The Center for Fiction’s New Home

Jonathan Vatner

In February the Center for Fiction, a New York City institution devoted to the creation and enjoyment of fiction, moved from Midtown Manhattan to a new space in Downtown Brooklyn. “The Center for Fiction has a history of moving to the city’s cultural center,” says Noreen Tomassi, the center’s executive director. “I was very excited about the Brooklyn Cultural District—it’s where much of our audience is, and it’s where we can serve families. And it’s an area with incredible public transit access.” The organization has relocated many times since it was founded in 1820 in Lower Manhattan as the Mercantile Library, decades before the New York Public Library opened. In its early years the private lending library hosted appearances by Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and John Rollin Ridge, one of America’s first Native American novelists. Now the center is a full-fledged nonprofit that hosts readings and writing workshops, sponsors fellowships and prizes for fiction writers and editors, and runs educational programs for kids from low-income families, among other programs.

At more than seventeen thousand square feet, the newly constructed space, adjacent to the Mark Morris Dance Center and steps from the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is roughly the same size as the center’s previous location. With the new building’s open layout, however, the center can host more public events and offer more amenities to members and visitors. Tomassi expects membership to double in the new location. “The dream for us was to create a space in New York City like the great houses of literature in Europe for people to read and write books together,” she says. “It’s a beautiful tradition.”

The ground-floor auditorium, the venue for the center’s programming, can seat roughly 140 people and is available for all manner of public and private events, from readings and book parties to film screenings and weddings. The center has already scheduled a number of readings, conversations, and screenings for the spring, featuring writers such as Laila Lalami and Maaza Mengiste (March 27), Geoff Dyer (April 4), Deborah Eisenberg and Alexander Chee (April 16), and Paul Auster with high-wire-artist Philippe Petit ( June 6). Through the KidsRead program, children from low-income families and nearby schools are also invited to participate in literary events; authors Kwame Alexander and Jacqueline Woodson will headline a KidsRead event on April 1. Seven classrooms offer four times the educational space of the previous building, allowing for an expanded catalogue of writing workshops and reading groups, and much of the new space is open to the public, including a café and bookstore that stocks titles from both major publishers and independent presses as well as works in translation.

Members, who pay $150 a year, have access to a private reading room and can borrow from the center’s eighty-five thousand books of fiction, including its award-winning mystery collection. For an additional fee members can use one of eighteen desks in a private, sunlit writers studio. Edgar Allen Poe wrote short stories in the Mercantile Library’s first such space in the 1830s; more recently, Megan Abbott and Alexander Chee worked on their novels at the Midtown location. During off-hours Chee spread out sections of his most recent novel, The Queen of the Night, and wandered the stacks for inspiration. “There was a magic to being more or less alone in a seven-story library that I needed for this novel, so much,” he says.

In designing the new space, the center’s leadership, along with Julie Nelson of BKSK Architects, made every effort to appeal to a literary audience. “The encounter between reader and writer is personal, individual,” Tomassi says. “How do you take language and make it visible and dynamic and spatial?” A careful observer might notice writing prompts etched into glass, a bench fashioned from books, and other furnishings that honor the Mercantile Library’s history, such as the bookstore’s chandeliers, which are giant replicas of a lamp once housed in the stacks. 

Like Tomassi and her staff, author Michael Cunningham, a member of the organization’s Writers Council, is excited about this new chapter for the Center for Fiction. “I’m thrilled that it’s going to be a place where writers can go to work and hang out with others who share the belief that writing matters,” he says. “In a world that is paying less and less attention to fiction, this kind of bald assertion of its importance is a remarkable gift.”       

 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Yonkers, New York. His novel, Carnegie Hill, is forthcoming from Thomas Dunne Books in August.

March/April 2019

A New Center for Black Poetics

by

Tara Jayakar

September/October 2016
8.17.16

In Print and Online

From late nineteenth-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar to Harlem Renaissance icon Langston Hughes to contemporary poetry stars Rita Dove and Toi Derricotte, the influence of African American poets on America’s literary culture cannot be overstated. But until recently there was no center that had significant institutional support and was specifically dedicated to sharing and studying the legacy of African American poetry.* Earlier this year, poets Dawn Lundy Martin, Terrance Hayes, and Yona Harvey decided it was high time to start one. The trio launched the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP) as a creative think tank to spark conversation and collaboration among poets and other artists, and to promote and archive the work of African American poets for future generations.

“We recognized that there was this huge impact that African American and African diasporic poets were making on American arts and letters,” says Martin, who codirects the center alongside Hayes. “We wanted there to be a place where we could really think and work through what that means.” Housed at the University of Pittsburgh, where both Martin and Hayes teach in the MFA writing program, the center held its first event in March—a set of conversations and readings about race, poetry, and the humanities—and will host similar events throughout the academic year. Its first course on African American poetry and poetics, led by Lauren Russell, the assistant director of CAAPP and an English professor, will be offered to undergraduate and graduate students during the 2017–2018 academic year and will feature visiting speakers each week. Hayes and Martin also plan to launch a residency and fellowship program, through which poets, artists, and scholars can work at the center for periods between a month and a year.

Part of CAAPP’s core mission is to archive and document the work of African American poets, which will be accomplished through both a physical collection of books and an online archive of lectures, readings, and discussions. While organizations like Cave Canem create space to nurture new work by African American poets, and other university centers such as Medgar Evers College’s Center for Black Literature and Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center work to promote black literature, CAAPP will focus specifically on the research and scholarship of black poetics, particularly as it relates to historical, artistic, and cultural repression, as well as corresponding social justice movements. “Cave Canem is twenty years old, and there still hasn’t been a large body of work about how it came into being or archival work around it,” says Hayes. “Our organizations historically haven’t had an opportunity to take care of our own information, to build our own insights around that work…. Now we are in a position to be our own historians and our own archivists, and write our own biographies about the importance of these roots.”

The University of Pittsburgh has long been a home for the work of African American poets. The university press, with editor Ed Ochester at the helm, has published notable titles by both emerging and established African American poets, recently Derricotte, Ross Gay, Rickey Laurentiis, Nate Marshall, and Afaa Michael Weaver. Hayes and Martin hope to work with the press on a book prize, and harness other university resources. “What a university can do is provide infrastructure, in a way that’s just not set up in most sectors of our society,” says Hayes. “Infrastructure and research capabilities.” The pair have enlisted faculty from other departments, including English and Africana Studies, to advise CAAPP and possibly teach future courses. “We think of ourselves as a start-up,” says Martin. “And like innovators in tech, we want to be open and inclusive as we generate new ideas about what it means to work in the fields of African American poetry and poetics. This seems especially important in these trying and divisive times.”

A significant part of CAAPP’s work will also intersect with the university’s MFA program. Graduate writing students will be able to take courses offered by the center and have the opportunity to help curate, design, and teach these courses. This goes hand in hand with how Hayes sees the MFA as an opportunity to teach students the tools and skills needed to hold positions of power in poetry and arts organizations. “A person who is interested in getting an MFA and being a poet can learn how to live in the world, whether they are directing centers or working as librarians, archivists, or critics,” says Hayes. “Just to alert and inspire a poet to do that is a possibility. Maybe you want to run a press or be an editor of a press. I don’t see why the MFA can’t be an opportunity to begin that conversation, as opposed to assuming that all you can do is write or teach.”

*Editor’s Note: After this article went to print, it was brought to our attention that a center dedicated to studying African American poetry was already established before the launch of CAAPP. The Furious Flower Poetry Center, housed at James Madison University and founded by Joanne Gabbin, has been cultivating and promoting African American poetry since 1994. We regret the error.

 

Hayes and Martin hope that the center will also help make the university’s MFA program a more welcoming space for writers of color, an important effort in light of increased discussion about race and diversity in MFA programs. For Martin, this means creating and maintaining a space of cultural inclusion. “Pittsburgh is a place where there are other students of color, and the graduate faculty is extremely diverse. There’s already some understanding between folks who are there, so you can start from a place of not having to work through your values and struggle to articulate your cultural perspective.”

The CAAPP directors plan to offer courses that intersect with visual art and music, in order to explore how thinking across disciplines can parallel thinking across cultures and perspectives. “Certainly, we feel like if anyone is prepared to build those new conversations, it would be African American poets and poets of color in general,” says Hayes, adding that CAAPP aims to include non-black people of color and other marginalized communities in the conversation. “We talk about collage and hybridity—that’s what people of color are. [We’re] not thinking about segregation, not thinking about fences around what we do, but looking across those bridges, saying, ‘Well, how are these people across the street interested in what I’m doing?’ even if they’re not poets. They might be architects, they might be scientists.”

Moving forward, the center will hold a community workshop, reading, and exhibition from November 9 to November 11 on poetry and politics titled “Black Poets Speak Out,” featuring Jericho Brown, Mahogany Browne, and Amanda Johnston. The directors also hope to host a reading by emerging women and trans poets. Martin and Hayes are optimistic about the social impact of the center’s work. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Martin, “especially given the state of violence in this country—violence against queer people, violence against black people, violence against women—it makes sense to take up things like African American literature, African American culture, African American history, African American poetry and art as a part of making the world better.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

A New Home for Hugo House

by

Lora Shinn

May/June 2018
4.11.18

In Print and Online

The Seattle literary arts organization Hugo House once made its home in a ramshackle two-story building with peeling paint outside and a yellow bucket to catch leaking rainwater inside. But with a growing number of visitors each year, the house could no longer comfortably support all the nonprofit’s programs. “We loved the old house, but we couldn’t fix it,” says Linda Breneman, who founded Hugo House with Andrea Lewis and Frances McCue in the late nineties. “It didn’t quite have the infrastructure we needed for more classrooms, a nicer space for literary events, better space for employees, and ADA accessibility.”

