Your Custom Text Here
In Episode 8 of the Dead Parents Society podcast, I read from "Eloquent Limbs" and sing "Books to Be Buried In," and I chat about these two works with some wonderfully thoughtful writers over at Kelly Writers House. Thanks to Jamie-Lee Josselyn for having me! Click hear to listen.
And learn more about this project here.
I am honored to be part of Jamie-Lee Josselyn's project, Dead Parents Society:
"Dead Parents Society is a podcast series from the Kelly Writers House about writing about the loss of a parent, hosted by University of Pennsylvania creative writing instructor Jamie-Lee Josselyn. We at Dead Parents Society are particularly interested in emerging writers who experienced their loss at a young age and whose writing and world view have been shaped, at least in part, by this. Our goal is to have frank, open conversation on a topic that many of us learned to be quiet or guarded about."
The podcast launched this week with a reading at the Kelly Writers House. Along with others who have written about the loss of a parent, I read from my essay "A Posture of Receptivity" and performed the song "Downpour." You can watch the livestream of that program here:
Dead Parents Society is a project that explores writing by those who have lost a parent at a relatively young age and that encourages conversation about the purpose of writing about such hardship,...
And stay tuned for this summer, when I'll be featured on the Dead Parents Society podcast, reading from my essay "Eloquent Limbs" and performing the song "Books to be Buried In."
Thanks to Relief Journal for publishing my essay "What My Brother Wore." Here is a brief excerpt:
We drove from Tuscany to coastal Cinque Terre, to the town of Vernazza. Midday, sunbathers draped like laundry over the black rocks, and we sat out for hours at the water’s edge—Joe, Chris, Austin and I. In a bathing suit, Joe’s body was strong and his broad chest looked so much like my dad’s, and his skin was fair and he smoked cigarettes and interrogated the snails, holding them like stretched hands into my face, and he seemed at once so much like a boy and so much like a man. We laughed like kids as Chris impersonated Pavarotti. When the sun was high, Joe was ready for a swim and he sat at the water’s edge wetting his toes, laughing in his timidity to plunge off of the rocks. In that moment I saw so many moments from his boyhood, his curiosity and caution, his sensitivity—never quite sure how the world would receive him.
The full essay can be found in the print journal, which you can purchase here.
Merry Christmas; Father is Gone
Merry Christmas;
Father is gone.
His body is dust on the mantle
Beside balsam needles, magnolia leaves
And a photo of young Mother
Kissing him in her crown of baby’s breath—
Those white hot holy stars—
Her lace and his gold-buttoned blazer.
Fire breathes below.
Embers turn ashes on hot stone.
We gather on couches and guess
What gifts he’d give if he were home.
What poems he’d pen to mark the year,
To smear our foreheads, dear, blest.
What words to wake us to Christ’s cheer?
Who wears the crown now,
those white hot stars?
Who blazes gold and evergreen?
Who lies with lions, wakes from dreams,
and, watching no clock, gathers us all?
Catherine Ricketts is a finalist in the Philadelphia Songwriters Contest & your support counts!
Cast your vote in the audience of the Finals Showcase at Ardmore Music Hall, 4pm on Sunday, May 31.
Event details. At the Finals Showcase, 12 finalists will perform for a panel of industry judges, and audience members vote, too!
Buy your ticket.
Listen to the song that won the votes of industry judges & has become a "fan favorite" so far.
I'd love to see you there!
Watch this video of the Leonard Cohen Song Symposium--an evening of performances and essays in celebration of the songs of Leonard Cohen, featuring Sarah Lindstedt (UPenn '15), Anthony DeCurtis (Rolling Stone), Brennan Cusack (UPenn '15), Mark Richardson (Pitchfork), Greg Djanikian (UPenn Creative Writing), Tom Moon (NPR Music), Cat Ricketts (that's me!) and Al Filreis (UPenn Creative Writing). My performance is at 57:37, but you'll be glad if you watch the whole evening.
Grace
When winter was as old as grandmother—
with her silver hair branches and silver skin fields,
pleased to live forever—I bought ten yellow tulips.
I rested their stems on my forearm, their
silken glowing faces on my elbow like a newborn
as I walked through a dusty violet sky.
Strangers smiled, surprised to see the burst of bright.
The moon dangled its sliver,
the air whispered its shiver,
and the flowers were a sleeping child.
