Readings & Workshops Blog

Amy Cheney is a librarian and advocate who has served preschoolers, middle schoolers, adults in county and federal facilities, students in juvenile halls, non-traditional library users, and people of color for over twenty-five years. Cheney has brought numerous writers—including Jerry McGill, Deborah Jiang Stein, Jesse De La Cruz, Luis J. Rodriguez, Cesar A. Cruz, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Ron Glodoski—to conduct readings, writing workshops, and talks with the youth she serves at California's Alameda County Library Juvenile Hall. P&W has been supporting these programs for over a decade.

Cheney's six-word memoir is: "Navigator of insanity, instigator of enlightenment." Her theme songs are "Short Skirt, Long Jacket" by Cake and "I Can See Clearly Now" by Jimmy Cliff. For more information, follow her blog, Reaching Reluctant Readers.

What makes your organization and its programs unique?
The Alameda County Library Juvenile Hall is a partnership between the public library, the county schools, and the Juvenile Justice Center to serve incarcerated youth.

When we first began the program, 81 percent of the youth said they had never heard a published author speak or read their work.

After authors visited the facility, 60 to 90 percent of the youth wanted to read their book or learn more. Sixty-three percent say they learn something new from author visits.

What’s the most moving or memorable thing that’s happened as a result of an event you’ve organized?
Seeing students, who haven’t had positive reading experiences in the past, wanting to read and reaching for the book (as well as having enough of the books to give them) is consistently memorable and moving.

How do you find and invite writers?
It's a process of intention, reading, research, networking, and luck. There were several artists that P&W helped us fund, who were little known at the time.

Walking home one evening, Jerry McGill was shot and paralyzed when he was thirteen years old. The shooter was never found. Jerry wrote a moving book called Dear Marcus, A Letter to the Man Who Shot Me. We were able to touch upon many issues that are often unspoken, but very real for the youth: getting shot, feelings of revenge, and forgiveness. Disability and life after severe trauma is an extremely important topic for our youth, but not often brought to light.

Deborah Jiang Stein was born in prison addicted to heroin. Her journey was fascinating to our girls.

Ron Glodoski does such an incredible program about physical, sexual, and verbal abuse. It is profound and life-changing for many of our youth to read, write, and explore these topics.

Youth are amazed that Jesse De La Cruz made it out of prison and is doing so well after more than forty-three years behind bars.

It’s also terrific to have well-known authors such as Luis J. Rodriguez, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and others grace us with their presence.

How has literary presenting informed your life?
When I was a rage-filled teen, I was forced—at least that’s how I remember it—to hear Maya Angelou speak in a church basement. I was pissed off I was there, but as the program went on I felt my defenses crack and something that had never been available to me opened up inside. This experience was so powerful, I’ve worked for thirteen years to provide the opportunity for others.

I've also learned a tremendous amount about integrity. Writing a book that reflects the truth is one thing, and living it is another!

What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for the community you serve?
I am not even sure how to answer the question adequately. They are invaluable in terms of hope, inspiration, contemplation, freedom, and provocation. Quotes from the students themselves, after meeting Jerry McGill, might help illustrate the value of these programs:

"It was really a very emotional experience. I feel like there should be more people sharing their experience of being victims to people who make crimes; kind of like seeing the other side of the coin. Keep doing the things you're doing in spreading your life story." —S

"I too have been shot and never found out who did it so I can understand that. I know you said that you forgave whoever did shoot you and that makes me think about if I ever knew who did it I would forgive them. I'm going to read your book when I get a chance." —D

"Your story made me want to write more, and to make my own book." —C

"I learned the best thing from you, forgiveness. I'm willing to learn more and hear more from you." —A

Photo: (Left to right) Writer Dream Jordan, librarian Amy Cheney, writer Jeff Rivera, and writer Coe Booth. Credit: David Shankman.

Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by the James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Andrea (Andy) Young blogs about her readings—supported by P&W grants—in New Orleans. Her third chapbook, The People Is Singular, was published in 2012. Her poems, essays, and translations have been featured internationally and in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Callaloo, Guernica, and the Norton Anthology of Language for a New Century. Since 2012, she has been dividing her time between New Orleans, where she works for the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, and Egypt, where she works for the American University in Cairo.

The P&W-supported readings I’ve done in New Orleans, like most of my writing from the last couple of years, were inextricably linked to revolution and the uprisings in the Arab “world.” These grants have catalyzed readings that likely wouldn’t have happened otherwise. The readings took place at the Antenna Gallery, a dynamic gallery space which features writers as all as visual artists, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Loyola University, and, at the invitation of the Tulane Arabic Club, at a restaurant which no longer exists called Little Morocco.