In August a shiny new $7.1 million Hugo House will open at the site of its original home. Located in one of Seattle’s first arts districts, on Eleventh Avenue across from a busy city park, Hugo House’s ten-thousand-square-foot space will appropriately serve more than ten thousand Seattle-area writers and readers annually. The larger building will allow the nonprofit to expand its offerings of classes, workshops, one-on-one consultations, readings, and book signings, providing a bigger, better hub for the Seattle writing community. “It’s a place for writers to gather,” says Tree Swenson, the nonprofit’s executive director.

Hugo House is named after Richard Hugo, who grew up in a poor Seattle neighborhood and eventually became a successful poet and beloved writing teacher. “The new building is a great way to honor the poet, whose art lifted him far beyond his underprivileged origins,” says Swenson, who knew Hugo personally. The space, on which builders broke ground in May 2016, will feature a light-flooded entryway with expansive windows, leading to a publicly accessible “salon.” The building will include six classrooms (up from the original four) and a 1,527-square-foot, 150-seat theater for readings and events, to be hosted in partnership with other organizations in Seattle.

The design of the new and improved Hugo House reflects the organization’s commitment to inspiring writers. “The imagination is summoned the minute you come in,” Swenson says. “NBBJ, a major international architectural firm, really listened and came up with a design that reflects the quirkiness of the writerly soul.” (The firm boasts clients such as Google, Microsoft, Cambridge University, and Stanford University, along with hospitals, courthouses, and libraries across the United States and abroad.) A team of designers from the firm met with Hugo House staff to form a planning committee, whose goal was to visualize a functional interior, tailored to enhance creativity. “We focused on how you create these environments that are eccentric and eclectic,” says NBBJ architect and partner Ryan Mullenix.

The interior of the building will be full of surprises and unconventional design elements. Each classroom will be constructed of different materials, including wood plank, cork, and frosted glass, with dry-erase walls for impromptu class notes. The house will also feature “staircases to nowhere” and benches that double as bookcases. A “pencil wall” in one classroom will hold hundreds of pencils. Curated quotes from Richard Hugo will be hidden around the building: near electrical outlets, at the edge of a restroom mirror, or in peekaboo windows. “You might find a quote on the ceiling,” Mullenix says, “and it will hopefully encourage people to come back.”

Initial planning for the space began in 2012, and in 2015 staff embarked on an effort to raise the necessary millions for estimated project costs. Benefactors, grants, and enthusiastic supporters provided $6.35 million. This spring Washington State gave more than $1 million in the form of a Building for the Arts grant. A community-wide campaign is currently raising funds for the remaining costs.

Staff members consider the new building’s early success an encouraging counter-narrative to the ways in which arts and nonprofit organizations are often evicted from their buildings, especially in city centers, thanks to rapid development and booming real estate prices. “Cultural spaces are being pushed out,” Swenson says. “As in any rapidly gentrifying city, we wonder, ‘What if other developers had this idea, to integrate an arts or cultural spot in new buildings, to keep the soul of a city alive?’”

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization officially designated Seattle a “City of Literature” in October. Since its founding, Hugo House has played a significant role in building that literary culture in the Emerald City. “Every city needs to have a place open to all writers, wherever they are in their journey,” Swenson says. “If you love books, reading, writing, and words, the literary community is so welcoming, and people will guide you. Writers helping writers.”    

 

Lora Shinn is a freelance writer and recovering librarian, whose literature-related work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, and Voice of Youth Advocates, among other publications.

Hugo House’s original home on Eleventh Avenue in Seattle.

I, Too Arts Collective

by

LaToya Jordan

March/April 2018
2.14.18

In Print and Online

For nearly ten years the brownstone at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem was silent. Once the home of celebrated Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes, who lived there for twenty years until his death in 1967, the three-story row house sat vacant, its dark stone walls overgrown with ivy, the paint of its once grand interior chipped throughout. The only evidence of the building’s literary history was a small plaque on the facade bearing Hughes’s name and designating it a landmark.

But today, thanks to the I, Too Arts Collective, the brownstone is once again bustling with creativity. On any given day one might hear the voice of a teen writer reciting Hughes’s poem “I look at the world,” or a community member reading at an open mic for the first time, or a distinguished author in conversation about the practice of writing. Established as a nonprofit organization by award-winning author Renée Watson, I, Too provides arts programming in Hughes’s house to underrepresented and marginalized voices. The collective takes its name from Hughes’s famous poem “I, Too,” which opens with the lines, “I, too, sing America. // I am the darker brother.”

“People need spaces where they can seek justice and stand up for what they believe in, spaces where they can be their full selves,” says Watson. “Often they are not able to do that in the world, so I wanted to have a space where they can come and create and engage with their community—that was really important to me.”

Watson, who lives in Harlem, walked past the vacant house for ten years, disappointed that nothing had been done with the space. She was inspired to take action in the summer of 2016, after hearing that Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone, located just a ten-minute walk from Hughes’s house, had been sold for $4 million. Determined that another piece of Harlem and African American culture wouldn’t be lost, Watson contacted the owner of Hughes’s brownstone and shared her vision of a space dedicated to preserving the writer’s legacy. The owner also didn’t want to see the building become gentrified, turned into condos or a coffee shop, but told Watson she’d need to come up with a year’s rent to turn her vision into a reality.

Watson, who in addition to publishing several well-received children’s books—including most recently Piecing Me Together (Bloomsbury, 2017)—has years of experience in business and nonprofit arts administration; she established the I, Too Arts Collective in July 2016 and launched #LangstonsLegacy, an online fund-raising campaign to lease the brownstone. In just a few months, with the help of the literary community and private donors, she raised $150,000 toward the lease, renovation, and programming costs. Watson signed a three-year lease in October 2016 and along with the I, Too team and a group of volunteers, cleaned, painted, and restored the building. On February 1, 2017—Hughes’s 115th birthday and the beginning of Black History Month—the Hughes House opened to the public.

I, Too now hosts weekly open hours at the Hughes House, during which the community and tourists can visit the space, walk the same parlor floor Hughes did, and snap photos of his piano and typewriter. Watson says the brownstone is less of a museum, however, and more of a space for people to create. I, Too runs a number of special programs and events at the Hughes House, including creative writing workshops for adults and young people, a recurring poetry salon with an open mic, a monthly social event for writers and artists, and discussions with writers about their process and work. I, Too also rents the space to other artists and nonprofits to hold workshops, readings, and performances. Writers who have visited the brownstone include Kwame Alexander, Tracey Baptiste, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Angela Flournoy, Nikki Grimes, Ellen Hagan, Jason Reynolds, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ibi Zoboi.

Watson and her I, Too colleagues— program director Kendolyn Walker, social media director Jennifer Baker, and graphic designer Ellice Lee, as well as working and honorary boards of directors made up of writers and artists—want to empower artists as well as honor Hughes’s legacy. “I wanted something that would add on to what he left behind,” says Watson. “I think that is a powerful thing, to not just celebrate his work in theory or by reading but also saying, ‘This is what he wrote, this is what he said—what do you want to say, and how are you continuing his legacy?’”

The program closest to Watson’s heart is the Langston Hughes Institute for Young Writers, which hosts writing workshops for young people during school breaks and throughout the summer. Funded by the Ford Foundation, the workshops allow teens to learn about Hughes’s work and share their own poetry. “I always say whenever young people are in the space, that’s when I get emotional and feel like this is why I am doing this work,” Watson says. “What moves me is when I see young people writing and finding their voices and expressing themselves.”

After a successful first year, the collective is working toward its long-term goals, including restoring the second floor of the house to create studio space and a library, as well as raising money to establish a fellowship program for writers. As part of the program, fellows would receive a residency in the Hughes House and hold workshops and readings in return.

The organization’s ultimate goal is to raise enough money to purchase the brownstone. “I want this to be a place that lives far beyond me or anybody involved with it now,” says Watson. “This is not just a trendy thing to do, but a sustainable space with roots in the ground for everyday artists to develop their craft and for established artists to share their stories and their voices.” 

 

LaToya Jordan is a writer from Brooklyn, New York. Follow her on Twitter @latoyadjordan.

Renee Watson, founder of the I, Too Arts Collective, next to Hughes’s typewriter. (Credit: David Flores)

Publishing, Empowering Teen Writers

by

Tara Jayakar

July/August 2017
6.14.17

In Print and Online

For Chicago teenagers with a passion for writing, there is no shortage of resources. Young Chicago Authors; 826CHI, a branch of the youth writing organization started by writer Dave Eggers; StoryStudio Chicago; and Writopia Lab, among other programs, have been offering writing workshops, open mics, summer camps, and poetry slams for kids throughout the city for decades. But a new organization has a more specific goal in mind for Chicago teens: to offer them hands-on experience in editing and publishing their peers. Launched last year by poet and educator Jennifer Steele, [Y]volve Publishing (YP) is an extension of Revolving Door Arts Foundation, which Steele founded in 2014 to empower and publish young and emerging writers and to get them actively involved in the publishing industry. Steele runs the organization almost exclusively on her own, with some help from a volunteer board that includes writers Fred Sasaki and Kenyatta Rogers. While Steele has other projects in the works for the organization, including workshops for young and new mothers, an anthology about postpartum depression, and a reading series, her primary focus is currently YP and its inaugural project, the Teen Chapbook Series, which features poetry chapbooks written and edited by teens. 

