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“Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude,” said Martin Luther King Jr. Imagine a character who needs to forgive someone. Who does he or she need to forgive? What was the nature of the injury? What were its implications? Does forgiveness come easily to your character, or is retaliation a more natural impulse? Does your character try and fail to forgive initially? See how your character’s desire to forgive creates obstacles and ultimately fuels your plot.
"The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest," Martin Luther King Jr. said in a speech on December 5, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama. Poetry can be a powerful vehicle for protest and social change. Write a poem in which you confront a subject that inspires personal objection. The topic does not have to be strictly political. For instance, Dylan Thomas’s villanelle “Do not go gentle into that good night” protests the death of the poet’s father: “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” See how you can wield and transfer oppositional energy into language and form.
Writer, vocalist, and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), as well as the album, Television. LaTasha has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, VCCA, The Laundromat Project, The Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Eben Demarest Trust, and Millay Colony. As an independent curator and artistic director, she has directed literary/music events at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Symphony Space, Bam Café, The Schomburg Research Center for Black Culture, Dixon Place, El Museo del Barrio, The David Rubenstein Atrium. A native of Harlem, LaTasha and writer Greg Tate are the founders and editors of yoYO/SO4 Magazine.
The day is January 6, 2014. In all fairness, I have never attended the Three Kings parade organized by El Museo del Barrio in my many years as a Harlemite. What often gets attention is Thanksgiving followed by Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa. But the gold, frankincense, and myrrh I remember from childhood. Los Reyes found the divine child by following the North Star across the desert for twelve days to Bethlehem. Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar (aka Europe, Arabia, and Africa) travelled by horse, elephant and camel. When they arrived, they presented baby Jesus with three symbolic gifts. I remember the story but now in the context of Babaaláwo and the Yoruba tradition; how three Babas determine through long earned wisdom the means of acknowledging. Three is a magic number. I am equally curious about the parade since witnessing one year a long line of folks on 111th and Lexington waiting to purchase the sweet baby Jesus bread from a local shop. This year I make an effort to attend the parade now in its 37th year, not because I am Christian or I’m hungry, but to show support for La Casa Azul Bookstore.
There are days I stroll over to this tiny colorful bookstore, am greeted by the founder and owner Aurora Anaya-Cerda, and wonder, “Woman, do you ever sleep?” As an “educator and supporter of cultural events in the East Harlem community for more than eight years,” I wonder how she keeps motivated and remains passionate about literacy. I wonder, Why open a bookstore when between 2000 and 2007 more than 1,000 bookstores across the country closed? I find myself at this place often because of this tirelessness that drives both Aurora and her staff. Together, they maintain a calendar filled with monthly programming that often serves as a safe haven, a family reunion, a community forum, and a charge of intellectual and creative support.
I wanted to dedicate a post to La Casa Azul Bookstore to acknowledge a space committed to fostering exchange in East Harlem and Latin America and as an example of community building. If I were to imagine the architecture of La Casa Azul’s lineage, it may include Frida Kahlo, Tim Z. Hernandez, Julia de Burgos, Junot Díaz, Rigoberto González, Pablo Neruda, Yuyi Morales, Eduardo Galeano, and La Bruja, to name a few. When my book first arrived, one of my personal goals was that it be available in the community that I grew up with, who eat the same food I often relish about but must enjoy in moderation. It mattered that the place of my birth, my navigating of Central and East Harlem’s streets–switching back and forth from Black English to Broken Spanish to brief words in Walof or Arabic–be the place where I would see my book carried. And as independent bookstores are back on the steady rise–if you haven’t made it over to Berl’s Poetry Shop in Dumbo, it’s worth the visit–I want this little bookstore on 103 and Lexington to prosper.
It is Monday, and the downpour by 9 a.m. is pretty fierce. Aurora has been named one of the Honorary Madrinas for this year’s parade and has selflessly invited local authors and customers to walk with the store’s banner. I accept the invitation because my time living in Harlem has taught me a big lesson when it comes to local business. On June 1, 2012, La Casa Azul Bookstore opened it doors. And though its founder and staff have successfully created this “literature hub” for El Barrio, it will need the local community (along with those who live in Williamsburg, Kentucky, and Yonkers) to support it as well.
