See The Nude Party perform fully clothed at The Southern Café & Music Hall on September 15. Supplied photo.
Baked grooves: Formed in a college dorm in Boone, North Carolina, The Nude Party got its start at a regular gig as a house band, where performing in the buff earned the group a reputation as “the naked party band.” Nude Party’s sophomore album, Midnight Manor, harkens back to those house party days with a blend of rock ‘n’ roll infused with ’60s vibes. The record opens with lead singer Patton Magee channeling a nervy and agitated Lou Reed on “Lonely Heather.” Then there’s the lamentful yet upbeat “Pardon Me, Satan,” the kazoo-filled “Nashville Record Company,” and “Things Fall Apart,” a ’60s-style pop ballad. The band will perform, fully clothed, with opener Pearl Charles.
Thursday 9/15. $16-20, 8pm. The Southern Café & Music Hall, 103 First St. S. thesoutherncville.com
Merrie Mill Farm & Vineyard hosts its Art Festival on September 16. Photo: John Robinson.
In vino ars: Say so long to summer by enjoying wine and art at the Merrie Mill Farm & Vineyard Art Festival, a day-long showcase of local creatives. Sip on a sparkling white as you peruse works from 18 artists in a variety of mediums. And a crisp rosé pairs nicely with soulful blues-folk from The Mojo Parker Express. The fest also features demonstrations, including glassblowing by Katie B, oil painting by Emily Baker, and mural painting by Breana Field.
Eva Surovell, editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily, contacted everyone she could find to shine a light on a mid-’70s controversy, when Bert Ellis Jr. invited a eugenics advocate to UVA. Photo: Eze Amos.
As soon as I sat down with Eva Surovell at Grit Coffee, I realized that I had no questions prepared. Normally, for me at least, this would be a terrible start to an interview. But as we were placing our orders, the editor-in-chief of The Cavalier Daily revealed herself to be so personable and eager to speak that I thought this meeting could simply be a conversation between two editors, a chance to talk shop—to just chat.
“I tell people I run the biggest gossip chain on Grounds,” Surovell said proudly. And what gossip she has! I asked to meet her for coffee the day she published her article on Bert Ellis Jr.’s role in inviting a prominent eugenics advocate, William Shockley, to speak at UVA in the 1970s. Ellis, one of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s recent appointees to the university’s Board of Visitors, was already a controversial figure, but this stunning and well-researched story utilized the power of UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library to shine a light on his divisive actions from nearly 50 years ago.
I was curious to know how she did it—how she was tipped off to this story and how she got ahold of people who hadn’t spoken to The Cavalier Daily in decades. But I also wanted to know more about her job, especially as I’m still fresh in my role as editor-in-chief at C-VILLE.
Today, Bert Ellis Jr. is a member of UVA’s Board of Visitors.
In 1974, he was the tri-chairman and spokesman for the student-run University Union. Supplied photo.
“I like to say that I failed upwards at Cav Daily,” she said. “I quite literally got both of my jobs, news editor and managing editor, because someone else stepped down, not because I ran for them and won them. Editor-in-chief was the first Cav Daily election that I ever won, which is really weird.”
Maybe that’s a humblebrag—Surovell, a double major in English and French, clearly worked hard to be where she is now, and her appointments to each position show that her colleagues trusted her to do the work. She said she came to UVA with a plan: work at the student newspaper, join a sorority, and run for student council. But The Cavalier Daily was the only thing that stuck, and she’s poured her life into it.
“I just wanted to write,” she said. “That’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. Journalism seemed like a fun way of doing it.”
Transitioning from her first role as a sports reporter up the editing ladder came naturally, she said. But the personal sacrifices she’s had to make to fit everything together has left her unsure if she’d serve as an editor-in-chief at another paper. Because of the workload, she can’t take a full slate of classes. And when the buck stops at the top, there’s no one else to rely on when she can’t do something herself.
“The transition from writing to editing wasn’t as hard as the transition from editing to managing,” Surovell said. “Managing is hard. I like to write, and I don’t get to do that much of it.”
