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A giant thank-you to everyone who attended, volunteered at, donated goods or raffle prizes for, and otherwise supported our fundraising party last weekend. Your generous donations and purchases will go toward an exciting new year of programming in our soon-to-be home at 106 Main Street.

An extra-special thank-you to Carver Farrell for hosting us at The Sweep; to the Goldenrod staff and friends for creating such a special meal from locally sourced ingredients; and to Wines by Fifi.

The Free Store is back!  We’ll be set up on December 9-10 and may continue after that depending on interest. The Free store will be open on December 9 from 1-5pm and on December 10 from 12-4pm.

Donation instructions: Good Cheap Food (53 Main Street, Delhi NY) has kindly agreed to accept donations for the Free Store in their lobby during their regular hours (10-6). We welcome donations of up to one cubic feet of desirable goods (think of things that would make good gifts) or one shopping bag of clean clothing in good condition. Please drop these off during Open Hours. For larger items or if you need to schedule a drop-off, send an email to info@bushelcollective.org. Some types of things to consider donating are: working small electronics, tools, excellent books, art, children’s toys, stationery / art supplies, high-quality clothing and accessories.

Dr Michele Yasson is an elder and pioneer in the field of alternative, natural, holistic medicine. This two-hour event is an opportunity to meet her, learn about and discuss her work in the field of natural, holistic medicine. A presentation on Lyme disease will be featured.

Bassist turned vagabond C.J. Boyd uses bass loops and voices in order to try and stop time. On perpetual tour since March 2008, movement and stasis are both at the center of his music. Weaving together improvisation with a sparse, minimalist aesthetic, Boyd creates waves of sound, worlds of provocative unlived memories through a singular approach to the upright bass and electric bass guitar that makes everything near and far.

Bushel’s own Tianna Kennedy (cello) and D. Marcus Johnson (banjo) will play an opening set, with a special guest Ryan Jahn.

Painter and book artist Laura Taylor (whose one-person show will open at Bushel in late December) leads this one-day workshop on making collage-based one-of-a-kind and easily duplicated artist books and ‘zines. Bring images and text you want to work with, or just bring yourself: all materials will be provided, and Bushel’s chapbook library will be available for browsing and ideas. Suggested donation is $15. All participants will leave with a handmade book-object.

Jennifer Firestone
Jennifer Firestone is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College. Her books include TEN, (BlazeVOX, forthcoming), Gates & Fields (Belladonna* Collaborative), Swimming Pool (DoubleCross Press), Flashes (Shearsman Books), Holiday (Shearsman Books), Waves (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), from Flashes and snapshot (Sona Books) and Fanimaly (Dusie Kollektiv).  Firestone co-edited (with Dana Teen Lomax) Letters To Poets: Conversations about Poetics, Politics and Community (Saturnalia Books).  Firestone has work anthologized in Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Songs, & Stories for Children andBuilding is a Process / Light is an Element: essays and excursions for Myung Mi Kim.  Firestone won the 2014 Marsh Hawk Press’ Robert Creeley Memorial Prize.

Ada Smailbegović
Ada Smailbegović is an Assistant Professor of English at Brown University. She has a degree in biology from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Poetry and Poetics from NYU. Her writing explores relations between poetics, non-human forms of materiality, and histories of description. She is a co-founder of The Organism for Poetic Research. Critical and poetic work includes Avowal of What Is Here (JackPine Press 2009), Of the Dense and Rare (Triple Canopy 2013), “Some Disordered Interior Geometries” (Reanimation Library; The Volta 2015), “Cloud Writing” (Art in the Anthropocene 2015), and an article on animal architecture and the affective ethology of Monk Parakeets (Angelaki 2015). She is currently at work on a critical-theoretical book Poetics of Liveliness: Natural Histories of Soft Materials in 20^th and 21^st Century Poetry and a poetry chapbook The Forest / or (On Waiting) is out from Doublecross Press

Citron Kelly
Christine “Citron” Kelly is a poet and artist living between Ashfield, MA and NYC.

Anna Gurton-Wachter
Anna Gurton-Wachter is a writer, editor and archivist. Her chapbooks include Mother of All (Above/Ground Press, forthcoming), The Abundance Chamber Works Alone (Essay Press, 2017), Blank Blank Blues (Horse Less Press, 2016) and CYRUS (Portable Press @ Yo Yo Labs, 2014). Other writing has appeared in No, Dear, 6×6, The Brooklyn Rail, Elderly, and The Organism for Poetic Research. She edits and makes books for DoubleCross Press.

Ian Dreiblatt
Ian Dreiblatt is a poet, translator, and musician. His writing has appeared in Bomb!, Web Conjunctions, The Agriculture Reader, Pallaksch. Pallaksch., Music & Literature, Entropy, Elderly, and elsewhere, including chapbooks from Metambesen and DoubleCross Press. His many translations include Comradely Greetings, a collection of the prison correspondence of Pussy Riot’s Nadyezhda Tolokonnikova with philosopher Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2014), and Gogol’s The Nose (Melville House, 2014), as well contributions to n+1, Jacobin, and Music & Literature. He is an enthusiastic student of canine-hominid relations, reed music, and soup-making.

MC Hyland
MC Hyland is a PhD candidate in English Literature at New York University, and holds MFAs in Poetry and Book Arts from the University of Alabama. From her research, she produces scholarly and poetic texts, artists’ books, and public art projects. She is the founding editor of DoubleCross Press, a poetry micropress, as well as the author of the poetry collection Neveragainland and several poetry chapbooks, most recently THE END PART ONE (Magic Helicopter Press 2017).

The second screening and discussion in the Get Woke! film series will take place on Sunday, Nov 19 at SUNY Delhi.

Sean Gallagher’s docmentary Brothers of the Black List tells the story behind the longest litigated civil rights case in American history. It all began in September 1992, when an elderly woman in Oneonta, New York reported that she had been attacked in an attempted rape by a young black male who cut his hand during the altercation. This led to a college administrator at nearby SUNY Oneonta giving the police a list of the names and residences of the 125 black men who attended the school. Police used this list to track down every black male in town, questioning them and demanding to see their hands.

The screening will be followed by a discussion led by Gallagher along with Sheryl Champen, former Admissions Counselor at SUNY Oneonta. This event takes place on the SUNY Delhi campus. Please see the Get Woke! website for details, directions and parking. More info / flyer here. 

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Get Woke! is a monthly film/discussion series intended to get us talking about race with filmmakers and experts – and each other. Sponsored by United Ministry of Delhi, friends of Fair for All, SUNY Delhi’s History Club & Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and Bushel Collective. The full screening schedule is posted here.

The Bushel clothing swap is back! Trade in your gently used clothing and accessories and refresh your wardrobe. Come swap men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing; bags; and shoes & boots. Please bring only washed and lightly worn items — or bring nothing but yourself, meet your neighbors, and take something home. Refreshments will be served.

Suggested donation: $5-$10

If you can’t make it to the swap, you can also drop off clothing for the swap at Bushel any time during Open Hours, or contact us to arrange a drop-off time.

Bushel is thrilled to welcome these two brilliant NYC-based poets and thinkers to read from their work.

Kim Rosenfield is a poet and psychotherapist. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Good Morning— Midnight— (Roof Books 2001), Tràma (Krupskaya 2004), re:evolution (Les Figues Press 2009) Lividity (Les Figues Press, 2012) and USO: I’ll Be Seeing You (Ugly Duckling Presse 2013). Her work has been included in the anthologies Against Expression (Northwestern University Press), The Gurlesque (Saturnalia), I’ll Drown My Book (Les Figues Press), and The Unexpected Guest: Art, writing and thinking on hospitality (Liverpool Biennial, ART/BOOKS). She is a recipient of a Fund For Poetry grant and is a founding member of the international artist collective, Collective Task. Her clinical writing can be found in Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Rosenfield lives and practices in NYC.

Anna Vitale is a poet, scholar, and performer. She earned a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she completed a dissertation entitled, Suicidal Fantasy in Three American Authors. Vitale also earned an MFA in Writing from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is the author of Detroit Detroit (Roof Books, 2017), Different Worlds (Troll Thread, 2017), Unknown Pleasures (Perfect Lovers, 2013), and Anna Vitale’s Pop Poems (OMG!, 2010). Her writing has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Harriet, Jacket2, Pedagogy, and P-Queue. Her video, “Street View Lyric,” was published by Gauss PDF. She lives in Brooklyn.

