Final Thursday Reading Series

FINAL THURSDAY READING SERIES

Thursday, April 24, 2008
Vibe Coffee House
Cedar Falls, Iowa

Featured Reader:
frje Echeverria

Vibe will also feature a display of frje's visual art

Signup for the open mic begins @ 7 p.m. on a first come, first served basis. Limited slots are available, so readers are encouraged to sign up early to read your best five minutes of poetry, fiction, or creative non-fiction. Singer-songwriters are also welcome. The open mic begins at 7:30 p.m. The featured reader takes the stage between 8:00 and 8:30 (depending on how many open mic readers there are). After the reading, there will be a brief question and answer session.

frje Echeverria taught in the UNI Department of Art for 38 years and retired in 2007. His writing includes spare poems and carefully worded treatments in essay and letter of sensation, experience, and understanding. His writing, like his painting, can be taken as an explication of subject matter or seen as a revelation of meaningful symbolic form. He feels the sound of his work is always elemental. You can read samples of his writing below and see a display of his visual art at Vibe.

Vibe is located at 909 W. 23rd St. in Cedar Falls on the second floor of Bought again Books. Persons needing access accommodation should call 266-7115 by the day before the event. For more information, contact Jim O'Loughlin.

Read Work By Featured Readers

Chaveevah Banks Ferguson

Eula Biss

John Bresland

Scott Cawelti
Bill Chene

Catherine A. F. MacGillivray

Nate McKeen
Aaron McNally

Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure

Cherie "Chillin'" Nelson

"A Painter's Sensation"
by frje Echeverria

I like to work from life. Careful observation makes what we are looking at seem to change; things seem to be moving when they are not; a person may become an hallucination of another person, familiar or unfamiliar, they may become unrecognizable even as a person. Yet in the end there is often an uncanny accuracy in the work whether it is of a person, an interior, a thing, a landscape. This accuracy is neither conventional nor caricature, but rather a new truth, not noticed before or during the making of the painting, but presented as if a revelation. As I begin and intermittently as I continue, there is the specter of the conventional: an invisible demon who chides me about how no one will recognize the sitter, the place, the thing in the finished work. Equally insistent, another demon encourages me to see freely, to follow my own inventive vision toward that as yet unglimpsed truth.

I like to include the environment, to be both talkative and silent while working, to paint rapidly the whole painting with one bamboo brush, to use the wrong colors, to continually readjust everything even when I have places that are exquisite but must be lost or destroyed to bring the rest of the work to blossom, to let the painting take as long as it must to come to fruition.

"A Korean Visitor"
by frje Echeverria

sometimes
on quick wind
comes grain of gold
from distant mountain

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