Photo credit: Austin B. Ricketts
One block from my house lies a 54-acre cemetery and green space on what was once the estate of William Hamilton, grandson of the founding father. I like to think of this as my back yard. This is a poem about The Woodlands.
Last December, I penned new words to this old song, the title of which means "long, long ago," "days gone by," or "old times." Today I am posting this new recording. Maybe it will help you to reflect and celebrate the moments you just spent with dear friends, which left you somehow whole-hearted and longing for more, all at the same time. That's how Christmas and the coming of a new year work on me. Maybe this song will help you to make some sense of that feeling.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind
Lest auld acquaintance be forgot
I'll sing for auld lang syne
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne
We'll take a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
Brim-fill that cup of kindness up,
Have a sip of wine and glow
Beside the tree, O pine with me
For the Christmas clock to slow
The Christmas clock to slow
The Christmas clock to slow
I’d give you all I know and have
If the Christmas clock would slow
The auld lang syne, told there
In the heirloom wooden crèche
Too strange, too complicated, O
We regard with awe and hush.
As Mary gazed at shepherd guests
And wondered at their words,
I’ll hold you in my pond’ring heart
Old friend, still much unheard
Old friend, so much is still unheard
Old friend, so much unheard,
A chasm full, immeas’rable
Are your secrets still unheard.
Imagine yet a table set
For all I’ve loved before
For brother, friend, ea ch tear to mend
Sit there with me til morn
Til morning light intrudes on us
Til morning light intrudes
Unhurried, stay til night gives way
And the morning light intrudes
For auld lang syne, my dear
For auld lang syne
We'll take a cup of kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
"Quiet" with Sarah Seligman and Lindsay Beck
"Pause" with Sarah Seligman and Mel Hsu
"Love You As You Grow" with Sarah Seligman
Here's a video from our October 3 show at the Tin Angel with Lowland Hum and Sonja Sofya. It was an honor to share the stage with musicians whose work I so esteem and whose company I so enjoy. Sarah's handprints are all over this song, as the piano composition is entirely hers. (Handclaps, mine.)
Downtown downpour Surprise July storm Take cover under the sycamores In the park as day grows dark You wait for the rain to die, You're watching the water For the drops on the pavement to splash a bit smaller Don't want to ruin your shoes Don't want the pocks on
Downtown downpour
Surprise July storm
Take cover under the sycamores
In the park as day grows dark
You wait for the rain to die,
You're watching the water
For the drops on the pavement to splash a bit smaller
Don't want to ruin your shoes
Don't want the pocks on the leather
So you stay where you are and you yield to the weather
In the living room at your daddy's side
Surprise, mother cries
The words you could say would just get in the way,
Tear-weary, you sit in the quiet
You wait for the rain to die,
You're watching the water
For the drops on the pavement to splash a bit smaller
Don't want to ruin your shoes
Don't want the pocks on the leather
So you stay where you are and you yield to the weather
Wait for the job
Wait for your partner
Wait for the healing you pray for your father
Wait for your mission
Wait for permission
Wait for restoring, you wait for remission
My time in Maryland was a season for writing. I set out to present a new song to my cohort every two weeks. Starting small last August, I borrowed words from Gerard Manley Hopkins to set his poem “Peace” to music. Each week thereafter, rather than waiting for inspiration as I had done in years past, I’d set aside four hours on a Friday afternoon to sit and do the work. I’d seek solitude in the breezy gazebo on the water, in a carrel in the Old Library, or in the echoey chapel, soaked in the sound of my own voice. I’d pull out the notes I’d scratched down throughout the week—a line that came to me on a bike ride, a phrase I’d plucked from a conversation with a friend—and I’d write around them. These were important times of processing, to make sense of my father’s diagnosis, of the books I was reading, of good and hard moments in the friendships in my home. I did this work alone—wrestling with words to say just what I meant, playing with my voice so that the words sounded like their meaning. I was in control.
Some of my favorite moments through the year, though, came when I was brave and humble to invite others into this generative work. By November, when I’d debut a song in the living room, I’d ask Chris and Lindsay to sing what they heard in harmony. Their voices wrapped like ribbons around my words, and I liked the sound of it. At Christmas, I penned new verses to an old song—Auld Lang Syne. I tried to find the phrases to articulate what many of us were feeling that December, the satisfaction and, still, the longing. And then I welcomed my friends to sing them with me. Bethany hopped on the old upright piano that was a hair out of tune. Chris and Lindsay took the high and low harmonies, and we built and built so at the finish, fifteen people stood around the piano, clutching song sheets and singing my words together. And suddenly they were our words.