Get Woke! is hosting its first screening on Sunday at SUNY Delhi. Filmmaker Lacey Schwartz will be present for Q&A after showing her award-winning personal documentary, Little White Lie, about her struggle to discover the truth about her racial identity as an adolescent growing up in Woodstock.

This event takes place on the SUNY Delhi campus. Please see the Get Woke! website for details, directions and parking.

Folklorist Hannah Davis will present a talk on upstate New York traditional foods, the first in a series of lectures called the Catskills Folk Lyceum offered by Catskills Folk Connection. Her talk complements CFC’s new project on Catskills foodways, begun this year.

Hannah Davis serves as the New York Folklore Society’s. Upstate New York Regional Representative for Folk Arts. A native of Noblesville, Indiana, Hannah holds a BA in Folklore and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University and an MA in Folk Studies from Western Kentucky. As the Upstate Regional Representative, Hannah is carrying out field research on traditional music, dance, material culture, occupational traditions, narrative, occupational folklife, and other customary practices to identify traditions and folk artists. Her service area includes the southwestern counties of New York State and, and a large portion of central New York.

Join us for a screening of Sally Potter’s first feature film, The Gold Diggers, a ground-breaking work of early-1980s feminist cinema. Starring Julie Christie as the Icon, the film is an ode to the power of movies and the power of gold and icons, as bank clerk Celeste (Colette Laffont) tries to reveal the relationship between gold and power—and male power. The Gold Diggers borrows from musicals, period dramas, and silent thrillers. Replete with singing, dancing, and semiotics, it was shot in black and white by Babette Magolte. Watch the trailer here. Angela Dufresne’s surreal short films reveal direct ties to her paintings, exploring pop culture and the power of images. This screening is programmed by ‘Beaver Fever’ guest curator Jennifer Kabat.

Dub Ground is a loose collective of artist-musicians. The core members of the group are Tim Cramer (trap drums and more), Paul Geluso (bass, horn and engineering) and Michael Milton (akete drums and voice). They aim to create an ambient rhythmic sound that transforms as a sequence develops from a song into instrumentals and scatting. $5-$10 suggested donation.

Please join us on Sunday, October 1st from 12:30-2:00pm for the closing reception of BEAVER FEVER, with readings by Jennifer Krasinski and Iris Cushing. Refreshments will be served.

BEAVER FEVER, guest curated by Jennifer Kabat, features works by Angela Dufresne, Pia Dehne, and Elizabeth Bonaventura. Read more about the exhibition.

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Jennifer Krasinski writes on art and performance for The Village Voice and Artforum online. She is a contributing editor for Yale University’s Theater Magazine, and is a faculty member in the MFA Art Writing department at The School of Visual Arts. In addition, she is the author of “Prop Tragedies,” a short collection of short short stories recently reprinted by Remedial Press.

Iris Marble Cushing is a poet, editor, teacher, and reader of texts both popular and philosophical. She is a founding editor for Argos Books and is the author of the book Wyoming. Her poems have appeared in FENCE, The Boston Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series; she also writes often about contemporary poetry by women for Hyperallergic. Iris is a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center and is currently working on a dissertation about the radical mystic poets Mary Norbert Korte and Diane di Prima. Her work can be found at iriscushing.net.

Artist Elia Vargas brings expanded video, crude oil performance, and music to Bushel, with ‘[Meta]rials’ and ‘Signal Works.’

From the artist: ‘The world was changed in 1859, when a commercial crude oil well began successful extraction, creating a bifurcation of earth energy into fossil fuels and mystic medicinal imaginings. Oil infrastructure and oil materiality have transformed the surface of this globe. Oil is media.’

Bushel is thrilled to host these four poets from near and nearly-near.

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Jared Daniel Fagen lives in Brooklyn and Arkville. His prose poetry has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Collagist, Numéro Cinq, Entropy, PLINTH, Sleepingfish, and elsewhere. He is the editor of Black Sun Lit and studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).

Rachael Guynn Wilson is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She holds a Ph.D. in English from New York University. Her poetry, fiction, and critical writing has appeared in Brooklyn Rail, Free Spirit News, Jacket2, Pelt, Textual Practice, The Volta, and the Reanimation Library’s Word Processor series. She is a co-founder of the Organism for Poetic Research and Studio Manager at Belladonna* Collaborative.

Alexandra Egan is a poet living and working in Brooklyn. As of August 2017 she has successfully resisted writing a bio.

Sparrow was born in 1953 in Lenox Hill Hospital, in Manhattan. He grew up in a housing project in Inwood, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, flunked out of Cornell University, became a hippie, studied at the Naropa Institute in 1976 with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen & William Burroughs, published his first book of poems in 1978 (Sparrow’s Poetry Coloring Book, entirely hand-drawn, xeroxed surreptitiously at a copy shop) returned to New York City (still in 1978), finished college, began graduate school at CCNY (studying with Ted Berrigan). Soft Skull Press published three of his books: Republican Like Me (about running for President of the United States in 1996), Yes, You ARE a Revolutionary! & America: A Prophecy – The Sparrow Reader. Sparrow is the longest-running contributor to The Sun magazine, beginning in 1981. He has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times (five poems & three op-ed pieces), The American Poetry Review, Lungfull! (plus other magazines) – and was quoted in Vogue. Sparrow plays flutophone in the “New Crimean” pop band Foamola. He now lives in a doublewide trailer in Phoenicia, New York with his wife Violet Snow.

Rebetika meets metal in Greek Judas, “New York’s Best New Psychedelic Band.” It’s true: we’ve seen them. So should you.

This group meets monthly on the first Wednesday to share concerns, observations, ideas and information and includes members from a wide variety of backgrounds: scientists, a sociologist, activists, teachers, plant & nature lovers. Newcomers welcome.

See the CALENDAR for the full schedule.

In the late winter of 2014, artist and chef Augustin Grenèche created a little dinner series called “People’s Kitchen” in a 1960’s diner turned private social club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It went on for a few nights a week for several weeks, with each day’s menu limited to 18 people. The sweet and comically vulgar cookbook Augustin wrote and illustrated to document the People’s Kitchen has been floating in digital purgatory for the last three years. Now Patrick Kiley and Publication Studio bring it to the people in physical form at last, at just the moment when Augustin returns to America to chef another pop-up restaurant, this time deep in the Catskills.

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Patrick Kiley runs Publication Studio Hudson, an on-demand publisher and bookmaker located in Troy.

Healthcare for everyone now!

Our current healthcare system wastes billions of dollars in administrative costs, fraudulent billing, and profit, while leaving many without access to quality care. Premiums continue to rise, and many now pay tax penalties while still going without care.

The New York Health Act allows NY State to bypass all the uncertainty and turmoil in Washington over replacing the ACA, by enacting our own new health plan to cover every resident of the state. This single-payer system would have no premiums, copays, deductibles, coinsurance, or out-of-network charges. 98% of New Yorkers would pay less than their current insurance premiums for better care. We are one State Senator away from passing the NY Health Act this year!

Bring a friend to this presentation to learn about NY Health, get your questions answered, and hear about ways that you can spread the word and help get the bill passed. Featuring Henry Moss, Ph.D., board member of Physicians for a National Health Plan-Metro NY, and James Krellenstein, a health policy activist who has worked on policy issues at the national, state and local levels.

Before you come, check out info on the bill at nyhcampaign.org

*** POSTPONED (watch this space) ***

August Lucey is a satire about a young man trying to find his political identity. A frustrated poet working in pharmaceutical advertising becomes a whistleblower to expose unethical drug testing, then leaves his job to live in the woods with a group of radicals who have gone off the grid to live an experimental life. Much of the film was shot around Hamden, NY in 2012. 60 minutes. $5 Suggested donation.

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Dylan Latimer and Jesse Karch are writers and directors of plays and movies. Based in NYC, they work with the Dome Theater company and have made two films together, August Lucey and Tuesday’s Bluff.

