We're happy to help spread the word about the first Books Alive! Conference sponsored by The Washington Independent Review of Books.  The conference will be held Saturday, June 8 at the North Bethesda Marriott Hotel Conference Center, opposite the White Flint Metro.

Books Alive 2013 is not only for authors and would-be authors but also for book lovers, book clubbers and for anyone who wants to learn more from top writers about how they do their craft.  For those who want to pitch a book, there will also be nearly 20 agents present. 

The subjects of the panels range from the state of the market and new platforms for publishing to memoir, biography, research, crime noir and plain old fiction. The day begins with a conversation between two Pulitzer winners, Washington Post critic Michael Dirda and Bill McPherson, the Washington Post Book World's first editor.  The luncheon speaker is Marie Arana, Bolivar biographer, memoirist and the last editor of Book World. 

 Several panels will run through the day.  Participating authors and agents include Paul Dickson, Tom Mann, George Pelecanos, Laura Lippman, Allison Leotta, Susan Coll, Marita Goldman, Sara Taber, Ken Ackerman, Kathryn Johnson, Ron Goldfarb,  David Stewart, Gail Ross, Keith Donohue, Jack Farrell, and National Book Award winner Alice McDermott.

An early bird registration rate is in effect through Wednesday, May 15. 

 

 

Susan Okie Wins Bethesda Poetry Competition

Susan Okie's poem "Perseid" was selected by Michael Collier as winner of the 2013 Poetry Contest organized by Bethesda Urban Partnership and Bethesda Magazine.  Ms. Okie is a member of The Writer's Center, and she has taken many workshops over the years.  We're glad to post her blog entry and winning poem. - The Editors

 

 

 

            I am a family practice doctor and medical writer who rediscovered my love of writing poetry in a workshop at Chautauqua about 15 years ago.  I am enormously grateful to the Writer’s Center for its role in helping me develop as a poet.  I’ve learned from the center’s gifted teachers, including Rose Solari, Judith McCombs,  Charles Jensen, Sue Ellen Thompson and, especially, Stanley Plumly. Friendships with other local poets have been an enduring gift of my studies there.

            In January, 2012, I embarked on the low-residency MFA program in poetry at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, NC. Although I questioned the wisdom of entering graduate school at 61, I can say now (as I near the end of the third semester) that it has been a transformative, joyous experience.  Each term, we work intensively with a single faculty member. My supervisors – Maurice Manning, Alan Shapiro and Marianne Boruch -- have nurtured my craft, expanded the breadth and depth of my reading, and helped me learn how to begin, how to be patient with a poem, how to revise.

            As a journalist who spent almost twenty years as a reporter and editor for the Washington Post, my greatest challenge has been moving away from linear thinking and narrative, toward the lyric and the unexpected. I wrote “Perseid” in late 2012, after my husband and I watched the August meteor shower with our younger son during a visit to  the Wind River range near Lander, Wyoming.

            My poems have been published in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Gettysburg Review, Passager, and the Journal of the American Medical Association. One is forthcoming in Hospital Drive, the literature and humanities journal of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. I am still active in medicine, volunteering weekly in a Montgomery County clinic for uninsured adults and teaching first-year medical students at Georgetown University about how to talk with and listen to patients.

 

                                                                                                            -- Susan Okie

 

             PERSEID 

 
Three of us in plastic chairs,
wearing all we brought, legs
under a quilt, tipping back.
The galaxy’s rim spins
above, silver churning
on starless black. That dark
is interstellar dust, says
my husband, not nothing.
I choose a black hole
in the wild white river,
and let my eyes unfocus, till
stars at my vision’s edge
brighten and burn,
steady in this high air.
Then a rushing spark,
a wake that glows and vanishes.
Under the blanket, Jacob
squeezes my hand. Nothing,
then another spark, another,
and on our right a flash
aims right for us and
goes out, burned to ash.
 

                                    --  Susan Okie

 

         

Tom Kirlin at The Writer's Center



We’ve just scheduled a poetry reading at 3:00 p.m. on April 27 with Tom Kirlin, whose Under The Potato Moon was published by Little Red Tree Publishing with support from The William Meredith Foundation. The book continues a Little Red Tree tradition of combining poetry and visual art, in this case reproductions of artwork by Nancy Frankel, who will also be in attendance.

