firefly bookstore's author pavilion at kutztown's annual block party.

yesterday, an annual block party in kutztown kept the streets in a good blur of people appreciating bubbles blowing in the air, free haircuts for kids, cotton candy, and plenty more. my favorite part involved a fellow playing johnny cash songs, and he even dressed the part. i am not positive but suspect from some light googling that a man named terry lee goffee may be this performer.

firefly bookstore, which recently relocated to a bigger shop (and it's gorgeously done, to boot) had a local authors' table with several rounds of us there throughout the afternoon. and they took care of us authors so well. we're lucky to have them in berks county.

i also left out and gave away copies of the key's spring 2017 issue, too, to let people know about the community poetry one picture at a time feature which i do, in hopes that we may have a few takers for the opportunity of the next prompt.

a poetry reading at berks history center during april: national poetry month.

berks history center hosted a poetry reading for this project in april as national poetry month. ed jastrzembski tested out his second round of being a special guest now since 2016 in sharing his memories about working at reading [truck] bodies and cartech before retiring. his wife, joan, also joined him again, since his jobs were such a big part of their family life's impacts.

my former french teacher from junior high joined the audience, and one particular point which she made served well to be said: that she once had a teachers' meeting maybe 10 or 20 years ago, where someone said most of our students as adults are going to have maybe 7 or so jobs in their lifetime, across different careers. and that's very different compared to some decades in our culture where people stayed in a single job for long stretches of time, and this was the case for ed, too. yet i realized i hadn't thought about that point in a while, and i've had more than 7 kinds of jobs, but some overlap. it says a lot about the need to be adaptable in surviving the economic landscape of life today.

and thank to alexis campbell of berks history center's staff for helping with the eye-scenes below.

a poetry reading at reading area community college during april: national poetry month.

in early april, i juggled conversations about the old world of berks county and our newer one with students at reading area community college. in a small group, we talked about the differences sometimes seen between those who were young and working decades ago and what they're like today with their personalities, values, and story-sharing, and then the difference of how young people live and labor today but also what they're like interacting with the people around them. it took on the shape of blending good and bad, much like light and dark in life's conversations. and it felt refreshing to notice students being aware of paying attention to the ways of people around them in our world today. communication and how we get along together is so much a part of how this or that pans out. taking the time to understand each other is everything.

zoe hudzik, who assisted with photography for this reading, so she isn't in the eye-scenes, unfortunately, shared how she loves hearing her grandparents' stories as well as just the way they put their thoughts out into the open, and she also feels similarly about seniors she worked with in the past at the highlands. her grandmother also used to work at narrow fabric in west reading, so there's a bit of hope that this woman in her 80s might be willing to be a poem-source for the third and final book in this project. we'll see.

and then we had a semi-official pizza-eating contest, which i won, totaling 5 slices devoured, with some crusts avoided only to eat more slices. a few of us remained for this savvy event.