It is summertime and I am back in Philadelphia, twelve new songs in tow. I’m glad to return to these familiar row homes and wooded streets, to the small listening rooms where I love to play, to the friends who sing along to the first songs I ever wrote. I am also glad to return to an old collaborative partner, my friend Sarah Seligman. Once a week, I take the trolley or a long stroll to Sarah’s Center City highrise, where my spare guitar resides beside her piano. Here, she is helping to stretch me further in humility as we create together.
Sarah’s work is in neuroscience. She is a PhD student at Temple, counseling clients in therapy and researching Alzheimer’s and aging. But she grew up with both science and music in her bones. Her grandmother was a musicologist who tapped away at a typewriter on the second floor of a Soho brownstone, composing biographies for Gershwin and Bernstein and articles for Vogue and the New York Times. Her grandfather is a psychiatrist on the Upper East Side. Her father spent his single years writing folk songs on the Upper West, then took a sensible job in radio; her mother is a pediatric cardiologist. As kids, the three Seligman children spent each afternoon at Hoff-Barthelson Music School, where Sarah was classically trained in piano. The demands of her undergraduate coursework in science set Sarah’s hands to rest for a few years, but when I took a poetry course and started writing folk songs, she stretched, sat down at a little keyboard, and began to play simple accompaniment to carry my songs along.
This summer, she adorns the new songs with piano flourishes that I could dream up but could never manifest. In four years of collaboration, her arrangements are growing more and more nuanced, and we are growing braver together. It has taken this time for us to warm up, though, because of the risk of collaboration.
Collaboration is a sacrament of humility and mutual deference. When I invite others into my creative work, I admit that what I have is not enough, that I need others’ gifts to complement my own. I am a folkie with no technical training. Alone, I can pin words down to say just what I mean, and I can bend my voice to evoke sorrow, longing, playfulness or celebration. But I can’t build tension with bass notes that resound in your bones; I can’t ramble my hands in ¾ time to sound like a summer saunter; I can’t twinkle in the high keys for a delicate finish. I need Sarah’s partnership.
In partnership, I yield control. I invite Sarah’s aesthetic instincts to mingle with my own. I am no longer the sole arbiter of the song’s meaning. My writing is deeply personal, often rooted in my own experience, so to invite another into meaning-making requires great trust. But Sarah’s work in psychology and her high capacity for empathy make her the perfect partner. She absorbs the stories of my songs into herself, and I am ever more awed at her insights into the human experience and her instincts for how to articulate my stories using the instrument before her.
Aristotle said
this: Good and effective ensemble is when its members have a commendable
knack of subordinating themselves to the benefit of the whole. Thousands of years later, 20th
Century Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly wrote, While singing in itself is
good, the real reward comes to those who sing, and think, and feel with others.
This is what harmony means. Age after age, and perhaps today all the more, humans are bent toward
individualism and self-focus. We like to be soaked in the sound of our own
voices. We like to
believe we are in control. We cringe at the words subordinate, yield, defer.
But Aristotle, Kodaly and I know that we need the corrective of moments of
collaboration that help us to listen outside of ourselves. In collaboration, we
learn that yielding to another ushers forth a richer bounty—that in deference,
we emit more radiant beauty.
On Friday night, we gathered in a Romanesque chapel nestled in Philly's Italian Market. Formerly an Episcopal church, this building has long housed the Fleisher Art Memorial. It's a glowing space with a golden story: In 1922, Samuel S. Fleisher, Vice
President of Fleisher Yarn Company, acquired this space and converted it into a
haven for reflection and creative expression for his factory employees
and neighborhood students. He said this...
“Thousands of young people toil during the day whose lives are unavoidably cast upon a background of routine and sameness—the world’s work must be done—to them should be offered pastures where beauty and inspiration may be gathered, places where rich and poor alike may give expression to their finer emotions—playgrounds for the soul.” -- Samuel S. Fleisher
Today, the folks at Fleisher honor their founder's vision with art workshops, gallery space, and the occasional concert. And no space in the city could be more hospitable to lyric-driven folk music. Stephen Dahmer and Ernie Migali took the stage before and after me with their own songs. Their voices filled each of the chapel's dark corners and holy coves--Stephen's delicate and nuanced, Ernie's red wine-robust. I left the night feeling rested and ready to do the work before me in our city, and further knit into the fabric of this place, our home.
