I am so super (superusted!) excited to be a writer included in the 2015 Talking Image Connection series. I’ll be reading my piece inspired by the art at the Soap Factory this Friday, November 6th from 7:00-9:00pm.

Luke Pingel, a professor at St. Kate’s, is this year’s director of Talking Image Connection. Here’s what he has to say about this art and writing synergistic night of genius:

“Part of the uniqueness of this series is that it provides an artistic dialogue between the visual and literary mediums. With that comes the challenge: writers asked to write at least part of their reading/performance specifically for the event, inspired by one or more of the pieces on display in the exhibition. They may use the term ‘inspired’ in whatever way best suits their voice and their ability to create.”

The exhibition that my fellow writers and I will be working with is titled “Superusted.” It opened September 12 and features 17 artists from five states in the Midwest Midcoast. I visited the exhibit to see what drew me in, what inspired me. And, boy, was I inspired!

Talking Image Connection brings together writers, performers, contemporary art and new audiences in art galleries around the Twin Cities.

Come hear original work by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins, William D. Waltz, Patrick Werle, me, Jordan K. Thomas, and special musical guest Venus de Mars, in response to superusted, The Soap Factory’s 4th Midwest biennial curated by Cheryl Wilgren Clyne.

Here are the writer bios:

Claire DeBerg writes from a closet in Minneapolis. The working title of her unpublished novel, Yakamoz, (which is Turkish for phosphorescence) is completed and being shopped to literary agents. Her essay, “Choosing Gloria” published in Brain, Child magazine reveals what transpired two short days before her plan to place her baby for adoption. She is the editor of a small women’s quarterly magazine which she promises you’ve never read (but thinks you probably should). With a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Northern Iowa, Claire prefers red shoes and her favorite punctuation is a colon: giddy up.

Venus de Mars is a multidisciplinary artist and musician, best known as a singer-songwriting transgender rock star and leader of the band All the Pretty Horses. A chance tax audit transformed her into a champion of artists’ tax rights, after which the Venus de Mars Fund with Springboard for the Arts was established. De Mars is the recipient of multiple grants and awards, among them a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, a Bush Fellowship, and a Minnesota Music Award. She is currently working on a memoir and her newest album is “Flesh and Wire.”

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins teaches in St Paul. She is the author of the chapbook OH NO EVERYTHING (Pockets Press 2015) and was a winner of Best of the Net for 2014. Look for her work in PANK, Beloit JoyFace Poetry and Arts Collective Journal, Linebreak, BOXCAR, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere.

Jordan K. Thomas is from the “lesser” Midwestern state of Iowa and is glad to have left. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Minnesota working on a hybrid memoir/essay collection focused on blackness, faith and the lack of faith, non-belonging, and being Othered by the Other. He also likes candy a lot. Some would say too much.

William D Waltz is the author of Adventures in the Lost Interiors of America, which won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. Zoo Music, his first book, won Slope Editions’ First Book Prize. He is the founder and editor of Conduit magazine, the only magazine that risks annihilation. Waltz lives in Saint Paul, near the Mississippi River and its fossil spotted bluffs.

Patrick Werle is a poet and poetry-instigator living in South Minneapolis. He is a Senior Editor with Poetry City, USA and an MFA Candidate at Hamline University. He is currently working on his first manuscript.

Click here for information about the superusted exhibit.