580 Split

From the Editors

Raihana Haynes-Venerable, Clare Lilliston, Davíd Andres Mejía, Arya Samuelson, Sean Schaeffer, and Kari Treese

This capsule issue of 580 Split commemorates a series of workshops offered by the student club Mills Oakland Writers Workshop (MOWW) at Mills College over the 2018-19 academic year. These workshops were free and open to the public. Each three-hour session was facilitated by a different local writer who presented curriculum on a particular topic of their choosing.

The issue showcases the facilitators of the workshops, highlighting the rich interplay between pedagogy and poiesis. You will see the title and description of each workshop, followed by a piece composed by the facilitator exemplifying the workshop’s theme. It has been an honor to host such innovative, dynamic, and thoughtful teaching artists who are dedicated to nurturing the Bay Area writing community.

By the Numbers:

13 creative writing workshops facilitated by 13 local writers.
154 total participants.
70 individual participants.
One-third of the participants were Mills students, and two-thirds community members from the East Bay.
25 participants attended more than one workshop.
16 participants attended three or more workshops.
Between 7 and 17 participants attended each workshop.

There is something to celebrate about a group of people committing to spend Saturday afternoons sitting around a table writing, alongside others who are equally invested in this task. By holding time and space, these workshops foster camaraderie, collaboration, and cross-pollination. They posit writing and thinking together as vital, meaningful activities, acts of serious play, along with practices of reception, such as close reading and close listening. It is through such temporary micro-communities that we might learn to extend ourselves as artists into wider ecologies of care.

We hope that in reading these materials, you, too, are inspired to write, to gather, to share.

Set Your Writing Mind Free

Cassandra Dallett

Bio

Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra has published multiple books of poetry, been published in over a hundred journals, been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, and graced many stages. She runs The Badass Bookworm Podcast, co-hosts MoonDrop Productions, and hosted the recently defunct monthly workshop ONTWOSIX. Look for links and books on cassandradallett.me.

Work

Set Your Writing Mind Free

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop description: In my workshop I tried to set the mind free by reading poetry aloud to the group. I then gave them timed free writes with prompts such as: “when did you realize that you needed to leave?”, “I come from…”, or “the last thing that knocked you down.” I read a variety of favorite poets like Danez Smith, sam sax, MK Chavez, and Joyce Lee. We talked about curating reading series and hosting successful workshops, as well as how to give and receive useful critique and reject what is not useful.

Full Moon Through Concertina Wire

–looked close enough to touch
but I didn’t mention it on our visit.
Flat dusty farmland covered in malls,
Drive-Thru’s of So-Cal Burger places
and thousands of caged men
in the middle of this valley.

Razor wire you say you’ve learned not to see
when admiring the snowy peaks around you.
The crows come talk their shit,
run off the smaller birds.
Families of feral cats on the yard
fighting and fucking
alongside the other jailbirds.

You raised a baby crow in your locker
till he was large enough
to stuff up under the eaves,
find his wing back to mother
and you stuck there
burning up phone lines,
trying not to ask for too much.

Only the moon between us.
I bare myself to its
all-seeing sphere
as if it will reflect me onto you—
while it washes the backyard.
This yard will never be dark again
when the people move
into the monstrosity next door.
I’ll live in its shadow of scrutiny
waiting for you.
I saw one of those bugs back there,
the ones they call Children of God,
its convict-striped body deep in the dirt
and I couldn’t make him scream
or myself,
the razor wire I’m never able to un-see,
imagining your flesh in ribbons,
guns pointed at your head.
The concept of close is so far off.
How you could run across four lanes,
lose yourself in a Staples parking lot.
Inmate blues, Property of …
even after four hundred years
all roads lead to incarceration.
Men in solitary define freedom
in a way only they can.
Trigger men come home,
treason is sometimes celebrated—
if you’re rich, not black or brown.
My heart is locked up—
a crucified animal
bursting blood through barbed wire.
The birds go back and forth
from the watch tower
and you wonder
why they choose here
to make their nests.
We stuff ourselves
with vending machine junk food.
The whole murder shows up
scavenging Cheetos and Popeyes
when the picnic tables get turned
sideways.
Like I feel—
walking out that door without you.
The earth on its axis
—me without one.
Carefully inspected
so as not to show much flesh.

Somewhere behind me
you spread ‘em and cough.

Bio

Cassandra Dallett lives in Oakland, CA. Cassandra has published multiple books of poetry, been published in over a hundred journals, been nominated for five Pushcart Prizes, and graced many stages. She runs The Badass Bookworm Podcast, co-hosts MoonDrop Productions, and hosted the recently defunct monthly workshop ONTWOSIX. Look for links and books on cassandradallett.me.

Writing the Hybrid

MK Chavez

Bio

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal. She is a recipient of the 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Her latest publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomadic Coffee and online at Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day.

