On August 1 at 7 pm at Hollow Earth Radio, we start our second season. Lacey Jane Henson will present her short story “Trigger.” Check out what Paul Constant wrote about us in the summer issue of The Stranger’s Arts & Performance Quarterly:

The Furnace Reading Series brings an outstanding author together with the weird aural hallucinations that sometimes appear on Hollow Earth Radio every now and again, just to see what happens. The resulting story is part radio play, part tone poem, and part memorable performance, and while they’re all archived online atthefurnaceseattle.wordpress.com, there’s something special about seeing the whole thing performed live. Tonight’s Furnace brings local author Henson to read her short story “Trigger.”

See you at the next Furnace on August 1!

• Bradford Loomis inspired by “More Like Home Than Home” by Anca Szilagyi
• Nancy K. Dillon inspired by “The Last Night at Manuela’s” by Buffy Aakaash
• Katrina Kope inspired by “Three Songs” by Rae Diamond

Fetch: noun:  The distance traveled by wind or waves across open water; the distance a vessel must sail to reach open water.

Kathlene Postma’s performance of “Fetch” is this Thursday at 7 pm, at the Hollow Earth Radio performance space. The story’s title comes from a nautical term (definition above) and is one of several terms that organize the story. I asked Kathlene about it in anticipation of her reading.

AS: How did you come to use nautical terminology as headings for the sections of “Fetch”? Did the terms come before the story? Did the story call for the terms?

Kathlene Postma: Great question! The nautical terminology and the story “Fetch” grew up together.  My husband and I are both teachers, and we have three school-age daughters.  Every day at least one or more persons in my house are memorizing terms or figuring out how to explain them.  In this story Georgia, the central character tries to understand something as mammoth as Lake Superior while also struggling with the results of a terrible car accident.The funny thing about words and their definitions is the way in which a person comes to comprehend them.  Our lives are layered with seemingly random but powerful impressions and events–a car accident, a new town, a shattered foot–and those can saturate abstract words or principles we might be memorizing in school.  If you teach, you spend most of your time organizing knowledge for a group of students, but what happens creatively within that organization is unique to each student.  You can’t control what an individual does with the information you provide or the way it integrates into who she or he is becoming. There is a magic in how that works.  With this story I try to explore the illogical beauty of the process.  For Georgia, the nautical terms are peripheral–she merely learns them to help another teacher–but they help organize for the reader the direction her life takes.

It seemed as if she had been the one to die, so light she felt, so porous and open to the snowy sky. When the surgeon explained she was fortunate to still have her leg, she fixated on a hawk that hung every day over a nearby cornfield. It seemed frozen in the air.

The details again:

Thursday, May 16, 7-8 pm

Hollow Earth Radio performance space

2018 A E. Union St., Seattle, WA 98122

Or listen live online!

The performers:

Bradford Loomis marries grit and melody to dig to the roots of American folklore and speak of the raw reality of the human condition with soul, passion, and hope. Bradford will perform original music inspired by Anca Szilágyi’s story “More Like Home Than Home.”

On her critically acclaimed 2010 album, ”Roses Guide to Time Travel”, Oklahoma native Nancy K. Dillon mapped the road West; the dusty highways that conjure up images like Kerouac’s road trips, traveling dustbowl carnivals, and free-spirited 70s hipsters. Inspired by Oklahoma/Texas troubadours Townes Van Zandt, Eric Taylor, and Kevin Welch, Dillon’s songs are short stories about the various characters that populate rural American life, as well as her own travels through the American West and beyond.  2013 will bring the release of Dillon’s latest creative sonic efforts in songs inspired by her exploration mapping her family’s origins throughout Scotland, Ireland, England and the New World on a brand new CD entitled “Game of Swans”. Nancy will perform original music inspired by Buffy Aakaash’s play “The Last Night at Manuela’s.”

Katrina Kope is a Seattle based singer/songwriter that has performed in and around the area for over 10 years as the Katrina Kope jazz Quartet, Soul/R&B with Soul Kata, and Reggae with Leisure Sounds and Roll:One. Currently, Katrina co-hosts the all improve “Sing it Live” Jam for vocalists at the Seamonster and is about to release an album with her pop/electronic band, Purr Gato. Katrina will perform original music inspired by Rae Diamond’s essay “Three Songs.”

Here is a beautiful recording of Rae Diamond and Jessika Kenney’s performance at The Furnace on January 16.

Furnace: In the essay you discuss this moment where you and the chimera become one being– a kind of complete instrument. Was there a moment like that for you in writing this particular piece– where you and the essay became one or is that phenomenon reserved for sound?

Rae Diamond: Absolutely yes!  The essay & I became one at many points – most especially after long periods of stuck-ness, followed by profound inspiration & flow.  This happened with each of the three sections, all in different ways, & from different sources of breakthrough. Writing is completely different from playing music, although not so terribly different from composing music.  The kind of fusion I experience when playing music is much more intense for me because there is a different kind of immediacy.  Music is an art-form that occurs in time, whereas writing – although it takes time to write & to read – does not occur in that same timespace.  In fact, through writing, you can very easily stretch or shorten time, as well as travel into the future & into the past.  Playing music is not like this.  The musician makes notes, & those notes cannot be erased.  Although they all disappear, they are in the moment indelible.  For me, this applies a kind of pressure I do not feel when I write, compose, draw, or paint.  While I may get swept up in a similar way in any of these creative processes, losing track of time, & entering some kind of altered state, the state I enter when I play music – especially in a recording or performance setting – instills a sense of imperative that the other arts do not for me.  This makes music-playing for me more exciting, terrifying, challenging & exhilarating than other arts.

Wednesday January 16th, 6 pm

2018 E. Union Street– Live! In house event.

Or listen on line: http://www.hollowearthradio.org