P&W–supported poet Michael Medrano will blog about the literary climate in California's underserved Central Valley throughout the month of July. Medrano is the author of Born in the Cavity of Sunsets (Bilingual Press 2009). His poems have appeared in Askew; Bombay Gin; The Cortland Review; The Packinghouse Review; Rattle; and The Yellow Medicine Review among other publications. He is the host of Pakatelas, a literary radio show, streaming worldwide at www.kfcf.org, and hosts the Random Writers Workshop in Fresno, California.

Today, I write in a collaborative workspace known as The Hashtag in Fresno’s Tower District, an eclectic neighborhood often described by residents as a wannabe San Francisco or, as the kids on the eastside used to say, that gay neighborhood beyond the tracks. For me, the beloved Tower is more than a Bay Area cliché. It is my home, a place many Fresno poets have written about. It lies just east of the infamous Highway 99, another valley literary icon mentioned by Philip Levine, Gary Soto, and many more. It is where I conduct my literary radio show and lead the Random Writers Workshop, where I write and work on poems for my next book, which, you guessed it, is about the Tower District. You can say mi barrio is central headquarters for my personal arts movement!

Your personal arts movement? I hear my mother say, shaking her head, the pencil in her hand manically circling random letters in a giant word search book she keeps by the lamp.  Where’s my personal art movement, mijo? And while you’re at it, move out of that neighborhood. You know I don’t like you walking the streets by yourself!

Truth is, I stopped showing her my poems a decade ago because she could not stand me writing about familia, especially cousin Pee-Wee who died alone, by the canal, by Target. Don’t get me wrong. Mom has always been there at the big events, like when my book of poems came out, and I followed in that rich Fresno literary tradition by having a big ole, book release party. She teases me about the first poetry reading I co-organized with Tim Z. Hernandez, the much-talked-about reading where we performed to the only two members of the audience—our mothers! 

As a child, we used to take Olive Avenue from our East Fresno apartment all the way to Roeding Park, just west of the Tower. While there, we would picnic, visit the zoo or Storyland, which to us six-year-olds was just as amazing as Disneyland. Later, we would drive back to our eastside apartment down Olive Avenue, the main street of the Tower District. The miniature me would roll down the window, unbuckle the seatbelt in Mom’s 1978 Firebird while the car was in motion and point at all the little mom-and-pop restaurants. Let’s eat there, the restaurant with the big rooster on it! All I remember is that the streets were clean and the neighborhood seemed strangely alive.

Unfortunately, my mother always shot down those requests to visit the Tower. We can’t afford it! was her usual mantra, and who was I to question my own mom? I mean, it wasn’t like I was snooping around in her checkbook. I just took the rejection. Sad as I was in that six-year-old shell of my future self, I would vow, one day, to live in that great neighborhood just east of the freeway.

Ironically, I am completing this first blog post on Independence Day in a business I have supported the last couple of years; a place where I hammer out poems. Sure, the crime has piled on in recent years, and the artists, now, watch each other’s backs, more so in recent weeks. It’s true, maybe I should stray from walking home from the Hashtag at night, and maybe I should listen to my mother. I wonder how many writers have bucked the advice of their mothers. I bet there are many.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Poets & Writers-supported poet Mike Sonksen, a.k.a. Mike the Poet, led a five-day workshop at the youth writing center 826LA in Los Angeles. Sonksen’s journalism has been published in Wax Poetics, Los Angeles Review of Books, LA Weekly, and OC Weekly. He received Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center’s award for Distinguished Service to the Los Angeles Poetry Community in 2013. His weekly KCET column LA Letters celebrates bright moments from literary L.A. Here, he blogs about his experience at 826LA.

For the fifth consecutive summer I taught my Words Spoken poetry workshop at 826LA in the Northeast L.A. neighborhood of Echo Park. We had twenty diverse teens from Downtown, Historic Filipinotown, Silver Lake, Koreatown, Mt. Washington, and South Pasadena. The combination of 826’s ambience and the earnest personalities of the group made for an explosive week of poetry and community building. The writers ranged from twelve to eighteen, plus a few college students who made guest appearances. Close to a third of the writers were returning students, adding to the group camaraderie.

Each day we write four to five poems. Fast writers write more. The prompts alternate between open and closed forms like haikus, quatrains, cinquains, sonnets, odes, elegies, city poems, list poems, epistles, response poems, and collage poems—a mixture of the fundamentals and a dash of the experimental. The five workshop days focus on writing and reciting poetry, but students are also exposed to journalism, cultural history, geography, urban studies, and public speaking throughout each three-hour lesson.