Work

Writing the Hybrid

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: Come and explore the weaving of alliteration and assonance, sensory details, historical text, song lyrics, journal entries, and newspaper headlines. We will dive into the literary kitchen sink, use all the tools and strategies available to us, and write poems and essays that defy categorization, such as the prose poem, the lyric essay, the braided essay, and the hermit crab essay.

Persistent Supernatural Trope

When quizzed, medical students and residents said the unbelievable.

Unbelievable is a word synonymous with:

We know this to be true down to the spongy red matter of our marrows.

Studies suggest there is a problem when describing how black people are treated in the medical community.

Studies called the problem vexing.

The word vex comes from the Latin vexare
to jolt, shake, to toss violently,
from vexus and a collateral form of vectus
past participle of vehere—to draw, to carry.

I carry what I have into the doctor’s office. She says,

I’m sorry

when I tell her the story of my pain.

Pain is a universal concept. It can be localized and specific or radiating and spreading.

Like it was for Emily, I find that after a great pain, a formal feeling comes over me.

I am crystallized. It is difficult to describe a certain type of suffering.

In this lyric essay there is no scale of suffering, no tearing or pulling apart, no intense heat or heaviness.

There is a qualifiable simplicity to what it means when 2000 students at Emory University provide painkillers to only 50 percent of the black patients who have broken bones.

One study calls this behavior unconscious stereotyping.

Unconscious is to be unaware, un is equal to not.

Consciously unconscious. Unconscious is a sense word. To not sense, to be knocked out, for example, in a sentence:

The young man was knocked to the ground unconscious by your senselessness, and you left him there to die.

Types of pain:

nerve, bone
chronic
when one is told that one is too sensitive
acute, soft tissue
phantom
ancestral memory imprinted in our DNA

Researchers have found that mice can pass on learned information
about traumatic experiences
–in one case a fear of the smell of cherry blossoms–
to subsequent generations.

Researchers say they are perplexed by how many students hold false beliefs.

Some of us are never vexed by the suffering of others.
Some of us are good in emergencies.

58 percent of medical students in a 2016 Virginia study said, black skin is thicker than white skin.

Some key terms in these scholarly studies are bias and pain perception.

It is hard to look away from these studies because they are close ups of a festering wound.

Important questions left unanswered.

Was the dream deferred?

Did it explode?

Studies also show that some medical students believe the blood of black people thickens more quickly. The same article is also quick to say:

These beliefs are not born out of racist attitudes.

Chris Rock’s mother shared with him stories of growing up in South Carolina.

How black people had to visit veterinarians to get their teeth pulled, and only enter through the back doors, because if white people knew their vet treated black people they might not bring their pets to them any longer.

A peculiar intuition tested mustard gas on black soldiers,
and forty years of untreated syphilis in Tuskegee.

Superhumanization bias
is the belief that one being can take more suffering than another.

Bio

MK Chavez is the author of Mothermorphosis and Dear Animal. She is a recipient of the 2017 Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award and Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. Her latest publications can be found in bags of coffee from Nomadic Coffee and online at Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day.

Telling: Narrative Across Genre

Norma Smith

Bio

Norma Smith has lived and worked in Oakland since the late 1960s. She has been a scholar-educator-activist for more than 50 years. Her writing has appeared in literary, political, and academic journals. Norma’s book of poems, HOME REMEDY, was published in 2017 by Nomadic Press.

Work

Telling: Narrative Across Genre

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: We will contemplate the nature(s) of narrative. What is narrative? How it works in various genres. How you can work it. Hint: narrative is not always linear. However, it is the thread that holds everything together. Come with a story you want to tell. The story of your life; the story of a brief encounter; the story of your mother’s life; the story of a flavor. You will practice telling your story in different genres, including but not limited to fiction, poetry, journalism, scholarly writing, creative non-fiction/lyric essay, narrative medicine, finger-painting (just—sort of—kidding).

For example, in fiction, look for a narrative arc, look for character development, look for resolution of a problem or conflict or contradiction. In journalism, answer the questions, Who, What, Where, When, How, and, for long-form journalism, WTF? or Why? In academic writing, prove it (persuade me). In creative non-fiction or lyric essay, use all your senses—and ours—to tell the story. In poetry, tell what the words call upon you to tell, in the form they call to you. Play along.

Waking

1

I get into bed at night with my mortality. We snuggle up together. Soon, I close my mind’s eye. But my mortality worms her way back into my attention. Like a comfortable old lover, she prods and cuddles when all I want now is to rest, to doze off in my own pleasure. She wants to be congratulated. She wants to hear from my dry lips that she woke me completely. And she wants to hear from my lips that I love her. I do. I just don’t want to say it right now. Can’t she wait until morning? Just before dawn I’ll be willing again to stroke her thigh and startle her awake, take her by surprise as she takes me, every evening. Earlier every night.

