History of the frameshifts project

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 The Unsettling-Things  platform is the last work of the Frameshifts Project.  A previous website on this project was frameshifts.com.  

No longer caring for but caring because

     Grief is an unsettling thing—a strange country. I get around in it by making things up—some of them also unsettling things. There are different kinds of grief but they are alike in confronting us with a painful gap and asking—not politely—what will you do now? Your response is grief work, which you do either deliberately or by default. 

     When Bill Stanley, my college friend, died in a wreck before graduation, I made a narrative poem, called The Profit of Doom. A larger story formed around it, later including a threnody about fellow soldiers during my time in the army. Forming around that was an even larger set of stories and poems, two volumes entitled FRAMESHIFTS, which could only be finished after caring for Susie in her illness from 1999 to 2008. 

     When you can no longer care for a loved one, a loved habitat, or loved way of life, you begin to do caring things because of them—even unsettling things that seem strange to others. What I do is to take something that happened and let it become something that never happened—a story, poem, song-cycle, opera, or drawing. Mostly, I let it take its own shape because what it may become is initially unclear. It’s like whittling, which is why I call it folk-writing. When it’s done, the work will be performed and given away. Grief summons it into being and then the work itself demands to be rewritten and rehearsed until it is satisfactory.

So many memorials went into FRAMESHIFTS:

• Susie—throughout      the book in a half-dozen relationships between characters,
• My sister Susan, in the character of June Brightman, and elsewhere,
• My Aunt  Monte and Uncle Grady in characters of Cicero, Sally, Pinky, and also in  the opera MONTE AND PINKY,
• Granddaddy,  in Avery Crawley and in the X poem in HOUSE OF A THOUSAND ROOMS,
• Mom and      Dad, in the “Spearpoints Bright” story of FRAMESHIFTS, also in the   “Transactions with Emptiness” story in FORMS OF RESISTANCE, in the opera AMBER, and in many poems in HOUSE OF A THOUSAND ROOMS and COMING AROUND
• Countless references to  schools and classrooms, where I spent many happy hours as student and      teacher, and almost became a town-fixture,  always found on Saturday mornings at the Diner talking with other locals  about the annual procession of carnival days, charity walks, pony races, football games, and latest Zoning Board disaster. Bits of the town and school system, including some      familiar-looking characters,  now reside my books and music, 
• As do countless references to fields, woodlands, and rivers, and the wounds that  human beings inflict on each other and on their habitat. 

     None of these works were depictions of the way things were. They were made up—just as you would improvise a song on the piano. I believe that many kinds of art are memorials of this kind. They memorialize relationships by creating a speculative continuation of conversations. I’d rather memorialize than monetize.

  This folk-writer doesn’t live by his trade. He gives away what he makes. For him, commerce is communion. As Simon Rodía worked on his backyard tower or James Hampton made an altarpiece in his spare time, I have whittled away on words and music. My writing and music concerned the Human Project—that is, caring for and about the others of our species and keeping our long human conversation going.

      Maybe caring about the human species and its interdependence with others could lead someone to care more about the external effects of his next drilling-site than about investing in cryptocurrency. Who knows? I set the Human Project as the criterion for my folk-writing and composition, and for my paid work as a teacher. It is proposed as an aspirational criterion for other endeavors, such as business, government, engineering, and the arts. Mashkinonge gives examples of applying the criterion in his Bulletins.

My folk art applied the criterion to such issues as: 

· ethnic cleansing, in The People’s Voice,

· the relationship between business and education, in The Books of Daniel,

· the uses and misuses of religion and religious language, in Annunciations, Religious Hygiene for Wild Men, and La Rinuncia,

· racism and injustice, in Shura, Coming Around, Escape Plans, Pushback, and the score for Nightcaps (with libretto by Brooke Vandervelde),

· the interdependence of living things, in The Fisher of the James and the Bulletins of Mashkinonge,

·  the consequences of warfare to victims and military families, in Amber and Pushback, and in poems like Pushback (see the title poem) and An Unfinished Opera, in Abernathy's Adventures in Birdwood.

