Second Epiphany
I will be exhibiting a sculpture called “Second Epiphany,” which is part my ongoing examination of the effect of homeland, heritage and belief structure on humankind’s relationship to nature, science, and calamity.

Catherine Brady
Writer
MFA Faculty, USF

Almost Heaven
I will read from my recently completed novel, Almost Heaven, set in the Marin town of Bolinas and in the Point Reyes National Park. The novel explores (among other things) the tensions between people and place: the way in which the beauty of this region influences the culture of the people who live there. Bolinas is still determinedly counterculture, and this incorporates a fairly fanatical attitude about preserving the environment, which paradoxically generates a territoriality--maybe even selfishness--about preserving the place by keeping others out. I'm also interested in exploring the ways in which the web of relationships that connects the human beings does or does not mirror the ecological web in which seemingly distant events or things prove to be intimately connected.

Brandon Brown
Writer
Physics Faculty, USF

Laboratory as Place
I am writing about the sense of place that arises within a scientific research laboratory. Of course, physical science labs come in all sorts of flavors, sizes, and sects, but I hope to encircle fairly universal aspects by using detailed narrative anecdotes within the familiar essay format. Academics are naturally single-minded in their work, but in scientific laboratories, this focus can become communal in ways both voluntary and mandatory, to ends both constructive and debilitating. Many young scientists work literally shoulder to shoulder. The demanding hours of shared place mix scientific and human details to poignant effect, and I will focus on these regions of plain intersection.

Lewis Buzbee
Writer
MFA Faculty, USF

A Gallery of Imagined Landscapes
I was first swept away by literature when I read The Grapes of Wrath at 15. I was awestruck, literally, by the power of language to describe a landscape: "To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth." When we speak of a writer's world, I think we mean it literally, a real place made up of black strokes on a white page: Balzac's Paris, Dickens's London, Faulkner's little postage stamp of earth, Yoknapatawpha. In my own work, I've recently noticed, I've spent a good deal of time and energy, perhaps too much, creating imaginary landscapes, that is, real places that never existed, or places I've only encountered in my imagination: the future, the bottom of the ocean, Tarzan's jungle, Taiwan, Soviet Russia, Vietnam, a San Francisco where the days and nights are characters and control the city and its weather. I'll be reading excerpts from 30 years of poetry and fiction, attempting to piece together a gallery of landscape paintings.

Cheryl Czekala
Writer
MFA Student, USF

Staying Put
Having been moved from place to place--even country to country--as a child, the narrator of "Staying Put" discovers the beautiful and inviting city of San Francisco, and determines never to leave. But over the years, she discovers that change is inevitable, and remaining in one place does not guarantee familiarity of surroundings.

David Holler
Writer, Photographer
Rhetoric and Composition Faculty, USF

Sketches for an Apocryphal Atlas
For this project I’d like to read some post-travel fragments (mostly couplets and quatrains from Two Part Inventions and A Book of Days) that test the limits of the short poem. These micro-narratives come with an implicit question: how much meaningful experience can be conveyed in just a few lines? Can an implied narrative, or a years-later “re-impression” of a place like Sarajevo manage to meaningfully convey location, mood, dilemma? Time’s distortions can warp what few details we remember years after a journey. Maybe you remember that bullets were turned into ball-point pens for tourists in Sarajevo (but you forget the story surrounding where you saw these), or maybe you remember exactly where you were when you heard someone talking about living on whiskey and flour (but you forget this person’s name and other crucial details), or maybe you remember a welder’s shower of sparks working in the rain on a hopelessly blackened building (but you forget what part of the city this was). Sometimes only certain details remain, separated from their contexts. Enduring memories are invariably arbitrary. Which impressions remain and which are lost becomes a matter of sheer chance. (“More things survive by chance than intention,” said Graves.) Commensurating and celebrating that sense of chance in short poems might be seen as a reverent alternative to traditional “poetry of witness.”

I’d also like to read a few longer travel-related pieces, one from Indefensible Details, and perhaps some things from Mottoes for Sundials. I am also working on a book about Vienna and will probably read one piece from that manuscript.

Richard Kamler
Artist
Visual and Performing Arts Faculty, USF

yield to whim
Look for this installation in the grass on the south end of campus next to Fulton St. Beginning March 22. Yield to whim. I hope we all do.