2

My mortality’s twin sister demands three pages every day. Single-spaced. I can deliver that but wish sometimes she would leave me alone. Why does she insist on wearing rouge? The way my mother did when she was in her 40s. I use my hand-held calculator to confirm the years. Yes, the early ’60s, when my sisters and I stopped straightening our hair, let those springing curls fly loose, and stopped using bras to hold our breasts in place. We circled our eyes with kohl and went looking for sex. Even if we didn’t know what we were looking for, we were asking for it. My generation—sigh—we were not sluts; we were looking for something that had been deliberately hidden from us.

We were explorers, and we found it. There it was, waiting for us. We fell in love every time this skin rubbed against another’s skin. Shameless. At last! We were sure that we were the first generation to discover sex outside the hearth. Or at least the first generation since patriarchy discovered paternity. Even as we worshipped those pockets of Fabian free-lovers that grew among the Victorians, we were sure that we were new.

3

I get out of bed before dawn now that I live alone. I brew the dark dust into a libation that frees me to appreciate the day when it comes. My desk welcomes me every morning. We sit down together. The chair wraps its arms around my thickening waist and welcomes me back to work.

What am I doing wrong that a blank page has no fear of my writing across its back? I tattoo small orange blossoms onto it, and the fragrance of the Valley rises until my eyes fill. Those same years, in April, my mother—rouged or not—would drive us through the orchards past the outskirts of the town in the afternoon, until what was bleak at home rose into this aria of artificial snowfall—the fruit trees bursting with new life, promising fruition. Her cold prairie girlhood winter fluttered on the branches until she was sure that it was not snowing, but blossoming. Then we would turn around and drive home the same way we came, in time to cook for all those people—family, they called themselves.

Was it during those very drives that I promised I would never harness myself to that kind of buckboard? I would never lead a family to the trough I had prepared for them, where they would ignore my presence unless I stopped shaking the grain bucket. If I stepped away from the stove for a moment, they would get restless, mill about. They would miss me if I missed a meal. That is, if I missed serving them a meal.

I serve myself. My daughters watch me. I welcome them to the table. The day begins.

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN DRUMMING IN OAKLAND^[1]*

There has always been drumming in Oakland.
There has always been church-song.
Since the early days when you could stand on the shore,
back to the bay, before there was a bay, feel the surf
pulling and thrumming at your heart, before dawn.
When the bay was a delta, falling sharply
into the sea, before they connected
St. Francis to Marin with gold.
Before the mission, before the presidio.

Since people stood before dawn
among the poplars—that long stretch of alameda—
watching the eastern hillside, to sing the sun up over the oaks,
there has been drumming in Oakland. There has been
church-song.
The people believed back then,
as we do now, that the bright orbs—sun and moon—
were listening,
because
why wouldn’t they?

Listen to their relations.
There has been barbeque in Oakland,
since mussels and wild onion, rabbit and tender deer bits,
lay on the fire, ready
to be dropped into the acorn stew held
in dry-grass receptacles, ready to be
stirred into this rock-boiling water

to add flavor, simmering.
Mmmmmmm.
There has been song in Oakland.

And Oakland has been multilingual and multicultural
for tens of thousands of years, since people first began
to gather here to trade, a crossroads where the creeks
ran down to the bay, where steelhead and coho
climbed up to spawn while
grizzly watched
for their chance, hungry and irritable,
mumbling to each other.
There have always been

Complaints about the neighbors. We live next door.
Marry in. Bird and bear, turtle and wasp.
The locals let us know
what’s what if we can hear them:
There has always been song.

We have always moved to it,
each of us, as we—the two-leggeds, no fins, no leaves—
have moved here: ex-soldiers, land grabbers,
opportunist ranchers and our yanqui lawyers, a new police force,
murderous.

Alongside refugees from land-grabs,
from impoverishment and massacre elsewhere.
Workers crossing oceans or borders
to flee viciousness elsewhere
do the dirtiest work.

While some come as tailors, to cover us
in denim—that warp-faced fabric
sewn in goldfields—some arrive later, to build
steel warships, wanting
an honest day’s work
for a day’s pay. And safety
for their families. Respect.

Fishers and sailors move here
to the canneries, processors, foundries,
factories. Adding mussels and wild onions
to cioppino, to mae un-tang. Gardeners arrive—
Lao, Mien, Hmong, Kanjobal, Mam, Ibo,
Ahmara, Punjabi, Sicilian —
cooks and politicians,

Mexican and Palestino panaderos, bring their own
recipes, their own steps. Their own ways.
The children become
office workers, teachers, librarians, historians. Police.
Physicists and medicine seekers.
Artists and other sex workers.

We gather now against the drought, the fire, the storm,
assess the damage, organize
a promise: a living wage, a house,
some vision. There has been drumming.
There has been song. We find

A place that’s home. Where there has always been
song. Song has been here. Song has welcomed us.

Song draws a line
we can dance across, if we can hear
the drum.

If we can weave
this basket into something
that will hold.

