In the Saturday Interview, May Cobb talks with Austin-based multi-instrumentalist Guy Forsyth about The Freedom to Fail, his first studio album in six years. In a touching aside about his daughter, Forsyth explains the album title: “…she can only grow to the extent that she reaches for things.” Their discussion is framed by the backdrop of Austin, Texas, the continually metamorphosing “Live Music Capital of the World.”
Then, in a review of the “masterful” and “personal” Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, Kenji Liu highlights the gradually evolving voice of poet Eugenia Leigh. Her poems are “not either/or narratives… not just all good or bad,” Liu declares. The oftentimes binary nature of experience becomes a reason for gratitude and celebration.
Lastly, in the Sunday Essay, a helpful definition of plot comes to Julia Shipley as she bales hay on an artist-friendly farm in Vermont. “Plot is a place; it’s a grave, and it’s the book word for fate. It’s the story of what happens here,” Shipley writes. “But I think there’s more to it.” The farm proprietor, a resilient older woman named Gerri, stokes her curiosity with a bit of earthy wisdom, and Shipley looks to George Merrill, Willa Cather, Hayden Carruth, and others for inspiration.