On Sunday, June 11 from 12-3, trade in your gently used clothing and accessories and refresh your wardrobe at our first community clothing swap. Please bring washed and ironed items only, limit 25 items per person. $5 suggested donation

The Rural Route Film Festival brings you cutting edge films, highlighting rare people and cultures from the rare, overlooked corners of the world. This year’s show contains…Réka Bucsi’s latest animation, Love, featuring red panthers, black horses, and a giant water guy (and has been nabbing masses of awards all around the world)…Black Canaries, Jesse Kreitzer’s stunning, beautifully-shot 1907 period piece about an Iowa mining family’s continuous descent for coal…Jan van IJken’s The Art of Flying, artistically documenting one of the most spectacular sights on Earth involving starlings in Holland…and Ogasawara, Georgian director Tato Kotetishvili’s whimsical tale of a Dukhabor wedding on the Armerian border… Check out the full program, and watch the new trailer!

$5-$10 Suggested Donation at door.

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The screenings will be followed by a Q&A with festival director Alan Webber. Alan grew up in rural northeast Iowa. He obtained his master’s degree at New School University, while apprenticing under indie director, Hal Hartley. Alan is a screenwriter, whose scripts include ON THE FARM (about a Wall Street analyst who leaves the finance world behind to start a farm in upstate NY with an eccentric Eastern European woman, but falls into corrupt and healthy ways to keep the farm afloat), BETTER BACK THEN (about an aging, over-nostalgic baseball memorabilia collector who meets his estranged son in Cooperstown) and GRAVEL GRUNGE (about teen angst in ‘90s rural Iowa). He has directed numerous short films, and music videos for bands such as Akron/Family and the Silver Jews.

Wild nights! Wild nights! On Saturday, May 27th, Bushel will be open late, along with a crew of several local Delhi businesses, AND we’ll be raffling off $1,000 worth of amazing goods, donations, and wares to help fundraise for Bushel Collective! Swing by and purchase a raffle ticket for a chance to win amazing goods from Berry Brook Farm, Brushlands, B Side Ballroom and Supper Club, Bull & Garland, Delhi Paint & Paper, DISH, Foster Built Coffee, L’Ouvrière, Rachel’s Frame Shop, Siglio Press, Belladonna Collective, Star Route Farm, Stone & Sawyer, Table on Ten, Stone & Thistle, Tay Tea, Stonehouse, Ugly Ducking Presse, Wayside, and more to come! Sweet mercy!

Started too many of one vegetable and not enough of another? Pot up your extra seedlings or tubers and swap them with each other to bring a rich variety to everyone’s garden this season.

Blake has carved out a nitch and an audience all his own full of punks, hippies, college students, country music fans, tree sitters, high schools and their parents. His new double album ‘Recitative’ was recorded in the Hudson Valley(NY) and features Amy Helm, Cindy Cashdollar, & Doug Weiss along with west coast soul singer Grace Love, saxophone/trumpeter Thomas Deakin, and Noah Walker on guitar. The album was finished and mixed by Marc L’Esperance at heavyosonic in Vancouver, BC.

Twenty years into recording and writing, Blake celebrates his unusual songs forms, which land between spoken word, folk song & theatrical installation, with the title: ‘Recitative’.

Over 16 tracks Blake investigates Couples, US drone attacks, Work, Single Women, The Corner of Saturday Night, The Other End of Fck It, and The Rock & Roll Dream. $5 at door.

Join us on May 19 at 7:00 (doors at 6:30) for a 60-minute talk by Eugenia Bone: ‘The Kitchen Mycologist: How a little knowledge of mycology can make you a better mushroom cook.’

Eugenia Bone is a nationally known food and nature journalist and author. Her work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Denver Post, Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Martha Stewart Living, Wine Enthusiast, Sunset, Metropolis, and The National Lampoon.

She is the author of five books. At Mesa’s Edge was nominated for a Colorado Book Award. She wrote Italian Family Dining with her father, celebrated chef Edward Giobbi. Well-Preserved was nominated for a James Beard award, and was on many best cookbooks of 2009 lists. Mycophilia: Revelations From the Weird World of Mushrooms, was on Amazon’s best science books of 2011 list and nominated for a Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries award. Her fifth book, The Kitchen Ecosystem (October, 2014) was nominated for a Books for a Better Life award, and on many best cookbooks of 2014 lists. Her current project is Microbia: A Journey Into the Unseen World Around You, a study of life from the microbial point of view.

Her writing and recipes have been anthologized in a number of publications, including Best Food Writing, Saveur Cooks, and The Food & Wine Cookbook, among others. Eugenia has lectured widely, in venues like the Denver Botanical Garden, Georgia Center for the Book, the Rubin Museum, and the American Museum of Natural History, and many mycological and gardening societies, and has been the featured speakers at a number of mushroom festivals. She has judged food, wine, and writing competitions, and appeared on television, radio, and pod casts many times. She is the founder of Slow Food Western Slope in Colorado and is the former president of the New York Mycological Society. She is the cofounder of the feminist group, Downtown Women for Change. Eugenia lives in New York City and Western Colorado. More info at eugeniabone.com.

The 607 CSA is a collaboration between real family farms willing to aggregate product in order to offer our members the abundance and variety of the region. Importantly, we’re not middlemen, we’re farmers, so the money you spend on your CSA share will go directly to helping us run our farms. Working together and with your help, we small farms can scale up in order to provide enough food to meet the demand and standards of our communities. Plus, it’s delicious.

Directed by Cynthia Hill, Private Violence is a 2016 feature-length documentary film that explores a simple, but deeply disturbing fact of American life: the most dangerous place for a woman in America is her own home.

A post-screening discussion will be moderated by Phoebe Schreiner, national director of Breakthrough, which is co-hosting this event.

The screening starts at 7:00pm at BUSHEL: 84 Main Street, Delhi NY. Suggested donation $5.

Bring your beloved but broken items, and fix them with the help of a volunteer Repair Specialist. Enjoy a cup of tea or coffee and meet your neighbors. Please join us for this free community event. One week beforehand, find out what items you can bring for repair by contacting Transition Catskills: kz@TransitionCatskills.org

Transition is a worldwide network of grassroots community initiatives that seek to address the world’s greatest problems through homegrown, citizen-led action. Transition groups work with deliberation and good cheer to create a fulfilling and inspiring local way of life that can withstand the shocks of rapidly shifting global systems. They are reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, reimagining work, re-skilling themselves and weaving webs of connection and support. Courageous conversations are being had; extraordinary change is unfolding. On Saturday, April 29th, join us from 1:30 – 3:30 pm, directly after the Climate Change gathering in the square. Find out what Transition Catskills has been up to, what projects lie ahead, and how you might join in. Hosted by Transition Catskills.

In conjunction with the opening reception for the exhibition Not Even: Poets Make Collage, please join us for readings by three of the show’s contributors.

Saretta Morgan uses text and found objects to think through questions of intimacy and designed space. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Guardian, Apogee Journal, The Volta, Tagvverk, Mutating Cities and at podiums / on stages / alongside other beauties at The New School for Social Research, The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Poetry Project, among others. She has received support from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Tamaas Cross Cultural Organization. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University New Brunswick and lives in Brooklyn where she is a member of the feminist publishing collective, Belladonna*, a contributing interviewer at The Common and a 2016-2017 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Resident.

Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves (New York City, 1980) is an artist chiefly concerned with postcolonial ethnobotany working in the mediums of scholarship, diorama, corporeal wisdom, archival gesture and language. Greaves has been published in About Place Journal, The Recluse, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. She lives and works in New York City where she is young mother of The Florxal Review — a global journal of postcolonial ethnobotany foregrounding black femme plant life — and where she is completing work on The Bulletin of Wilderness and Academy: an introductory conclusion to unschoolMFA forthcoming from Organic Electric Industries. Galleries of her documentary photography and Afrofuturist dioramas are viewable on Instagram via @TerraBot and @SuperModelStudioPractice respectively.

Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times first fiction prize, and two chapbooks. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, and PlatteForum. She writes a monthly column on food for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City. Learn more about her at Sarah-Gerard.com.

Join Farm Catskills for a one-hour presentation, ‘Local Beef In Local Schools.’ This is the inaugural event in Farm Catskills’ 2017 Farm-to-School Talk Series. Ken Jaffe and Julia Van Loon of Slope Farm to School will discuss how and why they have partnered since 2012 to bring local beef—sustainably raised and free of antibiotics and hormones—to New York state school cafeterias. Farm Catskills’ own ‘Cow to Cafeteria’ project for Delaware County schools will also be introduced. Event includes a tasting. RSVP to this event (optional). This event has a Facebook page.