· the expression and embodiments of grief, the nature and necessity of studio-based education, and the societal role of speculative fiction, in Frameshifts, Forms of Resistance, and Death on His Heels in Richmond. 

       In fact, most of these compositions and writings are works of grief, beginning with the death of a college friend, which led to the writing of The Profit of Doom, the narrative poem which became Frameshifts. In these stories and poems, characters deal with the illness and death of a spouse, debilitation from chronic lung disease, the suicide of a favorite teacher, the deaths of friends in war, nervous breakdowns of veterans and victims of military conflicts, and even a gnawing, growing grief for the undermined life of the planet. Given such a threnody, perhaps it is not believable that in the midst of suicides, murders, sicknesses, and conflicts, the works are humorous in tone and content. And why not? Art is a restorative endeavor.

     The poems and stories invariably concerned the relationship between two people because the basic unit of the human project is a conversation. People are speech, as a character says in Frameshifts. And history is a long, continually interrupted, dialogue. In form, the works were lyric and narrative poetry, short stories, novellas, operas, cantatas, songs, song cycles, and amateur drawings. It was folk art, which is made to please ourselves and to share with others—like a warm quilt—the aim always being communion.

      In BRANCHING UP AND DOWN (2023), A history of work and collaborations, I give a more complete work-history of projects, productions, collaborations, and the rationales for books. Works with notes are listed below. 

     And the works are linked, particularly by characters who reappear unexpectedly in both musical and dramatic settings. Of course, you can read The Adventures of Abernathy in Birdwood without knowing about Frameshifts, Monte and Pinky, Tales Since the Shift, or Escape Plans, but you may want to investigate further. But be warned: Investigation may leave you dangling. I always leave things for readers to figure out on their own. This is not everyone’s cup of tea, as one reviewer delicately tried to break it to me. To which I replied: Of course not.

      I follow a life of study as a retired science teacher and folk-writer for the Human Project, which, as I keep saying, is caring for and about others and keeping our long human conversation going—hence the Unsettling-Things website. To gain understanding about this, I follow the practice of frameshifting. Think of this as readily changing viewpoint, role, perspective, context, scale of observation, habitat, niche, or other conceptual brackets.

      Understanding begins with verified and verifiable facts and experiences; then, paraphrasing Elwyn Tilden’s definition of faith in Toward Understanding Jesus (1956), it turns from the collection of facts to the interpretation of the whole of life, which includes self-evaluation and self-dedication. A life of study is about commitment to understanding—that is, to getting our stories right.  

     Understandings are variously bundled by different ways of knowing into laws, histories, ethics, music, graphic arts, and scientific research. In my studio, I bundle my understandings as poems and stories in words and music. Most of my time is spent on study and rehearsal, because once you think you have understood something—by making a story, poem, or song—you must rehearse to get it right. I keep shifting frames of reference.

    This is a practice of sustained attention and creative engagement that leads to a  prayerful cognitive procession—a brain-walk—shifting, for example from fatalism to willful action, from ignorance to understanding, from grasping to acceptance, waste to salvage, fear to hope, opportunism to compassion, exclusion to inclusion, and partial work to whole-hearted soul work. The studio takes most of my time. As a folk-writer, I simply bundle my experiences in books and musical productions, give them away as intelligently as I can, and then return to the studio

     My self-published work is about the Human Project—caring for and about each other and keeping the long human conversation going by promoting life-fostering concerns. The stories draw upon experiences as soldier, teacher, composer, and researcher and are presented as a gift to share, not an influence to monetize. From ANNUNCIATIONS, the first opera production (1969), and THE PROFIT OF DOOM (2000, c 1981 as Poems and Passages), the first book of stories and poems, to BULLETINS FROM MASHKINONGE (2025), I have written for the Fellowship of the Attentive. This fictional audience, first described in FRAMESHIFTS, looks for intriguing stories, poems, plays and musical narratives that challenge their frame of reference. They expect a creative work to go beyond entertainment. They ask,

            A good story or poem or aria—yes, but how are my attitudes, feelings, and perspectives heightened or      transformed by the experience?

