Floyd artist Lora Geissler (pictured above with two of her paintings) asked members of the Floyd Writers Circle to put a poetic voice to her recent body of work. At a Show Opening at the Café del Sol on Sunday, Mara Robbins, Rosemary Wyman and myself performed some of the poetry that resulted from her request. Although we knew the literal subject of many Lora’s painting was an old rusty sink abandoned on a beach in Maine, her zoomed in artist’s eye and sensibility transformed the ordinary into archetypal landscapes that lent themselves to personal interpretation and to the stirring of poetry.

Rosemary read her poem “Convergence,” titled for the painting of the same name. Behind milky scrim … shadowy limbs collect … ready to present. Indistinct faces press … anxious to peer … through the caul.

Mara’s poem of the same name, written for the same painting, began with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh “We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.” It read in part … Howl in the background, falling … ribbon, shells, signs. Birchbark … peeling out of sight, last night … when the stars … were stars, your fingers … This frame. The poem she’s reading in the above shot is titled “Cave of Disembodied Legs” and goes with the picture on her left, titled “Within.”

My little sips of haiku-inspired verse inviting the listener to slip in-between worlds were of moon and sun as star crossed lovers, a well, a skull, a kiss. A woman’s capacity … Love echoes far … I see myself … I see myself … I see. And Loyal companion … Fixed gaze … Death shows life … The way.

Lora was the 2008 winner of the Staunton Art in the Park Best in Show, winning a ribbon and a $1,000 prize, along with a solo exhibit at the Staunton Augusta Art Center, which took place this past spring. In an article for The Floyd Press about that exhibit Rosemary described Lora’s work as embodying … a silent generosity – a palpable quality of meditative introspection and reverence … She writes, … For Lora Leigh whole landscapes are to be found where sun bleached New England granite ledge has split apart to produce a deep inky crevice, or where Pacific tides and winds constantly erode sandstone cliffs unearthing prehistoric looking egg-shaped boulders. You can check out Lora’s website HERE.

~ Colleen Redman is a writer from Floyd who blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com

I’d heard of the Duhks before and mentally filed them away under neo-bluegrass, but then I heard their cover of the spiritual “Mighty Storm.” The funky drum beat and the soulful voice of Sarah Dugas made me sit up and pay attention right quick. But that powerful song is just the tip of the iceberg for this eclectic band—and their performance last night at Kirk Avenue Music Hall in Roanoke underscored that in a big way. (more…)

1. My favorite dust sprinkling Blue Fairy walks on clouds.

2. View of the Floyd Country Store from the newly renovated Station at Locust Street, which was celebrating their Grand Opening with tours. The building, once home of Mama Lizzardo’s Restaurant, combines studio businesses, a tasting room, restaurant, and apartments upstairs. It’s very impressive inside and out and the tour was a highlight of the day.

3. The Floyd Artist Association moved from Art Under the Sun and has a new gallery in the Station. The group also had an outside booth for the day (pictured). Tina Liza Jones (far right), a FAA member, led a group in an old time jam.

4. Looking down from one of the Station’s balconies onto Jubilee venders selling pottery, clothing, jewelry, art, food, and more.

5. A Wizard of Oz wind blew up and vendors helped other vendors hold the forts down.

6. Veterans raising money for veteran causes selling paper poppy flowers as a jamboree mountaineer passes by.

7. Young Actors Coop and Floyd belly dancers paraded through downtown bringing whimsy and theatrics to the event.

8. The first annual Floyd Jubilee was also a celebration of the new Warren Lineberry Memorial Park, named for a Floyd judge and active community member who passed away in 2003, and was brought to us by The Partnership for Floyd citizen group. There was general frolicking on the lawn all day, in this case to the tunes of Upland Express.