Most of the poems I read on these occasions were from a chapbook called The People Is Singular, a collaborative response to the Egyptian revolution featuring my poems and the photography of Salwa Rashad, an Egyptian photographer. All of these readings featured words that try to find a home somewhere between observation and engagement, between Arabic and English, between two cultures. As the spouse of an Egyptian poet, and the mother of two, I am part of a family that constantly seeks to find a point of balance between these things.

Poetry helps me to find that place, and these readings created opportunities to share it. Since January 2011, I have often been asked by American friends and family to help them understand what’s going on in Egypt: to direct people to reliable news sources or to give further context to the headlines. Poetry, of course, is about more than the facts, but I have found that it has served these last couple of years, among other things, to flesh out experiences that may feel distant, other.

Each of these readings also provided opportunities to explore different ways of presenting work. At the Antenna Gallery, I conducted a multimedia presentation with projections of Rashad’s work, soundscapes, and different reading styles. At Loyola University, I hung a small exhibit of Rashad’s work to accompany the poems. At the New Orleans Museum of Art, the reading was in a small gallery space filled with artwork providing a different context.

At Little Morocco restaurant, my husband, Khaled Hegazzi, and I read all the work bilingually, accompanied by the oud and guitar. The restaurant was packed, and the aromas of lamb, cardamom, carrots, and mint tea floated around our voices. It was January 2011, a frightening and exciting time at the beginning of what would come to be known as the “Arab Spring.” My chapbook was yet to be published, but the poems I chose (many in translation from Arabic) were in the spirit of the times. In the question and answer session after the reading, one person asked, “What would you call what is happening in Egypt now?” And I responded, “I’d call it a revolution.” Little did I know how big it was or how long the struggle would be. I continue to seek words that make the narrative(s) of these times tangible and human, though there are times I am hopelessly mute. These opportunities to read and share my attempts to voice my thoughts have helped me to feel that they matter to others and the world.

Photo: Andy Young. Photo Credit: Khaled Hegazzi

Support for Readings/Workshops events in New Orleans is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-funded Kamilah Aisha Moon currently lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of She Has a Name (Four Way Books). A recipient of fellowships to the Prague Summer Writing Institute, the Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, and the Vermont Studio Center, Moon's work has been featured in several journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, jubilat, Sou’wester, Oxford American, Lumina, Callaloo, Villanelles, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College-CUNY, Drew University, and Adelphi University. Moon holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.

Poets & Writers funds a wonderful workshop at a senior citizen recreational center in Manhattan called the Lincoln Square Neighborhood Center. A good friend of mine, Samantha Thornhill, regularly facilitates the workshop. I recently had the pleasure of being a guest instructor for one session, and it was an afternoon that I will continue to treasure for many reasons. What a treat to sit at the table with these women and experience their hard-won insights and revelations, their beauty. To witness their respect for what reading and writing poetry has always afforded them—how it delights, soothes and edifies; the sweet and profound awe it inspires.

Poetry is time travel. The opening free-write exercise “Give me back...” asked the women to reflect on the past. They transformed as they shared fifteen minutes later the many reveries they brought back to life, eyes sparkling as they showed through metaphor and great sensory detail what they once had and who they used to be "back in the day," and what their once young, supple bodies could accomplish (one of the ladies being a dancer). "Give me back my long, luxurious curls...nights with my husband before the kids came along. Just give me back my husband, gone now." They recalled what mattered and still does, expressed gratitude for what rose in the wake of loss along the way. There was sensuality, sass, and a healthy irreverence from a woman in her eighties as she read mantras for living that got her this far in life, until her respiratory problems took over and shortened her time in our session.

We discussed persona poems, compared lyric to narrative poetry, and explored space as breath in a poem. We studied form as the setting and craft as tools to compose these word-diamonds we hew from our personal experiences. The afternoon sun poured into the windows; we all glowed. It reminded me of the line in a Rumi poem, “Sunlight fell upon the wall / the wall received a borrowed splendor.” The sheen of discovery, recognition, acknowledgment, and transcendence filled the room. I always want to remember and keep sacred that this is a human business. As poet Jon Sands often says, we are “emotional historians.”