* In the past few years, during a time of gentrification/push-out of families and communities of color and poor people, newcomer gentrifiers have called on local police force to confront and harass long-time community members engaged in communal activities such as drumming circles, family barbecues in public parks, or singing in churches on Sunday mornings. ↑

Bio

Norma Smith has lived and worked in Oakland since the late 1960s. She has been a scholar-educator-activist for more than 50 years. Her writing has appeared in literary, political, and academic journals. Norma’s book of poems, HOME REMEDY, was published in 2017 by Nomadic Press.

Back to Elementary

Raina León

Bio

Raina J. León, PhD, is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols (2008), Boogeyman Dawn (2014), and sombra: dis(locate) (2016), as well as the chapbook profeta without refuge (2016). She is a co-founding editor of The Acentos Review. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education.

Work

Back to Elementary

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: The most incredibly brilliant divergent thinkers are not in boardrooms; they are in daycare, preschool, and lower elementary grades. The rigors of schooling, researchers say, may free our minds in some ways while caging our imaginations. It’s time to go back to your elementary freedom. In this workshop inspired by Patricia Smith, we rediscover the generative magic of play through card games and physical activities (that can be adapted for accessibility). Together we summon the wonder and innocence of childhood in order to see ourselves and our world as new. We push aside the apologies that barb themselves within our throats. We boldly face our shadow creature fears and find an invincibility even in the darkest memory. We will draw our imagined heroes and those we love. We will study the work of writers of color and queer writers have the dexterity to step back through time to reshape the world. Ultimately, we will all come away with the foundations for transformational work by going back to elementary.

mother sexed

desire threads itself up the veins of my left leg, a fertile pain that pushes into groin pulse. my animal moans i catch in my throat, control my breath, my pant, a small tantric practice, energy pull and swell. how the body blushes with heat. i am a rippling pool of remembrance. beneath the folds of the maternal body i feel my youth as a dancer, lithe and hard. two bodies in one memory. both sexed and sexy. it is not my husband’s voice that sets to fire, nor a long fuzzed and faded recollection of forever sepia lover. it is mine this rise to orgasm, the sharp smell of ozone in my nostrils. electric. i am alone, without the child who is my sweetest daily delight or the partner who sparks giggles and thrills. i am alone, this night in self-adoration. i coast a choppy wave, still as the abandoned surfboard, the dance, the ride without rider.

pass the dark and stormy

how the liquor lacquers my tongue slick
for a moment
i am joyous
true giggle

where is my baby?

at the bottom
of a glass
no
over an ocean
my laughter
effervescent bubbles
between

in a corner
of my mind
my parents cluck their tongues
is this why you left him
with his father?
a baby far from mother withers
or some guilt that thuds
in a pool i do not swim.

i am drunk
in an airport
a moment while planes land
guided by flags and flashing light
while baby sleeps sound
loved close and distant
and this is also
a mothering
so true
it bleeds.
see it
there?

Bio

Raina J. León, PhD, is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols (2008), Boogeyman Dawn (2014), and sombra: dis(locate) (2016), as well as the chapbook profeta without refuge (2016). She is a co-founding editor of The Acentos Review. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education.

Writing Through Collage

Laura Walker

Bio

Laura Walker is the author of five books of poetry: story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). She lives, writes, and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Work

Writing Through Collage

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: What happens when two things are in proximity—be they words, images, or sentences? What can we make of the spaces between? Harry Matthews wrote: “I think that what matters in writing, as in music, is what’s going on between the words (and between the notes); the movement is what matters, rather than whatever is being said.” In this workshop we will use borrowed language, collage, and Oulipian techniques to explore possibilities for this in-between space, for the movement between, and for what can live there.

excerpts from psalmbook

psalm 8

a braided moon

animals under our feet

psalm 84

we fade and lean flesh

boxy with yearning

sparrows a tumult

the rain comes down

and a thousand cards lying on the floor

a thousand cards

psalm 16

at night i confess to drinks with my neighbors

brown clay cups

you want no part of me

they hasten after each other

i am waiting for you

a night season stretched

Bio

Laura Walker is the author of five books of poetry: story (Apogee Press, 2016), Follow–Haswed (Apogee Press, 2012), bird book (Shearsman Books, 2011), rimertown/ an atlas (UC Press, 2008), and swarm lure (Battery Press, 2004). She lives, writes, and teaches in Berkeley, California.

Place and Personal Narrative

Vernon Keeve III

Bio

Vernon Keeve III is a writer from the south, and a teacher in Oakland. His full book of poetry Southern Migrant Mixtape is available with Nomadic Press.

Work

Place and Personal Narrative

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: How do we write about place? Do we talk about the people who populate it? Do we talk about its history—the people who have called it home it throughout time—the people who have manipulated it and saw the muds of it malleable? Do we talk about place for the nature that allowed it to even exist—the supernatural perceived around it—the rocks that thrusted themselves from the earth and the waters that carved them—the trees that grew from seeds lost in the soil–or the memory and trauma that haunt it? How do we write about place when so many factors go into defining it? And how can we write about them all? In this workshop we will read some eco-poetry, read some poetry about Oakland, walk around, and write.