Please enjoy the video footage of Friday's show...
Uploaded by Catherine Prewitt on 2013-07-02.
June 28, 2013 Catherine Prewitt & Friends at Fleisher Art Memorial with Sarah Seligman, Mitchell Stevens, Stephen Dahmer, Ernie Migali
With Sarah Seligman and Mitchell Stevens. Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia. June 28, 2013
With Sarah Seligman and Mitchell Stevens. Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia. June 28, 2013
Uploaded by Catherine Prewitt on 2013-07-02.
Here are some photos from the mini-tour that inaugurated my return to performing in Philly and its neighboring cities. I spent the weekend with David Tanklefsky and Craig Martinson (of Craig Martinson and the Heartbeats) and we rock-umented the whole trip for your viewing enjoyment. See here some home-made merch and house-show decor. See our view from the Lake Montibello house show in Baltimore, where we put a pup to sleep at our feet. See also the highlights from Brooklyn: the Williamsburg bridge, a privileged moment for me to chime in with one of my favorite songwriters during David's set at Cameo Gallery, a visit to Brooklyn Botanic Garden with Heartbeats' Eric Giordano (gardener by day, pianist by night), and a Memorial Day cookout at the home of Basement Band's John Durgee. What a weekend!
Pause
Twilight flicker sky, star-pricks bright
Fishing boats on the water working through the night
Sailors’ wives porch lights ‘cross the way
O should I go or should I stay
O should I go or should I stay
Well papa’s been waiting for his girl to come home
Mom’s been tired been working, been alone
So I told ‘em I’d see ‘em when April turned May
Should I go or should I stay
Should I go or should I stay
O can I pause it all
Not cease it, but stall it
To stay just a little while longer
O can I pause it all
Not cease it, but stall it
To stay just a little while longer
If I linger in these sunsets ‘til orange melts navy
And day sinks behind the trees across the bay
Will longing melt me sink me right down low’Oh
If I stay or if I go
O If I stay or if I go
Cherry blossoms by the chapel and a bloom of prayer
Hands open like a flower asking ‘Here or there?’
I’m learning to be quiet but the answer comes slow’Oh
Should I stay or should I go
Should I stay or should I go
O can I pause it all
Not cease it, but stall it
To stay just a little while longer
O can I pause it all
Not cease it, but stall it
To stay just a little while longer
Here, the life of the mind and the country quiet
There, to sit and to serve by my father’s side
Here, good work and good rest
There, obedience blessed
There, obedience blessed
These are days to savor.
By this time on Friday, I will be driving back to Philadelphia having finished my year at the Trinity Forum Academy, a residential graduate fellowship on the Chesapeake Bay. As the year draws to a close, I am grateful for the many delights and challenges of living and studying with these strangers-turned-friends-turned-family-- for the time and space to develop discipline in my creative work, for the songs and essays born of that discipline, for the strong network of colleagues who have graciously offered their mentorship, and for friendships marked by humble listening, by startling and beautiful honesty.
look forward to moving back to Philadelphia, where I'll begin playing out regularly and connecting again with the Philly scene. I am trilled for the return to urban life, for face time with old friends and for the promise of new ones. I am excited to focus my work, energy and affection in my neighborhood--to dwell where I live.
ere are some photos from our final days here. Photo credits to Kameron Horvath, Lindsday Beck, Karena Dixon and Skyler Fike.
Philadelphia, PA | May 24
Baltimore, MD | May 25
rsvp | catherineprewittmusic@gmail.com for event details
Later this month, I'll join Boston singer-songwriter David Tanklefsky for two nights of his spring tour, playing Philadelphia on Friday, May 24 and Baltimore on Saturday, May 25. David and I did a northeast tour together last spring, and I can't wait to share the stage with this talented songwriter and old friend once again.
May 24 | I will inaugurate my return to Philadelphia with small
and spirited house show at my family's home in West Philadelphia. I'll
share some of the songs I've been working on this year and take requests
for old favorites. Please grab a friend
and join us for this special night!
May 25 | The following evening, I'll tag along with David for a house show in Baltimore, MD. We'll join Baltimore folk musicians Letitia VanSant and MacGregor Burns. The night promises home brewed beer, new friends and general good cheer--I hope to see you.
Now on NoiseTrade: Pay-as-you-wish to download the EP Chanticleer, Certain Hope, recorded one year ago with Daniel Smith at Familyre Studio. When you download it, you'll also find a live bonus track. Please enjoy!
