Gallery Days, Juve Nights, and a meeting at the Pratt Center

Yesterday was Friday, August 29. It was the last day of my first week as a student at Pratt and the first day of intensity as a student and project director. It was quite fun.

The Hetrick-Martin Institute had an art show yesterday afternoon. This represented my first recruitment opportunity. It also provided the impetus necessary to finalize the recruitment section of my website and create flyers. The event was a great opportunity to meet HMI staff, interact with youth and spread the word of Raw Fiction. Even more than that, the event was great.

Every year, at the end of the summer HMI throws a gallery event to showcase the creative talent of their youth. This was the third year of the annual event called Inner Visions. Held in a basement room of well-known community meeting center, Judson Memorial Church at Washington Square Park, youth, staff and supportive community members filled the space with enthusiastic energy.

Here's a small sampling of the visual talent:

Unfortunately, I always get nervous taking photos in public and feel I did little justice to the creative sampling of talent of HMI youth. It's an organization I'll follow up with. Do presentations if possible. Establish a connection. I have a friend who works there but she might not always be there as she's just started in her own MFA writing program. To close the event there were performances. Dancers, actors, poets and singers. I couldn't help but cry when one young person shared their own sadness at not being able to find the right time to tell their mother about performing in drag, a hobby that brings much joy. Stories like that ram home the importance of a space like HMI. A space where youth get to be themselves, their true inner selves, without fear.

Before heading off to the Gallery I had a quick meeting with Christian and our contact at the Pratt Center to sign off on paperwork and meet face to face. We'll check in again in January to let them know of our progress and then I assume when the project is all over. This reminds me though, I have to send a follow up email about the dispersal of funds. It's a good thing I registered Raw Fiction, or StreetStall Publishing in fact, as a business. Being on the books can help jump over hurdles. I do get a lot of junk mail, especially from U-Line and credit card companies, but you never know when it will come in handy. Also makes filing taxes seem more legitimate.

Then Christian and I sat down at Pillow Cafe on Myrtle, a bit of a nostalgic venue for me, and talked about ghosts on the internet and other practical matters. Perhaps I'll read that legendary title, Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

No it does remind me though, I don't think I diligently logged my syllabus for Raw Fiction 2013. There was Sandra Cisneros and James Baldwin, excellent examples of fine writers who live(d) engaged lives with their communities. Zora Neale Hurston and Irvine Welsh as examples of writers who capture language in its spoken, or oppressed, forms. Bessie Head connecting to the land and bringing up issues of exile. Edwidge Danticat's tragic epistolary short story that opens Krik Krak, a refugee on a boat who left his lover behind, letters they never expect the other to receive. I showed a video about the crime of US rice in Haiti, crippling local food economies - the team really appreciated that. Sadaat Hasan Manto's brilliant story about the residents of a mental institution being displaced at the partition of Indian and Pakistan. The absurdity of the world. An exposure to a variety of ideas and styles. That's what Raw Fiction's curriculum is all about. Toni Morrison's essay on Moby Dick that challenges traditional, or white heterosexual male, literary criticism that is blind to a tradition of white heterosexual male critique of racist structures in the American psyche. Audre Lorde's poetry. Asian American writers from an anthology I found - I remember a very explicit gay piece I found and one of the team couldn't let the speaker's voice be male when the writer was. She did the same with Lorde's poetry. She wasn't homophobic, she'd just never been given gay literature and her mind had trouble adjusting, it was easier for her imagination to shift the gender of the writer, a writer could easily pretend to be another sex before a writer could easily be gay. I threw books at them and told them to read whatever struck their fancy. I gave them Vonnegut. I never found the right Sherman Alexie story but I gave them Leslie Marmon Silko. I started with America and moved into international works.

It will be impossible to give this new group of youth nearly as much as the last time. This time I'll give them a different facilitator each meeting.

