on formative spaces
To say 2023 has been a whirlwind would be an understatement of the highest order, hence the lapse in posts. Let’s just say I’m in the midst of launching multiple creative ventures/projects (!!!) at the moment.
I’ve been writing long enough to be able to chart my creative evolution, and I’ve found myself reflecting on some of the spaces that have molded me. Especially because I’ve been a teaching artist this year, putting me in a position to create a formative space for young people.
One of my earliest formative spaces was indeed, created by a poet/teaching artist who came to my school. It was 7th grade and Ms. Jacobi was a compact, sharply stylish woman who had us write and perform what we wrote. At that point, I had spent the better part of that year penning poems in a small legal pad, mostly about feeling like a third wheel in my friend groups of three. We had a poetry showcase at the end of her time with us; a few students, myself included, were selected to recite our poems to an audience. Ms. Jacobi was the first person who told me I was a poet. And you know what? I believed her.
Chicago’s mayors, as crooked as some have been, have always invested in a robust arts ecosystem for all ages After School Matters is one such initiative. ASM teens get paid a stipend to participate in arts or sports programs. The summer I was 15, I did a bookmaking camp. We learned about accordion style books, saddle stitch books, and crafting spines before making our own books at the end of the summer. Like most 15-year-olds, I was obsessed with music. Using paint, color pencil drawings, crayon, and collage, I created a book with lyrics and portraits of my favorite artists at the time: The White Stripes, Janis Joplin, The Specials, the Toots and the Maytals, Public Enemy and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, among others. I still have that book and thumb through the pages from time to time. It reminds me that I’ve always been multidisciplinary, even if writing is what I’ve chosen to hone in on.
Even though Free Street Theater is a theater ensemble, being in it shaped my writing practice monumentally. I was an ensemble member from ages 16-18 before forming a new artist collective with other ex-ensemble members, after our artistic director had been ousted by the board. Free Street trained my mind to run at a frenetic pace. We'd do emotionally-charged contact improv and then papers would be tossed into the air and pens would scatter across the floor and we’d just write and write and try to keep the pen moving. Then, our raw writing would be harvested and typed up to form original plays. I will say that that kind of frenetic pace is fine for prose, but less so for poetry. Poetry is more intuitive in that sense, it requires more pausing. So I’ve had to unlearn some of that frenetic pacing. I still get a great deal out of free writing though, every now and then.
I lived in a house with six other women during my senior year of college. Our green house was the Poetry House; we hosted our school’s poetry club and brought poets on campus for readings. Even if we weren’t all poets, we were a house of creative young women. Some of us were also dancers, or actors, or cinephiles. It was my first experience living in an artistic community, and it was lovely to come back to our colorful house, filled with book stacks and all kinds of posters and fashionable, fun-loving, cultured people. Anywhere we went on campus as a group, we made a bit of an entrance.