Show and Tell Gallery

hosted by Nikia Cummings

It’s a mystery as old as time — keeping the balance between making art and making money. Artists of all kinds meet this challenge — everyday wizards, who conjure art and summon money too.
After events, many of us will gather informally for food and drinks, and one of the favorite conversation topics is how each of us tries — successfully or not — to make art and also make a living in a city with a high unemployment rate, low wages, and limited opportunities to be paid as artists. How we create art is another fascinating topic of conversation for many creative people, either because we want advice or just because it’s interesting to compare notes.

Nikia Cummings, Amber Ridenour and dan raphael

Amber Ridenour

Poems, stories, and interviews by Amber Ridenour (“Starlite Motel“) have been featured in Gumball Poetry, 580 Split, Quill and Parchment, Slightly West, Mirror Northwest, Lexicon Polaroid, Word RiOT, Blown Out: Portland’s Indie Poets (Church of Poetry Press), KBOO’s The Talking Earth program, Underside Arts’ What Next?, Powell’s Books Smallpressapaloosa, The Someday Incubator, and some truly squalid taverns.

She has written four chapbooks in two years, attended half of an MFA writing program through a well-known university before fleeing in disgust, made a lot of interesting friends, and married the poet Chris Ridenour and started Night Bomb Press and The Night Bomb Review with him.

dan raphael

That a blue collar kid of two 1^st generation Americans who didn’t complete high school would write poetry seemed magical to dan raphael.

Math geek, and able to figure out a lot of things, dan’s main aesthetic principle is “language knows more than I do: I’m a relay, but must involve my current contexts. My poems jump around, have multiple levels — I continue to be surprised by what’s in them.”

FREE
7 p.m., Three Friends Coffee House,
SE 12th and Ash, Portland, Oregon

Podcast: Download (Duration: 56:36 — 38.9MB)