As we waited on 106 and Park Ave for the signal to begin, news came that the camels (yes camels…long before there were even sheep) had arrived. One of La Casa Azul’s staff members made makeshift maracas the night before out of tiny plastic cups, rice and tape. The Three Kings gladly take one and while the samba band is playing a few yards behind us, we giggle and shake our maracas. Poet, playwright, performance artist and long-time El Barrio resident Jesús ‘Papoleto’ Meléndez, the King Emeritus, holds his gift and waves from his bike driven carriage. Once we reached 116th, we turn west to Lexington where the parade ends. Aurora turns in her Madrina crown and robe to El Museo’s staff and we all gather to eat on 2nd Ave., still energized by the sounds, the walk, the children, the camels. As we sit there and eat our cubanos, maduros, tostones, and bacalao salads, I am still wondering how she does it all: From the selecting of books, the tin hearts with red ribbons, totes, and bright robellos to maintaining an online presence, programming events, book signings, workshops, and everything else that goes into being a community advocate. No, I really want this bookstore to have a long life for as long as Aurora will allow it.
Group Photo: Aurora Anaya-Cerda and Staff at Three King's Day. Credit: Nevada Lightfoot. Middle Photo: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs at 2nd Annual Local Author's Day. Credit: Aurora Anaya-Cerda. Photo: Jesus "Papoleto" Melendez at Three King's Day. Credit: Nevada Lightfoot. Photo: Selfie of La Casa Azul's Aurora Anaya Cerda with Camel.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is provided by the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is currently accepting applications for its annual creative writing fellowships. The $25,000 grants, which are given in alternating years to poets and prose writers, will be given in 2015 to poets. The deadline to apply is March 12, 2014.
Poets who have published at least one full-length poetry collection, or twenty or more poems or pages of poetry in five or more literary journals, anthologies, or publications, are eligible to apply. Detailed eligibility requirements are available here.
Complete application instructions, including all required materials, can be found on the NEA website. Applications must be submitted online through the Grants.gov website. Recipients will be announced in December 2014.
The annual fellowships are given in order to provide time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement for poets and prose writers. Applications are reviewed through an anonymous process in which “the only criteria for review are artistic excellence and artistic merit.” The NEA assembles a different advisory panel each year to review applications.
This year, thirty-eight fellowships were awarded to fiction and creative nonfiction writers; forty poets received the 2013 grants. Fellowships in fiction and creative nonfiction will be offered again in 2016; guidelines will be available on the NEA website in the fall of 2014.
Questions about the fellowship program and application process can be directed to the National Endowment for the Arts by e-mail to litfellowships@arts.gov or by phone at (202) 682-5034.
Shin Yu Pai is the author of several poetry books, including AUX ARCS (La Alameda, 2013), Adamantine (White Pine, 2010), Sightings (1913 Press, 2007), and Equivalence (La Alameda, 2003). She has also published a number of limited edition artist’s books, including Hybrid Land (Filter Press, 2010), Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks, 2007), and The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz, 2006).
A visual artist, she has exhibited her work at the Paterson Museum, The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, and the Three Arts Club of Chicago. She is a former curator for The Wittliff Collections and has taught creative writing at Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas at Dallas. Pai received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied at Naropa University.
A recipient of awards from the Arkansas Arts Council, 4Culture, the City of Seattle’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, and the Cambridge Arts Council, Pai has completed residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Taipei Artist Village, Soul Mountain, and is a three-time fellow of The MacDowell Colony. Over the years, P&W has supported numerous events she has taken part in as a writer in the Seattle, Washington area.
What are your reading dos and don’ts?
There are few things worse than not being able to hear the reader you’ve travelled distances to hear, so I almost always use the microphone if one is given, and I test it with the audience before proceeding with a reading. I also share information with an audience on the contexts of my poems to engage them in the process that informed the writing, so that my poems can be more accessible. I adhere to the time given to me and respect the time of my co-readers and audiences, and am conscious of listener fatigue. The don’ts are implicit in the dos.
How do you prepare for a reading?
When I started giving poetry readings fifteen years ago, I would practice reading my poems out loud and time the material, writing out comments in the margins of my work of information I thought might be helpful for an audience. Over time, as I’ve matured as a writer and grown more into who I am as a person (an unapologetic introvert with a penchant for occasional extroversion when it comes to poetry), this approach felt too polished or rehearsed, and less spontaneous.
While I never just wing an event with zero preparation, I do now often leave preparing for an event until the day of a reading to see what feels true to me in a given moment. I try to be who I am in front of an audience so that the poems can speak from my heart. I aspire to show up, instead of acting out a public persona.
