Spring Newsletter 2025
We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute
the real content of a work of art.
— Maurice Ravel
This month, we mark the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel. I love to celebrate his birthday any year because I share mine with him, but this time around the sun especially so. To mark the occasion, I wrote a piece for the WBJC newsletter. It’s short (with pictures) so I hope you’ll take a quick look here.
The Associated Press is reporting that the flu season in the U.S. is the most intense it's been in 15 years or more, with at least 24 million flu illnesses according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 43 of our 50 states—including Maryland—reporting high or very high flu activity. Sad to say, I’ve been part of the statistic. Then again, a friend sent me this:
Anyway, we soldier on. I’m determined to be well enough for some book events that I’ve been looking forward to for the longest time.
THIS EVENING AT 6!
The Chesapeake Shakespeare Company is making their Studio available to me and company member, Laura Malkus, to talk about Reinventing Shakespeare in light of The Deceived Ones, inspired by Twelfth Night, and CSC’s production of It’s A Comedy of Errors, Hon! both set firmly in Baltimore.
At the end of the month, on Sunday March 30, I’ll be venturing down to Virginia for the monthly Reston Reading Series in Reston’s Used Book Shop at 4 PM. The series was founded by writer and publisher/editor of the online journal Maryland Literary Review, Nathan Leslie, whom I met at one of the Lit & Art readings at the Bromo Seltzer Arts Tower in downtown Baltimore. And this is what I love about the greater Baltimore-Washington writing community—it feels like a big, welcoming family. I look forward to having Nathan on BookNotes when he comes out with his next publication.
Moderator Abby Higgs has put together a panel on Writing Between Worlds: Misplacement, Memory, and Meaning. I’m very much looking forward to joining Pantea Amin Tofangchi (Glazed With War), Diana Rojas (Litany of Saints), and Amara Okolo (Son of Man) as part of the Women & Gender Studies Graduate Symposium at Morgan State University from 1:30 PM – 2:30 PM on Thursday, April 3rd; and then again during the 22nd CityLit Festival on Saturday, April 5 at the Lord Baltimore Hotel downtown.
By now, The Ivy Bookshop and her sibling store, Bird in Hand, feel like home from home. On April 10 at 6 PM I’ll be so happy to be back at Bird in Hand in Charles Village to join memoirist, friend, and writing partner, Danielle Ariano (The Requirement of Grief), and poet, friend, and fellow-immigrant, Pantea Amin Tofangchi, to think and talk about The Self in Writing—as in: Is the novelist omniscient, or is she inevitably writing herself into the story? How does the “I” of the memoirist craft herself as a developed character? How much is poetry a self-reflection in time and place?
Between Reston and Bird, it’s off to Mpumalanga on the escarpment east of Johannesburg by way of England. The stop-over is to visit our beloved “Boys” in Essex (last seen on the QM2 crossing from Southampton to NYC last summer) and to meet Siva Oke. Siva is the beating and heart and soul behind the award-winning independent CD label, SOMM, which she founded thirty years ago; and for which it’s my pleasure and challenge to write the Sales Notes. One of her big upcoming projects is to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Afro-British composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, with a recording of his music conducted by Charles Peebles with the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast during June. If you’d be inclined to support this project, you can do so here.
In April, Siva has invited us for lunch at her home in Thames Ditton, Surrey, and booked us in to the Miter Hotel, which is set on the River Thames opposite Hampton Court Palace. As the saying goes: what’s not to love? Then the time in Mpumalanga will be a week for a gathering of the soul in that rarified atmosphere of stillness, flora, and fauna unique to that part of the world. It’s my fervent hope to be able to use the time and place to finish the first draft, at least, of my much neglected work in progress.
As we switch seasons, and leave the Polar Vortex to its own devices in the northern hemisphere, I’m sending you the warmest wishes for Spring/Autumn.
Until next time—