“Flirting is all about getting your heart’s desire.”

Burrell is a polished woman, wearing a knee length blue dress with beaded tear-shaped cutouts. Her nails, toenails, and understated bracelet are expertly coordinated. She appears confident and engaging—not too surprising for someone in her profession.

Burrell seems to be a walking embodiment of the characters in her book—young, successful, and armed with a romantic plan. Her novel, “Single Girl Summer,” the impetus for her workshop at Listenbee, is semi-autobiographical. “Single Girl Summer” features a recently divorced woman struggling to find her footing in the dating world. Burrell herself began the story after a painful divorce, and this experience doubtless informed the novel. Like Burrell, the three main characters all have successful careers. One is a lawyer; another owns her own restaurant. Though the novel appears to have more than its fair share of romantic-novel clichés and unrealistic moments, it has an empowering core—strong, successful women, taking control of their emotional and romantic lives.

Many in the crowd at Listenbee last Friday already knew and loved Burrell’s book for this reason; others who wandered into the gallery during the course of their Second Fridays art walks were just hearing of “Single Girl Summer” for the first time. The crowd nodded attentively as they listened to Burrell speak. In the this post-Mad Men era, it may be commonsense that a woman can be successful, independent, and unabashedly flirtatious all at the same time. Still, every now and then it’s nice to have a reminder. This is such stuff as dreams and book tours are made of.

Such a standard, however, can still be notoriously difficult to pin down. Take 79th Street BBQ. Out of 4 Yelp reviews, two give it 1 star, the others 4 and 5. A WGN video review calls it the best in the city, but the Facebook screenshot credited with the recommendation curiously cites “Lem’s 79th” (Lem’s Bar-B-Q, located on 75th, is highly regarded among critics). And it’s not as though one can rely on a name like “79th Street BBQ” for any hints, either.

So, four friends and I ventured hungrily into West Chatham, not knowing quite what to expect. We had planned on dining in, which 79th Street advertises as an option on their website, only to find that the few seats inside are suited more for customers awaiting pick-up orders. 79th Street, just three blocks from the Red Line and Dan Ryan, clearly caters primarily to an on-the-go clientele.

It’s also a place to try only if you are prepared to eat a lot of meat, at the expense of just about anything else. The menu offers a wide variety of standard barbeque fare—rib tips, wings, links, ribs, turkey drums, and chicken—but only lists “cakes, butter cookies, pies & appetizers” in passing. There’s no mention of sides.

We ended up going with the rib tips, wings, beef links, and pork ribs. Each comes in foil and a Styrofoam box, topped with fries and several generous ladles of mild sauce (a bundle of white bread is wrapped separately). 79th Street also makes no mention of sauce options, but after seeing the customer in front of us request the hot variety, I made sure to get some before we left. The lady behind the counter was kind enough to give it to me for free, even though a sign next to the register clearly stated a 55-cent charge for extra sauce.

With no place to eat in the restaurant, we headed home to eat. Though there hadn’t been much of a wait for our order, the commute was long. Luckily, the food has no problem staying hot. Our fingers learned that the hard way when we tried to sneak some fries at a bus stop. However, plain and thick-cut, they really only served to counterbalance the meat.

The rib tips were the clear winners of the bunch. They retained the deepest overall flavor, and certainly didn’t lack in tenderness. However, after picking through the top half of the box, we were left with a much less appealing mixture of soggy fries, chunks of fat, and excess sauce.

The wings benefited the most from the smothering mild sauce. Apart from that they were pretty standard, without a whole lot of flavor or spice involved. It’s never a good sign when barbeque relies too much on its sauce, and that’s no exception here. The sauce itself was sweet enough, and not too runny, but in every case the meats would have struggled to hold on their own. None possessed that distinctly smoky flavor that makes barbeque so worthwhile—the most critical component of all.

We demolished the pork ribs pretty quickly. They certainly weren’t bad, but they took tenderness to a fault. It almost seemed as though they’d been boiled. The beef links went a little more slowly. Heavy, dark, and difficult to trace back to a distinctly beef-like taste, they went mostly untouched. The side order of hot sauce complemented them well enough, though that itself was probably the biggest mystery of all. The sauce had a strong enough cayenne presence to drown out any other flavors, but lacked almost any sort of bite.

Although our hunger was more than satisfied by the meal, our appetite still longed for something slightly beyond. Perhaps 79th Street has its own band of devotees. But amidst all the small-time establishments dotting the South Side, this is one place that doesn’t exceed expectations walking in.

