“When everyone suffered so much loss, where did you begin?” says author Frances Park, when contemplating her latest novel, Blue Rice, which follows a plucky, sensible hero, while examining the devastation of the Korean War alongside the experience of immigrating to America. Park continues, “Your pain’s only special to you, right?”

Park’s indelible tale of loss, love, and bravery follows Pyongyang native Song Hanhee from her horrific experiences in Seoul’s red-light district in 1957 to her lonely suburban life as Honey Song—now Mrs. Joe Lipton—in early 1960s D.C. and Alexandria, where this novel is largely set. Along the way, Honey finds astute friends who help her. Once in Washington, she learns English, how to type, and how to get a job here—all without encountering anyone who looks like her.

“I grew up never even seeing another Korean American student, besides my siblings, from kindergarten through college,” Park tells City Paper. Born outside Boston, she came to Northern Virginia at age 3, when her father’s economist job moved the family to the area where she lives today. “There was only one Korean store when I was growing up, and it was in Arlington. And it was a big deal to go there. Occasionally my parents went into Chinatown to the store for some specialties.”

Blue Rice, which will be published by Vine Leaves Press on June 18, took Park more than 20 years to write, but she’s stayed busy with other projects. Park is the author of 14 books—including novels, memoirs, and co-authored children’s stories with her sister, Ginger Park. The two siblings also co-founded Chocolate Chocolate, a confection boutique across Connecticut Avenue NW from the Mayflower Hotel, in 1984. 

“Washington is mostly what I know, and the timeline of my parents is here,” says Park. “My whole history is here.” 

Beginning in the early 1960s, the Parks went to Seoul every three years. “People see Seoul today through the movies and whatnot, and it’s just so modern and advanced and stylish,” Park says. “All I remember was being eaten alive by these post-war sights. They traumatized me.” One visual she still remembers: little children holding bandaged, bloodied hands out for money. “We got the attention of the Beatles as soon as we got off the plane,” she notes. “We just looked different, and everybody knew we were Americans, and they would say, ‘Dollar, dollar, dollar.’ Their handprints all over any car we were in.” 

Growing up in middle-class White America, Park was haunted by memories of those children. Now, when she watches contemporary Korean dramas, she sees actors “wearing all these designer outfits … I think, well, their parents are probably my age, so what were they doing when I used to visit? And how were they living?” she says. “It’s just amazing to me that they came out of the ashes.” Inequality was something her dad  taught her about early. “I still, to this day, will not wear anything with a designer label on it. I just won’t.”

Park based Blue Rice’s Honey Song on a woman from her past. The unnamed woman, whose son Park tutored, was a sex worker in Korea before coming to America. Park remembers that though she was illiterate in both Korean and English, she was “extremely vivacious, loving, and liberal.” She left such an imprint on Park that she inspired an entire vivid novel.

“How many were there? They were countless,” Park says of the Korean women who needed to make new lives in a strange, new country. In fact, Blue Rice is dedicated “to all the lives lost and souls shattered by The Korean War, and to my late mother who lived and breathed it as she carried on in America, humming Korean songs.” 

Park says she’s “half-Korean, half-American in my spirit.” She started writing when she was 10, but she didn’t write about Koreans or Korean Americans until she was in her 30s. “It never even occurred to me,” she muses. 

Last year, Heliotrope Books republished Park’s novel The Summer My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon. Originally acquired and released by then-new, now-defunct, splashy publishing company Talk Miramax Books in 2000, the reprint has been revised and streamlined. Heliotrope also published Park’s memoir in essays, That Lonely Spell: Stories of Family, Friends & Love, in 2022, which featured previously published pieces from national magazines. 

One essay, “Mister, Your Shoelace Is Untied,” is a jazzy-voiced meditation on family. “Totally experimental, totally lawless,” she says of the essay and her writing in general. “I like to write without any rules … I like to write the way Janis Joplin sang.” 

Despite more than a dozen books on her author list, Park prefers short-form writing, and “those epiphany moments”—as she refers to sudden flashes of insight into life—mean everything to her. 

“Most of the time, you’re just kind of coasting and things can be funny. Things can be maddening, but it’s not that electrifying.” But then, Park says, “Something happens. You’re going to remember that it’s seared in you.”

Blue Rice, the latest novel by Frances Park and published by Vine Leaves Press, comes out June 18. vineleavespress.com.

In my opinion, every season is reading season, but there’s something about fall that makes you want to nestle down with a good book and a good drink. And with the new season comes an abundance of new books all vying for your attention. Below, City Paper’s book critics have dug into some upcoming and recent releases with local ties that span genres and styles to give you a head start on your fall reading list. It’s also another reminder that great things come from D.C. —Sarah Marloff

Her Own Happiness by Eden Appiah-Kubi

Release date: Sept. 5, via Montlake Romance

Genre: Romance

From Amazon Publishing’s Montlake romance imprint comes Her Own Happiness, a cheerful sophomore effort from the D.C.-born Maryland native Eden Appiah–Kubi, loosely inspired by Jane Austen’s Emma. (Appiah-Kubi’s first novel, 2021’s The Bennet Women, also bears the imprint of another, even better known, Austen classic.) In Her Own Happiness, best friends Maya, a plus-size, pansexual artist, and Ant, an asexual lover of plants and nature, exemplify the beauty and strength of platonic Black love … at least, at first. But can their blossoming, romantic feelings survive the machinations of celebrity “girlboss for good” Emme Vivant, who sets Maya in her mentorship sights?