Two years ago, I taught a Poets & Writers-sponsored workshop filled with sixth grade honor students at the Young Women's Leadership Academy in Queens. For ten weeks, we focused on elements of craft and discussed the work of published poets, unpacking what each poem had to offer us. We created an anthology. These girls were gifted and bright beyond their young years, their poems suffused simultaneously with innocence and wisdom. Kristalyn proclaimed, “My name is a dragon / just like me! It has power / and can let loose.” In an ode to her fingers, Tearah wrote “You clasp my knuckles in prayer...you hold my pen, my writing sword!”

The young women made me hopeful for their individual futures and the future of the world. The more mature ladies filled me with the strength to face my own golden years with grace, and to handle the inevitable curves and challenges ahead with the same aplomb they exhibited. I was struck by how, in both workshops, the students' faces shone with the same wonder, and conveyed a careful stewardship and thoughtfulness when giving such astute feedback and suggestions. I was honored to encourage the young women to experience poetry for the first time, and equally honored to witness many of the older women use poetry to relive some major events that shaped their lives.

Among the many important moments, both of these workshops affirmed that poetry contains a brilliance that we can access and own for a lifetime. Through poetry, we can transform ourselves and change others as we sit around each other's poems like campfires for warmth and sustenance. For as long as we can hold our “writing swords,” we possess the power to draw breath, to speak, and to listen.

Photo: Kamilah Aisha Moon. Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

In October, Poets & Writers supported readings by several writers at apexart in New York City. Project director Marie Burns blogs about the unique Double Take: Writers Reading Series.

Author and Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio organizes apexart’s Double Take: Writers Reading Series. Each season, participants are tasked with the same assignment: Select a partner, reflect upon a shared experience, and produce creative responses—essays, stories, poems—inspired by that topic. Both participants are then invited to read what they’ve written back to back, showing just how different perception and prose can be.

Earlier this month, with generous funding from Poets & Writers, Inc., apexart hosted two Double Take readings. As the crowd packed into apexart’s lower Manhattan gallery, they listened to Library of America editor in chief Geoffrey O’Brien and his writing partner B. Kite describe the twisted plot of a futuristic adventure film without ever disclosing the film’s name. Rather than reflect upon an experience the pair had already shared, they decided to watch this new movie separately and write without comparing notes. The audience was captivated by the delivery of each essay as they followed the exciting narration of a sci-fi thriller.

Vijay Seshadri, the Michele Tolela Myers Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and his writing partner, Rachel Cohen, focused on a gallery-hopping hobby they haven’t been able to enjoy since Rachel moved from New York to Boston. Their friendship stemmed from a shared love of art history, and Vijay wrote specifically about the Museum of Modern Art’s 2011 De Kooning Retrospective. Sharing past museum anecdotes, Vijay described how he wished his friend Rachel had been around to wander the galleries with him on one of his seven visits to the exhibition. His essay and poems were a lovely ode to their friendship and to their shared love of culture.

During our second reading of the season, we heard from Nelly Reifler and Cathy Park Hong as they imagined futuristic surveillance technologies. Nelly wrote a product summary for a newly released mindreading app with the capacity to track streams of thought while scanning the user’s subconscious and the subconscious of others in their memory. The app could explore hopes, worries, and fantasies while recalling moments as image data. Her story noted all of the app’s “benefits” including the app’s ability to reevaluate all contributing sides of a story in painstaking detail. Most audience members were relieved they weren’t due for an upgraded OS anytime soon.

Continuing this theme of prying into personal lives, we heard from Chris Sorrentino, a core faculty member at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and Andrew Hultkrans, on one of history’s most notorious patrons of surveillance. Before delving into the complex character of Richard Nixon and discussing his place in history, Chris and Andrew screened a series of political advertisements from Nixon’s 1968 campaign to share with the audience. The late Sixties were a troubled and turbulent time, and each campaign ad was more intense than the next, ending with the ominous slogan, “This time vote like your whole world depended on it.” The campaign clips set the stage for the Nixon Double Take. While discussing egos and opposing truths in politics, the audience couldn’t help but think of the government shutdown and that maybe next time, they should vote like their whole world depended on it.

Photo: Chris Sorrentino discusses Nixon.

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-supported poet Koon Woon, October’s Writer in Residence, was born in a timeless village in China in 1949. In 1960 he immigrated to Washington State, first to the logging town of Aberdeen, then to Seattle, where he now resides. He turned to poetry while he was a mathematics and philosophy student coping with mental illness. Later he attended the workshops of Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington. At the age of forty-eight, Koon’s first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, was published by Kaya Press. 

