Bee
And Thistle Storytellers
Litchfield
author Andy Thibault is among six writers featured during the Sunday Night
Storytellers series this spring at the Bee And Thistle Inn in Old Lyme.
The series of dinner parties runs March 18 through April 29.Thibault's
appearance is scheduled for 6 p.m. on April 29.
"We're quashing the winter doldrums," innkeeper Linnea Rufo
said.
Thibault, author of Law & Justice in Everyday Life, published the
award-winning Cool Justice column in The Connecticut Law Tribune from
2000-06. He currently publishes a blog on cops, courts, general news and
the arts at www.cooljustice.blogpsot.com.
F. Lee Bailey described Thibault as "a gunslinger from the Old West,
ready to fire at anything that moves -- especially if he doesn't take
kindly to the movement ... He is in a way a corollary of Robin Hood; he
takes from the powerful and gives to the weak."
Thibault's reporting on the Smolinski missing person / love triangle case
last fall coincided with a request by the Waterbury police department to
seek FBI assistance. A series he co-authored about a shady land deal and
an attempt to shut down a Montessori school in Enfield has drawn the
attention of corruption investigators. An extensive interview with
Thibault about blogs was published in the Fall 2006 edition of Readings,
the quarterly publication of The Connecticut Center for the Book.
He is an adjunct lecturer in English and a mentor in the MFA writing
program at Western Connecticut State University. He is a consulting
editor for the literary journal Connecticut Review and the author of
several other books including The History of the Connecticut State Police
and The 12-Minute MBA for Lawyers. Thibault chairs a non-profit foundation
that awards $1,000 prizes annually to young poets and writers in
Connecticut -- The IMPAC-Connecticut State University Young Writers Trust.
He is also a licensed professional boxing judge and a private
investigator.
As chief investigator for the Washington, D.C. public interest law firm
Judicial Watch, Thibault brought in from the cold two girlfriends of the
late U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown as the firm probed cash for trade
mission placements and other corruption in that agency.
Thibault delivered the 2004 Pew Memorial Lecture in Journalism at Widener
University, Chester, Pa. His speech was reprinted in The Executive Speaker
newsletter.
Other authors in the Bee and Thistle Inn series include: Robert Holland,
The
Voice of the Tree, March 18; and Mary-Ann Tirone Smith. Girls of a Tender
Age, April 1.
The Bee and Thistle Inn sits on five acres by the Lieutenant River in Old
Lyme. It has 11 guest rooms. The inn was built in 1756 as a private home.
Patrons can reserve for the storytelling series and a three-course dinner
at 860-434-1667 or by email at innkeeper@beeandthistleinn.com
Thibault has been an editor at publications including The Hartford
Courant, The Commercial Record and The Times Leader, Wilkes Barre, Pa.
His writing also has appeared in Connecticut Magazine and on "Page
Six" of The New York Post. He is a former commissioner of the
Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission, a former vice chairman of
the Litchfield Board of Education and a former board member of the
Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He has also served as vice president
of the Litchfield-Morris Rotary.
Thibault's work as an investigative reporter and feature writer hasearned
numerous state and national awards, including a series that won first
place prizes from the National Newspaper Association for investigative
reporting, the New England Press Association for community service and the
Connecticut Society of Professional Journalists for in-depth reporting.
Thibault is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists. He also
serves on the advisory board of the Connecticut Center for the Book,
an
affiliate of the Library of Congress.
Link:
http://cooljustice.blogspot.com/2007/03/bee-and-thistle-storytellers.html
Three
Amigos Read
Thursday,
June 29, 2006
12:00 pm to 2:00 pm
Andy Thibault, John Briggs & Ravi Shankar read from new work:
940 Broad Street
Bridgeport, CT. 06604
Phone: (203) 336-6911
Andy
Thibault, author of Law & Justice in Everyday Life, is an
award-winning columnist for Law Tribune Newspapers, mentor in the MFA
writing program at Western Connecticut State University
As chief investigator for the Washington, D.C. public interest law firm Judicial Watch, Thibault brought in from the cold two girlfriends of the late U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown as the firm probed cash for trade mission placements and other corruption in that agency.
Connecticut’s state court judges, in reaction to a satirical column Thibault wrote about the prospects for the notorious basketball judge Bobby Knight to gain appointment to the bench (Cool Justice 10-2-00 http://www.andythibault.com/columns/Cool%20Justice%20-%2010-2-00.htm ), cancelled their subscriptions to The Connecticut Law Tribune en masse. (Judge Takes Issue with Law Tribune www.andythibault.com/interviews-articles/Judge-Law%20Tribune.htm) [Both articles on line @ www.andythibault.com ]
“In terms of what we buy and distribute in the judicial branch, we have a choice, and right now we’re not buying the Law Tribune,” said the Connecticut Chief Court Administrator, Robert Leuba. “There are some attitudes being used editorially which are not helpful to improving communications among the legal community … ” Law Tribune Publisher and Editor Vincent Valvo said the cancellations -- valued at $16,000 in annual revenue – didn’t put a significant dent in his paper's circulation or finances. But, he allowed, “We are not happy that the judiciary as a branch of government has decided to boycott us.”
In September 2004, the Hartford Courant and The Connecticut Law Tribune reported that the FBI seized notes, cameras, a journalist’s phone book containing sources and other materials from investigators working with the Murzin-Thibault Investigative Group. Lawyers chastised the government for taking the materials, noting the Fourth Amendment prohibits such seizures.