The chapbook series began last summer, when Steele asked four teenagers on the slam poetry team she coaches to each write five poems and then expand that work into a chapbook-length collection. The four young poets—Nyvia Taylor, Semira Truth Garrett, Kai Wright, and Jalen Kobayashi—worked with one another, along with Steele, to edit their poems. “Each book has been a personal journey for these writers, as they explore personal ideas and also think about how to expand the craft of their writing,” says Steele. “Semira, for instance, was really interested in learning how to write short poems. Jalen has learned about truth versus fact when writing a poem. And Nyvia has been writing brave poems that are confronting difficult, personal subjects.” 

The chapbooks, each featuring artwork the poets chose themselves, were published in May. Steele also invited four established poets, including CM Burroughs and Jacob Saenz, to write introductions to the chapbooks. For the young poets, seeing their words in print has had a powerful impact. “When you have a hard copy of something, it’s forever,” says Kobayashi in a video on the press’s website. “As poets, we share our work on social media, but that can only get you so far. Once you actually have that physical copy of all your words on the page, nobody can take that from you.” Wright agrees: “I’m just a little Chicago kid from the West Side, but to be able to put my work out there in a permanent way—these are just my words that are here and nobody can take my story, or my truth, or my life away from me as a result of that.” 

The Teen Chapbook Series will be published annually, and next year’s series will be expanded to include fiction and nonfiction. (Submissions will open this month, and the chapbooks will be released in Spring 2018.) Steele is also in the process of developing a teen editorial board, which will oversee the production of each book in the series from start to finish. “We’re hoping to have a full-fledged publishing program that includes graphic design, marketing, and promotion teams by 2018,” Steele says. Students will create a call for submissions, read and select manuscripts, and then be paired with a more established editor or writer to edit the selected manuscripts. They will also work on every stage of production, from layout and design to promotion. Steele plans for the press to release three to five chapbooks through the series each year and to put out other books as well. This summer she is working with a group of teens to curate, edit, design, and publish a book of poetry and fashion photography centering around the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial, which is being celebrated this year in Chicago. The anthology will be published in October. 

By teaching teens how to publish books, Steele believes she will help equip them with both entrepreneurial and collaborative experience that will be applicable within and beyond the creative industry. By taking on the role of an editor, publisher, or marketing executive, Steele says, the young people involved with the YP will acquire marketable skills before they even graduate high school. She also hopes to reach more teens by bringing YP books into classrooms. Starting in the 2017–2018 school year, she plans to provide the chapbooks to teachers in Chicago schools and help them develop lesson plans based on each book’s content or theme. “We often hear from teachers that they wish they had more books written by teens to share with their students, so we’re hoping this could fill that need,” she says. “As far as I know, there aren’t many collections of poetry being taught in the classroom, let alone collections by teens.” 

Steele’s commitment to empowering teens is partially motivated by her own experiences as a young person. “I didn’t know I could be an editor,” she says. “I thought if I got my English degree, I was just going to be a high school English teacher. But if someone had told me that I could be editing a magazine, I probably would have made different choices. We’re trying to create these experiences for kids at this age so they can make more informed choices about what they’re interested in doing. That’s the underlying point of all of this: creating, through the literary arts, skills that can be transferable to any career path they’re interested in.”

Tara Jayakar is the founder and editor of Raptor Editing. She lives in New York City.

[Y]volve Publishing’s poets (from left) Semira Truth Garrett, Jalen Kobayashi, Kai Wright, and Nyvia Taylor. (Credit: Kikomo.p Imagery)

Amanda Gorman Named National Youth Poet Laureate

by

Maggie Millner

4.27.17

Online Only

Last night in New York City, at a historic ceremony at Gracie Mansion, nineteen-year-old Amanda Gorman of Los Angeles was named the first national youth poet laureate. The unprecedented title, to be awarded annually, honors a teen poet who demonstrates not only extraordinary literary talent but also a proven record of community engagement and youth leadership.

For Gorman, poetry and civic outreach aren’t separate interests. The Harvard University freshman knows firsthand that creative writing can build confidence and a sense of community among young people whose voices are often underrepresented in mainstream dialogue. In 2016 she founded One Pen One Page, a nonprofit organization that provides an “online platform and creative writing programs for student storytellers to change the world.” She continues to serve as the organization’s executive director.

Gorman’s own writing often addresses the intersections of race, feminism, and adolescence, as well as the changing landscape of her native Los Angeles. For both her poetry and her advocacy, Gorman has been recognized by Forbes, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the YoungArts Foundation, and the OZY Genius Awards. She has also performed on The Today Show, ABC Family, and Nickelodeon News, and helped introduce Hillary Clinton at the 2017 Global Leadership Awards.

“For me, being able to stand on a stage as a spoken word poet, as someone who overcame a speech impediment, as the descendent of slaves who would have been prosecuted for reading and writing, I think it really symbolizes how, by pursuing a passion and never giving up, you can go as far as your wildest dreams,” said Gorman at the ceremony on Wednesday evening. “This represents such a significant moment because never in my opinion have the arts been more important than now.”

Amanda Gorman, national youth poet laureate.
 

The event represented the culmination of years of work by arts organizations across the country. In 2009 literary arts nonprofit Urban Word NYC, in partnership with the New York City Campaign Finance Board and Mayor’s Office, began bestowing the annual title of New York City youth poet laureate on one visionary poet between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC, says the program was founded on a belief that “young poets deserve to be in spaces of power, privilege, and governance, and to have their voices front and center of the sociopolitical dialogue happening in our city.”

Since the inception of New York’s youth poet laureate program, arts and literacy organizations in over thirty-five cities have followed suit, launching their own youth laureateship positions. As it spread nationally, the program garnered support from the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and PEN Center USA, among other major poetry organizations. Finally, in 2016, the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities partnered with Urban Word to bring the program to the national level.

Last July a jury of prominent poets, including U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang, and Academy of American Poets executive director Jen Benka, narrowed the pool of local laureates down to five national finalists. Poets were evaluated on the caliber and subject matter of their poems, as well as their commitment to serving their communities through volunteer and advocacy work, and each finalist was selected to represent a geographic region of the country (Northeast, Southeast, South, Midwest, and West). Along with Gorman, Hajjar Baban of Detroit, Nkosi Nkululeko of New York City, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay of Nashville, and Andrew White of Houston were named the first annual regional laureates and finalists for the inaugural national youth poet laureateship.

Each finalist received a book deal with independent press Penmanship Books, which published Gorman’s first poetry collection, The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough, in 2015. Over the past year, the finalists have also had the opportunity to perform for large audiences at renowned venues, including the Poetry Foundation, the Kennedy Center, and the White House. As the national youth poet laureate, Gorman will continue to give readings and participate in events across the country throughout her yearlong term.

“The role of poetry, especially in marginalized communities, is to provide a voice to those who are traditionally silenced,” says Cirelli, “and the best way to effect social change is to provide platforms for youth to tell their stories. We hope to leverage our work to allow these diverse stories to be told in spaces that have historically omitted youth voices, and to energize and engage the issues that they are most passionate about.”

The ceremony at Gracie Mansion featured performances by three of the finalists, as well as a roster of current and former New York City youth poets laureate. The performers were introduced by a group of acclaimed poets, including American Book Prize winner Kimiko Hahn and four-time National Poetry Slam champion Patricia Smith. Nkululeko recited a poem about his hair, a metaphor through which he discussed his relationship with his mother and collective African American history. Baban, who was named runner-up for the national title, recited a sestina on language, family, and her Muslim name. Finally, Gorman delivered a poem about how her speech impediment led her to discover writing.

“I am so grateful to be part of this cohort of young creatives who are taking up their pens to have a voice for what is right and what is just,” Gorman said in her acceptance speech. “I don’t just want to write—I want to do right as well.”

 

Maggie Millner is Poets & Writers Magazine’s Diana and Simon Raab Editorial Fellow.  
 

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

by

Dana Isokawa

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

In 2008 the Library of Congress, the Children’s Book Council, and the nonprofit organization Every Child a Reader established the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature position to celebrate and promote books for children and young adult readers. The current ambassador, graphic novelist and recent MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Gene Luen Yang, started his term in January 2016. Yang has devoted much of his work to his Reading Without Walls Challenge, which encourages kids to read books with unfamiliar characters, topics, and formats. Yang is the perfect advocate for such an undertaking: His popular graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints have pushed against cultural stereotypes and blurred the lines between the comic-book and book-publishing industries. More than halfway through his two-year term, Yang spoke about his work as the ambassador.

What inspired you to come up with the Reading Without Walls Challenge?
We want kids to read outside their comfort zones, and we want them to do it in three ways. One: We want them to read about characters who don’t look like them or live like them. Two: We want them to read about topics they don’t know anything about. And three: We want them to read books in different formats. So if they normally read only graphic novels for fun, we want them to try a chapter book, and if they read only chapter books for fun, we want them to try a graphic novel.

What are you planning next?
Right now we’re trying to promote the Reading Without Walls program. We’ve put together a bunch of downloadable materials: recommended reading lists, posters, and certificates of completion. We’re hoping librarians, booksellers, and teachers will download, print, and use these materials to promote the initiative with their classes. And we’re trying to do a wider national push for the summer.

What else is involved in the national ambassador position?
It’s pretty flexible. I have a few speaking engagements—I was at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., in the fall, which was a ton of fun. I’m going to go again this year, and I’ve done a few school visits, some of them in person, some of them over Skype. We’ve tried some online stuff. I have a video podcast called the Reading Without Walls podcast—it’s just me having conversations about children’s books with people I really like. I had one that came out with Lois Lowry, who wrote The Giver; another one with Patrick Ness, who wrote A Monster Calls. I also do a monthly column at Book Riot about making comics, and we’re probably going to start another podcast this year.

