Media Matters

Tasha Golden and her husband Justin Golden formed the band Ellery in 2005 and have recorded five albums.

A Way With Words

Poet and Musician Makes Words Sing

By Donna Boen

When Tasha Golden MA ’12 was learning to read, she became obsessed with Dr. Seuss, reading over and over again about Horton and his Whos and that crazy, hatted cat.

“That sort of set me up to be in love with rhyme and meter and the play of words.”

A music composition major, Golden spent years on the road performing in Ellery, an alternative folk duo based in Cincinnati. She’s the songwriter; husband Justin is the arranger/producer. In 2009 they made a record with Grammy-winning producer Malcolm Burn and went on a national tour to support it.

By year’s end, Golden suffered a bout of clinical depression. She needed a break and liked the idea of studying poetry on Miami’s serene Oxford campus. It freed her to write about topics she never dared before, such as sexuality and rage and loss of faith. “I really wanted to get back to my love of words.”

Poetry is taking her songwriting in a new direction. She and Justin are back in the recording studio with her songs, heard in the films No Strings Attached and A Strange Kind of Happy and TV shows One Tree Hill and The Lying Game. Also collaborating with a photography friend on a book of her poems, she’s finding it hard to figure out which poems “need to exist.”

Easier is her blog for Ploughshares, Emerson College’s literary magazine in which she emphasizes that poets’ words matter.

“Poetry can start dialogue about issues that have been swept under the rug publicly, politically, socially. I feel like it can actually make something happen outside of the world of words.”

So Many Lovely Days
Mara Kirk Hart ’55
Kirk Press
In So Many Lovely Days: The Greenwich Village Years, Hart writes about her parents’ early-married life. “From 1927 to 1939 my parents, George and Lucy Kirk, owned the Chelsea Bookshop at 58 West 8th Street in Greenwich Village. They dreamed of a carefree, Bohemian life, with only the bookshop and each other to care for. Even now, as I write this many decades later, sometimes I feel like an intruder, as if I was partially responsible for the death of this dream. Without children, could they have kept their beloved bookshop? Could they have stayed in the Village? Would they have been happier?”

Whatever Comes
Mark Massé ’74
CreateSpace.com
Whatever Comes is a dark comedy about an aspiring Irish-American writer in 1970s Cleveland and his decade-long sentimental fool’s journey to find love and success. For years he grabbed for lovers like a drowning man, leaving little passion for the blank page. In this modern-day morality tale, 20-something Max Galway endures an odyssey of trials and temptations, false goals, and foolish pursuits. He claims his quest for literary fame is hijacked by an unholy trinity of family, work, and romantic woes. But Galway is his own worst enemy en route to enlightenment.

The New Face of America
Eric Bailey ’80 MA ’83
Greenwood Publishing Group
More and more, the idea of America as a melting pot is becoming a reality. Written from the perspective of multiracial citizens, The New Face of America: How the Emerging Multiracial, Multiethnic Majority is Changing the United States brings to light the values, beliefs, opinions, and patterns among these populations. It assesses group identity and social recognition by others, and it communicates how multiracial individuals experience America’s reaction to their increasing numbers. This compendium looks at multiracial families today, rural and urban multiracial populations, and multiracial physical features, health disparities, bone and marrow transplant issues, and adoption matters. The book also discusses how America’s current majority institutions, organizations, and corporations must change their relationship with multiracial and multiethnic populations if they wish to remain viable and competitive.

Chicago River Bridges
Patrick McBriarty ’86 MA ’88
University of Illinois Press
Chicago River Bridges presents the untold history and development of Chicago’s iconic bridges, from the first wood footbridge built by a tavern owner in 1832 to today’s marvels of steel, concrete, and machinery. It is the story of Chicago as seen through its bridges, for it has been the bridges that proved critical in connecting and reconnecting the people, industry, and neighborhoods of a city that is constantly remaking itself. This guidebook, with full-color photography of existing bridges and more than 100 images of bridges past, chronicles more than 175 bridges spanning 55 locations.

The Hiding Place
David Bell MA ’01
NAL Trade
The murder of 4-year-old Justin Manning rocked the town of Dove Point, Ohio. Janet Manning has been haunted since that day she lost sight of her brother in the park. Now, with the 25th anniversary of his death looming, a detective and a newspaper reporter have started to ask questions, raising new suspicions. Could the man convicted of the murder—who spent more than two decades in prison—really be innocent? Soon, years of deceit will be swept away, and the answers that Janet has sought may be found much closer to home than she ever could have imagined. A shallow grave holds the deepest secrets.