Ken Jaffe has owned and operated Slope Farms in Meredith, NY for 10 years, mostly producing grass fed beef for NYC restaurants and butcher shops. For the past three years, Ken has partnered with Julia Van Loon, developing and promoting sustainable beef for New York State’s school and Institutions. He previously practiced medicine for 25 years and studied public health at Columbia.

Julia Van Loon has been a champion for School Food Reform since 2006. Julia is president of Slate Foods and partners with Ken Jaffe to bring Slope Farm to School Beef to private and institutional markets in NY State. Julia has 35 years of hospitality and food service business experience.

Image from Slope Farms

How To Lease Land to Farmers is a FREE two-hour workshop for landowners interested in leasing to farm enterprises and will cover topics such as: Types of farm operations – pros and cons; Listings and opportunities; Valuing farmland and determining lease rates; Elements of a sustainable farm lease; Tax exemptions and easement opportunities and more.

The workshop will be held twice: once April 1st in Delaware County at Bushel Collective in Delhi and again April 8th at the Fly Creek Area Historical Society.Both workshops are on Saturdays from 10am until noon. CADE will continue to offer consultation post-workshop and will facilitate connection to farmers looking to begin or relocate farm businesses. The workshop is designed to help landowners take advantage of agricultural tax exemptions while preserving regional farmland and improving the quality and diversity of available food in the region.

To register, please call 607.433.2545 or email tianna@cadefarms.org

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CADE connects farm and food producers to resources by providing professional, individualized and confidential business and marketing consulting to agricultural entrepreneurs. For the past 25 years, CADE has been a key partner in building a vibrant local food system, in which locally owned agricultural businesses thrive and consumers are nourished by healthy sustainably produced food.

Otsego Land Trust conserves our natural heritage of woodlands, farmlands, and waters that sustain rural communities, promote public health, support wildlife diversity and inspire the human spirit.

Land for Good’s mission is to ensure the future of farming in New England by putting more farmers more securely on more land.

When gypsy grifter Matko is abruptly swindled by his own partner, he is unable to pay the large debt he suddenly owes. As an alternative form of payment, Matko forces his adolescent son Zare into an arranged marriage with his partner’s midget sister, Afrodita. However, both Zare and Afrodita find the marriage objectionable, and their attempts to escape the situation lead to a series of unpredictable comic escapades. Black Cat, White Cat is a 1998 Serbian romantic comedy film directed by Emir Kusturica. It won the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice Film Festival.

Free, with $5 suggested donation.

Join us for a literary reading by Nat Baldwin (The Red Barn) and Douglas W. Milliken (One Thousand Owls Behind Your Chest). Doors at 6:30, Reading begins at 7:00. Free, with a suggested donation of $5-$10.

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Nat Baldwin is a writer and musician living in Portland, Maine. His fiction has appeared in Diagram, Fanzine, PANK, Sleepingfish, Alice Blue, and elsewhere. He has released several solo albums and plays bass in Dirty Projectors. His first collection of stories, The Red Barn, will be released in spring 2017 by Calamari Archive. Joanna Ruocco says of the collection: “In The Red Barn, Nat Baldwin decomposes narrative’s safe spaces. The symbols in the nightmare landscape are nothing other than themselves. Nails. Boards. Tubs. Chains. Buckets. Teeth. A story of boys is stripped sentence by sentence. What’s left is the brutal music of language laid bare.”

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of the novel To Sleep as Animals and several previous chapbooks, most recently the pocket-sized collection Cream River. His stories have been honored by the Maine Literary Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and Glimmer Train Stories, and have been published in Slice, McSweeney’s, The Collagist, The Believer, and elsewhere. From a normalized dystopian future to the ever-impossible now, Milliken’s three-story cycle One Thousand Owls Behind Your Chest searches the borderland where the terror of human confusion confronts the babbling chaos of the Nature Without, where alienation fingers the braille surface of connection, where violence digs its nails into compassion. For more: www.douglaswmilliken.com

This 90-minute documentary combines archival footage and interviews from the ACT UP Oral History Project to explore ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) from a grassroots perspective. The film takes the viewer through the planning and execution of a half-dozen major actions including Seize Control of the FDA, Stop the Church, and Day of Desperation, with a timeline of many of the other zaps and actions that together forced the U.S. government and mainstream media to deal with the AIDS crisis.

Followed by an informal, practical conversation about protest tactics with ACT UP activists Alexis Danzig and Matt Ebert.

Doors at 6:30, screening at 7:00. $5-$10 donation suggested; light refreshments will be served.

Join us on Sunday, 3/18 from 11:00-1:00 for a more in-depth training with Alexis Danzig. Details here.

Documentary director/producer Martha Jeffries joins us for a screening of her recent one-hour feature, part of the Emmy Award-winning ‘Years of Living Dangerously’ series on climate change. Doors open at 6:00, screening begins at 6:30. Followed by a Q&A with Jeffries.

As global emissions soar, the oceans are becoming warmer and more acidic, creating unbearable living conditions for all marine life and threatening precious ecosystems. Actor Joshua Jackson travels to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef to look at the devastating impacts of ocean warming on the world’s largest reef system and the predicted impact of ocean acidification. Featuring scientists, scholars, fishermen, and ocean activists including Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Jim Barry, Laura David, Rene Juntereal, Zenon Suan, Loren Legarda, and Sylvia Early. Executive Produced by James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Photo: David Dare Parker for National Geographic Channel

On March 11 from 12:00-3:00, bring your extra seeds (open-pollinated, non-GMO) and pick up something new to grow in your garden this season. Packets, label forms, and supplies will be provided. If you want to prepare in advance, download and print this PDF, cut in quarters, fill in the informational labels and place with your seeds inside clear plastic ziplock sandwich bags.

Ratified in 1865, the 13th amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” DuVernay’s acclaimed documentary traces how the exclusion of those committed of crimes from the protection of the amendment has led to the mass criminalization and incarceration of African Americans. With appearances by Angela Davis, Charles Rangel, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and others. Doors at 6:00, screening at 6:30. Free and open to the public.

Released before the US entered World War II, Chaplin’s first sound film makes famously earnest slapstick satire of a fascist threat the extreme horror of which was still to be revealed. First in Bushel’s “Déja Vu” series. Doors open at 6:00, screening at 6:30. Suggested donation: $5

On Sunday, February 19th from 2-4, join poet and song-maker Iris Cushing for an afternoon of making fun, silly, and beautiful songs about peace and justice. Musical instruments will be available, and musical accompaniment will be provided for budding songwriters by Bushel members. We will work together on a single song to perform and record at the end of the afternoon, and have time to make individual songs to sing and share with family and friends.

Part of the Signs of the Times exhibition project.

On Saturday, February 11 from 12-5, join us to make signs. A lot on your mind about the state of this country? Put it on a board and give voice to your concerns, your hopes. Supplies provided.to share your opinions with our elected representatives.

Presented in conjunction with Signs of the Times, our new exhibit coordinated by Mina Takahashi and Marco Breuer. Refreshments and supplies will be provided.

On Sunday, February 12 from 12-5, join us to share your opinions with our elected representatives. Stationery, stamps, addresses, and topic lists provided. Lost your handwriting skills? Typewriter available; or bring your laptop and use our printer.

Presented in conjunction with Signs of the Times, our new exhibit coordinated by Mina Takahashi and Marco Breuer. Refreshments and supplies will be provided.

On Saturday, February 18th from 12-5, join us for a day of political correspondence as we find inventive ways to share our messages. Come and create postcards and posters to the rhythm of a working tabletop letterpress machine.  We will have printed stationary to share and plenty of supplies on hand for use. Kids welcome! $5 suggested donation

Part of the Signs of the Times exhibition project.

Are you concerned about impending changes to your healthcare options? Come to Bushel from 11:00-1:00 to voice your concerns and begin to plan for the future on this day of public resistance to upcoming policies endangering healthcare.

