Archive April 2019

Jamie Moore is the author of the novella, Our Small Faces (ELJ Publications, 2013). Her work has been published in magazines including TAYO Literary Magazine and the Nervous Breakdown. She is a professor at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, California, and executive director of the Watchale Workshop.

California’s Central Valley has a surprisingly rich literary history, and the Watchale Workshop team has learned a few things about our literary community. Firstly, it is a community centered around Fresno, the city hub of the Central Valley and location of the nearest MFA program, which makes many of the literary events inaccessible to community members in the south part of the region, particularly writing students at the College of the Sequoias, where I teach. Secondly, many events are focused on a single genre—poetry—perhaps as a result of the success of poets from the area. Lastly, and of greatest concern to us, many literary events are focused on and organized by men. Knowing the rich diversity of writers in our area, the Watchale Workshop aimed to showcase what more the Central Valley has to offer with our inaugural day-long event full of workshops and lectures that took place on April 6 at the College of the Sequoias.

The idea for Watchale started as a conversation between fellow writers over coffee. The four of us at Watchale were brought together by a desire to create opportunities for writers like us: POC, queer, emerging. After recruiting a student team in September 2018, Watchale was conceptualized, the name derived from Sandra Cisneros’s poem “Loose Woman.” We wanted to make a statement: Watch out! We’re coming for you! We’ve been here! We’re ready to be heard!

With our mission statement in mind—to create an alternative narrative of our literary community—we carefully curated a lineup of writers that put women and queer voices at the center of our literary conversation. We invited women writers who not only had Central Valley connections, but those we knew would help us create a space for our student writers to be included in the larger literary community. I wanted Watchale to complement the women-centered literary groups already doing work in Fresno, such as Fresno Women Read and Women Writers of Color Central Valley. This was our festival to shine.

And shine we did. In the morning, generative workshops in several genres led by P&W–supported writers Ife-Chudeni Oputa, Monique Quintana, and Wendy C. Ortiz encouraged participants to pick up their pens and get writing. Oputa’s workshop focused on the theme of “Ownership,” asking emerging poets to consider the duality of ownership, and what we owe to ourselves and our communities.

After a rousing reading with Sara Borjas and Wendy C. Ortiz, participants gathered for craft lectures on topics like community organizing, freedom and futurity, scene writing, poetry structure, and self-publishing. The evening reading celebrated both our student readers from the College of the Sequoias Quill Creative Writing Club and our featured writers of the workshop.

Students and community members were invigorated by a literary space that felt like us, of us, for us. I deeply believe we served that purpose and thus, Watchale became the literary event of my dreams. Watchale is a love letter to the Central Valley and to the writers who’ve been missing from the narrative thus far. We’re here now.

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.

dave ring is the community chair of the OutWrite LGBTQ literary festival in Washington, D.C. He has been honored to receive fellowships and residencies from Lambda Literary, FutureScapes, DISQUIET, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Currently at work on a novel, his stories have been published or are forthcoming by GlitterShip, A Punk Rock Future, and the Disconnect. He is the editor of the anthology Broken Metropolis: Queer Tales of a City That Never Was published by Mason Jar Press. Follow him on Twitter at @slickhop.

Currently I’m the community chair of the annual OutWrite LGBTQ literary festival, held annually on the first weekend in August in Washington, D.C. I inherited the position from Julie Enszer, the editor of Sinister Wisdom. Last year’s keynote speaker was activist and writer Michelle Tea, and the festival itself featured more than ninety authors, forty exhibitors, and a full day of readings and panels—all put on by volunteers.

In addition to the annual festival, OutWrite holds a number of literary events throughout the year. Marianne Kirby, author of the novels Dust Bath Revival and Hogtown Market, organizes an annual speculative reading series in May at East City Bookshop that changes its name a bit each year. In 2017 we held the first reading, “The Future Is Queer,” with Craig Gidney, Sunny Moraine, Day Al-Mohamed, and Sarah Pinsker. In 2018 “The Future Is Still Queer” welcomed Na’amen Tilahun, K. M. Szpara, Ruthanna Emrys, and Marlena Chertock. 2019’s reading on May 4 will be called “The Future Is Still Very Queer” and features Rashid Darden, Nibedita Sen, and Lara Elena Donnelly.