I also give thought to the venue for which I will be reading. When I read recently at a P&W–supported event with The Wing Luke Museum in Seattle, I thought about the audience for the museum, which has a focus on Asian-American history and identity. I shared poems from my most recent book Aux Arcs on race and my experiences as an Asian-American woman living and working in the South. As a museum studies graduate student, I had spent time at The Wing cataloguing collections, including loaned items from the artist Roger Shimomura. So I also shared a poem that I had written inspired by contemplating Shimomura’s pop culture self-portrait of himself as “Washington Crossing the Delaware.”
Have the disciplines of photography and art curating crossed over into your writing, and the way you think about poetry and presentation?
Poetic presentation is not simply about an experience of activating randomly selected poems by reading them aloud to an audience. I think in terms of trajectories and sequences—images that talk to and across one another for specific audiences based on themes that can arc across different bodies of work from the present and past. I think in terms of editing/curating for presentation and making spaces for the listener to enter the stream of consciousness.
I have often been asked to give slide show presentations in which I talk about the influence of visual artists on my work in tandem with reading my poems. I do think that these sort of hybrid presentations can be a useful way to engage an audience in one’s creative and analytical process.
Presentations are really a kind of event or happening—for the book launch of Aux Arcs, I invited artist Whiting Tennis, who provided the cover art for my book, to perform his folk rock music at the event. Since the poems reflect on race and the experience of living in the South, I asked Whiting if he would perform some of his more lyrical folk songs, in particular a ballad about John Brown to create a bridge to the poems.
What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
You never know when something you read or say in a workshop will light a fire for someone and inspire them to explore their own story or creative expression. The value of literary programs is in providing a model for the community that individuals of all ages, experiences, and educational backgrounds might explore the richness, inherent worth, and complexity of their own vision—that audience members may see something of their own experience mirrored in my poems, and take that experience and run with it. Poetry is for the community and acts as tool to build community. When I say community, I don’t mean the literary audience of poets and writers, academics and peers. I mean everyday people engaged with the struggle and art of living fully from an authentic place that brings together mind, spirit, and heart.
Photo: Shin Yu Pai. Credit: Daniel Carrillo.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle 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.
Though people typically make every effort to appear confident, accomplished, and cheerful to others, we all have flaws and shortcomings. Many people, in fact, are defined on some level by their imperfections. From a fear of flying and substance abuse problems to shopping addiction and weight issues, the inner lives of the people you write about are just as compelling as how they dress or what they say. Write five hundred words about one of your shortcomings, and describe in detail how it affects your life and changed you as a person. Being honest about your life will make you a more empathic writer when characterizing the flaws of others.
Effective listening is imperative to effective writing. Listening carefully while sitting on a crowded subway, drinking coffee in a lonely diner, or asking a stranger for directions can lead to new characters, settings, and story lines. It is also important to listen to your own characters. Make a list of ten questions to ask a character you are developing. Listen to your character’s answers, diction, and inflection, and write down what you hear and see in your imagination. Most people, including fictional characters, will tell you who they are. You just have to ask.
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” This quote from Robert Frost reveals the raw origins of poetry, and emphasizes the complex cerebral and emotional forces that inspire poems. Think of how poetry accommodates both the expansiveness and simplicity of our emotions. Use this unique and paradoxical phenomenon to write about a profound and complicated experience in your life: perhaps the death of a long-suffering loved one, or the graduation of a child, or the private self-confession of having fallen out of love. Start with a single emotion, and begin your journey there.
The finalists were announced today for the tenth-annual Story Prize, an award given for a short story collection published in the previous year. The winner will receive $20,000.
The finalists are Archangel by Andrea Barrett (W. W. Norton), Bobcat by Rebecca Lee (Algonquin Books), and Tenth of December by George Saunders (Random House). The collections were chosen by Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey and director Larry Dark from among ninety-six submitted books, published by sixty-four different presses in 2013. The finalists will each receive $5,000.
Lindsey and Dark also announced the winner of the second annual Story Prize Spotlight Award, a $1,000 prize given for a “short story collection worthy of additional attention.” The 2014 winner is Byzantium (Graywolf Press) by Ben Stroud.
This year's final judges—author Antonya Nelson; Tin House editor Rob Spillman; and Stephen Ennis, director of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin—will select the 2014 Story Prize winner, who will be announced at the annual awards ceremony and reading on March 5 in New York City.
More about this year’s finalists and Spotlight Award winner can be found on the Story Prize website and official blog. Claire Vaye Watkins won the 2013 award for her debut collection, Battleborn.