Thibault is a member of the National Conference of Editorial Writers, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Connecticut Library Association and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He also serves on the advisory board of the Connecticut Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress. His current writing projects include books about prosecutorial misconduct, political corruption and the murder of a black youth by a white policeman in Connecticut, as well as a series of short stories about the adventures of a private eye.
JP Briggs is the author of Trickster Tales, a collection of
stories published by Fine Tooth Press (2004). He has had over 25 stories
published in literary magazines, including Pudding Magazine, Manifold, New
Novel Review, Ibis Review, River Oak Review, Northwest Review, Art Times
and a chapbook entitled Entangled Landscapes, which he co-authored with
poet James R. Scrimgeour from Pudding House Press. He is the author and
co-author of several nonfiction books on aesthetics and physics, including
Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon & Schuster); Fire in the
Crucible (St. Martin’s Press); Seven Life Lessons of Chaos
(HarperCollins), and Turbulent Mirror (HarperCollins), as well Metaphor,
the Logic of Poetry (Pace University Press). He is the senior editor of
Connecticut Review and a Distinguished CSU Professor at Western
Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut, where he led the
team that developed the MFA in Professional Writing.
Ravi Shankar is a poet-in-residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of the internationally acclaimed online journal of the arts, <http://www.drunkenboat.com>. His first book Instrumentality, was published by Cherry Grove in May 2004 <http://www.cherry-grove/shankar> and was named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards. His work has previously appeared in such places as The Paris Review, Poets &Writers, Time Out New York, The New Hampshire Review, Blackbird, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, Descant, LIT, Crowd, The Cortland Review, Catamaran, Caketrain, Fourth River, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry, The Paris/Atlantic, Ecopoetics, The Indiana Review, The Electronic Book Review, Western Humanities Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and the AWP Writer’s Chronicle, among other publications, including two anthologies of contemporary poetry. He has taught at Queens College, University of New Haven, and Columbia University, where he received his MFA in Poetry. He has read at such venues as The National Arts Club, Columbia University, KGB, the Asia Society, Artspace, University of Virginia, the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and the Cornelia Street Café, has held residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, has served on panels at UCLA, Poet’s House, South-by-Southwest Interactive/Film Festival, and the AWP Conference in Baltimore and Vancouver, been a commentator for NPR, KKUP and Wesleyan radio and been featured in the Hartford Courant, The Journal Messenger and in the Shoreline Press, reviews poetry for the Contemporary Poetry Review and is currently editing an anthology of South Asian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern poetry. You can read an interview with him at: <http://jacketmagazine.com/16/dev-iv-shank.html>.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
INSTRUMENTALITY
Instrumentality plays expectations and delivers uncanny reformulations that seem "predestined, in retrospect." Ravi Shankar’s poems are filled with the pleasure of subjects dissolving into ideas, ideas folding into sounds, and sounds echoing familiar but elusive translocations.
-Charles Bernstein
Quirky, quizzical, inquisitive, Ravi Shankar in Instrumentality goes in quest of what the oddness of language and imagination can reveal: “a hush of atoms holding a planet together.” By turns, lyrical and meditative, these poems are guided by a strong intelligence toward resolutions that are both surprising and apt.
-Gregory Orr
A New Confessions of Zeno, this time in verse. Topics most of us brood over in private are here brought out into daylight by an analyst clad in bullet-proof unembarrassment. Ravi Shankar is a comic tragedian of philosophic collisions that occur at the intersection of memory, desire, perception, mutability, and language. Wild swoops made on the rheostat of diction and intricate consonantal echolocation enable the invention of this poet’s analogue for the metamorphic nature of what is past, or passing, or to come.
-Alfred Corn
Ravi Shankar's poems are immortal in the flesh, finding in the life of the mind--its interpretations, its "instrumentality"--the surpassing, transient lyrical moment; and in the life of the world's body the permanent, unflinching presence of thought, unconfined by time or space. They are the verbal artifacts of a singular, many-sided, and distinguished consciousness.
-Vijay Seshadri
This is a very special first book. Ravi Shankar's poems have a fine tuned sense of form, a rare delight in language. Through wit and abstraction they reveal a metaphysics of longing, binding us to the elements of our moving world.
-Meena Alexander
Here are poems I’ve not seen before. A fog lifts and Ravi Shankar gives the reader a landscape of language filled with sharp, stainless, geometric forms. There is considerable distance to travel from page to page. Even in a poem like “Home Together” Shankar detects a vacuum in love. From a men’s room to a San Francisco sunrise, Shankar emerges with a pocketful of koans reflecting the wisdom hidden in the stars.
- E. Ethelbert Miller
-Richard Harteis
In the stunning title poem of Instrumentality, Shankar writes of “action’s unstuttering arc which is eloquence and muteness at once.” That idea expresses what I find in this collection, for here poems becomes performatives that enacts their totality in the tension between graceful expression and silence. Shankar is a deeply philosophical poet who explores the major questions while attuned to the flux that is the very stuff of existence, and does so while moving from place to place—Illinois, Florida, Mumbai, Monteverde, and Hell’s Kitchen—a Spiderman of the imagination. And, in terms of tone, there’s no cynicism or irony here, rather the pleasures of varied vocabularies and deft juxtapositions ajumble on multiple levels. One senses the sheen of a new poetry.
ANDY THIBAULT, Columnist
P.O. Box 1415
Litchfield, CT 06759
tntcomm82@cs.com
www.andythibault.com
*Phone: 860-567-8492 *Fax: 860-567-9119
*Cell: 860-690-0211