Reflecting on the reading series, Marianne says, “Curating this series of readings focused on queer speculative fiction has been a tremendous reminder that queer identity by its very nature is speculative. When we create and share our visions of the future, we create radical art.”

OutWrite events always remind me how beautiful and affirming representation is. Representation can become sanctuary in a reality that frequently erases, elides, or minimizes queer people’s existence, not only in relation to queerness, of course, but all the other identities that they carry with them. Honoring and showcasing those identities has been a gauntlet worth picking up.

This year’s festival has three featured writers: Kristen Arnett, Jericho Brown, and Wo Chan. Themes include: faith and sexuality, exploring colonialism and diaspora-driven identities, the legacy of Stonewall, and the line between identity and commodity (particularly for writers of color). Friday, August 2 is our kickoff and on Saturday, August 3, we’ll have ten panels and twenty readings. The festival concludes on Sunday, August 4 with six writing workshops, open to both emerging and experienced writers. One of those workshops, “Culinary Speculative” led by Nibedita Sen, will explore the exciting intersection of worldbuilding and food. Please join us!

Support for Readings & Workshops in Washington, 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.

Usha Akella is the author of six books, and her most recent collection was published by Sahitya Akademi in India. She earned an MSt in Creative Writing from Cambridge University and is the founder of Matwaala, the South Asian Diaspora Poets’ Collective, and the Poetry Caravan series, which brings poetry readings and workshops to women’s shelters, senior homes, educational institutions, and hospitals. She has read her poems at a number of international poetry festivals and was selected as a Creative Ambassador for Austin, Texas in 2015.

Walking toward the Red Room at the KGB Bar in the East Village for a Matwaala poetry reading, Sophie Naz and I spotted a sign with the words “Waste your money” in front of a restaurant and we burst out laughing. It’s these random things that punctuate one’s flowing experience of the tumult of New York City—and I’d say of Matwaala too. Things that are quirky, like little bolts of lightning in our pedestrian life. Like Salman Rushdie sauntering in at the opening of the Matwaala poetry festival at New York University. Like Yogesh Patel’s whale metaphor to capture the angst of immigration or Sophie Naz’s Russian hat, a prominent sartorial prop at the festival. Like the Matwaala mug, which acts as the physical award given to the poet-of-honor with their lines of poetry inscribed on it.

Since its inception, Matwaala has been marked by magic, community, and camaraderie, a festival that was birthed to increase the visibility of South Asian poetry. Realizing its mission could be achieved in New York City, where it broils with academic institutions and cultural ferment, Pramila Venkateswaran, our codirector, and I moved it from Austin, Texas to New York in 2017.

Eleven of us gathered at New York University, Hunter College, Nassau Community College, and the Red Room to read and share our poetry with students, faculty, and audience members. U.K. poets Yogesh Patel, the 2019 poet-of-honor, and Kavita A. Jindal joined us from across the pond. U.S. poets Indran Amirthanayagam, Zilka Joseph, Vikas Menon, Sophia Naz, Ralph Nazareth, Ravi Shankar, Yuyutsu Sharma, Vivek Sharma, and Pramila Venkatewaran visibly moved audiences with poetry textured by the issues of immigration, displacement, politics, identity, family, and experiential moments of life that have no labels.

Back in Austin, what is foremost in my heart is gratitude for so many who believe in softening borders. Kindness has no skin color. Bonnie Rose Marcus and the Readings & Workshops Program at Poets & Writers, Tim Tomlinson and Deedle Tomlinson, and Norman Spencer made so much possible. The universities that hosted us—NYU, Hunter, and NCC—gave South Asian voices a chance to be heard. Live on poetry is what I heard for three days. Your time is now.

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.

Jack York is a queer fatty from Queens, New York. She writes mostly poetry and creative nonfiction, but is rapidly rediscovering her love of fan fiction. She coproduces Streaks of Lavender, a zine on queer resistance through creative writing and community building. York earned her BA in English from Queens College, and works as an administrative coordinator for the New York Public Library. Find her on Instagram @jackyork_ and @streaksoflavender.