The reading will be held here at The Writer's Center, 4508 Walsh Street, in downtown Bethesda. It's free and open to the public, and will be followed by a reception and book signing.

Richard Harteis, President of The William Meredith Foundation, will be joining us, and he is helping to coordinate the program. Long-time members of The Writer’s Center will recall William and Richard as old friends of the Center; it’ll be nice to have Richard back. Under The Potato Moon comes with a Foreword by Richard Harteis and an introduction by Michael Collier, posted here:

Introduction

In Thomas Kirlin’s passionate, soberly rollicking Under the Potato Moon a weathervane “turned preacher” prays for the “Archangel rain” to nurture our world “with such crippled grace” that “Van Gogh himself would lurch afield to paint his breath away.” There is such exuberance of imagination and such abundance of transformation that his poems are apt to leave a reader breathless and gasping in surprise. Kirlin is like a capacious, melodic barker calling us to the carnival of an intensely vivid and deeply humane circus of life.

But the energized and rambunctious imagination is only one feature of Under the Potato Moon. The collection contains forthright yet gorgeous and poignant love poems. In “Banquet,” one of several sonnets, a couple, in the aftermath of a dinner party, take sustenance in the unrequited looks they stored up for each other during the evening by recognizing an illumination in their bodies that:

          “...sings:
          Feast & appetite, feast & appetite—what
          but love of bones ever set out table right?”

In “Delivery,” while working his way through a stack of mail, Kirlin considers the “vanities of love.” The poem leads him in a typically delightful and unpredictable way not only to forgive “love rages” and
the “torn heart” but also to mull over the meaning of Christmas and Salvation Army Santas.

Connected to Kirlin’s spry and sparring imagination is a quick literary wit that showcases itself in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Aquarius,” a parody of Wallace Stevens that begins:

          “Sporting a suave tuft
          a titmouse circles
          the crystalline globe—
          now even the blackbird knows:
          icicles, in the right hands
          weep to fill
          Aquarius’ bowl.”

Kirlin is drawn to allusion not because he feels it’s necessary to display his erudition but to show how his own work is part of the woven fabric of literary conversation and tradition.

For all the vociferous charm of Kirlin’s poems and the lightness of touch they can produce, he is a poet of deep and committed social consciousness. In “Anthem,” banter and play give way to a serious poem about the Cold War and Vietnam era when, as he writes:

          “there was blood on the sky each time you
           sighed;”

In the disagreements of those decades, he locates the genesis of America’s current social and political polarizations:

          “Yes, we strangled Cold War paranoia to a stillborn stupor;
          yes, we broke old colonial maps in two, setting
          democracy free, but we also destroyed intergenerational
          communion, the brightest path to e pluribus unum.”

Finally, among the many reasons we read poems, one of them is to see how a particular person takes him or herself. In other words, the presentation of a life measured against a particular time and place, foregrounded in the personal but always with the social, political, and cultural coloring in the background. Thomas Kirlin’s poems amply answer this need and as such they offer a vivid record of what it’s like to be alive straddling two centuries.

Michael Collier, Director
Bread Load Writers’ Conference

"Telescope I" by Nancy Frankel

[Fired Clay, Acrylic] - 17" L x 6" Dia

Private Collection of Charles and Pat Timberlake

Think Global; Write Local:

TWC’s Writing Staycation

By Angela Swayze

After researching writer’s retreats a few years ago, workshop leader Zahara Heckscher came to an inspired conclusion: there should be an affordable writing retreat in the D.C. area for busy people who can’t afford the time or cost of leaving their family and responsibilities. Thus was born Writing Staycation, The Writer’s Center’s week-long retreat for writers who need to get away and write.

Heckscher’s workshop seeks to transport busy D.C. area residents to a place where “their souls and bodies are being nurtured so that their minds can focus on writing.”

Bringing in paintings, flowers, healthy foods, and in part guided by Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Heckscher leads participants through five consecutive days of structured writing.

“We start on time and end on time,” she says. “Within the structure comes the freedom.” But it’s the space, and nurturing energy of that space, she likes to emphasize, that matters most.

