Poets & Writers Blogs

Writer Patricia Roth Schwartz blogs about facilitating a P&W-supported workshop series at the Terwilliger Museum in Waterloo, New York.

A graceful Queen Anne structure, the Waterloo Library & Historical Society, which opened in 1880, is the first building in New York State built as a library. In 1960 a local businessman donated funds to open an attached museum of Waterloo history, which bears his name: Terwilliger. The Terwilliger Museum’s a spooky place. It is low-ceilinged, dim, and its two floors are partitioned into several areas filled with antique dolls, guns, china, vintage fire-fighting equipment, musical instruments, Native American artifacts, and the replicated interiors of both a pioneer cabin and a country store.

I’d written a grant proposal to Poets & Writers for a three-week workshop: Writing Your Way Through History, the first program ever held in the museum. I showed up at the appointed time, fully expecting no one to be there. In semi-rural areas, the hardest aspect of putting on an event is publicizing it, and we hadn’t done much. Even so, right on the dot, several people climbed the stairs to meet me. A short while later a few others arrived. In all, seven people attended at least part of the program, including a fourth-grader, granddaughter of a Terwilliger Museum member. Armed with a sheet of writing prompts I’d given them, participants explored the museum, searching for characters and stories amongst the museum’s holdings. After an hour, we retired to a cozy nook with tables and chairs in the library adjacent to the museum, an ideal writing space.

Everyone was busy except Mary Alice, a feisty, intelligent woman in her 70s who used to write a column for a local paper but stopped. She’d been suffering from writer’s block, she told me, but arrived to the workshop with a brand new baby blue journal. Now she sat frozen before a blank page. I walked up to her and asked quietly, "Who's your character?" "Grandma," she said. "Okay–What's happening? Tell the story," I eagerly replied. A heartbeat passed. Her pen rose to the page. "It's Midge." And out the story poured. Inspired by the exhibit of a 1920s dressed mannequin doing laundry on a washboard in a galvanized tub, Mary Alice told the story of tomboy "Midge" (herself), getting her clothes dirty and "Grandma," instead of getting mad, simply offering, "I'll teach you how to wash them."

Everyone else in the group (as if by some alchemical change that affected them all simultaneously) wrote astonishingly excellent stories, each set in an historical context. Eagerly they read aloud to each other. By the end of our sessions, a writers’s group of five of the attendees had formed and continues to meet, planning a blog and a chapbook to showcase their work. Best of all, Mary Alice called to tell me she’d resumed writing her column and even received a raise in pay for it!

Photo: Patricia Roth Schwartz. Credit: Sandy Zohari.

Support for the Reading/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

For the month of September, longtime P&W-suported writer Patricia Roth Schwartz blogs about her experience in Seneca County, New York.

October in the Finger Lakes flares out in a profusion of color: scarlet maples, golden beech, burgundy sumac. Deer leap across country roads. I drive to the tiny village of Ovid where history has left its imprint, especially in the form of a charming set of Greek Revival county courthouse buildings (now a museum) in descending sizes known as The Three Bears.

I eat my picnic lunch at a table outside the adorable structures (Baby Bear is as big as a child’s playhouse) savoring sunshine and drifting leaves. Spotting a tiny thrift shop across the street, I'm there in a flash. It’s full of almost all new clothes, each item a dollar! Soon, clutching five items, I approach a sweet-faced lady in her 80s who serves as volunteer cashier. Suddenly I realize I've left home with no cash! The thrift shop does not accept credit cards or checks. The cashier tells me I can come back later to pay. "We close at one.” I say, "But I'm doing a poetry reading at the Edith B. Ford Memorial Library." I point to the flyer in the store window.