9. It was a great turnout and I think everyone who attended would agree the Jubilee was a success. There were tractor rides and a garden Par-Tea on the lawn of one historic home. I was sorry I missed some of the other musical performances, Rob Neurirch’s storytelling at the Hotel Floyd amphitheater stage, and the Hollerin’ Contest (but Sally gave us a good sample of the hollerin’ at the Café del Sol Spoken Word later that night).

~ Colleen Redman is a writer from Floyd who blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com

The following was published in The Floyd Press newspaper on June 4, 2009 and online HERE.

Environmental activist and best selling author Bill McKibben recently spoke at The Floyd Country Store on sustainable local economy. He was hosted by Sustain Floyd, a newly formed citizen group with a mission of protecting and enhancing the natural, cultural, and economic resources of Floyd.

Scholar in Residence at Vermont’s Middlebury College, McKibben lives in a Vermont town smaller than Floyd. He’s a Methodist Sunday School teacher, and has written for a wide range of publications, everything from The New Yorker and The Atlantic to Christianity Today, National Geographic and Rolling Stone. His first book End of Nature has been described as being the first to bring attention to global warming. His latest, Deep Economy, questions the assumption that unlimited growth is an essential part of a healthy economy.

Rural communities once thought to be getting passed-by because they didn’t have four lane highways hold the most promise for economic sustainability today, McKibben told an attentive crowd of about 140. “The curve of history is bending in a new direction. Small towns are on the right side of history,” he said.

Citing the recent spike in gas prices and its inevitable return, McKibben explained the importance of asking how we can do things closer to home. “Five years ago the cost of bringing a container load of goods from China to the U.S. was $3,000. Last summer the cost of bringing a container load of goods from China to the U.S. was $18,000.”

For a local economy to be sustainable, emphasis needs to be on resiliency, rather than constant growth and speed, and on what economists call “comparative advantage,” McKibben explained. Comparative advantage means determining what your locality has that others are lacking, or what McKibben refers to as “playing to your strengths.”

Food grown on small local farms and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farms, along with homegrown music are some of Floyd’s “valuable commodities” that foster its independence, Mckibben pointed out. His comments brought nods and applause from some in the crowd. After praising the county for being ahead of the curve, Mckibben added, “I predict that Floyd’s biggest problem will be that it will be too desirable. It would be smart to deal with land use and planning in advance if you want to protect the things that make it so desirable.”

McKibben said he wrote Deep Economy after coming across poll data showing that Americans’ satisfaction with their lives peaked in 1956 and has since been on the decline, even though the material standard of our wealth has almost tripled since then.

Another study that piqued his attention was one that compared big box chain shopping with Farmers Market shopping. Sociologist’s conducting the study found that shoppers at Farmers Markets had 10 times more conversation. “It’s how everyone shopped for 10,000 years, since the beginning of agriculture, and how 80% of the world population still do. Local food knits communities together,” McKibben said.

“China and the rest of the world are starting to use oil in large quantities. There’s only so much of it in the ground.” Citing a recently released report from the International Energy Administration, Mckibben reported that the world is running out of oil faster than once thought. Without cheap oil, mobility won’t be as easy as it was in the past and the idea of moving everything long distances won’t be as feasible, he said.

But there are also hopeful signs. “For the first time in 150 years, the number of small farms in Virginia and in others places around the country is on the rise,” Mckibben noted, adding that “Farmers Markets are the fastest growing part of the food economy in this country. Wind power is the fastest growing source of electric generation around the world, and local live performances and festivals are growing very quickly.”

An engaging question and answer period followed Mckibben’s half-hour talk and went on for over an hour. Responding to a question on the problems of rural transportation, he suggested the use of new technologies to organize ride sharing and said we could learn a lot from young people. “They have an intuitive sense of how to build community across these new sets of technologies.”

Addressing a question about climate change, the issue that McKibben spends most of his time working on, he remarked, “Policy change is important. We can’t solve global warming one light bulb at time anymore. It’s too big. It’s happening too fast. We need huge change, but we can do some of the work ourselves.”

