BLUEBEARD

“Every man must have one secret, even if only one, from his wife,’ he said. “…All is yours, everywhere is open to you–except the lock that this single key fits.”
–Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

Join us as we unlock Bluebeard’s forbidden chamber with:

* Artist, writer, and educator Coleman Stevenson

* Psychiatrist Dr. Chinenye Onyemaechi,

* Melissa Mullins, professor and folktale scholar

* Katharina Raven, photographer and filmmaker

* Michelle Ruiz Keil, author

To experience this gruesome tale of deception, discovery, and escape, here to the fullest, before the reading, follow the links:

https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm040.html
https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault03.html
https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm046.html
https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0311.html#devil

and the first story in:
https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/1-the-bloody-chamber-and-other-stories-1979.pdf

BIOS AND TALK DESCRIPTIONS:

Chinenye Onyemaechi, M.D. (“Dr. Chi”) is a board-certified physician specializing in general and forensic psychiatry. She merges her career in medicine and passion for travel into her work as a locum tenens (traveling) psychiatrist. She offers her clinical expertise to various hospitals around the U.S. and, additionally, provides consultation to the legal system concerning the intersection of psychiatry, human behavior, and the law. Dr. Onyemaechi will discuss ways the Bluebeard-type tales may relate to the journey one goes through in insight-oriented psychotherapy, especially as it pertains to awareness of our unconscious behavior patterns.

Melissa Mullins directs the Writing Center and lectures in the English department at Berry College in Rome, GA. Her published work ranges from an examination of fashion writing in 19th century women’s magazines to the language of Modernism and Romanticism in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series to issues of translation and illustration in variants of “Rapunzel.” Her current project largely focuses on documenting and interpreting early illustrated editions of Charles Perrault’s Contes de Fees and charting how illustrations accompanying this collection intersect with anomalies in the collection’s 18th century translations. In 2017, she delivered the presentation “The Many Lives of ‘La Barbe-Bleue’: Illustration as Radical Adaptation in the Work of Charles Perrault” at the International Association of Word Image Studies in Lausanne, Switzerland, and it is from that presentation that she draws inspiration for the piece she will be presenting at “All Kinds of Fur.”

Katharina Raven, aka Kraven, is a professional Photographer and Filmmaker from Portland, Oregon. With a focus on fashion and storytelling, she specializes in music videos and commercials and is known for her avant-garde and thought-provoking visuals. Katharina’s bachelor’s degree in Digital Film & Video allows her to approach photoshoots with a cinematic eye, captivating narrative, and film industry workflow. Since relocating to Atlanta, she has done photoshoots with celebrities such as Precious Harris of “T.I. & Tiny: Family Affair”, and Lakeith Stanfield of the hit series “ATLANTA”. At All Kinds of Fure, she will discuss her series Ghost Bride, a conceptual fashion photoshoot created in collaboration with Viva Bradley. The story follows a newly dead bride as her soul begins to travel throughs the various stages of death.

Coleman Stevenson is the author of three collections of poems, Light Sleeper (2020), Breakfast (2015), and The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 (2012), several books about the Tarot including The Dark Exact Tarot Guide, and a book of essays on creativity accompanying the card game Metaphysik. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications such as Seattle Review, Mid-American Review, Louisiana Literature, tarot.com, and the anthology Motionless from the Iron Bridge. In addition to her work as a designer of tarot and oracle decks through her company The Dark Exact, her fine art work, exhibited in galleries around the Pacific Northwest, focuses on the intersections between image and text. She has been a guest curator for various gallery spaces in the Portland, Oregon, area, and has taught poetry, design theory, and cultural studies at a number of different institutions there, most currently for the Literary Arts Delve series, which includes seminars at the Portland Art Museum. Co-curator for this edition of All Kinds of Fur, Stevenson will read a selection of poems inspired by themes in “Bluebeard” and “The Robber Bridegroom.”

Michelle Ruiz Keil is a writer and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and a way with animals. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, All of Us With Wings, called “…a transcendent journey” by the New York Times and “…a fantastical ode the Golden City’s post-punk era” by Entertainment Weekly, was released from Soho Teen in 2019. Her second novel, Summer in The City of Roses, is forthcoming from Soho Press in June 2021. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Michelle has lived in Portland Oregon for many years. She curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.

[Zoom Link Here]