But, sometimes, she does. The Ellis story started with a message from the Cav Daily’s anonymous tip line before the semester started. Surovell was at home in northern Virginia at the time, and figured she would look into it when she was back on Grounds and could sift through the archives. But curiosity gnawed away at her.
While she was watching a Jane Austen movie with her mother, she Googled “Shockley Bert Ellis controversy.” (“I am notoriously a terrible movie-watcher,” she said. “I cannot pay attention. I’m always on my laptop or doing something else.”) The first hit was a class taught by Claudrena N. Harold, titled Black Fire: The Struggle For Social Justice and Racial Equality at the University of Virginia, 1960-1995. There, on the course website, was a PDF of The Cavalier Daily from 1974 with the headline, “BSA Will Ask Union to Cancel Debate.”
“I clicked on it and my jaw just dropped,” said Surovell. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s real.’”
The next morning, Surovell drove back to UVA and headed into the archives to take photos, documenting the back-and-forth between a young Ellis—then the tri-chairman and spokesman for the now-defunct student-run University Union—and other organizations like the Black Student Alliance. For Surovell, who’s always been fascinated by UVA’s 1970s history, the conflict both fit with her conception of what the university was like at the time, and stood out as a significant event she had never heard of before.
Surovell made a list of every person mentioned in the coverage who she could find, and set about trying to contact them.
“It proved extremely difficult, ’cause some people have passed away, most of the women had changed their names,” she said. And on a personal note, “a lot of these people were figures that were very iconic in UVA history, in 1970s history, and I was intimidated about reaching out to them.”
Many of the sources she contacted didn’t even know that Ellis was on the Board of Visitors.
Naturally, next came writing the story. Surovell writes on the floor (“I’m a floor girl”). But what comes after that? “Well,” she said, “I had to email Bert and Youngkin.”
They never responded. But the wait to hear back from them left Surovell nervous. She had just moved onto the Lawn, and her name was on her door. Considering that Ellis had already gone to a Lawn student’s door to cut down a sign with a razor blade, she was concerned that there would be personal backlash from him.
“I knew that he was on Grounds too, ’cause I had met him,” she said. “I met him probably two days before this article came out.” By chance, Surovell and Ellis had crossed paths at Grit Coffee while he was in town for a BOV meeting. “I was sitting there quite literally working on the article about him and he was sitting like 10 feet away from me.”
One of Surovell’s quirks as a writer is that she has a three-song playlist she listens to before publishing a stressful article—when we spoke, the last time she played it was before posting the Ellis story. “I played it like four times, and then I went on an anxiety run,” she said. “And then I played it again, and then I published it.”
The Cavalier Daily and Surovell received glowing praise for the article, with professors and other professional journalists reaching out to compliment the work. In particular, staff from UVA Library’s Special Collections were pleased that their resources were used in such an extensive way.
“It’s just information that needs to be out there,” Surovell said about the “disappointing, not surprising” news on Ellis. “I’m glad that it’s out there—there’s work left to be done, for sure.”
Read the August 18, 2022, article “Ellis at center of controversy over eugenicist speaker while at U.Va., archives show” by Eva Surovell at cavalierdaily.com.
The Future Land Use map increases density across the city from three units per parcel in general residential to over 13 units in high density areas. A middle density category would allow up to 12 units. File image.
Ask anyone about Charlottesville’s most pressing problems, and chances are affordable housing will top their list. The city’s new Future Land Use Map, adopted last November as part of the comprehensive plan, has been touted as a solution. It aims to increase housing supply by allowing greater density in every city neighborhood from three units per parcel in general residential areas to more than 13 units per parcel in areas designated high density. While the details of the zoning are still being worked out, the plan has been met with fierce opposition.
First came a lawsuit from anonymous plaintiffs alleging the city violated state law when it adopted the FLUM. After three of the four complaints in that suit were dismissed by a Charlottesville judge in August, dozens of city residents have now signed an open letter that claims the process to create the Future Land Use Map has been “flawed from the beginning” and that it is not the best way to accomplish the city’s affordable housing goals.
“Insufficient data was collected, insufficient analysis was done on data, insufficient citizen participation was solicited, which led to a faulty diagnosis of the problem in Charlottesville with housing affordability, which is leading now to a proposed treatment which is not indicated,” says Ben Heller, one of the city residents who signed the letter.