In regard to feeding those in need during the transition from fossil fuels, and in the midst of extreme weather events predicted by scientists, he paraphrased Scripture saying “Love one’s neighbor,” and recommended bringing in people who don’t think of themselves as environmentalists, involving local churches, and having back-up systems. “What’s most important is to have strong communities where people can rely on each other,” he summarized.

Founder of 350.org, a global initiative to bring awareness to climate change, Mckibben encouraged the audience to consider creative ways to get involved in the group’s October 24th action project, a day of worldwide rallies, parades, and art installations designed to build a movement around the climate crisis. “It makes an impact,” he said.

Towards the end of his talk Mckibben joked, “Don’t you guys have to go to work at some point?” With a blend of intellect, humor, and spiritual reflection, he managed to convey an upbeat message about the global challenges ahead, predicting that the quality of life will be actually be going up. “Our problem is that we’ve been trying to meet non-material needs for love, respect, status, affection, and all those things humans need with material purchases, and it hasn’t worked very well.”

Mckibben doesn’t consider himself an optimist or a pessimist. He long ago stopped thinking in those terms. “I just get up every day and try to figure out what I can do to change the odds in the right direction,” he concluded.

~ Colleen Redman is a writer from Floyd who blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com.Note: a video clip of McKibben at the Floyd Country Store can be found HERE.

The following was published in The Floyd Press May 28, 2009. I saw the play last night and can highly recommend it. It’s being performed tonight at 7:00 and Sunday at 5:00.

Since the fall of 2005 Floyd’s Young Actors Coop (YAC) has been entertaining audiences. With over a dozen productions of original plays and stage adaptations to their credit, and building on the momentum of their well received winter performance, “Comedy through the Ages,” the group has a new play opening on May 28th at the Winter Sun Music Hall, with subsequent showings on May 29th and May 31st.

The full feature play, titled MEN2B, was written by Haden Polseno-Hensley in collaboration with YAC founder and director Rose McCutchan. Polseno-Hensley and McCutchan both have theater backgrounds that began more than a decade ago at Floyd County High School under the guidance of Drama Teacher Nan Johnson and Forensics Coach Janet Keith.

According to YAC’s Myspace site, MEN2B is described as having a “good mix of social commentary, humor, and music with a tip of the hat to the Beatles.” It’s a comedy with a plot that revolves around a Boy Band with fake British accents, their groupies, and an investigative reporter, says Polseno-Hensley.

Comedy is a good fit for Polseno-Hensley. As a member of a comedy troupe at Vassar College in New York, where Polseno-Hensley was an English major, he wrote as many as twenty skits that were performed in front of large audiences. The Floyd native recently relocated back to Floyd from Alaska, after receiving an MFA degree from the University of Alaska in Anchorage.

The four members of the fictionalized MEN2B group are played by Elias Sarver-Wolf, Cameron Woodruff, Ian Gammarino, and Emerson Perry and are loosely based on another fab four: John, Paul, George and Ringo. Perry’s character, who likes to wear lots of necklaces, is named Blingo Scar. Gammarino wears a white suit like John Lennon’s and Woodruff walks barefoot across Locust Street in a photo take-off on the Beatles’ Abby Road album cover posted on the YAC Myspace page.

“They know nothing about the Beatles,” Polseno-Hensley explains. “It’s their super evil producer who has made them speak with accents, put them into clubs, told them how to act and told them who their favorite Beatle was.”

Art Goldberg, the evil MEN2B producer trying to capitalize on the Beatles’ popularity, is played by Abraham Cherrix. Marsden Woddail is the band’s road manager, and Boy Band fans trying to get into a concert are played by Bethlehem Cherrix, Jessica Spangler, Avery Foster, and Vivianna Lynch. Alesandra Hicks plays one of the girls’ little sister who threatens to tell her parents about her older sister’s activities if they don’t let her tag along. Bedelia Burris- McGrath is the reporter probing for the truth. Other cast members are Coriander Wooddruff, Maggie Avellar, Hanna Da’Mes, Hannah Schwenk, Hannah Mitchell, Arlo Glibert-Tanner, and Wilson Coartney.

