Jensen Beach likes to start with a sentence, listen to how it sounds. Then, he writes another one.

The Vermont fiction writer never approaches a story with a big theme, he says, or even a plot. He starts with an image, a character, a place. In his book of short stories, Swallowed by the Cold, each stand on their own, sometimes bright and a bit funny, other times bleak, often reflecting the features of the Swedish landscape where they take place.

Ultimately, the book connects characters who reappear throughout the stories around the recurrence of life’s difficult events—death, car accidents, violence, war and torn relationships—and the ways that people respond and adjust to them. Last month, Beach received the 2017 Vermont Book Award, bestowed by the Vermont College of Fine Arts to an author of an outstanding work of literature, for Swallowed by the Cold.

“It features things that I love,” Beach says of the book, published in 2016 by Graywolf Press. That includes Sweden itself, where he lived for six years, as well as sailboats and the water.

When he’s not writing or teaching writing and literature at Johnson State College, where he is also fiction editor for Green Mountains Review, Beach is skiing or hiking or swimming. In the water, he composes some of his best stuff, he says. “Physical activity is a really important part of my practice,” he says. Beach is not a wake-up-at-6-and-write-for-hours kind of author. Even amid the ruckus of his three kids—ages 12, 9 and 7—he prefers to work at his kitchen table or in his office at the college, where he can read out loud and hear the rhythm of the prose.

Beach, who grew up in northern California, has wanted to write since childhood. He started as an English major at a California community college before heading to Europe, living in Hungary for a time, then landing at Stockholm University. With a plan to become a professor, he started publishing stories in various online literary magazines and anthologies.

Short fiction always was Beach’s favored form. He reveled in “that feeling of breathlessness of just being totally wrecked by a Flannery O’Connor story,” he says of one of his favorites.

Returning to the States for graduate school at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he felt a bit disconnected, he says. He left Europe and became a Californian living in New England. “I think I was a little homesick,” he says. Stories about Stockholm started pouring out of him and ended up as the manuscript for his thesis.

Beach joined the University of Illinois faculty as a lecturer before moving to Johnson State. In 2011, a friend he met at a summer conference introduced Beach to her literary agent. They reworked the stories and shopped them to publishers, placing some in Paris Review, A Public Space and The New Yorker before selling the whole collection to Graywolf.

Beach writes about places after he leaves them, partly out of nostalgia and partly because the distance gives him perspective and inspiration. He’s now tackling his first novel, set in California and Florida, where he has spent some time in Miami. He finds it fascinating to see the contrasts from neighborhood to neighborhood. “It’s a novel about transitions and change and those kinds of personal experiences that we go through,” he says.

Ensconced in the picturesque town of Jericho, close to hiking trails and ski slopes, Beach has no plans now for a Vermont-based story or collection. Maybe at some point, he says, if it shows up in that first sentence.

Jensen Beach–author
Jericho, Vermont
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The post Word by Word appeared first on Take Magazine.

Kevin Rhodes may be known in Massachusetts as the maestro of the Springfield Symphony Orchestra and Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra in Boston, but his baton reaches far beyond the state’s borders. Rhodes also conducts the Traverse Symphony Orchestra in Michigan and regularly flies across the pond where he’s well known for his conducting in Norway, Paris, and beyond.

Rhodes has conducted in the major musical capitals of Europe for over two decades, leading major productions at the Paris Opera, Vienna State Opera, Berlin State Opera, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, Dutch National Ballet, Verona Ballet, and Stuttgart Ballet. Last season, he made his Norwegian National Ballet debut conducting Don Quixote, after conducting an all-Balanchine program, an homage to the late New York City Ballet dancer Violette Verdy at The Paris Opera, and Nureyev’s production of Raymonda in Vienna. Rhodes added a Romeo and Juliet in Stuttgart to the mix, alongside his annual appearance as conductor for the Rudolf Nureyev Gala at Vienna State Opera Ballet. The upcoming season is equally frenetic with a return to Raymonda and a mixed-bill in Vienna and Swan Lake in Stuttgart, as well as plans to conduct the Nureyev Gala on what would have been the late dancer’s 80th birthday.

All that world travel aside, New England remains culturally exciting to Rhodes. “The close proximity of so many instrumental artists, which allow us to have this wonderful orchestra in Springfield of a quality completely out of proportion to our region’s population size, is a gift from which we all benefit,” he says. “While it’s part of the cultural life per se, the incredible beauty of New England certainly adds dramatically to the joy of creating art here.”

KevinRhodes after Stuttgart performance of Romeo and Juliet. Photo courtesy of Kevin Rhodes.

For the Indiana-born conductor, who began his professional conducting career at the age of 16 in his hometown, the road to New England took a transatlantic detour. After receiving his bachelor of music in piano performance from Michigan State University, he subsequently earned his master of music in orchestra conducting from the University of Illinois. He moved to Switzerland to become a house conductor at Basel’s Stadttheater, before moving to the larger Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Dusseldorf, where he led hundreds of performances of the operatic repertoire, from Die Zauberflöte to Der Rosenkavalier, while simultaneously serving as the principal ballet conductor at the Vienna State Opera. During his time in Europe, Rhodes led repertoire ranging from the operas of Strauss, Verdi, Puccini, Massenet, Mozart, and Smetana to the major ballets of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky.

It’s not all classical music for Rhodes. In 2015, he conducted the Springfield Symphony Orchestra at the nationally-televised season opener of the New England Patriots at Gillette Stadium with rapper T-Pain. He’ll take on the Star Wars and Star Trek Sci-Fi Spectacular for a Springfield Symphony Pops.

Photo by John RobertWilliams

Rhodes is excited about his performances in Springfield this year. “Our season grand finale with legendary pianist Misha Dichter in an all-Rachmaninoff program is, for sure, among those I can’t wait to perform, as well as combining our choruses with the University of Massachusetts choruses for the Verdi Requiem. There’s a super cool concerto for trombone and orchestra by Japanese composer Yoshimatsu, played by our own principal trombone Brian Diehl;  a new cello concerto by American composer Lowell Liebermann played by star cellist Julian Schwartz, and well, every concert has something I’m really looking forward to, as it turns out.”

Kevin Rhodes–conductor, Springfield Symphony Orchestra
Westfield, Massachusetts
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Top image: Kevin Rhodes. Photo by Anne Deniau

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