had no idea of what I was doing. I didn’t even know how to tune a guitar. I had to listen to a record to find the standard tuning and then a friend came over and taught me how to change strings because I was breaking them,” Bensusan remembers. His early influences were from America, he loved bluegrass and studied French songwriters. “I listened to various things — Bob Dylan was a big influence but also the French singer songwriters of the day. I was singing a lot, writing my own songs as well. I was strumming and singing, then I heard the music of Pentangle and John Renbourn in England and that is what really kicked me to look at the guitar differently and I started to use the guitar to play instrumental music.”

He moved from guitar to playing the mandolin, where he was discovered by the legendary banjoist, Woodstocker Bill Keith in 1974 while Keith was touring Europe. “I started my career with Bill when I was 17.” In need of a mandolin player Keith hired Bensusan to play in his band with Jim Rooney. “Bill was my hero because I heard of him through his recordings with Bill Monroe and different people. I was totally thrilled and we toured together. Thanks to him I met my other big heroes, The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Brothers in Amsterdam.” Playing music with Keith and Rooney was a brand new and exciting experience for this young virtuoso who lived, ate and breathed guitar. “One morning after breakfast,” Bensusan remembers, “Bill hears me playing guitar and he comes close and he says, ‘Wow what is this that you are playing?’ He was so amazed that he invited me to play solo guitar in every one of our shows.” Keith told Bensusan “okay, you are going to start the second set with three or four pieces on your own. He gave me my chance. He really believed in me. He was the man who put me out there.”

Claire Keith, Bill’s wife of 40 years, met Keith by taking Pierre to a Bill Keith recording session in Paris. Bensusan recalls, “Bill married a dear friend of mine, a French woman, Claire. Claire and I we were like brothers and sisters, like family really.” Claire Keith also reminisces about those early days in France. “He was an unbelievably gifted kid, just unbelievable. He happened to live in the same suburbs that I did in Paris. There was this club where every week we would go. He must have been 15 because I was 19, I had a car and he didn’t. We became pretty good buddies. I was driving him into Paris several times a week to the clubs. We stopped by some studio where this recording was going on. Pierre was there also because it was a French Bluegrass project,” which was where Bensusan met his Bill Keith. “Pierre was such a gifted kid he was so overwhelmingly visible. When you see such talent arriving everybody recognizes it instantly,” Claire says.

Bensusan was 17 when he signed his first recording contract in 1974 releasing “Pres de Paris” which won him the Grand Prix du Disque award for Folk Music at the Montreux Festival in Switzerland. “I invited Bill to play one song with me and it became a very popular tune which was aired on French radio every day for one year, ‘Sunday’s Hornpipe.’ Bill recorded the same song again on one of his records, Banjoistics in 1984. Bensusan and Keith kept in touch through the years and remembers seeing his old friend a few years ago when Claire and Bill went to see Pierre play at Saratoga Springs for the last time. Bill Keith passed away last October.

Bensusan’s most recent recording, Encore, was the winner of the Independent Music Award for best live album. Dubbed the “Mozart of Guitar” Bensusan released Encore in 2013. “Three years ago I wanted to celebrate my 40th year in the music business and I thought I should have a live record available because I do not have a live record. So in 2013, I had three months off the road and I started to listen to dozens of concerts. I listened to these tracks with Bill Keith, Jim Rooney and Leon Francioli on upright bass, who passed away just a month ago, a fantastic Avant Gard Jazz player. So I approached Bill and he gave me Jim Rooney’s contact information. I had lost contact with Jim for the last 30 years. And I said, listen my friends, we have some amazing music recorded live from that concert and the sound is very different. I sent them a copy of the concert and I asked them if they would give me please their authorization to use a couple of tracks for my record and they were so happy to be part of it.”

When asked about what Bensusan sees in his future, it becomes obvious that not only is this self-taught prodigy unique, he is an optimist and a humanitarian as well. “I worry about this world; the way this world is going. Some of the stuff I really don’t like. It worries me. The wars, the fundamentalism, the things that have happened in Europe and in America. I’m in tune with our world. I believe in transforming our emotions. I believe in transforming whatever comes our way. You have to be able to transform the bad as well, even the stuff that is very bad and put them into some kind of order that makes sense.”

Bensusan puts things in order with his music. “We could go towards chaos and we could go towards beauty and I think that at the end of the day beauty will always prevail. I am an optimist because every day I wake up and I’m happy to be alive.”

Bensusan is very much looking forward to playing in Woodstock, Saturday, April 30th at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Woodstock at 7:30 PM. “It’s good to play different songs every night. I try and surprise myself. I want to be on the road where I feel the best. The stage should be like my bedroom”

Bensusan plans to continue to change the world with him music. “Music helps and transforms. Some people hate it and they want to ban it. It is direct, it goes directly to your heart to the center of gravity of what we are.”

Pierre Bensusan will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 30 at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, 2578 Route 212, Woodstock (half a mile east from the intersection with Route 375). Tickets are $21. To obtain them in advance, see StringTix Music Events on Facebook.

Gioia Timpanelli

“Storytelling is an all-purpose wrench — it fits everywhere,” said Woodstocker Peter Blum. “You can use it in therapy practice or working as a bartender. A teacher can capture students’ attention by telling a story. It’s also good to examine what stories we’re living by, and if they’re not productive, change them.”

He has organized the first Woodstock Story Festival, to be held Saturday, April 30, through Sunday, May 1, at Mountain View Studio. From physician and psychiatrist Lewis Mehl-Madrona of the Coyote Institute, to our world-renowned local storyteller and scholar Gioia Timpanelli, presenters will explore the role of story in our lives, how to change our stories, and how to help others through the medium of storytelling. Events will include interactive exercises, lectures, musical performances, discussions, and, of course, storytelling.

Blum is a hypnotherapist, inspired by the work of Milton Erickson, whose “teaching tales” supported a therapeutic style using story to induce a trance that made clients more open to suggestions for change. Blum’s own story includes his escape from New York City in 1969 as a “full-blown hippie” with the goal of starting a rock band. He had a stint as “guru reviewer and poetry editor” for Woodstock Times. In 1970, he helped start Family of Woodstock, where he later worked as a supervisor for ten years. “You hear a lot of stories there,” said Blum. “All people are carrying around their story. Some people are stuck in the same old victimized story. Erickson told his students, ‘Your job is not to get your patients into trance but to get them out of the trance they’re already in.’”

The archetypes of myths and folk tales repeat certain themes, as in the “Hero’s Journey” outlined by Joseph Campbell. “We’re all on a Hero’s Journey,” said Blum. “It’s a story that helps you look at what is yours and what are the challenges you have to face. It includes initiation, resources, magical allies.” This perspective informs the work of presenter Richard Schwab, a mythological consultant who helps people and businesses identify and change the stories that are guiding them.

Folk traditions have power for Lewis Mehl-Madrona, who draws on his Lakota and Cherokee lineage as he links medicine stories with his training in neuroscience to present “The Story of the Story that Found a Home.” The audience will help guide the tale’s development, with the assistance of Barbara Mainguy, a contributor to Mehl-Madrona’s book Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story (Bear and Company, 2015).

Novelist, interfaith minister, and counselor Elizabeth Cunningham will talk about and read from her series The Maeve Chronicles, which re-imagines Mary Magdalene as a feisty Celtic maiden, in tales rooted in Celtic folklore. Cunningham has remarked, “Both counseling and writing require deep listening and an understanding of the transforming power of story.”

The tales told in dreams will be tackled in a talk by WDST’s Woodstock Roundtable host Doug Grunther, who has interviewed innumerable authors and storytellers for his show. He is also a Dream Work Facilitator, having led dream groups around the region and hosted many radio programs interpreting dreams with internationally renowned dream expert Dr. Jeremy Taylor.