Her participants agree. A self-proclaimed “staycation junkie,” Sheila Walker wrote on a recent First Person Plural blog that “The continuity and intensity of five consecutive days of Staycationing, rather than the usual once a week for several weeks, was exactly what I needed.” Andrea Solarz shares that the Staycation helped her jump start her writing and gave her a lot of motivation that “continued long after the week ended.”

So how does it work?

The day starts with a reading, Heckscher explains, often from such names as Pablo Neruda or Thich Nhat Hanh.

There may also be a writing prompt, however both take as little as 30 minutes. Then, it’s time to write.

Lunch involves guest speakers, like writer Danuta Hinc or acclaimed poet E. Ethelbert Miller, all of whom are open to one-on-one sessions afterwards. Lunch is followed by more time to write. Another break if offered later in the day, such as an outdoor walk.

“It’s good for the body to take a break from writing and gets creative juices going,” Heckscher says.

The day typically closes with a brief check-in to help participants become more self-aware of their process, such as identifying at what point they felt most productive during that day.

Outside the daily structure, participants also have the option to work on technique or talk nuts-and-bolts of writing with Heckscher or one of the lunch speakers. They also have the option of retreating to their own private space.

“Some need to be in a room alone,” says Heckscher.

Either way, Heckscher makes a conscious decision to stay away from workshopping students’ material, emphasizing that the purpose of the class is to focus on writing. “Critiquing is another class,” she says.

Born in part from “desperation and poverty,” the Writing Staycation has hit its mark. Over time, the workshop has seen its share of repeat attendees as well as new participants of varying stripes. Heckscher describes participants as “early 20s to their 70s and everyone in-between novice writers and already published authors.”

She goes on to say that she has a “radical faith in everyone that comes to Staycation, whatever their stage in the writing process.”

Seeing her role more as a facilitator than a leader, her goal is to create the space for people to be at their creative best. “If you want mint tea, I make sure you have mint tea. I know everyone who has walked in the door has made a huge commitment. I honor them all for making that commitment to writing.”

Heckscher is co-author of the book How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas. She has also written numerous articles that have appeared in books and the online travel magazine www.TransitionsAbroad.com, where she serves as contributing editor. Heckscher teaches professional writing at University of Maryland at College Park.

The next Writing Staycation is set for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. April 22 – 26 in Bethesda. Check our website for more information. Visit The Writer’s Center’s youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/TheWritersCenter) for a video of Zahara discussing Writing Staycation.



Two Writing Staycations are now posted on our Website. To join a workshop give us a call or click the start date to register online.  Writing Stacation starting: April 22 or June 24.   .

O-Dark-Thirty Publishes Second Issue

We’ve been very fortunate to receive grants from the National Endowment for the Arts over the last few years to offer support for writing workshops for veterans, active duty service members, and their family members. Through these workshops we’ve come to know and appreciate the good work of the Veterans Writing Project. In addition to writing workshops, VWP produces a literary journal, O-Dark-Thirty, which has just published its second issue. We’d like to thank Dario DiBattista for this blog posting to First Person Plural.

‘For Us to Bear the Report’: The Writer’s Center and O-Dark Thirty, a Military Veteran-Run Literary Journal


By: Dario DiBattista


The Veterans Writing Project, for which I’m an instructor, provides free writing workshops to veterans, service members, and their families at places like the George Washington University, and also provides instructors through the National Endowment for the Arts for writing workshops at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center at Bethesda because we believe that every veteran has a story tell, those stories are important, and they can serve to heal. The Writer’s Center supports us in partnership through teaching and through helping sharing veterans’ stories with our online and print literary journal O-Dark Thirty.

Our newest issue, our second issue, had an ominously recurring theme: our “ghost issue.” And the artwork on the cover, a piece called “Cody” by Army veteran Joe Olney, sets the tone appropriately.

A wonderfully reflective essay by John Purdue (letters of his to our editor) continues the theme in the nonfiction section. Purdue served stateside during Vietnam, sometimes dealing with burn victims, more often dealing with the mental tragedies of war in a special unit for some of the broken men who returned from combat. His goal was to help provide them a better facility than the one in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and help them “not blow the back of their heads off.” None died under his care. But two were successful at suicide while on leave. The emotion and struggle of Purdue of coping with those experiences, among others, perhaps lead him to hold a gun later in the narrative, considering his own suicide.