Black Boys

Black boys play outside and are told to bathe and change before sitting at the table for dinner with their families. Black boys get shaken awake by mothers to get ready for school on gray cold mornings. Black boys wait in colorful coats—bright backpacks (black boys love purple but are taught it’s a girls color, so we hide it in blue)—black boys wait for autumnal shaded school buses.

Black boys trade Magic and Pokemon cards in the library before the school bell sounds. Black boys run to class, afraid of tardies—and the mamas who will find out.

Black boys play video games, because freeway induced asthma chokes them from basketball courts and football fields. Black boys ignore tight chests up and down courts and endure.

Black boys die from broken hearts.

Black boys love their black teachers and smile and get excited when they see them outside of the school building—those I know your Mama and Daddy type teachers—see them in church on Sunday type teachers.

Black boys want pets: dogs, cats, and rabbits to pet. Black boys want reptiles, and amphibians and birds,

‘cuz black boys want wings.

Black boys praise God. Black boys sing in the choir.

Black boys get in trouble for bad grades. Black boys dream. Black boys run with outstretched arms still praying for the flight that was never given to Bigger Thomas,

‘cuz black boys want wings.

Black boys feel the pain of their dying mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers.

Black boys think they won’t age to become men.

Black boys will be boys, who hope to become men, who learn like everyone else to do what is the difference between wrong and right.

Black boys need chances.

Black boys camp. Black boys hunt. Black boys fish. Black boys cry when they watch The Fox and the Hound.

Black boys draw pictures in crayon worthy of anyone’s refrigerator. Black boys want to
write—write raps—write rhymes—write poetry.

Black boys want to and deserve to tell their own stories.

Black boys fear the monsters in their closets and under their beds—and in the streets outside of their homes—fear those they should not fear.

Black boys cower. Black boys have nightmares. Black boys climb into the beds with their
parents.

Black boys create. Black boys breathe. Black boys laugh. Black boys cry.

Black boys bleed.
Black boys breathe.
Black boys feel pain.
Black boys want to live.

But

Black boys die.
Black boys die.
Black boys die
more.

But if you take any line from this poem to hold close to your heart, please take
that black boys, all black boys,
want to live.

Bio

Vernon Keeve III is a writer from the south, and a teacher in Oakland. His full book of poetry Southern Migrant Mixtape is available with Nomadic Press.

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

Ari Banias

Bio

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and A Symmetry (The Song Cave, 2018). He’s the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, NYFA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and others. Ari lives & teaches in the Bay Area.

Work

Things I Didn’t Know I Loved

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop description: This workshop takes its name from the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s poem of the same title. We will spend time with that poem together. We will think about time. We will think about urgencies. We will consider attention. We will look at and make our own lists that start in the anecdotal and lead elsewhere, lists that begin in observed detail and move via nonlinear associations to the unexpected, to memories, that open themselves to statements, turns, undoings. We will talk about the energy of repetition. We will enact the power of repetition. We will read aloud and possibly we will travel out of the building.

TRIBUTE

Home now I examine the nose-down

fly on my floorboards

the fine hairs on its legs

a broken umbrella folding unfolding

What passes through the keyhole of a look

twist of your ribcage as you turn to me

debts you’re saddled with and debts you ride

We try to keep the radiant capsule buried

we try not speaking

the lake we watch over watches back

You show me photos of water

and we get caught on the surface

it calls us up quick as champagne

as weightless

I give you a stone you shine in your mouth like a plum

Taped above your desk, a quote about vogueing

I photograph while you’re at work

so I can be with it later

“for when we are no longer ashamed of ourselves,”

–is that now?

“we will be free to imagine

an order of our own”

The stone you give me sits at the deepest point of my pocket

Our skins touch

the stone’s and mine

From nine floors up the lake’s ethereal

green gown refuses to end

but we know it has edges

Now surround my hand entirely

sweetly crowd me

When the creditors call

I answer and tell them about

my debts to your mind

the dark reds of the carpet the sun wrings pink

and other forms of adoration

Blue underglow on the fly’s body or a blues

from an adjacent room

Bio

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and A Symmetry (The Song Cave, 2018). He’s the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, NYFA, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and others. Ari lives & teaches in the Bay Area.

Bodies and Forms

Amy Berkowitz

Bio

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, a longform lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma. She’s the host of the Amy’s Kitchen Organics reading series and the coordinator of the Alley Cat Bookstore residency program. She’s currently working on a novel. More at amyberko.com.

Work

Bodies and Forms

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: The body playing basketball, the body that holds trauma, the joyfully rebellious body, the body that sometimes uses a wheelchair and sometimes uses a cane, the body in pain, the body that [fill in the blank]. I’m interested in how we write about and through our bodies, in what our bodies have to say and how they find their voice/s. Does your body speak in poetry, prose, or some combination? Do you write your body with humor or anger or conversational language or scientific terms or all (or none) of the above? In this workshop, we will read writing about a variety of bodies by a variety of writers and let their words inspire us to write our bodies’ truths.