“Kahlil Gibran said a sense of humor is a sense of proportion,” said Blum. “So I invited Paul McMahon, who does the Rock ‘n’ Roll Therapist. He tells people, ‘Shout out your problem, and I’ll write a song on the spot that’s guaranteed to solve your problem — in the next lifetime or two.’”

Blum is currently vice-president of SageArts, a Rosendale-based organization that brings songwriters together with elders to co-write songs about the elders’ lives. He brought in musician David Gonzalez to work with the group. “David’s from the Bronx, and so am I,” said Blum. “He’s a Nuyorican, I’m Jewish, and we’ve both worked with Pauline Oliveiros and Karl Berger. He has a doctorate in music therapy.” Gonzalez will present his theatrical piece “MytholoJAZZ,” which enjoyed sold-out runs at Broadway’s New Victory Theater. It’s described as “the classic Greek tragedy of Orpheus and Eurydice set to scat-jazz and dynamic movement, and ‘Three Whiskers of a Lion,’ a trans-national mashup that conjures compassion from chaos.”

Local innovation consultant and speaker Mitch Ditkoff is the author of Storytelling at Work: How Moments of Truth on the Job Reveal the Real Business of Life (Idea Champions, 2015). He will talk about how we can use storytelling to spark creativity and create community in the workplace.

Shelley Stockwell-Nicholas is a California newspaper columnist and the author of 17 self-help books. President of the International Hypnosis Federation, she has been featured on ABC, NBC, BBC, “Good Morning America,” Wall Street Journal, and many other media outlets. Her presentation is entitled “Here’s A True Story I Made Up.”

The festival will close with folktales told by Timpanelli, considered one of the founders of the worldwide revival of storytelling. The winner of many awards, including two Emmys, she observes that folk stories “have a sneaky logic found in poetry, metaphor, and dreams. They believe in balance: what is missing at the beginning will most likely be found at the end.”

The Woodstock Story Festival will be held Saturday, April 30, 1-9 p.m., through Sunday, May 1, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., at Mountain View Studio, 20 Mountainview Avenue, in Woodstock. Admission is $95 per day or $150 for both days. For details and tickets, see http://www.woodstockstoryfestival.com.

Walter Plate, Still Life #12, 1972, gouache on paper. Photo courtesy of the Woodstock Artists Association & Museum. From the exhibition Art on Paper: Works from the Permanent Collection, opening Saturday May 7.

The Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) presents the exhibition, Art on Paper: Works from the Permanent Collection, opening with a reception, 4 p.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, May 7 at WAAM, 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock. The exhibition, installed in the Museum’s Phoebe and Belmont Towbin Wing continues through Sunday, August 14.

WAAM’s Permanent Collection is comprised of over 2000 objects, and approximately 400 are works on paper. Selections for Art on Paper include works in ink, graphite, mixed media, conte crayon, watercolor, pastel and paint on paper support, representing motifs in still life, abstraction, portraiture and landscape. The exhibition will also include drawings that served as studies for murals and paintings along with examples of artist’s sketch books.

Represented are early Woodstock artists such as Konrad Cramer’s Portrait of John Carroll, c. 1930, Andrew Dasburg’s Portrait of Judson Smith, c. 1932, and Harry Gottlieb’s, Hannah (portrait of the sculptor Hannah Small), 1928. Several landscapes record the pastoral environs of Woodstock and include Bolton Brown’s ink wash drawing, Woodstock Scene of 1932, Jane Jones, delicate ink drawing, Quarry Trees, Woodstock, NY, c. 1940 and George Ault’s graphite drawing, Barn by the Road, 1938. Another image, specific to Woodstock, though not a traditional landscape, is Philip Guston’s pen and ink, Ref’s Back Porch, 1947, depicting the flotsam and jetsam of the porch of artist Anton Refregier.

Exhibitions in WAAM’s other galleries opening on Saturday, May 7 include: Far & Wide — the 8th Annual Woodstock Regional in the Main Gallery; Lenny Kislin in the Solo Gallery; Lisa DeLoria Weinblatt on the Active Member Wall; Small Works in the Founder’s Gallery; and Bailey Middle School ELL (English Language Leaners) in the YES Gallery (Youth Exhibition Space).

For more information see www.woodstockart.org or call 679-2940.

Humpty Contemplates The Reconstructive Capabilities Of The King’s Horses by Lenny Kislin, from his WAAM show opening Saturday May 7.

Lenny Kislin came to Woodstock in 1970. He’d just finished law school — to please his father — and he bought some land, determined to build his own home. “I didn’t even tell my father because I didn’t want to get into those arguments. Going to law school taught me what I didn’t want to do,” he says. “I’ve always been an artist on the edge, and I drew very well when I was younger. When I was writing my notes in law classes, I’d doodle and write ‘blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ I just wasn’t that interested. I wanted to be a singer/songwriter, and had been playing in a band out on Long Island during college. But all my money disappeared into building the house, and I thought ‘maybe I’ll have to take the bar exam and actually become a lawyer.’”

Luckily, Kislin had a friend, Marty, a chemical engineer who wanted to open an antiques shop in Catskill. “He saw me drowning in my misery and said, ‘take a drive to Albany with me. I’m going on an antiques buying trip.’ So, Nancy, my wife, gave me $10 to spend. Back then, they weighed the objects — heavy ones were 50 cents and light ones were 25 cents — and if I saw things I liked or that were interesting, I showed them to Marty first. What he didn’t want, I took. I spent the whole $10. I knew Nancy would be upset — that’s how poor we were, and I’d never been poor before — and she started to cry when I told her.”

“That’s when I got hooked,” says Kislin. “It turned my life around. I would go to auctions in Kingston, looking for American folk art. Back then, you could get it. Other people were looking for oak furniture, glass, silver, special things, but I couldn’t compete in that realm. I bought items to sell that had,” he pauses, “a certain attraction.”

He offered his finds at the Woodstock Flea Market and recalls another, more convincing, epiphany. Kislin had purchased a log cabin quilt for $20 at a Kingston auction and a woman asked how much he was selling it for. “I looked at her. I looked at Nancy. I said, ‘$75,’ which was probably a very low price. She swallowed that quilt. That’s when a silent thundercloud went off in my head — a $55 profit, right off the bat! And that began my life as actually working hard for a living.”

Kislin’s solo show of assemblage art opens on Saturday, May 7 at 4 p.m. at Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM) and it will be, he says, “one of the best shows they’ve ever had. I’m not a modest person, and you might think I’m sounding over-confident, but when people say, ‘you’re the greatest,’ I need that. When I was a kid, it wasn’t the greatest. I didn’t like my childhood. But great things have happened along the way. I met my wife, and getting her to love me? That was the greatest. I was her best friend for years: she had a boyfriend and I wanted to be in her life so I became her good friend. Then, she became my wife, and we’ve been married 50 years, thank goodness.”

The show is evenly split between retrospective and newer pieces. Each one is a whimsical, thought-provoking and sometimes downright curious work of art, accompanied by a brief narrative or sly joke that reveals Kislin’s idiosyncratic perspectives. As he puts it, “they’re not just objects on a board. I revere these objects, and so much work goes into them for me to decide that it’s good. I magnify what these things have been through their existence.”

What they have been, in their most recent existence, is his. Kislin has amassed a studio/warehouse and a home filled with objects saved to use for his art, beginning with that first fateful foray to Albany in 1972. Over the years, he hauled objects, took risks, hoped for the best, and learned about what sells (and what doesn’t) — and sold his treasures at some of the best shows in New York City, Massachusetts and Nashville, all places where the folk art he loved was not readily available. “This was the beginning of when folk art was becoming really desirable and I entered into the antique business in that manner. The thrill for me,” he continues, “was in discovering something really wonderful. While I was hunting for materials to sell, I found a lot of materials to put aside for future art projects. ‘Broken’ was often the difference between art and antiques. I mean, people go to the dump to look for materials to make art, and over time I have collected thousands of objects to make art.”

