Maggie Dubris

THE VANISHING BIRDS PROJECT
The Vanishing Birds Project, a collaboration between visual artist Linda Byrne and writer Maggie Dubris, combines ghostly, translucent nest sculpture created from plastic six-pack ringtops, the recorded songs of extinct and endangered birds, and spoken word. The purpose of the project is to increase public awareness of the habitat degradation that birds have undergone in the past 300 years with the increase of human populations, and of the ways in which the human experience has been diminished with the loss of these indigenous bird populations.

Skels
(Soft Skull Press, May 2004)
When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless people—the “skels”—who comprise most of their patient population. On a call in an underground encampment one night, she meets an albino man, a street poet/musician, and the brother of a man whom she has just pronounced dead in one of the caves. She witnesses his encounter with a brutal, possibly psychotic cop, and, as she moves through her first summer as a medic, their paths cross again and again. She falls in love with the albino’s writing; the poems he leaves scrawled on walls and bridges, and begins to find her own voice as a writer. Then one night he leads the cop on a chase that ends in tragedy; the cop falls down an abandoned airshaft, and only Orlie performing an illegal medical procedure as he lies dying in a storm drain saves his life. He awakens bent on vengeance, and the albino becomes a wanted man. In her struggle to save him, Orlie uses everything she’s learned that summer, and finds that there is a magic around her that she never suspected; a river flowing from the great writers of the past directly into her world, a river she can use to ferry the albino to safety.

Weep Not, My Wanton
Weep Not, My Wanton, the final book to be published by John Martin's legendary Black Sparrow Press, contains eight short stories: The Dream Book, The Final Miracle, You Can't Spell Mess Without E-M-S, What's New Pusscat?, The Mighty Up, The Rolling Stones Learn to Relate, Give It Up, and A Man Does Not Choose When to Have a Heart Attack, along with a 50 page prose-poem, WillieWorld, based on the author's experience as a 911 paramedic in New York City. The final section of the book is a 70 page series of linked poems, Toilers of the Sea, concerning extinction, time, comic books, and the passage of the old world into the new.

WillieWorld
This book consists of the epic poem, WillieWorld. Ammiel Alcalay, writing in the Poetry Project Newsletter, said, "In this stunning debut, Maggie Dubris creates a fabric in which words are tied to the world, to the elusive fate of people exposed to misery, evil, and tenderness of their own and other's making . . . here are sentences that, at any turn, could tear your heart open . . . exhilarating flights of lyric that achieve the redemptive noise of great rock songs . . ."

Welcome To WillieWorld
A collaboration between New York City composer Andy Teirstein and New York City writer and paramedic Maggie Dubris, this CD (drawn from the first section of the poem, WillieWorld), traces the journey of a female medic through the margins of society as she cares for the people the city has no use for.