Clown Cantos – An Evening with Barbara Mossberg
Join us for a lively and luminous evening with celebrated poet, scholar, and memoirist Dr. Barbara Mossberg, as she brings to life her latest work, Clown Cantos: Everything Is Alive In Its Own Way, Singing. Inspired by Radiotopia’s Everything Is Alive, Dolly Parton, Dante, Dickinson, Einstein, Emerson—and always, Thoreau—Mossberg invites us to hear the hidden music of the everyday: the heroic worm, the comic leaf, the poignant truth of our place in the cosmos.
Blending memoir, poetry, and reflection with her signature humor and insight, Mossberg explores “Emily Dickinson’s Clown’s ‘tremendous scene,’” guiding us to improbable joy and meaning in life’s most overlooked encounters. With 60 years of writing radical heroics, Dr. Mossberg offers a profound, often hilarious, and always deeply human performance that celebrates our shared quest for belonging, purpose, and wonder.
A free, public event—come laugh, listen, and leave seeing your own life with new eyes. All are welcome.
Dr. Barbara Mossberg is an international prize-winning professor of comedy and tragedy, epic, and environment, actor, dramatist, dramaturg, puppeteer, author across media, and poet, who uses her platforms as California laureate/Poet in Residence and University of Oregon Professor of Practice to tell not only her own experience in verse and drama, but to illuminate the essentialness of each person’s story as necessary for our collective appreciation of our human fates, the quest to belong, to be identified, to move cosmically and comically beyond sorrow and solitude to a greatness and joy of being, with Thoreau as a model.
Interested in learning more with Dr. Barbara Mossberg? Check out her memoir intensive.