Lightsey Darst offers a poetic, play-by-play dispatch on what it felt like to be in the audience for Skewed Visions’ performance Black Water.

Sarah Howard reports on how two new Twin Cities initiatives, the Starling Project and Artists in Storefronts, are re-imagining uses for empty commercial spaces.

Matt Konrad explores the edges-of-everything world of Lester B. Morrison’s Kingdom of Nah in the new art-and-story book, House of Coate, written by Brad Zellar and published by Little Brown Mushroom Books.

Music columnist, composer, and pianist Jeremy Walker muses on the rewards of boldness in a risk-averse culture and on freedom, individual expression, and the joy of failing well.