Emma is perhaps more of a launching pad for Her Own Happiness than a direct blueprint. If Austen is an arch, at times cynical, witness to societal foibles, Appiah-Kubi is perhaps the sweeter sister, critical of class inequality but earnest and broadly optimistic when it comes to human behavior. All the same, Austen fans will seize on the references; in (fictional) coverage, Vivant is described by Washingtonian as “handsome (WTF?), clever, and rich,” while Maya muses, “Truth was, there’s no perfect place for a Black queer woman, especially one without a small fortune.” 

At heart, Her Own Happiness is a cozy, good-natured tale of love and friendship, following characters who do not define themselves by their hip body piercings or artsy tattoos but, rather, through kindness toward others. Appiah-Kubi combines escapist descriptions of fashion and travel with an honest look at how so many of our lives have been shaped by COVID-related isolation and uncertainty. Residents of the DMV will delight in regionally specific callouts, including Rock Creek Park, Takoma Park, and Washington City Paper (hey, that’s us!). —Annie Berke

Unreliable Narrator by Aparna Nancherla

Release date:  Sept. 19, via Viking Press

Genre: Memoir 

Who am I to hold forth on comedian Aparna Nancherla’s new essay collection Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome? This debut book is an insightful, savvy read. It recognizes up front that “impostor syndrome—like probiotic yogurt—does primarily get marketed toward women and minorities.” Clearly, Nancherla’s wholesome and society-critiquing voice deserves the pop cultural space to be understood as panoramically human. “I’ll never find all the answers. But there’s meaning in trying, and meaning can be everything,” she writes.

Now based in Los Angeles, the D.C.-born, McLean-raised Nancherla was perceived by her physician parents and older sister as a shy, passionate kid who didn’t quit, who first told jokes in public at an open-mic night in Tysons. She turned 30 before her first big break as a writer-performer on the 2012–2013 TV show Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell. With her ever-bigger jobs and personality-specific opportunities that followed, she explains, “Every day was Take Your Doubter to Work Day!” 

Deemed a “unicorn” in show business, Nancherla has built a versatile career as a second-generation Indian American woman who leans into onstage jokes about treating her anxiety and depression. “I think it’s hard, in comedy, or in any field maybe, to not have people put you in a box,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. “But I don’t think of myself as ‘the Mental Health Comic.’” 

Her wide-ranging book also delves into her creative process, being online, and finding love that feels like home, as well as filler bits of uneven quality. Some major pieces stay on thematic task by dissecting her experiences through an informed lens of destigmatizing all mental illnesses. While documenting her eponymous topic was “an extremely agitating and disorienting process,” Nancherla stays brave because she can. “Being completely, painfully honest is the only worthwhile place I know to begin,” she writes. “Life can so often be a grotesque maze of smoke and mirrors.” 

Everybody hurts, even as the era shapes any humor in our public responses to that private fact. Way back in 2012, Nancherla tweeted, “Any pizza can be a personal one if you cry while you eat it.” Seemingly reasonable self-doubt in a world this duct-taped may indeed be an unreliable narrator. But that voice inside, the one that wants to dream and do, is reliable. It’s all we’ve got.  —Diana Michele Yap

Scenic Overlook by Anne Ray

Release date: Oct. 1, via Awst Press

Genre: Fiction, Novel-in-stories

Recalling a childhood memory of her father digging in the front yard, the protagonist of Anne Ray’s evocative Scenic Overlook explains, “I think of that day now and half of it has the flatness of looking into a television, a projection. The other half has the roundness, sharpness, of looking through a telescope.” This novel-in-stories from independent, Austin-based Awst Press follows Katie, a college dropout with a bone-deep loneliness and a penchant for wandering, as she grows up, moves away, and makes various homes for herself in the American West. Scenic Overlook, as the title suggests, is more about what Katie sees than who she is, and her desire to become more than an absence, a void, in her own life, carries across the book’s 13 chapters. 

Of these installments, “Answering Machine” stands out as a topical treatment of abortion that delves deeply into the intricacies of women’s friendships. Of her relationship with her friend Yahlie, with whom she lives and shares not just expenses but emotional intimacy, Katie says, “These days we’re more like two pioneer women who’d met face to face on the Oregon Trail and became traveling companions after losing their wagon trains in a snowstorm.” 

Characters like Yahlie and Katie’s brother, Danny, are delicately rendered; together with the snapshot quality of the collection and the reflective quality of the narration, Scenic Overlook reads more like a memoir than a novel. An Elliott City native currently working as a digital archivist of radical and historical press materials, Ray has produced a skillful debut that will appeal to readers and viewers of Into the Wild and Nomadland. —Annie Berke

Company by Shannon Sanders

Release date: Oct. 3, via Graywolf Press

Genre: Short stories

D.C.-area writer Shannon Sanders won the 2020 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers with her story “The Good, Good Men.” It’s a stunner of a piece, an exploration of the growing distance between two brothers as they prepare to run off yet another opportunistic boyfriend from their mother’s life. The story was originally published in Puerto del Sol’s Black Voices Series in 2019, and it’s the opener for her new short story collection, Company, that comes out from Graywolf Press on Oct. 3.

