The Merry Barn is thrilled to host the first East Coast convergence of artists whose books were recently brought into the world by The 3rd Thing, a Pacific Northwest-based independent publisher of necessary alternatives. 

Join Summer J. Hart (she/her) and Eli Nixon (they/them) at the Merry Barn on Sunday, Feb. 5 from 3 to 5 p.m. for an afternoon of place-based poetry and performance. Summer will read from her forthcoming poetry collection, “Boomhouse” (Fall 2023), and preview concepts from a companion visual art installation. Eli will share their proposal for a new holiday in homage to horseshoe crabs and invite us to revel in primordial wonder as they perform a suitcase theater version of their illustrated manual and field guide to a new holiday, “Bloodtide” (2021). Copies of the recently-released 2nd edition will be for sale! 

About the artists: Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist from Maine, living in the Hudson Valley, New York. Her written and visual artworks are influenced by folklore, superstition, divination, and forgotten territories reclaimed by nature. In addition to her debut collection Boomhouse, she is the author of the microchapbook, Augury of Ash (Post Ghost Press). She is the recipient of a 2022 MacDowell Fellowship. Her poetry can be found in Waxwing, The Massachusetts Review, Northern New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. Summer is a member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist, or exist but call for creative intervention. They are a settler-descended trans-queer clown, a cardboard constructionist, and a maker of plays, puppets, parades, pageants, suitcase theaters, drawings, and low-tech public spectacular. Eli collaborates with artists, activists, schools, mental health and recovery centers, libraries and the more-than-human world to expand imaginative capacity and build muscles for collective liberation. They are a Rhode Islander living on Narragansett land.

About the press: “The third thing” is the idea that emerges when we use imagination instead of compromise to solve a problem, meet a need, repair an injury, right a wrong, answer a question, question an answer, to get where we’re going, to go somewhere new.

The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. Every year or so we publish a cohort of projects representing in form, content and perspective our interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities. We think of each project in the cohort as a break in the stockade—a way out of the settlement and into the wilderness. Come through.

Merry Barn is at 417 River Road in Edgecomb. For more information visit www.merrybarn.com