Local authors Kelly Dolejsi, left, and Tara Downing will read from their books Friday, March 6, at Samizdat. Courtesy photo
COMMUNITY News:
Ever wonder what the cows would think of a bull dancing in glitter? Or whether the small brown birds bobbing in the pines are actually cinnamon-feathered sonnets?
Find out this week, when Samizdat hosts local authors Tara Downing and Kelly Dolejsi for a reading at 6 p.m. Friday, March 6, at the bookstore, 174 Central Park Square. A book signing will follow the reading, which will include new material as well as excerpts from their published work. Books will be available for purchase.
The event is free and includes tea.
Downing’s book, Human Be ing, delves into the absurdity of being human through anthropomorphic stories. Its subtitle, And the walk you must take when there is no soap, derives from a trip Downing took to the mountains with friends.
“We were staying in an old cabin in Colorado and the outhouse didn’t have any running water,” she said. “Our friend went to use the outhouse and when he came back he said, ‘If you don’t have soap then you have to take a walk,’ and that phrase became an inside joke for years.
“For me, it represented that the way we see things, the way we do things becomes a habit so entrenched in the way we see others that we cannot see things in any other way until the soap is taken away and we have to take a walk or see things a little differently.”
Dolejsi’s book of poems, The Missing Sea, is “similar to Tara’s,” Dolejsi said, “in that it’s focused on the absurdity of being a human in specific roles: daughter, mother, reader, dog-sitter, mourner, driver, dreamer, cheesemonger.”
Dolejsi said she wrote the book to cope with the feelings that came up throughout her relationship with her mother, but especially those during the period beginning with her mother’s diagnosis of throat cancer and continuing well after her mother died.
“Poetry was the only thing I could write for a while, the only way to capture the absolute absurdity of cancer, death, grief, and love — the wild irrationality of it all. The complete soaplessness,” Dolejsi said.
When people read the poems, Dolejsi said she hopes “they feel joy along with her sadness, or at least a sense of possibility. Even during really hard times, life is loaded with chances for connection, love, and peace.”
Downing said she wanted to tell the stories that have stuck with her throughout her life.
“These stories have made me think about how our poor way of connecting and communicating continually leaves us missing each other,” she said. “Our inability to be compassion-forward makes us trip into otherwise simple situations and make tragedies out of bids for connection.”
Downing said in her family, “we use the phrase, ‘pretending to be human’ when we are just going along with something or when we feel out of place. I think it’s because we are always being told that we should be different from what we are. That being brown is not okay. That being unsure is not being confident, and for some reason neither is okay. That being a bully is strength. Being human is complicated but to me, listening and understanding will always be strength.”
Downing has a Master of Science in Mental Health Counseling from Westminster College and a Bachelor of Art in Anthropology from Metropolitan State University.
Dolejsi has published poetry and fiction in many literary journals. Her poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net, and her contribution to the book, September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond (edited by William Heyen) was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook, That Second Starling, was published in 2018 by Desert Willow Press. She also writes plays, reviews, and feature news stories for her local community in Los Alamos. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College.