“The Good, Good Men” is the perfect introduction to Sanders’ writing. Her voice and style are reminiscent of Elizabeth Strout and Deesha Philyaw, with her beautiful, layered plotlines and character-based world building. This is not a loud collection, but instead a deeply moving one. The stories are linked, the feel almost novel-like, with every character offered the chance to step into the spotlight. Each story becomes a hero’s tale—even characters we were sure, earlier on, were the villains. Sanders’ craft is precise, her writing absolutely gorgeous, but it’s this care and love for the flawed humans she’s created that captures our hearts as we read. Her work is quietly propulsive, the collection a fast, often funny read despite its thorny subject matter. Families are complicated, loving, and sometimes even terrible, Sanders shows us, but also funny as hell.

We’re right there with her the entire time. It’s not hyperbole to say that I laughed, cried, and was completely devastated by the end of this collection. I’d fallen so in love with this world, and with Sanders’ writing, that it was very hard to put Company down. (Sanders will read from Company at 7 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Politics and Prose.) —Hannah Grieco

Bad Questions by Len Kruger

Release date: Oct. 3, via Washington Writers’ Publishing House

Genre: Fiction

Novels that are very funny and truly sad are rare, but Washington metro area writer Len Kruger’s Bad Questions is one. Set in Silver Spring and Rockville, Maryland, in the late 1960s, it traces the mistakes, confusion, and above all questions of seventh grader Billy Blumberg, whose father, his Hebrew school principal, has just committed suicide. It’s impossible to read this book and not get frustrated with Billy—the way you get frustrated with any stubborn adolescent, especially one who won’t stop asking questions that turn into, and turn their answers into, pretzels. “I could think of plenty of questions,” Billy tells the reader. “I was the Albert Einstein of questions. They came to me when I blinked my eyes, when I heard houses settling and telephones ringing, when I shoveled macaroni and cheese into my mouth.”

But then, given the strangely unexpected plot, it is really very fitting that this kid would make so many unlikely inquiries. To avoid a spoiler, all I’ll say is that the plot involves a junior high teacher, who tells her class, “At some point in your lives your minds will snap. All of you. Do you understand? Snap. Crackle. Pop … You—each and every one of you—will enter the Kingdom of Madness. It may be for the briefest of seconds. It may be for a week. It may be for a year … But it will happen … And there’s not a thing you can do about it.”

This somewhat crazed teacher delivers this oration at the novel’s beginning, then pops up later, weirder than ever, and alters the course of Billy’s interior life. He also gets into trouble, but that’s to be expected of a solitary, introverted, somewhat wacky teenager, whose very depressed father has just killed himself. Suicide looms over the book and, naturally, Billy’s entire life. Indeed, the novel begins with Billy lighting his father’s yahrzeit, the candle in memory of the dead, and ends with it. In between, the story is filled with narrator Billy Blumberg asking, as always, lots of questions. —Eve Ottenberg

Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession by  Laurence Leamer

Release date: Oct. 10, via G.P. Putnam’s Sons

Genre: Biography 

In Hitchcock’s Blondes: The Unforgettable Women Behind the Legendary Director’s Dark Obsession, Washington, D.C.-based author Laurence Leamer (Capote’s Women) peels away the glamour of Hollywood to detail the director’s troubling relationships with eight high-profile blonds who starred in his movies. These actors include Ingrid Bergman (Notorious), Grace Kelly (Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief), Janet Leigh (Psycho), Kim Novak (Vertigo), Eva Marie Saint (North by Northwest), Tippi Hedren (The Birds, Marnie), Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), and June Howard-Tripp (The Lodger).

Readers unfamiliar with Alfred Hitchcock’s methods will learn about his obsession with these women and, explicitly, how he controlled every aspect of their lives including what they wore and how they styled their hair. On set, Hitchcock made his stars uncomfortable. During the filming of Vertigo, he placed a plucked chicken inside Novak’s dressing room, and he bombarded Hedren with dirty jokes throughout a lunch date. But he really crossed the line when he made “a sexual proposition so unspeakably crude that for the rest of her life [Tippi] could not even repeat his words,” Leamer notes in the book.

Leamer also guides readers through the actors’ personal lives starting with Bergman’s divorce from Petter Lindström and her marriage to Italian director Roberto Rossellini. He then delves into Novak’s battle with bipolar disorder and Kelly’s marriage to Prince Rainier III of Monaco. 

Hitchcock was a master craftsman, but his seedy behavior, which would not be tolerated today, diminishes his accomplishments. Hitchcock’s actions, which Leamer so astutely documents, would make a cogent horror film—no editing required.  —Wayne Catan

Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away, edited by Hannah Grieco

Release date:  Nov. 14, via Alan Squire Publishing

Genre: Short stories

There’s something deeply human about the urge to run away. We all, at one point or another, have longed for escape—be it from the mundane, the stress, or the fear that exists in our daily lives. Those feelings are captured succinctly, and sometimes beautifully, in the new release of short stories from Alan Squire Publishing. Edited by City Paper contributor Hannah Grieco, Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away is a compact collection, totaling just over 200 pages, which means most of the aforementioned 40 stories are on the extreme end of short. Though the quick reads make it difficult for the reader to submerge themselves in, they offer brief moments of that craved escapism: We can run away in these pages and come back however quickly we like.