     Members of the Fellowship of the Attentive bring sustained attention and  creative engagement to their experiences because they want to become more attentive, knowledgeable, compassionate, and alive. They are not looking for nostalgia or repetitive self-confirmation but for an acknowledgement of the losses and shortcomings so painfully apparent in our current world-situation, a time of violence, wounds, and carelessness. The Fellowship is attentive to life-fostering concerns and responds sympathetically to the personal and existential grief underlying the Frameshifts Project.  

       Perhaps in these works I have made a kind of wound-treatment center where humor, music, stories, appeal to imagination—the source of both impairments and improvements to the Human Project. Writing for this imagined Fellowship, I produced stories, poems, and operas with linked themes and characters. Musical productions and author readings were opportunities to fundraise for charitable causes and to give books away. These events were also opportunities to discover that the Fellowship actually existed. Perhaps you are a member of the Fellowship of the Attentive.

     The larger Human Project is the long conversation kept going by all people caring for and about each other by doing the many kinds of careful and skillful work that embody the life-fostering concern. Keeping this work at the center of our lives. is the subject of such works as the opera, Books of Daniel,  the song cycle, The Fisher of the James, the Bulletins from Mashkinonge, and this platform for conversation, Unsettling-Things. 

     A comment by Mashkinonge: Review of Rose’s work forces me to conclude that he has been on a moral project. It’s fishy, however, because he does not accept the aims of religions, utopian visions, zealous activists, or inspirational marketers. I distrust zealotry even when I agree with the zealot. But review of both operas and books does reveal a maker with a sense of social responsibility, however limited. 

     In some works, like Bulletins from Mashkinonge, he even has an agenda, arguing that humans are a procession like a great river with eight tributaries, each of them independently making its way at its own speed from the watershed of human history to merge at some omega. Already it sounds fishy,  doesn't it?

        Only a fish can really notice the different currents coming into a river—their smells, flavors, and subtle forces—which is why a magical fish-shaman had to put the book together--and this U-T platform as well. 

     As I explained to Avery Crawley long ago, to understand this great procession, as your poet Whitman called it, you must understand prayer. Prayer is not some kind of telepathic one-way transmission twisting in on itself; it doesn’t move inward to self-justification. It moves outward to justice. After our long conversations under the bridge where the Pawmack River flows past Rectortown, Crawley would later repeat my words when he spoke at the tent-revivals to build the Fellowship of the Attentive  for his Salvolution project:

Prayer is sustained attention and creative engagement, personal or collaborative, which leads to a cognitive procession from fate to will, ignorance to understanding, grasping to acceptance, waste to salvage, fear to hope, opportunism to compassion, exclusion to inclusion, and partial work to soul work.

                                                                                                                                                       (from FRAMESHIFTS, V. 2, P. 38)

     Some of those tributaries meander for generations, even turning backwards—as in those periods when humans seemed to fall in love with fatalism and ignorance. This is why humans continually need guides like a magical fish to caution them on what they wish for.

  NOTE:  ONLINE ACCESS TO ALL WORKS IS AVAILABLE AT RICHARDLYONSROSE.COM. 

     FRAMESHIFTS is the source of most of the other books and music. A two-volume collection of eight linked stories and two narrative poems, it tells the story of the shifting world of Avery Crawley, a charismatic biochemist and trash collector whose preaching leads followers to establish the Salvage, an inland community distant from the flooded Eastern Seaboard of a time in the near future. This community, the Fellowship of the Attentive, creates a kind of apocalyptic work-study program of habitat restoration and the genetic manipulation of behavior. Opposition from their neighbors in this imaginary region of Northern Virginia comes from the Board of Faith and Practice, a theocratic community. The first story is a cozy mystery that opens with campaign-manager’s discovery of his murdered boss, a political hack who had just won a councilman’s seat in the city of Holburn. The stories that follow introduce an off-center, speculative-fictional world whose over-arching plot links characters, stories, and poems in multiple genres—mysteries, military thriller about lost missile codes, and science fiction about a futurist community. Of course, some readers find this unsettling, preferring a series of books which follow the same formula. While I don’t do that sort of writing, I do put some characters from Frameshiftsinto other books and music. But, alas for readers, I also follow the unsettling practice of continually shifting frames of reference—a practice I nonetheless recommend for writing, music, and daily life: turning grief into life-fostering work instead of allowing it to swamp the soul and disable the will.

