Laura

The next Broken Planetarium is Variation-tines Day! Our culture puts a great emphasis on romantic love, but what about all the other kinds of love that enrich our worlds? Let's celebrate all the variations of love around us. Let's woo our friends, family, neighbors, habitat, animals, food, and more. Write

December Prompt: Time to Defy The next Broken Planetarium is Time to Defy. Virginia Woolf said "Thinking is my fighting." Toni Morrison says that, "This is precisely the time when artists go to work... That is how civilizations heal." Is there art that you have found or that you can

The next Broken Planetarium is Losing My Religion. In the past, some of the most moving art came from religious patronage and religious devotion (Michelangelo, Hafiz, mother f&@$ing amaze balls 80s country-pop diva Amy Grant!) Many now shy away from religion because of its associations with extremism, violence, bigotry,

The next Broken Planetarium is Art Party! Create an art making station for our art party and bring it to share on Saturday, July 23rd @ 5:00. Build your own sensory booth involving smelly markers, velvet, and Sriracha. Redo the game of Life into a drinking game that includes alternative

The next Broken Planetarium will be a Pajamajams house concert on Wednesday, June 15th @ 6:00, featuring Dan Blakeslee, Moniker, and Laura Dunn, plus anything you'd like to share that keeps you up at night. BYOB, and BYOPajamas. Listen to lyrical folk music and get cozy and haunted. We'll pass

The next Broken Planetarium is Make Portland Weird Again. Make your art in the middle of the city, brightening and confusing your fellow citizens, and bring photos and stories of your experience to share. Have a fancy tea party in the median on Cesar Chavez. Put tiny flux capacitor statues

The next Broken Planetarium is Sunday, April 24th. The theme is Agua Vida. Create something around a moment where you felt most alive, and narrate that moment as if it took place under water. What would it look like? How would it be different? Create a dance around your skydiving

The next Broken Planetarium is Sunday, March 20th. The theme is ety-mythology. Etymology is the history of the meaning of a word and its origins. For instance, we know the word "clue" as a fact or idea that helps us unravel a mystery or problem. But it comes from the

Thank you, Jessica Wallenfels of our theater hero Many Hats for this thoughtful tribute to Fertile Ground, all of its amazing shows, and Frankenstein: A Cabaret for American Theater. http://www.americantheatre.org/2016/01/29/sampling-locally-grown-artisanal-theatre-at-portlands-fertile-ground/

A thoughtful piece by Kathleen Dolan for Thru Magazine on Frankenstein: A Cabaret http://www.thrumag.com/frankenstein-a-cabaret/

And a review from the Portland Mercury: http://www.portlandmercury.com/BlogtownPDX/archives/2016/01/28/fertile-ground-review-sex-jazz-and-monsters-in-frankenstein-a-cabaret

Check out a beautiful review of Frankenstein: A Cabaret from Sophia June of Willamette Week. http://www.wweek.com/2016/01/22/fertile-ground-diaries-frankenstein-a-cabaret/ Also we were top picks for the week in WW as well. Thank you Enid Spitz! http://www.wweek.com/2016/01/22/willamette-weekend-16-things-to-do-and-see-in-portland/

The next Broken Planetarium is The Art of Losing. Like Bishop's poem ( http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996), make something out of what you've lost, whether it is your keys, your chinchilla, your mind, or your religion. Tell us a story about losing and also how you fill the negative

The next Broken Planetarium is Mortified. Inspired by the podcast, and that Frankenstein who looked in horror at what he made, we are looking to examine how we perceive our own art. Take something that you have created that now embarrasses you and bring it to share. You can bring

About Frankenstein: A Cabaret From the producers and writer of last year's The Snow Queen: A Folk Opera, Frankenstein is reset in the changing and charged atmosphere of contemporary Portland. The story of Mary Shelley's monster comes alive through eerie folk music, contemporary dance, and cabaret story telling. Interlaced within

A sandwich is often named after its insides. Tolkien didn't write about no Upper or Lower Earth. And who is happier in a triple spoon than Lucky Pierre? This month we celebrate the middle, the median, the filling. Write a novel set at midnight, about a middle manager on midway

After a July hiatus, the next Broken Planetarium will be Friday, August 7th. 6:00 pm potluck/ 7:00 pm start. The theme is copycat. Take someone else's idea that you've loved, and like a cat, bat it around in your paws while it suffers, then gobble it up and

The next Broken Planetarium is Sunday, June 28th. The theme is pro-pocalypse. In a world, where too many film previews start with "in a world" and then show an apocalyptic setting, how can we envision a positive future? How is a positive future possible if we never see it? What

The next Broken Planetarium will be Friday, May 29th at 7:00. The theme is stowaway. Let's not keep art and life as separate spheres. Don't have your day job and then your night of unpaid nude fluting. Where can art stowaway in your daily life? How can you pepper

The next Broken Planetarium will be Saturday, April 25th at 7:00 (potluck) and 8:00 (start). The theme is Origin Story. For millennia, religion had the monopoly on where we came from: from a rib, a misogynistic swan, a scoop of clay, a bossy finger, or a crazy dance.

The next Broken Planetarium will be Saturday, March 14th @ 7:00. The theme is close encounters with your younger kind. What would you do if you encountered your five year old self? What would you say? This month, make a piece of art that would speak to your five year

Many of you who have been coming to the planetariums have seen the poems I was working on last spring for this chapbook. I am so excited to tell you that Spider Blue has been published by Dancing Girl Press. Thank you for all your support, edits, courage, and co-mentorship.

The theme is dark and dirty! Create out of your sexy shadow. Create something that examines what parts of you that are kept underground, making out with Hades while your mom weeps through the winter. Write a burlesque featuring those misogynist literary characters you secretly want to do (HEATHCLIFF, anyone?