Archive February 2019

Brad Buchanan is professor emeritus of English at Sacramento State University. His poetry, fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in nearly two hundred journals, and he is the author of two collections of poetry: The Miracle Shirker (Poets Corner Press, 2005) and Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter (Roan Press, 2008), as well as two academic books. His third book of poetry, The Scars, Aligned (A Cancer Narrative), is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He cofacilitates a P&W–supported writing workshop run through the University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center. He was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in February 2015, and underwent a stem cell transplant in 2016, which involved temporary vision loss and a slow recovery. He is currently in remission.

I didn’t know how badly I needed to be part of an Amherst Writers & Artists-method writing workshop until I’d begun cofacilitating one myself.

Before I explored the possibility of creating a workshop intended for people who were, like me, dealing with issues related to illness, disability, and recovery, I had never heard of the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method. When I approached Terri Wolf, program manager at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center and my current cofacilitator, about doing something for people who needed a place to write about their challenges, she introduced me to the basic principles of AWA: you give only positive feedback, ask no questions of the writer, treat the piece of writing as if it were fiction, and generally create a safe space for writers to say whatever is on their mind. Facilitators give prompts, but leave writers free to ignore them if there’s something else that needs to get written that day. (More details about this method and its genesis are contained in Pat Schneider’s book Writing Alone and With Others, which explains the rationale and protocols for the method she pioneered with lower-income women in Amherst, Massachusetts.)

Perhaps most importantly for me, the AWA method stipulates that facilitators write and share their work with the rest of the group. Knowing that I would, if nothing else, have a new piece of writing to show for my two-hour workshop sessions was incentive enough for me to come to the first sessions with a sense of pleasurable, if nervous, anticipation.

As it turned out, things went very smoothly. The truth was, I had really just been the catalyst for a revival of an AWA-style writing group that had begun more than ten years ago, but had fractured and eventually dissolved as people’s day jobs took their toll. Many of the new group’s participants were veteran writers and hardy workshoppers, and had mastered the finer points of workshop etiquette that I tended to forget (don’t address the writer as “you,” for instance).

I wrote happily and easily with the group, rather surprised at the way everyone seemed to be enjoying the atmosphere Terri and I had created. I didn’t worry much about what I was writing; my first workshop poem, for instance, was about my cat, Amaryllis—a fine creature, and even in her way an emotional support animal for me, but not exactly literary dynamite.

It took me three workshop sessions to unclench enough to start writing about my complicated, dammed-up feelings concerning my stem cell transplant. The writing prompt that triggered the first real breakthrough for me was a simple one: My cofacilitator asked us all to recall experiences in our lives as if looking through a photo album, and to select one mental photograph that meant something to us, and then write.

I had no trouble at all choosing mine: It was an actual photograph that showed me and my brother James in street clothes and football helmets. The poem begins by describing the scene. Then, the focus shifts to my brother, who is in front of me, evidently acting as my faithful blocker (hence the poem’s title “Pass Protection”):

he is my gargoyle
and gatekeeper
giving me time to look around

The more I wrote, the more I realized what the photograph really meant for me: My brother was acting as my protector, just as he would, much later, as my stem cell donor.

I couldn’t read this little allegory of sibling interdependence aloud without getting choked up. At the time, I was more than a bit embarrassed; after all, I was supposed to be the facilitator, not the weeper-in-chief. Yet as I reflected on what had been happening in the workshop’s earlier meetings, I realized that someone had shed tears during each session, and that by “losing it,” as they say, I was actually simply paying my overdue entrance fee into the collective.

As I write this, a few weeks later, I can’t think of anyone who is still coming to the group who hasn’t displayed the same visible and audible emotions in front of people they would, in any other context, consider strangers. Within the safe, shared, egalitarian space we had established, people could let go of their shame and inhibitions, if only briefly. I no longer need to rely on mere intellectual approval of the AWA method; I have seen proof of its effectiveness and have benefited from it myself, both as a writer and as a recovering cancer patient.

Support for Readings & Workshops in California is provided by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Nordette N. Adams received an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her poetry has appeared in Rattle’s Poets Respond series, Unlikely Stories Mark V, Quaint Magazine, About Place Journal, Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, and included in social justice curricula. Her essays have been referenced in multiple books and journals and media outlets including HuffPost, Pajiba, SheKnows, NOLA.com, Slate, Vox, and the Washington Post.

Ms. Lodonia, a white-haired senior citizen, recites from memory a poem written by her mother. Ms. Charlotte comes with verses of a Halloween poem she’s penned and a meditation on her visit to India. Ms. Mary, Mr. Lloyd, and Ms. Quencell listen to lines of a ballad. Their faces brighten as they recall their youth, and Mr. Francis, who is blind, weighs every line, every lyric he hears. When he adeptly analyzes a verse, other workshop members nod in agreement. These were the participants who sat in my Friday workshop series last October and November at the Kinship Senior Center in New Orleans—most past seventy—some struggling to recapture memories, others with memories sharp as crystal.

