Everything I learned about rockets as a kid came from a Kiss song. That's rather unfortunate because I found out much later that "Rocket Ride" was not, in fact, about space travel but rather very Earthy matters.

If only I had Anne and Jerzy Drozd's Science Comics: Rockets - Defying Gravity to guide me rather than a subliterate Ace Frehley jam.

If you don’t necessarily consider Michigan a hotbed of the modern design movement, you’re not alone. But two recent books aim to change that perception, and their authors will appear in Ann Arbor this weekend as part of the Kerrytown Bookfest.

“People do not think of Michigan as a design center," says Brian Conway, Michigan’s state historic preservation officer. "They think of New York or Los Angeles but skip over the Midwest. But there was this very strong design industry here in Michigan, and it actually still exists.”

Art forms will interconnect during "Poetry Through the Ages," one of the many events of the second Rasa Festival, which goes from September 1 to October 7. Visual art, dance, and music are to embody the words of Indian poetry in this new addition to the festival on Saturday, September 15, from 8-9:30 pm at the Arthur Miller Theatre in Ann Arbor.

Sreyashi Dey is a conceptual artist, choreographer, and dancer for this event, as well as director of the Rasa Festival and president and artistic director of Akshara, the organization producing the festival. She described the concept of "Poetry Through the Ages" by saying "words of the poetry will find expression in the diverse art forms that will work together to create a new aesthetic tapestry."

Without a doubt, Laura Palmer’s corpse remains one of the most enduring images to come out of ‘90s television.

Anyone who has watched the Twin Peaks premiere (either at the time of its airing or as part of the younger, revivalist crowd) is certain to recall the eerie impression that Laura is simply sleeping, bound to wake up any minute -- this despite, of course, the fact that she is quite clearly “dead, wrapped in plastic.”

The shot is memorable, perhaps, not so much because of any particular aspect of the composition, but because of the horrible incongruity of its visual and dramatic elements. The viewer is presented with a face apparently at peace, the only hints of death’s presence being the pallor of Laura’s flesh and the slight blue tint of her lips. Faraway from the brutality of Laura’s murder, the image is at such a great remove from the horrific violence behind it that it sits with us in a way that is particularly uncomfortable. But more than that, the image is important for its symbolic significance, for what its very presence on our TV screens says about the way we think and the stories we tell ourselves as a society.

Alice Bolin takes the idea of this symbolic significance as her jumping-off point in a remarkable new collection of essays -- aptly titled Dead Girls -- which she read from on August 17 at Literati Bookstore. A sprawling mosaic of analysis, cultural criticism, and memoir, Bolin’s collection touches on much more than the phenomenon of the “Dead Girl” in the American popular imagination, despite its title.

There’s a moment near the end of Laura Bernstein-Machlay’s new book of essays, Travelers, in the middle of the author’s conversation with a friend on page 163, when she makes the comment, “I’m a liar … I’ve lied to everyone I know. I lie to myself every damn day.”

Out of context this excerpt might seem to cast the speaker in an uncharitable light -- an appearance that is ameliorated by having come to know the narrator as a genuine and warm person over the course of the previous 15 essays -- but it’s worth mentioning because it speaks to the heart of one of the challenges inherent in the genre Bernstein-Machlay has thrown herself into with this book. When taking oneself as a subject, how can you ever be sure that the truth is what you think it is? How can you weed out the false from the real in the stories we tell about ourselves, reinforced through repeated use?

“I had to be as honest with myself as I possibly could,” Bernstein-Machlay said in an interview. “And that meant moving past the lies I was so easily telling the world. So much that I was telling them to myself. And they weren’t big lies, they were just the stories about yourself that get you through the day.”

Is it almost over? It’s almost over.

But you still have time to enjoy some good summer books.

Still searching for the perfect beach read? Look no further than Michigan mystery writers Darci Hannah (Cherry Pies & Deadly Lies), Pamela Gossiaux (Trusting the Cat Burglar), Greg Jolley (Malice in a Very Small Town) who are appearing at Nicola’s Books on August 16 at 7 pm for "a late-summer mystery event, filled with great beach reads for your last summer gasp." 

Hannah began her writing career with historical fiction, penning 2010’s The Exile of Sara Stevenson. But when her agent recommended writing in another genre, Hannah started Cherry Pies & Deadly Lies and knew just where she’d start.

Callie Feyen's new book begins with a kiss. But the writing of said book began with an essay -- one she wasn’t particularly keen to write.

“My editor at [T.S. Poetry Press] asked me if I wanted to write about teaching Romeo and Juliet to eighth graders. But at the time I thought it would be too painful.”

The longtime middle school teacher felt that way after she found herself at a school where lesson plans were scripted and tightly monitored; teachers received reprimands for going “off script.” After years of creative lessons plans and multisensory activities, Feyen was frustrated by being locked down in a specific teaching style and writing the essay would make her "remember how I used to be able to teach.” 

Feyen’s editor then suggested starting with an essay about the classroom experience; that essay ended up becoming the first chapter in The Teacher Diaries: Romeo and Juliet. The book details Feyen’s many years of teaching the Shakespeare classic to middle school students. 

Building a month-long festival from the ground up is challenging enough when it focuses solely on one artistic discipline, such as music.

But last year's inaugural Rasa Festival was a multidisciplinary party with performing, visual, literary, media/films, and culinary arts from India, presented in various Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti venues.

It was a big achievement and the 2018 edition (September 1-October 7) looks to build on that success with more art exhibitions, dance performances, poetry readings, music concerts, film screenings, and a foodie event.

Here's the full calendar of events, many of which are free:

Imagine you love a sport. You live that sport. You follow that sport and know the players and the stats and the plays.

And then you move to a place where that sport is not only not revered but is called by the wrong name.

That’s what happened to Gary B. France 23 years ago when his physiotherapist job brought him from Lancashire, England, to southeast Michigan. He found himself starved for information on soccer (football) in general -- and more specifically, Manchester United, aka The Red Devils, aka The Reds.

“We are so used to 24/7 coverage these days that we might not remember that there wasn’t much back in the '90s," France says. "All I had was my own passion and the drive to remain connected to the sport.” 

In those days France got his sports fix during transatlantic calls to his father and from two-week-old British newspapers that he found in the Little Professor bookstore in Dearborn. By chance, he found an old shortwave radio and got BBC World Service, which gave coverage of the second half of one game once a week on Saturday mornings. “I just had to hope it was my team!” laughs France.

The world wide web can do many things: find the recipe for that cookie you had at camp that one summer, identify the weird rash you have on your arm, and tell you the name of the band that sang "Life in a Northern Town."

But there are many things that an algorithm simply cannot provide and many of those things can be found in bookstores like Ann Arbor's Aunt Agatha’s, home of new and used mysteries, detection, and true-crime tomes: the smells of old books that have been opened, read, and reread by many loving hands; stacks of dog-eared novels waiting to find their reader; sounds of pages turning, people murmuring over what they are reading. 

I love this author! I’ve read all of her books -- isn’t she great? She is so underrated.

Since 1992, Robin and Jamie Agnew's Aunt Agatha’s is the place that finds the authors you haven’t heard of before and makes you a lifelong fan, a store where writers who are at the beginning of their career blossom into major forces.

And it all ends this August.