Welcome, it’s a new website…
Wednesday, November 29th, 2006Welcome, please come in, we’ve got a new look and some changes on the website! We’ll be updating for the next few weeks, so please check back to have a look around.
As I write this, it’s a warm day in West Virginia, an unusual reprieve between the frosts of Halloween and the winds of winter. Chloe the snow-white cat is keeping me company. Now that the leaves are down, I can see the lights of Charleston spread out by the river about a mile away.
It’s a blog, this is, it’s my first time blogging and I’m slipping my toes into the water. How goes it out there? Bob and I are getting ready for a short road trip to New Jersey, to play in my old hometown. It’s been a year of transition, letting go of the old family home and letting go of Mom, too. It takes a little getting used to. Going home is not what it once was. There’s only so many times you can drive past the old house and look curiously at what the new people have added — a blue-lit castle and plants across the front porch, snazzy bright pickup trucks parked under the woodpeckers’ peartree — and what they’ve taken away — the old blue spruce tree, cut down in chunks. But there’s the coffee shop, the Cocoon, where we run into the locals who’ll join us for a night of music. And there will be Christmas lights for 500 miles from here to there, including, we hope, a brand new display where I once hung our own.
In West Virginia, I’m working on a book project due to go to press in January, called Patchwork Dreams. It’s a kids’ and community songbook for Big Ugly Creek, WV that builds on a project I did two years ago collecting oral histories and writing songs with children and adults at Big Ugly, funded by an Artists and Communities grant from the MidAtlantic Arts Foundation. I’m up to my ears in songsheet entry and 400 pages of transcripts, and I get to take the work into schools to sing with kids. Bob and I are also gearing up to start our second year of Music Mentors in the East End of Charleston, teaching dulcimer to K-5ers. We’re expanding into drums, guitar and keyboard with the help of our new instructor, Tim Courts, and more local grant support.
All for now, I’ll write again soon. Hope you like the new look, thanks to my good friend Janis at Second Chance Productions. Let’s stay in touch.