This is definitely a better quality of stuff than what you’d find at the dump …

Now, he says, sorting through his materials and objects is like hunting a second time. “I might get a germ of an idea from an object and it causes a relationship to grow into a piece.” Nancy built him a studio so he could store his art objects (and, truthfully, to get some of it out of their house). Though he doesn’t always remember exactly where a particular item has been placed, and it’s not always easy to maneuver around to get to it, he has a rich stockpile of artistic choices. “One of the most frustrating things in my life is that I can’t go into the aisles anymore,” says Kislin, who uses a walker. “I used to walk field after field — I was a hunter — and I loved that aspect of the business. I don’t have that thrill of being the hunter anymore.”

When he’s creating art, he brings objects into the house and works on the dining room table. He says he develops a response to the material that he’s working with, and ‘use me well’ goes through his head. His goal is to not distract attention from the object and to associate elements of pieces together. “When people see a piece of art, they never think about what comes before, about how it came into existence. I try to create a unified subject matter that makes sense, and then I title it to help the viewer. They’re often clever and funny, and I almost always wait for it to be done before I title it,” Kislin explains.

This is Kislin’s fourth solo show at WAAM, and he has selected about 30 pieces to exhibit. WAAM has honored him twice since the turn of this century: he received their Kuniyoshi Award last year for a lifetime of producing high quality work and, in 2000, the Towbin Award as Artist of the Year.

“Want to hear my theories about why I’m drawn to old things?” Kislin asks. When he was young, growing up in the South Bronx, he was almost killed, twice, and he came to believe he would die young. “I could have had ‘pessimistic’ engraved on my forehead. I collected things I knew were old — quartz stones I would find in the streets of the Bronx, and I even went west hunting for old rocks. Being into old stuff, stuff that comes to be through time, is giving me more time. Not physical time, mental time. It’s adding on years. It’s about the time it took to get to me, the time it took to make it, the person’s time who made it: I’m a time collector. It adds another dimension onto my life, an addition of time within me, and it artificially gives me more time.”

Kislin has to work in spurts now, when he feels pain-free enough to do it, and doesn’t socialize as much as he used to do. But, with a lot of great friends, a regular poker game each week, his daughter and four grandchildren who live nearby, and his sweet Nancy, Kislin says, “I have a happy life. In May, I will be 70 years old. I’m so disappointed. I was wrong. I didn’t die young.”

Title those comments, “Kislin, Smirking” or maybe “Time Heals All Pessimists.” What about “The Artful Dodger?” Go see his show, you’ll see for yourself. Lenny Kislin’s got better stuff to create with than you’ll find at the dump or in your garage — guaranteed — and he knows how to assemble it into pieces that are equally rare and quite striking.

Lenny Kislin, Opening Reception is 4 p.m.-6  p.m., Saturday, May 7. The show runs through June 5 at Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (Solo Gallery), 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock; 679-2940, www.woodstockart.org/solo-gallery/.

John Simon (photo by Kevin Yatarola)

“It’s going to be like being in my living room. I’ll play some songs, tell some stories… real warm and relaxed I hope,” says John Simon about his performance at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 14 at The Kleinert-James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street, Woodstock. Simon will be performing some of his songs and reading from his working manuscript, Truth, Lies and Hearsay — A memoir of a Musical Life in and Out of Music.

John Simon name may not be a household word, yet the breadth of recordings that he has produced over the 50 or so years scans like a walk of fame of the music industry, whose albums continue to sell.

Often referred to as the “sixth member of The Band,” Simon’s copious productions include the first two absolute classic records by The Band. “Nothing got on those records that didn’t pass through all six of us,” he says. Just producing The Band alone would be a crowning achievement for most people, not for Simon.

Bass player Harvey Brooks, who played with everyone from Dylan to Hendrix worked with Simon on sessions including The Electric Flag and Mama Cass ‘s “Dream A Little Dream of Me” called him “the consummate producer, musician and arranger. We worked on many projects together and he always got the best out of me.”

At the age of four Simon’s father, a surgeon, encouraged him to play piano. “I also learned other instruments when I was in high school so that I could play in the high school band. I can play a lot of instruments, you know.” Simon played baritone horn on The Band’s “Tears of Rage” and the Tuba on “Rag Mama Rag” as well as the stunning piano on “Sad and Deep” on Dave Mason’s classic debut record Alone Together. “There was a time when I just played on a lot of records. Me, like everybody else, would show up just to have my name on the session.

“I just progressed like any other kid would on piano learning my Hayden, Clementi, Mozart and Beethoven. When I was a teenager I got interested in jazz and asked my dad to find me a piano teacher who could teach me jazz,” he says. “I found this great local teacher up there who kept me going on the classical music as well as learning the boogie woogie.”

Simon has always retained his great respect for classical music, where his roots are. “The idea that these composers can, out of their own heads, use such a broad pallet to make such a wide range of sounds, every instrument in the orchestra and how they combine? These days it’s a lot simpler because people have computer programs so they can try out what they sound like, everything is so different. I mean music used to be a blind idiom. There was no visual. The only time that you could see music being played was if you went to a concert or at somebody’s back porch where somebody was playing. There never was any visual attached to it. Then once MTV came out it was music videos then music changed completely, the audience demanded visual stimulus as much as audio stimulus.” As far as recording, “it’s pretty much the same thing. It used to be that you had to record live, there was no overdubbing or that kind of stuff. You just recorded live. Then Les Paul with all his brilliance figured how to layer things with his tape machines and his Les Paul guitar, and Mary Ford, recording with tons of guitars and people, just the two of them making records. He opened the door for multi-track recording and that became an art in itself.”

After graduating from Princeton, Simon took a job at Columbia Records. “I was hired as a trainee and they taught me how to do everything. Then they started assigning artists to me that nobody else wanted because they weren’t profitable. I got artists like Frankie Yankovic — America’s Polka King, and Charles Lloyd, he hadn’t become famous yet.”  It didn’t take long until Ken Glancy, “an angel from heaven,” moved John from the Classical Music Department to the Pop Music Department.

In 1966, things would change when Simon produced the hit single for The Cyrkle. “Red Rubber Ball” was to become number two on the Billboard 100 charts and sell over one million copies. The song was co-written by Paul Simon (no relation), who John would later produce with Art Garfunkel on the incredible Bookends, which also went platinum twice with a number one hit single, “Mrs. Robinson.”

“They were the very best people. We shared so many of the same sensibilities. They were clever and bright, funny and sarcastic, musical, no friction at all with Paul and Artie. Nothing was good or went on the album without both of their approval.”

Due to scheduling problems with Bookends, Simon was assigned one of the artists that “nobody else wanted because they weren’t profitable,” Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.

“Leonard Cohen was supposed to be recorded by John Hammond but Hammond was scheduling sessions too far apart for Leonard, so Leonard asked Columbia to give him another producer and we were assigned to work together. It was a joy to work with Leonard Cohen. He was much more a man as opposed to all these other groups that I worked with that were kids. He was not that much older in age but that much older in experience and street craft.”

Many of Simon’s experiences come to life in his three-hundred-page manuscript “Truth, Lies and Hearsay.” John Simon, the writer, confesses, “I get letters, emails from fans and listeners and they say that they like what I am doing. Often they are housewives, truck drivers or accountants. One of them that I got was from a manager for Red Light Management, one of the top two or three management companies in the country. When a manager says ‘is anything that I can do to help you out?’ let me know. You call him back.” So Simon did and was encouraged to play Joe’s Pub (in New York City) and do some other concerts — and write a book.