Why do you think it’s important for kids to read books with characters who don’t look or live like them?
There are studies that show that fiction in particular builds empathy—that when you read about characters who don’t look or live like you, you begin to understand them a little bit better. You understand what makes you similar and how vast the differences are, and it helps you to be a little bit more compassionate toward people who are different from you. Right now it seems like—not just in America, but around the world—we need a little more empathy. And I include myself in that too. I worry about how technology affects us. Just recently with the presidential election, there was all of [this research] about how Facebook basically shows you stuff you like to read. And then even beyond that, you can literally read about yourself all day. You could just fill your whole day with pure narcissism because of digital media. And I think fiction is the exact opposite of that. Well-written fiction pulls you out of your own mind space and helps you see into the thoughts and lives of somebody else.

Can you think of a book where you were reading without walls as a kid?
As an Asian American kid growing up in America in the eighties, almost every book that I read was outside of my own walls, because they were about kids that were part of the majority culture. I do think that maybe gender-wise there were books that pushed me outside of my walls. Like almost every kid in the eighties, I loved Beverly Cleary and I loved the Ramona books. I think as a character Ramona really broke stereotypes and cultural norms about the way little girls should act, because she was creative and rambunctious and kind of loud. And there was a lot of overlap in the way she saw the world and the way I saw the world as a little kid. So I think that that pushed me out. And there were also books that mirrored my life. I started collecting comics in the fifth grade and got really obsessed with superheroes. I wonder if part of that obsession comes from the fact that these superheroes negotiated two different identities—Superman wasn’t just Superman, he was also Clark Kent. In some ways that mirrored my own reality since I had a Chinese name at home and an American name at school; I lived under two different sets of expectations. And Superman is actually an immigrant too—he deals with the cultures of both Krypton and America.

Have your experiences as a graphic novelist informed the challenge, especially the part about reading in different formats?
Yes, absolutely. I think in America, up until pretty recently, the comic-book market and the book market were really two separate entities. They had their own stores, distribution systems, norms, and readerships. It’s only in the last ten or fifteen years that they’ve started working together. I really think I’ve been a beneficiary of that merging, and it’s exciting to see. It’s exciting to see how publishers and authors who are prominent in one area are starting to embrace the work from the authors in the other area. More and more we’re seeing publishers who typically only publish prose books start to add graphic novels to their list. On the other side, we’re starting to see comic-book publishers recruit writers who are primarily known for their prose, like Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Marvel.

Do you think that’s because people’s opinions or the form itself is changing? Can you diagnose why that shift is happening?
I think there are three prominent comic cultures in the world. There’s the American one; there’s an Asian one that’s centered primarily around Japan, and there’s a European one centered around France and French-speaking Belgium. And in those other two cultures, comics have been prominent for a long time. If you go to Japan, there will be people of every age and gender reading graphic novels and manga on the subways. In France, it’s the same way: They televise the comic awards shows. In both of those cultures, it’s always been a big deal. It’s only in America that comics have been in this backwater. And that really goes back to the 1950s when the child psychologist Fredric Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent, in which he argued that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. The United States Congress took it very seriously and had a series of congressional hearings where they called comic-book authors, publishers, and artists to Washington, D.C., to testify to see if comics actually caused juvenile delinquency. These hearings lasted for a few weeks, but didn’t end conclusively—there was no congressional decision that came out of it. But they damaged the reputation of comics in the eyes of the American public, and that lasted for decades. That didn’t happen in Japan or France. I feel what happened in Japan and France was a much more natural development of the medium, whereas in America it was stunted. It wasn’t until the last couple of decades that people have forgotten about what happened in the fifties. People have finally started to realize that comics don’t cause juvenile delinquency.

What draws you to working with and writing for young people?
I think it’s kind of my natural storytelling voice. When I first started writing comics, I was a self-publisher. I was working at a tiny scale. I would Xerox comics and I’d try to sell them at shows. I’d sell probably a dozen or two—tiny scale. And when you’re working at that level, you don’t think about demographics. I wasn’t actually categorized as a young-adult author until I signed with First Second, my primary publisher. They come out of the book world, not the comic-book world. In the book world age demographics are huge; that’s how booksellers decide where to shelve their books and how to sell them. So I was categorized there. It’s not something I had in my head when I first started, but I think it sits well—probably because I was a high-school teacher for a long time. I taught high-school computer science for seventeen years, so I was just surrounded by teenage voices, and a lot of that just bleeds into you. When you spend so much time in the hallways of a school, the voices of those hallways just kind of get into you.

Dana Isokawa is the associate editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Academy Establishes Web Resource for Teen Poets

6.18.09

Online Only

Yesterday, the Academy of American Poets launched a new online poetry resource targeted at teenage readers and writers of poetry. The initiative was conceived after the organization conducted a survey of visitors to its Web site and found that 75 percent of users developed an interest in poetry before the age of eighteen.

The new home page features writing resources and a collection of poems for teens, as well as links to the organization’s discussion forum and a comprehensive index of Web sites and reference materials for poets. A “Leave Your Mark” feature prompts teen users to share indispensable lines of poetry, upcoming events, and to create virtual poetry notebooks of their own design featuring poems, writer profiles, and interviews culled from the Academy’s site.

Young writers are also prompted to sign up for the “Street Team” newsletter, which will notify them of poetry projects and contests in which they could participate. Planned programs include the Free Verse Photo Project, in which a line of poetry is written using a temporary medium and photographed before it disappears, the National Poetry Writing Month challenge and pledge drive, and Poem In Your Pocket Day.

The home page initiative was funded by close to five hundred Academy members, the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, which supports advancement of artistic inquiry and scholarship, and the graduating class of 2008 from Holmdel High School in New Jersey.

A New Center for Black Poetics

Q&A: Thomas’s App for Young Readers

by

Jennifer Baker

July/August 2017
6.14.17

In Print and Online

In the summer of 2014, eighteen-year-old Kaya Thomas launched We Read Too, an app that offers a comprehensive database of multicultural books for young readers. Thomas had been frustrated with the difficulty of finding books by and about people of color in libraries and bookstores, so she designed and wrote the code for the app (she recently graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in computer science), which now has information on hundreds of books and more than fifteen thousand users. “I knew that if my app had even helped one person feel represented and showed them that their stories are being told too,” wrote Thomas in a piece at Medium about starting the app, “I had done my job.” Word spread further about We Read Too in March after Thomas launched an Indiegogo campaign to expand the app and raised $15,000. In the next several months, Thomas plans to launch a website for We Read Too and expand its catalog to more than a thousand books. As work on the app progresses, Thomas spoke about her larger mission and hopes for We Read Too. 

How has the We Read Too app evolved over the years?
When I first released We Read Too, it had a directory that included 300 children’s and young adult titles. Each title had a detail page where you could view the book cover, title, author, and description. There was also a suggestion feature where users could send me titles they thought should be included. Since then the directory has expanded to more than 630 titles, and you can search by author or title. You can now share any of the books via text message, e-mail, or social media, and you can view the book on Safari to purchase it. There’s also a discovery feature now that allows you to see one random book at a time so you don’t have to search through the entire directory.

Was it a purposeful decision to include both self-published and traditionally published books in this list? 
I wanted to include self-published works because it can be hard for those authors to get readers to discover their work. A lot of authors who are self-published have reached out to me in hopes that We Read Too can be a place for them to get more reader discovery for their work. I know that for authors of color it can be hard to get into the publishing world, so I want to support those who haven’t gone through the traditional routes. I want all authors of color to have their work highlighted in We Read Too, regardless of how they got their work out there.

Do you have plans to include adult fiction in the app?
I eventually do want to include adult fiction in the app, but it would be a larger undertaking because there are so many different genres within that category. I want to make sure I have a significant number of titles in each genre before I add them to the app. 

We Read Too is free. Do you think you will ever charge for it so you can continue updates and expansion? 
We Read Too will always be free for individual users. I never want to charge users to access the directory of titles because that would be counterintuitive toward the mission. I want titles written by people of color to be easier to discover and all in one place, not blocked by a paywall. I want users to discover titles they can share with the young people in their lives and community. I want users to know that these titles exist and, more specifically, for users who are people of color, I want them to see that there are authors who share their background and are creating work that reflects their culture in some way.    

Jennifer Baker is a publishing professional, the creator and host of the Minorities in Publishing podcast, the panel organizer for the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books, and the social medial director and a writing instructor for Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of the forthcoming short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018).

Kaya Thomas (Credit: Faith Rotich)

Q&A: Nicole Sealey Leads Cave Canem

by

Tayari Jones

May/June 2017
4.12.17

In Print and Online

Cave Canem was established by Cornelius Eady and Toi Derricotte in 1996 to nurture black poets both on the page and in the publishing marketplace. The Brooklyn, New York–based organization’s many programs include writing workshops, master classes, a reading series, publication prizes, and an annual retreat, which brings together more than fifty poets, or “fellows,” each year. In January Nicole Sealey, previously Cave Canem’s programs director, became the organization’s new executive director. A veteran arts administrator (including a previous role as the assistant director of Poets & Writers’ Readings & Workshops program), Sealey is also a poet; her first full-length collection, Ordinary Beast, will be published by Ecco in September. A couple of months into her new position, Sealey spoke about the future of Cave Canem.

Can you tell me a little bit about your relationship to Cave Canem?
Almost ten years ago I participated in Cave Canem’s eight-week fall workshop in New York City, facilitated by Marilyn Nelson. I was a very young writer and it ended up being a formative experience in my life. We got serious about craft and made lifelong connections in the process. I’ve met many of my closest friends through Cave Canem, the closest of all being my husband, John Murillo. The very least I can do for an organization that has served me well for the last decade is to return the gesture. 

How does being a writer influence the way you will lead the organization?
Cave Canem has always had a “poets first” philosophy, which has served the organization well for the last twenty-plus years. Remember, the organization was founded by rock-star poets and directed for the past decade by Alison Meyers, also a poet. In that tradition, I plan to lead with both head and heart, which are the qualities I value most in poetry. 

