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Nina Romano at Books and Books

3/29/2016

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     I’ve lost count of how many readings I’ve been to at Books & Books in Coral Gables. Up until last night, they’ve all been pretty much the same. Rows of foldout chairs filled with the authors’ Miami-based friends, relatives, and fans, book lovers gathered en masse, have made the sizable store feel smaller and more humid than the tropical air outside.
      Nina Romano’s reading on February 28 was nothing like this.
     There could not have been more than twenty people in attendance. The only full row was directly in front of the podium, its chairs occupied by Romano’s husband, long-time friends, and her former professor, John Dufresne. Still, before the reading even started, Romano’s excitement was as obvious as it was contagious. She moved about the room, introducing strangers to one another and offering wine and food to all with the warmth of a doting Italian grandmother. I felt cared for, welcome.
     As a host, Romano was gracious. As an author, she was grateful. The occasion for her appearance at Books & Books was to promote her latest novel, Lemon Blossoms. It is the second installment of her Wayfarer trilogy in which we are introduced to Angelica Domenico, a Sicilian girl whose idyllic life on her family’s lemon grove is jostled by loss, trauma, and desire. Romano’s gratitude was never clearer than when she announced that Lemon Blossoms is dedicated to John Dufresne, Romano’s thesis advisor while she was earning her MFA at Florida International University. It was his suggestion to embark upon the marathon of publishing a trilogy and his words of encouragement that keep Romano writing. In his introduction to her reading, Dufresne called Romano a “force of nature” in possession of what Nabakov called shamanstvo—the enchanter quality.
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     Romano read from the opening chapter of Lemon Blossoms. Her prose is ripe with stunning cultural detail that transported her audience to turn of the century Sicily. Her homework—consisting of long-term travel, family interviews, and the mining of personal memory—had been done, and thoroughly. Angelica is eight at the novel’s outset, and undergoes a series of rites of passage in the first chapter alone. She buries a beloved pet chicken, menstruates prematurely, and even drinks her father’s wine in secret. Romano’s protagonist is a precocious girl who not only comes of age on the page, she comes alive.
     When Romano finished reading, she opened the floor to questions. None came, only comments. Audience members lauded her gifts as a storyteller and shared their excitement over the release of the final novel in the Wayfarer trilogy, forthcoming from Turner Publishing in July. The first book in the series, The Secret Language of Women, is set in China in the late 1800s and introduces the Italian sailor Giacomo Schimenti, who becomes a major character in Lemon Blossoms.
      At one moment when Romano expressed a bit of disappointment at the audience size, the comment lingered for a breath and then dissipated quicker than it was spoken, as not a single one of us regretted being part of her rapt audience for the night.
 
          —Miguel Pichardo

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A Taste of the Bard at Florida International University