The collection features 40 writers (for the 40 stories), including local fiction author Amber Sparks, whose 2020 short story collection And I Do Not Forgive You was named a best of the year by NPR and the Washington Post; Aubrey Hirsch, whose byline frequently appears in my email via Roxane Gay’s The Audacity and Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell At Me newsletter. Hirsch’s story in Already Gone is a haunting and sexually gruesome reimagining of the biblical tale of Lot’s wife; like the bruises mentioned in the pages, the story lingers. However, it’s Deesha Philyaw’s “Mother’s Day” that stands out most for me. Author of the debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (being adapted for television with Tessa Thompson executive producing), Philyaw’s short is a beautiful story of a mother choosing herself over her adult children. It pulls you into the bright colors of Miami and offers thoughts on family and commitment that are worthy of reflection. If you long for a quick kind of escapism, this collection is for you. —Sarah Marloff

A Georgetown University graduate whose writing for the Washington Post’s Style section led to a life-changing call from a Rolling Stone editor in the 1970s, Julia Cameron says her early career “was an IOU to Washington, D.C.”

Inspired by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting on Watergate, she wrote a feature for Rolling Stone, “Life Without Father,” on E. Howard Hunt’s family. (Hunt planned the Watergate break-in that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon.) As Cameron tells City Paper, Hunt’s children were so cooperative that the experience taught her not to predict the story before she wrote it, “but to explore what was actually there” and on her interview subjects’ minds. Her advice to journalists itching to lay down a lede: “Don’t be too certain of your direction before you start. Be open minded.”

This also is wise guidance for your future. No matter how exactingly you plan, or don’t, the universe has a way of blowing plans up. Leaving D.C. in 1974, she moved to Los Angeles and eventually New York, marrying twice and raising a daughter from her first marriage. 

In 1992, originally intended as a hymn to healing, came Cameron’s classic book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity. At first, she thought she was writing it for herself and a dozen friends. But she began to mail copies to people who requested it, and soon it became apparent that “there was much more of a demand for the book than I had realized,” she says. Today the book has sold more than 5 million copies in 40 languages.

Now living Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cameron is the proud creator of dozens of books, poems, songs, films, and plays. This Saturday, Jan. 7, Cameron joins her editor, Joel Fotino, for an online writing workshop through Politics and Prose that she hopes will give participants a sense of optimism, tenacity, and empowerment. (“I probably sound a little bit like Tony Robbins right now,” she dryly remarks, pivoting from promotion to soul on a dime.) Each ticket includes a copy of her latest book, Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer.

“I wanted to write a book that would encourage people and would give them a sense of hope,” Cameron says. “We have a mythology that tells us that writing is difficult, and I wanted to say, no, it’s life sustaining.” 

In Write for Life, out Jan. 10, she suggests that writers need only one quality for success. Not look-at-me brilliance, but honesty. “When I write, I ask myself always, ‘Am I being honest? Am I being authentic? Am I being of service?’ These three questions, answered in the affirmative, yield me a piece of writing that withstands scrutiny,” Cameron writes in her new book. “The same will be true for you.”

The famed primary tool she introduced in The Artist’s Way—the morning pages—comprises three pages of longhand morning writing. “It teaches us to be candid, it teaches us to be brave, it teaches us to be vulnerable, it teaches us to be authentic,” she tells City Paper. “If you have a project that you want to finish, try writing morning pages. And see if that doesn’t lead you forward.”

These days, Cameron is composing yet another new book and finds herself enjoying the writing. “When I get a page, I feel exuberant,” she says. When asked what color that emotion is to her, she says, “Exuberance to me is an effervescent green.” 

Thirty years after The Artist’s Way was published, inspiring writers across the world, interviews, podcasts, and profiles with Cameron still spring up across the internet. The final word for City Paper is hers:

“I want to say that I love to write, and that I hope my love of writing is contagious. And if it’s contagious, I hope that it urges people to go forward. And I think if you think you want to write, then you should write. And trying to encourage people to believe in themselves is sort of my message. To trust yourself. Believe in yourself. Believe in your work.”

Julia Cameron’s virtual writing workshop begins at 4 p.m. on Dec. 7 at Politics and Prose. politics-prose.com. $60.

The self-loathing of a useless uncle. Rejection from friends in childhood. The brutal suffering of a dying parent. The perfidy of a wickedly careless spouse. Walking the pain side of the line more than the comic, playwright Young Jean Lee’s decade-old musical We’re Gonna Die is a future cult classic. Concluding Round House Theatre’s 2020-2021 virtual season, this new streaming production is a high-spirited, cathartic hour of monologues and original pop songs based on traumatic scenarios common to the human condition in all their absurd particulars, and its true stories are awfully timeless.