What’s ahead for Cave Canem and for you as the new executive director?
In May we’ll be capping off our twentieth-anniversary year with Cave Canem 20/20: A Panoramic Vision of Black Poetry, a two-and-a-half day poetry forum at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn. The forum will offer readings, skill-building panels, artist conversations, and more. I’m also looking forward to my first retreat as executive director. The retreat takes place in June at the University of Pittsburgh in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. It’s our flagship program, and where, as Harryette Mullen says, “black poets, individually and collectively, can inspire and be inspired by others, relieved of any obligation to explain or defend their blackness.”

So much has changed since Cave Canem faculty member Elizabeth Alexander recited “Praise Song for the Day,” the inaugural poem for Barack Obama in 2009. What do you see as the role of Cave Canem, and poetry more broadly, in the new political climate?
“So much has changed” is a very gracious way to describe the political climate in which we now find ourselves. In “Praise Song for the Day,” the speaker asks, “What if the mightiest word is love?” I have no doubt that it is love, but the new administration would have me believe that the mightiest word is fear or, worse yet, the president’s name. It is neither. It is love. And what is love if not a society based on justice and equality? With this in mind, the role of Cave Canem in particular, and poetry in general, is and will be to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. With love. Bigly. 

Are there any outreach programs on tap to connect poetry with readers?
Cave Canem’s Poets Tour, a nonprofit speakers bureau, connects national audiences with Cave Canem fellows through readings and workshops. This year we hope to increase the number of participating fellows and reach out to presenting institutions, including high schools, universities, museums, libraries, and prisons. We want to bring black poets to diverse communities.  

Tayari Jones is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.         

Nicole Sealey (Credit: Murray Greenfield )

Q&A: Yang Inspires Young Readers

The American Writers Museum

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

What do Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Jack Kerouac’s 120-foot scroll upon which he famously penned On the Road, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” all have in common? They are on display, side by side, at the American Writers Museum (AWM) in downtown Chicago, which officially opened its doors to the public in May.

A museum focused solely on the nation’s writers and writing, the AWM is the first of its kind in the United States. Founder Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish engineer and scientist who lives in Washington, D.C., was inspired by the Dublin Writers Museum, which opened in 1991. “I love literature, in particular poetry, and just love spending my time with Irish writers there,” O’Hagan says. “When I looked into visiting an American version, I was shocked to learn none existed. So I decided to start one myself.”

Eight years later, after nearly $10 million in private funds was raised and “months upon months” were spent debating the museum’s design and focus, the AWM was born. Housed a block from Millennium Park, on Chicago’s “cultural mile”—so called for its many museums, colleges, and theaters—the nearly 11,000-square-foot museum displays everything from Walt Whitman’s verse to Octavia Butler’s reflections on writing to Timex’s famous slogan, “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” The variety is no accident. Rather than hire a single expert of American letters, the AWM formed a committee of writers, scholars, critics, and arts administrators from around the country to determine what the museum should celebrate.

“When we set out to define ‘American writing,’ we realized we didn’t want to just house literature,” says O’Hagan. “We also weren’t interested in the idea of the ‘best’ writing or in sealing the museum off for academics or quote-unquote ‘readers.’” Instead, the museum aims for a broader reach, focusing on how American writers and writing have shaped the country’s identity and culture and continue to inform everyday lives. “Our mission, like perhaps all important writing, is to include, not exclude. So we focused more on the extraordinary history of American writing, the array of types and backgrounds of people who have contributed to it, and the story of America our writing collectively tells.”

To create this inclusive space, O’Hagan and his team of developers hired Amaze Design, a firm known for creating visually striking, interactive learning spaces such as the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama. The final product is a vibrant, inspiring space that allows museumgoers to interact with the writers of America’s past and present and get inspired to write themselves. In “Mind of a Writer,” patrons can bang away like Hemingway at a bank of old typewriters and hang their masterpieces on the “Story of the Day” wall for others to enjoy. The “Word Play” exhibit houses a variety of word games on a virtual tabletop, encouraging visitors to write and share original poems. “This isn’t a library,” says O’Hagan. “It’s not a place where you want to go sit down and read. It’s a three-dimensional space where you interact with what you find, not just look at it and move on.”

In addition to the interactive portions of the museum, several exhibits focus on the history and range of American writing. A mural depicting a tree full of squirrels reading famous children’s books fills an entire wall of the “Children’s Literature Gallery.” The exhibit in the main hall, “American Voices,” celebrates a hundred emblematic American writers below a sixty-foot timeline of American history, starting with the exploration of the Americas by Europeans in 1492 and ending in the present day. On an opposite wall, a “Surprise Bookshelf” encourages visitors to explore less literary writing, such as cookbooks, sports writing, journalism, and song lyrics.

So far, the museum has been a success. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, authors Stuart Dybek and David McCullough, and other writers, booksellers, and community members attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony in May, and the museum is already on track to reach its goal of 120,000 visitors annually. The museum also offers regular events and resources, such as readings, workshops, author discussions, and storytelling hours, and the staff hopes to expand the museum’s programming by partnering with writing organizations across the country.

The museum’s opening comes at a tenuous time for the arts in America, with funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities being threatened. But its early success is a reminder of the public’s interest in American writers and writing, and the AWM seems poised to affirm and protect the value of American literature for years to come. “It will be an enormous resource,” Dybek said at the museum’s opening ceremony. “And hopefully it will spread through the United States this notion that you can have this kind of local, cultural institution—something that passes on the culture.” 
 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.

The Poetry Coalition Takes Flight

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

Poetry Is Going Extinct, Government Data Show.” “Does Poetry Still Matter?” “Poetry Is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?” These headlines, the likes of which seem to crop up on the Internet every year, suggest the same thing: Poetry is no longer relevant in America. No one reads it, and no one cares. “Thankfully, they’re wrong,” says Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets. “People are turning to poetry, not away. That’s the story the Poetry Coalition plans to tell.”

The Poetry Coalition is a partnership of twenty poetry organizations from across the United States, including the Academy of American Poets, the Wick Poetry Center, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, LAMBDA Literary, and the Cave Canem Foundation, whose goal is to enhance the visibility of poetry and its impact on American culture as well as on the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds throughout the country. 

The coalition began to take shape in November 2015, when leaders of fifteen of the twenty participating organizations gathered at the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to explore how they might work together. “We determined that if we leveraged our unique assets as poetry organizations across the nation and collaborated on our actual programming, we would inspire more interest and support in the art form,” Benka says. The time for such a collaboration seems right, as—despite what the headlines suggest—the popularity of poetry appears to be on the rise. “We’re seeing gigantic increases in people subscribing to poetry journals and Listservs,” says Benka, who notes that coalition members’ websites have also seen increased traffic in the past couple of years. “There are more journals than ever…. Everything is trending up. Nothing is trending down.”

The coalition’s first project, “Because We Come From Everything: Poetry & Migration,” launches this month and will present an array of programs on the theme of migration. Throughout the month, each member organization will present a program or project focused on the theme. CantoMundo and Letras Latinas—which both work to promote the voices of Latino and Latina poets—will publish essays and interviews with poets on Latina and Latino poetry and migration on the Letras Latinas blog each day. The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival will address migration through a more environmental lens by copresenting The Birds of May at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival, which will be held in Princeton, New Jersey, from March 28 to April 2. The film examines the diminishment of New Jersey’s Delaware Bayshore after Hurricane Sandy and the ensuing threat posed to the migratory patterns of the endangered red knot bird. The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers’ National Student Poets Program, meanwhile, will post poems by National Student Poets as well as others that tackle the migration theme to their Tumblr page with the hashtag #WeComeFromEverything. 

The list of programs is as innovative as it is socially relevant, especially amid increased national conversations about immigration. “Any way you tackle migration is going to have social relevance,” says Benka, “but it’s particularly appropriate for a collection of nonprofits in support of poetry to be doing it, and we’re excited by the variety of interpretations and mediums of the programs we’re putting together.” Once the initiative is complete, the coalition plans to evaluate its success and organize similar initiatives.

While it’s hard to predict how the coalition will enhance the visibility of poetry among the general public, the organizers believe that working together to promote poetry across shared themes will demonstrate the form’s particular and powerful impact on, within, and across communities. “Poetry uniquely inspires empathy and greater understanding between people,” says Benka. “What better way to build on the popularity of poetry and to tell the true story of the art form than via poetry itself?”    

 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. He is the acquisitions editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor in chief of poemoftheweek.org, founder and editor of the Floodgate Poetry Series, and founder of the Little Grassy Literary Festival. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.
       

Whitman, Alabama

by

Maya C. Popa

July/August 2017
6.14.17

In Print and Online

Filmmaker Jennifer Crandall first visited Alabama in 2013 on a short-term assignment for Alabama Media Group, a digital media company that produces television and video programming and publishes three of the most prominent newspapers in the state. Though she was living in Amsterdam at the time, Crandall was so inspired by Alabama that she moved to Birmingham, became the company’s first artist-in-residence, and began developing a documentary project that would showcase the state’s citizens. But rather than use a traditional interview format, Crandall decided to center her project around Walt Whitman’s iconic 1855 poem “Song of Myself” for its celebration of American identity. She has since spent the past two years traveling throughout Alabama, filming people reading from the poem. The resulting series, Whitman, Alabama, captures the spirit of the state and its people while illustrating the many themes of the poem—race, religion, politics, sexuality, and immigration—that the nation continues to wrestle with today. 