“The idea of upzoning is [that] pure density solves the problem, and it’s not been demonstrated in any city that’s tried it,” says Martha Smythe, another letter signer.
The letter’s other stated concerns include that the city’s consultants never provided the number of needed units at various levels of affordability, that the Plan did not address the infrastructure needs of the city today or those required to accommodate implied future growth, and that the character of existing neighborhoods is threatened.
“The idea of going and upzoning the whole city, if you stop and think about it, feels very much like trying to make amends for past faults and past issues,” says another letter signatory, Philip Harway. The FLUM “feels like our elected and appointed representatives are throwing a Hail Mary pass.”
Vice-Mayor Juandiego Wade, who had just been elected to council last November when the previous council voted to adopt the FLUM, disputes that characterization. He says the actual zoning ordinance will take about a year to be finalized. Even then, council can make adjustments.
“If we approve something and two months or two weeks later, we see something needs to be changed, then we can change it,” he says. “I see it as a dynamic process.”
The other councilors were either unavailable or did not respond to a request for comment.
Real estate analyst Quinton Beckham, principal broker for K.W. Alliance, agrees with the letter’s claim that higher density alone will not solve the affordable housing crisis.
“How this affects affordable housing in our city is one cog in a very, very large machine,” says Beckham, noting that the lack of housing inventory does contribute to the high cost of homes and increasing the number of units will relieve some of the market pressure.
“Every person that we get placed is one less person that strains the system,” he says. Beckham disputes the letter’s claims that higher density creates more traffic—“it’s sprawl that increases traffic”—and says greater density reduces other costs associated with growth.
Developer Kyle Redinger also disputes some of the letter’s assertions and says Charlottesville hasn’t kept up with the pace of housing demand. He says greater density is overdue.
“When people see the zoning opportunity, they get nervous because they think they’re going to have a lot more density in their part of the city. And the reality is, that should have happened 20 years ago,” he says. In his opinion, the FLUM doesn’t go far enough.
“If your goal is to solve housing affordability, any restrictions or barriers to land use has to be done away with,” he says.
The controversy is likely to continue as the city completes the zoning process. Heller says more specifically targeted density should be a part of the affordable housing picture, but he says there are better solutions than zoning.
“We could look at making it easier to convert commercial centers to residential housing. We could look at land trusts where the city contributes its own land to developers in exchange for affordable housing,” he says.
While Habitat for Humanity and Piedmont Housing Alliance are the major players in constructing Charlottesville-area affordable housing, Heller believes there are other organizations in the country that could do the same work for lower per-unit price.
Wade says council is “listening to what people have to say,” but Harway claims better communication and more public input during the process would have reduced some of the current opposition.
“I think there’s really an issue of trust with the city that a lot of residents have expressed to us that they do not trust what the city’s doing as being in their best interests,” says Harway. “And, yes, these are mostly middle class folks. But they’ve been paying the taxes for, you know, as long as they have owned homes here. And to ignore them and put them at risk is certainly not a smart move.”
Courteney Stuart is the host of “Charlottesville Right Now” on WINA. You can hear interviews with Martha Smythe, Ben Heller, Philip Harway, Quinton Beckham, and Kyle Redinger at wina.com.
The restrictions in interim City Manager Michael Rogers’ proposed collective bargaining ordinance were hotly debated at the September 6 City Council meeting. Supplied image.
Since interim Charlottesville City Manager Michael Rogers and D.C.-based law firm Venable LLP presented a proposed collective bargaining ordinance last month, the Amalgamated Transit Union, Charlottesville Area Transit employees, and other union supporters have pushed back against numerous restrictions, including initially limiting bargaining to police, firefighters, and bus drivers—and keeping certain items, like health and welfare benefits, off the bargaining table.
During the September 6 City Council meeting, multiple community members urged the city to give all city employees the right to unionize at the same time, and allow them to bargain over benefits and disciplinary procedures, among other major ordinance revisions. However, several called for police to be excluded entirely from bargaining, citing the mass resistance to reforms and accountability shown by police unions across the country.