3/29/2016

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     On February 10th, some lucky attendees had the rare pleasure of getting a taste of Shakespeare’s world—or at least, his libations—at the Spirit of Shakespeare Event at Florida International University’s (FIU) Biscayne Bay Campus. Part of FIU’s month-long celebration of hosting the Folger Shakespeare Library First Folio exhibition,in School of Hospitality and Tourism Management’s bayside building and was hosted by FIU Vice Provost Steven Moll, featured an afternoon of ale tastings, lectures, and readings dedicated to the Bard and his enduring influence.
     First up on the menu was the tasting, which included three different types of alcoholic beverage that were common during the Elizabethan era: mead, gruet, and small beer.
     “You simply couldn’t risk drinking water,” said Chris Gill, an affable, bearded young man who was serving the samples in small tasting glasses. “So most people drank some form of ale, even the children, as the process to turn water into ale helped to make it more potable.”
     A senior in HFT, Gill took a brewing class on a whim last spring and within a year turned his hobby into a passion, eventually working at the Biscayne Bay Brewing Company as an up-and-coming professional mead maker. The light golden mead, which is brewed from honey, was remarkably delicate and crisp. If ales had personas, this would be beer’s coquettish little sister, with just a hint of sweetness behind its playful sparkle. Its refined smoothness showed why this brew was reserved for the nobility of the time.
     The spicy gruit, brewed with a combination of herbs and spices such as rosemary, myrtle and heather rather than the hops traditionally used for ales, was mostly served in the taverns of the time. The small beer was brewed to contain very little alcohol, mainly as a means to purify water. It was the drink of choice for servants, commoners and children, although Queen Elizabeth I herself was known to enjoy the beverage. All three beverages, brewed on campus based on research done by the HFT students themselves, were smooth and flavorful.
     The tasting continued during a series of brief lectures centering on the Elizabethan age from a culinary perspective. After Gill spoke, HFT Professor Nancy Scanlon gave a spirited talk on the Elizabethan kitchen, accompanied by a slide show of manors and castles where these beverages and other delicacies, like venison or lampreys with hot sauce, were created to feed the appetites of the upper class in banquet halls. English Professor Vernon Dickson presented an intriguing look at the attitudes and beliefs surrounding food during that era, and how these concepts influenced the representation of food in works of the time, including Shakespeare’s writings.
     The sweet ending to the afternoon’s feast of events was a reading of Shakespeare-inspired works, emceed by Professor Lynne Barrett of FIU’s Creative Writing program. Creative Writing Professors Denise Duhamel and Julie Wade started things off with a reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 which begins, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,”  followed by a refreshing remake in today’s vernacular. Then graduate and undergraduate students as well as alumni of the MFA program including poets Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and Nicholas Vagnoni, and novelist Neil Plakcy, presented contemporary takes on Shakespeare in poetry, fiction, and prose. For me, the highlight of the reading was "On Quoting Shakespeare," by Bernard Levin, read Professor Dickson, which featured a litany of sayings and phrases  that Shakespeare used and popularized which are part of our language to this day.
     All in all, the afternoon was at once culturally satisfying and left attendees hungry to discover even more about Shakespeare and his era. As any chef, or brewer, worth his salt will tell you, whether it’s a creation of the culinary or cultural kind, that is the true recipe for success.

          —Clidiane Aubourg
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Alafair to Remember: Alafair Burke at Murder on the Beach

3/8/2016

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     I arrived at the Murder on the Beach bookstore in Delray Beach, Florida, fifteen minutes early for mystery writer Alafair Burke’s speaking engagement. I sat in my car. February 15th was a Monday, after all, and I didn’t want to be nerd-early, pretending to browse as I waited for the event to begin. At ten minutes to seven, I walked in to find the place nearly full.
     Murder on the Beach is a small mystery bookstore with blood red walls and strategically ripped crime scene tape strewn around the doorways. On Monday night, many of the floating bookshelves had been pushed into corners to make room. It was a packed house. Nearly thirty people showed up, and extra chairs had to be brought out from the back room.
     Alafair Burke is the author of two mystery book series. She is currently on a publicity tour for her latest novel, The Ex, a stand alone mystery centering around a prosecutor, Olivia Randall, whose ex-boyfriend, Jack, calls her from the police station asking for legal help. Jack is a chronically sweet man, and Olivia expects his legal trouble to be some trivial mix-up. But no, Jack stands accused of triple homicide. The novel asks the question, did Olivia ever know Jack at all?
     Many members of the audience seemed familiar with Burke’s previous novels, but some did not. Burke began the event by introducing herself and sharing her background. She was a prosecutor in Portland, Oregon, and an avid reader of mysteries. She found herself skimming any scene featuring a prosecutor. She found them to be cardboard cutouts who never contributed to the mystery. This didn’t line up with how Burke experienced prosecutorial work. Being a prosecutor was fascinating, and so she decided to try her hand at writing a mystery novel of her own. (She has some advantages here. Her father is none other than crime novelist James Lee Burke.)
     She opened with a joke. “I used to be a prosecutor, but now I’m a law professor and novelist,” Burke said. “I’ve gotten very good at enunciating when I say that. I once told a man at a dinner party that I used to be a prosti.... Needless to say, he misunderstood my background and found me a lot less interesting when I turned out to be a lawyer.” This much is certain, Burke is comfortable in front of a crowd, and she spent a solid twenty minutes talking about her background, both with the law and with writing. She then opened the floor for thirty minutes of Q & A, and everybody’s hands shot up. Some had questions about her writing process, and about her family.
“Would you ever collaborate with your father?” one man asked. “Not if we wanted to stay friends after,” she quipped.
     After half an hour, she brought the Q & A to a close, though it felt as if one or two people might have had more questions. To me, this is a testament to her ability to work a room. There is nothing more painful than when somebody stands in front of a room and asks two, three, even four times, if anybody has any more questions. She left the audience wanting more.
     I was in the minority last night, because I went into the event unfamiliar with Burke’s writing. This will not be the case for long. She was charming, and her description of The Ex had me headed to the register where I bought a copy for her to sign.