The first installment in the series featured ninety-seven-year-old Virginia Mae Schmitt, who has since died, reciting the poem’s famous opening lines. “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” reads Schmitt from an armchair in her living room in Birmingham. “And what I assume you shall assume.” Since that initial shoot, Crandall, with the support of Alabama Media Group and the help of fellow filmmakers Bob Miller and Pierre Kattar, has filmed around forty of the fifty-two planned films; she posts a new video to the project website (www.whitmanalabama.com) each week. The project features a diverse group of Alabamians, including Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham; Mariam Jalloh, a fourteen-year-old immigrant from Guinea living in Birmingham; and Demetrius, Frederick, Patricia, and Tammy—all inmates at prisons in Montgomery. 

Acquaintances and friends introduced Crandall to several of the project’s readers, but she approached many people at random too. Crandall was surprised by how readily Alabamians agreed to being filmed. Each subject is asked to read from one of the poem’s fifty-two verses. “No matter what way we went about it, people just said yes,” says Crandall, who notes that the project is not about making the audience into Whitman experts. “Most people have heard of Whitman, from Alabama to anyplace else I’ve been, but they are not really conversant in his work. Fundamentally, it’s a project about getting Americans more conversant about who we are as Americans.” 

Crandall strives to make the videos intimate reflections of the subjects and to film them in environments where they can be fully themselves: a living room, for instance, a front porch, or the woods. Each video juxtaposes candid moments alongside the recitation. A group of teenagers skateboard, dance, beatbox, and tease one another in a vacant lot while taking turns reading verse 21. One participant, Beth Spivey, recounts getting into her car in the middle of the night to chase a vandal down the road before reading the opening lines of verse 34.

Crandall embraces spontaneity in her process. She filmed verse 43 by driving along Route 43 and seeing whom she might encounter. While passing through the small city of Union Springs, she met Anthony Stewart, who was sitting under a tree. When she asked him to read a portion of the poem, he explained that he has a hard time reading. In the video, Crandall can be heard feeding Stewart the lines from behind a tree. The result is moving: Stewart repeats complex language with composure, lines Crandall herself stumbles over. “I’m not a good reader, but I’m a good singer,” Stewart says. The scene closes with Stewart singing as a thunderstorm breaks over Union Springs. “That is the stuff I live for,” says Crandall. “Each of these verses has its own fingerprint, which has to do with the people behind the camera, in front of the camera, and the Whitman verse chosen. This project is 51 percent serendipity, 49 percent planning. It’s a gamble, but part of what we do is in the spirit of the moment. We work with what people give us. Everyone is a coauthor in that they feel some sense of ownership.”

In the opening verse of “Song of Myself,” Whitman proclaims, “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” This sentiment lives at the heart of Crandall’s series, celebrating the disparate lives of individuals while emphasizing our unity as a nation. “Whitman wrote the poem at a pretty divided time,” Crandall says. “He did a lot of work to help us empathetically understand who we could be and didn’t restrain himself to the time and place he was from. He offered us guidelines for how to think of ourselves as Americans. We are inextricably linked to one another and no one particular thing. Today we’re struggling with that.” 

The irony of using the words of Whitman, a Northerner, to showcase the South does not escape Crandall. “Bringing this poem to life by Southerners was an attempt to remind us that if you’re a Northerner, you’re also a Southerner. We are part of each other.”  

Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. She is the author of the poetry chapbook The Bees Have Been Canceled (New Michigan Press, 2017). Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.

Bob Tedrow, a concertina maker in Birmingham, Alabama, plays the banjo as part of his reading of verse 7 of “Song of Myself” for the Whitman, Alabama project. 

The Shakespeare Sonnet Project

by

Maya C. Popa

November/December 2016
10.12.16

In Print and Online

In 2013 actor and director Ross Williams, founder of the nonprofit New York Shakespeare Exchange, set out to film all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets, each performed by a different actor in a New York City location. After raising nearly $50,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, filming began. The original deadline was Shakespeare’s 450th birthday (April 23, 2014), but the project’s aim—to merge the literary and visual arts, and bring the poetry of William Shakespeare to the poetry of New York City—quickly proved more ambitious than expected. 

As Williams and his team—made up of producers, a copy writer, and text coaches—began to film the sonnets, it became clear that the project transcended a mere collection of recitations. Each video became an artistic object in its own right. “This project is unlike any I have seen before,” says Mark Karafin, who directed Sonnet 108, which won runner-up in the annual Shakespeare Short Film Competition in 2015. “I read Sonnet 108 and it spoke to me immediately.” Filmed at the John T. Brush Stairway in Harlem, where the Polo Grounds, the original New York Giants baseball stadium, once stood, the sonnet explores “the first conceit of love, and its agelessness.” “I felt strongly about this location,” says Karafin. “It had substance and relevance to New York. There was history here.” Billy Magnussen, an actor who earned a Tony nomination for the Broadway production Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, stars in the film, and recites the sonnet in a voice-over. “My favorite part of this project was the opportunity to collaborate with such talented and inspiring artists in every department,” says Karafin.

Each of the project’s short films, released online and through a mobile app, offers a unique stylistic take on the sonnets: The adaptation of Sonnet 73, which opens with “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” depicts a gray, blurry image of a man sitting beneath a wintry arbor in Central Park while another man plays the saxophone. Sonnet 116—“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”—features a couple walking along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade in the rain. Sonnet 44—“If the dull substance of my flesh were thought”—uses special effects to portray a man walking in an abstract, geometric landscape as his skin morphs into different metals. 

The Sonnet Project app, which was launched in May 2013, has been an integral part of the project’s success, offering a catalogue of the filmed sonnets and a mapping feature that shows the setting used in each production. This allows the project to highlight locations in New York City that tourists and locals alike might otherwise overlook. “That’s been a part of the project that really makes people notice us,” says Williams, who adds that the interactivity of the project “could really make an impact” in terms of its reach. Additionally, each video provides a transcript of the sonnet, including a brief analysis and explanation of the wordplay. “It’s a unique platform to learn and expose all parts of Shakespeare,” says Karafin.

Ultimately, the project aims to nurture the next generation of readers and artists, helping them gain confidence with Shakespearean language and inspiring them to take on creative projects of their own. “We are currently deep in the creation of the Sonnet Project educational tools,” says Williams, who, by the end of the year, plans to unveil a two-week curriculum for high school students that teaches Shakespearean language and encourages students to create their own Sonnet Project films on their mobile devices. “We have had a number of educators tell us that they like to use the Sonnet Project in their classroom because it’s the one time of day they can stop telling their students to put their phones away,” says Williams.

So far, the Sonnet Project has engaged more than five hundred artists and produced videos for all but approximately thirty of the sonnets. Filmmakers and directors are invited to apply to create an original video adaptation of any of the remaining sonnets; if accepted, the Sonnet Project will work with that filmmaker to assign a New York City location, actor, and text coach for the film. In his plans for 2017, Williams hopes to launch a second series of videos of the 154 sonnets, this time filmed in locations all over the United States and abroad. The team also hopes to add several new mapping features to the app so that it can support walking tours and even scavenger hunts. “Our goal is to create a global conversation about Shakespeare,” says Williams. “By existing in a cinematic space, Shakespeare can feel alive and present.”

 

Maya C. Popa is a writer and teacher based in New York City. Her website is www.mayacpopa.com.

Calling Ishmael

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

January/February 2016
12.15.15

In Print and Online

A phone rings, but it’s not the one in your pocket; you realize the sound is coming from an old-school rotary pay phone in a corner of your favorite bookstore. You look around. It’s just you and this softly ringing relic of a bygone era. You pick up the phone. “Hello?” you say. “Ishmael, what’s going on, man?” a smooth-talking stranger says on the other end. “I just wanted to tell you a little bit about my experience with The Catcher in the Rye.”

Welcome to Call Me Ishmael, perhaps the most celebrated opening sentence in literary history and now an innovative and irresistible new tool for discovering books and sharing stories about them. The project began in 2014, when founders Logan Smalley and Stephanie Kent were exchanging favorite opening lines of books in a bar in New York City’s West Village. One of them wondered aloud, “What if Ishmael had a phone number? What if you actually could call him?” In an instant, the idea for Call Me Ishmael was born: a phone number, an answering machine, a website, and an invitation to “readers around the world to tell us stories about the books they love.”

The process is simple: If a reader has a story to tell about a particular book—how it was a source of inspiration, maybe, or how it was life changing—that reader can call Ishmael at (774) 325-0503 and leave the story as an anonymous voice mail. Those who just want to listen can visit the website (callmeishmael.com) and hear more than a thousand stories about books of all types: literary fiction, fantasy, mystery, poetry, nonfiction, and everything in between. Smalley and Kent select their favorite stories and share a few each week on the website and via social media. When the pair discover a particularly wonderful story, they transcribe it on a typewriter (yes, a real manual typewriter) and share it as a video.

But they’re not stopping there. Now, in the form of a rotary-style pay phone produced this winter, Call Me Ishmael will soon be found in bookstores, libraries, schools, coffee shops, and even homes around the world. A small placard on the phone provides a directory of books. Dial the number for, say, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road or Mary Oliver’s Thirst, and moments later a caller is listening to a stranger’s journey with Kerouac or, in one of Smalley and Kent’s favorite calls, a woman’s recollection of serenading trees with Oliver’s verse in a Nashville park.

To fund the project, Smalley and Kent, who both have day jobs—Smalley is the director of TED Education and Kent works in community and marketing at Astrohaus—conducted a Kickstarter campaign in early November 2015. The campaign exceeded its ten-thousand-dollar goal in the first two days, and the project’s first phones will be produced early this year, including one that will be installed in Avid Bookshop in Athens, Georgia. The phone is portable, requires minimal space, and can be plugged in or powered by a rechargeable battery. It can be purchased outright (the cost is still being determined) or rented for events such as festivals or readings. Owners can also track the number of listens for each story on an app that manages the phone.

