Loch Norse Magazine’s monthly open mic nights have long been a staple among Northern Kentucky University’s community of creative writers—a chance to share emotionally raw work in front of a small crowd of creative peers. While the student-run publication’s last meetup, hosted Friday, Oct. 7, was conceptually familiar to anyone who had attended a Loch Norse event in the past, its ambience felt considerably different.
Attendees gathered around a small, rectangular stage that propped performers up in front of a wall that displayed rows of identically sized photographs. When the night’s special guests—poet Marianne Chen and experimental multi-instrumentalist Bailey Miller—performed, a moon-like lantern hanging from the ceiling bathed the dimly-lit room in subtle, cool hues. Loch Norse’s open mics have always been artsy, but here, the environment felt noticeably elevated.
This open mic was the first Loch Norse event hosted in NKU’s Fine Arts Building. Produced in collaboration with the School of the Arts (SOTA), the reading was conceived as a way to create a more engaging atmosphere for presenters and encourage hybridity between multiple art forms.
After the magazine was forced to move their open mics to ZOOM for nearly two years due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Loch Norse reinstated its in-person get togethers in late 2021, initially using the Steely Library’s Farris Reading Room as their venue.
“The visual arts are inspired by poetry and music. Nothing is singular and no one lives in a bubble."
“We wanted to try and make things even more creative, so I met with Sso-Rha Kang, SOTA’s gallery director, to ask if she’d be interested in collaborating, and she was,” says Loch Norse’s faculty advisor, Kelly Moffett. “I wanted a better place to hold the events because we lost our original outside space, and the library felt kind of formal. I asked if we could use SOTA’s galleries, but she took it three steps further and said, ‘let’s collaborate.’”
Moffett invited Cincinnati-based poet Marianne Chen to deliver half of the night’s dual guest performance. Weaving imagery from Ferdinand Magellan’s landing in the Philippines, chain emails forwarded from her father and memories of her classmates back home in Michigan, Chen’s poetry ruminated on her own identity with an intimate touch—a sensitivity that Kang felt overlapped with the atmospheric songwriting of co-performer Bailey Miller.
“It didn’t matter so much to me that the artists were similar or working with the exact same kind of content, but more that they would be interesting to pair together,” Kang says. “I saw Bailey perform at another venue, and there’s something about the way she performs music that I felt would really set up a mood or mindset that would work well with a poetry reading.”
Rather than perform one after the other, Chen and Miller traded the stage in brief intervals, Chen reading two or three poems before Miller would play the same number of songs in response. Miller’s solo music was well-suited to the gallery’s cozy confines, composed of gentle, droning phrases played on harp, banjo and autoharp with enough echo and reverb to turn these pluckings into an amorphous cloud of sound.
"Poets and musicians are inspired by each other,” Kang says. “The visual arts are inspired by poetry and music. Nothing is singular and no one lives in a bubble. Especially when you graduate and become part of an arts community, you’ll see that everyone is working together or that different fields of art that are adjacent become blended together. I thought, ‘Why not bring that to the gallery?’ It’s nice to think of these things as not separate, but able to come together in collaboration.”
The giant paper lantern that lit up the stage actually belonged to Kang. When it’s not hovering above performers, emitting moody shades of blue and violet, it’s usually at home in her kitchen.
“I thought it would be perfect in making the space feel young, interesting and vibrant,” Kang says. “I worked with Scott Slucher, who works at SOTA, and he brought the stage. We talked about the arrangement I wanted for the stage, which I felt was something pretty simple and doable—a simple rectangular stage lit from underneath so it glowed. The goal was to transform the gallery, taking away that sterile atmosphere and bringing in something that felt welcoming and interesting.”
Enough students volunteered to read or share their own prose or poetry that the time limit per reader had to be slightly shortened to accommodate the crowd. Loch Norse student editor Josefina Garcia believes that the gallery setting helped spark the participatory spirit.
“It helped elevate the whole experience, and I think that really showed in both the attendance and the number of people who wanted to read,” Garcia says. “It felt like we were hosting something very special that people will remember.”
Loch Norse’s final open mic night of the year will take place on Friday, Nov. 11, at 5:30 p.m. on ZOOM. There will be four guest readers, three of whom are alumni: Christen Kauffman, Rae Jager, Caroline Plasket and Sara Moore Wagner.
Though there aren’t any specific dates slated for next year, open mics will return next semester, with a special magazine release party taking place in April (submissions close at the end of January). According to Kang, it’s very possible that there could be more collaborations between Loch Norse and SOTA next year.
“Kelly has already reached out to me about some poets she has for this spring,” she says. “It’ll be a matter of if the timing works out with our gallery schedule, but it is definitely something I’d love to continue.”