STORY COLLECTIONS: Stories are often accompanied by poems.

FRAMESHIFTS, VOL. 1-2 (CreateSpace, 2011): Stories and poems that keep shifting scenes.  Beginning with Harry Pettiford’s discovery of his murdered boss, a political hack who had just won an election in the Northern Virginia town of Holburn, the mystery story leads into a military thriller, more mysteries, a story of speculative fiction, and a narrative poem. Links between the reappearing characters in the stories gradually reveal the social movement that has been building in the background like a catastrophic storm. 

SHURA (children’s book in collaboration with Sushmita Mazumbar, Director Pause Art Studio Arlington, Virginia) and THE QUEEN AND THE CROCODILE (Please contact Sushmita directly at https://www.sushmitamazumdar.com/studio-pause to buy copies of these two handmade books, also found in the Children’s section at the Main Library, Richmond, VA.) The unillustrated texts are also in House of a Thousand Rooms.

FORMS OF RESISTANCE (2022) Stories about brothers in love with the same woman, how to keep everything in mind that your mother told you to remember, and other vexing issues as different pairs of people push back on the walls that separate them. The Utley boys grew up as military brats rehearsing for world war and listening to their mother say to always keep others in mind. While Manny flew from one righteous cause to another, his twin, Jimmy, obsessed about taking risks; both fell in love with the same woman—their stepsister, Jeri. Unlike their baby sister, Alma, the other three siblings kept the world in mind even when the world had other things in mind for them—Vietnam, Bhopal, the hotel bombing in Bombay, a disappearing way of life, and Alma’s boyfriend, the terrorist. “Transactions with Emptiness” is the anchor story of the collection. 

DEATH ON HIS HEELS IN RICHMOND (2022) More Frameshifts Stories, & fables concerning the Fellowship of the Attentive. These spin-off stories follow up on some of the characters from Frameshifts and introduce Izzy Breit, whose school for the attentive is later featured in the opera, Escape Plans. Retiree Harry Pettiford had hoped to settle down in Richmond after the calamitous events in FRAMESHIFTS (2011), but his daughter returns as a tattooed Tarot reader with deranged clients who loop him into another disaster. A collection of stories and fables, Death on His Heels in Richmond revisits the world created in FRAMESHIFTS—the Fellowship of the Attentive, the people of NAFELS, and the Giants of Einhorn. Also included is the libretto to Escape Plans. 

ABERNATHY’S ADVENTURES IN BIRDWOOD (2024) Residents in a senior residence unsuccessfully try to downsize, right-size and size up their new situations. A collection of poems and stories, it also gives final updates on some of the characters from Frameshifts. Also, it is organized according to the eight tributaries of the human project--if that interests you.

POETRY COLLECTIONS: Poems are often stories.

HOUSE OF A THOUSAND ROOMS: Anthology of Collected poems, 1965-2022 , including lyrics, narrative poems like “Teak” and “The Giants of Einhorn,” poems from previous collections and chapbooks, poems in sets and sequences, and some librettos from the operas. All poems are extracted from their original contexts and arranged alphabetically in a new presentation. The poems shift to stories; the stories shift to poems; fiction to exposition, and speculative fiction to lyrics. Perhaps such a mix-up cannot be tolerated in a period of seamlessly packaged, double-insulated, plastic-sealed one-step dinners, microwavable sentiments, recycled history, and foam-packed thinking. Or maybe it’s just the kind of mental shift that’s needed. Poet and Frederick Douglass performer Nathan Richardson says, “Richard Rose can turn a box of sand into diamond dust.”

Two works contained in FRAMESHIFTS

THE PROFIT OF DOOM (in FRAMESHIFTS) The Viroid Messenger & the Fellowship of the Attentive.  This is the seed around which all other work crystallized--the story of Willie Allen.