Transition is a worldwide network of grassroots community initiatives that seek to address the world’s greatest problems through homegrown, citizen-led action. Transition groups work with deliberation and good cheer to create a fulfilling and inspiring local way of life that can withstand the shocks of rapidly shifting global systems. They are reclaiming the economy, sparking entrepreneurship, reimagining work, re-skilling themselves and weaving webs of connection and support. Courageous conversations are being had; extraordinary change is unfolding. On Saturday, January 14 from 4:00-6:00pm, come to Bushel to find out what Transition Catskills has been up to, what projects lie ahead, and how you might join in. Hosted by Transition Catskills.

The first screening in Bushel’s “Don’t be fooled” film series will be all four episodes of John Berger’s seminal BBC series, ‘Ways of Seeing.’ RIP John Berger. Also: We got a popcorn machine.

Beginning on January 8, come sit and knit (or crochet!) with others, from 1:00-3:00pm. Spare needles and yarn are available if you don’t have your own. Ongoing through January; after that check the Calendar to see if it’s on.

The first screening in Bushel’s “Mad as Hell” film series can only be Network, Sidney Lumet’s 1976 satirical evisceration of U.S. corporate media. Written by Paddy Chayefsky and starring Faye Dunaway and William Holden.

On Sunday, November 27 at 7:00pm, please join us for a free screening of Adam Curtis’s new documentary, Hypernormalisation. It’s over 2.5 hours so if you will be more comfortable on our folding metal chairs with a cushion, please bring your own!

This month, whenever our Free Store is open (beginning on Friday, November 25, from 1-5pm), we will also be collecting supplies and facilitating donations and letter-writing campaigns to support the Standing Rock water protectors who are peacefully protesting the Dakota Access pipeline. A list of needed supplies is available on the Oceti Sakowin Camp website, where you can also donate online if you wish to support the protectors’ efforts. A recent overview of the situation at Standing Rock can be read here.

Photo by Rob Wilson photography

With hate crimes, bullying, and harassment increasing around the country, many in our community are concerned about safety. Bushel invites community members to gather family and friends for three afternoons of learning basic self defense, led by Phoebe Schreiner.

Classes will take place on Nov 27, Dec 4, and Dec 11, from 3:30-5:30pm.

Phoebe trained in the martial arts of Okinawan Goju karate and Chinese Wushu (commonly known as kung fu) for a decade in New York City and has taught self-defense to diverse populations. The afternoon sessions will build your confidence and introduce basic self-defense strategies. In a safe and fun environment, we will explore real scenarios and put your new skills to practice to build “muscle memory.”

All participants should come with comfortable clothes for standing and floor exercises. People over the age of 12, of all genders and physical abilities, are welcome.

To cover expenses, we ask those who can afford it to pay $5-$10 per class, but nobody will be turned away for lack of funds. Space is limited; please reserve online if you want to be assured of a spot.

Bushel will host a Free Store during open hours (follow our Instagram and join our mailing list for the most updated open hours) beginning on ‘Black Friday’ (AKA Buy Nothing Day) and through the end of the year. The Free Store opening will be on Friday, Nov 25 from 1:00-5:00pm.

Donation instructions: We welcome donations of up to one cubic feet of desirable goods (think of things that would make good gifts) or one shopping bag of clean clothing in good condition. Please drop these off on Friday 11/25 between 12-5, Saturday 11/26 between 12-5 or Sunday 11/27 between 12-3. For larger items or if you need to schedule a drop-off, send an email to info@bushelcollective.org. Some types of things to consider donating are: working small electronics, tools, excellent books, art, children’s toys, stationery / art supplies, high-quality clothing and accessories.

We will also be collecting blankets, sleeping bags, warm winter clothing and other supplies for Standing Rock. Please read this post and follow the link to the updated list of needs.

Nik Clifford and Jenny Miles’ limited-edition artist book, a companion to their fall 2016 exhibition at Bushel, is now available from our online store.

118 pp, edition of 20, numbered and hand-bound. $25. Purchase here.

On Wednesdays in November—the  9th, 16th, 23rd, and 30th—come write together from 6:30 to 8:30. All people / genres / methods are welcome.

Feeling apocalyptic? Come to the first installment of our eco-apocalypse film series. Watch Charlton Heston uncover a dark government secret in a dystopic vision of 21st-century NYC (seen through 1970s eyes). Wednesday, October 19: Doors at 7:00, screening starts at 7:30. Donation-based entry, bev & popcorn.

Beginning on October 9, Rod Sauquillo will teach one-hour all-level classes in Contact Improv, a dance technique founded in 1972 by Steve Paxton. Integrating his background as a modern dancer and his studies in Aikido, Paxton developed Contact Improv through investigations with his students and colleagues. The practice revolves around falling, rolling, counterbalance, lifting using minimal effort, and allowing points of physical contact to provide a starting point for exploration through movement. The dancing may be slow or fast and often involves rolling and weight-sharing; it is practiced barefoot with loose fitting clothing.

Classes are from noon to 1:00. See the CALENDAR for updated schedule. Suggested donation: $10

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Rod Sauquillo practiced Contact Improv for several years in Washington, DC. He attended a powerful workshop given by Martin Keogh in 2014 and was inspired to provide a space for this form to take root and flourish in our area. He studied dance while in college and teaches yoga.

Does anyone ever really understand what their parents do? In The Good Bad Things, Jennifer Kabat tries to unravel the truth about her late father, who may or may not have been in the CIA. Was he up to something more radical than the exportation of democracy? In a hybrid essay woven with slides her father took on his trips for the State Department, she delves into the era of the Cold War, when communism was fought with co-operatives, rural America was drafted into the fray, and rural electric co-ops were mobilized for the fight. The essay is a reckoning with an era and its values, and asks how they might haunt our own moment.

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A recent finalist for Notting Hill Editions’ Essay Prize, Jennifer Kabat is working on a book of linked essays, GROWING UP MODERN, exploring ideology and the landscape from the modernist suburb where she grew up to where she lives now in the Catskill Mountains. Harper’s, The White Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review and LARB have run selections from the book. Her ongoing collaboration with Kate Newby was recently subject of an exhibition at the Poor Farm in rural Wisconsin, and her essays have been included in exhibitions at Arnolfini in Bristol UK and in “Autobiography” at Index in Stockholm. Awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, she teaches at NYU.

On the occasion of Mercedes Teixido’s exhibition at BUSHEL, poet and National Book Award recipient Claudia Rankine asked her friend about how working and performing with her custom-built drawing machine has influenced her thinking and practice. This conversation will be included in BUSHEL’s forthcoming monograph on Teixido and her drawing machine project.

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Claudia Rankine: I have been living with the line drawings you made years ago with an earlier iteration of a drawing machine. Can you speak about that early project and how you have changed the way you think about your process using drawing machines?

Mercedes Teixido: The large-scale pieces you have were made with drawing machines improvised from rubber bands and tape and cardboard. They were meant to take my hand away from the activity of drawing; they were asking where the beauty is in the work. I performed them with eyes closed, using only movement and time, so curiosity replaced the more common mode of striving to make a good mark. Drawing is so often understood as a skill, but I think of it more as an activity, a trace of a moment; a drawing is most interesting to me when it feels like ephemera. The machines allow for an emphasis on the moment of making, which means that performance is part of the work. To use a machine or some mechanism invites the body to be considered, even as it also becomes a bit removed. The newer writing machine that draws in duplicate emphasizes this aspect of performance and makes the presence of the body visible in the work.

CR: I think for someone like you, who professionally interrogates the mark on the page, the challenge then becomes how to reassert your drawing process—since the mark, what gets represented, is what remains. As I am thinking about your desire to keep the viewer involved in the performance of drawing, I am reminded of the work of Ann Hamilton. The bodies in Hamilton’s installations are inescapable, as they are tied to their activity. What artists have allowed you to understand your process over the years?

MT: There are artists whose work effortlessly affects me. I recognize something that feels familiar but has become a form in their work. Philip Guston described it as “coming home.” The work of Richard Tuttle affects me this way. He has a radical freedom and a sense of gesture that is startling. Emma Kunz, a Swiss artist and healer, is another important artist for me; her work was meant to influence the well being of others. Tantra paintings have that same purpose and seem to exist in their own space. Yoko Ono is important, too, as a fluxus artist who really questions the way that art manifests in the world. It is political. In performance and in many of her pieces there is an invitation; the viewer is implicated as part of the work.