7901 S. Wentworth Ave. Monday-Sunday, 24 hours. (773)483-7909. 79thstreetbarbecue.com

“Natural Selection” features four artists: Jessica Hogberg, Kristen Maniscalco, Grace Scott, and Mark Yee. Although their respective styles vary in medium, texture, and style, all of their works explore ecological themes—a premise powerful enough to make the vibe of the show feel cohesive. Acrylic paintings, ink drawings, and ceramic sculptures create pieces of hazy abstraction and lustrous realism, yet all the works come together under a unifying palette.

The plain white walls and wood floors of the gallery allow colors to shine through the distraction of the evening’s bumping mash-ups and crowd. Shadowy greys, ranging from metallic to clay, merged viscously with feathery greens and blues. Cool shades are so prominent in the works that brighter colors, when they do emerge, are striking. The parallel themes and colors of the artists’ oeuvre are so arresting that it takes a good deal of examination to get to know the character of the individual work of each, to be able to distinguish each artist from another, and to start to understand their distinct purposes and goals.

Hogberg, a young, pretty, tall, and down-to-earth brunette, is concerned with systems—how harmonious, self-contained orders form from the interactions of tiny individual organisms, how even the most minute creature can retain its own unique qualities, but almost become an environment or a landscape when part of a group. This concept of the aggregative clockwork of autonomous living things can be seen throughout her work, in the repetition of donut/bacteria-like shapes in cool greys and teal-greens, each distinctive but contributing to an elegant whole when perusing through her paintings.

Maniscalco is responsible for the exhibition’s intriguing, lifelike, and oft-cryptic ceramic sculptures. She displays bulbous spheres arranged in herd-like formations and a grotesquely realistic and fascinating snake whose head is devouring a human heart and whose body is cut into sections that become maze-like tunnels for mice. Although Maniscalco’s work is perhaps the most impenetrable of the exhibit’s abstract collection, the theme of environmentalism offers a helpful entryway into understanding her pieces. “My work is a reaction to our exponential population increase, and communicates the importance of respectful forethought regarding our natural resources,” she writes in her introduction to her contribution to “Natural Selection.” With this lens, spheres become symbols of subjugated womankind in “Dwindling Matriarchy.” The snake and mice become, perhaps, an emblem of the cyclical and balanced relationships in nature, even between predator and prey.

Scott’s work represents the most diverse and versatile use of media and style of the four artists, with pieces displaying an expertise in both tattoo-style inkings of whales and in glossily surrealistic oil paintings featuring icy landscapes and falling blackbirds. In her introduction to Natural Selection, Scott discusses “integrating the ‘myth’ ” into her work, allowing her to “juxtapose it with the harsh realities of the modern world.” The presence of myth becomes obvious in pieces like “Eden,” an ink print of a female bodied, raven-headed, satyr-footed creature clutching the infamous apple in its beak, a take on the Paradise Lost myth that makes the viewer question the relationship of man and beast and the spiraling after-effects of human nature on nature in general.

Finally, Mark Yee is a stylish and polished ex-financier who makes larger-than-life, cloudy, abstract paintings in mixtures of acrylics, chalk, and oils. His hilly, three-dimensional pieces are reminiscent of landscapes. Like Hogberg, his inspiration comes from the synthesis of “energy and rest, peace and strife, yin and yang.” These notions can coexist “simultaneously in natural phenomena,” he writes on Black Cloud’s website. Simultaneity is visible in works like “Piece 57,” where primordial mists are at the same time flat and highly textured, colorful, and cool—as if each painting coincidentally captures an instant and eon within the borders of its canvas.

Black Cloud Gallery, 1909 S. Halsted St. Through May 30. Monday ,10am-3pm; Wednesday, 11am-6pm. Free. (773) 678 3950. blackcloudgallery.net

So begin the simple directives, shared with the audience members, that guide the stone-faced, barefooted women standing against a minimalist backdrop of ROOMS, a small standalone gallery in Pilsen. Todd and Marrakesh Frugia’s one-night-only performance art piece, “Songs From the Sea of Boths,” came on a warm, inviting evening as gallery-goers streamed along S. Halsted for Second Fridays. During the three-hour period of the show, the women stood in the gallery ringing their chimes as viewers came and went, staying as long or as short a period as they liked.

After turning into the narrow entryway, an unobtrusive white door with a sign asking for viewers to “please enter quietly” opens,  inviting the sounds of the delicate, penetrating chimes and the slow, rhythmic steps of the twelve women. They stand straight-backed, arms raised, the thin silver chimes clasped in their hands and dangling from their wrists, forming angular, geometric traces against the bare white canvas of their simple sleeveless dresses.

