Carolyn Dunn's News and Views

It has been a wonderful summer. I spent a week with the Creek Divas at this year's playwrights' retreat with Native Voices at the Autry. It was my third retreat, first as an actor, since I was workshopping two of my plays in the previous retreats. I had the honor of working with my friend Joy Harjo on her new one-woman show Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light as well as on Creek playwright Julie Pearson-Little Thunder's The Girl Who Was Captured By Ghosts. I'm also really excited to announce that my play The Frybread Queen will be presented as a staged reading at the Wells Fargo Theatre at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park on November 3rd.

My new poetry book, Echo Location, will be published by the end of the year and we are in editing stages. Griselda Suarez is editing and some of you may know her work from Through the Eye of the Deer. Griselda is on faculty in Chicano-Latino Studies at Cal State Long Beach and is working on several of her own manuscripts, including the excellent The Mysteries of the Maginficent Rosario Santos. Gris and I have known each other since working together at Upward Bound at Cal Ploy Pomona where she was a lead tutor and resident advisor for summer programs. She later went on to become the assistant director for Educational Talent Search for AASE in San Francisco where she earned her MFA in creative writing and returned to Southern California to teach at Idylwild Summer Arts and CSULB. We both have had similar career tracks, being academics as well as dedicated to educational opportunity and TRIO programs.

We will also be developing the literary journal Angelena in the coming year, both online and in print. Angelena is a journal devoted to creative and critical works by women writers of color in Los Angeles, "from the freeway to the river." Our inaugural edition will feature Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, the Chumash/Tohono O'odham poet; African-American playwright Calysta Watson; Tongva scholar and artist Cindi Alvitre, the Kickapoo-Creek diva herself, Arigon Starr (who many people don't know is an incredible artists as well as musican/ playwright/ singer/songwriter, etc. etc...) among other L.A. based poets. The sense of a poetry community in Los Angeles is very limited and Gris and I are working toward filling the void and using the journal as a way to build community and use art as activism here in this city. We are looking forward to getting Angelena out by Spring 2009, so look for coming updates on this issue. Paula Gunn Allen had agreed to write the editorial for the inaugural issue but due to her illness was unable to do so. We honor her memory by continuing with the first issue.

Sadly, the final edition of the Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts will be forthcoming in the fall. Terri Windling and Midori Snyder have worked so hard over the years to keep this online journal up and running and will close the journal in order to concentrate on their own work but will keep the mythic arts alive in other venues. I will have a new piece in the final journal, "Spider Woman". Terri and Midori published several of my Deer Woman articles and most of my poetry published in the last few years has been through Endicott.

And, in closing, I am very pleased to announce that my first children's book, coauthored with my evil twin brother Dr. Ari Berk, will be published at the end of the month by Abrams. Coyote Speaks contains original poetry and stories by me as well as re-tellings of traditional stories by both of us from across Indian Country. Some of Ari's wonderful artwork is in the book as well as his dedication to preserving storytelling traditions of Native America. Also included is a final chapter on storytelling in Los Angeles, since both Ari and I are from this city alot of people love to hate. Ari also has some exciting projects forthcoming and I hope to be able to announce them soon (hint, hint).

I'm also pleased to announce that we are working on a new website for both myself and Mother Bear Media. Karen Strom, who has by sheer determination and will brought so many native writers to the web, has been my webmistress for the past eight years and I thank her so much for her patience with me and my lack of mad computer skills to get my site up. Robert Silent Thunder will take over from her and will struggle to comprehend the madness as we work on getting new sites developed and published this fall.

More sooner than later, hopefully!

Endicott Journal of Mythic Arts final issue now online:
http://www.endicott-studio.com/jMA08Farewell/index.html

Coyote Speaks is now available through the usual suspects...published August 20th.

Labels: Coyote Speaks, literature, poetry