All this work has that quality of feeling of a personal experience.

I am increasingly aware of my work as relational. The impulse of the drawing machine was to manifest my voice, and that was what was most interesting to me. It was as if I was speaking to a person, an audience of one. Then I started to invite others to become part of the impulse of the work.

CR: The new drawing machine has a public performance component. Does this add an element of randomness to the work? How do you think of control relative to the duplicating lines in your newest process?

MT: Claudia, thanks for this question. Ideas around randomness and control are such a part of this work and my thinking about it.

When I was first asked to perform and to make improvisational drawings on the spot, I was doubtful that this would be a meaningful way to work; I thought I would be an artist on display. But what I learned that first night and in all subsequent performances is that by giving up a sense of what was going to happen, there was more possibility. What is changed is that you initiate the project but also know it will become something you never intended or imagined. Sometimes it’s uncomfortable when my assumptions are revealed to me. By inviting others in as part of the work, something completely novel surfaces. There is both excitement and respect for anyone that is willing to step in, even for those who just want to watch. I find that my work has become simultaneously more my own and more about a shared experience. Realizing how energizing it is to let go of ideas about the work and allow for the influence of others has changed both my work and my teaching. Ideas about success and failure are upended.

I am not always sure what I am doing or what I think of it. This is the most interesting territory for me. There is more acceptance and curiosity in the work; this can come in as the result of letting go of control. My studio is still a place of solitude that I need to stay grounded. The work I make there provides a contrast to the performance work, which invites me to activate a different self.

CR: Plato says the line is a point in motion, and for you the motion is relational. One form of motion communicates with another. How does this latest drawing machine work exactly? How am I invited in?

MT: Basically, the way it works is that I sit at the drawing machine and any person who cares to can read to me. The reading activates me to draw. The first performance was at the home of the poet Anna Moschovakis; she has a library in the spacious hallway, next to a beautiful old staircase. I wrote out simple instructions (on the drawing machine in duplicate, of course) inviting anyone to read to me from one of the books. When that happened, I would “draw” in duplicate, and when I was done, the reader would be given one of the duplicate drawings. One of the aspects of invitation that interested me in that piece was the permission and encouragement to browse a private library. I always want time to look through someone’s books, yet fear it would seem intrusive and rude. Here is an art event at a private residence where pulling books and looking at their content is an act that anyone present can—and is asked to—perform. The element of reading aloud adds another layer. I was interested in what books people would select, wondering: What are they interested in? How long will they read? How will they use their voice? Reading aloud has its pleasures, and hearing all kinds of people read their selection is thrilling. Some of the readers sat on the stairs, other stood. I remained silent and felt completely engrossed in my drawing. It was some of the most intense studio time I have ever experienced.

I learned from that first performance that you have to make a space for someone else to enter. Each person is unique, and I respond differenty to each. I will never forget a woman who read to me in DC at the Emerge arts fair. That library had to be created, so I asked a student of mine to create a collection of books about the “other Washington, DC.” The books he collected were amazing: underground zines, manuals for floor cleaning in government buildings circa 1950, headmasters’ letters, a memoir of a male stripper at a gay night club, and a history of domestic employees in the area. That memorable reader was 90 years old and she selected to read from the most provocative section of a zine from the 80’s. I mailed that publication to her when the fair was over.

This practice has become about improvisation, and there is no better way to improvise then to allow the presence of someone else to be a catalyst. You have to trust the process and surrender control in the conventional sense. Ah, control again: to be in the moment, I have to be open to the moment—whatever it brings.

CR: If the length of time you work on a piece in the performance is determined by how long the reader reads, do you find yourself working on pieces onside of that time?

MT: My credo in the performances is “you do what you want, and I will do what I want.” I want the reader to feel free and for my response to be the same. I am propelled by the reading, but I’m doing my thing too, and it starts to have its own logic. Sometimes I am done quickly, and other times I keep going. There‘s an interesting and pleasant nervousness about the gaps when I keep drawing or the reader keeps reading.

CR: I am curious how the more public practice with readers’ voices in your head changes how you feel present. Do you listen as you work, or do you find yourself engaged with the reader as much as the text? Has this performance practice changed your expectations for your private studio time? Does the time now feel more solitary, or are the terms so different that it’s an unfair comparison?

MT: The reader gives me the moment. There is nothing more complex than a person standing near you reading with intention, so my response is varied. Sometimes I immediately jump in while listening; other times I wait and just listen for a while. As I mentioned earlier, the first time I did improvisational work with public readers was a revelation. I didn’t know how interesting it would be for me, or how natural, to work with that kind of response and immediacy. Improvisation is something I had not consciously engaged until then. Now it’s a fundamental practice in my studio as well.

I should say that even before the performances, I was writing with the drawing machine, trying to make myself do short essays without thinking them out ahead of time. I am interested in the rejection of editing as a separate process, and in fusing the impusles of drawing and writing. The performances launched a new level of trust in process itself, so that even my image-based work is really improvisational now. I’m not interested in an overt kind of perfection; I try to plan nothing and even not to think that one decision about form or line or color or image is better than another—the “right” decision is the one I make in the moment. I try to work ahead of my rational thought process. I tend to work in large numbers of smaller pieces so that there’s no fear of making something less successful.

I took a Zen calligraphy class a few years ago, and the idea of making strokes and marks quickly and then doing another drawing, and another, made sense to me. You just keep with the moment and the experience. This is all of course very influenced by my interest in Zen Buddhism.

CR: My final question has to do with satisfaction. When you step back from a piece, what gives you satisfaction? Is the feeling or the knowing beyond language?

MT: Satisfaction comes in various forms. While it can be difficult to articulate, it’s important to try to understand, so try I will. First, just being in the studio is a kind of satisfaction. The awareness of the solitary joy of the studio is always there. In terms of looking at the work itself, certainly I am looking for a certain presence from the form, and I am less convinced by the work at some times than at others. The work is forming its own visual impulse and language as it borrows from existing languages. Ultimately, I’m trying to be honest, to drop pretenses. Form is full of ideas: my own and those of cultural precedents. How can I engage those things, but hold them in my way of understanding them? It may be satisfying because it’s just beginning to become something that feels like a relevant ground for my work.

In a sense I try not to be satisfied or disappointed or frustrated, although those things are somewhat inevitable. Sometimes I make something that leaves me mystified; it takes me a while to know what to think of it. I am learning.

Boston NVC trainer Paul Merrill will lead a free two-hour introductory talk / workshop in the nonviolent communication method founded by Marshall Rosenberg.

”’Nonviolent communication”’ (abbreviated ”’NVC”’, also called ”’compassionate communication”’ or ”’collaborative communication”) is a communication process developed by Marshall Rosenberg beginning in the 1960s. It focuses on three aspects of communication: ”self-empathy” (defined as a deep and compassionate awareness of one’s own inner experience), ”empathy” (understanding and sharing an emotion expressed by another), and ”honest self-expression” (defined as expressing oneself authentically in a way that is likely to inspire compassion in others).

Habits of thinking and speaking that lead to the use of violence (psychological and physical) are learned through culture. NVC theory supposes that all human beings have the capacity for compassion and only resort to behavior that harms others when they don’t recognize more effective strategies for meeting their needs. When people can identify their needs, the needs of others, and the feelings that surround these needs, harmony can be achieved.

While NVC is taught as a process of communication designed to improve compassionate connection to others, it has also been interpreted as a spiritual practice, a set of values, a parenting technique, an educational method and a worldview.

Paul Merrill is a co-trainer at NVC Boston with Shivani Carroll. His NVC studies began in 2002 and he is a 2005 graduate of Bay NVC’s Leadership Program. Prior to moving back to Boston, Paul was a founding board member and co-trainer at Brooklyn NVC. In 2012, he co-facilitated Mediate Your Life’s East Coast immersion program at Essex MA. He has been repeatedly invited to assist at the annual New York NVC Intensive, as well at NVC trainings at the United Nations, in Belgium and Poland.

On Friday, August 19 at 7PM, Bushel welcomes three New York City-based poets to read from their work.