The chimes ring out without pattern, as some of the women stand statue-still and others slowly lift an arm to ring a chime. A few women put down their arms and speak: “Each of their own,” they say, following a prescribed script, turning to either the left or the right. “Sometimes one. Sometimes the other,” they continue, stepping according to the instructions.

“We’ve been dealing a lot with sort of random patterns and rules,” Frugia says, describing the piece as a game of sorts for the performers. They can strike one of their chimes, or turn left or right, but can only take a limited number of steps. Drawing from a theatrical and literary background, the artists had given the performers a specific script to follow as they lower their arms and turn.            Frugia says that audience reaction has varied widely, alternately describing the performance as marionette-like, mechanical, or like a sea. “We’re giving a fertile soil for art to grow,” Frugia says, likening the process to a farmer throwing seeds onto a field, not knowing exactly what will sprout. “There’s always someone who just walks in, looks at the piece, and their face just kind of gets stuck…That’s the audience member I’m going for, that person that gets mesmerized or trapped.”

Originally, the piece was commissioned for a wedding, Frugia says—something that was unique in their artistic experience. “We wanted a piece that was about two things that were coming together,” she explained. The “Boths,” then, refer to the two chimes on the wrists of the performers: “through the actor, [the separate chimes] become a both.”

Furthermore, he is interested in the effort driving the choices that the women make. They must hold their arms up throughout the performance, save for the very strict stipulations set in the script. They can ring either chime, as long as each chime is allowed to fully ring out before ringing another. The instructions provide for the inevitable tiring of their arms by allowing them to be lowered when a performer wants to recite the script.

Marrakesh and Frugia drew performers from their theater friends and from connections with actors and models, as well as from regulars who see their pieces and ask to participate—those curious to know what it would be like to stand and ring a bell for three hours. “We do these long, endurance-driven shows,” he says.  “The piece is for them just as much for the audience.”

The women move in the space as if in a dream, the gentle rings and the low murmur of their voices creating a slight hum in the air, as their bare feet pad slowly, methodically, across the floor. The white of their dresses almost glows, and the movement and non-movement of their bodies form an eerie spontaneous choreography. “But a single both in a sea of boths,” they say. “What music.”

835 S. Halsted St. Hours by appointment. (312)733-1356. chicagoartsdistrict.org

Tameka Jones of Pretty in Pink Productions has answers. Her speed dating service, Twenty First Dates, presents the opportunity for love at first (or twentieth) sight to the South Side’s lonely masses in the form of fleeting romantic encounters.

Jones, who also operates under the alias “Miss Pretty Pink,” says that the idea for Twenty First Dates came from repeated viewings of the romantic comedy Hitch. In the film, Will Smith plays a “date doctor” who diagnoses men’s romantic foibles, before curing them with dates of both the blind and sped-up variety. Jones says that the premise, coupled with the perils of the fast-paced life led by most singles, inspired her to launch her speed dating service. She says, with a dreamy gleam in her eye, “There’s just not enough time to find dates nowadays. It’s easy here compared to a bar!”

Twenty First Dates occurs weekly in the rear of L26, an edgy dining hotspot in Bronzeville, and is, without a doubt, an updated take on one of love’s most ancient rituals. Female speed daters sit expectantly on the inside of a ring of tables as each new man cycles by. Dates lasts five minutes, before Jones rings a bell that signals a shift to the next potential mate.

Loosened up by the one free drink included with Twenty First Dates’ $25 admission fee, I decided to try my hand (and my heart) at this unconventional, albeit intriguing, new dating ritual. From the outset my encounters were uncomfortable, undoubtedly due in part to compounded flirtatious anticipation and necessarily dry journalistic inquiry.

An innocent, investigative query of, “Do you come here often?” was met with no sympathy in the eyes of my first partner, so I trashed that angle of attack in favor of something more straightforward.  I decided it might be best to evade, up front, any further shenanigans. I found an escape from suggestive banter in the following mundane disclosure: I’m actually a reporter, do you mind if I ask you a few questions about speed dating?

From there, the conversations grew decidedly cooler, but perhaps more pointed. The women whom I “encountered” throughout the night had come to Twenty First Dates for reasons ranging from the brightly curious (“I wanted to try something new!”) to the somewhat more practical (“It’s a good way to get to know someone safely and non-creepily”). By and large, Twenty First Dates’ clientele said they hoped to meet new people. It felt ironic, considering the decidedly modern nature of speed dating, that most daters seemed to be searching for a “more traditional” alternative to the chaotic and stifling world of meat market–esque bars and clubs.

