Poets & Writers Blogs

Nancy Hathaway has written books on astronomy (The Friendly Guide to the Universe), photography (Native American Portraits), mythology, astrology, and more. Her shorter pieces have been published in periodicals that range from Alimentum and PaperTape to American Recorder and Self. She lives in New York City. 

In 2009 I was invited to lead a writing workshop at St. Margaret’s House, an independent-living facility for the elderly and disabled that operates in lower Manhattan under the auspices of Trinity Church. The prospect excited me, except for one thing: The members of the workshop, which is funded in part by Poets & Writers under its Readings & Workshops program, had been meeting for years with another writer. Their community, I imagined, was fully established, and I wasn’t certain I would fit in.

I also didn’t know how to begin, though I’d taught composition many times. My friend Sally, a veteran workshop leader, suggested that I bring something in for the first day. Everyone likes a handout, she said. So I printed out a page of quotations about writing. There were inspiring passages from Kafka and Annie Dillard, along with rueful pronouncements from William Styron (“Let's face it, writing is hell”), Joy Williams (“Nothing the writer can do is ever enough”), and Flaubert (“Writing is a dog’s life, but the only one worth living”). These downbeat quotations from distinguished writers reassured and consoled me. Writing is hard—and I’m not the only one who feels that way. I was sure the writers of St. Margaret’s House would relate.

But they did not relate. As I ran through my quotations, they seemed mystified and faintly hostile. Why, they wondered, would Willa Cather believe, “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen”? That couldn’t be true. (Flannery O’Connor upped the age to eighteen.)

And, sexism aside, why would Donald Barthelme say, “A writer is a man who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do”?

And what did Red Smith mean about opening a vein?

I tried to explain. Eventually a septuagenarian in a floral blouse asked if we could change the subject and talk about Hemingway.

Absolutely.

She said that a series of electro-shock treatments had wiped out his memory. He couldn’t write, and that’s why he committed suicide, and what did I think about that?

I said I thought it was a tragedy.

She couldn’t stop thinking about it, she said, whereupon a luminous, white-haired woman at the other end of the table leaned forward, eyes blazing. “When did that happen?” she demanded. “1961? 1962? Get over it!”

By the end of the session, I was worried. Timed writing exercises on specific topics had not gone well, and free-writing was a disaster. Leading this workshop was going to be rougher than I thought.

That was almost five years ago. Since then, despite diminished hearing, vision problems, mobility limitations, and other age related torments, most of the people I met that night (and a few new ones) show up weekly, pages in hand. Their writing has improved, as have their critical skills. Honest and encouraging in approximately equal measure, they really are a community, and I am honored to be part of it.

I date the turnaround to the third session, when I brought in two poems: “The Game” by Marie Howe and “Scrabble in Heaven” by Jane Shore. After we talked about them, I asked everyone to write about a game, and I set my iPod ticking. The results astonished me. A retiree who had been paralyzed by random prompts wrote nonstop about Monopoly. A former professor conjured up a long-ago badminton game. A second-wave feminist (and well-published journalist) tied a cogent political analysis to the plunder and betrayal involved in the board game Risk. There were pieces about checkers, dominoes, and Twister, and even a rumination on Freecell, the online solitaire game. Playing Freecell, wrote the Hemingway fan, “My breath becomes even, my blood oxygenated.”

Since then, we have read a lot of poems, and the workshop has been transformed. Poems are better than prompts, even when they are used as prompts. Standard prompts may stir up memories but they offer nothing by way of literary models. Poems do that and more.

First, they show how other writers excavate sensitive material and thus they are liberating. Have mixed feelings about your niece? Read Louise Glück. Your father? Start with Roethke and go from there. Anxious about, say, cancer? Read Elise Partridge, Rosanna Warren, and, while you’re at it, Whitman. Poetry peeks into every heart and under every stone. It reveals all—and it’s short.

I like to bring in paired poems – W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams on Breughel, for instance – but mostly I use individual poems. Stephen Dunn’s “Death of a Colleague” caused a commotion, raised voices and all. Katrina Vandenburg’s “Handwriting Analysis” inspired an essay that I am positive will become one woman’s first outside publication. Christopher Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” written circa 1760, occasioned an ode to the pharmacy chain Duane Reade.

A writing workshop is not meant to be a literature class. But how can it not be? Even for writers of prose, reading poetry illuminates subject matter, disentangles emotions, highlights the importance of craft, and demonstrates precision in language.

But there is one thing it cannot do: persuade writers to rewrite—not merely to make isolated corrections but to rethink, rephrase, even reorganize. Rewriting is a complex business, and many members of the workshop resist it.

I don’t blame them. Rewriting can be tedious (and worse). Still, every spring, as the deadline for our annual literary review—a booklet—draws near, the workshop participants sit down with their stories, personal essays, and occasional poems and, I am happy to say, revise.

I attribute that miracle to the power of publication. Because poetry is stimulating, and self-expression is valuable and satisfying, but publication, however humble, reaches beyond the self, beyond the workshop, and into the world. Publication galvanizes.

Top: Nancy Hathaway. Photo Credit: George Sussman.

Bottom:  Journal 49. Photo Credit: Nancy Hathaway.

Support for Readings & Workshops in New York City was provided, in part, by 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 A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Dimitri Keriotis’s short story collection The Quiet Time is forthcoming this fall from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Flyway, BorderSenses, Evening Street Review, and other literary journals. He teaches English at Modesto Junior College and co-coordinates the High Sierra Institute. He and his family live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.



At the end of last semester, memoirist and poet Suzanne Roberts came to Modesto Junior College (MJC) to read and to talk with students. A couple of nights after the event, I walked into an English 101 class and instantly heard, “That was really something Thursday night.” Tito, a re-entry student in his fifties, was talking to me. He repeated, “That was really something.”

“Yeah? What specifically?” I asked.

“Just going and hearing an author, a real author. That’s something I’ve never done before. I didn’t know what to expect, but, man, was that really something. I can’t wait to read her book.”

I teach in a community where literary events are as rare as double rainbows. Not surprisingly, most of my students have not heard of a book reading, which makes attending one out of the question. Even those who have heard of readings rarely want to go to one. P&W funding has allowed our school to consistently bring writers to MJC for the past eight years. Comments like Tito’s are not unusual. But to be honest, most students who attend our readings do so because the event is part of a class, or because it is offered as extra credit. It is unfortunate that just like many of my colleagues, I resort to such a tactic to ensure a decent turnout—attach an extra credit assignment to the reading. This move feels like a foul, as if I’m paying my students to become part of a large enough audience. It saddens me to think that without this approach only five students would probably show up. But is dangling a carrot wrong if it helps students grow? Tito’s comments suggest not. Those of us who savor literary events feel personal growth happening as we listen to a writer deliver a gripping passage, answer a juicy question, or discuss issues of craft, so we return time and time again, but how can those unaware know to go? They can’t unless guided there by way of an incentive.

More often than not, my students later report that a reading was worth their time. After the Suzanne Roberts reading, a student e-mailed me about it: “As I headed to the Little Theatre, I really wanted to be at home on my couch playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto [this is verbatim!], but I needed the extra credit, so I went. I thought the whole thing was going to be stupid, but I’m glad I went. She was cool, and I learned something new. I might even go to another one someday.”

Enough of my students have been turned on to literature by hearing authors read their work, answer their questions, and talk with them one-on-one while their books get signed that I won’t dare ditch my approach. We don’t always know what’s good for us until someone basically forces us to do something that can have a lasting effect.

Anyone for some extra credit?

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

Dimitri Keriotis’s short story collection The Quiet Time is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin State University Press. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Flyway, BorderSenses, Evening Street Review, and other literary journals. He teaches English at Modesto Junior College and co-coordinates the High Sierra Institute. He and his family live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

We’ve all heard the news about the economy creeping back to life. This notion recently became real when a colleague and I wanted to bring writer Suzanne Roberts to Modesto Junior College to read from her memoir Almost Somewhere. I hit up my dean for some money for a P&W matching grant, and without pausing, he said, “I can find something for you.” As I walked out of his office, I wondered if I’d heard him correctly. The last time I asked for money I’d been laughed out the door.

Ours is a familiar story: Over the past few years of the Great Recession, the funding for nearly all things literary went bone dry. Our college’s literary journal—Quercus Review—though ten years strong with submissions from such heavy hitters as XJ Kennedy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Amiri Baraka, and Wanda Coleman was killed from the college budget in Robespierre guillotine fashion. And support for author events didn’t fare much better. Whereas we’d previously brought a poet to campus in the fall and a prose writer in the spring, and were able to pay them four figures, we found ourselves clawing at a few lost quarters found in the faculty lounge furniture. Hard times had hit. When I talked with friends at other campuses, they told me more of the same. I thought our college’s lit-event life was long dead.

But all hope was far from lost. Writer Daniel Chacón, who’d once taught at MJC, contacted me about coming to read and visit classrooms. When I told him that I wasn’t sure if I could scrape together a three-digit compensation, he said, “I understand. Whatever you can do will be fine.” Chacón’s response led the way, encouraging us over the next few years to invite other authors. We knew better than to try to offer two readings a year, so we scaled it down to one. Over the next three years we were able to average a reading a year because the writers essentially repeated Chacón’s message. It seemed as if an overall understanding spread across the literary community: We’ll do what it takes to breathe life into the events that keep our community alive. But still, we had to pay the artists something. Even when they said that they would come for free, and a couple did, it would have been criminal to take them up on it. One year we tapped a forgotten fund designated for literary events established back in the day, which allowed us to pull together enough funding to apply for a P&W matching grant. Another year we knocked on any door whose office had the faintest smell of money. The only one that came through was that of the Associated Students, the student government. After that we walked into a desert. Those who’d supported us in the past not only didn’t throw us a bone, they all but slammed their doors in our faces. We felt strongly about continuing our practice of visiting authors, and we became scared of what would happen if we stopped. While we could handle not offering our community a reading one year, we worried that the Pooh-Bahs in charge of the money would get used to writers not coming to campus, which would make it tough to bring them back when better times returned. Keeping our momentum up, though our number of readings had dropped by a half, was vital. We’d been lucky enough to receive P&W matching grants in the past, but what if you had nothing for P&W to match? Feeling gutsy, I called P&W’s LA office and asked this question. I nearly fell out of my chair when they encouraged us to apply anyway. We did, and P&W allowed our wheels to keep turning.

No doubt we have yet to fully return to fat times, but it seems like we’ve made it through the financial bottleneck. This past fall poet and memoirist Suzanne Roberts did come to campus, and this spring we’re bringing poet Patricia Smith. We’re able to offer greater compensations than we have in years. It’s a nice feeling, returning to flusher times that result in writers being rewarded more than has been possible of late. No doubt such rough times will return someday, but the lean times have taught us that we never have to completely do without literary inspiration.

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

Writer, vocalist, and sound artist LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), as well as the album Television. She 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, New York, LaTasha, along with writer Greg Tate, is the founder and editor of yoYO/SO4 Magazine, which has been funded by the Poets & Writers Readings & Workshops Program.

Somewhere in the Bronx there is a community garden called Hispanos Unidos. There, a cherry tree produces thirty pounds of cherries annually. Cucumber, cabbage, beans, figs, jalapeño peppers, peaches, and eggplants are grown and harvested. Tinkerbelle the cat guards the flock of chickens that live underneath the makeshift house. Inside the house on a wall is the worksheet for those who maintain the garden. The membership is ten dollars per month for men, five for women. The house serves as site of inquiry and celebration and as a location where Latinos maintain their cultural ties and language. It is a place where one can disregard the actual city residing outside the gates of the garden, where one can find respite in an array of fruits and vegetables. Where a rooster crows above the overhead subway train. It is gardens like this one that became the inspiration for Lincoln Center’s La Casita poetry and music festival.

In 2013, along with representatives from the Caribbean Cultural Center, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Asian Arts Alliance, and Lincoln Center Out of Doors, I had the pleasure of being part of the curatorial team for La Casita. This was different from my previous curatorial endeavors. This was not about my personal artistic tastes or what I was attempting to accomplish on my own. This was about the collective voice and the spirit in which La Casita was founded in 2001 by LCOOD’s former program director, Jenneth Webster, and Ana Araiz, an independent producer. Connected to the traditional casitas located in the Bronx, Harlem, and the Lower East Side, its purpose has to do with the richness of poetry and music. Like the casitas, the festival is meant to serve as an oasis situated in the urban and at times cold architecture of the city. As it serves as a platform to “create and recreate traditions,” it also equips artists with a platform for political demonstration. In 2004, La Casita was one of only a handful of venues where participants protesting against the war and the Republican National Convention in NYC could do so without restriction.

The curatorial process was similar to a family conversing at a kitchen table. We talked. We debated. We laughed. We shared ideas. We shared food. It was foreign, and at the same, a familiar I had not yet experienced. We came together to build a bridge that connected us all to the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the United States. Collectively, we put together a two-day lineup of musicians and poets to perform at Lincoln Center and Teatro Pregones in the Bronx. We carried out La Casita’s goal to create a place where “poets, troubadours, bands, comedians, singers, percussionists, and storytellers could gather together to pass on las palabras; the oral traditions of the spoken word and song.” And while it has proven home for those largely rooted in the oral tradition, it has equally shared space with Pulitzer and PEN winners. Elizabeth Alexander, January Rogers, Amiri Baraka, Aracelis Girmay, Carl Hancock Rux, Joy Harjo, Ishle Yi Park, Colin Channer, Mayda del Valle, Mark Turcotte, Tara Betts, John Trudell, and Angelo Moore of Fishbone are among those who have been featured, and since 2001 over two hundred musicians and poets have performed at this casita.

By the time La Casita came to Teatro Pregones in the Bronx, I understood myself not only as a curator but also as a supporter of each and every artist featured. I felt myself representing the spirit of community gardens: places where everyone is welcomed regardless of artistic, aesthetic, and cultural background. The casita itself, which visual artist Manuel Vega was commissioned to create for this festival, is maintained every year, much like the casitas that inspired Webster and Araiz in 2001. Sunflowers, birds, Afro percussion, floating snails, lizards, Yoruba and indigenous symbolism, and cityscapes cover the tarpaulin walls while curtains of gold and silver tinsel accentuate the door and windows. Some years ago a red rooster—who in Yoruba faith is said to have assisted Oduduwa in the creation of the earth—stands at the top of the casita facing north on a weathervane, alive and stout. This year it is Shangó.

Click here for video of poet Irma Pineda reading at La Casita.

La Casita poetry and music festival does not garner much attention from the larger poetry community but deserves it. It is one of those rare places in New York where traditional and contemporary cultures are expressed and celebrated on this little stage. You are introduced to multiple languages and dialects. You are encouraged to dance. Celebration is an exchange. You learn how to celebrate. It feels much in line with Hispanos Unidos in the Bronx—where the harvest of ripe cherries and everything that grows there is shared with the community outside its gates. Where, over good food, everyone is an equal and no one is overlooked.

Click here for video of the Bodoma Garifuna Culture Band performing at La Casita.

Top Photo: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. Photo: Cheikh Hamala Diabate at La Casita at Lincoln Center Out of Doors. Photo: Poets, Jesus 'Papoleto' Melendez, January Rogers, Irma Pineda and Hip Hop artist Bocafloja at Day 2 of La Casita at Treato Pregones. Last Photo: Some of La Casita's curatorial team (Melody Capote, Charles Daniel Dawson, Claudia Norman, Rich Villar, Bill Bragin and Lillian Cho) with poets John Blake and Nolan Black Eagle Eskeets.

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.

In an effort to celebrate great books of long ago that were overlooked by major American literary prizes such as the National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prizes, online literary magazine Bookslut has launched its own new award.

The Daphnes will posthumously honor books published decades ago, starting with the year 1963, in order to “right the wrongs of the 1964 National Book Awards," editor Jessa Crispin writes on the Bookslut blog. “If you look back at the books that won the Pulitzer or the National Book Award, it is always the wrong book. It takes decades for the reader to catch up to a genius book, it takes years away from hype, publicity teams, and favoritism to see that some books just aren’t that good.”

The Bookslut team has begun compiling nominations of some of the best books published in 1963—very few of which even made the NBA shortlist—which in fiction included The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, V by Thomas Pynchon, and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, among others (John Updike's The Centaur took the fiction prize that year). Notable nonfiction works of the year included Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (the award went to a biography of John Keats); and while a John Crowe Ransome anthology took the prize in poetry, other 1963 collections included 73 Poems by E. E. Cummings, Reality Sandwiches by Allen Ginsburg, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law by Adrienne Rich, and All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton.

The editors are currently seeking more nominees for the best books of 1963, in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. Nominations can be sent via e-mail to Jessa Crispin.

A panel of judges in each category, comprised of writers chosen by the editors, will read each nominated book and vote on the winner.

Stay tuned to the Bookslut blog for more updates about the award, and in the meantime check out an interview with Crispin by Dustin Kurtz of independent publisher Melville House.