Next, the theme is also explored in the fiction section in Rod Merkley’s “Walk Until You Sleep.” The former Army medic author envisions a protagonist who has struggled too long with his demons from war and decides that killing himself is the only solution. But he doesn’t want to make it seem like suicide, because he thinks that truth will damage his memory to his son who will survive him. He considers a planned motorcycle wreck or “death by police” but ultimately just plans to go on a long walk, which takes an unexpected turn.

There are other excellently crafted works loosely related to the theme (and don’t forget to check out our profile of William Zinsser, who is a veteran of WWII).

We thank the Writer’s Center for their support of what we’re doing, and hope you’ll check out 0-Dark Thirty and consider subscribing.

Poet Lore's 124th Birthday Reading

Cover of A Night in Brooklyn

We undid a button,

turned out the light,

and in that narrow bed

we built the great city—

—D. Nurkse,
from “A Night in Brooklyn”

This Sunday at The Writer’s Center, former poet laureate of Brooklyn D. Nurkse and local poet Teri Ellen Cross will read in celebration of the 124^th birthday of Poet Lore, the semi-annual poetry journal published by The Writer’s Center.

 

Widely recognized as a distinctive voice in contemporary poetry, D. Nurkse will read from his newest collection, A Night in Brooklyn (Knopf, 2012), which will be available for purchase and signing at the event. D. Nurkse’s previously published books have moved through such diverse terrains as the fragility of a second-generation son’s exchange with his immigrant father, the biblical past and the complexities of its legacy, and the mysterious systems of ocean life.

The poems of his newest collection, separated into three parts, read—in its publisher’s words—as a “haunted love letter to the far corners of his hometown.” Tina Chang, current poet laureate of Brooklyn, understands the book to be “as much a celebration of the borough as it is a meditation on history, time, and the furious love of the places the poet inhabits.” These poems roam freely in time and the borough’s landscape, and yet, as Margot Farrington noted in a 2002 interview with Nurkse for The Brooklyn Rail, his poems have a reliable signature: always, a “touch of strangeness draws us inward to a deeper truth.”




D. Nurkse; photo credit: Jeremiah Kuhfeld

The gravity of Nurkse’s poetry may relate in part to his human rights work and familial history. His work has taken him, as an educator, into prisons such as Rikers Island Correctional Facility; as Brooklyn’s poet laureate, into inner city schools; and, now, as an elected member of Amnesty International’s board of directors, into a position of governance over the organization’s wide-reaching humanitarian activity. Refugees from Nazi Europe, Nurkse’s parents moved to New York during World War II.  His family moved back to live in Europe and then returned again to the United States at the time of the Vietnam War. In the same interview with Farrington, he speaks of his experience of war “like a radio playing in another room.” Likewise, in some poems, troubling realities impinge on the intimate dynamics of its subjects from afar. They remain out of sight and elude finality.




Teri Ellen Cross


D. Nurkse’s powerful work has found a happy home in Poet Lore. The same is true of the work of his co-reader Teri Ellen Cross, whose poems have been widely published. A Ford Foundation and Cave Canem fellow, Teri Ellen Cross serves as the Poetry and Lectures Coordinator at the Folger Shakespeare Library and was formerly a producer with WAMU’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show.

This event also marks the release of Poet Lore’s newest issue, our Spring/Summer 2013 volume. Both Poet Lore’s editors—Jody Bolz and Ethelbert Miller—will be present, and a cake-and-champagne reception and D. Nurkse’s book signing will follow the readings. Please join us there! We look forward to sharing poetry, cake, and champagne at this free and public occasion in honor of Poet Lore’s longevity.

Poet Lore’s 124^th Birthday Reading, Sunday, April 7, 2:00 PM, will be held in the Jane Fox Reading Room of The Writer’s Center. Visit this link for directions to The Writer's Center. Or phone in at (301) 654-8664 for more information.