Though few speed daters considered themselves to be conventional (“I am anything but traditional,” one woman assured me), most seemed to hold views tending toward old-style romance. One young lady affirmed her belief in love at first sight, stating hopefully, “Anything is possible in the first five minutes of meeting someone.” When asked if she might catch that kind of spark at Twenty First Dates, she replied, “It might not be tonight, but someday, definitely.”

Another speed dater took a slightly different view: “I’d like to believe [in love at first sight], but I don’t think I can!” The venue, however, struck her as an opportunity for “instant connections,” a fitting and ostensibly modernized version of first-sighted love.

As for the madame of the evening, Tameka Jones affirmed her belief in the reality of love at first sight. “In the first two minutes of taking to someone,” she said, simultaneously starry-eyed and grounded, “You can form a connection that tells you if you’re compatible for the long-term.” The promise of such an apocalyptic spark powers much of the drive behind speed dating. What better place to find Mr. or Mrs. Right than in a quick and intimate environment? It’s enough time to know.

Though Twenty First Dates only launched at the beginning of the month, a surplus of eager daters, Jones’ gusto, and the encouragement of spring seem to promise success. Twenty First Dates will be kindling the fires of summer flings and lifelong couplings for a long time to come.

Twenty First Dates, L26 Restaurant, 2600 S. State St. Wednesdays, 8-10pm. $25. 

Last Wednesday, Vargas opened his both serious and comical speech at the University of Chicago’s International House by saying, “My name is Jose Antonio Vargas and I look Asian, which means I’m Filipino.” Throughout his talk—which left many members of the audience with damp tissues—Vargas played to his audience’s emotions in order to convince them that the United States immigration policy is racist and in dire need of reform.

Vargas began with his own story. In 1993, as a twelve-year old, he immigrated without his parents to Mountain View, California in the Bay Area. “I got there before Google,” he says jokingly. When he went to apply for a Driver’s License at the DMV in his late teens, he discovered that his green card was counterfeit. Since then, he has managed to evade the authorities while becoming one of the nation’s most celebrated young journalists. He has held coveted positions at some of the country’s most eminent publications including the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post.  In 2007, Vargas won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Virginia Tech Massacre, but the journalist terms his acclaimed profile of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the New Yorker to be the “high point of [his] career.” As a high school student, he says he thought, “Maybe I could write myself into America.” And that is exactly what Vargas has done.

His campaign, called “Define American,” is a mission to fix “our broken immigration system” and to create a “21st century underground railroad for illegal immigrants” to fill in where the government has failed. Vargas is critical of the “show-me-your-papers” bills being passed in Arizona, SB 1070, and Alabama, HB 56. He sees this legislation as the white man’s hypocrisy. “From 1892 to 1954, twelve million Europeans were welcomed into the United States at Ellis Island. And sixty years later, America is faced with the migration of another twelve million people.” The most important question, he says, is not “who, when, where, or how many,” but, “why do people want to come to the United States?” He answers this questions with another. “Why couldn’t I have a better life in Manila?” Vargas’ rhetoric is somewhat oversimplified. He seems to have overlooked the question of whether or not it would be sustainable for the United States to grant citizenship to every individual in the world who wants to become an American citizen.

To this day, Vargas, who has become a sort of celebrity activist, travels through airports in this country without a valid visa, betting each time that the authorities won’t catch him. “‘Why don’t you just make yourself legal?’ people ask me.” He gave the I-House audience his answer with a smirk: “Cause I’m a masochist and this is so fun.”

Run aground in the water of Morgan Shoal, a shallow expanse of botanically lush water which extends over half a mile between 45th and 51st Streets, the 109-foot vessel resisted all rescue attempts. After three days of struggle and a safe evacuation, she tipped. She may have caught fire. Since that summer, the Silver Spray has rested underwater off the shore of 49th Street, tranquilly preserved by the lake’s fresh water.

This was the story told last Saturday at the Hyde Park Historical Society by long-time Hyde Park resident Greg Lane, who swims in Lake Michigan every day and harbors (pun intended) a kind of boyish enthusiasm that would more likely be expected of his grade school son. Lane was intrigued by the Silver Spray’s boiler, which is visible from shore, so one day he swam out to investigate.

