The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Musings on Being and Becoming Human

Issue 5: Spring into Summer 2006

AT HOME here are writers speaking in a style more conversational than studied for an audience who might be seated on a front porch at night watching fireflies create random small rays to light up the listening, or in the dining room of an ancient inn with lamps and perhaps a hearth fire to kindle community.

It takes only one or two steps of the imagination to move through the dusk to the dining room at the inn or the porch of a house or, by daylight, to a backyard garden for picking grapes and for gossiping, a verbal mode associated with the term grapevine. We say I heard it on the grapevine, referring to rumor, advance news of interest to the community, sometimes scandal, always a dramatic story or piece of a story, circulating, making the rounds, lingering on the surface even when it suggests hidden things.

Gossip is a varietal narrative to be cultivated for its piquancies. But art, like soul, yearns for depths. This round of The Grapevine focuses on the art of darkness. The subject might also be called endarkenment.

One room of the site is the salon in which presentations are going on. Another is a reading gallery for exploring parallel worlds in fiction, mythology, and metaphor. A third contains a miscellany of items meant to enlarge the ongoing theme of this symposium: what it means to be human.

The SALON presents a variety of storytellers and image makers and thinkers, from promising beginners to seasoned artists of mature and full-bodied talents.

Go to Parallel Worlds for a detailed exploration of THE ART OF DARKNESS as a context for the Presentations in this issue.

The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon welcomes comments from visitors. Use the Contact button to send e-mails that will be forwarded to appropriate persons.