“I wasn’t too excited about it because so many other people have labored in the vineyards and poppy fields and marijuana fields of rock and roll who have actually hung out with the people more than I did so they had much more lurid tales.”

Music to Simon meant something different. “It was like a day job to me, I had a family and I would do my rock and roll and then go home to my family. As I started writing, more and more memories came up and they were interesting to people. I just finished the last draft of it but it’s way too long for my tastes. I did a lot of the illustrations in it, photographs, so it’s 300 pages and I think that it should be 50 pages. I would rather have 50 dynamite pages than 300. My next step is to cut it back down again.”

Simon plans to read from his manuscript at the Kleinert, and one of the stories he recites will be the 22nd chapter, “The Most Important Date in Rock and Roll” — “and it’s not Elvis Birthday or when Mick Jagger reached puberty.” Not to spoil the surprise, you’ll just have to come Saturday night to hear Simon tell it as only he can.

He still remains very active today, writing music and working on various projects. He recently completed accompanying text in Elliott Landy’s latest book, “The Band Photographs 1968-1969. He’s also working on a new show with his wife C.C. Loveheart, an actress and a major talent in her own right. The show is about C.C. growing up in Las Vegas and her going to watch the atom bomb test as a child. “We are just finishing up a play now called The Amazing Sunshine Traveling Medicine Show set in 1921 and it’s a musical we will be putting it out next summer at the Shadowland theater in Ellenville and then New York City.”

Simon can also be seen every Thursday night in Ellenville at The Aroma Thyme Bistro with his Jazz trio at 7 p.m.

“So I am really enjoying writing. You can’t dry up the fountain, I’ll always keep writing.”

An Evening with John Simon, takes place at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 14 at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker Street, Woodstock.

Tickets are $20, and $18 for Byrdcliffe members. To purchase tickets, call 679-2079 or see www.woodstockguild.org/johnsimon.html.

You know, if you even wrote five songs a year, after 50 years you’d have 250, quite a body of work. And if you started going back over them, you just might be able to piece together your life story, or at least a narrative line around which you could elaborate and gain understanding.

Marc Black has written far more than five songs a year, and has taken some and constructed a new show he calls, “Life, One Song at a Time…” which he will perform solo, at 8 p.m. Sunday, May 15 at Upstate Films Woodstock (the former Tinker Street Cinema.)

“I’m experimenting putting my songs in a story context,” he says. “Everybody has a life to bring us to this moment, it’s a history and I just realized that when I told myself the story of my life, the most telling and reliable form that I have to talk to myself is my songs.”

He talks about the shock of hearing Elvis for the first time as a five year old, then falling out of love with music when the army took Elvis. “In High School, I had my own band and we did shows with the Doors, Neil Diamond and The Dave Clark 5 and that really shaped my idea of who I am.”

His years of playing in Woodstock shape the conversation. “It was such a wonderful journey. I was psychedelicized in college and moved to Woodstock and really embraced the Woodstock community, talking to myself and the people in town through the songs I was writing. There are literally hundreds of songs. I don’t know how many songs are in the show, maybe 15, I never counted them…”

“I try to sprinkle through the changes we all go through, being a 20-something know it all, then having a family…that cuts you down a few notches, gives you some humility. Moving to New York, how that felt. You’re just interested in different kinds of songs. At this stage of my life I’ve been really involved in anti-fracking and social justice and environmental justice. It’s just kind of natural. There’s nothing that tells my story or gives me a sense of who I am but my songs.”

“As artists you have that desire to share who you are, especially with folks who have been your friends and who you have been playing for, for 40 years. Playing at Joshua’s with Mike and Betty in 1973, shaking the White Water Depot, what those songs meant to me along the way…

“At a certain point you look at impermanence. The life we’ve chosen. It’s beautiful to me to know that I have these bits of my mind and my heart that are expressed in this way that can be recreated and shared.”

Admission is $10. Advance tickets are available at the Upstate Films box office, 132 Tinker St. Woodstock. Or call 679-6608.

It’s that time of year again. Flowers blooming, summer bearing down, and Bob Dylan is another year older. This year he turns 75 and in honor of that Family of Woodstock presents its 8th Annual Bob Dylan Birthday Celebration at 8:30 p.m. Sunday May 29 at the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock. (There’s a Champagne reception at 6:30 p.m. and doors to the concert open at 7:30 p.m.)

Musical Director of this year’s benefit Connor Kennedy, says “Bob Dylan is the most transformative American musician who has ever lived. He is boundary breaking. Every record reveals a different person, musically and thematically.”

A diverse lineup of great talent will be presenting Dylan’s music, many backed by Kennedy and his band Minstrel.

Hosted once again by Happy Traum, who played with Dylan in his Woodstock days and will also perform, the evening features everybody’s favorite musician Larry Campbell, Master of the Telecaster Arlen Roth, and Hall of Famer John Sebastian.

This year NeeNee Rushie (of The Big Takeover) and the great local duo, Kenny Siegel and Blueberry of Johnny Society, take the stage for the first time. New to the celebration are harpist Mikaela Davis and Jared Samuel of NYC’s Invisible Familiars who are, along with Bill Sims Jr., this year’s featured out of towners.

Also performing from deep in the Dylan song book are Marc Black, Jules Shear, and Robert Burke Warren; Jay Collins, Brian Hollander, Eric Redd, Doug Yoel and Carmen Senski.

“Extraordinary” surprise guests are also promised.

Through the generosity of the Bearsville Theater, Family’s Crisis Hotline and the John Herald Fund will receive all proceeds from ticket sales.

Dylan, of course, lived in Woodstock when Family of Woodstock was born, during those turbulent times in 1970. Formed by a group of volunteers, it was led by founding member Gail Varsi who told police, “If there’s a problem – call me – 679-2485.”  Family of Woodstock’s motto was then and remains: “Any problem under the sun.”

Always changing to meet the community’s needs, this spring marks the opening of Family’s newest service, TextMeBack, a crisis line using the hotline’s signature phone number for the growing segment of the population that prefers texting to calling. Texting provides the same 24 hour/365 day a year access to Family’s array of services as the phone hotline does.

The John Herald Fund, now in operation for ten years, helps musicians in the community who are in need. Named for the great singer/songwriter who passed away in 2005, the fund has paid bills for many local players who needed a hand.

Tickets are $100 for first row, including a pre-concert champagne reception and 5 raffle tickets for a chance to win an Elliott Landy photo; Golden Circle seating is $65 and includes the pre-concert champagne reception; $45 for floor and balcony reserved seating; and $25 for standing room.

Purchase tickets online at www.radiowoodstock.com/concerts; or, by phone, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. at 845-679-7600. For more information, see www.fowinc.org.

I’m not sure what to call Irmalinda’s Doll: A Volume of Drawn Thoughts (Author’s House, 2016) by Saugerties artist Valerie Owen. It’s definitely a book, emphatically an artist’s book. It comes close to being a graphic novel, but the plot doesn’t really manifest until a third of the way in. Up to page 30, I wandered uncertainly through the wash of dreamlike images and poetic speech balloons, alternately entranced and confused.

Actually, I first misread the subtitle as “A Volume of Dream Thoughts,” and I persist in suspecting that many of the images came from the author/artist’s nighttime unconscious. Plus on page 4, a cattish creature scratches its head with a humanoid finger and muses, “What’s the difference between a Dream & a Memory?” which seems like a relevant question. If any of the panels are sourced from Owen’s memory, she must have a strange and visionary life indeed.

Dream imagery is a familiar subject for writers and artists. Long dreams narrated in novels tend to lose me pretty fast, but scenes that take place within dreams — some of Carlos Casteneda’s adventures with the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan, for instance — can be compelling. Painters make good use of the incongruous juxtapositions of dreams, as in the dreamscapes of Salvador Dali. Owen marries these verbal and visual techniques in handsomely rendered pictures with words that almost make sense, defying the demands of narrative structure to carry the reader/viewer along on a bucking magic carpet ride.