         —Jaimie Eubanks
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DASS Literature and Jazz at the Olympia Theater

3/8/2016

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Photo: Courtesy DASS
      On February 3, Miami's literary community gathered at the opulent Olympia Theater, long a mainstay of the city's small but dedicated creative class. The event, hosted by the Downtown Arts and Science Society (DASS), drew hundreds of patrons for a dramatic reading of works by four local authors, accompanied and interpreted by an experimental jazz quartet.
     DASS's curator, author Raul Guerrero, says this is exactly the kind of "intellectual flirting" its members enjoy every month. Drawing on the concept of the salon, which flourished during the European Enlightenment and enjoyed a heyday during the Parisian jazz age of Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, DASS functions as a local social club that discusses themes ranging from science and innovation to literature and music.
     This Wednesday offering produced a conversation among many different art forms: literature, drama, music, and architecture, housed under the Olympia's gilded dome.
     Coincidentally–or perhaps not–each of the four authors chose a passage that focused on the nature of father-daughter relationships. Pairing literature with jazz–especially stories like these, turbulent re-tellings of traumatic experiences–was a natural fit. Gary Thomas and his quartet produced melodies that could please a discerning jazz lover, while setting up a dialogue with each story.
     Kicking off the evening, Chantel Acevedo read from her latest novel, The Distant Marvels. A Cuban-American author who recently returned to her native Miami as a professor in the University of Miami's English department, Acevedo chose to read the excerpt herself. Acevedo's selection looked at the protagonist's complicated relationship with her bullish father, a devout follower of Jose Martí in his fight to liberate Cuba from Spanish rule.
     Stacy Conde's The Red Speck followed. The author opted for a dramatic reading by actor Terrell Fritz, whose magnetic boom and startling tenor served her story well. Driving along on a bleakly rainy evening, father and daughter mentally spar, their secret musings heard only in their own heads - and by the audience. His anger, at first seeming to be  meant for a foolish wife, unraveled before the audience: it was his daughter he had called “a cunt,” and not the gold-digging woman he refused to divorce.
     Between Conde and Acevedo, viewers got a real sense of the difference between a  reading and a dramatic interpretation, and how they affect the way a work is consumed.  The audience was abuzz with chatter between the readings, discussing what they’d just heard.
     Understanding how persona and prose play off one another, novelist J.J. Colagrande produced a kind of virtual reality. His geeky schoolboy demeanor led the audience through a sort of video game, the protagonist cycling through the stages of teenage angst, as he read from his work-in-progress, a coming-of-age story called Reduce Heat and Continue to Boil.
     After an actor's reading of Vanessa Garcia's White Light, a story loosely based on the writer's own struggle with losing her father during an important moment of her career, the quartet strummed its final tune.
Exploring the velvety halls of Miami's oldest theater, patrons lingered for an hour longer. Some stayed for the cocktails, others for the conversation, the sound of literature buzzing in their ears.

          —Nicole Martinez

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