Attempting to describe the setting for her Neighborhood Theatre Group’s annual Black Cat show, group co-founder Kristin Anne Danko said audience members can expect similar vibes to a ‘90s TV classic anthology series that aired on Nickelodeon.

“They should expect horror stories—it's going to be a little scary, a little silly, and it should get everyone in the mood for Halloween,” Danko said of the upcoming production of Black Cat: Folklore. “A good thing to think about is something like Are You Afraid of the Dark?”

Regardless of whether you’re a fan of scary campfire stories or nostalgia television programming, the Ypsilanti nonprofit theater company’s annual fall production aims to provide an immersive experience, Danko said, with “campfire seating” available for audience members who want to sit close to the stage.

The Neighborhood Theatre Group has been producing “theatre from scratch” since 2015, Danko said, performing plays, musicals, sketch comedy, and even short films in recent years. Black Cat: Folklore is the ensemble theater group’s latest devised production, written entirely by its eight-person cast, along with Danko, Director Marisa Dluge and ensemble members A.M. Dean, Kim Gray, and Aeron C. Wade. Shows are scheduled for October 17-19 and 23-25 at The Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.

The fear before, during, and after immigration raids distresses both the immigrants who are directly affected and the networks of people who provide support to immigrants.

That is why it is a matter of public health and why William D. Lopez, a public health professor at the University of Michigan, studies immigration.

“The net of deportation pulls in so many more people who didn’t expect to find themselves pulled into the mass deportation campaign or machine,” Lopez told Pulp.

Lopez has now written two books on the topic of immigration. His first book, Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, focuses on one raid by ICE, SWAT, and local police in Washtenaw County and what happened afterward. In Lopez’s words, “That book was not so much on the people who were deported but on the families who are left behind and, by extension, the communities in which those families live.”

Lopez’s latest book, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, was published in September and is broader in scope, with stories of six worksite raids in 2018. However, according to Lopez, little is known about such raids, an issue that drives Lopez’s research.

“When things are not defined, they’re harder to study, understand, and resist or oppose,” he said. “We describe our work as research advocacy.”

It’s October, so many of us are in the mood for a good ghost story, and you needn’t look any further than Penny Seats Theatre Company’s The Woman in Black.

Never heard of it? Neither had I. But it’s based on a 1983 novel by British author Susan Hill, and Stephen Mallatratt adapted it for the stage a few years later.

With a cast of three, who play a multitude of characters, The Woman in Black went on to become the second-longest running non-musical play in London’s West End—second only to Agatha Christie’s stalwart The Mousetrap—and a 2012 feature film adaptation starred Daniel Radcliffe.

“Several Michigan companies have mounted the show, all with vastly different takes on it,” said Penny Seats’ executive director Lauren London. “One of the most fun things about this show is the number of ways it can be interpreted.”

As London describes it, the two main characters are an actor and a man who wishes to convey to his family and friends, with the actor’s help, a traumatic experience he suffered.

The Kerrytown Concert House’s annual Edgefest has long prided itself on scouring the globe to bring some of the foremost artists making avant-garde music to Ann Arbor.

But the 29th edition of the four-day festival will have a decidedly more localized bent, with several artists hailing from Detroit and Chicago gracing the lineup.

This year’s festival, entitled Edgefest 29: Speaking OUT, takes place October 8-11 at Ann Arbor's Kerrytown Concert House, featuring several artists from the two Midwest cities, including Kenny Green and his Cosmic Music Collective, which is composed of members from both Detroit and Chicago.

The informal talk series Nerd Nite Ann Arbor hit its 100th-event milestone in July, but nobody threw a party for it.

“We talked about whether we wanted to celebrate it or not, and we decided every Nerd Nite is a neat Nerd Nite,” said Ann Arbor District Library's Emily Murphy, who co-hosts the event with AADL colleague Jacob Gorski.

“And yes, we hit 100, but we’re gonna keep going. We acknowledged it when we were there and said, ‘Here we are—wow, 100 times,’ but I feel confident that we’re gonna just keep going, and people [will] keep coming to it.”

Murphy and Gorski are hosting the 103rd edition of Nerd Nite Ann Arbor on October 9. The two-hour event, held on the second Thursday of every month at LIVE, features three speakers giving informative talks in a bar setting for 15-20 minutes on topics of their choice.

Topics often cover science, technology, health, history, and pop culture. The October 9 event features speakers Kim Williams-Guillén on the bats of Wayne County, Chuwen (Cullen) Zhong on the impacts of loneliness and social isolation on people’s health, and Jim Ottaviani on identifying and tracking asteroids in our solar system.

A new “live media festival” in Ypsilanti aims to expand the conversation on what media is, with live experimental works in audio, video, projection, and expanded cinema that goes beyond traditional film.

Those attending the first Media Live Ypsi live performance festival on October 10 and 11 can expect everything from Bring Your Own Beamer projection art displays to a half dozen “durational artists” each delivering their own three-hour sets of storytelling and other nonlinear performances that could incorporate audience participation.

It’s all intended to shake up how people perceive the “live” performance, Media Live Ypsi co-organizer Abhishek Narula said, while emphasizing the need to be present to truly experience the media being displayed.