References and more information on D. Nurkse can be found at the following links:

Random House’s webpage for A Night in Brooklyn:
(http://www.randomhouse.com/book/217598/a-night-in-brooklyn-by-d-nurkse)
Random House’s interview with D. Nurkse for Bold Type Magazine:
(http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/1202/nurkse/interview.html)
Poetry Foundation’s profile of D. Nurkse:
(http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/d-nurkse) 
Title poem of A Night in Brooklyn published online: (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/180548)
The Brooklyn Rail Interview with D. Nurkse by Margot Farrington, 2002: (http://www.brooklynrail.org/2002/03/books/in-conversation-with-d-nurkse)

Irish Poets at The Writer's Center

We recently received an email asking if we'd like to host a reading by three visiting Irish poets, and fortunately we were able to schedule the event.  They'll be reading here at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 8.  There's no admission charge, and all are welcome. The reading will be followed by a wine reception courtesy of the Embassy of Ireland, Washington DC.

The Writer's Center welcomes visiting Irish poets Siobhan Campbell, Anne-Marie Fyfe, and Iggy McGovern.  Monday, 8 Apr, 2013 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, Maryland. Email us at post.master@writer.org or call 301-654-8664 for directions.

Siobhan Campbell is known for her quirky take on contemporary Ireland and on the limping Celtic Tiger. As well as writing poetry, she works with veterans of the forces in the US and the UK and edited Courage and Strength, Stories and Poems by Combat Stress Veterans  (2012). Her most recent poetry collections are Cross-Talk, That Water Speaks in Tongues and The Cold that Burns. She has published in Poetry, The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, Magma, Poetry Ireland, The Irish Times, Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets and other journals and anthologies. Awards include prizes in the National poetry competition, Troubadour and Wigtown International poetry prize and Templar Chapbook prize. Siobhan writes accessible, wry and sometimes satirical verse,

Iggy McGovern lives in Dublin where he is Associate Professor of Physics at Trinity College. His poetry has been widely published in anthologies and journals in Ireland and abroad, as well as in the popular ‘Poetry in Motion’ series on trains in the Dublin suburban rail system (DART). He is author of two collections of poetry, The King of Suburbia, and Safe House. He also edited the anthology 2012: Twenty Irish Poets Respond to Science in Twelve Lines, published by Dedalus Press in association with Quaternia Press, and co-edited (with Jean-Patrick Connerade) Science Meets Poetry 3, published by Euroscience. Well-known for his witty, playful, but emotionally engaged poems, McGovern is the recipient of the McCrae Literary Award and the Hennessy Literary Award for poetry.

Anne-Marie Fyfe: poet, creative-writing teacher, and former Chair of the Poetry Society, (2006-2009), lives in West London. She has published four volumes of poetry, including Understudies: New and Selected Poems (Seren Books, 2010) and has won several awards including the Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition with her poem Curaçao Dusk. Anne-Marie has been organiser of Coffee-House Poetry in London for 14 years and is co-founder and organizer of the John Hewitt Spring Festival on the Antrim Coast. She has edited anthologies, has guest-edited and written for poetry magazines, and has worked with writers’ groups, schools, hospitals, libraries and prisons. Anne-Marie is a mesmerizing reader of her wonderfully musical lyric poetry.

Delphi Quarterly: We Want to Hear Your Voice

(Former workshop leader Ramola D, who moved to Boston a few years ago, recently emailed to let us know about Delphi Quarterly, a newly-launched online site she co-founded that publishes interviews with writers. She was glad to write about the site for First Person Plural.)

 
Delphi rose out of a feminist vision of connection—writers connecting with other writers, writers speaking with, inspiring, and supporting each other—and when I first began to mull over the idea of starting a journal of craft interviews and literary conversations online, I was drawn especially to the notion of creating an across-all-levels platform for a diversity of writers’ voices.

We seem to live in a world dominated by the promotion, publicity, and hype generated by mainstream publishing—an old-school model that reeks of commerce and patriarchy. Too often we do not hear the voices of the visionary poet, the experimental prose writer, the serious fiction writer or essayist, the playful linguist, the revolutionary satirist, the documentary ecologist, the thoughtful memoirist or dramatist. If you are young, a beginning writer, an “emerging” writer (emerging into publication, I assume that means), a writer struggling for years to publish your manuscripts, a writer writing outside the norms of acceptability for mainstream publishers to recognize, your voice is not heard except in your own immediate environs—for years and years—while entrenched others, deserving or not, are lionized to perdition.

