Leticia Gonzales hasn’t always known her niche. “The first thing I wanted to do was dance,” she said. “Then sing. Then I wanted to join a Mariachi group and wanted to play trumpet, but I couldn’t play trumpet. Then I wanted to play bass, but I couldn’t play bass. So it was guitar or violin, and guitar is fucking stupid.” Tonight at 7 p.m., Gonzales will be performing her senior show featuring nine musical selections from various nations ranging from America to Macedonia, Ireland to Guinea. She will showcase her talents on vocals, violin and three African drums (Dununba, Sangban and Kenkeni). But organizing the event, and performing in front of a crowd was the last thing she wanted to do. Gonzales grew up listening to American Folk music, and when she enrolled at University of New Mexico, music seemed to be the natural choice. But its program was too confined for her musical curiosity. Faith renewed when she transferred to SFUAD and discovered its Balkan and African drum ensembles. “The only way I can talk about why [I like Balkan and African music] is that I heard it and it spoke to me,” she said and that seems to be a running theme. Along with being a music major, Gonzales is also working toward a minor in writing, something she considers her true passion. “Writing would be the vessel,” she said. “ And inside of that is music, textiles, philosophy, language and everything else that makes me excited about living.” Caitlin Brothers, Gonzales’ friend and musical partner, sees her experience as a writer seeping into her senior show in the arrangement of music, and spoken word selections. “I feel like she’s organized the show almost how one would arrange a poem,” she said. “It feels like being a part of a nine point poem.” Brothers and Gonzales perform with each other often, including as part of their band Storming The Beaches With Logos In Hand. They also share the connection of both being women in a predominantly male department. “Having a conversation without being listened to, is bearable sometimes,” said Brothers. “Trying to play music with someone who isn’t listening to you—you can’t fucking do anything, We found each other as people who can listen to one another. She knows I’ll listen to her, and I know she’ll listen to me.” In part to Gonzales’ distaste for singing publicly, and the duo’s musical compatibility, Gonzales acknowledges that her show would be lost without Brothers’ contribution on percussions and vocals. “When I was considering African rhythms and singing the tunes that I’m singing, the only way that I thought that would come to fruition was if I imagined Caitlin doing them with me,” said Gonzales. She is self-deprecating, nervous about applying make-up for the camera, but it is clear with her attention to detail in writing, and dedication in learning new music, that Gonzales knows what she is doing. “I’m hoping that in presenting things in a methodic and tight woven way, there will be an hour where everybody in the same room is connecting in the same way, on a winter night,” she said. Along with Gonzales and Brothers, the show also features collaborative composition between Gonzales and Sam Armstrong Zickefoose, as well as Bailey Schaumburg reading a selection from Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.” Gonzales requests that there be no cell phones or photography, and that you hold all applause until the end. Leticia Gonzales Senior Show O’Shaughnessy Performance Space 7 p.m. Free...

On Oct. 14, Tom Sleigh, a noted poet, read excerpts from his most recent collection of poems — “Station Zed” — to a crowded O’Shaughnessy Performance Space at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. The collection is part of a new body of work by Sleigh inspired by his recent travels to the Middle East. In addition to the poems, Sleigh journalized the experience in an essay titled “The Deeds” in which Sleigh casts himself as a poet in journalist’s clothing, seeking passage to the Lebanese city of Qana in order to learn the Palestinian side of the 2006 Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “I loved doing it,” Sleigh says, “I didn’t think about myself…all doubts immediately vanished… [and] there was no detail too small that wasn’t suddenly charged with interest.” “The Deeds” was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review in 2008, and selected for inclusion in the 2009 edition of the “Best American Travel Writing” compendium. However, before this acclaim Sleigh says he had no desire to go to Lebanon — adding, as a joke, that he barely knew where to find it on a globe. “What I didn’t know about Lebanon could fill many books.” In 2007, Munir Akash invited Sleigh to Lebanon. Akash is the founder of the Trans-Arab Unity Foundation, and Sleigh’s invite was part of an initiative by the group to bring artists and writers to the Middle East. Sleigh says Akash wanted him to assess and write about the conditions of Palestinian refugees, “particularly in the aftermath of the 2006 war.” Originally, the trip was postponed for three months, Sleigh says, because of backlash from the murder of “a very prominent Christian Maronite politician” — Plerre Gemayel. According to the trans-Arab news network Al-Jazeera, the cabinet minister was gunned down in his car during a traffic jam in a Christian neighborhood — almost immediately his death was followed with “angry protests” by his supporters. Though unsettling for Sleigh, an assassination turned out to be the least of his worries. “As soon as we landed,” he says, “a huge car bomb went off.” In Lebanon, Sleigh says car bombs are so frequent that while watching Abbott and Costello’s “Meet the Mummy” in a Beirut hotel room, he saw commercials for personal bomb-detecting devices — an experience upon which he elaborates in “The Deeds.” During his visit, the violence only escalated. Sleigh says he experienced some of the worst internal violence since the 15 years of civil war that took place in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. “People were being blown up all the time…and I was scared.” In spite of his fear, or maybe as a result of it, Sleigh became “acutely aware” of the world around him, and was “totally interested in what everybody was wearing, what they were thinking [and] what they were saying.” The experience, at times, was even “exhilarating.” Because most of the fighting in 2006 had occurred in the southern part of Lebanon, Sleigh says he decided to go there to see what, if anything, had been preserved. “But did I know what the hell I was doing?” Sleigh asks, adding, “no.” Never before had Sleigh attempted journalism. Sleigh met Chris Merrill — another poet whom he describes as an “old-school journalist who covered the Bosnian war.” Merrill showed Sleigh the journalistic ropes, and through technical mimesis Sleigh acquired the information-gathering skills that would be required of him to complete “The Deeds.” “It was monkey see, monkey do,” he says, but “poetry taught me how to compress information, and to describe accurately what I see.” In gathering information for his essay, Sleigh says he “did lots of interviews,” and not once throughout the process did he use a tape recorder, which he believes acts as a barrier between the journalist and the subject when the two are attempting to establish trust. Also, a subject — in the absence of a tape...