My Uncle Sum was my second maternal uncle and my mentor, a man of three teachings: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. He told his wife that the proper place to wash his clothes was at the river by the ancestral shrine, the part of the chicken to give their nephew was the thigh, and the way to regulate the household was to avoid unnecessary noise.

He told me that the short pines behind his house in the village could be used to make furniture for newlyweds. Their scent, he said, would lure the Shaolin Buddhist monks, but the way to fight is by avoiding fights. The way to use an abacus is to balance equals with equals, the ebb and flow of the Tao. He read me stories in our Canton flat. He signed his name to my school report cards when my father was faraway in America.

Literature comes from great love—love for stories and books, love for the unseen and the invisible, but mostly love for humanity. My Uncle Sum taught me those things, and when I won my first literary prize, he told me that was the time to work even harder.

In taking my cues from Uncle Sum, I stood in opposition to my pragmatic father, who labored to support his wife and eight restless children. After I joined him in the United States, we lived in the housing projects. At one point, he worked as a fry cook for a restaurant owned by the mayor. Another time, he was forced to take a job at a restaurant that fronted a whorehouse, where I helped him in the kitchen until the wee hours of the morning. It was a traumatizing experience (and no doubt a contributor to my struggle with mental illness), which I blocked out as I hit the school books, became the literary chair of my high school, and won a science scholarship.

But that’s only part of my journey to becoming a poet. Here are my instructions for the rest: After a promising career as a student, begin a slow descent into the hell of mental illness. Live in flea bag hotels or on the street. Get confined to psychiatric hospitals and jails. Live in tenement rooms with a sink in the corner and a hotplate to cook pinto beans and bacon rinds, reading the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Anne Sexton while not caring if your soul survives. Labor under the glare of a bare bulb trying to write as tenderly as Pablo Neruda and as daringly as Cesar Vallejo. You won’t have money, but you will have a strange, unshakable optimism about humanity.

The latter is what I learned from Uncle Sum. When he was across the Pacific dying of liver cancer, I was starting my life as a poet. I felt like I was drowning in shallow water. But armed with poetry, I survived, as strong as a cockroach.

Everyone wants to win the Yale Younger Poets prize or the Pulitzer. But even winning the Nobel does not guarantee nobility of soul. As I said before, I write because I have to. It is the exorcism of all that is still immature in me.

Photo: Koon Woon reads with Beacon Bards at the Station coffee shop in Seattle. Credit: Greg Bem
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-supported writer Charles Alexander is a poet, bookmaker, and founder/director of Chax Press. He is the author of five full-length books of poetry and ten chapbooks, and the editor of a critical work on the state of the book arts in America. His most recent book of poetry is Pushing Water, published by Cuneiform Press. Some Sentences Look for Some Periods, a chapbook, has just been released by Little Red Leaves. He has taught literature and writing at Naropa University, the University of Arizona, and elsewhere. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his partner, the painter Cynthia Miller.

What makes your press unique?

I might say, with Frank O’Hara, that we are “trying to keep it somewhere between mess and message,” i.e. while we have an overall purpose to support a broad range of innovative American poetry, the books happen because something grabs me. I have been asked how I can reconcile Chax Press’s interest in both the poetics of Black Mountain and that of language poetry; I see no contradiction in that reach, but rather an openness to various forms.

We also show our roots, i.e. that we began publishing books with handset type, printed on the Vandercook Press. We still publish such books, along with a lot more trade paperback books of terrific poetry.

Another fact that makes us unique: Chax has never offered a prize, and has almost never submitted our books for prizes, because we don’t believe that competition and recognition (of that variety) are what it’s all about.
 
What recent project and/or program have you been especially proud of and why?

The work of Linh Dinh seems to me some of the most creative and challenging poetry of our time. I am so glad we have been able to publish three of his books, including The Deluge, an anthology of new Vietnamese poetry, which he edited.

And of course, it doesn't hurt to look at recent books on our shelves by Alice Notley (Reason and Other Women), Maureen Owen (Edges of Water), Lisa Samuels (Anti M), and Will Alexander (Inside the Earthquake Palace), among others.

Plus, I get to work with young interns with terrific ideas.

As a book artist trained in letterpress printing, hand papermaking, and bookbinding, what are your thoughts on how e-books and new technologies are changing our concept of the book?

Books happen more quickly, get to people more quickly, and are more ever-present in our increasingly electronic lives. There is a lot of good about this, though I sometimes think people are reading bits and pieces more—songs rather than albums, greatest hits more than a poet’s deep immersion in a project. One terrific thing is that more young people are publishing works in new ways. As Charles Olson wrote in “The Kingfishers,” “what does not change/is the will to change.”
    
