It was a beautiful day in Cambridge today, during the yearly festival in October.  The streets were enlivened by bands and solo musicians.  An old accordionist with a red velvet lined case strung tears like pearls and hung them from the sky above his thick, dirty fingers.  I was lucky enough to see the Balkan- influenced, Seattle-based group the Orchestra Zirconium marching through the streets.

Together with poet Rita Banerjee and other writers, we also met for our session of the Cambridge Writers Workshop at the Inman Square 1369 cafe.  We continued on to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, which holds a wonderfully poetic and eclectic collection arranged just how Ms. Gardner left it.  There, we listened to the Borromeo String Quartet play Béla Bartók's quartets 1, 3, and 5 in a performance that left me feeling like several weather systems had passed through my inner skies.  Afterwards, we roamed around the strange and beautiful collection and wrote ekphrastic poetry stories in the sunlit courtyard.

If you are in the Cambridge area and want to join a small community of writers, come to the Outpost 186 ( 186.5 Hampshire Street, Cambridge, MA) at 7 p.m. on Friday October 16th, and stay for our interdisciplinary arts cabaret with poetry, music, and visual art, beginning at 8 p.m.

Check out this video: Ochestra Zirconium

-- Diana Norma