In 1995, my family moved to Santa Fe for just shy of two years. We joined a food coop
and picked up our weekly share at the farmer’s market. Not sure what to do with a
pumpkin, I put off cooking it for a week or two. When I finally took up the knife,
the pumpkin was completely dried, had become a sound-producing instrument.
This kind of magical transformation happens in New Mexico where, I learned,
there’s even a word for rain that dries before reaching the ground, virga.
Coming soon: To Set Right
Lynne Shapiro’s chapbook, To Set Right, is a portal, an entryway into the ways of reconciling ourselves to the world that oftentimes wishes to rend us apart through its violences and hatreds. It is politically and historically engaged, it has a heart that is communitarian in spirit, and it compellingly advocates that our global affections are what in the end will sustain us. Even as we feel broken at times, the poems remind us how we must continue to repair ourselves as if the repairing were a meditative way to reclaim our lost histories, lost connections. This small but indefatigable book looms large as an invitation to enter a way of living that has as its core healing and solace, a life that engenders and replenishes.
Gregory Djanikian
To be published by Word Tech Communications, October 2021
Coming Soon: Gala
An irreverent, chapbook-length hybrid poem, with embedded feminist argument, set in the 1980s New York art world. Stylish, steeped in art history and mythology, GALA is a narrative anecdote, a love story about coincidence, art, film, Surrealist lore, and the desire to set the record straight. With color illustrations.
To be published by Solitude Hill Press
Morocco Residency
Word Up, Culture Vulture’s Artist’s Residency. Sefrou, Morocco
January 2017
I was lured to Morocco by the promise of staying in an ancient, medina in a town where textile buttons are made for djellabas. The buttons were like breadcrumbs leading me to Sefrou where I wrote new poems and worked on a translation into Arabic, Tifinagh, and Darija. I read at Clock Café in Fez and in the Streets of Sefrou for a culminating arts walk at night. To learn more about Culture Vultures’ programs, and the exciting Museum of Multiculturalism being created at this very moment in Sefrou: http://culturevulturesfez.org.
Sussex Residency
Beetime Artist Residency, Art, Ecology, and Science, East Sussex, England, June 2017
Opportunity to study bees and biodynamic farming. In response, I created a series of poetry sketch books, which I made by hand and shared at an end-of-residency exhibition and poetry reading. “Drone Poem”, written during the Beetime Residency, won first place in the Remembrance Day for Lost Species Poetry Competition in Dublin, Ireland. See Beetime website above for more information about the organization. Check out Natural Beekeeping Trust’s fabulous website for cutting edge thinking about bees and rewilding: https://www.naturalbeekeepingtrust.org
Santa Lucia Residency
Finding the Common Thread, a Beetime Art & Ecology Research Residency, Santa Lucia, Vejer de la Frontera Spain, September 2019
This was a residency for three, a visual artist, Philip J. Riley (UK/Cyprus), Becky Leach (UK), a storyteller, and me. A section of a long poem, written and performed in Santa Lucia, will be published in my upcoming chapbook, To Set Right. https://beetime.net/en/