Owners of Call Me Ishmael phones can also use the app to assign any voice mail in Ishmael’s library (or stories that the phone owner uploads) to any button on the phone. “A bookstore might want to make all buttons correlate to stories about a visiting or local author, or a librarian might want to feature stories sourced from a fifth-grade class,” says Smalley. “It’s just a simple and, hopefully, delightful way to discover and celebrate books.” The phone’s app even has a “mysterious button”—when an owner presses the button on the app, the physical phone will start ringing. When someone answers, a message will play.

The response to Call Me Ishmael so far has been positive—not least, the founders believe, because it taps into why people so deeply love books. More than two thousand readers have called in and left messages, and the recordings have been played over a million times. “Ishmael is a really unique way to talk about books and to get people talking about books,” says Smalley. “It isn’t a review of books, it’s a way for people—writers, readers, teachers, anyone—to share stories about the stories that have touched them.” Kent agrees: “Books affect us in profound ways. Ishmael provides readers a way to share that experience, and it’s fascinating the range of people who call and the books they tell us about. Sometimes people call and instantly start crying. More often than not, they share intimate stories from their own lives.”

In one message, about Shirley Conran’s book Lace, a woman says, “I was adopted at birth. And at the time when I read this book, I wanted desperately to find my birth mother. And I found her.” In another, a man talks about his experience with Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches. “I was born about five months before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate by definition is not equal,” the caller says. “My Sunday school teacher told us that God wanted us to be separate.” Another: “I feel like I grew up with Harry Potter, as crazy as that sounds.”  

Ishmael also gets his fair share of prank calls (one caller asked Ishmael to pick up toilet paper for him, another declared her love for him). “The calls are just absolutely hilarious,” Kent says. “We compiled them for April Fools’ Day this year. It’s quite a treasure to wake up every day and hear what people have to say.”

Call Me Ishmael has also bridged the gap between readers and authors. Last March Cheryl Strayed posted a response to a Call Me Ishmael voice mail about her book Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar, on her Facebook page, saying that the message made her day. John Green tweeted “I’m in tears” in response to a compilation video of readers who called Ishmael to share their experiences with Green’s young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars. This is precisely why Call Me Ishmael was designed, Kent says: “to build community via narrative and to share books. Strayed and Green are just two examples of how it can do this. We’re super excited to see where all of this goes.”

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a poet, an editor, and a lecturer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is the author of a poetry collection, Ghost Gear (University of Arkansas Press, 2014). His website is andrewmk.com.

   

Dear Readers, You Are Not Alone

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

January/February 2017
12.14.16

In Print and Online

When you walk into a bar full of people silently on their phones, no one thinks anything of it,” says Guinevere de la Mare, founder of San Francisco–based Silent Book Club. “But when you walk into a bar full of people silently reading books? Now that’s an arresting image.” It’s also an image that’s becoming more common, as a new literary trend gains traction around the country: silent reading parties.

Here’s how it works: A group of friends and strangers meet at a bar or library or private home once a month and read together. They don’t read the same book. They can come and go as they please. They’re not even expected to discuss what they’re reading. All they do is read, in a shared space, together, as a community. And while some show up, read, and leave without saying a word, many pass notes, laugh out loud, or share paragraphs they particularly love with one another.

“A lot of people end up hanging out all night,” says de la Mare, whose organization helps people start their own clubs across the country and overseas. “It’s a community-driven movement to get people out in public and switch out their phones for a book.”

The original silent reading party was held in 2009 by Christopher Frizzelle, who hosts a monthly meeting at the historic Sorrento Hotel in Seattle. “This is literature standing up for itself,” says Frizzelle, who is also the editor of the Stranger, an alternative weekly published in Seattle. “TV is so good now. Breaking Bad and The Wire are basically novels, and TV is an easier, more social act. Reading, on the other hand, no matter what it is, isn’t something you typically do with other people. Silent reading parties change all that.”

Since that original party eight years ago, writers and book lovers around the world have followed suit, launching their own silent reading parties in places like Bangalore, India; Brooklyn, New York; Portland, Oregon; Evansville, Indiana; and Spokane. This past April, writer Daniel Handler (also known as Lemony Snicket), started a silent reading party at a hotel bar in San Francisco, and donates a portion of the bar proceeds from each meeting to local libraries.

“The beauty of the parties is that they’re so easy,” Frizzelle says. “People interested in starting a reading party somewhere call me for advice. Nothing actually happens at the series, I tell them. People just get together and read. So I give them my blessing and tell them to keep it simple.”

De la Mare’s Silent Book Club goes a few steps further. In addition to hosting regular reading parties in San Francisco, the organization publishes a blog on reading and books, curates an international Silent Book Club event calendar, and offers tips on how to start a club. They even send an event kit to people looking to host their own club, which includes table signs, bookmarks, and coasters. Since establishing Silent Book Club in 2012, de la Mare has helped launch fifteen Silent Book Club chapters, with monthly events in more than twenty cities worldwide, including Washington, D.C.; Birmingham, Alabama; Des Moines; Phoenix; Oakland; Andover, England; and Melbourne, Australia.

Why are these groups where “nothing actually happens” so popular? Frizzelle thinks it’s obvious: “Reading is such an isolated activity,” he says. “You’re alone. The room is quiet. You don’t have anyone to share what you’re reading with. Which is all great, it’s part of why we read. But sometimes you want to be where things are happening too, like a bar.”

Ryan Molden, a regular attendee of Frizzelle’s silent reading party, echoes this sentiment, but with a twist: “When I first started going, I had just gone through a really hard breakup and was looking for new ways to meet people. I love to read, so I thought I would check it out. Long story short: I didn’t meet my girlfriend Jessica there, but when I asked her to join me, about a year and a half ago, we fell in love, and we just moved in together.” Molden adds, “The readings provided a great way to get to know each other. And seeing so many people engrossed in reading, in a time where reading is not exactly considered cool? That’s inspiring. We’re both so glad for the opportunity to share that time together. It’s the kind of thing the world needs more of.”

For de la Mare, silent reading parties help her carve out time to read in a busy schedule. “Being a mother,” she says, “you’re often completely alone. All day. And though I’ve identified as a reader my entire life, it was really hard to give myself permission to do something for me when I was raising my toddler. The silent book club gave me that permission. That’s a gift I wouldn’t, now that I have it, go without.” 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, and writing coach. He is the acquisitions editor of Upper Rubber Boot Books, founder and editor in chief of poemoftheweek.org, and founder of the Colorado Writers’ Workshop. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.

Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

by

Jonathan Vatner

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

In March of last year Pat Conroy, the best-selling South Carolina author of such lyrical, semiautobiographical Southern epics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died of pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after, his closest friends established a nonprofit writers center and museum to pay tribute to the author’s legacy. Officially launched in February, the Pat Conroy Literary Center offers a growing roster of workshops, readings, lectures, book clubs, and special events to nourish a vibrant creative community in Conroy’s adoptive hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. “We want the center to be a haven for writers and readers, a nexus point in Southern literary life,” says Jonathan Haupt, the center’s executive director.

The idea for the center started with Marly Rusoff, Conroy’s friend of forty years and his agent for the past decade. At Conroy’s funeral, someone suggested erecting a statue in Beaufort; the idea was quickly dismissed. “My reaction was, ‘My God, Pat would hate that,’” Rusoff recalls. “What you need is a writing center, helping people the way he wanted to be helped when he was a young writer.” Conroy self-published his first book, The Boo, in 1970, and when Houghton Mifflin offered him $7,500 for his memoir The Water Is Wide, he naively replied that he couldn’t possibly raise that much money to print the book. Once he established himself in the publishing industry, Conroy dedicated himself to launching the careers of talented writers, offering advice, encouragement, and critique—not to mention effusive blurbs. Rusoff sees the center as an extension of this lifelong pursuit. 

Rusoff herself has experience in building such organizations: In the seventies, her Minneapolis bookstore became the site of the Loft, now one of the nation’s largest nonprofit literary centers. For the Pat Conroy center’s headquarters, Rusoff and her partner, Mihai Radulescu, rented a house in downtown Beaufort, owned by the mayor and his brother. The house is not unlike the one described in The Great Santini—a columned antebellum Charleston-style affair, rocking chairs on the porch and all—and it’s within walking distance of Tidalholm, the mansion used in the film. The center held a soft opening in October with a rotating exhibition of Conroy materials, including his writing desk, his father’s flight jacket, and the handwritten opening pages of The Prince of Tides.

Haupt and the board, chaired by Jane T. Upshaw, the distinguished chancellor emerita of the University of South Carolina in Beaufort, have organized the center’s programming around Conroy’s two central lessons for writers. “He believed that the best thing for being a better writer is to be a better reader,” Haupt says. “We want to honor that with an elaborate book-club model to help people read more intensely, more deeply, and with greater empathy. To writers, he said to go deeper. When you think you’re there, you’re not even close.” 

In keeping with this second lesson, the center invites local instructors and visiting writers to offer craft workshops focused on character development as well as talks and master classes. The faculty includes Bernie Schein and his daughter Maggie Schein, both loyal friends of Conroy’s; New York Times best-selling authors Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe; and South Carolinian novelist Bren McClain. 

The center will sponsor numerous special events in Beaufort and Charleston. The Watering Hole, a group of Southern poets of color, will be teaching workshops in August at the Penn Center on nearby St. Helena Island, where Conroy is buried and where he first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A series called “Evenings of Story and Song,” also planned for this year, will blend literature and live music. And the center will offer guided tours of Beaufort and Charleston, the two places most steeped in Conroy lore. Haupt also plans to extend the center’s reach by sponsoring book festivals and other events throughout the South.