Ali Power is the author of the book-length poem A Poem for Record Keepers (Argos Books, 2016) and the co-editor of the volume New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight (Rizzoli, 2014). Power’s poems have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, LIT, No, Dear, The Pen Poetry Series, and elsewhere. From 2008 to 2015, she was an editor at Rizzoli Publications in New York. Currently, she is pursuing her master’s degree in social work at New York University and co-curates the KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series.

Claire Donato is a writer, educator, digital art curator and accidental performer. Her books include Burial (Tarpaulin Sky Press), The Second Body (Poor Claudia), & Someone Else’s Body (Cannibal Books). She teaches at Pratt Institute and is a Writing Associate at The Cooper Union and has taught previously at Parsons The New School for Design, School of Visual Arts, Fordham University, Brown University, 826 NYC and UnderAcademy College, a ‘pataphysical online college as collage that was ultimately realized—at least provisionally—as a free school. She is also an independent digital arts curator at Babycastles Gallery in Manhattan.

Jeff T. Johnson is a writer, critic, and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and lived in Oakland, CA for 16 years before relocating to the East Coast. His writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Fanzine, PEN America, Jacket2, Encyclopedia Vol. 3, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. His open-field concrete digital poem THE ARCHIVERSE is documented at archiverse.net, and is anthologized in Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. He is currently a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute. For more information, visit jefftjohnson.com.

On Thursday, August 11 from 5:30-7:30PM, Annie Schwed from the Roxbury Arts Group will host an information session for those interested in applying for arts funding through the Decentralization Grant Program (DEC) of  the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA).  DEC funds are used to support projects in three areas: Community Arts, Arts Education, and Individual Artist.

Anyone interested in applying for a DEC Grant must attend an information session. In each information session, Schwed will review grant guidelines, review the grant process, highlight successful DEC Grant-Funded Projects, and provide tips for successful grant writing. All DEC Grant Information Sessions are free and open to the public.

On Saturday, July 23 from 12-5, trade in your gently used clothing and accessories and refresh your wardrobe at our first community clothing swap. Please bring washed and ironed items only, limit 25 items per person. $5 suggested donation

Beginning on July 6, join Kristie Burnett of Bovina for weekly hourlong meditation sessions every Wednesday evening at 7pm. Please bring your own cushion; no prior meditation experience necessary.

From Kristie: ‘Meditation is a physical practice that helps us shift habits, cultivate relationships and build a deeper compassion toward the world. Perhaps you’ve never meditated before and aren’t sure where to start, or you have a meditation practice and would like to practice with a group. Come sit and together we can share a moment and some space.’

The Very Best of the Rural Route Film Festival, Vol. 2

Bushel is pleased to welcome a special screening from the Rural Route Film Festival.

Friday, June 24th @8pm
Introduced by Alan Webber of Rural Route
$5 suggested donation

This compilation of ten short films from the film festival’s past five years tells the epic tale of a Belgian rooster, the complicated ordeal of a Kentucky trailer park alligator, the delicately sand-animated disappearance of a young boy amongst a pack of wolves, and a visual onslaught of thousands of full-screen flowers, along with documentaries on the old world turf-cutting culture of Irish bogs, injustice in a Cambodian farming community amongst a traditional wedding, the sad secrets of a Lebanese beekeeper, a poetic look at the Ethiopian salt trade by the late Robert Gardner, a cruise ship’s Antarctic voyage, and an old Andean man’s continued journeys to harvest ice from the tallest volcano in Ecuador. View the full line-up HERE, and check out the trailer HERE.

Dancer and choreographer Vicky Lundell (formerly with Mark Morris Group) teaches an all-levels modern dance class on Wednesday mornings from 10:00-11:15. The class builds on techniques based on the teachings of Martha  Graham, Paul Taylor,  José Limon and others. Suggested donation: $10/class

Bovina Town Councilman and EMT Mark Rossley will offer a two-hour Heartsaver CPR and AED course. Each student who completes the workshop will receive a two-year certification. $20/student

Sunday, June 12 at 1:00-3:00pm. Space is limited: reserve your spot now.

Please join us on Friday, May 27th at 7:00pm for a poetry reading featuring writers from Delaware County and New York City. Followed by a reception.

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Emily Brandt is the author of three chapbooks: Sleeptalk or Not At All (Horse Less Press),ManWorld (dancing girl press) and Behind Teeth (Recreation League). Her poems have appeared in The Offing, Apogee, Sink Review, The Atlas Review, and other journals. She earned her MFA from New York University where she facilitated the Veterans Writing Workshop. She’s been in residence at Saltonstall Arts Colony (NY) and Elsewhere (NC), and is an Emerging Writers Fellow at Poets House. Emily is a co-founding editor of No, Dear, Web Acquisitions Editor for VIDA, and a contributing writer for Weird Sister. She lives and teaches in Brooklyn.

Elizabeth Zuba is the author of two books of poetry, Decoherent The Wing’ed (SplitLevel Texts, 2016) and May Double as a Whistle (Song Cave Press, 2015). She is the editor of Not Nothing: Selected Writings by Ray Johnson 1954-1994 (Siglio Press, 2014); translator and co-editor of Marcel Broodthaers: My Ogre Book Shadow Theater Midnight (Siglio Press, 2015) and La Familia Americana, an anthology of contemporary American poetry (Cosmopoética: Madrid, 2010). Elizabeth has recently translated Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête (Granary Books, 2016) and 10,000 Francs Reward (Printed Matter, 2016), as well as numeroustexts for the current retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art (February-May 2016) including his 1975 book En lisant la Lorelei. Some of Elizabeth’s critical work has appeared in Bomb Magazine, Black Mountain Studies Journal, The Reanimation Library’s Word Processor, and Ray Johnson’s Art World (Feigen Gallery, 2014).

We are delighted to welcome Robert Bollinger and his team for an engineering and design presentation of Bollinger Motors’ versatile, all-electric off-road & utility truck.

The CAD (computer-aided design) layout of the entire vehicle will be on view, including high-voltage architecture, powertrain, chassis, suspension, gearboxes, exterior, features and more.

Followed by a Question & Answer period and reception.

Saturday, May 14 @6PM

Bushel is thrilled to host Swedish poets Johannes Heldén and Mara Lee, visiting from Sweden to read from their new and forthcoming publications with Argos Books (whose books are also for sale at Bushel). Joining them will be poet and Argos Books editor Elizabeth Clark Wessel, author of Isn’t That You Waving at You (Big Lucks, 2015).

Reading starts at 7:00 pm. There will be drinks!

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Mara Lee is a Swedish poet, novelist and scholar. She is the official Swedish translator of Anne Carson. Lee grew up in the south of Sweden, and now lives in Stockholm. Her literary debut, Kom, was published in 2000, and was nominated for the Borås best debut award. It can be described as an investigation of feminine sexuality from the vantage point of a masochistic logic, while at the same time flipping the script of power relations. Since then she has published several poetry collections and novels. Her work has been translated into German, French, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Spanish, and she is the recipient of several literary awards, including Svenska Dagbladets Literary award, The P.O Enquist Award, and Albert Bonniers literary Award. Lee’s work, including her most recent novel Future perfect and the scholarly essay The Writing of Others, revolves around issues of power, otherness, femininity and transgressive desire. She was recently elected a member of the Board of Directors of the Swedish Royal Institute of Art.

Johannes Heldén is a visual artist, poet, and musician. Born 1978, he lives and works in Stockholm. He receive Sweden’s biggest art prize, the Åke Andrén fellowship, in 2015, and the Evolution project won the inaugural N. Katherine Hayles award in 2013. Heldén has published three full-length music albums, most recently System (Irrlicht). He’s been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and Headlands Center of the Arts and has shown work at ISEA 2015 in Vancouver, HUMlab at Umeå University, Broken Dimanche in Berlin, Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Inspace in Edinburgh, NIMK in Amsterdam, The Gothenburg Museum of Art among others. Heldén is the creator of five extensive digital online works of poetry and visual art. His most recent book is Astroecology, which is forthcoming from Argos Books in 2016.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is a founding editor of Argos Books & co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. She is the author of three chapbooks Whither Weather (GreenTower Press, 2012), Isn’t that You Waving at You (Big Lucks Books, 2015) and Amsterdam (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). She lives in rural Connecticut and translates Swedish novels for a living.