Kathryn Kefauver
Writer
MFA student, USF

Listening To The Rice Grow
I am working on a novel that unfolds in Laos and in Washington D.C. The book traces two narratives: one moving back through the past of the central character, and one moving forward through the landscape of Laos. Each of the storylines explores the themes of family and memory, and the ways in which place both defines and changes people. I've lived in Laos and have studied Laotian, but have found fiction to be the best way for me to explore my lifelong interest in the ways that culture and character intersect. I’ll be reading a short excerpt from this project.

Kristen Kennedy
Writer, Photographer
Rhetoric and Composition Faculty, USF

Hiding from the Light
My work is a personal exploration into how light defines and shapes my relationship to coastal Rhode Island, a place I still call home. I am currently working in multiple genres and media, including poetry, essay, and for this project, photography. The latter provides me with the most immediate medium to represent meaning in light's attachment to familiar objects, landscapes, and people--from the chinks in a dune fence to the shadows that both protect and illustrate the faces of home.

Vijaya Nagarajan
Writer
Religious Studies Faculty, USF

Hosting the Divine on Thresholds in India and America
My project centers on a women's ritual art tradition, the kêlam, performed by millions of Tamil women everyday on the front thresholds of homes, temples and stores in Tamil Nadu in southern India. The kêlam, made of rice flour, is drawn at dawn, and exuberantly celebrates auspicious times and places. This work explores Hindu women's relationship to the kêlam as beauty, form and play, both in India and America.

John Nelson
Video Documentarian
Religious Studies Faculty, USF

Sacred Space and Place in San Francisco: a Video Documentary
This project builds on the experience of a course titled "Sacred Spaces: the Geography of Religion" taught during the 2003 Fall semester at USF. The 27-minute video explores different conceptions of the "sacred"--some religious and some not-- and applies them to a variety of sites within the city of San Francisco. From the Gothic grandeur of Grace Cathedral, to a small garage-size Buddhist temple imported from Hong Kong in 1991, to the quiet fern-lined banks of the Presidio's Polien springs where native peoples once lived, to the Victorian gloom of the repository for cremated remains at the Columbarium--the students' direct encounter with these and other sacred sites provides experiential points of reference that embody fundamental human orientations to the land and cosmos. And yet, in all cases, the ways in which the public interacts with these sites has a political dimension to it because each place is guarded, maintained, and kept symbolically distant from the everyday world--all characteristics of "the sacred." It is the intention of this video that university audiences in comparative religion or other courses will come away with theoretical tools for recognizing and interpreting the sacred spaces in their own lives.

Roseanne Pereira
Writer
MFA Student, USF

Guavas and Pears
Through a series of essays, set at different moments in my life, I will explore my ever changing relationship with Goa, India. En masse, these essays will explore the meeting points of a personal, imaginative space and a more public, historic reality. Goa will be explored as a space of death, a guidebook in the Rand McNally store, and as a garden in Sunrise, Florida. This variety hopes to pick apart how much of our interpretation of a place is what we bring to it, and what we need from it. As much as these essays are about Goa, they are also about imagination and how imagination complicates one’s sense of a place. These essays will examine the stirring forces of imagination as it relates to a youthful sense of wonder, but also, the corrupting nature of nostalgia, a type of imagination that impacts identity in more debilitating ways. The final essay in the series hopes to be one of stark reality, seeing Goa while wrestling one’s imagination from it.

Dean Rader
Writer
Associate Dean, Arts and Sciences, USF

Replacing Places
I am working on two projects. First, I’m devoting some time to a handful of poems about particular places. Secondly, I am writing an essay on Oral Roberts University, entitled "God, The Tower, and the Future: Oral Roberts University and the Sparkle of the Other World" that will appear in a forthcoming book on campus architecture and culture called Good Campus Bad Campus. The essay gives a semiotic reading of the architecture of Oral Roberts University and of Dean’s home state of Oklahoma.