Some of the texts we explored together:

“Alternative Pain Scale” by Sonya Huber
Excerpt from “Breasts: A History” by Krys Malcolm Belc
“I know crips live here” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Excerpt from “Unruly, Adjective” by Carmen Maria Machado
“A Symmetry” by Ari Banias

Excerpt from Utopia and Other Problems

A note on how the chronically ill body shows up in my novel: The protagonist, Ruth, is chronically ill, but the book isn’t about her illness. Ruth gets involved with all kinds of things over the course of the novel that aren’t directly related to her chronic pain—she works at a children’s theatre nonprofit, calls out a rapist, goes on a five-city poetry tour—but at the same time, her illness is an intrinsic part of her character and even helps shape the rhythms of the narrative. For example, because Ruth’s pain and fatigue are worst in the morning, most of the book’s action happens later in the day.

When my alarm went off on Sunday morning, I tapped snooze and turned away from the window. 9:00 a.m. was too early. It went off again at 9:10, 9:15, 9:20: still too early. I reluctantly got up a little after 9:30, but I wanted to stay in bed. Mornings are when my pain is the worst: my muscles are sore and my whole body aches. No matter how much I sleep, I wake up feeling like I’ve barely slept at all, and no matter how much I did or didn’t exercise the day before, I wake up feeling like my body has accomplished some formidable physical feat.

For years, I’d felt guilt and shame around my pain: I felt lazy because I wasn’t an early riser, irresponsible when my pain made me late to an event. Why was just getting out of bed such a struggle for me? It was embarrassing. I avoided talking about it, blamed Muni when I arrived late and flustered to a weekend brunch or a work meeting and then quickly changed the subject.

I was only just beginning to understand that I didn’t have to give myself such a hard time, that the guilt and shame were optional. Back when we were sleeping together, Sammy had taken me to see a show by Sins Invalid, a disability performance project. We sat together at the back of the theater holding hands as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha welcomed us: “You are not an individual health defect,” she said. “You are a systemic war battalion / You come from somewhere / You are a we.”

Sammy also has chronic pain and that was one of the first things we bonded over. During the Winter Solstice poetry marathon, they noticed me doing physical therapy stretches in the back of the anarchist infoshop. “I know that one,” they whispered, smiling. “These chairs are so uncomfortable,” I whispered back. They jerked their head towards the back door and I followed them out.

“You are a we.” I felt like Leah Lakshmi was speaking directly to me. Her performance gave me permission to move at my own pace, to recognize myself as disabled, to recognize disability as a kind of liberation. I didn’t sort all of that out right away, but I did—gradually—start to forgive myself for my slow-moving mornings.

Bio

Amy Berkowitz is the author of Tender Points, a longform lyric essay about chronic pain and trauma. She’s the host of the Amy’s Kitchen Organics reading series and the coordinator of the Alley Cat Bookstore residency program. She’s currently working on a novel. More at amyberko.com.

Ancestral Mythology: The Journey

Ingrid Keir

Bio

Ingrid Keir is a poet, curator, publisher and healer. She runs Feather Press, an independent women’s literary press based in the Bay Area, and Toward the Light Healing, an energy healing practice. She is co-founder of the WordParty, a long-running San Francisco poetry and jazz series. Her latest book of poetry is The Choreography of Nests (2016). She facilitates writing workshops in the Bay Area that often integrate healing and wellness into the practice of writing.

Work

Ancestral Mythology: The Journey

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: This is a generative writing workshop that will be framed around ancestral mythology. Everyone has ancestors that have provided the path for us to be here today; we carry their DNA and intergenerational synchronicities. We will explore the significance of place, nature, personal mythology, and the ways that upon reflection, lineage shows up in our lives. We will reach back and forward while exploring both shadow and light. We will create, rewrite and embody our own personal mythologies.

GOOD NEWS

Pink waterfalls warmed by thermal meditation habits. Walls as cocoon. Womb of safety. Inky sky. A murder of crows in the canyon. Raucous jabber. Last fig on the tree, flesh pulled open by hungry beak. Not unlike the last poem you wrote. The news cycle’s terrible forecast. I open my mouth wide to eat all the fear. The transmutation of cobwebs and thick stringy cords, into gold and pomegranate halos. Altered to love and lovers and loving. Good news doesn’t sell. Down to brass tacks. The phoenix rising is not on Fox. Not on CNN. Phoenix turned dragon lives inside me. The tiny pinecone gifted to me by a 1200-year-old tree says: come as you are. Yew. Madrone. Coastal Redwood. In her burned-out trunk, the scar is not a scar but a portal to strength. The dust of ancestors run throughout our pinecones.

