This salon diary appeared in the Jan. 21-27, 2026, issue of the Echo.
The elegant Strauss Room in back of The Ellington Restaurant still feels festive on the 13th, which is a comfort for these January blues. Queens writer Mary Lannon is our salon host tonight. She asks us to honor former IAW&A President Brendan Costello’s memory, who sadly passed away nearly a year ago now, Jan. 22, 2025.
Mary will introduce a plethora of poets and sprinkle some prose, playful theatrics and a hint of academia in there for good measure. Is plethora a worthy collective noun? Hang on… a stanza of poets is too staid. An exclamation of poets! A resplendence! We are getting ahead of ourselves.
Opening is Sarah Fearon, the longest standing IAW&A Board Member (strong ankles run in the family). With an excerpt from her one-person comedy show “We Are Happy to Serve You,” Sarah becomes Snazzy Peabody, ‘a real estate legend in her own mind’. We are privy to Snazzy’s wheels spinning and deals breaking as her day develops. Snazzy is constantly on the phone with hilarious asides and insider tips on how to handle business in this modern age of acronymic neighborhoods and misunderstood socials. “Hang up on yourself! No one expects that”. sarahfearon.com
Vaughn M. Watson is a teacher at The Manhattan School of Music and a vaunted poet, having gained attention for his debut collection “going out & being normal.” It’s an apt title. His poetry finds truth and wonder in the everyday, a trip to a Jersey spa or a painting hanging on a wall. Like Frank O’Hara, Vaughn is contemplative but also in the mix, living life whilst observing or vice versa, gaining inspiration as he goes. It’s Vaughn’s first time reading at a salon and we hope he returns.
Salon semi-regular, Melanie Beth Curran, brings her zines to the stage today. A collector of Irish-Americana, and a modern-day musicologist, Melanie gives us a reverie of revelry, one wild night with Dundalk band The Mary Wallopers in a Times Square pub. I’m not sure what they were drinking, but ‘cod liver oil and orange juice’ it was not.
Taking us to the break, crime writer, M.C. Neuda starts her tale with a gun. We think we know how that’s going to end. Her story concerns a cuckqueaned lady who gets harder boiled as we go. The gun becomes the center of the couple’s separation squabbles. Who gets it? Wouldn’t you like to know?
Time to feed the meter.
After the break IAW&A salon stalwart, poet Bernadette Cullen lets her words flutter about the hushed room. The natural imagery becomes abstract and feels so delicate that you just know the beauty will shatter, even in the rain she conjures. Bernadette’s ekphrastic poem is imagery on images, her poetry pared down until even the wreckages disappear and the sky vanishes.
Next, we welcome first time presenter, Susan Michele Coronel. A Queens resident and Yiddish speaker, Susan’s poems tonight offer sonorous insights to the stages of a Jewish woman’s growth. The child’s thoughts that some traditions, like matzo ball soup, are worth keeping and the nearly grown-up thoughts that true love should not be bound by those same traditions. The creepy dybbuks of mythology make a visceral appearance as phantoms of pregnancy. Susan’s debut poetry collection, In the Needle, A Woman, won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Prize.
Talking of beliefs also is Francis Fallon. Professor Fallon of St. John’s University, once of Trinity College, Dublin, tackles Oscar Wilde’s faith and thoughts on religion, and indeed his religion, through textual analysis. Was Wilde agnostic, ambivalent? Born Protestant and baptized Catholic on his deathbed, but beforehand when asked on his religion, Wilde stated, “I don’t think I have any.” Prof. Fallon has a soothing voice, a keen mind and witty insights.
Next is our salon doyen, the venerable Maureen Hossbacher. Our last poet tonight, our “clean-up poet” as she calls herself whilst battling the noise of an upset table and shards of a pint glass being swept away. It’s not a rowdy crowd but shush! Maureen’s aware that her words have a darkness to them as she comes to terms through poetry with all of her recent losses, and with surviving. She leaves us with “Why do Men Love War?” As Maureen points out, a poem that would be timely if it wasn’t ever thus. She did warn us.
And as Francis Fallon quoted Matthew Arnold earlier tonight, the words came back whilst listening to Maureen.
“And we are here as on a darkling plain/ Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/ Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
So we shall go, but not before a song. Melanie Beth Curran straps on her guitar and belts out a found tune from Butte, Mont. She unearthed an Irish miner’s Union song from the 19th Century to the air of “Auld Lang Syne,” and a rousing goodnight it is.