An open mic follows each assignment; inevitably, every student shares his or her work with the group, but some are quicker to open up than others. Learning elocution and the aesthetic beauty of language through reciting poetry is a time-honored tradition. Freedom is encouraged and judgment checked at the door. There’s no shortage of laughter and tears.

A multi-generational extended family forms the bedrock of our writing community. Guest poets Traci Kato-Kiriyama, AK Toney, and Sara Borjas dropped in to share poems and offer writing tips, as did Jamal Carter, Monique Mitchell, and Chris Siders, three former high school students now in college. Marisa Urrutia Gedney, the director of 826LA’s Echo Park location, is an award-winning teacher who makes sure everyone has fun and gets a lot of writing done.

After five summers at 826LA, I have witnessed dozens of students become empowered when writing poems about their lives, families, and neighborhoods. Creative writing, according to the theorist Lester Faigley, allows students to “use narratives to explore the politics of location.” Several of the poets memorized their work, adding even deeper personal meaning to the experience.

There’s nothing more sublime than watching budding writers emerge into poets. We had more writers this year than ever before. I am thankful for 826LA’s perennial hospitality and to Poets & Writers for funding us over the last four years. The workshop gets better every year. The culminating chapbook will be unveiled with a live reading at 826LA on July 24. Come hear the kaleidoscope of voices that form the patchwork of Words Spoken.

Photos: Top: Mike Sonksen. Credit: Chris Felver. Bottom: Sonksen and Monique Mitchell. Credit: Cheryl Klein.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The Intergenerational Reading features teen and senior writers from P&W sponsored workshops. On June 8, 2013, participants gave a reading at the Barnes and Noble in New York City. Manuela Cain, Readings/Workshops (East) intern, blogs about the event.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, in what is considered by many to be the literary capital of the world, I found myself on the top floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble. To say that I have experienced New York City readings, poetry and otherwise, would be an understatement, and yet I came to this event with few expectations about what I was about to see or hear. For the twelfth year in a row, Poets & Writers has sponsored the Intergenerational Reading: Connecting Generations. This annual event brings together seniors and teens from P&W–sponsored organizations such as GED Plus/Medgar Evers, Goddard Riverside Community Center, Grand Street Settlement, Kew Gardens Community Center, Kingsbridge Heights Community Center, Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center, Stanley Isaacs Neighborhood Center, and Urban Word NYC.

The twenty-seven writers were brought on stage in randomly selected groups. Regie Cabico, the event's host, ignited the room with an unparalleled energy and enthusiasm. If I had any concerns going into the reading, Regie was certainly the man to ease them, as he served as the bridge between the diverse array of writers.

It would be easy to make assumptions about an event such as this. Already a dynamic is set in motion by the mixing of ages and cultures. One might assume that the seniors would have nothing but memories, and the teens something resembling angst and passion. However, what happened on that stage transcended any simple labels or assumptions. At the very essence of the human experience is love, and loss. The five senses simply serve to allow us to take it all in, and with the sharp language, flowing prose, and sometimes shocking revelations, there was a lot to take in.

One young woman, a poet with a strong sense of rhythm and voice, read a piece that fully embodied the experience of a bitter and painful breakup. Later, a senior woman narrated the experience of a later-in-life love affair with a sharp attention to detail. A teen read from his iPhone while a senior joked about not being able to make out her own handwriting. A young woman’s pride and strength was an older woman’s never-fading confidence in the face of growing older. Every question that was raised by a teen’s work was answered by an elder, or vice versa. Each seed of an idea that one writer planted had been grown through the work of another. What became clear through the course of the reading was that a community had taken shape that genuinely surpassed any differences in age or culture. And what better way to light a passion for writing in the young than to reignite the fire within those who are at risk of losing it, or worse, never having had it at all.

To the writers who bared their hearts and souls that Friday afternoon at the biggest Barnes & Noble in New York City, thank you. Thank you for showing us all that writing isn’t simply a tool, or a skill to be used and forgotten, but rather the window to our deepest desires, passions, and drives. To the seniors who proved that youth is more than a number, and the teens who were wise beyond their years, never stop writing.

Photo: Intergenerational Reading presenters. Credit: Margarita Corporan.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.