Longtime CAT driver Matthew Ray encouraged the city to use final binding arbitration—during which a neutral arbitrator makes a decision that must be honored—to resolve certain grievances and negotiation impasses, as well as allow CAT supervisors to have representation. “If you don’t have a neutral, third-party arbitrator, it’s not really a union to me,” he said during public comment.
Though the proposed ordinance permits the city and a collective bargaining unit to hire a neutral fact-finder to resolve a dispute, the city manager or council can reject the fact-finder’s recommendations. Across the city, supervisors; seasonal, temporary, confidential, probationary, and management employees; and volunteers would not be allowed to unionize. And units would not be able to bargain over health and welfare benefits, core personnel rules and decisions, and budget matters.
Daniel Summers, who has driven for CAT for over a decade, also pushed the city to speed up the ordinance’s timeline—to give the city and units time to engage in mediation and fact-finding, Venable has recommended any collective bargaining agreement go into effect on July 1, 2024, meaning employees not included in the initial three units would have to wait until 2026 to unionize.
“The way things are going right now [at CAT], things are falling apart at the seams,” claimed Summers. “You’ll have people who won’t want to work for the transit system, if they don’t see the collective bargaining taking place.”
Local resident Greg Weaver voiced concerns about Rogers’ employer, The Robert Bobb Group, and its anti-union track record—as emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, Robert Bobb clashed with local unions when he outsourced hundreds of jobs to private contractors and closed dozens of schools in 2011.
Allowing police to unionize could put a stop to the city’s criminal justice reforms, like the Police Civilian Oversight Board, explained Weaver. Nationwide, police unions have prevented officers from being held accountable for misconduct, and worked to overturn reforms through collective bargaining. “The police have already shown that they are quite well organized, and that they have the power to get a police chief fired,” added longtime housing activist Brandon Collins.
Following public comment on the ordinance, Councilor Brian Pinkston voiced his support of police officers, but was hesitant to include them in the initial bargaining units. “That’s not a hill I’m going to die on [if] we decide to go forward with the police being a part of the first three, but it’s my sense that the community would prefer for the police to be later, if at all,” he said.
Councilors Michael Payne and Sena Magill pushed for the ordinance to allow bargaining over all benefits and disciplinary procedures. Payne also supported permitting non-binding arbitration for non-fiscal matters, and creating a third bargaining unit for general employees—not just police. “If there is a concern about staff capacity, we could phase it in, and limit it to transit and fire department who have come forward with pledge cards, and first-come-first-serve phase in anyone else who comes forward to us,” he said.
Mayor Lloyd Snook questioned whether binding arbitration over non-fiscal matters, like disciplinary procedures, would compromise the city manager’s authority to hire and fire, and pushed back against calls to ban police from unionizing, claiming that Charlottesville does not have “a history of serious police violence.”
“I don’t think that we have two classes of employees: police officers and everyone else,” said Snook. “That’s in essence what this argument becomes, to say because police officers have done bad things in the past, mostly in other places, we’re going to treat them differently.”
“Do you think those are things [about binding arbitration] that cannot be addressed while still matching what other localities in Virginia have done?” asked Payne. “And on the police point, what would you make of the argument that there’s a qualitative difference with the police because they have a monopoly on the use of the violence, and there’s no other employee that could have the legal authority to kill you?”
“The fact that a police officer carries a gun to me doesn’t change anything else about the employment relation. It doesn’t mean we give them certain rights, or deny them certain rights,” replied Snook.
Rogers and Venable will consider the community and council’s comments, and return to the councilors with an amended ordinance to vote on during their October 3 meeting.
A multi-million dollar renovation project for the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail will upgrade aging utilities and add new resources like classrooms. Photo: Skylcad Aerial.
‘People don’t get well in a cell’
Charlottesville City Council passed a resolution last week supporting the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail’s request for state funding for a massive $49 million renovation project. Jail leadership hopes the state will contribute around $12 million, leaving the three localities that use the facility—the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle and Nelson counties—on the hook for the rest.