Characters recur intermittently, reining in the attention when it threatens to stray due to the relative shortage of continuity. Old Dog, a cat named Billy Milk Mustache, a Chumash shaman, Fog-Face-Fowl, Cool Cucumber, Peachy Keen, Art Deity, Sky Coyote, and the nameless doll — they wind through the pages, sometimes accompanied by quotes from Keats, Goethe, Ramakrishna, Jane Roberts (the “Seth Speaks” channeler, I assume), and others. The plot leaps in unexpectedly when Irmalinda’s son Henry announces, “If little Sally hadn’t crawled under the house that day, she’d still be alive.” We learn from the back cover blurb that Sally’s doll, made by Irmalinda, “knows a secret, and Irmalinda’s memories and past are part of understanding their shared destiny.””

After page 30, the middle-aged Irmalinda and the stitch-faced doll are seen more often, as their intertwining stories, memories, and fantasies leap around in time, along with events such as the Battle of the Little Big Horn, a duel with a scorpion, and a conversation with a horsefly. Death, fate, and art are frequent themes. The illustrations vary from cartoonish to detailed and lush, careening back and forth from spontaneous to intricate, against sensuous pastel backgrounds.

There is a sense of freedom to these pages, a refusal to allow conventions of storytelling to distract from the integrity of a fertile and wide-ranging imagination. While in some cases, this approach can make text hard to absorb, here its liberating quality is passed on to the viewer. The spinning mind, trying to grasp what’s going on, is continuously flung into a sense of wonder, either through the arresting imagery or the frequently generated question, “Where did she ever get these ideas from?”

And it’s even better the second time through.

Valerie Owen exhibits her art at the Arts Upstairs Gallery, 60 Main Street, Phoenicia. Her book can be ordered at http://www.irmalindasdoll.com.

Robert Chanler screen depicting panther attacking white stag.

In 1990, while first writing for this paper, I began “ghosting about” what was then called the “Woodstock Artists Association.” One afternoon, through a half open door, I overheard a would-be curator informed in no uncertain terms: “We can’t have a Bob Chanler exhibition here! He was stark-raving mad!” It was precisely at this moment, then, that my fascination for this nearly unheard of genius began. Which is why, a quarter of a century later, it’s a privilege to announce that an astonishingly well-researched volume devoted to the masterful achievement of Chanler, a Woodstocker later in his life, has at last found its way into print via The Monacelli Press, in a book entited Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering The Fantastic, edited by Gina Wouters and Andrea Gollin.

Margaret Astor Ward, whose mother died in childbirth, was raised by her grandparents on a 420-acre estate upon which the climate-challenged mansion “Rokeby” still stands, less than a mile from what is today Bard College. Margaret’s grandfather was William B. Astor, “the wealthiest man in America,” who inherited Rokeby through his wife’s family. After marrying John Winthrop Chanler, Margaret gave birth to no less than eleven children before, understandably, succumbing to pneumonia in 1875 at 37; her husband met the same fate three years later. By 1883, three of the Chanler children had joined their parents, and the eight surviving “Astor Orphans,” including Robert, (1872-1930) were raised by a cousin, servants, and governesses at Rokeby.

Although the eldest, John Armstrong “Archie” Chanler, was the only sibling known to visit an insane asylum, eccentricity permeated the entire brood, with Robert, born in 1872, actually taking the cake.

Brilliant, rebellious, precocious, and licentious, 17-year-old Bob Chanler was sent off to Rome in 1889 with Archie and his, then, wife; the artistic leanings of this gigantic “little brother,” were already quite pronounced. Upon coming into “his money” four years later, Chanler married Julia Remington Chamberlain, the sister of Archie’s wife. The newlyweds moved to Paris where Chanler continued formal art education and fathered the first of two daughters. However, “disgusted with the sterile instruction of atelier and academy” Chanler and family returned to Italy, the renaissance art of which, a six-foot-four Bob Chanler seems to have devoured whole. Completing his first decorative panel in Paris in 1900, RWC returned to New York, seeking sanctuary in the purchase of a farm in Red Hook he called “Sylvania,” a mile from Rokeby. In Manhattan, that same year, his first gallery show consisted of mural decorations.

Irresistibly popular, Chanler was elected to the New York State Assembly; a political detour which failed to prevent his return to Paris. Here, the atheistic omnivore encountered a Chinese screen which set his highly tuned sensibilities aflame. Spontaneously reimagining Whistler’s original annexation of this Eastern objet d’art, “Chanler’s screens” would become his personal calling among American millionaires for the next 25 years. On that same trip to Paris, Chanler also met his great patron, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, which probably had something to do with his subsequent divorce. Back in the States he became Sheriff of Dutchess County for the next three years, preferring the title “Sheriff Bob” ever after. Chanler now married “the most beautiful woman in the world.” Opera singer Lina Cavalier, however, first demanded a pre-nuptial agreement assuring her a fortune even should the marriage fail. Unstable brother Archie’s telegram was succinct: “Who’s Looney Now?” Tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic made a fortune all their own as Robert Chanler’s second marriage and honeymoon ended simultaneously.

Rebounding from financial as well as emotional disaster, Chanler rented (and soon bought) adjoining brownstones on East 19th Street in Manhattan. These became his notorious “House of Fantasy,” the artful equivalent of a mad professor’s laboratory cum fraternity house. Here all-night parties anticipated the Roaring Twenties while maintaining the decadence of fin-de-siecle Paris. The Gilded Age in hedonistic decline, Chanler managed what today would be termed “mania” with vast quantities of alcohol; his rapacious social life and increasingly eccentric career besting one another in an evermore bizarre bacchanal.

Now monied lightning struck as Chanler enjoyed one of the great publicity coups of the age. Because of his enormous popularity in high society, such movers ‘n shakers soon insisted their own Chanler be represented in a privately sponsored event, today known as “The Armory Show of 1913.” It would become Modernism’s “shot heard ‘round the world,” repercussions of which dethroned Paris, to make New York City the new hub of Art’s whirling roulette wheel. Here, remarkably enough, though a total stranger to museums, this enfant terrible of an insider, this gigantic, brilliant, all but overwhelming force known as Robert Winthrop Chanler, found no less than nine of his astonishing works lining the entrance of The Art Event of the Century. But it didn’t end there.

Recently released papers surrounding the centennial celebration of this mythic event reveal that Chanler’s VIP “access” allowed him to replace and rotate his most-talked-and-written-about screens with more than a dozen others. The result being, that in the single month during which the Armory Show captivated New York — and the world, Chanler was represented by as many as 24 works. In a sense, then, Chanler showed more of his work than any other American or European artist, including Picasso and Cezanne. Not surprisingly, the reputation of “The Grand Bohemian,” as Cosmopolitan called him, went through the roof. But astounding as his screens were and were to become, Chanler’s legend would depend upon the decorative environments he would create in the private homes of somewhat eccentric wealth. (Imagine Hearst’s San Simeon on LSD, and you begin to get the picture…)

Much of Robert Winthrop Chanler: Discovering The Fantastic understandably focuses on the restoration of these long-ignored treasures with increasingly technical chapters. Especially noteworthy is the newly revealed fireplace and chimney of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Greenwich Village studio; its massive, rigid flames obviously topping the French at their own game. Suffice to say: once you hold this book in your hands, the cheap tricks of a Jeff Koons are instantly exposed as such. While the authentic wonders found between the covers of this book indeed pry the lid off Chanler’s forgotten accomplishment…they reveal what? An American DuChamp? A Jules Verne of art — 40,000 leagues beneath historic recall? Actually, none of these descriptions do RWC justice, for the best of his work is beyond metaphor.