With 37 roles played by 19 actors aged 7 to 18, MEN2B is the first YAC full feature play and the first one that Polseno-Hensley has written. Another first is the participation of Mike Mitchell’s students at The Floyd Music School, expanding on the showcase of local young talent.

“There is live singing of Yellow Submarine and Eleanor Rigby. The Floyd Music School is going to play on most everything that we do, mainly violins,” says Polseno-Hensley. There is also an original piece, reminiscent of a Boy Band song that was written just for the play by Adam Parks, a musician who was recently visiting Floyd. “It has a familiar pop sensibility. I think it’s brilliant. It captures exactly what we were trying to do,” noted Polseno-Hensley.

McCutchan, who has a degree in Theater Performances from Marymount Manhattan College, taught an arts based afterschool program to young children and acted in Community Theater in New York before resettling in Floyd. Excited about MEN2B, McCutchan says, “It’s just so much fun. The main characters are well developed and there are some sensational side characters. It’s a play that shows off the kids and how amazing they are.”

~ Colleen Redman is a writer from Floyd who blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com. Her writer’s bio can be found HERE.

~ The following appeared (in a slightly different order) in The Floyd Press on 5/21/09
1. The weather cooperated for the 3rd Annual Tour de Floyd last Saturday. Under sunny skies, 98 riders made the 63 mile loop, much of it along the Blue Ridge Parkway. Participants left the Floyd Fitness Center in groups at 8:30 and arrived at the downtown stoplight soon after.

2. With a green light, bikers cycle past the Floyd County Courthouse.

3. A group of mostly women wave and smile as they pass onlookers.

4. Heading out of town for Franklin Pike and then to The Blue Ridge Parkway.

5. Rest stops at Floyd Dry Goods and Buffalo Mountain Store were sponsored by The Partnership for Floyd. Some bikers made pit stops and enjoyed the views at Smart View, Rocky Knob, or Mabry Mill. Support vans and a rescue squad vehicle were on hand if needed.

6. Blacksburg resident Jan McGilliard said she was training for Team in Training, a national biking event at Lake Tahoe that raises money for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. She rode Tour de Floyd in honor of her friend, a fellow athlete who recently died of cancer. Blogging about her fundraising efforts, McGilliard has raised $12,000 for the cause, her blog (janintraining.com) reports.

7. Wearing their Tour de Floyd T-shirts, provided by the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, Crey, Jean, and Alea Lacoste make a good support team for the bikers. The turn-out for the ride was up from last year’s 76 riders, Jean Lacoste said.

8. Holding more than a thumbs-up, Tour de Floyd organizer Paul Lacoste and a friend from Washington D.C. take a break from cycling to pose at the Saddle. The ride raised $3,000 for The Floyd Rescue Squad, Lacoste later said. “Everyone was all smiles and all went well,” he added, reporting that the last group of cyclists returned from the tour loop to the Floyd Fitness Center at 3:45 pm.

9. Houck and K.B. Medford from Winston Salem and Mimi and Mike Dannhardt from Vienna, Virginia, stop for fudge provided by Nancy’s Candy in Meadows of Dan. Houck Medford (seated), Director of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, came out to support the Tour de Floyd riders and take pictures.

10. A list of Tour de Floyd sponsors, pictures, and a link to a Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation slideshow of the ride, can be found on the Tour de Floyd website at tourdefloyd.swva.net. Lacoste encouraged those interested in the event to volunteer for next year, saying, “The rides have been successful and are growing. With that growth comes a lot of work. If anyone wants to be involved in ways other than riding, they can go to the website’s contact and send us an email.”

~ Colleen Redman is a writer from Floyd who blogs daily at looseleafnotes.com. Her writer’s bio can be found HERE.