When I entered the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City for the first time in October 2017, I was the largest person in the room. This is typical for most spaces I’m in, but what surprised me is that this time I wasn’t sure if I should shrink or rise to fill my space.

The group was diverse in race, ethnicity, age, gender, size, and ability. We came from various career paths, most having rushed to the museum from work or school. We brought different levels of publishing, of confidence, of practice. Yes, our queerness united us, but more than that was the desire for community, for a place to feel less othered, for folks to intentionally hold space for our thoughts and words, to be with us as we tried to resist rather than acquiesce.

Creative Writing From Queer Resistance is an eight-week workshop conceived and facilitated by Nancy Agabian. Since 2017, it has brought together three cohorts of queer writers to meet in community, read the work of our queer author ancestors, and continue their legacy of resistance through writing. As each workshop ended, there was a strong desire to continue this work, and across cohorts, participants have become friends and accountability partners for their writing.

What began as a simple, “We should make a zine!” has blossomed into Streaks of Lavender, a forthcoming zine produced by workshop alums. Through this zine, we are creating opportunities to build community beyond the safety of the museum’s gallery walls and to turn our words into action.

At the 2019 New York City Feminist Zinefest, we cofacilitated a creative writing workshop for queer, trans, and gender non-conforming folks focusing on rage, the theme of our zine’s first issue. Inspired by Nancy’s workshop, we read Sandra Cisneros and Audre Lorde alongside some of our own work, and invited participants to share too. We discussed anger, fear, and how we can find safety in our minds and our beds, sometimes. We laughed, we stretched, we literally screamed at the top of our lungs.

And me? Two years after I first entered the museum, I’m invigorated and ready to start letting go of those initial insecurities, those doubts that hold so many of us back, especially marginalized folks. Each doubt focuses on I, but through this new community of writers, in so many unexpected ways, I have become we.

The launch party for Streaks of Lavender’s first issue will take place on Tuesday, April 30 at 6:30PM at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art.

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.

Romaine Washington, MEd., is the author of the poetry collection, Sirens in Her Belly (Jamii Publishing, 2015), and a fellow of the Inland Area Writing Project at the University of California in Riverside and the Watering Hole in South Carolina. She writes about her experience as the workshop facilitator for the San Bernardino Inlandia Writing Workshop sponsored by the Inlandia Institute. The library workshop is one of many free writing workshops organized by the Inlandia Institute in California’s Inland Empire region, and cosponsored by Poets & Writers.

Over a year ago, I began attending the San Bernardino Inlandia Institute workshop located in the cozy Howard M. Rowe Branch Library. Facilitator Allyson Jeffredo shared her vision of creating a workshop steeped in honest conversation and a safe space. We were instructed to discuss the heart of the work which primed us to be receptive to constructive critique. Her mission of guiding us to our best writing selves was the perfect example of an effective workshop leader.

When Allyson moved, I was invited to be the facilitator and inherited a healthy workshop with friendly, patient, and creatively curious people like former social worker Charlotte LeVecque, who taught us about her love of horses in a poem titled “The Jump”:

He takes off
                         not a foot on the ground
My horse and I take wing

Our haiku guru, Cynthia Charlwood Pringle, transported us to a mini-retreat with these lines:

ocean inhales, holds
its breath – pauses – releases
foamy crescent domes

Our workshop participants range in age from mid-twenties to eighties, from college students to retirees. The octogenarian from Germany and the dancer in her twenties who works with at-risk youth have a mutual admiration for each other’s poetry and joie de vivre. The creative process, natural flow in fellowship, and mutual respect makes each meeting memorable.

We’ve had visits from guest presenters like Marilyn Kallet, the poet laureate of Knoxville, Tennessee, whose dynamic presentation focused on “Joy in Everyday Things.” We went on a library scavenger hunt for inspiration and read impromptu lines with Kallet, but we were all most deeply moved when she read from her work.

For our next meeting, we will have guest presenter and local author Isabel Quintero, whose debut novel, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces (Cinco Puntos Press, 2014), won the 2015 Morris Award for Debut YA Fiction. She will speak to us about expressing our authentic voice. I am excited to see how this will impact our writing.

With each meeting I see growth in what is produced and the quality of constructive comments. Having inherited such a wonderful workshop, my mission is to see each person continue to thrive.

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.