Offering something so small

Dear friends,

What a year! Grad school has been intense. Mills College has been intense. CTP has been intense.

As ready as I was to be a graduate student, I was not prepared.  Ready, because it is time.  Time to have a career renaissance. Time to model for my young daughter that lifelong learning is something we do in our family. Time to learn how to write what has always been inside me.

But not prepared because I did not make appropriate adjustments to my schedule and workload to accommodate all that is required to do this well. And not prepared because I did not know what to expect from workshop, craft, or literature classes.

This state of being ready but not prepared extends to my CTP workshop. I have been ready to design and build this workshop since the idea came to me while tutoring reading in the county jail some years ago. But even with the opportunity provided by CTP, I was not fully prepared to make it happen before the academic year ended.

Leslie and I came very close to running the workshop--we wrote an awesome syllabus and lesson plans and met some great people who are interested in seeing "Take Back Education" happen. And working with Leslie was so good for tempering me and for adding a critical perspective--I only wish she could be here longer to work with.

As I approach my second (but not last) year at Mills, I remain ready for this education and am finally prepared for it. I know now what I need in terms of time and what to expect from intensive graduate-level English courses (I was a geography major). I have some family business early this summer and then plan to turn my attention back to "Take Back Education" to see if I can make it happen before school starts again.

adventure with abandon - first post

my workshop has taken a hiatus. from december until about april i tried to get participants, and tried some different approaches. first, in december, i asked for permission to host the workshop at 27th and broadway at my favorite abandoned building- not to go inside, but just to lead kids around the outside to observe and find inspiration. then i printed out flyers and gave them to libraries and the YMCA to post on their boards, which they didn't. i also emailed about a dozen high schools in december and january asking them to pass on the information to teachers and students who might be interested. OSA got back to me and said they would offer class credit to whichever OSA students took my workshop- which was a great boost, but no one signed up. i was planning on hosting the workshop over spring break, but when no one had signed up just days before then, kiala suggested i work directly with OSA, but soon found out they wouldn't have time during the remainder of the school year. next, kiala set lucien and i up to work together. lucien was in a science fiction literature class and thought some classmates would be interested, so i decided to change the workshop up and have it all take place at mills to make it easier. but only one of lucien's classmates was interested.
im planning on trying again with this workshop in the late summer or early fall, and i know i will start out differently. i want to ask a couple high schools if i can work directly with them, or just if i can come in and plug my workshop. that way, the faculty and the students can have a tangible relationship with me and know that they can count on me and my workshop. from there, ill pass around a contact information sheet for interested students. i dont think i will bring the students to the abandoned building, at least in the first series of workshops, because i want to feel confident in my ability to lead the class and keep everyone organized before, and for their parents to know that im capable of doing those things in an outdoor setting, especially alongside an abandoned building.
so over the summer, ill be revisiting my syllabus and plans, and tweak them if need be, and soon ill begin contacting schools. looking forward to getting this workshop off the ground!

our class description

This is the description that is currently being sent out to parents and prospective participants of our workshop. I hope they find it interesting. I'd take the class, at least:

WIERDNESS AS REBELLION: EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC THROUGH WRITING

This workshop will explore the music of Sun Ra and John Cage through ekphrastic translation.(Ekphrasis is the act of writing through or in response to another art form.) We will encourage each other to investigate weirdness, including our own weirdness, as radical acts of the self. Through procedural, constraint-based writing, we will together invent a new alternative space and time that offers us the ability to embrace difference as a new and hopeful alternative to conformity.

Bio: Ivy Johnson is a poet living and working in Oakland. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College. Her first chapbook, Walt Disney’s Light Show Extravaganza, was published by Boog City in 2011. Her book As They Fall, a collection of fragments published on note cards, was recently published by Timeless, Infinite Light.

Bio: Housten Donham received his B.A. in Literature from the University of Arizona and his M.A. in Literature from Mills College. His scholarly interests have long included modern and contemporary American poetry. He has written on the work of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Grenier, and Rae Armantrout, among other poets. In his spare time he makes digital poetry and writes about horror movies.

good news

Ivy and I have, actually, finally gotten a placement. We will be teaching one class, an hour and a half, at the Bay Area Public School in July. This is part of a larger summer-long session in which participants, who will be 13-20 years old, will engage in poetry workshops. Each week, a different poet(s) will be leading the class. The class we will be conducting is called “Weirdness as Rebellion: Experimental Music Through Writing.” We will be looking at performances by composers John Cage and Sun Ra, and then will respond in a way that is similar to our demo we conducted last semster for CTP. What I really want to stress is for participants to engage with their weirdness, and to understand that everyone is weird and that they should embrace their own unique weirdness and cultivate that. 

It seems obvious that it is all about who you know. And in this case, it's again true. It is only through our connections with the Bay Area poetry scene that we were able to get in on this program. I'm very grateful. That's how things work, I guess. I just hope we can eventually expand this class into something more. Now that we have connections with the Bay Area Public School I'm sure that will all be much easier to do.

