AFTER WORDS

November 27, 2015 - January 31, 2016

NOVEMBER 28 READING HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL JANUARY 23, DUE TO WEATHER AND ROAD CONDITIONS.

Regional artist and book-maker Rachel Epp Buller will present a series of new books on Final Friday, November 27, from 7-10 pm.  The exhibition runs through December and January.

The following evening, Saturday, November 28, Fisch Haus will host readings of recent work by Elizabeth Schultz and Catherine Anderson, as well as an artist discussion with Dr. Buller, from 7-9 pm.  This event has been rescheduled for January 23, 7-9 pm.

For the Final Friday reception in January, Dr. Buller will invite Bethel College students from her January interterm Book Arts course to exhibit their final projects.  Working with poems by Elizabeth Schultz and Catherine Anderson, Dr. Buller's students will select compelling phrases to inspire their book creations - much as she has done in the work on exhibit at Fisch Haus.

ABOUT THE ARTIST AND AUTHORS

Rachel Epp Buller

Dr. Rachel Epp Buller explores creative and critical paths in her dual practice as printmaker/book artist and art historian. Much of her recent art and scholarship focuses on intersections of art and the maternal. She is currently Associate Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College.

Elizabeth Schultz

Following retirement from Kansas University’s English Department, where she was known as a Melville scholar, Elizabeth Schultz became a dedicated advocate for the arts and the environment. She continues to write about the people and places she loves and has published two scholarly books, five books of poetry (three in 2014: The Sauntering Eye, Mrs. Noah Takes the Helm, The Quickening), a memoir, a collection of short stories, and a collection of essays. Her scholarly and creative work has appeared in numerous journals and reviews.

   “Poetry can open the pores of your imagination, mind, heart. It can let you hear underground rumblings and stars singing. It can knock you flat out on the pavement of your life or whisper secrets to you that you didn’t know you knew. The hardest thing about writing poetry is trying to find the words to say it. Sometimes you don’t know what “it” is: a feeling, an intuition, a flutter of something red at the end of an alley. Poetry, for me, demands that I peel back layers of my own life, of things I’ve taken for granted. This can be crazy-making; it can be exhilarating. I’ll be sharing a diversity of my poems, some recent, some from my books, covering personal experiences as well as the experiences of the imaginary Mrs. Noah, who had quite a job to do, tending to so many animals on board that ark.”

Catherine Anderson

Catherine Anderson is the author of The Work of Hands (Perugia Press) and In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books). Her third collection, Woman with a Gambling Mania, appeared in 2014 with Mayapple Press and was named as one of the Kansas City Star’s top 100 books of the year. Poems and essays have appeared in the Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, the Midwest Quarterly and many others. In 2013, she was the recipient of the Gary Gildner Poetry Award offered by the I-70 Review, and in 2010, she won the Crab Orchard Review’s Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. For two decades she lived in Boston where she edited a community newspaper and taught English. She now lives in Kansas City where she has been working with the region’s refugee communities for over eleven years. Of Catherine Anderson’s second collection, The Work of Hands, poet Robin Becker wrote: “This poet’s vision of North American community challenges our expectations and rewards us with vivid imagery and the textured music of her lines.” Of In the Mother Tongue, Catherine Anderson’s first collection, the late poet Maxine Kumin wrote: “Everything Anderson has experienced or observed is rich material for her poetry. All of it is suffused with caring—a compassion that ideally knows no gender.”