Hot Fun in the Summertime
...announcing FED's summer 2024 line-up!
Just before they headed off to Woodstock in 1969, Sly and the Family Stone recorded “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” A different era, a different mood, but a spirit that FED’s special guests and I would like to invite you to help us invoke as you join us at the table this summer. It’s a joyous spirit, full of possibility and good community. It’s the stuff that fills us up with sunshine, inspires us to dance around and sing, and carries us through darker moments.
For our second season, FED kicks off with the Solstice on Thursday and DJ D:RC’s chill mix. D:RC aka Darcy Reenis also designed our season’s graphic, email banner, and FED’s new logo. Preeta Samarasan likewise returns this season with the second installment of the Object Permanence series. Darcy’s mixes and Preeta’s fictional-nonfiction series are FED exclusives, and you can look forward to installments for seasons to come. These FED regulars are joined in the kitchen by exciting new FED voices—from Ukraine to a rock face in the High Sierra to a garden on the coast of Maine and more, so much more. Bounty from our literal and metaphorical kitchens to yours.
Read all about the summer crew in the bios that follow. Collectively, this global crew of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks and craftspeople is preparing a wide-ranging, challenging, comforting, exciting, and downright extraordinary feast.
We’d love to hear from you this summer as you pull up your chair! Add your voice to the conversation via comments and likes. Invite others to the table—all are welcome. And, subscribe to never miss a tasty morsel. Here’s to adding a little hot fun to your summer!
Big love, Ashley
In order of appearance…
June
Darcy Reenis: Dutch-born graphic designer and DJ D:RC, currently residing in Athens, Georgia. Since the mid-90s, Darcy’s been a key player in the southeast US dance music scene. While at The University of Georgia, he launched Phungus, a DJ/artist collective that produced events in Athens and Atlanta. After Phungus disbanded, he established Studio:Machina, a graphic design practice specializing in music industry branding, which continues to this day. With a reputation as a prominent DJ in drum 'n bass and related bass music genres, he regularly shares club and festival stages with major names. During the pandemic, he created the Liquid Lovers Lounge, a recurring DJ stream and archive focused on the more melodic sounds of liquid DNB. As of 2022, he joined the team behind Torch, a long-running Atlanta DNB night held at The Masquerade music venue. Soundcloud: http://soundcloud.com/d-rc Twitch: www.twitch.tv/drcmachina
IG + FB: @drcmachina
July
Michelle Waters: painter, animal rights and environmental activist, represented by Cactus Gallery in Los Angeles, California. Michelle has shown widely in the U.S., and work is held in private collections in the U.S. and Europe, including the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto. She is a member of international artist groups including the Hinge Artist Collective, Women’s Eco Art Dialog, Artists for Conservation, and the Art of Compassion Project, and she donates a portion of art sales to grassroots animal and environmental protection organizations. Born and raised in Los Angeles in an artistic, progressive, activist family, Michelle has been making art since she was a small child, then headed north for a B.A. in art from University of California, Santa Cruz, and lives now with her husband and six rescued cats in the redwood forest of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the wildlife and trees are a constant source of inspiration and healing.
Preeta Samarasan: author of two novels, Evening is the Whole Day (2008) and Tale of the Dreamer's Son (2022), as well as of numerous short stories and essays. Preeta is also a lifelong pianist and enthusiastic amateur musician, currently studying harpsichord. Preeta spent her childhood in Ipoh, a Malaysian town famous for its tin-mining history and its limestone hills, for which its fat beansprouts, smooth rice noodles, and juicy pomelos are credited. She saw out her adolescence in the mountains of northern New Mexico and then spent the following twelve years in the northeastern and midwestern United States. After earning an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, she moved to France, where she has been living since. Other current pursuits include learning to read and write her ancestral language, Tamil, and working on a novel about two elderly sisters. She is very excited about the opportunity to explore her interests in a way that is both playful and profound here on FED.
Oksana Lutsyshyna: a Ukrainian writer, translator, and poet, Oksana is the author of three novels, a collection of short stories, and five books of poetry, the latest of which was published in English translation—Persephone Blues, Arrowsmith, 2019. For her latest novel, Ivan and Phoebe, she was awarded the Lviv City of Literature UNESCO Prize (2020) and the Taras Shevchenko National Award in fiction (2021). Oksana holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and is currently Assistant Professor of Instruction in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches the Ukrainian language and Eastern European literatures in translation.
August
Adam Blue: an artist, author, illustrator, and designer, Adam was born and raised in California and has also lived in Colorado, New Mexico, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Degrees include BA in Biology from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the California College of the Arts. In addition to making contemporary art, writing experimental books, and working professionally in design, Adam is an Art Editor of the nationally acclaimed literary and arts journal, Whitefish Review. He served on the Board of the Helen Day Art Center in Stowe, VT, was Education Director at AVA Gallery and Art Center in Lebanon, NH, and served as Project Manager at CoolSnowGlobes. In 2020, Adam launched his own company, Blueberry Jamz LLC.
Jennifer Metsker: author of the poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise, which won the Editor’s Prize from New Issues Press. Her poetry has appeared in Beloit, Rhino, Gulf Coast, The Cream City Review, and other journals. Most recently Jennifer’s work can be found in The Dialogist, Four Way Review, and THE SHORE. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design of the University of Michigan.
Jason Axel Summers: filmmaker, photographer, and musician. Jason landed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina for college when the region’s music scene became a hotbed of community, creativity, and weird success. He was in a band, helped build and run a music venue, DJ’d at a storied college radio station, worked restaurant jobs, and began photographing a who’s who of bands—Archers of Loaf, Polvo, Southern Culture on the Skids, Squirrel Nut Zippers—and making “cheap, fast, and scuzzy” Super 8 music videos. In the 1990s, Jason began working on low-budget feature films, moved to NYC, and met collaborator and wife, Kate Fix. Together, they worked for 32 seasons on NYC’s Fashion Week and as a camera-assistant team on features, commercials, and documentaries including the 2002 Academy Award-winning short film “Thoth,” before relocating to an old farm in North Carolina. There, Jason tries his hand at ecological forestry, and the couple continue to collaborate, now also, with daughter Zoe. Projects include the underground, punk-rock, love-story documentary, Unknown Passage: The Dead Moon Story, a 25-year-long art project known as the Xmas Card Project, and their latest, a documentary shot over 20 years about musician and visual artist Stuart Gray aka Stuart Spasm—I Should Have Been Dead Years Ago (2024).
September
Peter Golcher: a one-time mechanic, turned engineer who, “for his sins,” is also an attorney. Peter was born and raised in a small village in England (with a “really scary castle”), has since lived on both US coasts and an aircraft carrier—making four trips across the Atlantic—and is currently living in the Santa Cruz mountains with his wife and six cats. A climber since long before leaving the UK—hillwalking in the Lakes and Scotland led directly to adventures in the California wilderness with a particular attraction for Yosemite, the High Sierra, and many miscellaneous wild places—Peter finds “a certain pleasure – essential even – in travelling slowly through the wilderness, permitting our complex array of thirty-three senses to enjoy the full experience of nature, which may – if we’re fortunate – be re-experienced through the visual arts, such as photography.”
Reginald McKnight: author of The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas, White Boys, Moustapha’s Eclipse, He Sleeps, and I Get on the Bus. His many awards include the PEN/Hemingway Special Citation, Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, Kenyon Review Award for Literary Excellence, Whiting Award, Drue Heinz Literature Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the Hamilton Holmes Professor of English at The University of Georgia.
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All are welcome at the table, and together, we co-create and sustain community.