SPECIAL GUEST PRESENTATION

IMPROVISATION AND CREATIVITY: POLLAN & PLOTKIN IN CONVERSATION

Friday, November 8 7:30-9:30 PM

Admission: $15 Louis J. Roussel Performance Hall- Loyola University 6363 Saint Charles Avenue | New Orleans, LA 70118

Michael Pollan, the celebrated environmental journalist, essayist, and New York Times best-selling author of How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, joins the New Orleans-born ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, President of the Amazon Conservation Team and author of Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice: An Ethnobotanist Searches for New Medicines in the Rain Forest, for a magical evening exploring encounters with unscripted reality.

Moderated by Randy Fertel, author of A Taste for Chaos: The Art of Literary Improvisation and The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak: A New Orleans Family Memoir.

"One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in a flow of a present that is literally wonderful - wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself."

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind