Abracadabra: She’s out of the box with a wand of her own. Erica Sodos is a magician, psychic entertainer and motivational speaker currently in residence at the Mercury Cafe. In advance of her May 31 show there, The Magic Within: Psychic Explorations in Telepathy and Empathy, we chatted with Sodos…
The graphic novel Wild Ocean dives into the plight of endangered animals by giving readers a glimpse of life in the deep sea. The collection of stories looks at twelve sea creaters that are dangerously close to extinction, from sea turtles to albatrosses.The book, edited by Matt Dembicki, was created…
Washington Park is the focus of a major brewhaha right now. Last week Denver City Councilman Chris Nevitt, who represents the area, sent a letter to the Denver Department of Parks and Recreation asking for a six-month alcohol ban at the park due to abuse and “bad behavior.” The only…
When he hit rock bottom, DIY zine-maker and literary adventurer Justin Hocking started taking evening jaunts from New York City to Rockaway Beach, where he surfed the waves under the moonlit sky. He defied death; he navigated trauma; he searched the shadows of his soul. This period of self-exploration launched…
Was it really dozen years ago that Trista Sutter, a pediatric physical therapist moonlighting as a Miami Heat dancer, had her heart broken on the first season of The Bachelor and then became the very first Bachelorette, falling for poetry-writing firefighter Vail Ryan Sutter and getting married on national TV?…
As an obituary writer, Bruce Weber confronts mortality more than most. So he decided to bid farewell to middle age by taking a cross-country bike trip which he used to reflect on aging and mortality in his memoir: Life Is a Wheel: Love, Death, Etc., and a Bike Trip Across…
Jovan Mays, the first-ever poet laureate of Aurora, wants his poetry to capture the voices of the city’s people, who first inspired him to write and perform poetry. An Aurora native and graduate of Smoky Hills High School, Mays has been invested in the Aurora community since he was a…
On Monday, Governor John Hickenlooper announced the creation of the Sand Creek Massacre Commemoration Commission, designed to further understanding of that dark chapter in Colorado history as the 50th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre approaches on November 29, 1964. And that process just got a big boost when Columbia…
Your story matters, says poet Yosimar Reyes, who denies the dominant narrative of United States citizenship, that “real Americans” are blue-eyed, blond-haired, white, upper-middle class men fully assimilated into the American Dream. This isn’t historical; this isn’t reality, he says:This is a nation founded on immigrants. Living in the United…
If there’s one thing science-fiction writers love as much as exploring space and meeting aliens, it’s traveling back in time and screwing things up. From H.G. Wells to the recent reboot of Star Trek, time travel is one of the genre’s most well-explored tropes, but authors keep finding new ways…
Though telepathy and photographing dreams seems like the stuff of sci-fi, physicist Michio Kaku says science is catching up to fiction. In his new book, The Future of the Mind, the theoretical physicist and co-founder of string-field theory delves into the study of the human brain and these seemingly impossible…
Local author Colleen Oakes’s newest book, Queen of Hearts hit the shelves on February 14. To celebrate the first book in her new trilogy, she will be at Bookbar on Saturday , February 22 at 6:30 p.m. Oakes took a break from writing to talk to us about straying far…
Though it’s a human-rights movement with roots in gay-liberation activism, the fight for rights for sex workers is much less recognized, says Melinda Chateauvert. Her new book,Sex Workers Unite: A History of the Movement From Stonewall to SlutWalk aims to change that, chronicling the the movement from the struggle to…
Some novels take a while to get going, and some give you an immortal dwarf, a time-traveling corpse and an alchemical mystery before the end of the first chapter, as City of Lost Dreams does. The follow-up to the best-selling City of Dark Magic finds protagonist Sarah Weston in an…
It may seem downright unChristmasy to be talking about the dead, grateful or not, at this time and season. But if you’ve got an eccentric, contemplative, bookish, introspective type on your shopping list, then I have a suggestion: Dayton Foster’s The Dead Do Speak To Us…of Love, Life & Death…
As a member of Rabbit is a Sphere and Everything Absent or Distorted, Robert Rutherford helped bring some of Denver’s finest indie rock and pop to life. Those bands have since ceased to be, but Rutherford is still writing in the same idiom, even if the final form is a…
A trip across the plains over Thanksgiving reminded me how much I love Kent Haruf’s books — 1999’s Plainsong and its sequel, Eventide, at least. (Benediction, the third in the sort-of series about the fictional town of Holt, seems almost like a parody.) Haruf, who now lives in Salida, grew…
With Cars, Cards and Carbines, author Travis Heermann is aiming to bring some fun back into the world of speculative fiction. The forthcoming anthology — aiming for a December 2014 release and currently seeking funding via Kickstarter — is primed to do just that with a series of action-packed stories…
Poet and conceptual writer Robert Fitterman tackles a heavy topic in his latest work, Holocaust Museum, a recontextualization of captions for photographs displayed in the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Fitterman sees modern poetry moving toward appropriation as a means to critique and create conversation around a…
Is Lumber Baron Inn: Denver’s Mystery Mansion, Denver historian Phil Goodstein’s latest book, really about just one building? “Yes, it is,” replies Goodstein. “Compared to a lot of my books” — like the recently released Denver History Index, about where to find out more about the city’s past and present…
Reading is about more than following a narrative or learning facts; it can also be a profound shared experience that culminates in a better understanding of ourselves and each other. In that spirit, welcome to the Westword Book Club, a weekly feature celebrating the books that inspire Denver artists.
“Whatever a community goes through affects its artists as well. What poets bring to the healing process is a kind of articulateness, a way of expressing what many of us feel and need to find the words for,” says David Mason, Colorado’s poet laureate, who will be sharing poetic reactions…
