Author talk
From the co-author of The Spirit Almanac and mindbodygreen’s Senior Sustainability Editor comes a timely guide to reconnecting with the outdoors, with new science on why nature makes us healthier and happier in body and soul. Author Emma Loewe visits Gibson’s Bookstore virtually on April 13 at 7 p.m. to present Return to Nature: The New Science of How Natural Landscapes Restore Us. She is joined in conversation by Gibson’s alum Hannah Fries, author of Forest Bathing Retreat: Find Wholeness In the Company of Trees (new edition and title coming in August 2022, Being with Trees: Awaken Your Senses to the Wonders of Nature; Poetry, Reflections & Inspiration).
Join Emma and Hannah as they discuss how humans have fallen out of sync with nature, even as science acknowledges all the healing benefits of being outside, and how and why we can live longer and happier lives surrounded by wildness.
Registration required at eventbrite.com/e/ 261168521077.
Jazz sanctuary
Sunday at 1 p.m. at Concord’s First Congregational Church (177 N. Main St. – corner of N. Main and Washington St.), Jazz Sanctuary will begin Holy Week exploring the centrality of love in the Christian way of life in a different way, imagining a vigil conducted by Mary Magdalene at Jesus’ tomb from his burial until his resurrection. The jazz worship experience entitled, “Remember Me – The Jazz of Vigil.” will include readings from Christian and Hebrew Scripture alternating with jazz standards of love and loss sung by Vocalist and Pastor Emilia Halstead and played by The Jazz Sanctuary House Band (Joey Placenti on saxes and flute, Jock Irvine on bass, Ed Raczka on drums, and Tim Wildman on piano). The inspiration for the service is a book by Cynthia Bourgeault entitled, “Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity.” This will be an in-person gathering that also appears on Facebook Live and on an edited video several days later on the YouTube channel: Concords First Church. There is no admission, and wherever you are and because of who you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.
Walker lecture
The Walker Lecture Series invites you to join us for “The Art of Film and Sennet, Chaplin, Keaton and the Art of Silent Film Comedy” with Patrick Anderson. Explore how film creates and delivers ideas and reflects popular attitudes. Increase your film vocabulary and have fun discussing movies with film buff and scholar Patrick Anderson. Then enjoy the art of silent film comedy as it was developed by three masters. The lecture will be held April 13 at 7:30 p.m. at the Concord City Auditorium. It is free and open to the public. Learn more at walkerlecture.org.
Poet conversation
Gibson at Gibson’s! The name is a happy accident, but we’re thrilled to have an author alliteration. New Hampshire poet Rebecca Kaiser Gibson visits Gibson’s Bookstore to present her new volume of verse, Girl as Birch: Poems on April 11 at 7 p.m. via Zoom.
Without being a manifesto, Girl as Birch explores female gender roles with both pliant and uprising imagery and action. Restriction and rebellion, silence and speech, appearance and artifice, passion and repression, the past and being present, buffet and embolden the speaker of these poems. The elastic and varied syntax, pace, music, and the use of rhetoric and wit express deft self-examination. The book moves from serial impressionistic poems of early childhood to discrete lyric poems of memory and experience and on to a sense of emotional, social, spiritual evolution, not resolution.
Registration required at eventbrite.com/e/ 256097734217.