"I think a lot of art today is experienced online—on Instagram, on YouTube, and all that,” said Narula. “It's hard to sort of document; it's hard to capture these things. We really want to have that experience for the people that are in Ann Arbor and Ypsi and to bring people together. I think post-pandemic, people have been interacting online, and we still sort of live most of our worlds online. So, we're trying to break that a little bit by providing the live experiences where you sort of have to be there.”

Jay Platt thought he'd be an engineer. The boat lover moved to Ann Arbor in 1963 from Alexandria, Virginia, to study naval architecture at the University of Michigan.

But a different career called out to him after he visited a bookstore in New York City:

"I had always been interested in older things, for one thing, and books—I wouldn't say I was a collector, but I would make a point of getting an earlier edition," Platt told Elizabeth Smith and Amy Cantu in an episode of AADL Talks To that was published March 30, 2024. "Then in early, I think, '71, I believe it was, I was in New York City with a good friend of mine, and he was into book collecting. We visited some bookshops ... but one we went into and he asked for this book by—I forgot what the title was—but the book dealer went way up in, knew right where it was. I said, 'How did he know that? There are thousands of books here,' and now I know, because you know your stock. You have to, and that's what got me started."

Platt worked for a couple of bookstores in Ann Arbor before launching his own business here in 1975: West Side Book Shop at 113 West Liberty Street. He and his partner at the time held an opening party on September 21, 1975, at the store, which is located on the street level of the John Haarer Building, which was built in 1888.

Fifty years later, West Side Book Shop is still going strong inside the Haarer Building.

Octaves by Tyler Dunston moves through a world where “As always / uncertainty is ours.” 

These poems bring in earthly realities like death and the dullness of the noon hour while also reaching more broadly to the skies in which “the moon and stars wilted / through layers of floor-to-ceiling glass.” The realms collide or overlap. A tangible structure interacts with the sun when “I looked outside / at a slab of brick buttered with light.”

The poet’s perspective is clear in the appearances of the first person “I” across the poems, as the poem called “On W.G. Sebald’s natural history of the herring” declares that “I always thought death was ashen gray.” First person plural expands the outlook to involve the reader through meditating “On emptiness” with the lines, “We understand the weight of ladled things, / time maybe most of all, easy to waste / and hard to throw away.”

In Dunston’s poems, his visual art background shows through because the poet is never only fixed on his own experience but rather takes in the full scene and notices the details. The whole time, “I’m feeling my way / in the dark toward you, the sea in my ear.”

Dunston is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan. He previously earned his MFA in poetry from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Stanford University. Octaves was also a finalist for the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest, and as the title suggests, many of the poems contain eight lines. 

Fellow poet Jason Barry joins Dunston in conversation to celebrate the release of Octaves at Literati Bookstore on Tuesday, September 23, at 6:30 pm.

Dunston and I spoke about Octaves, visual art, his PhD studies, what he's reading, and what he's working on next.

This story originally ran on December 5, 2024. "The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry" continues documenting Michigan poets, and on Monday, September 22, there's a live poetry reading at the Downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library showcasing four poets from the project: Owólabi Aboyade, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, Bryan Thao Worra, and Rebecca Biber.

Chien-an Yuan is an evangelist.

Not the type who's selling you hope in exchange for a monthly tithe but the kind who just wants you to believe—in art and its healing powers; in music and its succor; in poetry and life-giving energy.

The Ann Arbor musician-photographer-curator works not just in words but in deeds—and sometimes, the deeds are words, carefully arranged and expertly recited as is the case with The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry.

The project is a collaboration between Yuan's 1473 record label, Michigan poets, and Fifth Avenue Studios, the recordings division of the Ann Arbor District Library (AADL). 

Named after two high school teachers who inspired Yuan, The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry is a collection of recited poems, documented at Fifth Avenue Studios, with covers created by local artists for each chapter in the series. (Shannon Rae Daniels' watercolors will adorn the first 10 sessions.) All the recordings can be listened to and downloaded free of charge whether or not you have a library card.

The anthology's construction is ongoing—you can listen to Ann Arbor poets Kyunghee Kim and Zilka Joseph so far—but there's an official launch for the project on Monday, December 9, at 6 pm at AADL's Downtown location. Kim will be joined by upcoming Coolidge-Wagner writers Sherina Rodriguez Sharpe, Chace Morris, and Emily Nick Howard, along with Yuan introducing the poets and talking about the project. (Joseph will be at a future Coolidge-Wagner event.)

I sent Yuan some queries about The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry, and his answers were so passionate, revealing, and thorough that they stand alone without my framing questions.

Below is Yuan's testament to the power of art and a brief history of The Coolidge-Wagner Anthology of Recorded Poetry:

Pat Deneau sings about the adrenaline rush he gets from work and music on the song “Hits the Same.”

The musician-firefighter’s heart pounds as he climbs on a firetruck with the Ann Arbor Fire Department, or sets foot onstage with The City Lines and sings, “I don’t know what I’m doing here / But my heart is racing / Is this the price to feel so alive?”

“When I’m singing those lines, I’m almost picturing like I’ve got the hose line in my arm, and I've got my buddy on my back pushing me in and the fire’s pouring overhead,” said Deneau about the anthemic opener from the Ann Arbor trio’s new album, Prescribed Fires. “It feels exactly the same as flipping the standby switch on the amp, and the volume control is up and the cymbals wash.”

“Hits the Same” also sets the compelling narrative for The City Lines’ third album, which explores parenthood, career, mental health, heritage, and the environment.