A Platform for Your Voice

We at Delphi think there is value in your voice, in hearing your voice and in including your voice, while you are writing, reading, publishing pieces in local or larger forums, living your writing life, and living your creating, rather than only when you land the agent, the book deal, the million-dollar movie deal. We know and live the understanding that writing is a process, and can accompany a life. We want to create a space where you and I and all the writers we know can talk shop, talk craft, and exchange insights while we are living this one-and-only writing life.

The Writer as Publisher & From the Workshops

Early in Delphi’s inception, Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor for The Los Angeles Review, who co-edits the journal with me, offered for inclusion a series of his interviews with writers as publishers. This now forms a regular feature—our launch issue highlighted Sarah Gorham, of the wide-reaching Sarabande Books—and we hope to keep it going. With the launch, we also introduced a workshop feature, where we highlight a writing workshop: participants can interview the workshop leader, or the other way around, or each other, mainly to give a glimpse of what the workshop is about, its high points and excitements. Our launch featured the Bangalore Writers Workshop, a fearless venture embarked on by a recent MFA graduate, Rheea Mukherjee, with her writer friend Bhumika Anand—participants from their workshops interviewed them. We are moving currently to also include documentary filmmakers in our rubric.

 

Writers Interviewing Writers

We invite you to join the conversation. Literally, this means, if you are a writer, beginning or established, if you admire the work of any writer you know or work with, please interview her or him! Send us a note first to introduce the writer to us. We are looking for interviews that highlight craft and focus surrounding a single published work, whether a book, a poem, a story, an essay, or a play—recent, or from another time. We want to encourage writers to interview each other—interview the writers you know and the ones you admire; do round-robin interviews of writers in your writing workshop, short or long. If you are in a workshop, as participant or leader or peer, whether a paid-for or private workshop, offer us insights into how your workshop works, what it does best, to be featured in From the Workshops.

Please drop in at Delphi Quarterly online for more information and to read our unique launch issue featuring Vermont poet Neil Shepard and Baltimore writer Justin Sirois. Delphi wants to feature your voice!

Documentaries Need Characters Too, Preferably in Crisis

We're glad to post a blog by David Taylor, who leads a half-day workshop on "Writing the Documentary Treatment" on March 2, and "Narrative Science Writing," a four-week workshop that begins March 13.

Moses Asch, founder of Folkway Records

You’ve got an idea for a documentary. It’s true, an important story with relevance to viewers today. Fantastic. How do you tell it?

‘Writing the Documentary Treatment’ gets that process started. One question we’ll explore is, Who does the story happen to?

Like fiction, documentary films use the narrative elements that draw us into any story: intriguing characters, compelling scenes and conflict. (Conflict doesn’t mean people shouting. It can mean a disconnect between a person’s desires and her situation.) Some time ago I worked with Smithsonian Channel and Spark Media on a film about the original indie label, Folkways Records, which later became Smithsonian Folkways. In the 1940s, Folkways started on a shoestring. In a cramped Manhattan studio, they recorded musicians now recognized as legends: Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Pete Seeger and many more.

How do we tell that story in 47 minutes? In the first few minutes the film had to quickly establish why the story mattered – the iconoclastic label, the long string of recordings of all kinds, and the music that anyone would recognize.

Then, just as important: we had to show how its success was always precarious, and that Folkways was likely to collapse before any of that came to pass. We decided to show the moment where the founder, Moses Asch, faced disaster.

Asch, a sound engineer, envisioned starting his own record label but stumbled early. After bankruptcy in 1946, Asch was banned from having any significant role in the recording industry. At age 42, he considered his life a failure.

Why give precious screen time to such a low point, so far from Folkways’ ultimate success? Because in that moment we feel the crisis that Asch faced, and we feel the weight of what’s at stake: Recording wasn’t a platinum album or a paycheck for Asch. At some level it wasn’t even a choice. It was something he had to do. He would go rogue.

That reveals the essence of a leading character, and it does it through the action of his behavior.

The film, Worlds of Sound: The Ballad of Folkways, unfurls the legacy of the musicians and producers drawn into the Folkways orbit. Ultimately the story is bigger than Asch. But for grabbing viewers quickly, there’s nothing like a character in crisis.