Darrell g.h. Schramm
Poet
Rhetoric and Composition Faculty, USF

The House of Death
Over the years I have been shaped in great part by an abstract place: the House of Death. I have become more and more dismayed to discover this house has so many rooms and that no room has been so utterly dark as the last one I have entered. Each time coming to a door, I assumed it would lead me outside. But I suspect now that the door outside will lead to my own death. Of that I am not afraid. Always this house, this place of death, has made me more aware of my own sexual body, shaping me toward light. Contradictions? But isn't death the contradiction of life? My project, then, is to locate the words to shape that houseled spirit that has shaped me. While currently I am finding it in poetry, occasionally prose intrudes. The spirit must have its own way.

Tracy Seeley
Writer
English Faculty, USF

Kansas and the Poetics of Place
This book began with a confession: I grew up in Kansas. It took a long time to admit that. Tell people you’re from Kansas, and you’ll see what I mean. And then I began to wonder: What does it mean to come from a place? What did Kansas have to do with me? Having made the confession, I made the pilgrimage. I’ve made three trips so far, to investigate, remember, and imagine Kansas. Through a series of interlinked familiar essays, I combine memoir, travel narrative, cultural history, and ruminations not only on Kansas, but on the meanings of place. Through interleaved chapters, I also trace a second journey through illness and treatment for cancer, as I explore the body as place.

Aaron Shurin
Writer
Co-Director MFA Program, USF

Reciprocity
No fog; six weeks of fabulous, withering heat; a garden of one's own - at least for a while: a little Marin idyll. How a San Francisco city slicker with a florabunda streak finds meaning among the roses and hoses of a summer retreat.

Glori Simmons
Writer
Thacher Gallery Manager, USF

"Against Nature" from Graft
Place is essential to my current work, a novel titled Lilac City, set in Spokane, Washington. In fact, the setting of Spokane with its train tracks and strip malls, fields and forests is not a new subject in my work. For the presentation, I will read "Against Nature," a long poem that explores gender through history and horticulture, drawing in part from my experience growing up on a rustic "gentleman's farm" (a setting that would now be considered subrural) outside of Spokane, Washington. Other inspirations include an antique book on gardening that I discovered at the Gleeson Library: The Expert Gardener: or, A treatise containing certaine necessary, secret, and ordinary knowledges in grafting and gardening ... faithfully collected out of sundry Dutch and French authors printed by Richard Herne in1640 and the Marquis De Sade's jail letters to his wife. In this poem, the art of tree grafting and the narrator's contemplation of gender reassignment show us the ways in which the body, too, is a setting, a garden.

Susan Steinberg
Writer
English Department Faculty

how one becomes homeless is this
I am working on a long story, possibly a novel or novella, which follows two linked narratives. Both involve aspects of “place,” specifically with different ways of perceiving or interpreting temporary places and/or “homelessness.”

Melinda Stone
Media Artist
Media Studies Faculty, USF

Ambient Film: The California Tour
The California Tour is an on-going series of film events that brings energetic ambient cinema to forgotten and neglected places. The first in the series was a tour of quirky, slightly off-center films about California to drive-in movie theaters throughout California in the Summer and Fall of 2003. The tour was inspired by a dual desire to draw attention to the remaining drive-ins of California and perform in the hinterlands of the state, where alternatives to mainstream cinema are rare. It was a perfect fit as the last of the California drive-ins are located in places far from the urban centers where land is not a hot commodity and outdoor theaters are still valued as much as strip malls, parking lots and housing developments. To celebrate and disseminate the wonders of our first event, The California Tour is creating a DVD that includes a digital reproduction of the film program and a documentary about the tour. I will show the documentary and selections from the film program, including some of the audience participation films we created and screened. The Pioneer Woman Screen Test will be part of the mix, with casting happening in the Harney Plaza, at 2 PM the day of the screening. Who will be the next Pioneer Woman? The audience will decide. There will be a sing-a-long, bingo and prizes, too.

Elsie Tamayo
Artist
Human Resources Administrator, USF

Mixing Memory With Desire
While place is often a specific location, I am interested in the places that transcend physical space, places that evoke spiritual, emotional, metaphysical, psychological states of being.

Through visual language of painting and 3-D language of natural and found objects----I explore how we, as humans, create place from meaning. Particularly, how meaning is shaped by memory (whole recollections and fragments) that shifts over time and is palpable through desire.