Bio

Ingrid Keir is a poet, curator, publisher and healer. She runs Feather Press, an independent women’s literary press based in the Bay Area, and Toward the Light Healing, an energy healing practice. She is co-founder of the WordParty, a long-running San Francisco poetry and jazz series. Her latest book of poetry is The Choreography of Nests (2016). She facilitates writing workshops in the Bay Area that often integrate healing and wellness into the practice of writing.

Poetry and Sacred Technologies

Julian Talamantez Brolaski

Bio

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet, songwriter, and country singer. It is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and coediter of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari Edwards. Julian maintains a blog of handwritten poems at https://julianspoems.tumblr.com

Work

Poetry and Sacred Technologies

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

swine of the times

Issue 20: Anthologia

Workshop Description: This workshop will draw on kinaesthetic and yogic technologies to facilitate an openness to ‘the beyond,’ and as a way of tuning our radio antennae to the sources of creativity. We will experiment with interaction with the natural world (trees, flowers, grass, etc.), bodily movement, guided meditation, breathwork, and certain techniques of yoga to achieve self-induced trance states, to enliven our receptivity and enlarge our ‘vision.’ Between each experiment we will write and share our work. The goal here is to expand sensory perception beyond the limits of the physical body, and to use this expanded perception in the service of poetry.

Poem forthcoming.

Bio

Julian Talamantez Brolaski is a poet, songwriter, and country singer. It is the author of Of Mongrelitude (Wave Books, 2017), Advice for Lovers (City Lights 2012), Gowanus Atropolis (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), and coediter of NO GENDER: Reflections on the Life & Work of kari Edwards. Julian maintains a blog of handwritten poems at https://julianspoems.tumblr.com

On Origin Stories

sam sax

Bio

sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer & educator. He is the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & Buzzfeed. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press, a 2018 Ruth Lilly Fellow from The Poetry Foundation & currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Work

On Origin Stories

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: Where you from, where you going, where you at? In this workshop we’ll look at the origin story poem and think through methods of corrupting, queering, and reinterpreting the objects, facts, and narratives of our lives in our writing.

ETYMOLOGY

in the beginning there was a beginning & before that it’d already begun & before that a gun

every story i love begins with violence. every story ends. a life undone as a button slid through the winged gap in its fabric. little portal opening into light into a bald chest bared as a fang

the etymology of gun is wonderment from the dutch

from my uncle’s locked cabinet he shot out over the city of los angeles laughing to impress

as i sassed lavish in my black jeans

the etymology of gun is hunger from the french

from the waistband of a strange man’s madness as he traced my outline down an unlit louisville street.

from the greek

fired from a passing car through my neighbor’s window entering his brain & refusing to leave—bad houseguest

from the old english a man enters an orlando nightclub
breathes

the etymology of gun is police is greed is country. from the german from the sea

almost gossip outside my barred window. almost the falling sound of metal leaves

from the old country—my mother’s town where the gun store on the corner’s
the only business not out of business

from the new country where a weapon can be shipped to your doorstep next day

the etymology of gun is tied to horses from the old norse

a woman’s proper name made of two words for battle

i held a gun only once. my lover begged me to press it against the back of his head as we fucked. his pistol fit so easy in my hand when i pulled the trigger, my god,
the sound it made swallowed me.

click click click click [ ]

Bio

sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer & educator. He is the author of Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series, and Bury It, winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He’s the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion with poems published in the New York Times, Poetry Magazine, & Buzzfeed. He’s the poetry editor at BOAAT Press, a 2018 Ruth Lilly Fellow from The Poetry Foundation & currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Writing Poetic Trauma Narratives

Cassandra Rockwood Rice Ganem

Bio

Cassandra Rockwood Rice Ganem is a Berkeley-based writer. Her award-winning poetry and non-fiction explore trauma, PTSD, and diaspora. She holds a BA from California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Cassandra is a queer-identified feminist with an interest in the Middle East being of Lebanese descent.

Work

Writing Poetic Trauma Narratives

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: In this one day workshop we will look at ways to explore personal trauma narratives through various hybrid poetic forms. The language of a traumatic experience, across one experience or across an entire lifetime(s), is unique to each individual, depending on where they are in their healing process. Through writing about trauma, the writer observes and bears witness to their experience(s) in an effort to better understand and de-stigmatize the nature of living in a traumatized body and/or mind. These narratives, if shared, ask the reader to look closely at the damages resulting from oppressive and abusive behaviors in our interpersonal relationships and in society at large. They ask that we build compassion and take responsibility for our actions. In a time of massive social upheaval and transformation, we have to forge new pathways; it is through creative risk-taking that the nature of writing expands, both in how it functions on the page and what it offers society at large.

Memory is elemental – it can be like wind perpetuating a storm or it can ripple like water. Sometimes it’s shaped like a castle in the sand, with child hands, and then later washed away. We will learn to compile memory in ways that are authentic to us as individuals. We will look at hybrid poetic forms and writing styles exploring intergenerational trauma, colonial trauma, traumas held in the body, and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome), among others, in an attempt to find and free our own truths. This workshop will deeply honour and witness all of the ways that we, as survivors of various forms of trauma, share our stories, embark on our healing, and find our strength to persevere through writing.