Reuben Jackson - News from Vermont

As some of you know, Richard Blanco will return to the Washington area this spring, and we’ll host his poetry reading with Dan Vera here at The Writer’s Center on Saturday, May 18. Richard’s publisher had contacted us  to say that he was hoping to read from his new collection of poems at the Center, where he had been a very popular workshop leader before moving several years ago. Richard burst onto the national spotlight earlier this year when he was selected to read a poem at President Obama’s inauguration.

His return visit got me thinking about former workshop leaders who have left the area but remain active in their literary community.  Today we’re glad to post news from Reuben Jackson, a native Washingtonian who now teaches high school in Burlington, Vermont. Reuben’s long-running poetry workshop, A World Bold as Love, was titled for a Jimi Hendrix song. He worked for several years as an archivist in the Smithsonian Institute’s Duke Ellington collection, and he now hosts a music program on Vermont Public Radio.

- Sunil Freeman


As a long-time workshop leader in DC, can you talk a bit about your experience now teaching high school students in Burlington, Vermont?

(RJ): If I had to sum up my experiences as a high school English teacher in Burlington, Vermont, I would borrow two words from an essay by Amiri Baraka: The Changing Same. (Ok, that's three words.) What I mean is that I constantly run into (and/or teach) younger versions of the friends I had in high school--not to mention students interested in worlds and ideas beyond the "norm." In other words, students I consider younger relatives--literary and musical soulmates.

Of course, these students are, as said students like to say, way more tech savvy than I would have been at their age--or am now, for that matter.

Teaching is draining as all get out, but I like it a great deal. It is a joy and a challenge getting students to introduce themselves to their way of thinking--especially in this test-heavy academic environment. Still, I am glad I changed lanes.

You’re known both for your poetry and your love of music, and you’ve often brought the two together in your poetry workshops. Can you talk a bit about how you see these forms feeding each other, and also about your music program on Vermont Public Radio.

(RJ): As far as poetry /music connections are concerned, well, I consider both genres gateways to possibility. Both provide numerous routes to their respective destinations. (I am thinking of form here.) As a teacher, I constantly find the use of form in poetry introduces writers to aspects of their craft they may be less familiar with. Believe it or not, high school students are often more willing to write, say, a sonnet in praise of the young man/young woman whose presence sets their hearts aflutter than older, more guarded bards.

Could you talk a bit about some of the poets and composers who have influenced you.

(RJ): Favorite poets/composers.... Wayne Shorter, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams, William Parker, Amiri Baraka, Paul Blackburn, Ornette Coleman, Marcus Miller, Julia Fields, Major Jackson. (I could go on for days.)

Could you describe the cultural and literary community in Burlington, and any differences or similarities to what you’ve seen in the Washington area.

(RJ): The extent of my interaction with Burlington's literary community mainly consists of the workshops I've done with the Young Writers Project. I consider myself someone who has been blessed with a number of writing opportunities, but who doesn't really write poetry these days . My weekly jazz show on Vermont Public Radio is a kind of creative endeavor--as is the structuring of substantive ( and hopefully interesting) units of study for school.

By the way, Burlington is more like DC than you might think. I didn't expect a Norman Rockwell painting come to life--but it is interesting how we humans end up recreating that which we thought we had enough of..(Tailgating--strip malls, etc.)

Many of your friends in the Washington area keep in touch by way of your many poetry and music postings on Facebook. Would you like to talk about the role social media might play in the creative process and/or in strengthening a sense of community across great distances?

(RJ): Social media--Frankly, Facebook is my daily drum. It's another outlet for all the flotsam and jetsam that flows through my weird brain--and a way of keeping in contact with the various stations of one's life. Still. I try not to spend too much time on it. It is dangerous that way.

Are there plans for a return to the Washington area?

(RJ): Will I ever return to DC? I am not trying to be flippant (or pseudo sagacious ) here, but if this life has taught me anything, it's what the great pianist/composer Thomas "Fats" Waller once said--"One Never Knows, Do One?" I should also add that my last trip to DC reminded me that my hometown had indeed gotten too fast for me. I was glad to see so many old friends, but goodness, I missed the mountains--and people saying hello on the street.