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5 books match the query 'Improvisations'

cover of Beneath the Skin of Sorrow: Improvisations on Loss

Beneath the Skin of Sorrow

Improvisations on Loss

Nnenna Freelon

Duke University Press, 2025

Over a period of just six months, eminent jazz vocalist and composer Nnenna Freelon’s life changed irrevocably. Her soulmate and husband of nearly forty years, the renowned architect Phil Freelon, passed away from ALS, her sister Debbie succumbed to cancer, and the family dog, Basie, died as well. In the immediate wake of these compounding losses, Freelon could not find a way to process or understand her grief and lost the ability to read, sing, and improvise. The inner melody that had vibrated inside of her since childhood went silent. She then realized that the only way to move forward was to lean into her grief.

Part love story, part homage to jazz, and part guide to creative practice within bereavement, Beneath the Skin of Sorrow follows Freelon’s difficult and personal journey to healing. Calling on the improvisational skills that she had built over her forty-year career as a jazz singer, Freelon crafted her new reality by improvising—thinking about grieving as a series of small, daily engagements with the world around her. Slowly, Freelon regained the pieces of her musical sensibility, realizing that flowing between words spoken and words sung allowed her to understand what could not be fully realized in either realm.

By improvising a new life, Freelon forged a new companionship between grief, art, and daily life. In the essays, poems, lyrics, and explorations of jazz standards that comprise this lyrical and elegiac memoir, Freelon shows how thinking about grief as an exercise in improvisation can lead to a creative coexistence with grief in all its forms.
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cover of Far Flung: Improvisations on National Parks, Driving to Russia, Not Marrying a Ranger, the Language of Heartbreak, and Other Natural Disasters

Far Flung

Improvisations on National Parks, Driving to Russia, Not Marrying a Ranger, the Language of Heartbreak, and Other Natural Disasters

Cassandra Kircher

West Virginia University Press, 2019

Cassandra Kircher was in her twenties when she was hired by the National Park Service, landing a life that allowed her to reinvent herself. For four years she collected entrance fees and worked in the dispatch office before being assigned as the first woman to patrol an isolated backcountry district of Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. There, Kircher encountered wonder and beauty, accidents and death. Although she always suspected the mountains might captivate her, she didn’t realize that her adopted landscape would give her strength to confront where she was from—both the Midwest that Willa Cather fans will recognize, and a childhood filled with problems and secrets.

Divided and defined by geographic and psychological space, Far Flung begins in the Rockies but broadens its focus as Kircher negotiates places as distant as Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, Russia’s Siberian valleys, and Wisconsin’s lake country, always with Colorado as a heartfelt pivot. These thirteen essays depict a woman coming to terms with her adoration for the wilds of the West and will resonate with all of us longing to better understand ourselves and our relationships to the places and people we love most.

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cover of Improvisations on a Missing String

Improvisations on a Missing String

Nazik Saba Yared

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

Nazik Saba Yared’s novel, Improvisations on a Missing String, tells the story of Saada Rayyis, who, after a mastectomy and prior to another operation which she may not survive, considers the course of her life with the purpose of understanding not only where she has been, but also where she is going.

In her attempt to cope with complex feelings of alienation and insecurity, she struggles against traditional expectations in order to secure a sense of belonging and fulfillment—but always on her own terms.

From her childhood in Palestine, through her university studies in Cairo, and finally as a teacher in Beirut, we follow the development of this independent woman as she comes to terms with her feelings about family, lovers, politics, art, and finally her own aspirations for belonging.

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cover of Improvisations: Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research

Improvisations

Methods and Methodologies in Lifespan Writing Research

Ryan J. Dippre

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Improvisations provides readers with insights and options as they develop new lifespan writing research projects or seek to re-orient existing projects to incorporate a lifespan lens. In Part 1 of this edited collection, contributors consider research methodologies that have been adapted to the particular demands of lifespan writing research, with each methodology given two chapters: one that outlines the process of taking up the methodology, and another that provides a detailed example of the methodology in action. In Part 2, contributors suggest new methodologies for lifespan writing research and highlight challenges that this line of inquiry presents as an ethical and socially conscious research agenda. These chapters, representing both established experts and new voices in writing, literacy, and education research, will be of use to graduate students and novice researchers, accomplished researchers pivoting to this area of study for the first time, and others who want to learn more about lifespan writing research.
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cover of Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews

Quarter Notes

Improvisations and Interviews

Charles Wright

University of Michigan Press, 1995

Quarter Notes harvests recent reviews, essays, memoirs, and interviews by acclaimed poet Charles Wright. Wright uses creative variations on the form of the linear essay including interviews with himself as interviewee, correspondence (with Charles Simic), and experimentation with what he calls Improvisations "non- linear associational storylines". The book's short, staccato-like bursts add up to much more than the sum of their parts.
This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism and the hydrosyllabic foot in poetry; a comparison of poems and journeys; appreciation of poets Donald Justice and John Crow Ransom; an attempt to define "image"; discussions of the current state of poetry; and various highlights from the Charles Wright Literary Festival.
Charles Wright's books of poetry include The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He received the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the 1992 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Souder Family Professor of English, University of Virginia.
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