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20S x East End Books Ptown presents the celebrated novelist and memoirist Paul Lisicky joins performing artist John Kelly at the Hawthorne Barn, the pair will dive into Lisicky’s new work, Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell with a very special surprise at the end, NOT to be missed.
From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell’s mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and turned to prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and into the professional world of letters.
As the decades passed, Paul’s connection to Mitchell’s artistry only deepened. Joni’s music was a constant, a guide to life and an artist’s manual in one. As Paul navigated love and heartbreak and imaginative struggles and the vicissitudes of a creative career, he would return again and again to the lessons found in Joni’s songs, to the solace and challenges that only her musicianship could give.
Song So Wild and Blue is a gorgeously written, beautifully intimate, and unique tribute to the woman who shaped generations of creators and thinkers. Lisicky offers his own coming-of-adulthood as testimony to the power of songwriting and staying true to your creative vision. A guide to life that is part memoir, part biography, and part homage, Song So Wild and Blue is a joy for devoted Joni enthusiasts, budding writers, and artists of all stripes.
Paul Lisicky is the author of seven books including Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (one of NPR's Best Books of 2020), as well as The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award), Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, Conjunctions, The Cut, Fence, The New York Times, Ploughshares, Tin House, and in many other magazines and anthologies. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rose Dorothea Award from the Provincetown Library. He has taught in the creative writing programs at Antioch University Los Angeles, Cornell University, New York University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of Texas at Austin and elsewhere. He is currently a Professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Camden, where he is Editor of StoryQuarterly. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
John Kelly is an award-winning performance and visual artist. His performance works dramatize the lives of characters – whether actual or fictional – revealing their challenges, foibles, and humanity: sometimes autobiographical – other times inspired by the realities of cultural outsiders, and the hurdles and political realities they navigate. His latest dance theatre work Underneath The Skin (based on the life of the 20th century gay novelist and tattoo artist Samuel Steward) was commissioned by the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, and had a subsequent run at La MaMa. In 2024 he was a Baryshnikov Arts Fellow. He recently completed his first graphic memoir, A Friend Gave Me A Book, based on a near catastrophic trapeze accident.