Upcoming Events

• Friday, July 31, 2026

  Songs and Stories of People in Nature with a Flavors of Jewish and Appalachian Culture, 6 p.m. The Kitchen Garden, 131 South Silver Lane, Sunderland

  This will be a rich and unusual evening with four quite powerful acts.

  Burikes looks to be great fun with artists who know their stuff and convey it with depth and pep. https://www.burikes.com/about

  Miriam Saperstein stewards Jewish water rituals through their interdisciplinary practices of writing, visual art, sound, and archival research. The rituals they work with most closely are mikvah (immersion) and tashlich (casting off sins). In Jewish tradition, water is alive and has purifying abilities. Living in a body further disabled by the climate crisis’ effect on their water retention and bloodflow, amidst a contaminated watershed, they explore the interplay between purification and pollution. Collaborating with their local watershed, they invite queerness into the water-ritual liturgy through poetry and song as well as researching ancestral rivers, letting their energy flow through the storytelling.

  Velvl studied Yiddish language and storytelling with a master artist who lived in Tucson after working for a spell in TX with the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980s. So Velvl carries all this along in story and song.

   

  On upright bass, ukulele, as well as an Arabic drum known as a doumbek, Joe Blumenthal joins Claire Dacey https://www.clairedacey.com/ and Carrie Kline. Our music will probe people’s interactions with their natural environment. We’ll open with one of the oldest songs in the English language, a version of the Beowulf story and Grendel’s cave we learned in West Virginia as it was handed down through the oral tradition. We’ll include the songwriting of Kate Wolf with a wizened grandpa living his days under Western skies and a love song dancing down muddy roads, a lament on strip mining from the views of a boy and a spider, songs of joy and music in the air to join in on, along with easy to catch songs of hope and inclusion that have come from or been adopted by the Singing Resistance Movement.

• Tuesday, August 11, 2026

  Airing of our Audio Documentary Room to Grow: The Inner Lives of Farm Workers in the United States in an Age of Turmoil, in the Greenfield Public Library Community Room, 6:00 -7:45 PM with discussion

  Room to Grow airing at the Greenfield Library: https://greenfieldpl.libcal.com/event/17103388

• Thursday, August 20, 2026

  Franklin Musicians Coop Energy Park Concert Series 6:00 – 8:00 p.m., 3rd set (7:20 p.m.)

Talking Across the Lines Featured Product

Written in Blood features the work of Appalachia's leading scholars and activists, making available accurate, ungilded, and uncensored understanding of history. Includes feature articles by Michael and Carrie Kline.