We are excited to present our first event in Portland. TVP in PDX!
Join us for Field Notes - An Evening of Poetry and Prose - Exploring Connection in its many forms-connection to place, to land, to other people, to memory, to the more-than-human world, or to oneself.
Featuring:
Shannon Amidon
Merridawn Duckler
Will Hornyak
Leah Jay
Brooke Kuhnhausen
Corey Pressman
Joellen Sweeney
Door open at 6pm with some light refreshments, craft activity and mingling. Readings begin promptly at 6:30.
Free admission - Seating is limited - You must RSVP to join
Brooke Kuhnhausen is a psychologist, with a deep love for imagination and meaning making and a cherisher of poetry, art, and music. She deeply values creativity, play and collaboration as portals of transformation and imagination so vitally needed for new ways of being together and with the earth. She cherishes exploring how contemplative, and embodied practices of presence might root us more deeply in resilience, interbeing, and aliveness in these potent and possible times. She has been part of a number of eco-feminist collaborations with written, spoken and visual art, including including writing for Deep Times Journal, the public talk Feeling in the Anthropocene, land art show Terra Incognita Luminaries, a meditation on Joy Harjo for Spring Creek Project and a reflection on Creative Belonging. Brooke lives on Kalapuya land in Portland, OR near many dear living beings, including kindred friends, family, and collaborators, beloved waterways, wild roses, and rich loamy earth.
Joellen Sweeney is a theatre artist, writer and teacher from Portland, Oregon. Her creative research focuses on environment; whether through whimsical, heartfelt writings, immersive and site-specific performance, or lush multi-layered vocal music, Joellen loves to create and support experiences that build connectedness between people and the natural world.
Recent theatre credits include work with Artists Repertory Theatre, Seattle Shakespeare Company, Shaking the Tree Theatre, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, Northwest Children's Theatre and Renegade Opera, with whom she is a Creative Company Member. She is also a co-founder of Bedrock Theatre, a performance collective that combines storytelling, live music and hiking in parks and wilderness areas, and an Advisory Board Member at The Verdancy Project.
Taking after her grandfather, Ben Sweeney, (who wrote a poem everyday) Joellen writes essays and poetry when she’s supposed to be doing other work. Her first poetry collection, The Small Particulars, will be published by Verdant Publishing in Fall of 2025.
Shannon Amidon is an artist, writer, and community builder who lives and works in Troutdale, Oregon, where the forests, fields, and creek edges of the Pacific Northwest find their way into everything she makes. She is a wonder seeker, a beekeeper, a lover of insects, old books, and the kind of beauty that most people walk past without noticing.
Her writing explores creativity, ecology, and the art of building a life that means something. Her essays on art and creative practice have appeared in notable publications, and she is the author of Nurturing Creativity: A Guide to Building Your Artist Residency and Cultivating Creative Community and the anthology Cycles of Creation: Five Years of The Verdancy Project.
Shannon is the founder and director of The Verdancy Project, a multidisciplinary nature-based artist residency and creative community on a 4.5-acre property in Troutdale.
Will Hornyak- From American tall tales and Native American myths to Mexican fables, Russian fairytales and beyond, Will Hornyak weaves a wide web of beautifully crafted stories from oral traditions around the world. A strong performer with a love for the music and rhythm of language, Will fully engages his audiences in bringing traditional and original stories to life. He often shares the stage with audience members with lively participation stories.
Will teaches storytelling at Marylhurst University and performs at festivals, schools, theatres, pubs and churches throughout the United States. He has been a featured performer at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee and at numerous regional festivals. He was named Artist of the Year Young Audiences of Oregon and Southwest Washington. The National Storytelling Network awarded Will with the Brimstone Grant for his environmental education program: Living Streams: Stories for Healthy Watersheds. That program for K-6 schools, has educated and entertained over 60,000 students and teachers. He lives in Milwaukie, Oregon not far from the Willamette River where he loves to paddle a canoe.
Leah Jay is an artistic polymath, aspiring beat poet and “crazy dumbsaint of the mind”, spiritual seeker, follower of the Way, and fae forest defender who lives in Beaverton, Oregon. Five years ago she moved north from California driven by wildfires and opportunity. The isolation of the pandemic, coupled with the challenges of chronic illness, inspired her to rekindle her poetic urge, with her work only recently seeing publication.
She’s taken inspiration from: watercolors, acrylic paints, pastel chalks, ink, yarn, wool, paper, trees as friends, pond creatures, worlds both seen and unseen, Joan of Arc, biology, subatomic particle physics, and scripture from every religion. Her colorful, expressive art has been shown, published, and collected widely. Highlights from her art career include directing 2001’s WTC Memorial Art Project to facilitate artists’ responses to 9/11, and creating the artbook “Amphibian Love” which raised money for frog conservation efforts.
Leah is currently a comfort care hospice volunteer, and enjoys meditation and chanting with the Bright Way Zen spiritual community. Her most recent accomplishment is completing New York Zen Center’s Foundations in Contemplative Care program, and she looks forward to mastering the art of composing new prayers for a world that needs them.