We’re Gonna Die feels rigorous in content and form—both in the tough truths imparted by Lee and in the tight arc of emotional build-up and release. Yet it’s also weird and funny, and goofily jubilant at the end. And it is timely, as we slowly process the personal impacts and global tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Powering Round House’s production is Regina Aquino’s expressive, kinetic performance as the everywoman Singer. In what is essentially a one-person show, Aquino can depict a six-year-old gleefully riding her bike, a bereft college grad whose significant other has just moved out, or a middle-aged person freaking over finding a first white hair. She’s also a triple threat who unfurls her Broadway-lush mezzo-soprano voice and whose conscious movement commands the stage. She’s plugged in to universal feelings.

The play’s theme is pain—regular human pain. The fact that that happens every day to someone doesn’t make it any less horrible. When bad times come for us, what actually is comforting? The Singer explains that her aim is to pass along examples of the ordinary, common-sense things that have made her feel better. “I’m sharing them with you in the hopes that they might help you to feel less lonely when you’re in pain, which I hope you’re not,” she says.

Aquino is joined on stage by local band The Chance Club’s Manny Arciniega on drums, Matthew Schleigh on guitar, Laura Van Duzer on keyboard, and Jason Wilson on bass, who also provide back-up vocals, musical direction, and arrangements of Lee’s songs.

Director and choreographer Paige Hernandez and the creative team made this production with love. In the program book, Hernandez tells dramaturg Naysan Mojgani, “We’re really looking to be D.C.-centric, as well as culturally specific.” The enjoyable rock-flavored pop songs are arranged to quote punk and go-go. Scenic designer Paige Hathaway’s thoughtful set includes a concert flyer for Bad Brains. “Our local audience will see themselves represented, and those who are tuning in from afar will learn more about us and this region and what makes us so dope,” she says. Aquino, who identifies herself as of Filipinx heritage, noted to the Washington Post that The Chance Club worked the Philippine national anthem into the score. Every time she heard those chords, she cried “because it’s so rare to be uplifted and honored in this way.”

In the partitioned back of the set, the four Chance Club musicians each are illuminated with lighting designer Harold F. Burgess II’s inviting jewel tones—purple, yellow, green, and blue—and the staircase in the center glows ruby red. 

Lee, who became the first Asian American woman to have a play on Broadway with the focus group-informed Straight White Men in 2018, is known as an “adventurous” playwright who typically writes about identity. Her work is often characterized as experimental or nonlinear. For We’re Gonna Die’s 2011 premiere at Joe’s Pub in New York, Lee told Artforum, “[This] is my first show where it has all the crowd-pleasing elements but none of the formal frustration.”

There was an audience for this filmed performance, who were screened and tested for COVID-19. During the last song, as Aquino and the Chance Club dance joyfully and repeatedly sing with big smiles, “We are going to die,” we see the socially distanced audience, somberly masked. They are clapping along.

This closing number works—not necessarily on paper, but when you see this production. After the show’s barrage of disappointments, betrayals, and grief, and lessons in what is truly comforting, it’s hard won. Plays may be built on words, but the ebullience of the entire cast’s hearty singing and choreographed dancing—like no one’s watching, and full of life—gradually comes to feel like the most profound lesson of all. 

Keep watching, past the credits, until the very end, for a surprise. Every now and then, real-life experiences can be wonderful, too.

Streaming on demand has been extended through July 25. $32.50. roundhousetheatre.org.

Raya Bodnarchuk didn’t plan her joyous, life-affirming series of 1,926 daily paintings as a formal project. For close to six years, she just decided to do something every day that she likes to do, no matter what else was happening. Something tiny, but really good. 

“Life gets complicated,” she says. “We all take out the trash, or we all clean up something in the house, because we have to keep it going. But how about: Do something you love. Keep that going and see what happens.”

Once Bodnarchuk started, she made sure not to stop. It just felt terrible not to do it. She painted real life on the street, things that appealed to her; she took her paints along when she went on vacation or trips. Every day, she’d write the date on the back of the painting and a title for it, and try to post it on Facebook before midnight. 

Currently on view at the American University Museum, Raya Bodnarchuk: This Is a True Picture of How It Was, presented by the Alper Initiative for Washington Art, displays all of her 1,926 paintings from 2013 to 2018. The fully illustrated exhibition catalog can be read online or in print. But the feeling of being in the big gallery with nice entrances and a curved wall in front, walking around, and being immersed in the art all around you is totally absorbing, she says. The museum reopened to the public on June 1. 

All three exhibits open now at the museum—hers, The Long Sixties: Washington Paintings in the Watkins and Corcoran Legacy Collections, 1957-1982, and Peace Corps at 60: Inside the Volunteer Experience—went up in the winter. Installing Bodnarchuk’s exhibition required a lot of meticulous, very picky work, she says: preparing the walls with magnetic paint, and then putting up every single painting. “Our preparator, Kevin Runyon, managed this feat,” Jack Rasmussen, director and curator at the American University Museum, writes in his foreword to the catalog. “It was the museum’s challenge to show every painting, in order, as a fitting celebration of Raya’s life as an artist.” 