FINDING A PURCHASE (in FRAMESHIFTS) A librarian under house arrest  mentally accompanies Lewis and Clark and re-imagines the library as an undiscovered territory.

COMING AROUND (Brandylane, 2018):  Journeys in and out of Richmond from the time when it was Slave Central for the nation to modern times. It is a companion work to the opera Monte and Pinky, performed by Capitol Opera Richmond at the Black History Museum and Cultural Center on April 7, 2018, and at other venues. First person accounts in vivid verse vignettes and stories about travels of Blacks and Whites between Louisiana and Richmond and the checkered history of human commerce, from 1815 to the present time, including a few relatives of the author.

PUSHBACK(Atmosphere, 2021) Poems pushing back on pandemic, prejudices, and four centuries of preconceptions,  in response to various afflictions, microbial and political. The poems go from humorous situations like “A Tramp Packs Up Along Pennsylvania Avenue,” to science fiction, in “Bitner gets a life” to the poignant “We’re Full,” and other poems that journey through the grief and mental static of current times. Educator Carol Tomlinson says, “Pushback is Richard Rose’s trip to the dark woods of our time . . .” A companion opera to this work is Nightcaps, described below.

NARRATIVE MUSIC: Recordings of some opera productions are on the YouTube channels. Contact the composer for copies of performance scores. Dates are for productions by Marginal Notes Ensemble, Scissortail Productions, Capitol Opera Richmond, and other performance ensembles. A compilation of this music, underway in 2025, will possibly be published on Amazon, to include music from Abernathy’s Adventures in Birdwood. Rose’s narrative music has been produced and recorded by many ensembles since 1968, but the complete recordings are in limited supply.  Parts of the librettos are found in House of a Thousand Rooms and in story collections.

ANNUNCIATIONS (1969, 1980, 2009) Cantatas and Mass in meditation on the parable of the Samaritan. 

This was the first musical narrative. See Branching Up and Down for its history and rationale.

BOOKS OF DANIEL (1997, 2009) Opera about mergers & acquisitions, Babylon, farming, education, & love.

AMBER (1999, 2018) Chamber Opera about a survivor of Bataan, and a military family’s macabre way of coping with loss. 

THE PEOPLE’S VOICE (2001) Opera about the ethnic cleansing of Tories during the Revolution, based on the story Landscapes, by De Crevecoeur.

LA RINUNCIA (2009, 2016) Opera about becoming a monk, even though your loved one knows you’re mistaken.

THE FISHER OF THE JAMES (2013) Song Cycle about Mashkinonge, a magical fish who grants foolish wishes and teaches a fisherman to pay attention to the river.

MONTE AND PINKY (2018) Chamber Opera about octogenarian roommates, once Employer and Washwoman, now in new roles.

ESCAPE PLANS (written 2022, not yet produced) Jazz opera about a social worker trying to reform her hometown, the theocratic town of Fairall, and its Board of Faith and Practice. 

NIGHTCAPS (2023), libretto by Brooke Vandervelde of Amherst, VA. Undergraduates discover the shameful past of their university and its cherished traditions. See https://www.nightcaps.show/

OTHER WRITINGS AND WORKS:

BRANCHING UP AND DOWN (2023), A history of work and collaborations. This draft of a work-memoir will not be revised. It is  of limited interest to casual readers. 

RELIGIOUS HYGIENE FOR WILD MEN (2023): Sermonettes to various wild men from the times of Enkidu to that of the Manosphere, along with essays, poems, and reviews from the former blog-site, frameshifts.com. 

BULLETINS FROM MASHKINONGE (2025), Warnings from a magical fish about the Human Project. The magical fish from the Fisher of the James provides both warnings and a study guide for humans who come to the river to make bad wishes. Also included are the librettos for the Fisher of the James and Escape Plans.

ACCESS TO THE WORKS--contact Richard Rose at the outlook email address if you don't find what you want here:

AUTHOR PAGE: https://www.amazon.com/author/richardrose

YOUTUBE CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/@richardandkathleenrose9325