“There’s nothing quite so enchanting as swimming along in the lake and then suddenly looking down and discovering a propellor that’s as tall as you are,” he says. Scuba diving is illegal off the shores of the lake (“It puts people in danger of enjoying Lake Michigan,” Lane quips), but this doesn’t stop him from spreading the gospel of the sunken ship. At 10am on most Sundays, Lane can be found guiding civilians on “shipwreck tours”—free-dives out and down to the corpse of the Silver Spray.

Shipwrecks in American waters are protected by the Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987, created, essentially, to bring looters and abandoned booty within the realm of law. With no individuals to claim ownership, sunken vessels are given, by default, to the state. Lane expresses concern about protecting the wreck from municipal interference.  He wants people to be aware of, and to appreciate, the abandoned Silver Spray and its resting place on the shoal.

“Just like a historical building, it has a story to tell,” says Lane, a consciously modest and somewhat accidental spokesman for the wreck. Speaking to a full crowd in the Historical Society’s small space along Lake Park Avenue, his rhetoric  resembles a rallying cry to the amateur Hyde Park enthusiast. “I am now an underwater archaeologist,” he says with a smile. “That’s the great thing about this shipwreck. It’s the most accessible on Chicago shores, and it’s ours.”

Clark and Samarov are headlining this second installment of the Seminary Co-op’s “Doppelgangers” reading series, which aims to bring together local writers with similar interests, styles, and even last names (the first installment featured Adam Levin and Sarah Levine, both local authors and SAIC faculty). With the lighting situation resolved, the two writers, monoliths in the world of ‘Chicago cab driver fiction,’ assume positions on adjacent barstools and begin to read.

Clark chooses excerpts from “Nobody’s Angel,” a work that reads as a traditional murder mystery but also functions as a historical and topographical exposition of the mean streets of Chicago. Clark himself grew up devouring the works of Raymond Chandler and Nelson Algren, citing the first three pages of Algren’s “The Man with the Golden Arm” as the work that made him want to write. This influence is noticeable in his prose, which is simple and uncluttered, and, when read in his wonderfully abrasive Chicago accent, reflects the man’s desire to capture a seedy past and in the process, tell a damn good story.

Samarov, by contrast, is more of a critical commentator, interested in recounting his experiences with stupid, drug-addled, oversexed passengers, and using these to describe the reality of being a cab driver in a bustling, metropolitan city. “Cab drivers aren’t really seen as people,” he relates. “To most, you’re just the back of a head.” This sense of alienation, Samarov adds, makes for “a behind-closed-doors” dynamic that he believes heightens the humor and intimacy of his stories. Reading from “Hack,” a collection of short stories that take place primarily in downtown Chicago, Samarov, in Bukowski-like fashion, rants about inebriated teenagers, backseat sex-fests, and his general loathing of the ‘Drive-thru’ all in an honest, humorous, and genuinely unaffected fashion.

The event concludes with a brief but illuminating Q&A session, revealing, among other things, Jack Clark’s once unmistakable resemblance to Travis Bickle (I’d buy it) and Dmitry Samarov’s grim but characteristically comical message for prospective English majors: “Be careful, you might end up working at Starbucks or, you know, driving a cab.”

(Courtesy of Ten Thousand Ripples)

The intersection of East 87th Street and South Commercial Avenue in South Chicago appears safe, spacious, and lively. Countdown timers usher groups of pedestrians across the wide streets, through an intersection framed by a dollar store, car dealership, and liquor store. The streets are made of solid and unblemished concrete, the buildings of weather-worn brick. For the residents of this neighborhood, the corner’s banality has veiled a terrible memory.

On November 13, 2009, Latin Kings member Michael Vilella was shot and killed while standing near the intersection with a female companion in the early morning. Five days later, Luis Garcia stood at a small, temporary memorial for his fallen friend. Garcia had tried to transfer high schools to leave behind his gang and start anew, but failed due to poor grades and his criminal record. In a space for grief and reflection on the awful consequences of the gang violence he grew up in, he was fatally shot through the chest by a gunman some 400 feet away.

The intersection sits at the crossroads of the Latin Kings, Ambrose, and Latin Dragons territory. It’s not an easy life to escape; the death of these two boys serves as a painful reminder of that fact.  Since the shootings, the community of South Chicago has held this memory as a symbol of the uphill battle for safety. Indira Johnson’s new project, Ten Thousand Ripples, hopes to offer the neighborhood a new perspective on the future.

