Cheri's Books & Music

There were many nights this past month when, instead of staying home to write about what I had seen the night before, I went out to see something else. At a writers conference in Grand Forks, North Dakota, several years ago, a writer said to the audience (it was either Arnost Lustig or Josef Skvorecky, I can’t remember which), “It’s not so glamorous to be a writer; while you’re out drinking and dancing, we’re home scribbling.” I think he’s right. Lustig or Skvorecky’s claim can help explain why this month…

I happened onto Peter Geyen's work by accident last week when I was in downtown Minneapolis. His exhibit "Know More Funny Business," which benefits Children's HeartLink, is up in the IDS Center's Crystal Court (on Nicollet Avenue) until November 10. You can see some images from the show on Geyen's facebook page.

The big parts of his work--the parts you see across the room--are slick and shiny, which always draws the eye, or at least mine, and the pieces, which are three-dimensional, are meticulously…

I know that she has been publishing books in English for a while now, but I am often slow to catch onto things; only recently did I discover the work of Liliana Ursu, but now she (along with another Romanian poet, Ileana Malancioiu) is one of my favorites.

I discovered Ursu when I was writing an essay this summer about American poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Gallagher, along with Adam Sorkin and Ursu herself, have translated two of Ursu’s books, The Sky Behind the Forest (published by…

I've been thinking about music and dance this week, as my sister, Julie Johnson, has been rehearsing for a November show she's doing with the dancer Tamara Ober; we've been talking about how music affects the kinds of dances that dancers make, and vice-versa.

When I was newly twenty-one I went to see live bar music for the first time at Whiskey Junction in Minneapolis. I was a student at Augsburg College and I was about to fall in love with a transfer student who had a girlfriend in the Navy. He was a…