Which is why I highly recommend you acquire this book and, in Chanleresque style, consume it whole — with one caveat. We’ve all heard the cliché that true genius must risk failure at every turn. Well, with Chanler this old chestnut becomes formidable truth. For he does absolutely “lose it” from time to time, particularly in portraiture.

While the academic cool of a many-authored-essay-style art book infrequently satisfies a fan of biography, here such compartmentalization is welcome, perhaps even necessary. Front and center we find: the work, its place in history, and debate surrounding its importance, disappearance, restoration, and — we hope — renaissance. So our primary attention stays with the art, which is proper to any rediscovery process.

However, this approach begs for a full-scale biography, a portion of which is herewith supplied in miniature as regards RWC’s significance to Woodstock.

Immediately following his 1912 divorce from Lina Cavalieri (and just before the Armory Show), “Sheriff Bob” makes a pilgrimage to Indian Country in Arizona. Period photographs show him frolicking with a young actress named Clemence “Clemmie” Randolph, who becomes Chanler’s “primary life companion” thereafter.

For the next two Saturday nights, movie lovers can experience the power of life affirming films and the filmmakers who create them. The Woodstock Film Festival is hosting two events to celebrate its focus on exceptional filmmaking.

Each year, the WFF hosts an annual Spirit of Woodstock Celebration to gather together friends and patrons in support of their year-round schedule of film, music and arts activities. This year’s honorees — Ron Nyswaner and Philippe Petit, two luminaries with homes in Ulster County — will be feted on Saturday, June 4. Nyswaner’s documentary, She’s the Best Thing In It, won the audience award at last year’s WFF: he is a renowned screenwriter (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil, Soldier’s Girl), author (Blue Days, Black Nights: A Memoir of Desire), director, producer and activist.

Petit gained fame for his 1974 illegal high wire walk between the World Trade Towers in New York City, and was featured in the Academy Award winning film, Man on Wire. He is also a magician, street juggler, barn builder and the author of 10 books, including Creativity: The Perfect Crime. Cocktails and hors d’oeuvres will be served at a private residence overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir. (see below for details.)

One week later, there will be a special screening of the new documentary film, Life, Animated, on Saturday, June 11 at Upstate Films in Woodstock, followed by a Q&A with the Academy Award winning director, Roger Ross Williams.

The film chronicles one family’s journey to re-connect with their son, Owen, a healthy, happy young boy who inexplicably went silent at the age of three. Owen’s father, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, wrote a book, Life Animated: a story of Sidekicks, Heroes and Autism, about how Owen and his family were eventually able to re-connect via the boy’s love for and knowledge of Disney animated films. Disney characters such as Simba, Jafar and Ariel paved the way for the family to once again communicate with each other, and allowed Owen to convey his feelings and needs and begin to create a life for himself as a young adult living in his own apartment.

Suskind and Williams first worked together 15 years ago when Suskind was a correspondent and Williams one of the producers at Nightline with Ted Koppel. When Suskind started writing the book upon which Life, Animated is based, Williams says he was “blown away by it, and thought it would make a great documentary film. The book was written very much from the point of view of Ron and his wife, Cornelia, so for me, the film picks up where the book leaves off. The film is centered on a very transformative year of Owen’s life,” says Williams. “People with disabilities like autism are often depicted from the perspective of the outside looking in, but this film is from the inside looking out. It takes you deeper and deeper into Owen’s head, and brings you inside his world for a different perspective.”

The film premiered at Sundance last year, where Williams won the Director’s Award. Williams and his film have been on the festival circuit since then, and he received Audience Awards in San Francisco and at Full Frame in North Carolina. Life, Animated premiers in New York and Los Angeles theaters on July 1, with subsequent screenings scheduled nationwide.

“I hope as many people as possible will get to see it, and that it will help them to see living with autism in a different way,” says Williams. “People with autism have a lot to offer if we stop and listen. Because of their affinities and their focus — and Owen’s is on Disney — they in a sense become experts, and use that laser focus to understand things in the world.”

Williams says the film expanded his vocabulary as a filmmaker because there were several different layers to Owen’s experiences, but also because the telling of the story relies heavily upon the use of animation. “The amazing thing about Owen and his story is that he grew up on a diet of myth and fable. The Disney re-telling of classic fables is very Joseph Campbell. Owen is on a hero’s journey, and like Campbell, is an expert on fables and the human experience. During Owen’s journey as a human being and the telling of what he accomplished, he becomes very wise.”

At the New York premier, Disney soundtrack composer Alan Menken conveyed his excitement and support for the film, and told Williams he sees much more depth in the Disney stories as a result.

Williams is the first African-American director to win an Academy Award: his first film, Music by Prudence, won the 2010 nod for documentary short subject, and his second, God Loves Uganda, won more than a dozen awards before being shortlisted for a 2014 Academy Award. Last November, Blackface, his short film on the Dutch tradition of Black Pete and Sinterklaas, sparked a national debate on the Netherlands’ legacy of slavery. “The Dutch love Sinterklaas, but they don’t know their history. They made a fortune selling slaves, and the film was confronting,” says Williams. “I got death threats and received emails saying ‘you stupid black monkey, why don’t you go back to Africa?’ It was really controversial.”

An acclaimed television journalist and producer for over 15 years prior to making the switch to independent filmmaking, Williams is taking his particular view from behind the camera to another level: mentoring.

Using and channeling adversity into art is something he had to “learn the hard way. When you grow up in a disadvantaged community, you’re not always given the tools you need, and that’s why I try to serve as a role model. People think their story is one that no one wants to hear, and as an artist, you have to learn to take that pain and use it in your work. It’s very powerful, and you have to be honest,” says Williams. Thematically, his films have often focused on populations who have been left behind, and he has become a champion of the outsider. “As a Black gay man, that’s been my power. I use that feeling of alienation in my work. Don’t shy away from who you are.”

The son of a single mother, Williams’ mom worked as a maid for Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania. She attended the ceremony when the college gave her son an honorary doctorate degree, and he told listeners that his mother used to take him along with her when she cleaned the toilets at the frat houses. “When I took her to the Oscars, she was in heaven. It was the first time she had ever flown on an airplane,” he says, recalling his win for Music by Prudence. His next film for CNN Films and The Why? Foundation, takes a very personal look at the prison industrial complex. Some of his friends from high school are in the system, and he’ll be filming in his hometown of Easton.

Just before Williams bought his home in Roxbury in 1999, the 50-acre property once owned by a Mississippi Riverboat Captain was the setting for the feature film You Can Count on Me starring Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo. Today, Williams’ husband runs a successful destination wedding business at The Roxbury Barn, and the couple divides their time between Delaware County and the Netherlands.

Williams’ appearance here in Woodstock will no doubt add fuel to a mounting Oscar buzz for Life, Animated.

TWO EVENTS: 2016 Spirit of Woodstock Celebration Honoring Ron Nyswaner & Philippe Petit, Saturday, June 4, 5-8 pm, $100-$5,000 per person, private residence. For tickets, or for more information, see http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

Life, Animated, screening, 2 p.m. Saturday, June 11, at Upstate Films, 132 Tinker Street, Woodstock. Tickets are $13, $14 and $15 per person; call 679-4265 for tickets or see http://www.woodstockfilmfestival.com.