Best known for her sculpture, collages, and silkscreens, Bodnarchuk was born in New York City but raised in Maryland by her artist parents. She always knew what she wanted to do, and when she was done with college, at the Rhode Island School of Design, she came back to the area and got started. She never made an outright decision to switch from one place or one desire for what her life should be to another. What she was doing in D.C. and Maryland was just so interesting, and here she had everything she wanted. She worked and taught at Glen Echo Park for 14 years and was a faculty member at the Corcoran College of Art & Design for 32 years. She’s known as a sculptor, and local art lovers can see her carved white pine sculpture, “All Good Dogs,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; cast bronze sculptures of animals, including this fox, along the length of the pedestrian bridge near the Forest Glen Metro station; her group of life-sized figures for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission headquarters in Laurel, visible from I-95; and more in several collections. 

The title of this exhibition, This Is a True Picture of How It Was, is actually the title of one of the paintings. Rasmussen thought it would be a good title for the whole show. 

The exhibition is organized by date, starting at the beginning, and punctuated by the years—from 2013 to 2018—in big type on the walls. The paintings begin as little four-inch squares of mostly black-and-white ink drawings that took a few minutes; she used an ordinary pen on nice Rives paper that she already had, liked, and cut to size. They evolve into horizontal seven-inch by four-inch rectangles, and to using tubes of gouache, an opaque, water-based paint. 

Bodnarchuk would like people to look at each painting and decide what they like. Some paintings are very sad, and some are very uplifting, she says. They depict all seasons, all weather conditions. They contain a lot of nature: branches and blossoms, animals, sunsets and moonrises, snow. They’re dated, so people can find their own birthdays. The paintings are often local—houses and streets, the Potomac River, the C&O Canal, the day when President Obama’s helicopter carried the former First Couple away—but also range further out to Baltimore, Lake Erie, and the West Coast. 

She can tell a million stories about these paintings. “My reason for doing them was to put down what I saw in my own way,” she says. More Blossoms Nearby, from April 9, 2018, depicts cherry blossoms not far from the Tidal Basin’s famous trees. She started this painting with the forms set against a green background. Then she saw it needed some branches and white petals. She allows that cherry blossoms are pink and fluffy and pretty, but standing under the mass of blossoms is a magic thing, beyond the pale. Like clouds at sunset, they’re fleeting, powerful, and beautiful.

A Colorful Shrub Late Afternoon, from Nov. 21, 2017, looks like the Biblical burning bush, she says. It had a giant form and was a color that was so exotic but so down to earth. It was just a shrub in somebody’s yard. And then, the season changed, and that quality was gone. 

In 2012, Bodnarchuk found out she has mesothelioma, a rare cancer. Painting every day was a big help. “To keep going, just simply keep doing what you do,” she says. “It’s the kind of thing you tell students, art students—the whole thing: ‘Take your sketchbook with you when you’re on the bus. Just do something while you’re sitting there,’” she says.  “And so, I told that to myself.” 

She had to redesign her life to do what she wants. “It’s not my main goal to finish things,” she says. “It’s my main goal to open new paths that allow me to keep going, in ways that I’m interested in and that are physically possible.” 

When she finally stopped painting every day after more than five years, she didn’t plan to quit entirely. She thought, “Well, I can take a vacation from it.” She had to convince herself that it was fair to take a break. Since then, she has started some other paintings, three times the size but like her daily series, and some sculpture, three more life-size figures that are almost done. “I’m determined,” she says.

Some people start thinking that they want to do major work but have no place to do it, no materials, no money to get them. Bodnarchuk has advice: “Clear a path to make something because you did it every day, not because you knew what it would look like,” she says. “Even if it’s teensy, clear the path to make it easy for yourself to accomplish what you want to accomplish.”

At the American University Museum through Aug. 8. 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. (202) 885-1300. More information, including health and safety guidelines and timed tickets, is available at american.edu.  

Misty Copeland discusses Bunheads

Most know Misty Copeland as the first Black ballerina to be promoted to principal dancer at American Ballet Theater in its 75-year history. However, she’s also an accomplished author who’s published children’s books and a memoir. In 2014, she published her children’s debut Firebird, about a young girl struggling to embody the titular character of Stravinsky’s eponymous ballet. This year, she’s following it up with Bunheads, a picture book based on Copeland’s own experiences discovering the art form at age 13. In the book, a young Misty discovers dance through Arthur Saint-Léon and Leo Delibes’ Coppélia and vies for the part of Swanilda, the ballet’s heroine. On Sept. 29, she’ll discuss the book at a MahoganyBooks virtual talk with its co-owner and co-founder Ramunda Young. The talk begins at 7 p.m. on Sept. 29. Registration is available at crowdcast.io. Free. —Kaila Philo