Excerpt from The Bed Roots

Content Warning: Sexual Violence

A weed wrapping itself around budding life, anything she tries to cultivate—shakes the house makes a bed under her bed.

When someone knocks on the door—when I wake her
from sleep—she startles—sometimes hides—wide-eyed—
she curls her ankles and wrists,
he’s pulling her down,
to a place where
she can’t
breathe

or scream

or run.

***

A friend tells me over coffee one day,

“I’ve been reading this book about PTSD. Soldiers get it when they come back—hard to blend in after a war. It’s the same for survivors of sexual abuse.”

“Forced to conceal the effects of trauma, how can you relate to others? Manage recurring feelings about perpetrators?”

“Phobias so intense self-medicating is the only relief?”

Repeatedly
destructive relationships that mirror earlier experiences, because there was no other presence—no other love.
relationships that mirror earlier experiences, because there was no other presence—no other love.
that mirror earlier experiences, because there was no other presence—no other love.
mirror earlier experiences, because there was no other presence—no other love.
because there was no other presence—no other love.
—no other love.
other love.
love.
.

“In worst case scenarios, she ends her life.”

***

[Someone] [took] my Mama when she was a teenager.

(The story varies depending on who’s telling it.
I have retold it myself in various ways):

1. [—a criminal] took Mama when she was fifteen and held her hostage in an apartment in Boston for [three weeks].

2. [—drug-dealer boyfriend] kidnapped her when she was eighteen and kept her there for [three days].

3. [—father’s drinking buddy] kept her in an apartment in Boston and raped her repeatedly.

One day the window was left open—Just a crack
—Help! Go to [ ] Street. Get my family!
She yelled to some maintenance men below.

Her voice, fierce lioness tendril, rising through the window toward light, [so fuckin’ heroic]
desperate to stay alive.

Her voice, blossoming amidst urban sprawl, [creeping phlox] breaking through asphalt. The fault
of that ass who broke her, forever encroaching on her—jungle of concrete.

Her voice, full of violets, fucking heroic, finding its way through walls, brick and mortar,
sprouting amidst a history dense and silencing,

made its way.

A version of this work was previously published in The Lifted Brow.

Bio

Cassandra Rockwood Rice Ganem is a Berkeley-based writer. Her award-winning poetry and non-fiction explore trauma, PTSD, and diaspora. She holds a BA from California Institute of Integral Studies and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Cassandra is a queer-identified feminist with an interest in the Middle East being of Lebanese descent.

Writing from the Visual and the Sonic

Maw Shein Win

Bio

Maw Shein Win’s full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press (2018). Maw is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-2018), and her forthcoming collection of poetry will be published by Omnidawn in 2020. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UC Berkeley. See more at mawsheinwin.com.

Work

Writing from the Visual and the Sonic

Issue 22: Ecologies of Care

Workshop Description: Find inspiration for your writing from a variety of visual, literary, and audio prompts ranging from word games to collaborative exercises to experimental music. In this workshop, we will play with language, read poetic texts, and invent new work together. What do you take delight in? How do you transmit the mysterious?

Art In America

a smear of color and then as a girl in motion

the discomfort induced by this cross-wired

carnal narcissism suggests a sort of discourse on

the increasing denaturalization of nature

and the mechanization of creativity

which mines the organic geometry of

genetic and cellular forms to create compositions

that attempt to fit the details

of her own life

into economically derived systems

obscured by a thick dollop of lustrous

pale-pink oil paint

cryptic narratives

map out the descent

from rural grace into suburban angst

an obsessive quest for order

notice the vicissitudes

of personal existence

travel endlessly in search

of the sublime

realize the artifice

of your constructions

From Invisible Gifts: Poems (Manic D Press 2018)

Bio

Maw Shein Win’s full-length collection Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press (2018). Maw is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016-2018), and her forthcoming collection of poetry will be published by Omnidawn in 2020. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the English Department at UC Berkeley. See more at mawsheinwin.com.

Masthead

Spring 2019

Guest Editor

Clare Lilliston

Managing Editor

Davíd Andres Mejía

Prose Editors

Arya Samuelson

Kari Treese

Poetry Editors

Raihana Haynes-Venerable

Sean Schaeffer

Faculty Advisor

Stephanie Young

Art Direction and Design

Livia Foldes

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Full Moon Through Concertina Wire

Persistent Supernatural Trope

Waking

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN DRUMMING IN OAKLAND[1]*

mother sexed

pass the dark and stormy

excerpts from psalmbook

Black Boys

TRIBUTE

Excerpt from Utopia and Other Problems

GOOD NEWS

ETYMOLOGY

Excerpt from The Bed Roots

Art In America

THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN DRUMMING IN OAKLAND^[1]*