Poné Ensemble

A misplaced program caused me to omit last month my review of the Poné Ensemble’s April 3 concert, at New Paltz United Methodist Church. I love this brave little group’s recent music program, the next of which will bring them to the Arts Society of Kingston this fall. As always, the performances at this concert were first rate, which figures since most of the players are members of the Hudson Valley Philharmonic. I particularly enjoyed being introduced to the music of Dennis Bathory-Kitsz, whose brief “Clouds of Endless Summer” featured flowing counterpoint which immediately grabbed my attention and held it. I found Joshua Groffman’s “Miniatures for Horn and Bassoon” (Nick Caluori and Jeffrey Marchand) a little bland, but the playing injected interest. There were no surprises music by the better-known Benjamin Britten, Lowell Liebermann (a substantial Trio for Flute, Cello, and Piano”), and Peter Schickele, but the music was all excellent. People who think they are afraid of 20th or 21st century music should give the Poné Ensemble a try.

At the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra’s May 22 concert (Quimby Theater, SUNY Ulster), a discrete note announced the abrupt end of Nathan Madsen’s period as Music Director. (“A change in Madsen’s circumstances has brought an end to his tenure with the orchestra.”) If you are curious you can just look his name up on Google and you will not enjoy the story you find. As a musician, Madsen rescued the WCO from the disastrous work of his predecessor and brought some ambitious projects to his work, and I’m grateful to him for that. The May 22 concert was mostly a celebration of the work of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, who performed some of their typical folk music delights, mostly with the orchestra. Guest conductor Gwen Gould, known for her work in Columbia County, added Copland’s little-known “Outdoor Overture” to the program. If it’s typical of her work, she should be a leading contender for the music directorship of the orchestra. The Copland was crisp and energetic, the orchestra sounding its very best. Gould also led the accompaniments for Jay and Molly very well. The brief cameo by the Strawberry Hill Fiddlers was also very entertaining, the music less elaborately arranged, and thus better, than some performances by the group I’ve heard. No profundities here but it was an emjoyable and well-attended, afternoon.

Saugerties Pro Musica concluded its 2015-16 season on April 8 with a repeat appearance by the oddly-named di.vi.sion Piano Trio. (Program notes say the trio was founded as part of di.vi.sion, whatever that is.) These are substantial musicians and they brought us a substantial program including two recent compositions, one from this year. Haydn’s “Gypsy Rondo” Trio, in G Major, is the most popular of his trios today and it’s a charmer, although it would be fun to hear some of the others more often. The ensemble’s playing was also charming, graceful and well balanced, with nice execution of grace notes in the second movement and amusing emphases in the third. Benjamin Yarmolinsky’s Violin Sonata (dated both 1987 and 2001) opens with a Bloch-like Hebraic slow movement, then goes on to a couple of semi-pops movements, reasonably engaging. Anthony Gatto’s “Hope is Wanting to Pull Clouds,” the brand new piece, is seven minutes of repetitious simple episodes surrounding silences. It was curiously affecting and left me wanting to hear more from this composer. The program ended with a great 20th century masterpiece, Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2. The performance here was excellent but seemed a bit too civilized for this tragic, wrenching music until the very end, which became downright frightening. An interesting interpretation! I look forward to the 2016-17 season, which will begin in September with the return of the great pianist Inesa Sinkevyich, this time with cellist Rebecca Hartke.

Piano Plus concluded its 2016 season on May 28 at the Olive Free Library. Like all the pianists in this series, Mei-Hsuan Huang, who came all the way from Iowa, is an excellent player. Unfortunately, we got off on the wrong foot with each other. She played Mozart’s Sonata in F, K. 332, with rhythmic flexibility which I thought would be appropriate for Chopin but not for Mozart. She also skipped all of the marked repeats, denying us the opportunity to hear how she would handle the same music again. (In a successful performance, the player will not only change approach somewhat but also change the actual notes with ornaments and embellishments.) In four works by Rachmaninov, Huang’s pianism worked beautifully with the romantic music, demonstrating the same flexibility which I didn’t like in Mozart but which was completely appropriate for this music, as were her tonal weight and technical fluency. Violinist Matthew Woodard (the “Plus”) joined Huang for a tantalizing sample of Britten’s Suite, Op. 6, a piece I haven’t heard live in its entirety since Charles Libove and Nina Lugovoy played it at Maverick. Huang showed her sensitivity to Chopin’s idiom in two Nocturnes and the Ballade No. 1 by adopting elements of 19th century playing style, including having the left hand lead the right in the first of the Nocturnes and using more rhythmic flexibility, again very appropriate for this music. Composer George Tsontakis certainly knows how to get interesting musicians to play for this brief spring series! And yes, the new cork flooring in the library’s large room does improve the acoustics somewhat.

The major June classical music highlight in our area is the Hudson Valley Chamber Music Circle series of three concerts, starting on June 4 with the legendary Emerson String Quartet. Better call (845-339-7907) right away in hope of snagging any remaining tickets. Aston Magna starts its series of four concerts, early music and period instruments, on June 18, also at Bard. This is a superb series which seldom attracts the audience it deserves. This year the concerts will take place at the Bitó Conservatory Building at Bard, which has fewer seats than Olin Auditorium, so you may want to reserve tickets early at 888-492-1283 or www.astonmagna.org.

Ars Choralis will be warming up the Maverick Concert Hall with “Música Hispánica: Then and Now, featuring Ariel Ramírez’s Misa Criolla on June 18 at 7 p.m. and June 19 at 4 p.m. Tickets are now available at DIG in Saugerties, Mother Earth’s Storehouse in Kingston and Golden Notebook and Catskill Art & Office Supply in Woodstock, or at www.arschoralis.org ($18, half price for students 18 and younger). Elizabeth Mitchell & Family kick off the Maverick Young People’s Concerts on June 25 at 11 a.m., and the Maverick Concerts series begins the next day, June 26, at 4 p.m. with the Escher String Quartet in music of Beethoven, Bartók, and Dvorák. Not too early to start marking your calendars!

Maria Elena Maurin and Chris Grady in Brilliant Traces.

A bride fleeing her wedding bursts into a cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, where she is soon snowbound with the solitary resident, Henry Harry. These two refugees from civilization are forced to deal with their suddenly intimate situation in Brilliant Traces, a roller-coaster of a play by Cindy Lou Johnson, presented by Performing Arts of Woodstock (PAW) from June 24 to July 10.

“This play is imaginative and out of the box,” said director Sande Shurin. “It’s very funny and then very threatening, then fun again — up and down, like life, where who knows what comes next?”

Local high school history teacher Chris Grady stars as Henry Harry, with Maria Elena Maurin as Rosannah DeLuce, the errant bride. Shurin, who teaches acting both in New York City and in Woodstock, first encountered the play when Maurin brought it to her class to work on. Maurin liked the script so much, she decided to produce the play in the city with another Shurin student, Evan Leone, originally from Kingston. When Leone was given a role in an HBO series, the play was cancelled. Shurin had directed Clybourne Park last year for PAW, so she offered to bring Brilliant Traces to Woodstock, again with Leone as the male lead. Another TV series, Feed the Beast, came along for the young actor, so Shurin recruited Grady, yet another of her students, to play Henry.

Brilliant Traces, which opened at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater in 1989, uses heightened reality to explore the sense of isolation and the need to be understood. “It makes good use of what theater is,” said Shurin, “as opposed to more realistic plays. It isn’t O’Neill. It’s very edgy, gutsy, bold.”

Shurin’s experience includes directing on Broadway (The Price of Genius) and at such venues as BAM, Lincoln Center, Playwrights Horizon, Carnegie Hall, and LaMama. Her many students have included Anthony Rapp, Matthew Modine, Sylvia Miles, Jai Rodriguez, and Tony winners Casey Nicholaw and Amy Spanger. She enjoys directing for PAW, which allows her to work a bit on the experimental side, while using the “Transformational Acting” style she brings to her directing and teaching.

“I demand a high bar for the actors,” said Shurin. “An actor needs to be willing to be with their own experience and not pretend to have an experience. I used to teach based on memory, but it took people out of the moment. Part of my technique is using what you’re feeling, using your impulses. This kind of work carries into my directing. ”

Her preference is to work on plays and films that involve transformation and transcending limitation. “I like things you can turn into an experience that takes people beyond their reality of the moment to see new possibilities and look inside themselves. This play fits right into that category.”