My goal with the workshop series, sponsored by Poets & Writers, was to engage seniors with poems I believed they could access and explore. Too often people are afraid to discuss poems much less attempt to write them, so I opened the series with a bit of fun, a type of Name That Tune music game with selections from decades the seniors were likely to remember. I told them that song lyrics are the kissing cousin of poetry. After hearing part of a song, the seniors named it and at least one artist who had covered the song. The first person to answer scored a point. Three songs later, they discerned what the songs had in common and guessed, based on the song selections, the subjects of the poems we discussed that day.

The first week, songs were narratives about fathers, the next week mothers, and by the last week, songs of political protest. Often, after a few bars, one or two seniors would start singing along, sometimes with great gusto which led to laughter and the sharing of life stories. Then I would introduce them to poems with the same themes as the song selections by both well-known and locally-known poets. Participants might observe a poem’s form or lack of form. Did they hear rhyme or feel a rhythm? What was the speaker’s attitude toward the subject, and did the poem move them? Seniors offered profound insight into darker poems as well as witty takes on lighter poems. I asked them to write a few lines of their own on the theme of the day or to try writing something in a similar style, blues for example.

I hoped to plant a seed, to help them remember a former love of verse, or to discover a new love. I believe the workshop series succeeded in sparking an appreciation for poetry in its different shades and colors. The seniors were grateful for the sessions, and I am grateful to Poets & Writers for making the workshops possible for them, and for me.

Support for the Readings & Workshops Program in New Orleans is provided, in part, by a grant from the Hearst Foundations. Additional support comes from an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others, and from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Vincent Toro’s debut poetry collection, STEREO.ISLAND.MOSAIC. (Ahsahta Press, 2016), was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. He is a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, and winner of the Caribbean Writer’s Cecile de Jongh Literary Prize and Repertorio Español’s Nuestras Voces National Playwriting award. Toro is a professor at Bronx Community College, a contributing editor at Kweli Journal, a writing liaison for the Cooper Union’s Saturday Program, and participates in school programs for DreamYard and the Dodge Poetry Foundation.

When Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta and I started the Latinx Poetry Reading Series at Bronx Community College (BCC) back in 2016, our intention was to provide the students in our Latino Literature classes the opportunity to have direct contact with some of the writers they were studying. What began simply as a means of adding dimension to our curriculums quickly became so much more.

Ninety-six percent of the students at BCC are students of color. Sixty-three percent of that population is Latinx. A great many of these students are first or second generation immigrants. In contrast, the majority of the faculty is white, and outside of the Latino Literature classes, Latinx authors and texts are grossly underrepresented on class reading lists. This makes the school’s Latino Literature classes one of the few places in which they can find themselves, their own cultures and histories, represented in the curriculum.

The lack of access to writing by, for, and about Latinx people extends itself beyond the campus and into the Bronx. As of 2016 (when Barnes & Noble in Co-op City closed its doors), the Bronx, a territory with 1.5 million residents, has exactly zero bookstores. Even our college lacks a physical campus bookstore (it was closed during the 2017-2018 school year). The message to the students, and to the Bronx community at large, is that literature—both that which reflects their experience and any other kind—should not be considered important in their lives.

Nevertheless, our students cannot contain their excitement when they begin reading Latinx texts in their classes. In all my years as an educator, the Latino Literature classes at BCC are the only classes where the students regularly do not want to leave when time is up. Students who formerly claimed to never read anything that wasn’t assigned in a class suddenly ask me for further reading suggestions.

This enthusiasm is only amplified when we get them in a room with Latinx poets. At each of the BCC Latinx Poetry Series readings, I survey the audience to see how many of them are attending a poetry reading for the first time. As it stands, about ninety percent had never experienced a live poetry reading. Yet during these readings and the Q&A sessions that follow, they’re riveted. They keep the poets there long after the reading is over to take pictures with them, get books signed, and ask more questions. This year, after an hour, I had to drag the poets away from students so they could catch their train. Many students have asked where they can find more poetry readings afterwards.

Clearly, there is a need for these kinds of literary and cultural events at the school and in the Bronx. But because BCC has an underserved population of people of color in an underserved borough of people of color, there are no resources to support these events. It is only with the assistance of Poets & Writers that we are able to provide compensation for our guest poets. Now in its third year, the BCC Latinx Poetry Series has hosted some of the most exciting and important Latinx poets currently working in the United States. We have been visited by Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Nancy Mendez Booth, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Bonafide Rojas, Raquel Salas Rivera, Roberto Carlos Garcia, and BCC’s own Dr. Grisel Y. Acosta, who is a widely published author, associate professor in the English Department, and coorganizer of the reading series.

We are already in the early planning stages for next year’s reading. It is our hope that the series will be around for many years to come and that over time its audience will build, drawing in more members of the college and the public while helping to fulfill the need for greater support of Latinx literature in the Bronx and beyond.

Support for the Readings & Workshops Program 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 Frances Abbey Endowment, the Cowles Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.