Special Event: Dream Delivery Service & Dream History Tour of Riverwest with Mathias Svalina
Mathias Svalina will bring The Dream Delivery Service to Milwaukee from Sept. 8–21! Svalina will begin his stay by leading a dream history tour of Riverwest on Sept. 8 (details below), and 10 days of Dream Delivery Service will commence on Sept. 11.
The Dream Delivery Service is a nomadic literary arts project in which Svalina writes and delivers dreams to subscribers. The dreams are brief surrealist narratives, written in the second person and addressed to the subscriber. Though Svalina invents and writes the dreams, the recipient dreams them in the reading of them. The Dream Delivery Service was started in 2014 and has delivered more than 40,000 dreams in over 35 cities. In that time the service has worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the MOCA Tucson, the Poetry Foundation, and Just Buffalo Literary Center, among other institutions, and has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, Hyperallergic, the BBC World News, on the front page of the Denver Post, and in other media of which you’ve heard, and more of which you probably haven’t.
How to receive dreams: Dreams for recipients who live within about a four-mile radius of Woodland Pattern will be delivered to your door or mailbox most mornings by bicycle, while dreams for recipients outside that radius will be mailed. If you live in Milwaukee, we invite you to sign up to receive dreams, which will arrive to you free-of-cost! This is a first-come, first-serve opportunity, with sign-ups happening at the Sept. 10 Poetry in the Park reading featuring Svalina and on our website.
DREAM DELIVERY SIGN-UP IS NOW FULL.
In addition to running the Dream Delivery Service for the past decade, Mathias Svalina is the author of eight books, most recently Thank You Terror, published by Big Lucks Books. His first short story collection, Comedy, will be published later in 2024. Svalina was a founding editor of Octopus Books and has led writing workshops in universities, libraries, community spaces, and in prisons. Since 2014 he has run a dream delivery service, traveling around the country to write and deliver dreams to subscribers. With the Dream Delivery Service he has worked with the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Poetry Foundation, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and has been featured on NPR's Morning Edition, Hyperallergic, and the BBC World News.
As part of his visit to Milwaukee Mathias Svalina will lead a dream history tour of Riverwest. This walking tour will begin at Woodland Pattern.
With the dream history tour, Svalina will guide folks through the neighborhood surrounding Woodland Pattern, pointing out places where things that never happened happened, and elucidating a few of the city’s imaginary histories. Modeled on normal city-history walking tours, but taking into account the political reductionism and erasures often found in civic history’s uses of the past, the dream-history tour mixes facts from history, surrealist invention, and outright silliness, encouraging participants to view their city with new forms of wonder and mythos.
ATTENDING IN PERSON?
Registration is no longer required for in-person event attendance at Woodland Pattern. However, it is still helpful and appreciated!
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