Performing Arts of Woodstock presents Brilliant Traces at the Mescal Hornbeck Community Center, 56 Rock City Road, Woodstock. Shows are June 24 and 26, July 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, and 10, with evening shows at 8 p.m. and Sunday matinees at 1:30 p.m. There is no Saturday performance on June 25. Prices: $23 general admission, $20 for seniors and students. All seats $15 at the June 23 preview, 8 p.m. See http://performingartsofwooodstock.org for info and online tickets. Reservations are also available at (845) 679-7900. The Community Center is air conditioned, and there is tiered seating for the show.

Woodstock Playhouse Company members Kelly Murphy as Miss Sarah Brown and Michael Gaudio as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at the Woodstock Playhouse.

“We’ve been called a ‘steppingstone to Broadway,’” said Doug Farrell, company manager and vice president of the Woodstock Playhouse, which launches its 2016 summer stock season on Friday, June 17, with a production of Guys and Dolls. The theater’s annual gala dinner fundraiser will be held June 18 at Cucina Restaurant, preceding the Saturday night show.

Since it was taken over by the Hurley-based New York Conservatory for the Arts (NYCA) in 2011, the Playhouse has held auditions in New York City for its summer shows, this year including Beauty and the Beast, a new drama entitled Cherry’s Patch, and the musical Pippin. “The actors we hire are rising professionals or pre-professionals coming out of theater programs across America,” said Farrell. “The directors and choreographers are from New York City.”

Over the past 30 years, a multitude of local kids have gone through NYCA, learning to sing, dance, act, and collaborate with others in lively productions, some of those students going on to theatrical careers. Farrell, the non-profit’s vocal director and musical director, now also manages the Playhouse, with the goal of continuing its historic role in the community.

The circular theater at the entrance to Woodstock, created by Robert Elwyn in 1938, was recently recognized as a historic site of American theater and music history by the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area. Among its performances were the last great sound-out concert of Jocko Moffit, featuring Richie Havens, in 1968, acknowledged as a precursor to the 1969 Woodstock Festival. The Playhouse has also been seen as one of the first rural extensions of Broadway and was home to the Margaret Webster Shakespeare Company, in partnership with actress Eva LeGallienne. Celebrated actors appearing on its stage have included Leo G. Carroll, Anne Meara, Larry Hagman, Diane Keaton, Judd Hirsch, Estelle Parsons, Lee Marvin, Chevy Chase, and many others.

The June 18 dinner will mark the 78th anniversary of the Playhouse. Cucina will accommodate 60 guests for wine and appetizers, followed by an Italian meal, coffee, and biscotti before the 7:30 p.m. performance of Guys and Dolls. After the show, there will be a champagne/chocolate meet-and-greet reception with the cast and directors of the Woodstock Playhouse Production Company.

This rendition of the classic musical stars Kelly Murphy as Salvation Army Sergeant Sarah Brown. At a recent rehearsal, said Farrell, “Kelly started singing, and everyone in the building stopped to listen to her voice ringing out. She has a perfect spin on her voice — it’s hypnotizing.” The show will be directed and choreographed by Andrew Parker Greenwood, who has done several other musicals for the Playhouse, including Oklahoma!, and West Side Story. “He has a great feel for the old-time musical,” noted Farrell.

Beauty and the Beast, opening July 8, is directed by Frank Sansone, a NYCA graduate who is now an Equity actor moving into directing and choreography. His experience performing on Disney cruises suits him well for Beauty and the Beast, now that he has settled in New York City.

On the last weekend of July, the Playhouse presents a drama, Cherry’s Patch, based on the experience of two firefighters who died in the 9/11 disaster, friends of playwright Ron Scott Stevens. The action takes place in a Brooklyn firehouse, where the crew blames one of their members for the death of their beloved leader. As they work through accusations, the politics and budgetary problems of the firehouse come to light, giving an inside look into the lives of firefighters. Proceeds from the show will go to the local fire department and their families.

“This is a rich and deep play,” said Farrell. “It puts you into the shoes of other people, and you begin to understand why they are the way they are, the way only theater can convey a human energy. People sit in the same room with each other and feel the ripple of what’s happening — like an ocean wave that hits us, and we feel the force of that wave.”

The final show of the season, Pippin, will open August 5, directed by Randy Conti. The 70s musical, originally choreographed by Bob Fosse, tells the story of a young man searching for his “Corner of the Sky,” as one song puts it. “Revivals of this show are sometimes taken out of their element and commercialized,” said Farrell. “Our approach will be about the magic, the spirit of the Hudson Valley. Where else can you go to feel that connection to the quiet of your own heartbeat, away from the hustle and bustle of New York and the Internet? All those things fade — but hopefully not the human spirit.”

The Woodstock Playhouse, 103 Mill Hill Road, presents Guys and Dolls from June 17 to July 3, Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. Tickets range from $32 to $40. On Saturday, June 18, the gala dinner at Cucina costs $150, including the show, with festivities beginning at 5:15 p.m. Tickets are available through http://www.woodstockplayhouse.org.

“If it had been left up to me,” says Susan Hoover of her new book, “it would never have been done.” But publisher Dayl Wise of Post Traumatic Press didn’t leave it up to her. He encouraged Hoover to compile a book-length collection of her poetry, most of it never before published. At 3 p.m. Saturday, June 25, at the Woodstock Artists Association and Museum, 28 Tinker Street, Woodstock, The Mathematics of Disengagement makes its formal debut with readings by Hoover and fellow-poets.

Hoover spent her first five years in Montreal, where she learned to speak French from a nanny. The family then moved to Williamstown, Mass., home of Williams College and also of a level of sophistication not common to small cities. The Hoovers lived on a farm, although they weren’t farmers; her father was an inventor, her mother “center of the social hub of Williamstown. It was an interesting way to grow up.”

At an early age Hoover became obsessed with the guitar. Unsatisfied with early teachers, she taught herself and by the time she was ready for college she was practicing up to twelve hours a day. After getting a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado, she went back to Williamstown and realized she had no idea of what she wanted to do. After the summer she returned to Colorado and drove around the mountains, eventually finding an abandoned cabin on a dirt road which she managed to rent for $15 a month. For a while she supported herself as a folk-style singer-songwriter, using a combination of her writing and music talents, performing in small Colorado clubs. She also taught guitar, which became more of her focus. She moved to New York, where she taught guitar at the Mannes School of Music and the Guitar Study Center.

In New York, Hoover became serious about writing poetry. She joined Poets in Public Service and the Teachers and Writers Collaborative, through which she taught poetry all over the New York City area. In 1980 she rode her motorcycle up to Woodstock to visit friends she had met in the Gurdjieff movement. She liked the town enough to rent a cabin off Abbey Road, where she spent summers until 2004 when she moved to Woodstock permanently.

Although Hoover had published two poetry chapbooks in 1995 and 1997, she seldom sent poems to magazines and never had thoughts of another book. “I can’t bear the business end of self-promotion.” But when Wise and his wife Alison Koffler approached her to do a book, she completed a project of putting together material written over more than three decades. “If they hadn’t asked me,” she adds, “it would still be sitting on the desk.”

Asked to describe her material, Hoover says, “It has inner landscapes, but I avoid the pronoun ‘I.’ I want people reading it on some level to think of themselves as having written that poem.”

Listeners will be able to learn how they identify with Hoover’s landscapes at WAAM on June 25. Readers will include Hoover, Patricia Martin, Alison Koffler, Victoria Sullivan, Bruce Weber and possibly others. There is no admission charge, although donations to WAAM are welcomed and copies of the book will be available for sale and signing.