An Evening With the Creative Humanity Alliance & Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading
BEING JONAS WILDER
When forty years of songs finally reveal their map.
Something is happening in Reading, MA on October 10th.
Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading and the Creative Humanity Alliance are bringing Being Jonas Wilder to your community — a solo music-theater evening of story and original song that people tend to describe as the most unexpected hour and a half they've spent in a long time.
No opening act. No intermission. Just the story, the songs, and the room.
About the Evening
Part concert. Part memoir. Part conversation.
Being Jonas Wilder is performed by singer-songwriter and author Mark Firehammer. The show follows Jonas Wilder — the central character of the novel The Echo and the Voice by J.W. Kindbloom, Firehammer's pen name — through five songs and the stories of what those songs were actually carrying, told in real time.
Each song has three movements: the story of how it arrived, the song itself, and the understanding that only came years later — in hindsight. By the time the last song plays, the audience has traveled the full arc alongside Jonas Wilder. Most people sit very still for that one.
"There are moments in a live performance when the songs open up and something underneath them becomes audible — without having to stop listening to the music to hear it. That's where Being Jonas Wilder lives."
reading, MA October 10th
Mark Firehammer as Jonas Wilder
Who This Evening Is For
Every room has a Stephen in it.
After a show in South Carolina, a man waited until the room had emptied and approached Jonas while he was wrapping his cables. "I think I've been asleep most of my life," he said. His name was Stephen. Ten years later he returned to show Jonas what had become possible on the other side of that awakening.
Being Jonas Wilder is for anyone who has ever felt the pull between who they were born to be and who the world asked them to become. It's for the person in the back of the room who leans forward when a song describes something they thought only they had felt. It's for the listener who has always suspected the map exists — they just hadn't been handed it yet.
This show is particularly at home in UU congregations, where the questions it carries — about authenticity, inherited identity, and the long work of return — are questions the community already holds as central to the examined life.
A Shared Evening
Good for both communities.
Creative Humanity Alliance
Restoring connection through creative expression
The Creative Humanity Alliance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Holyoke, MA. Every donation and merchandise purchase from this evening extends its mission — and all contributions are tax-deductible.
Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading
Programming that reflects universal and humanist values
Unitarian Universalist Church of Reading co-presents this evening as an expression of its mission — welcoming people into meaningful experiences that honor the examined life. It's the kind of event that introduces new people to a congregation they might not have found otherwise, and leaves everyone in the room with something worth carrying home."
October 2026
Being Jonas Wilder-U.U. Church of Reading
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A 501(c)(3) tax-exempt public charity corporation in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
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