How to Build a Fire: Legacy
Thursday, December 19, 2019
7-9PM
The December theme for HTBAF is “legacy.” What does that mean? What is a legacy? There’s an old Pierce Pettis song with that title. The song ends:
We learn the golden rule
In separate Sunday schools
In a house long divided against itself
It is a legacy
Passed down to you and me.
What we choose to believe
We dare not question these things.
It is a legacy
It’s a wild and bitter seed
Scattered on those fertile fields
Where the roots run deep.
What do we create, what do we leave behind? What do we build, what lasts?
The final lyric from Hamilton is wrapped in the heartbreak of legacy, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” What do our families and our histories embed in us? What do we choose to carry forward into the future? What story do we want to tell, do we want others to tell about us?
This month, we are telling stories as part of Open Source’s annual Soup Kitchen. We’ll share a vegetarian meal and we’ll share stories about what remains, what lives on. Come share the evening with Open Source and How to Build a Fire.
This month’s storytellers are Radhiyah Ayobami, Bridgett M. Davis, Bob Holman and Deb Farrell Nelson.
Radhiyah Ayobami was born in Brooklyn by way of the South. She is an African Studies graduate of Brooklyn College and a prose MFA graduate of Mills College in Oakland, CA. She has been published in several journals including Kweli, Agni, and Tayo Literary Magazine, and has facilitated writing workshops with pregnant teens, inmates and elders. She has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sustainable Arts Foundation, Atlantic Center for the Arts and Under the Volcano Mexico. She is a Reiki Master, an herbal tea blender, a listener of the trees and Mama to a beautiful son. She is also the author of The Long Amen.
Bridgett M. Davis is the author of the memoir, The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life In The Detroit Numbers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and named a Best Memoir of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews. She is also the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral, shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Award. She is writer/director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts, and a creative writing and journalism professor at Baruch College, (City University of New York). Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Millions, Salon, the LA Times and O, Oprah Magazine. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in Brooklyn with her family. Visit her website at www.bridgettdavis.com.
Bob Holman is author of 17 poetry collections, most recently The Cutouts (Matisse) from PeKa Boo Press and Sing This One Back to Me from Coffee House Press. Holman has been dubbed a member of the “Poetry Pantheon” by the New York Times Magazine. As a professor, he’s taught at Columbia, NYU, Bard, and the New School. As an arts administrator, he’s served as coordinator and curator at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and was the original Slammaster and a director of the Nuyorican Poets Café. A scholar of oral traditions in West Africa and beyond, Holman co-founded the Endangered Language Alliance, where he currently serves as co-director.
Deb Farrell Nelson was raised in a small town in Connecticut. After a car crash killed her father when she was eight, Deb masked her pain with humor and hyperactivity, while inwardly she experienced intense anxiety and fear of death. This tension—between outer experience with the tangible world and inner awareness of that world’s impermanence—persists in her artwork. Deb studied world religion and psychology at College of the Holy Cross, received dual degrees in Psychology and Studio Art, and earned top jury awards for her explorative body of work on childhood memory. She moved to California in 1996 to co-create a social art program for homeless men and women, people who transformed city sidewalks into uplifting plant and rock installations. She then moved to Boston and helped found an art therapy program for the residents of a homeless shelter. She is also Senior Director of a national, nonprofit leadership search. She has over 17 years of direct experience leading fundraising and strategy for nonprofit organizations. In 2007, Deb and her husband moved to Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood where Deb took inspiration from the emerging street art movement. She currently lives in Park Slope with her two young children.
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How to Build a Fire was created by poet Terence Degnan. Each month, four diverse individuals share personal narratives centered around a theme. Their stories weave together an illustration of the human experience. This year’s hosts are Christina Marks and Stacie Evans. In December, while Christina is making art and fabulousness in Finland, Stacie will host with Terence.
How to Build a Fire takes place at Open Source Gallery — a welcoming, nurturing, intimate, safe environment, a participant-driven art initiative that provides space, community and conceptual context for creative play and critical commentary.