The center’s signature event is the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, which will be held October 20 to October 22 in Beaufort and features readings, performances, panels, screenings, and workshops. Haupt created the festival in 2015 as a seventieth birthday celebration for Conroy, who attended nearly all the sessions. In 2016, the second annual event was held in his memory. “That first festival was such a gift to us,” Haupt says. “No one knew, not even Pat, that he was sick.”

Those who can’t make it to Beaufort can read and contribute to Porch Talk, the center’s new blog, which is hosted by writer Janis Owens and features essays on craft and publishing. “It’s not a shrine to Pat,” Haupt says of the blog. “We’d love writers at all levels of their career to participate, to make writing and publishing a little less mysterious.”

For novelist Cassandra King, Conroy’s widow and the center’s honorary chair, the new institution honors his memory perfectly. Conroy was a voracious reader and rapt listener, King says, generous to a fault. “I’m thrilled that we’re able to keep his spirit going in this way,” she says. “I just know he would be proud.” 

 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

by

Jonathan Vatner

March/April 2017
2.15.17

In Print and Online

In March of last year Pat Conroy, the best-selling South Carolina author of such lyrical, semiautobiographical Southern epics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, died of pancreatic cancer. In the weeks after, his closest friends established a nonprofit writers center and museum to pay tribute to the author’s legacy. Officially launched in February, the Pat Conroy Literary Center offers a growing roster of workshops, readings, lectures, book clubs, and special events to nourish a vibrant creative community in Conroy’s adoptive hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina. “We want the center to be a haven for writers and readers, a nexus point in Southern literary life,” says Jonathan Haupt, the center’s executive director.

The idea for the center started with Marly Rusoff, Conroy’s friend of forty years and his agent for the past decade. At Conroy’s funeral, someone suggested erecting a statue in Beaufort; the idea was quickly dismissed. “My reaction was, ‘My God, Pat would hate that,’” Rusoff recalls. “What you need is a writing center, helping people the way he wanted to be helped when he was a young writer.” Conroy self-published his first book, The Boo, in 1970, and when Houghton Mifflin offered him $7,500 for his memoir The Water Is Wide, he naively replied that he couldn’t possibly raise that much money to print the book. Once he established himself in the publishing industry, Conroy dedicated himself to launching the careers of talented writers, offering advice, encouragement, and critique—not to mention effusive blurbs. Rusoff sees the center as an extension of this lifelong pursuit. 

Rusoff herself has experience in building such organizations: In the seventies, her Minneapolis bookstore became the site of the Loft, now one of the nation’s largest nonprofit literary centers. For the Pat Conroy center’s headquarters, Rusoff and her partner, Mihai Radulescu, rented a house in downtown Beaufort, owned by the mayor and his brother. The house is not unlike the one described in The Great Santini—a columned antebellum Charleston-style affair, rocking chairs on the porch and all—and it’s within walking distance of Tidalholm, the mansion used in the film. The center held a soft opening in October with a rotating exhibition of Conroy materials, including his writing desk, his father’s flight jacket, and the handwritten opening pages of The Prince of Tides.

Haupt and the board, chaired by Jane T. Upshaw, the distinguished chancellor emerita of the University of South Carolina in Beaufort, have organized the center’s programming around Conroy’s two central lessons for writers. “He believed that the best thing for being a better writer is to be a better reader,” Haupt says. “We want to honor that with an elaborate book-club model to help people read more intensely, more deeply, and with greater empathy. To writers, he said to go deeper. When you think you’re there, you’re not even close.” 

In keeping with this second lesson, the center invites local instructors and visiting writers to offer craft workshops focused on character development as well as talks and master classes. The faculty includes Bernie Schein and his daughter Maggie Schein, both loyal friends of Conroy’s; New York Times best-selling authors Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe; and South Carolinian novelist Bren McClain. 

The center will sponsor numerous special events in Beaufort and Charleston. The Watering Hole, a group of Southern poets of color, will be teaching workshops in August at the Penn Center on nearby St. Helena Island, where Conroy is buried and where he first heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak. A series called “Evenings of Story and Song,” also planned for this year, will blend literature and live music. And the center will offer guided tours of Beaufort and Charleston, the two places most steeped in Conroy lore. Haupt also plans to extend the center’s reach by sponsoring book festivals and other events throughout the South.

The center’s signature event is the annual Pat Conroy Literary Festival, which will be held October 20 to October 22 in Beaufort and features readings, performances, panels, screenings, and workshops. Haupt created the festival in 2015 as a seventieth birthday celebration for Conroy, who attended nearly all the sessions. In 2016, the second annual event was held in his memory. “That first festival was such a gift to us,” Haupt says. “No one knew, not even Pat, that he was sick.”

Those who can’t make it to Beaufort can read and contribute to Porch Talk, the center’s new blog, which is hosted by writer Janis Owens and features essays on craft and publishing. “It’s not a shrine to Pat,” Haupt says of the blog. “We’d love writers at all levels of their career to participate, to make writing and publishing a little less mysterious.”

For novelist Cassandra King, Conroy’s widow and the center’s honorary chair, the new institution honors his memory perfectly. Conroy was a voracious reader and rapt listener, King says, generous to a fault. “I’m thrilled that we’re able to keep his spirit going in this way,” she says. “I just know he would be proud.” 

 

Jonathan Vatner is a fiction writer in Brooklyn, New York. He is the staff writer for Hue, the magazine of the Fashion Institute of Technology.

The American Writers Museum

by

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

September/October 2017
8.16.17

In Print and Online

What do Tupac Shakur’s “Dear Mama,” Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Jack Kerouac’s 120-foot scroll upon which he famously penned On the Road, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” all have in common? They are on display, side by side, at the American Writers Museum (AWM) in downtown Chicago, which officially opened its doors to the public in May.

A museum focused solely on the nation’s writers and writing, the AWM is the first of its kind in the United States. Founder Malcolm O’Hagan, an Irish engineer and scientist who lives in Washington, D.C., was inspired by the Dublin Writers Museum, which opened in 1991. “I love literature, in particular poetry, and just love spending my time with Irish writers there,” O’Hagan says. “When I looked into visiting an American version, I was shocked to learn none existed. So I decided to start one myself.”

Eight years later, after nearly $10 million in private funds was raised and “months upon months” were spent debating the museum’s design and focus, the AWM was born. Housed a block from Millennium Park, on Chicago’s “cultural mile”—so called for its many museums, colleges, and theaters—the nearly 11,000-square-foot museum displays everything from Walt Whitman’s verse to Octavia Butler’s reflections on writing to Timex’s famous slogan, “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” The variety is no accident. Rather than hire a single expert of American letters, the AWM formed a committee of writers, scholars, critics, and arts administrators from around the country to determine what the museum should celebrate.

“When we set out to define ‘American writing,’ we realized we didn’t want to just house literature,” says O’Hagan. “We also weren’t interested in the idea of the ‘best’ writing or in sealing the museum off for academics or quote-unquote ‘readers.’” Instead, the museum aims for a broader reach, focusing on how American writers and writing have shaped the country’s identity and culture and continue to inform everyday lives. “Our mission, like perhaps all important writing, is to include, not exclude. So we focused more on the extraordinary history of American writing, the array of types and backgrounds of people who have contributed to it, and the story of America our writing collectively tells.”

To create this inclusive space, O’Hagan and his team of developers hired Amaze Design, a firm known for creating visually striking, interactive learning spaces such as the American Jazz Museum in Kansas City, Missouri, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama. The final product is a vibrant, inspiring space that allows museumgoers to interact with the writers of America’s past and present and get inspired to write themselves. In “Mind of a Writer,” patrons can bang away like Hemingway at a bank of old typewriters and hang their masterpieces on the “Story of the Day” wall for others to enjoy. The “Word Play” exhibit houses a variety of word games on a virtual tabletop, encouraging visitors to write and share original poems. “This isn’t a library,” says O’Hagan. “It’s not a place where you want to go sit down and read. It’s a three-dimensional space where you interact with what you find, not just look at it and move on.”

In addition to the interactive portions of the museum, several exhibits focus on the history and range of American writing. A mural depicting a tree full of squirrels reading famous children’s books fills an entire wall of the “Children’s Literature Gallery.” The exhibit in the main hall, “American Voices,” celebrates a hundred emblematic American writers below a sixty-foot timeline of American history, starting with the exploration of the Americas by Europeans in 1492 and ending in the present day. On an opposite wall, a “Surprise Bookshelf” encourages visitors to explore less literary writing, such as cookbooks, sports writing, journalism, and song lyrics.

So far, the museum has been a success. Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, authors Stuart Dybek and David McCullough, and other writers, booksellers, and community members attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony in May, and the museum is already on track to reach its goal of 120,000 visitors annually. The museum also offers regular events and resources, such as readings, workshops, author discussions, and storytelling hours, and the staff hopes to expand the museum’s programming by partnering with writing organizations across the country.

The museum’s opening comes at a tenuous time for the arts in America, with funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities being threatened. But its early success is a reminder of the public’s interest in American writers and writing, and the AWM seems poised to affirm and protect the value of American literature for years to come. “It will be an enormous resource,” Dybek said at the museum’s opening ceremony. “And hopefully it will spread through the United States this notion that you can have this kind of local, cultural institution—something that passes on the culture.” 
 

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum is a freelance writer, editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. His poetry collection, Ghost Gear, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. His website is andrewmk.com.

The Poetry Coalition Takes Flight
Whitman, Alabama
Honoring Pat Conroy’s Legacy

In Print and Online

Noreen Tomassi, executive director of the Center for Fiction, in the auditorium of the center’s new space in Brooklyn, New York.  (Credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

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Date:
  • February 12, 2019
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