Virtual Happy Hour: Alma Woodsey Thomas

The year she turned 16, Alma Woodsey Thomas’ family moved from Georgia to Washington, D.C. Howard University’s first fine arts graduate, she taught art at Shaw Junior High School from 1924 to 1960, incorporating African American history into her lessons. Thomas painted part-time until she retired, when her work transformed from realistic to abstract. Her first show of abstract work debuted at Howard in 1966, when she was 75; she died in 1978. Thomas’s contemporaries were the Washington Color School painters. When the Obamas put the glowing rainbow-hued sun of her 1966 painting “Resurrection” in the White House’s family dining room, she became the first African American woman artist in the White House’s collection. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is home to two Thomas paintings: 1969’s “Iris, Tulips, Jonquils, and Crocuses” (on display) and 1973’s “Orion” (not on display). The vibrant colors of “Iris” in downward-moving lines make me feel the mixed joy of raindrops causing flowers to bloom. “Orion,” part of her Space series inspired by NASA’s space program, is flecked with stitches of white, like stars, set in an earthy red. With a virtual happy hour on Sept. 22, staff of the National Museum of Women in the Arts will celebrate Thomas’s birthday with special guests Andra “AJ” Johnson and Gwendolyn H. Everett. Johnson, a cofounder of DMV Black Restaurant Week and the author of a forthcoming book, White Plates, Black Faces, will teach you how to make a specialty cocktail or mocktail inspired by “Orion.” Everett, an associate professor of art history at Howard and the former director at the university’s Gallery of Art, will speak about Thomas’s legacy there. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. on Sept. 22. Registration is available at nmwa.org. Free. —Diana Michele Yap

Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out

“Cleverness is overrated, and heart is underrated,” Mike Birbiglia wrote in 2016 for the New York Times. The empathetic Georgetown University and DC Improv alum, known for storytelling shot through with an enthralling honesty, is also a comedian, director, actor, writer, filmmaker, author, and now host of a free weekly podcast, Working It Out. Since May, Birbiglia has gifted comedy fans with about a dozen podcast episodes in which he works out new material amid veering, spelunking conversations with other comedians or creators. In the second episode, stand-up comedian and former Saturday Night Live writer John Mulaney, who, like fellow basketball fan Birbiglia, belonged to an improv group at Georgetown, tells vulnerable tales about youth sports travails. This evolves into Birbiglia explaining that a touch of unwarranted self-belief is part of getting on stage: “Hands down, I don’t know a single comedian for whom this isn’t true. You will bomb a lot of times. And when you’re bombing, you basically have to tell yourself: No, this is going pretty well.” Agreeing with him, Mulaney harkens back to the basketball court, where he warmed the bench. “I did think I would get better. Yeah, I’m only 12,” he recalls. “I didn’t know that that was it.” In the seventh episode, he chats with Sarah Cooper, a comedian and author who moved to Rockville at age 3, graduated from the University of Maryland College Park, and went on to work for Yahoo! and Google, who now does viral videos of her lip-syncing Donald Trump. And apart from the podcast, Birbiglia and his wife, poet J. Hope Stein, are participating in Politics and Prose’s P&P Live! Series on Aug. 21, where they’ll discuss their insightful new book about becoming parents, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. The podcast is available at https://workingitout.libsyn.com. Free. —Diana Michele Yap

The Palestinian Diaspora Stories: Chile and Colombia

Did you know there’s a large population of Palestinians throughout Latin America? There were several waves of Arab migration from Palestine between the 19th and 20th centuries, and many immigrants settled throughout countries such as Honduras, Colombia, and Chile. The latter country is home to half a million Palestinian-Chileans to this day, boasting the largest Palestinian community outside the Arab world. To learn more about this community, join the Museum of the Palestinian People on Aug. 21 for a discussion about the diaspora in Chile and Colombia. The discussion will be hosted by two community leaders: Marcelo Marzouka, a Palestinian-Chilean lawyer and scholar who promotes investment in Palestine, and Odette Yidi, a Colombian-Palestinian scholar on the Palestinian diaspora in the Caribbean. The talk begins at noon on Aug. 21. Registration is available at eventbrite.com. Free. —Kaila Philo

EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America

Fighting for fairness is a part of the American story. “For many persons with a disability, the greatest struggle is to have others accept them as human,” read just a few of the words interspersed with images and recordings in EveryBody: An Artifact History of Disability in America, an online exhibition launched by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History seven years ago this month. That truth appears next to a stake used as a grave marker in 1882 that Katherine Ott, project director and lead curator, can’t forget. “The stark, rusting grave marker from the Georgia ‘Lunatic Asylum’ at Milledgeville cuts me emotionally because it documents the brutality of segregation and the inhumanity of institutionalization,” Ott says. “It is especially powerful at this moment because there are more people with intellectual and cognitive disabilities locked up than ever before in prisons, and a significant number of those killed and injured by police are people with disabilities.” Sometimes who is silenced can shout loudest about society. Sometimes what goes unnoticed by others is actually what to pay the most attention to. Images of more recent artifacts include adapted flatware from the 1970s, used cane tips from the 1990s, and a purple T-shirt that says, “I Am NOT a Case, and I Don’t Need to Be Managed!” from 2002. The exhibition is organized by themes. The grave marker from Milledgeville appears on a page titled “Identity,” which is grouped under the “Place” category that’s divided, chillingly, into “Outside” and “Inside.” Inside, of course, means in an institution. Some subcategories are named after telling slogans: from “Help the Handicapped” to “Crip is Hip.” On a page titled “Civil Rights, Disability Rights,” which discusses efforts by disabled people to participate fully in society, a well-known poem by the late writer and activist Laura Hershey proclaims: “You get proud by practicing.” The exhibition is available at https://everybody.si.edu. Free. —Diana Michele Yap