The mixed-media works and found object installation for this show are reflections on memory and the impulse of life longings and yearnings related to “place”. They are drawn from our experiences with nature, within family, at play , at work, and in society. As I’ve come to explore the meaning of place, I hope these visual and 3D works provide the viewer a window in to her/his own exploration of place --"mixing memory with desire”.

Randy Turoff
Writer/ Photographer/ Graphic Artist
Rhetoric and Composition, USF

Images/Ecologs
Born and raised in NYC, I also lived in coastal Massachusetts and in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, for 8 years. I've been in San Francisco for over 10 years with frequent trips back east. I started to write ecological poetry in NY and have continued this ongoing activity through a number of different ecological environments I've inhabited. The visual poetry has evolved and I'm in the process of hyperlinking it with my own computer enhanced photo/graphic imagery to generate a combined word/image project that I envision as a book, not unlike a collection of pages in an illuminated manuscript. For the Poetics of Place project, I would simply like to show a short word/image sequence from part of my Cape Cod series, which is one strand of a much longer and more involved tapestry of work.

Marianne Villanueva
Writer

Absence
My piece will be an excerpt from the beginning of my novel-in-progress, which is about Kansas as seen from the point of view of a 17-year-old mail-order bride. My heroine is a woman who has spent all her life on an island in the middle of the Philippine archipelago. Coming to the midwest is an unsettling experience--the reality is not at all what she has imagined. Yet she is alive to all aspects of the landscape in ways that people who have grown up there are not. Snow, the seasons, the slight dips and rises in the landscape, the smell of wheat, bayberries, mud, spring-- these are imprinted on her consciousness and become braided with the sensation of loneliness. I want to call this excerpt "Absence" because I want to highlight what is MISSING from this landscape...

M. Teresa Walsh
Writer

The “Hotelito”
Fifteen years ago I slipped and fell out of my Harlem apartment window, striking feet-first three stories down, the force shattering my L-1 vertebrae. Bits of bone sliced through strands of my spinal cord and started me on a journey that led from New York City’s Harlem and Columbia-Presbyterian Hospitals, to Helen Hayes Hospital a few hours north on the Hudson River, to Habana, Cuba where I spent three years as a medical patient—twelve months in two different hospitals and twenty-four months at El Hotelito, a small hotel that housed women, children and men from across Latin America and the Caribbean who were receiving medical treatment in Cuba—and finally back to my home in San Francisco. A journey from Manhattan’s blare and concrete, to Habana’s soft air and heat, to San Francisco’s salty wind and wide views. I write about these three landscapes, plus two others: the body that I had to learn again as if it were new territory, and the stories that we sick and injured told each other again and again as if our stories were the only territory in which we could heal.

Benjamin Wells
Mathematics, Computer Science, USF

The Place of Pilgrimage
"Place" in "the place of pilgrimage" refers to a role, a location, a ubiquity, and a paradoxical atopia. My first experience with this experience was passive: I had been pilgrimed. Since then I have taken several active steps. That first step involved St. Francis of Assisi, a felicitous conjunction of name-places. A recent step bore me to Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, contemporary with Francis, and his students. The latest was to the conflict and confluence of the two surrounding, carrier traditions in Andalucia/Al-Andalus. Weaving through all of these has been a continual journey to Avatar Meher Baba. The paradox is that one travels half the world to bow down in one's own heart. This makes the place of pilgrimage everywhere. But that is not my conscious impression. So I plan to explore pilgrimage this spring, in a more reflective manner, without going, doing, being there. Because this will be happening between the time I am writing this and the time I am talking about it, little can be said in advance. Because any collateral works will take shape during the time of reflection, I am not sure what they will look like, but I imagine that they will be largely geometric, poetic, lucid, and symbolic re/collections.

Films
“Dreams from China” is a highly lyrical diary-like film essay lending perspective to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square. “Extremely sincere…presenting a paradox of Chinese politics and society” (NY Times). Shot from 1983-85 while the filmmaker was working in Tianjin and Beijing..

“Live from Shiva's Dance Floor” is a short documentary directed by acclaimed filmmaker Richard Linklater. The film follows Timothy "Speed" Levitch (star of the documentary The Cruise) as he tours lower Manhattan and Ground Zero. Speed – a philosopher, historian and self-described "cruiser" – believes that "life is an ongoing opportunity for celebration." The film focuses on how he can reconcile that belief with the devastating events of 9-11 and how we as a city and a society can mourn yet move forward. It also incorporates Speed's unique vision of what should be done with the "sacred land" that is Ground Zero.