I went back to the Copy Shop on E4th Street to get the pages I'd already copied of the flyer cut into squares. The owner of the shop remembered me. It's been at least a year and a half since I've been there. What a sweetheart. Then to Judson Memorial Church. Then to a reading in Brooklyn.

I was skeptical about this reading at a bar in Bed Stuy. What kind of bar was it going to be? One of those trendy new bars with an elitist owner and deliberate decor that emphasizes what great taste the interior designer has? One of those bars that's shutting down businesses that have been in the neighborhood for decades who are shuttering up because of the pressure of rising rents and the reticence for all the monied newcomers to patronize a place owned and staffed by locals. It wasn't one of those bars. But it was certainly that scene. I don't think I've been in such a predominantly white space in New York City in years, or in ever. But the bar was Tip Top Bar & Grill. The bartenders, bouncer and chef were all African Americans in their 60s, or perhaps 70s. It's a stronghold against the onslaught of money that is infiltrating the formerly known as terrifying Bedford Stuyvesant. So this series brought Brooklyn's young wealth to this bar. And perhaps they'll go back - but probably not, they're safe in numbers, when they can take over a place, but as a couple or trio, would they really go back to an unpretentious black bar because it plays great music and feels real comfortable? And be the minority? I don't know. It is irrelevant because that's not why I went out last night. I went out to support one of my professors. Rachel Levitsky. And it was worth it. She performed a collaboration. Two speakers with a video. His voice like Thom Yorke's on Fitter Happier, her's a little less robotic. The video - a montage of conformity with references to Monsanto and suburbia. [See comments for additional information.]

I didn't get home very late but it's Labor Day weekend and I live on Eastern Parkway. Juve was happening in my bedroom, or at least that's what it sounded like. It took me a couple of sleepless hours before I thought to shut my window and turn on the air conditioner. That did the trick of drowning out external noise, but then there was the noise of the air conditioner to prevent sleep. Somehow I still woke up before 7am this morning. I'll probably go grocery shopping at the Farmer's Market, make a huge brunch and then take a long nap so I can read my assignments for the coming week.

To do:
Space - seems like my first choice isn't going to pan out.
Follow up with Pratt Center
Follow up with HMI
Follow up with members of my cohort interested in collaborating
Get my hands on Pedagogy of the Oppressed … but then is that something I want to read more than the history of Oakland Community Schools.

Something I tell the youth I work with: "Question everything, even the material that I give to you."

Before & After & From Now On Is Never Enough

Tonight's title is a play on words. On Thursday, August 28 the MFA in Writing program at Pratt Institute is throwing a kickoff reading and party called Now Before and After is Not Enough, the words boldly falling across the huge poster-flyers. It sounds relevant to activism and art. All that is not narrow spills over into the category(ies) of activism and art.

I have returned from a summer of rest and reflection in the Catskills to a hectic city with pressing academic, economic and family concerns. School starts this week, I need to find a job, I need to get on top of all my Raw Fiction administrative tasks and I lost two uncles in the first two weeks of this month.

Two brothers who couldn't have been more different. The artist and the activist. The actor and the macho. The model and the revolutionary. This year I will be running Raw Fiction in memory of my father's brothers with an understanding that being black and gay or black and militant during the Civil Rights Era were equally radical lifestyles that opened doors allowing my out queerness and disabling censure and censors around my voice.

As I enter a second round of Raw Fiction I am thinking about art as activism and activism as art.

I am also thinking about losses. The loss of field trips, the loss of individual mentorships, and the skimmed-down schedule.

And then I must think about gains. This year I have the chance to focus on curriculum while engaging in coursework theorizing radical pedagogies.

The first group of youth helped me establish the image of Raw Fiction. They told me what they valued most about the concept and they also designed the logo and website and created the first publication.

This year I want to focus on youth concerns - and obviously it will be a limited opinion poll as I'm recruiting four youth. But these four young New Yorkers will help me identify and establish Raw Fiction's community concerns, as will my Pratt cohort and professors.

To Do
Recruitment and confirmation of space