Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

Words are a preoccupation with this week's new edition of Saturday Sharing.

✦ A comprehensive digital archive of poetry readings, the sound archive Oregon Poetic Voices is a wonderful resource. The long list of Oregon poets whose work may be heard online affords many wonderful moments for your listening pleasure.

✦ If you missed my tweet on this, here's the demo for the Kindlegraph, technology that allows an e-book author to e-sign his or her book. This may be the cliched wave of the future but it doesn't do much for removing the growing barriers between writers and their readers.

✦ Utah State University's Western Literature Association has created Syllabus Exchange, a marvelous resource for teachers of western American literature and culture. Syllabi are organized as graduate, undergraduate, and introductory courses, by genre and subject, and by region and state. They're fun to browse, just to see what you might have missed in your own education.

✦ Indulge your interest in rare books at Between the Covers. As one of the taglines reads, "We're not just your usual bunch of book geeks." Need an example? The site features images of books that rotate in 3-D, so you may see front, back, and spine, and even zoom in.

✦ The weekly literary blog AboutAWord publishes original short essays by contemporary writers, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Annie Finch, Terrance Hayes, Douglas Kearney, and Matthew Zapruder. Next month the blog begins publishing "micro interviews" with writers.

✦ Writers, scientists, science editors, journalism and MFA students, and graduate, post-doctoral, and faculty researchers have formed NeuWrite as a forum for collaborative work and individual projects. Browse the lists of members and publications to get an idea of who's involved and what they're doing. The group, dedicated to public dissemination of science, is supported by Columbia University's Office of Graduate Affairs.

✦ The secular and fascinating Art Monastery Project is an international community of artists committed to monastic living as applied to the creative process; each member follows the path of an Art Monk in exploring how spirituality, creativity, and integrity combine to create a holistic way of life. The video below introduces the project, which came to my attention via  Christine Valters Paintner at Abbey of the Arts, who recently was interviewed by the Nathan Rosquist, a monastery member, about her book The Artist's Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul With Monastic Wisdom. My thanks to Christine.