Frederick Marx is an internationally acclaimed, Oscar and Emmy nominated producer/director with 25 years in the film business. He was named a Chicago Tribune Artist of the Year for 1994, a 1995 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of a Robert F. Kennedy Special Achievement Award. His film HOOP DREAMS played in hundreds of theatres nationwide after winning the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and was the first documentary ever chosen to close the New York Film Festival. It was on over 100 “Ten Best” lists nationwide and was named Best Film of the Year by critics Roger Ebert, Gene Siskel, Gene Shalit, and Ken Turran and by the Chicago Film Critics Association. Ebert also named it Best Film of the Decade. It is the highest grossing non-musical documentary in United States history. It has won numerous prestigious awards, including an Academy Nomination (Best Editing), Producer’s Guild, Editor’s Guild (ACE), Peabody Awards, the Prix Italia (Europe’s top documentary prize) and The National Society of Film Critics Award. The New York, Boston, LA, and San Francisco Film Critics all chose it as Best Documentary, 1994. Utne Reader named it one of 150 of humanity’s “essential works.”

HOOP DREAMS is the first in Marx’s planned trilogy of feature documentaries on teenage boys. BOYS TO MEN?, recently completed, is the second. MEN TO BOYS, now in research and development, will be the third.
In 1993 Marx received an Emmy nomination for HIGHER GOALS for Best Daytime Children’s Special. Producer, Director, and Writer for this national PBS Special, Marx directed Tim Meadows of “Saturday Night Live” fame. Accompanied by a curriculum guide, the program was later distributed for free to over 4,200 inner city schools nationwide.

Completed in 1999 but still to be released, THE UNSPOKEN, Marx’s first feature film, features stellar performances from Russian star Sergei Shnirev of the famed Moscow Art Theatre, and Harry J. Lennix, most known for Spike Lee’s GET ON THE BUS, Tim Robbins’ BOB ROBERTS, and TITUS. A hobbyist songwriter, in 1991 Marx recorded a number of his songs collectively known as ROLLING STEEL. Two of those 11 songs are used over THE UNSPOKEN tail credits and one is used in BOYS TO MEN?

Having worked for a time as an English and creative writing teacher, Marx began his movie career as a film critic, and has worked both as a film distributor and exhibitor. He has also traveled extensively. He lived in Germany from 1970-71 and again in 1978, and in China from 1983-1985. He’s traveled repeatedly through Western and Eastern Europe, and North Africa. With a B.A. in Political Science and an MFA in filmmaking, Marx has coupled his formal education with a natural gift for languages, speaking German and some Mandarin-Chinese. His interest in languages and foreign cultures is reflected in PBS’ international human rights program OUT OF THE SILENCE (1991), the widely acclaimed personal essay DREAMS FROM CHINA (1989), and Learning Channel’s SAVING THE SPHINX (1997).

Marx’s previous three films premiered at the New York Film Festival. His short films are distributed by Facets Home Video. Having dedicated his life to the making and promotion of independent films, Marx, a true maverick in the increasingly commercialized world of “independent cinema,” continues to provide a voice of artistic and social integrity. He repeatedly returns to work with disadvantaged and misunderstood communities: abused children, the working poor, welfare recipients, prisoners, the elderly, and “at risk” youth. He brings a passion for appreciating multiculturalism and an urgent empathy for the sufferings of the disadvantaged to every subject he tackles. As his mission statement above indicates, his is a voice strong and clear, and profoundly human.

Timothy Speed Levitch is a prolific playwright and actor, cruiser and urban philosopher in an ongoing love affair with the world. Subject of the Emmy-award winning documentary The Cruise, Speed first came to national prominence as the brilliant interpreter of New York City on Gray Line Tour buses. He now conducts private tours and has published his own guide to New York: Speedology: Speed on New York on Speed (Context Books, 2002) and appeared in a number of films, including Waking Life (2001), Scotland PA (2001) and Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, which features his philosophical reflections on what we should really put on the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center.