Behind me another shopper speaks up. "Here—" she pushes a five dollar bill toward me. "I'll send you a check," I say and thank her profusely. She says, "No need." "I'll come over to the library," offers the cashier, Anna, who'd been telling me earlier about growing up nearby on a farm. "You said a friend of yours was coming." "Yes, I can borrow five dollars from her," I say. So it's settled; I go next door to a small supermarket. I need a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. (It's been that kind of day.) I have a little change; I'm sure it’s enough. But at the cash register I’m counting out pennies. Behind me, another Ovid angel appears. A young man plunks down coins, insists on paying for me. I walk across the street to the library in a pleasant daze, convinced I‘ve entered another plane of existence, one that is utterly charmed.

A small group gathers for my reading. I sit in a comfy rocker in the children's reading nook, encouraging everyone to sit in a semicircle around me. Halfway through the reading, Anna, the thrift shop cashier, enters. She's brought her lunch, a large submarine sandwich. Sitting discreetly at the back table, she eats it, crumples up the wrapper, then moves up to the semicircle. I read poems about my family, my childhood in West Virginia—memories, stories. Afterward we talk. "When I was married," the widowed Anna says, "I had a notebook I used to write in. My husband thought I was pretty good." I don't think Anna has ever been to a poetry reading before. We encouraged her to get another notebook and start up again.

Photo: Patricia Roth Schwartz. Credit: Sandy Zohari.

Support for the Reading/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Washington, D.C.–based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about headlining at the P&W-supported reading series LouderARTS earlier this year.

The LouderARTS reading series at Bar 13 is classic. Walking towards it, you could miss it if you weren’t paying attention. The stairs leading up to the entrance had me thinking of a horror film, where the expected becomes something frightening. The door opens to dim lights, a large space filled with people, a bar wet with alcohol, and poetry banging against the walls.

It’s only fair to admit that I’ve read at Bar 13 once before. Three, maybe four, years had passed since the last time I’d read there. The crowd seemed more aware of the little things that make a poet crave the mic. Patrick Rosal, author of the forthcoming Boneshepherds, was in the audience rubbing shoulders with young poets as they all enjoyed the moment with something cold to drink. I sat at the bar for near an hour waiting for my turn, listening to the crowd scream out lines of their favorite poems. I get a little nervous reading after six or seven poets have read and the audience has already been read to for an hour or so. 

That night I read poems I’ll likely never read again. A suite of sorts, and the intimacy of the space allowed it to happen. I get all these images in my head when thinking about poetry and poetry readings. The one that nestles most comfortably is my imaginings of Bar 13. It isn’t just the alcohol. It isn’t just that Lynne Procope and Marie-Elizabeth Mali are both electric poets and excellent hosts. It isn’t the slam competition. It’s that all of those things fit perfectly into this intimate space where people come to listen.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Since 2007, P&W has supported literary events in Houston, Texas. Literal, Latin American Voices, an award-winning bilingual magazine, was among the first Houston organizations supported by P&W. We asked its founder and director, Rose Mary Salum, author of the short story collection Spaces in Between, to share her experience as a presenter of Latin American literature and art.

What was your most successful literary program?
One of the most successful programs we hosted this year was Poetics of Displacement: Latin American Émigré Writers and the Creative Imagination. When Gisela Heffes invited us to collaborate with Rice University on this series, we immediately agreed. The response was amazing, especially to Sergio Ramírez, who I introduced! People approached me to express their absolute satisfaction. 

What makes your programs unique?
We invite established authors from Latin America, who are perhaps not as well-known in the United States. Everyone is familiar with the boom authors—the García Marquezs and Vargas Llosas. Besides these magnificent authors, there is a vast array of writers who are innovative and at the vanguard of literature. We have always questioned the practice of promoting writers familiar to our audiences to minimize the risk of failure. Ultimately, the quality of work is what must win in the end. Having a magazine with these characteristics (bilingual with Latin American subject matter, but still international) puts us in the peculiar place of voicing a de-centered point of view that steers away from the dominant culture, and we want to keep going this way. The United States is becoming more and more aware of the vast repository of literature that exists “down there.”

How do you find and invite readers?
I carefully choose dates and venues to make it easy for people to visit. There’s a huge niche for Latin American writers and readers in the United States, but we are scattered. Houston is a gateway at the perfect geographical point of connection between a continent with two languages. The mission of Literal is to exploit this location and get these cultures closer to each other.