Join us at 7:00pm on Saturday, April 16, for a literary + musical event to celebrate a new publication from fellow travelers Publication Studio (Troy chapter): Cream River by Douglas W. Milliken. There will be readings by the author and music from Scott Sell and Tianna Kennedy.

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What is Cream River?

Eight stories about getting everydamnthing wrong. Proudly wearing your self-infliction for anyone to see. Defaulting to the lazy way out of even the easiest situation. Staring your last chance straight in the eyes and blowing it nevertheless. This pocket-sized edition of pratfalls and delusions—ranging in landscapes from rural Italy to downtown Boston—includes a digital download of Cream River‘s musical twin, the four-song EP by Blind Pelican, Whiskey Dick. Like the two halves of a black and white cookie, the book and record are a unified work, a single vision interpreted through two distinct media by two confused personae.

Douglas W. Milliken is the author of four books, including the novel To Sleep as Animals and the pocket-sized collection Cream River (both through Publication Studio). His stories have earned prizes from Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, and the Stoneslide Corrective, and have been published in Slice, the Collagist, and the Believer, among others. His teeth and gums are locked in a desperate war. www.douglaswmilliken.com

Sara Wintz was born in Los Angeles and studied literature and writing at Mills College, Oxford University, and Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard. Her first book, Walking Across A Field We Are Focused On At This Time Now (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012) is an epic poem about the 20th century that explores the foundations of facts, time, and social identity. Wintz is the editor of two anthologies of poetry and a contributing editor to Ugly Duckling Presse’s annual performance art sourcebook, Emergency Index. The recipient of a grant from The Fund for Poetry (2013), Wintz is at work on a second book of poems and a book of interviews with contemporary women poets called Conversations with Women.

Jackqueline Frost is the author of The Antidote (Compline Editions) as well as a number of chapbooks: The Soft Appeal (Nous-Zot Press), You Have the Eyes of a Martyr (O’Clock Press), and most recently, Young Americans (Solar Luxuriance in the US, and Defector in the UK). Her writing has appeared in venues such as Rethinking Marxism, BOMB Magazine, Lana Turner, FanZine, Pez Espiral, and LIES: a journal of materialist feminism. Jack is a PhD student in French Studies at Cornell University where she works on anti-colonial poetics and the philosophy of history.
The reading will take place on Friday, March 25 at 7pm

Come to Bushel between 12-5 on Saturday, March 5, for our first annual Seed Swap! Bring your seeds to share and join in a tradition as old as agriculture itself. Peruse the seed offerings and start planning your Spring garden, or just join us to have a cup of coffee and dish about dirt. Please make sure your seeds are labeled with seed type and expiration date, if applicable (any kind of container / envelope is fine).

$5 suggested donation at the door to benefit Bushel; refreshments will be served.

(Image borrowed from the mobile seed exchange, SEED BROADCAST.)

Join us on Friday, January 22, for the launch of Yamana Sanders’s new book of poems and drawings, along with readings by Yamana and friends. The book, Rainbow Walking, will be on hand at Bushel the evening of the launch. Doors at 6:30, reading at 7:00. Refreshments will be served.

In February, join Delhi-based dance instructor Jeremy Pickens for four beginner-level, weekly one-hour West Coast Swing dance classes. Lessons will be held every Sunday in February (7, 14, 21, 28) from 5-6pm, with an optional open practice following each class. Each class builds on the previous, so please plan on joining us for the entire series. Note that a dancing partner is not necessary when signing up, as we will be rotating regularly throughout each class to give everyone a chance to learn from each other and grow in skill together. However, as West Coast Swing is a social dance, we ask you to sign up either as leader or a follower so that class composition remains balanced.

A special Introductory class will also be offered on January 23rd at 7pm.

> Register online for the Introductory class on January 23rd (free).
> Register online for the four-session course in February ($40 suggested donation).

What to bring:
Only one item is required for participation: Proper footwear. The ideal dancing shoe is one with a suede leather sole and is flexible yet supportive. Certain types of smooth rubber soles (such as those on a Bloch sneaker) work as well. Whatever footwear you choose, please make sure that the sole is both non-marking and clean, i.e. don’t wear it in off of the street.

ABOUT WEST COAST SWING*

West Coast Swing (aka WCS, Westie) is a partner dance with roots in Lindy Hop. It is characterized by a distinctive elastic look that results from its basic extension-compression technique of partner connection, and is danced primarily in a slotted area on the dance floor. The dance allows for both partners to improvise steps while dancing together, putting West Coast Swing in a short list of dances that put a premium on improvisation.

Philosophically, modern West Coast Swing is in large part defined by an emphasis on musicality and connection. West Coast Swing is an evolving social dance that has gone through many changes throughout its short history, over time incorporating techniques from numerous dance styles. In writing about West Coast Swing, Skippy Blair advises that, “The only problem that exists in swing is when someone decides there is only one way to dance it. There is never only one way to do anything. Try on different styles that you admire in other people…until you find the comfortable one that fits.”

Videos: #1, #2

*adapted from Wikipedia

T R A V E L I N G D O W N T H E P S Y C H O P A T H
Works by Bloomville-based artist Christopher Bailey. Opening reception at 6pm on Thursday, January 7.

Beginning on December 27, photographer and Delhi resident Heather Phelps-Lipton will be tending to our Instagram feed, posting photographic responses to BUSHEL and its goings-on.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Heather Phelps-Lipton was born in Ithaca, N.Y. and raised by wolves. Her photography is a dialogue between curiosity and alienation and explores the drama of the everyday. Heather studied art at San Diego State, technique at ICP and collodion under Jill Eisenberg and Joni Sternbach. Her photographs have been shown in San Diego, LA and New York. She has also shown photo-based pieces that employ pencil, crayon, embroidery and projection. Heather lives/works in Delhi, New York.

Mary Skinner offers thirty-minute Reiki sessions. Suggested donation $10, but no fee is required. All proceeds go to support Bushel programming.

Read more about Reiki here.

Upcoming / available sessions are listed on the Calendar page: search for “reiki”.

(Photo: Heather Phelps-Lipton).

Visit during Open Hours to see (and sometimes participate in) our current exhibition; browse our library of handmade chapbooks; buy books from Ugly Duckling Presse, Siglio Press, Argos Books, Canarium Books, Rescue Press, Black Sun Lit, Organism for Poetic Research, Belladonna* Books, and more; drink an organic pour-over coffee; bring your laptop and use our free WiFi — stay awhile! See the CALENDAR for the next Open Hours.

From December 21-24, 10am-7pm, Bushel will be home to a temporary incarnation of Clove & Creek : objects for the home, body and spirit, a curated mercantile based locally.

Thanks to everyone who came out to our first event at Bushel! It was a packed house and we couldn’t have asked for a more energetic and amazing night. Huge thanks to Ommegang Brewery, the Daily Star, and the Walton Reporter for sponsoring and covering the event, and double-huge thanks to our readers and artists, Tyler Weston, C.A. Kaufman, Jennifer Kabat, Emily Skillings, Catherine Tayler, and Kate Newby. Above you’ll see Catherine reading an essay on flamenco (complete with slideshow).Thank you, Catskills!

MODEL

by Jenifer Manzano (2009)

[Sacred Harp at Bushel is on hiatus as of June 2016.]

Sacred Harp Catskills hosts community singing sessions on the third Wednesday of every month. Bring a dish to pass at 6 p.m. for a potluck. Singing starts at 6:30 p.m.

For more about Sacred Harp Catskills, visit their website.

Sacred Harp is traditional, a cappella, community harmony singing. All singings are free and open to newcomers, all ages, all voices, and all levels of musical experience. Loaner books and tutorials are available at the singings.

We’ll have you singing in four-part harmony by the end of the night. (Here’s what it sounds like when hundreds of people do it.)

from ‘Nothing to Say’

by Ann Lauterbach

(Belladonna* Chaplet #85, Winter 2006)

Join us on Saturday, December 5th, at 5:30PM for Bushel’s first reading, featuring poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from Catherine Taylor, Kate Newby, Jennifer Kabat, Emily Skillings, C. A. Kaufman, and Tyler Weston, along with visual works by Newby.

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Come visit our (mostly) Poetry Chapbook Reading Room, filled with an international collection of hundreds of handmade books and zines. Contact us to schedule a visit.