It’s heart month! Local poet and photographer to be featured in Williamsport First Friday event
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WILLIAMSPORT -- In anticipation of Valentine’s Day, Lycoming Arts will feature two local artists during February’s First Friday Event on Feb. 2.
Poet Marjorie Maddox and photographer Karen Elias, co-authors of "Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For," a poetry/photography collaboration, will be featured at this month’s First Friday event at the Lycoming Arts Gallery, 46 W. Fourth St., Williamsport.
Their collaboration features images and poems -- many of which were created during the pandemic -- centered around a cracked heart-shaped stone that Elias discovered on a beach in Maine and that, she says, came to symbolize for her the sorrows, and necessary healing, of our troubled world.
Poet and photographer worked together in what is called an ekphrastic process, whereby art inspires art: word at times giving rise to imagery and imagery likewise sparking word.
On Friday the artists will sign their collection, and Maddox will read selected poems. The event will also feature violinist Peter Harris as well as student artist Muireann Tran.
From the Preface: "In Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For," a cracked, heart-shaped stone inspired us to nuanced portrayals of love, obsession, grief, joy, loneliness, independence, anger, protest and hope. It led us back to memories and forward to our responsibility for the earth, to fairy tales -- real and shattered -- and to this complicated world in which many of us, with our fragile, courageous hearts, benefit from the shared visions of others.
Dr. Karen Elias, who taught college English for 40 years, is an artist/activist, using photography to raise awareness about climate change. She curates the annual juried photography exhibit at the Clinton County Arts Council in Lock Haven, and her award-winning work appears in private collections and galleries. "Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For," an ekphrastic collaboration with poet Marjorie Maddox, appeared in 2022 from Shanti Arts. Additional collaborations have appeared in such literary, arts or medical humanities journals as "About Place," "Cold Mountain Review," "The Ekphrastic Review," "The Other Journal," "Glint," "Poetry in Transit," "Ekstasis," "Valiant Scribe" and "Ars Medica." Elias, also a playwright, has had work chosen by the Climate Change Theatre Action and performed in eight countries.
Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University, Marjorie Maddox has published 14 collections of poetry with two forthcoming -- including "Begin with a Question" (Paraclete, International Book and Illumination Book Awards Winner), the ekphrastic collections "Heart Speaks, Is Spoken For" and "In the Museum of Her Daughter's Mind," based on her daughter's paintings (www.hafer.work), and including work by Karen Elias, Greg Mort, Margaret Munz-Losch and others (Shanti Arts). She also has published the short story collection "What She Was Saying" (Fomite); four children's and YA books, and "Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania" (co-editor with Jerry Wemple, PSU Press). She is the 2023-2024 host of WPSU's weekly show Poetry Moment. Please see www.marjoriemaddox.com.
The artists invite you to stop by the Lycoming Arts Gallery on Fourth Street in Williamsport, from 5 to 8 p.m., to meet and talk with them, have some refreshments and perhaps come away inspired.
"Please join us," Maddox said, "on this collaborative ekphrastic path, which -- we hope -- will lead you as well to new insights and creations."