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“So, it doesn’t seem like this is about the physical Buddha heads,” I tell her. We’re sitting in a busy Uptown Starbucks near one of the proposed locations for the 100 Buddha heads she plans to build. According to the plans, the heads will be three feet in diameter and seemingly half-submerged in the ground.

She laughs and elaborates on the project’s goal: “I guess a lot of the communities are looking for a way to get people to come together and talk to each other.” There are ten participating organizations in ten Chicago neighborhoods. Each hopes to bring a Buddha head to their community and start a conversation about an issue important to their quality of life. “It’s more about the fact that the Buddha [head] will be there,” she explains.

Johnson is white-haired and kind, a full-time practicing artist and peace activist for over 20 years. Her work has appeared across the United States, in Mumbai, and in Brussels; her solo exhibitions have made it throughout Chicago and the Midwest, including a spot in the Museum of Contemporary Art. She draws inspiration from the same man as her artist father and activist mother: Gandhi. “They said he was the half-naked man who took on the British Empire!” she says joyfully.

Jackie Samuel, New Communities Program Director of the South Chicago host organization, Claretian Associates, shares Johnson’s spiritual affinity for peace rhetoric. “I’m hoping that people see the Buddha head and go, ‘What’s that? Why is it here?’ So that when…that conversation starts, we can start engaging the community. People will talk about what we need, and that need is peace.”

More so than Johnson, Samuel appears to feel the burden of her community on her shoulders. She grew up nearby, and now works towards “positive economic, physical, and social change” though the arts. There’s real hope that this new project will work to create just that, ten thousand ripples throughout Chicago.

First, the host organizations will survey residents to help decide on a location for the Buddha head based on how they want to help their community. For South Chicago, it’s definitely an issue of safety. The heads will stand three feet tall, emerging from concrete, gravel, or grass, a completely white face with revealed nose, eyes, and hair tied in a bun, hopefully accompanied by a QR code on the side.

It is striking, unavoidable—you have to wonder why it’s there. Or that’s what Johnson hopes. Like Samuel, she envisions residents striking up a conversation about it with a stranger on the street. As these conversations occur over and over, a broader dialogue can grow to bring the whole community closer.

But really, why the half-Buddha head?

“It stemmed from the image of the Buddha in my art,” Johnson tells me. Large Buddha heads were placed in the center of a carpet on a platform as part of a previous solo exhibition of hers. Without any prompting, people naturally began sitting down in groups in front of the Buddha. She tried it again and again. No matter where the exhibition was, they all felt the “same response of feeling peaceful,” says Johnson. A simple concept, to be sure, but she wondered, “if we had them out in the streets, what could the response be?”

As a universal icon for peace, a balance of the secular and spiritual, it’s hoped the Buddha head will resonate with all people, no matter their race or religion. The project knows itself to be “ambitious in its breadth, and bold in its objective,” according to Kickstarter.com.

As of press time, the Kickstarter campaign to fund Ten Thousand Ripples is unaccomplished. The website warns, “This project will only be funded if at least $15,000 is pledged by Sunday, May 20, 4:59AM GMT.” A donation to the project is a gamble in favor of unnamed groups for undecided purposes, a risked dollar in faith that these Chicago communities can succeed in a creative pursuit for peace. Some may argue that if money will be spent, it should go elsewhere—to the schools and police. But this project offers a new solution for a problem that is becomingly uncomfortably familiar.

Behind Ondaatje’s light-hearted demeanor is an enduring history of printed works which have brought complex emotions, empathetic characters, and moving landscapes to inspired readers for decades. His most well-known book, “The English Patient,” centers around a burn victim with hardly any knowledge of his identity, and explores the intersections of several histories and characters. The English Patient garnered the Man Booker Prize for Ondaatje, who explained at his talk that the book started with a simple setting. A patient in bed, a nurse, and the two talking—such situational elements comprise what Ondaatje calls a “keyhole” to the content of his novels.

Ondaatje, white-bearded, looked every bit the part of the authorial sage. He spoke of the writing process, and how his mind spawns a novel from a well-visualized setting—which he relies upon to provide the underpinnings for characters, themes, and plot. He also read a few selections from his poetry collection “Handwriting,” and some new fiction. With gentle intonations and an unstirred focus on his creation, Ondaatje presented three passages from “The Cat’s Table,” which was published in 2011. He shared some excellent insights, expanding on the importance of setting to his writing, and he admitted to having no official process, or formal understanding of how he writes. As evidenced by the precisely constructed work he recited, Ondaatje remains an artist in every sense of the word.