Has literary presenting informed your writing life?
Every time I research new authors and read their books, their work has such an impact on me that some of my guests become characters in my fiction.

What is the value of literary programs in your community?
We cannot ignore the globalized world where influences roam freely. A program about literature is all about exchanging ideas, perspectives, and culture. Having said that, the programs we organize are always centered on the idea of being a platform for dialog, even if we are not familiar with other cultures within our own borders. “There is a tendency to abstract and aestheticize the colossal displacement of peoples and their cultures generated by globalization,” explains Lorraina Pinnell. A publication like Literal has a special role in addressing, in concrete terms and forms, cross-cultural contacts whirling through Canada, the United States, and Latin America. For our part, we are dedicated to resisting this tendency to abstract an entire reality; the publication and, moreover, the events we organize present distinct regions of the Americas in their various and sometimes clashing embodiments.

Photo: P&W-supported writer Sergio Ramírez with Gisela Heffes of Rice University. Credit: Enrique Vazquez.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Located in Chula Vista, California, Southwestern College (SWC) hosts a Guest Writers Series. Francisco Bustos, poet, musician, member of the spoken word/music collective Frontera Drum Fusion, and professor of English composition at SWC blogs about the P&W-supported reading series.

Every month SWC invites California-based writers to share their work. We have one bilingual reading and several Spanish language readings each semester. Many writers hail from San Diego County as well as the border cities of Tijuana, Baja, and California, Mexico. Being so close to the U.S.-Mexico border gives us a unique environment, rich in culture and aesthetic diversity. Our invited writers read in various styles, from English to Spanish and from Spanish to Spanglish (a mix of Spanish and English). It is not uncommon to hear audience members switch between languages in the middle of a conversation with a writer. 

On occasion, I participate as a poet/musician in literary and cultural events on both sides of the border. This gives me opportunities to network with writers from North County, San Diego, (the U.S. side of the border) as well as writers from Mexicali (the Mexican side of the border). Because of festivals like the Tijuana Book Fair and other festivals sponsored by the Tijuana Cultural Center, I also get to meet (and subsequently invite) writers who live far from our border region. We've had writers from as far as Mexico City!

This fall we are working on a reading that will involve Uberto Stabile, Spanish editor of the poetry anthology "Tan Lejos de Dios/So Far From God," a compilation of poetry from the Mexican side of the border region. Stabile will be presenting his book across the Mexican border region this November—hopefully, if all works out, with a pit stop at our very own SWC Guest Writer Series.

Photo:  Francisco Busto.  Credit: Gerardo Navarro.

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

From May 19 to June 9, 2011, P&W-supported poet D. E. Connelly, author of the manuscript "A Twisted Balance: One-Line Haiku & a Few Senryu," taught a haiku workshop at the Armory Park Senior Center in Tucson, Arizona. We asked her to say a few words about the experience.

The poet-sage Matsuo Bashō, born 1644, wrote in memoriam of a friend, “never think of yourself / as someone who did not count— / festival of the souls.” Ueda translated this Japanese haiku into English. The poet-artist Marlene Mountain, born 1939, wrote “white sugar white flour white male”—no translation necessary: It was originally written in U.S. English. Mountain’s haiku reflects the three word-cluster device of classic one-line Japanese haiku as well as its device of image juxtaposition: The first and second word clusters are specific images; the third word cluster, “white male,” is metaphoric, resembling one (including males of color and all females) who, offering no nourishment, choose instead to promote oppressive practices that strip people and things of their inherent value. As Bashō’s tone was of his time and place, Mountain’s is of ours—and each poet agitates the soul: Will I be remembered?  How will I remembered? 

Poets & Writers remembered those of us in the Arizona desert at a time when recognition of each individual’s contribution was being white-washed. With its support and encouragement, the Armory Park Senior Center in Tucson was able to host In The Spirit of Haiku: Three Workshops & A Public Reading. Like water in the desert, sponsorship of a poetry workshop at the Center is wonderful, but rare. 