How do you prepare for a reading (especially if a reader’s experience of the text is linked with the book as a medium)?

While a book may have an intimate relationship with the form of a work, it can never be the defining form for that work. A live reading brings out something else entirely. When I give readings, I do not assume that the audience has read my work. I’m often surprised that they have, but I think a poet has to be attuned to that moment’s creation.

What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?

So much! The word rouses the spirits of individuals, who then work and act in the community. Works of art in language challenge people to understand how language and life interact. Chax Press grew out of my practice as a poet and my sense of community with other poets. Its purpose has always been to contribute to a very wide community, one that is spread out in the present and that goes back deeply in time, forming something like what the poet Robert Duncan might have called a “grand collage.”

But let's get specific about community. It takes some very special people. My partner, Cynthia Miller, has been beside me all but the first year of Chax Press, and has become the artist for the press, a board member, my studio mate, and much more. Tenney Nathanson is simply one of the best poets I have ever known or read; he has also been a mainstay on the Chax board and in my life. Tim Trace Peterson exquisitely edits EOAGH, which is a web partner with Chax. Other members of the local community that have made Chax what it is include Barbara Henning, Lisa Cooper Anderson, Steven Salmoni, Karen Brennan, the late Hassan Falak, Anne Bunker, Samuel Ace, Jefferson Carter, and many more.

On the Chax Press website, it says “Chax press publishes writing that does not take things for granted—things like ‘what is a poem,’ ‘what is an author,’ or ‘what does it mean to read.’” Have your experiences as a writer, publisher, and bookmaker helped answer any of these questions for you?

I remember Jerome Rothenberg once writing that poetry must keep asking the questions that cannot be answered. If “what is a poem?” ever has a definitive answer, I don't know that I'd like to write poems anymore. I love it that we are always extending language, extending the possible answers to these questions. The poem, questions about author and authority, and reading remain essential to my life and work.

Photo: Charles Alexander. Credit: Cybele Knowles.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Tucson is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

P&W-supported poet Koon Woon, October’s Writer in Residence, was born in a timeless village in China in 1949. In 1960 he immigrated to Washington State, first to the logging town of Aberdeen, then to Seattle, where he now resides. He turned to poetry while he was a mathematics and philosophy student coping with mental illness. Later he attended the workshops of Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington. At the age of forty-eight, Koon’s first book, The Truth in Rented Rooms, was published by Kaya Press. 

My most recent reading in Seattle—a production of the Chrysanthemum Literary Society with support from Poets & Writers, featuring several Kaya Press writers—took place at two venues: Elliott Bay Book Company and Bruce Lee’s gravesite.

Before the reading, I met Kaya Press editor Sunyoung Lee in the Chinatown-International District, and we went to the Mon Hei Bakery for “egg tarts,” a type of egg custard and the title of one of my poems about bicultural adaptation. We had tea in Styrofoam cups at an economy cake shop, followed by wonton noodles at Mike’s Noodle House, across from the Grand Pavilion at Hing Hay Park. That site appears in my poem as the place pigeons flock and the orphans of the world meet.

When Sunyoung and I were fortified, we had three more missions for the day.

The first was the aforementioned pilgrimage to Lakeview Cemetery at the peak of Capitol Hill. We found the gravesites of Bruce Lee and his son Brandon, and Sunyoung unexpectedly asked me to read a poem. I read “Fortune Telling” from my book The Truth in Rented Rooms, a poem about my father and the hard-working Chinese immigrants of his time. As I read, planes flew overhead and rain began to fall. The Chinese say that Heaven answers by releasing precipitation. We drank wine and poured some for Bruce and Brandon Lee.



I found my own parents’ tombstones. They were simple restaurant operators, but they are buried alongside members of the Locke clan, the old Seattle family that produced the current Ambassador to China, the Honorable Gary Locke.

We caught a bus to Elliott Bay Book Company for our second mission, a reading at the world-famous bookstore. The reading was animated and diverse. Some of our poets read about biracial and adoptee identities; two publishers were represented. Thad Rutkowski came all the way from New York City. I read about how an emperor and I had discussed the mechanics of winning an election in my inner-city room. In poetry, nothing is impossible. The audience was a wonderful cross section of people, from world-class translators to walk-ins at the bookstore.

