Carrie Newcomer
Before and After: Creatively Exploring Our Transformative Stories

August 8 - 14 

“To my mind - a writer’s mind- Carrie Newcomer is much more than a musician. She’s a poet, storyteller, snake-charmer, good neighbor, friend and lover, minister of the wide-eyed gospel of hope and grace.”- Barbara Kingsolver (Author of The Poisonwood Bible)

i can’t explain it.
i couldn’t if i tried
how the only things we carry
are the things we hold inside
like a day in the open,
like the love we won’t forget
like the laughter that we started
and it hasn’t died down yet

from “The Gathering of Spirits”

Last fall when we began gathering suggestions for presenters for the summer of 2010, several people enthusiastically recommended Carrie Newcomer. Interestingly, those offering the recommendation came from different locales. All had experienced Carrie’s workshops and concerts and knew that she would be a great gift to those coming for a session at Ring Lake Ranch.

If you listen to her music and hear her story, you will understand why a week’s session with Carrie Newcomer will be an enormous treat, inspiration – and likely challenge—and why we will feel at home together at the Ranch.

• As a Quaker, she shares our spirituality of justice and peaceful living; many of her songs speak to these themes: e.g. she contributes a percentage of each album sales to the American Friends Service Committee.
• She is committed to protecting and nurturing creation: e.g. Carrie supports The Nature Conservancy, Slow Foods, and the World Wildlife Fund.
• As a believer that “good exists at the center of things,” she will ask us to explore and share our stories.

Each time I think of this session and listen to her sing I become more excited by this week.

Join us! Be ready to listen, tell stories, sing, and touch into the “good that exists” in you and in the sacred wilderness of Ring Lake Ranch. Peace and all good – Carl Koch, Director


For much more on Carrie Newcomer ’s biography, tours, albums, blog, and links to videos, check out her website: .carrienewcomer.com. Listen to her music and experience her performing.

Other selected albums by Carrie Newcomer –

More about Carrie Newcomer

About her latest album – The Geography of Light

Carrrie Newcomer’s new Rounder release, The Geography of Light, is about navigating and exploring the appearance of light and shadow in our lives. It is a layered work. On one level, the listener experiences these types of connections through Newcomer’s lyrics, which explore life with a progressive spiritual sensibility. In a world that encourages us to move faster and think bigger, Newcomer invites the listener to slow down and reflect on the small things that make life worthwhile. As Rolling Stone wrote, “Newcomer asks all the right questions and refuses to settle for easy answers.”

On another level, the listener hears a skillfully arranged and performed collection of folk roots tracks, with Appalachian and classical influences. Newcomer’s style is straightforward and accessible. Overall, she is not afraid to take on serious subjects, and does so with a healthy measure of good humor and self-awareness.

For her, “songwriting is not about being clever, flashy or fancy—it is about telling a compelling story in language and music with elegance and clarity.” The result is a resonant soundtrack for a world that is both sacred and ordinary.

Newcomer, a Quaker, cuts across secular and spiritual boundaries and is one of a relatively few well-known singer/songwriters working within the progressive spiritual continuum. The Geography of Light was in part influenced by Newcomer’s friendships and recent collaborations with influential authors and theologians, including Parker J. Palmer, Phillip Gulley, Jim Wallis, Scott Russell Sanders and Barbara Kingsolver.

Many of the album’s tracks examine compelling ideas and questions arising out of her relationships within this community—the idea that things are not always as they appear; that good exists at the center of things; that life is a process of transformation; that there is value in simple things; that wholeness is not beyond our reach. Through her songs, she asks: What is the nature of justice? When is it finally time to forgive or let go? Where do we turn for strength? Newcomer’s is one of a growing number of voices inquiring about these age-old issues from a new perspective—speaking about a shift in our culture, insisting that the religious right holds no monopoly on faith.

holy is the dish and drain
the soap and sink, and the cup and plate
and the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile
showerheads and good dry towels
and frying eggs sound like psalms
with bits of salt measured in my palm
it’s all a part of a sacrament
as holy as a day is spent
holy is the busy street
and cars that boom with passion’s beat
and the check out girl, counting change
and the hands that shook my hands today
and hymns of geese fly overhead
and spread their wings like their parents did
blessed be the dog, that runs in her sleep
to chase some wild and elusive thing

holy is the place i stand
to give whatever small good i can
and the empty page, and the open book

redemption everywhere i look
unknowingly we slow our pace
in the shade of unexpected grace
and with grateful smiles and sad lament
as holy as a day is spent
-- from “Holy As the Day Is Spent”