In addition to upgrading and replacing the 46-year-old jail’s HVAC units, electrical systems, lighting, and air filtration, the renovations will add outdoor recreation space, classrooms, programming space, bathrooms, and a larger visitation area. The housing areas will be upgraded with stress-reducing colors, more natural sunlight, and sound-deadening materials. For years, people incarcerated at the jail have called attention to numerous health and sanitary issues, including black mold, poor plumbing, leaky ceilings, standing water, freezing temperatures, and bug infestations.
The renovations will also create a dedicated mental health unit—which some community members spoke out against during last week’s City Council meeting, calling for more mental health-support resources that do not involve police or prisons.
“People don’t get well in a cell,” said Kate Fraleigh. “Those resources should go to community-based programs.”
“If there’s money for locking people up, there is surely money for treating those in crisis,” added Gloria Beard. “If anything, being locked up creates mental health issues.”
ACRJ superintendent Martin Kumer emphasized that the renovations will not increase the jail’s capacity—40 beds currently at the jail will be demolished during the renovations, and moved to the new mental health unit upon completion. If a bed is not needed for someone experiencing a mental health crisis, then it will be used for the jail’s general population.
“A lot of the critics forget that it is not up to the jail or to the City Council to decide that we are going to imprison people with mental illness,” said Mayor Lloyd Snook in response to concerns voiced during public comment. “It is frankly in most cases the product of judges having no good choice … [or] there’s no other way to protect society from someone who is mentally ill because we have no good way to compel them to receive treatment when they’re on the outside.”
“The only thing we can do is to make sure that if they’re going to require that somebody with a mental illness be locked up, we are at least trying our best to have some way of getting those people at least some help,” added Snook.
The Virginia Board of Local and Regional Jails is expected to vote on ACRJ’s funding request this month. Once it approves the funding, the member jurisdictions will be asked to fund their portion of the renovations, based on the number of people they have incarcerated at the jail.
Next June, the jail plans to advertise a request for proposals, and hire an architectural engineer for the renovations. Construction is expected to begin in August 2024 and finish in November 2025.
In brief
Out of retirement?
Former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney is one of three finalists to be the next police chief in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered by MPD officer Derek Chauvin in 2020. In February, Brackney—who has filed a $10 million wrongful termination lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville—announced that she was retiring from policing, and was appointed as a visiting professor at George Mason University. The two other MPD chief finalists are Brian O’Hara, deputy mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and Elvin Barren, Southfield, Michigan’s police chief. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is expected to nominate his top candidate—who will replace recently retired chief Medaria Arradondo—in the coming weeks, according to Patch.com.
UVA hate crime
The University of Virginia Police Department has released photos of a person connected to a hate crime at the school, and asked the public to help identify them. On September 7, someone appearing to be a white male wearing a dark-colored jacket, jeans, and shoes placed a noose—a weapon used to lynch Black people for centuries—around the neck of the Homer statue on central Grounds. Anyone with information about the incident is asked to contact UPD at 924-7166.
An unidentified person caught on camera is wanted by UVA Police for questioning. Photo: UVA Police Department.
Boost up
Free bivalent COVID-19 booster shots—designed to fight against both the original form of the virus and the Omicron variant—are now available at local pharmacies and clinics. While Pfizer’s shot is available to everyone 12 and up, Moderna’s is only available to adults over 18. To schedule an appointment, visit vaccines.gov.
Local bartenders offer a behind-the-scenes look at the goings-on at your friendly, neighborhood watering holes. File photo.
By Carrie Meslar
Bartenders have long been relied on as secret keepers and unofficial therapists. There in times of joy and times of sorrow, observing real life at one of the last true gathering places in our increasingly tech-driven world. In the current era of sitting down at the bar, more and more conversations are happening around the aging concept that the customer is always right. This isn’t to say that bartenders are any less excited to serve you, it is in fact the very basis of what they do, but perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at the goings-on behind the bar, and bring a bit more awareness to the next round.
Where one person sees a margarita, another sees an entire litany of things—the tequila that serves as the backbone, the lime juice that hopefully was squeezed just hours before, the delicate addition of sweetener, a necessary component that should provide balance without being cloying.
These thoughts happen simultaneously along with observations of half a dozen other things taking place around them. If you’ve ever had a drink with someone who is, or has been, a bartender you have likely witnessed this silent analysis. In that spirit, and in celebration of the simple joy of a well-made cocktail, here are some insights from area bartenders—things they wish more of their customers knew about life behind bars.