Fallout 3

For those looking to exorcise their post-apocalyptic D.C.-area nightmares, what better way to conquer your fear than the classic Fallout 3? The third-person action RPG game takes place in the year 2277 in an America still recovering from a nuclear war that began 200 years earlier. Players control a customized character with different attributes, but events and decisions in the game can drastically affect the plot and the character’s abilities. Much of the game centers around managing resources and survival, as well as fighting and politicking between the many factions that have taken over “the Capital Wasteland,” a fully traversable zone that stretches from the National Mall to Harpers Ferry. While Fallout 3 set the standard for great open-world video games, its relevance to DMV-area players is even greater. Bethesda Studios took great pains to render the shattered husks of the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Pentagon, and other notable landmarks. Players can walk past their own ruined houses as they ride out the pandemic! The area has been reduced to a sweltering desert/swamp mixture due to the environmental catastrophe, but we should all be used to that by now. Considering the mediocrity of 2018’s Fallout 76, perhaps it’s time to break out the classics as we socially distance ourselves. The game is available to purchase on Steam, and can be played on the Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows. $9.99–$19.99. —Tristan Jung

The Creative Independent

Sometimes, you want to create but run into a roadblock. You aren’t alone in that. Go to The Creative Independent, a growing collection of interviews, how-to guides, and more with musicians, writers, visual artists, and others. A safe place for artists to feel understood and learn, this internet gem focuses on been-there advice that’s practical both inside (your emotional journey) and outside (putting your work out there). Among the many generous people with D.C. ties who share their tips and thoughts here are the writer Marcus J. Moore; writer, producer, and Navajo tapestry weaver Sierra Teller Ornelas; and the musicians and label owners Katie Alice Greer and Ian MacKaye. Just two of the sections I’ve scoured with gratitude in my heart include “Making the time for creative work” and “Overcoming adversity.” Founded by editor-in-chief Brandon Stosuy and former Kickstarter CEO Yancey Strickler, the website has an utterly simple design, loads of wisdom, love to the world, and charm. If art is food for the spirit, like the great painter Wassily Kandinsky said in his 1910 treatise Concerning the Spiritual in Art, then The Creative Independent is sustenance for artists—artists just like you. The website can be found at thecreativeindependent.com. Free. —Diana Michele Yap

English cult comedian Daniel Kitson’s shows are a one-way communion. He expresses the riveting mundane intricacies of his life through virtuosic torrents of profanity and shimmering insights, but all we know about him is what he tells us on stage. His labyrinthine stories begin with a brochure-ready premise but soon morph into something else.

In Keep.,  now running at Studio Theatre, that something else is the two-hour accretion of a strange, thorny beauty unlike anything you could imagine existing, in this world, without first seeing this writer-performer’s art for yourself. 

“That’s just how it comes out,” Kitson says of his blistering, bliss-inducing gifts during his second solo play to appear in D.C.

Here’s the premise of Keep.:The austere set comprises a chair, a small square table, and a large, tall cabinet in back with 50 long drawers, rather like a library card catalog, with a lamp on top of the cabinet. The drawers contain varying lengths of pastel-colored index cards. Kitson, foul-mouthed with jittery tics and a stammer, claims that, on every index card, he has painstakingly named one of the 20,000 objects in his house. He claims that this play will consist of his reading aloud from each index card to list the entire contents of the house. 

Then the play changes shape, a metaphor, to me, for how we experience our existence unpredictably unfolding, from the mass-produced hope of baby blankets and dorm room posters to the sad specific majesty of a lucky adult life. Metaphors abound in Keep. The things in his house are the things in his head, and the things he keeps have meaning. 

To say here literally what happens next would spoil the story, though his meticulously constructed stories are not, to me, why a Kitson show matters. You go to see the singularity of his sensibility in person. 

He tells the audience that Keep. took him six and a half months to write.

“I feel lonely because—anyone? I’m alive.” He says there are different types of loneliness: the type that a spot of tea and a chat will help and existential isolation. He advises that “you can fall in love with essentially anyone” if two conditions are met: They’re not a jerk, and regular low-stakes proximity. “Sadness is important,” he says. It’s like “salt in the soup. You miss it when it’s not there.”

Before the show, while I was sitting near the box office, Kitson walked by, a complexly perceptive and self-aware glint in his eye. Somewhere well into Keep.’s two hours, he paused and looked up. Across the nearly black air, I mysteriously felt his glint reach my eyes, but I assumed it was an accident of live theater, and impossible at that. A few beats later, he said in an offhandedly dehumanizing way: “There’s press here. If you’re reviewing: Don’t.” 

This was, of course, part of his media-shy legend. I wouldn’t even mention this, as I don’t wish to take the bait by amplifying his throwaway moment of crowd work. But he also pointed out an audience member’s hearing aid, so that she had to interact about it, and repeated his perspective that women in his bedroom should “pop your clothes off, then.” His art very occasionally punches down.

Maybe I’m not achieving what I hoped for in this review. I set out mainly to explain why one goes to a Daniel Kitson show. I haven’t even mentioned the section of Keep. where he speaks at a meta level about making his art. 

“It’s impossible for me to tell you the truth,” he says. Then he explains that a slice of pizza is 100 percent pizza—but a slice of pizza is not 100 percent of the pizza. As his audience puzzles out that you can never really know all of anyone, I see him smile. 

To Dec. 1 at 1501 14th St. NW. $20–$25. (202) 332-3300. studiotheatre.org.

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