Workshop One, focusing on the haiku of Bashō (as translated by Sato), reviewed the classic poetic devices compressed within this seemingly simple one-line poem (e.g., two unequal phrases; a strong cutting word between; each phrase with its own specific imagery, which might portray the “what,” “when,” and “where” of the poet’s experience; a seasonal reference—all combined to best convey emotion in a syntax natural to the poet). 

Workshop Two, focusing on the haiku of Marlene Mountain, explored how the initial haiku in U.S. English (introduced, arguably, in the 1950s) evolved into what is currently promoted in English as a form of ten-to-fourteen syllables. Throughout, but mostly in Workshop Three, attendees shared original work: One participant incorporated calligraphy; another haibun; another read haiku in German, demonstrating how sound patterns, even without sense, can convey emotion.

The public reading gave participants a chance to interact with an audience, which included a few people in their twenties from Tucson Youth Development. One youth was deeply moved by an elder’s seasonal allusion of being in her life’s “December,” with feet on fire from pain as well from an urgency to experience fully and profoundly what remains of her life.

A deep bow to Poets & Writers, the workshop participants, the audience, as well as the Armory Park Senior Center who published the participants’ haiku in its July newsletter.
   
Photos: (Top) D. E. Connelly. Credit: Tom Wuelpern; (bottom) workshop participants. Credit: D. E. Connelly.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Tucson is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Poet Olga Garcia, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas and the chapbook Lovely Little Creatures, blogs about her experience facilitating a P&W-supported workshop at Southwest Bakersfield Library in Bakersfield, California.

When the California Center for the Book's David Gernand first connected me with Southwest Bakersfield Library to facilitate a memoir writing workshop, I had a sudden flashback.

When I was eight, my parents packed all five of us kids into an old, avocado-green station wagon and drove us to Bakersfield to pick onions. Once there, we toiled in the vicious heat, snapping enormous green scissors, filling coarse brown sacks with dusty white onions. One foreman came by every so often to halfheartedly shoo us kids off the field. Within minutes after he disappeared, we’d run back to our parents to help with the onion picking or the dragging of sacks that inevitably grew heavier with each added onion.

We were supposed to work the fields for several weeks that summer, but at night while we camped out and fought over the bare mattress laid out at the back of the station wagon, we beseeched our parents to take us home. The smell of onions permeated our clothes, skin, and hair. It burned our eyes and lingered on our tongues. After a few days, my father shook his head in defeat, saying we were the worst workers he had ever seen. As we drove out of Bakersfield, we waved goodbye to the onion fields from the rear window, promising never to return.

Thirty-three years later I’m in Bakersfield again, standing before a group of workshop participants at Southwest Library. It’s a small, ethnically diverse group of nine and their ages range from twelve to sixty. Some of them have aspirations of memoir writing; others have come simply to practice writing. I share my onion story as a means to discuss memoir writing (how place, sound, smell, and taste trigger snapshots of what we’ve lived). We do several exercises to probe into the personal stories archived in their bodies.

One exercise asks participants to write about a memorable place. Another asks them to use one of Sandra Cisneros’s vignettes as a springboard to write about their names. Both exercises produce intimate recollections, and it is through the sharing of these intimate recollections that we connect with one another.

Maria, the library branch supervisor, reveals a long-kept secret. “Well, you see,” she says “my name isn’t actually Maria.” The name was given to her by a group of Catholic nuns in the Philippines and it stuck. A great beginning to a memoir. Maritza, from Guadalajara, Mexico, was named after a character in a Brazilian soap opera. And Gene, the middle-aged man whose Mexican parents didn’t speak a word of English, was named after Gene Autry, the American performer known as the "Singing Cowboy." As Gene shares his story, his wife leans into him and mumbles, “I never knew that.”

Photo: Olga Garcia. Credit: Weenobee.com.

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