Third Post

Before our final class, a dinner reading at my home, I have decided to hold phone meetings with participants to work more closely with them and their pieces. While this is doable for a class size of four, I'm seeing the need to hold more sessions for more writing, revising, craft exercises, and one on one attention from me within the classroom.

It is so clear and evident that participants have been wanting to write their stories for some time, and really took this workshop to jump at the opportunity to do so. The material that participants are coming up with are extremely risky to write about, and I'm impressed with their ability to allow others to give them feedback in a way that both improve their craft AND help them look at their stories differently.

Next steps are:

1. I want to put their stories out there. Beyond the CTP anthology, I want to continue to work with them so that their pieces are made public.
2. I want to guide participants towards continuing to write. Each of them are enrolled in community colleges and I want to help guide them towards the resources available to them there. I also will encourage them to put their own work out in the world and will share with them ways to do this.
3. Beyond teaching this workshop again, there's an idea gestating that would create a platform for writers who are still developing their craft to share their work with their own communities. More to come later. 

Some Thoughts on (Failed?) Attempts

As some of you know, Darin and I’s workshop just didn’t get off the ground this semester. I’m driving to Alaska in a few days for work, so my time in the bay area is coming to the end. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get do the workshop we planned with this community. But I’m excited that I was able to help Darin put something together that he can implement in the future and I’m also excited about someday adjusting this workshop to the needs of a community where I’m living.

I wanted to reflect on some of things that worked and some of the things that didn’t work as well, because I think it might be useful info for future CTP organizers.

     

1.   We found some wonderful contact people! And in some unexpected ways. When we were working in a coffee shop one day, a professor from a community college in San Francisco approached us. She was really excited about our project and sent us some great material that she uses in her classes (including a beautiful essay by Jimmy Santiago Baca that I had never read). She would be a great person to work with and I will hang on to her contact info. Prof. Oparah’s help was also invaluable. I would recommend that anyone interested in working with critical resistance groups contact her ASAP. Prof. Oparah introduced us to another Mills student who was also very knowledgeable and very passionate about our project. Because there are already so many folks at Mills participating in critical resistance in one way or another, I think meeting and collaborating with other Mills students should be a priority for anyone planning a workshop with this focus.

2.       While it was helpful in many ways to have a workshop planned out, I think it might have been better to start by making contact with organizations and asking what they need. With this approach, we would probably have ended up running a very similar workshop, but establishing a relationship with organizations would have allowed us to construct a program tailored to their needs. In other words, because people in non-profit social justice organizations have 500 things to do at any given moment, I don’t think they have time to determine whether or not a workshop might fit into their programming and then go through the scheduling maze of establishing contact with a new set of volunteers (us), while simultaneously wrangling workshop logistics and searching for and communicating with participants. I mean, these are all things that need to be done, but I think that if one establishes a relationship with an organization first, you can learn what their (logistical) needs are and then offer a workshop that is already streamlined to fit in with their programming.

Finally, I’m really excited to have a list of contacts for collaborators, potential participants, and potential locations, a flyer design, syllabi, prompts and lesson plans, as well as a collection of scanned .pdfs to provide as readings. The list of contacts might be useful to future CTP organizers and the workshop packet can be implemented by Darin or I someday, as well as shared with organizations and future CTP organizers.

My Third Session

My third session this past Wednesday was very productive because I thought I might be getting graded and was expecting my instructor Ms. Givehand to possibly pop up but she couldn't make it. We reviewed the material the students had prepared for me and I collected the edits they made to the work from the previous week. I talked about affirmations and recited my  Self -Determination poem for them. I gave them a couple of choice prompts one stated to write a poem called "Because I love myself." One student did exceptionally well with this. What I wish I would have done is to go through the basics of making a poem for those who have less experience. Having students at different writing levels has slowed me down a bit.

Next time I will write down their suggestions so they can see words on the board and help them craft it and if I choose to repeat this all inclusive style of teaching in the future I will make sure I have an assistant. I can't focus on someone's writing and watch for any discipline issues at the same time when there's more than six or seven students. We did an alternative version of red light, green light  so I could plant the seed that they do have good memories and self-control.  Later on we also played the yes and no game to warm them up and so I could briefly discuss that it's ok to say no sometime. Their favorite was questions because it also allowed them to focus on what they wanted to say before they said it. A really great story came out of that. The only problem is I didn't stop them because they were having so much fun. I think I will have someone write down or record the dialogue next time.

My biggest accomplishment in this session was getting Laila's play performed and she was so excited. I read the narration and they came in during their respective parts. I also let one of the student's videotape because she said she wanted to be a filmmaker. Next week I want to gather the poems and stories that will be published, type them up and find out who will be willing to recite when the time comes to put on a CTP show. I'm still unsure of how short the short stories need to be though.