Below, listen to finalist Rebecca Lee read an excerpt from her collection, Bobcat, as part of the Poets & Writers Author Podcast series.
Writer, vocalist, and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), as well as the album Television. LaTasha has received scholarships, residencies, and fellowships from Cave Canem, Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, VCCA, The Laundromat Project, The Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Eben Demarest Trust, and Millay Colony. As an independent curator and artistic director, she has directed literary/music events at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, Symphony Space, Bam Café, The Schomburg Research Center for Black Culture, Dixon Place, El Museo del Barrio, The David Rubenstein Atrium. A native of Harlem, LaTasha and writer Greg Tate are the founders and editors of yoYO/SO4 Magazine.
Building the Architecture of My Lineage, Part 1:
I do not recall the entire conversation, only the moment when the poet Hoa Nguyen suggested to a class of writers that we figure out the "architecture of our lineage." Her talk had to do with her life as a writer and building community—a community that reflected one’s own personal influences and peers. One that reflected each of us as writers. She did not offer detailed instructions. There was no how-to-book on building community. But the phrase “the architecture of my lineage” left an imprint on me, and upon returning from graduate school to New York City, building community took on a number of manifestations in my life.
My creative work, for some twenty years, fluctuates between poetry and music with small moments in theatre and media. My decision to relocate to California was two-fold. I needed a break from New York. I needed to figure out if I was indeed a writer. Those two years away meant that my return to New York would require a type of resurgence. At the same time, my interests became less and less about my work. In fact, I thought little of it until the passing of Miriam Makeba on November 8, 2008. She was born the same month and year as my mother and despite obvious differences, I felt honoring her was to honor my mother’s generation. Miriam was definitely part of that lineage. So without much thought, I called Darrel McNeil, the associate producer of music programming at BAM Café Live and asked if I could assemble a tribute to her as a free concert. To my surprise, I got the ok.
What came next was a crash-course in project management. I had to write up a project description—something brief, something that would be handed over to other staff members. I needed to come up with a technical rider. If you languish over writing seventy-four-word artist statements, try your hand at concert proposals. The main focus of this event would take inspiration from a Makeba concert at the Salonger in Sweden in 1966. From this show, I proposed that selections from her catalogue be re-imagined and that the poets write new work for this occasion.
This tribute was to also reflect my artistic and cultural influences and admirations. It needed to represent the African Diaspora. So I invited poets Sandra Maria Esteves, Akliah Oliver and Lynne Procope. Having these three women poets meant having three generations of women who greatly informed my own work. I also invited vocalists Tamar-kali, Alkebulan X and Abena Koomsom (also a poet) who brought their artistic specialties from the Gullah Islands, Puerto Rico (via The Bronx) and Ghana. Lastly was the musical ensemble that consisted of Roman Diaz on percussion, Mazz Swift (also a featured vocalist) on violin, Essiet Okun on upright bass, and Carlos Almeida on guitar—all under the direction of Onel Mulet. Cuba, Trinidad, Ghana, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, St Louis, and the Gullah Islands were all here. I felt this represented just how far Miriam’s voice had reached.
I had produced a handful of music and poetry events in the 1990s, but this was different. More than ten years had passed. We needed rehearsal time. I needed a budget. BAM Café could only provide so much and a suggestion was made to have The Black Rock Coalition step in as a co-presenter. The BRC has had a long history with poets, and their very first concert at The Kitchen featured the late Sekou Sundiata. So it made sense. But even with the inclusion of BRC, my budget could not cover the even most modest of honorariums much less rehearsal hours. That is when the decision to apply for a Poets & Writers matching grant came into play. I suggested that the BRC apply on behalf of the poets, and the request was approved. And on the night of January 16, 2009, we celebrated the life and work of Miriam to a packed house of artists, non-artists from several generations and cultural backgrounds.
I did not foresee this impulse that would lead me to organize an event such as this. Now, life as an artist personally requires the ability to pull away from the front stage or podium and allow other artists feature their creative talents. For on those rare occasions when I am an ensemble member, I know how much the opportunity inspires my own creative growth. I returned to New York City wanting to worry little about my work and ended up learning the joys, struggles, rewards of being a young curator/producer.
For now, part of my mission to create musical/literary events that are both cross-generational and cross-cultural is a personal and constant investigation of what “building the architecture of my lineage” means.
Top Photo: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Credit: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Middle Photo: Akilah Oliver. Credit LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Bottom Photo: Mama Africa Flyer.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, and by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Additional support is provided by the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.