The day was an example of literary teamwork: Kaya’s resources plus my suggestions and organization and P&W’s support. Previously, P&W enabled me to bring Jack and Adelle Foley and John Holbrook to the Richard Hugo House literary center. Featuring out-of-town writers allows for literary cross-fertilization and makes Seattle a truly cosmopolitan city. These readings and workshops help make the world smaller and foster understanding among cultures.

For our final mission that day, we retired to a sumptuous feast at Hing Loon Restaurant in Chinatown.

Photo: Koon Woon reads with Beacon Bards at the Station coffee shop in Seattle. Credit: Greg Bem.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Seattle is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Suzanne Rancourt blogs about her P&W funded workshops with many underserved populations. Suzanne Rancourt is pursuing her Doctorate at the US accredited European Graduate School in Expressive Arts: Therapy, Coaching, Consulting & Education as well as a Chemical Dependency Counselor certification. She holds an MFA in writing, MS in Educational Psychology, AWA and CAGS. Suzanne draws from her Native American culture and military service (USMC, USA) in her arts practice and workshops. She has nonfiction work, The Bear That Stands forthcoming in the Journal of Military Experience, with recent work translated by Beatrice Machet. Her writing has been published in numerous journals, is used widely in schools, and transposed into the successful project, On Her Shoulders - a play about nine female veterans. Suzanne is a Managing Editor for Blue Streak - A Journal of Military Poetry. Suzanne has an upcoming P&W funded workshop open to female vets from all eras November 2, 2013 at the Stratton VA Medical Center, Albany, NY. Her award winning book, Billboard in the Clouds, is now carried by nupress.northwestern.

For several years I have had the good fortune of receiving funding from Poets & Writers' Readings/Workshops Program. These opportunities have taken me into prisons, veterans hospitals, homeless shelters for women and children of domestic violence, survivors of Traumatic Brain Injuries, drug and alcohol substance abuse recovery groups, young, inner city girls, YWCA’s, Military Experience and the Arts symposium, and more. I often get people emailing me asking about my use of writing in the field of Expressive/Creative Arts Therapy.

Of course, I recall my first attempts twenty or so years ago trying to explain to various academics my ideas. Neuroscience and brain chemistry fields really didn’t exist then, so usually my ideas were received with a raised eyebrow, leery glances, and silence. My first writing professor, Leonard Gilley, always said that perseverance was a writer’s mainstay. I continued to seek and cultivate my voice as a writer and in so doing I was met with profound adversity, and opportunities.

I focused on being my “authentic” self and in so doing embarked on a journey that led to Pat Schneider and her Amherst Writers and Artists method of facilitating writing workshops. By then I had already acquired two Masters Degrees with education in writing and psychology. I knew a good thing when I felt it. The AWA method, to use some of Pat’s phrasing, 1. is non hierarchical, 2. is experiential, 3. is a strengths based model, 4. can be used with all people regardless of age, religion, lifestyle, culture, cognitive levels, etc, 5. meets the writer/learner where they are at, 6. the facilitator takes the same risks as the participants, 7. it is NOT psychotherapy.

I continued to educate myself and learn from each participant in every one of my groups. I began to realize the changes occurring within participants and myself, not just the cathartic stuff, but the physiological things. For example, prior to a writing spree I may become highly agitated and then sit and write for hours or days. What’s that about? I wanted to know more. Expressive Arts counseling requires that we delve into our own Kafka-esque realities and for me that meant using my primary modality - writing. The change occurs in the process of the art making. Find the surprise.

Since this is to be a relatively short blog post, I won’t give you the full Monty but let’s say the bus most recently stopped off at my military service years. In 2012,  a young Iraq veteran, Travis Martin, followed his Authentic self and created The Journal of Military Experience. Their dedication in using the arts for helping each other, bettering our worlds and documenting our experiences is beyond profound. Each writer writes for their own reason with some discovering a knack that they cultivate into a well honed craft. Ironically, words can’t fully describe how much being reconnected with veterans has helped me. Resonance and resiliency; Perhaps those two words can give you an idea.

Writing transports the artist to someplace. That’s why many of us write. Writing as an Expressive Arts / Creative Arts therapeutic modality is serious business. You are accessing memories, emotions, activating neural pathways that can lead to change with the appropriate guidance and support. There are specific practices that we follow in our daily living, and our continued passion to seek, learn, experience and become more competent in our profession; to be a better human. Be Authentic.

Photo:  Suzanne S. Rancourt.  Photo Credit: Donna Davidson

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, with additional support from the Friends of Poets & Writers.