Dear <<Name>>,
My first book, Figuring, is out this week. (It only took a lifetime.) I am doing a single public event for it — a conversation with the wondrous Elizabeth Gilbert at Brooklyn’s nonprofit cultural institute Pioneer Works (where much of Figuring was written). Since the laws of physics are what they are, the space filled up fast and the event has been sold out for weeks. But I am thrilled to announce that we have secured a free livestream — you can join us, beginning at 7PM EST tonight, at this link. (No recording will be available after tonight, so real time is the only time to tune in — take it as a rigorous invitation to presence.) We will be conversing about creativity, science, the fragility of genius, the uncontainable and unclassifiable complexities of love, and the thousand beautiful and disorienting strangenesses that make us human. And we’ll have a couple of delicious surprises, which may or may not involve Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer.
I chose to hold this sole celebration at Pioneer Works because I so deeply admire their largehearted idealism and kindred-spirited ethos of building a nobler, more beautiful, more interconnected world across boundaries of discipline, culture, thought, and experience. They put on visionary, unexampled events and exhibitions, including Janna Levin’s Scientific Controversies – America’s most popular series of free science talks, exploring nature’s deepest unsolved mysteries – and the largest Haitian sculpture show ever exhibited outside of Haiti. (They are also home to my annual Universe in Verse celebration of science through poetry, into which I pour months of heart and soul every year.) If you enjoy this free livestream as much as you might enjoy a concert or a meal, please consider joining me in supporting Pioneer Works with donation. All proceeds from the tickets and all donations you can offer go toward our endeavor to build New York City’s first-ever public observatory — a labor of love which has animated me for the past two years. Pioneer Works is a nonprofit and, like Brain Pickings, they rely on patronage from those who love them to be able to continue doing what they do, which is so wonderful and hope-giving in a world so needful of wonder and hope.
DONATE TO PIONEER WORKS
Waving warmly from chilly Brooklyn,
Maria
P.S. Donations to Brain Pickings are always welcome, too — they have made all of this possible. For more from and about Figuring, see Emily Dickinson's electric love letters and the story behind the Auden verse that became the epigraph.