Accordions and Bengals

Some time last year,  I learned about The Night Garden Project and was immediately taken with it because it’s all about collaboration and the crossroads of ideas. It seems to have begun with gnomes and a rooftop garden (You can read about the origin here).

Photo by Megan Granholm

This Spring, the folks over at the Night Garden have decided to host an Inspiration Series, an opportunity for creative folks to get inspired by a particular artist’s work and raise money for the Great Lakes Bengal Rescue (GLBR) in the process.

The first artist to be highlighted/inspirational in the series is Jason Webley. Off stage, Jason is soft-spoken, genuine, and thoughtful. On stage and armed with his accordion, he’s like a musical pirate shaman creating worlds and breaking down preconceptions with his incredible sound. Truly.

From The Night Garden Website:

Every couple of months we will feature a new guest artist under the Inspiration tab in the sidebar (that will appear March 1, when we post our first guest’s contribution). Each guest artist will contribute a piece of art, and you’ll be invited to respond with original art of your own: anything, in any medium, whatever the guest artist’s piece brings out in you. Give it form, then show it to us! Write stuff. Photograph stuff. Draw stuff. Cook stuff. Make a bracelet. Knit some socks. Put on a puppet show. Listen to what the piece says to you, then say something back.

Entries for the first round in the series will be accepted beginning March 1, 2011 through April 30, 2011. More information can be found on The Night Garden website. Check it out, get inspired, donate!

There will be a new artist announced every few months, including a few you may know well (and personally).

😉

I leave you with this…

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu has been making magic with food and words for more than 20 years, incorporating folklore from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth. She’s a writer, content developer, instructor, and mother of three teenagers. Valya is the author of MOTHER CHRISTMAS, THE SILENCE OF TREES, and the founding editor of CONCLAVE: A Journal of Character. Along with Stephen H. Segal, she is the co-author of FORKING GOOD: An Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of The Good Place and GEEK PARENTING: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family (Quirk Books), and co-founder of the Wyrd Words storytelling laboratory. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her poetry and prose have been published in anthologies and magazines that include, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Culture, Gargoyle Magazine, Gone Lawn, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium. You can find her on Twitter @valya and on Mastodon.social @valya

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *