The (In)Visible Memoirs Project runs no-cost, community-based writing workshops throughout the state of California, with the aim of creating a literary landscape that pushes back on dominant literary discourse’s exclusionary practices. Between January and April, writer P&W-supported writer Ruth Nolan taught an (In)Visible Memoirs workshop at College of the Desert in Palm Desert, California. Project director Rachel Reynolds writes about the workshop.

The thing about invisibility is that there are real risks to refusing its cloak. Invisibility counts on these risks for its effective deployment. Anyone who has found their space at the periphery—which is more of us than not—knows how terrifying it can be to push back the curtain and demand to be counted. As the person at the helm of programming for the (In)Visible Memoirs Project, I am constantly awed by how many people—instructors, participants, and community sponsors alike—are ready to let their stories ring out.

According to the AFSP (American Foundation for Suicide Prevention), nearly 40,000 people took their own lives in 2010. In the same year, the AFSP identified nearly 460,000 attempted suicides. Tallied together, roughly half a million people navigated suicide directly in 2010. The lives of countless others were impacted too, as friends and family of those directly involved struggled to walk this terrain.

When professor Ruth Nolan responded to my call for new (In)Visible Memoirs Project workshops this past fall, she wrote, “All too often, suicide survivors become victims, too, of social prejudices and judgments, and having experienced this myself, I have come to realize there is a huge need to give suicide survivors a safe and productive space to write, identify, and heal.” We leapt at the chance to support her in her goal of providing the first-ever workshop for people who live in the Palm Desert region and have lived with the impact of suicide.

Ruth Nolan is a force. A professor at College of the Desert in Palm Springs, she teaches writing and literature in addition to advising the college literary magazine. She is a widely published poet and prose writer, and an editor to boot. Armed with both personal experience and the chops required to deftly usher writers into a carefully crafted safe space, we knew she would provide a transformative experience for her workshop participants. What we could never have predicted, though, was just how far she’d take them or how essential the space she held was.

Meeting with seven participants—who spanned a forty-year age range and various social and ethnic identities—Ruth discovered that many of them had either wanted or been invited to speak at public suicide awareness events in the region but then felt their story was too dark, or worse, been asked not to share it. Immediately, Ruth made space for sharing these stories a workshop priority. What began as a shedding of silence within the confines of workshop meetings gained momentum and bloomed into multiple readings at public events. As I write this today, Ruth and members of her workshop have just finished recording some of their work for radio broadcast. From silence to center stage in the course of a twenty-hour workshop—Ruth and her workshop participants are writers of the fiercest sort. 

Photo: From left: Darlene Arciga, Tim Johnson, Kimberly Martinez, and Ruth Nolan. Credit: Ruth Nolan.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W–supported poet Joseph O. Legaspi blogs about literary gatherings in his home borough Queens, New York. He cofounded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that serves Asian American poetry. The author of Imago (CavanKerry Press) and the forthcoming chapbook Subways (Thrush Press), he works at Columbia University.

Three years ago I moved to Queens because I fell in love. With a man, who is now my adorable, kind-hearted husband. The only person who could’ve taken me out of Manhattan, where I've resided since moving to New York in the mid-nineties to pursue a creative writing degree at New York University. Just as I had emigrated from Manila where I was born, then left Los Angeles to come to New York, I uprooted myself. You can say I moved because of family, a search for my own. An important part of the move was finding vital communities, creative and otherwise.

Gradually, I’ve found my footing as a poet in Queens, the literary underdog borough, the one noted for being the most ethnically diverse. Take a quick stroll and you’ll hear dozens of languages and you'll discover blocks of Turkish, Korean, Colombian, Irish, Indian, Nepalese, and Filipino establishments, restaurants, and groceries. Local libraries are stocked with books and movies in Hindi, Spanish, Urdu, Arabic, and Mandarin.

Queens is rife with inspiration. My upcoming publication, a chapbook of prose poems, was primarily inspired by the 7 train, which takes me away and returns me home. With its large immigrant population, Queens is a place of transition, fueled by hard work, aspirations and hard knock realness. People are so alive here with their plethora of cultural expressions.

And yet Queens is the forgotten borough. But literature happens here. Here is where Jack Kerouac, Mary Gordon, and even Walt Whitman once lived. Writing communities are thriving. Literary gatherings—public and private—occur. Three popular reading series quickly come to mind: First Tuesday at Terraza 7 in Elmhurst, hosted by P&W–supported Richard Jeffrey Newman; Oh! Bernice Writers Collective at Café Marlene in Sunnyside; and Boundless Tale Reading Series at the Waltz-Astoria.

Newtown Literary, a semi-annual journal, prides itself in publishing Queens writers. They also sponsor events such as QueensWrites! Weekend, a fundraiser, which main goal is to get borough residents writing.

Two weeks ago I found myself reading at a poetry salon in someone else’s living room. The talented P&W–supported poet Ocean Vuong has been hosting intimate, low-key salons in his Astoria apartment. Guests have consisted of local writers, though a couple have braved the sojourn from Brooklyn. (We’re very welcoming in Queens.) It was such an enjoyable and stimulating evening, punctuated with easy camaraderie and dialogue about my poems, poetics, and art. The salon engendered sharing, storytelling, and openness.

I envision such a congregation happening all over the borough, at all times. Alas, Queens has ways to go before being a literary mecca with its working class citizens trying to make ends meet and English being a second language to many. What we do have, we appreciate. This borough possesses such a hearty, pluralistic, down-to-earth character, and a hunger closer to purity. To me, Queens is home, where I love.

Photo: Joseph O. Legaspi (front) at a poetry salon in Queens. Credit: Peter Bienkowski.

Support for Readings/Workshops 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 Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Jade Foster is the founder of the salon styled poetry tour THE REVIVAL, which has connected over two thousand women across the United States and abroad. The third annual tour in 2012, funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign and supported in part by P&W, featured a troupe of queer women artists in D.C., Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Durham. Foster continues to use poetry as a tool in redefining American arts. To stay informed visit Cereus Arts. Her own literary work has been published in magazines, including online at Clutch Magazine and Elixher.

What are your reading dos?
I teach poetry to high school students, and we were just discussing what to do when you have a feature. First things first: Be prepared. Look like something. And definitely have options when it comes to your poems because you never know how large, small, or diverse your audience is going to be.

...and don’ts?
Never leave a reading early, or after you read. With the queer-women-led poetry tour THE REVIVAL, I share my work, but I also do a lot of the planning and set up, so I'm the last to leave. It's important to stay because you never know who you may meet or what kind of feedback you'll get on your process.

How do you prepare for a reading?
On the 2012 tour, we took the time to check in with each other and dedicated our performances to our ancestors at each and every show. It was the first time we did this, but I believe it really made a difference in our delivery, and helped us focus on our purpose as poets and conduits for the word.

What’s your crowd-pleaser, and why does it work?
I don't want to please a crowd. Never! I want someone to get upset, to get outraged, to feel challenged to do more. There's so much we can do just by taking a small step toward our own selves.

What’s the inspiration behind THE REVIVAL poetry tour?
THE REVIVAL started because I didn't fit in. I'm not a slam poet, I'm not an academic poet, and the open mics were boring me. Luckily, there were a few other women poets who felt the same way. A poem isn't finished until it's heard, so we all pooled our resources, reached out to friends and family to open their homes, and made it happen.

What do you consider to be the value of literary programs in the community?
We're in a peculiar place, on our own cliff...

I say it's time to jump. If folks are reading on Kindles, let's follow suit. If publishing houses are printing less, then let's print or come together to distribute our own work. Poetry is low-key in a vacuum right now—in a MFA middle-of-nowhere vacuum—and that's dangerous. It belongs to the people. THE REVIVAL is taking that jump and, like The Road Runner in those old cartoons, we hit the ground running.

Photo: Jade Foster. Credit: Anna Barsan.
Support for Readings/Workshops events 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.