Tuesday, June 3, 2014

And we're back . . .

Raw Fiction is back.

Last year, with no funding and no energy to rally either participants or monies, I let the project slip into a term of indefinite hibernation while I applied to grad school and fantasized about selfish acts of reading and writing in an institution in a city where I was a stranger with zero feelings of immediate and urgent responsibility to my community.

However, the only school that accepted me is Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, a mile from where I live. Not exactly the great escape I'd imagined, albeit the best fit. Pratt's program is staffed by radical thinkers and experimental writers. It also is community-centric, deconstructs the traditional workshop by creating a weekly studio space and deconstructs traditional literature courses by providing individual mentorships with faculty members. It was the only program that I found particularly exciting (other than Brown's, which did kindly place me on the wait list). The day after I emailed Christian Hawkey, the program coordinator, to confirm my matriculation he contacted me with a grant opportunity of up to $10,000 for a community project under the guidelines of the Taconic Fellowship. Said guidelines stipulated that any project that met the goals of the fellowship could apply. Those goals are, and I quote, "to expose more disciplines to community development work and to support Pratt Institute’s commitment to collaboration, inter-disciplinary projects, and service learning opportunities." Raw Fiction does that, I thought.

The part where Raw Fiction had to be slightly re-imagined was under the section called Evaluation Criteria. The panel of Pratt Center and Pratt Institute judges were looking for projects that addressed this:
Significance: Does the study address an important problem or question in the field of community development or sustainable practice? Does it build upon prior findings? How does it advance
the practice of community development or sustainable practice? What will be the impact of this project on future practice?

Christian, the faculty mentor on this student community project, put that part in writing. It will be interesting to enter that world of space, development aesthetic in writing with youth. It will also be interesting to replace the original project mentor, Tanisha Christie, with Christian. [But Tanisha, if you're reading this, you'll always be my mentor and Raw Fiction's first.]

One of the most important parts of Raw Fiction is to create a project in which the mentors and workshop facilitators (a.k.a. the adults), along with the reading materials, represent people from across the spectrum of race and ethnicity, i.e. people from across the spectrum of perspective. I don't imagine that will be too hard to come by at Pratt, or that an understanding for that psychological visual would be hard to come by.

Either way, I'm excited about the new challenges, new design, new aesthetic, new material and new chapter for Raw Fiction (and me).

Now that I've started this new blog, which will serve as a transparent, public record of Raw Fiction 2.0, it's time to update the website and shutdown my fiscal sponsor account.

We'll be back with more at the end of August, when I return from a personal, DIY, summer retreat.