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204-208 RIGSBEE STREET
THE ELEANOR BUILDING
DOWNTOWN DURHAM, NC
ELISE FICARRA
elise ficarra is a writer/poet who lives in san francisco and is an affiliate artists at headlands center for the arts. she co-edits minor/american and manages the poetry center at sfsu. swelter, her first book, came out in 2005 and she expects to complete her second book this year. her work has appeared in 26, bird dog, 14 hills, parthenon west and
other journals. one spring she had a blog for two weeks.
[photos by me!]
DAVID NEED
grew up in Cleveland and Massachusetts and has been living in Durham since 1994. He teaches South Asian religions at Duke, as well as classes on Religion and Poetry, Siberian Literature, the films of Andre Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick, and Beat Generation and Russian New Wave writing. A one-time participant in Boston’s long-running Stone Soup series (1976-82), David’s poetry, memoirs, translations and essays have recently been published in Talisman, Fascicle, and Mipoesias.
Things you might not know about David.
1) When David was five, he and his older brother would walk to school. His brother had been blown away by reading the story of Joan of Arc in a comic book, and, for about a week, read from a longer biography while they walked. Although they were not Catholics, for months afterwards, David and his brothers would talk about Joan after the lights were off, imagining pilgrimages to the place where her ashes fell into the Seine. David would later write a story called “St. Joan and the Bear”.
2) Two of David’s first loves were older women, one of whom was a professional astrologer. As a result, David can do the astrological dozens with the best of them.
3) Between the ages of 17 and 24, David hitchhiked across country five times, once making it in four days in order to catch Patti Smith’s Wave tour concert at UMASS Amherst. His worse ride was with a van load of Viet Nam vets, and one hippie from Oregon who’d been living in a tree for three years. The driver was going to Minneapolis to sign up to fight with the Contras against the Sandinistas. As the sun set, the Van picked up a girl, hitchhiking East, carrying two shopping bags full of rocks she’d been picking up alongside the road. At the outskirts of Minneapolis, the van ran out of gas. David looked around at the guys and the girl, and got out and started to walk. A little later, the van stopped; they’d gotten gas, did David want a ride to the interchange? The girl wasn’t in the van. Getting in, David asks, “Where’s the girl? “Oh,” they said, “she got out and ran across the highway and started hitching the other way.”
4) When David was in high school, Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” stood out in his mind among books he read; now he is sweet married to a Massachusetts girl who teaches Dostoyevsky and whose favorite book was “The Idiot”.
elise ficarra is a writer/poet who lives in san francisco and is an affiliate artists at headlands center for the arts. she co-edits minor/american and manages the poetry center at sfsu. swelter, her first book, came out in 2005 and she expects to complete her second book this year. her work has appeared in 26, bird dog, 14 hills, parthenon west and
other journals. one spring she had a blog for two weeks.
[photos by me!]
DAVID NEED
grew up in Cleveland and Massachusetts and has been living in Durham since 1994. He teaches South Asian religions at Duke, as well as classes on Religion and Poetry, Siberian Literature, the films of Andre Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick, and Beat Generation and Russian New Wave writing. A one-time participant in Boston’s long-running Stone Soup series (1976-82), David’s poetry, memoirs, translations and essays have recently been published in Talisman, Fascicle, and Mipoesias. Things you might not know about David.
1) When David was five, he and his older brother would walk to school. His brother had been blown away by reading the story of Joan of Arc in a comic book, and, for about a week, read from a longer biography while they walked. Although they were not Catholics, for months afterwards, David and his brothers would talk about Joan after the lights were off, imagining pilgrimages to the place where her ashes fell into the Seine. David would later write a story called “St. Joan and the Bear”.
2) Two of David’s first loves were older women, one of whom was a professional astrologer. As a result, David can do the astrological dozens with the best of them.
3) Between the ages of 17 and 24, David hitchhiked across country five times, once making it in four days in order to catch Patti Smith’s Wave tour concert at UMASS Amherst. His worse ride was with a van load of Viet Nam vets, and one hippie from Oregon who’d been living in a tree for three years. The driver was going to Minneapolis to sign up to fight with the Contras against the Sandinistas. As the sun set, the Van picked up a girl, hitchhiking East, carrying two shopping bags full of rocks she’d been picking up alongside the road. At the outskirts of Minneapolis, the van ran out of gas. David looked around at the guys and the girl, and got out and started to walk. A little later, the van stopped; they’d gotten gas, did David want a ride to the interchange? The girl wasn’t in the van. Getting in, David asks, “Where’s the girl? “Oh,” they said, “she got out and ran across the highway and started hitching the other way.”
4) When David was in high school, Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” stood out in his mind among books he read; now he is sweet married to a Massachusetts girl who teaches Dostoyevsky and whose favorite book was “The Idiot”.