Dex at Brightside Beach Pub
Years bartending: 18
What he wants you to know: “When you ask us ‘What’s good here?’ we’d like to think it’s all good. We wrote the menu after all. Knowing what you like, and perhaps more importantly what you don’t like, helps put us on the right track to recommend something you will enjoy. Everything isn’t made for every drinker, so throw us some additional qualifiers on what you are looking for. It makes our jobs easier and it is more likely that you will really enjoy the drink in front of you, which is what we are all about.”
Shaugna at Crozet Pizza at Buddhist Biker Bar
Years bartending: 9
What she wants you to know: “Regulars are important, but if we are doing it right, we have a lot of them. Sometimes between making the drinks, running food, answering the phone, and making sure everyone is having a good time, we might forget your name or your regular drink order. It’s nothing personal, so don’t hesitate to remind us by saying your name or ordering that favorite drink we make for you without having us guess. We are working hard back here to make sure you want to come back!”
Joel at Bobboo at the Quirk Charlottesville
Years bartending: 20 (give or take a few)
What he wants you to know: “Spirits are more versatile than you might realize. There are significant variations that exist within each category, and taking the time to experience those differences is not to be overlooked. With the resurrection of classic cocktails, more people are getting accustomed to seeing these spirits in elevated uses, but tasting them in neat form allows you to enjoy the craftsmanship that goes into a well-made bottle of spirit.”
Gil at The Bebedero
Years bartending: 7
What he wants you to know: “There is a lot going on. We are constantly searching for that balance between production and service. It’s not personal when we step away to grab something or drop another guest’s check—we are still listening. There are a lot of moving parts behind a busy bar, but they all require our attention to keep things running smoothly. So when things get hectic, we are still there to make your favorite drink and swap stories, but we are also working to make sure that the people on the other side of the room are getting the same treatment.”
Clay at Epineux Culinary Firm (pop-up series)
Years bartending: 8
What he wants you to know: “Trust us. Set aside your notion of what experience you are going to have, and trust us to put our knowledge and experience to work. There might be a specific version of a Manhattan that you love to make at home, but when we have created a version that has been tasted and tweaked to just the right place, be willing to go with it! It’s rare that any bartender you encounter is there with zero experience, so allow yourself to put your night into our hands. You might end up with a favorite new experience that you didn’t even know was an option.”
When COVID-19 forced the service industry to grind to a halt, many of the people who worked in it suddenly found themselves not only without work, but without the interactions that make one choose a career in hospitality. Getting back to the grind hasn’t been without hurdles, but it also brings a renewed sense of pride in the craft. There is a magic that occurs when everything is running well in a restaurant. It’s a hum of passion and hard work coming together for the guests, so while your bartenders are doing their best to adapt the swan method of looking graceful and composed on the surface, know that there is a strong possibility that, beneath the calm, they are paddling like hell.
In her memoir Bright, Kiki Petrosino relates her experience as a Black American of interracial background through fairy tales and literary references to Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and Dante. Supplied photo.
As a poet, Kiki Petrosino has published four collections, including most recently, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, and received the Pushcart Prize and the Rilke Prize, among other awards and fellowships. As a prose writer, her first full-length book, Bright: A Memoir, published in August, and she will give a reading from it on Friday, September 9, at New Dominion Bookshop.
C-VILLE Weekly: Though your poetry has embraced aspects of memoir, Bright marks your first book of prose exploring personal history. How did you decide to make this shift?
Kiki Petrosino: I consider this to be a really exciting expansion of my writing practice. Over the past several years, I became really intrigued by how difficult it is to write an essay. I can anticipate how it will feel to write a poem; I couldn’t anticipate how it would feel to write an essay but I wanted very much to write sentences and paragraphs and hear how my voice would sound in that form.
Once I finished my latest book of poetry, which was also a work of research, I realized that I had more to say on the topics of racial identity and background and upbringing. And I wondered if I could take some of the additional things I wanted to say, and the additional stories I wanted to tell, into a lyric prose form. I wanted to see if I could do it, I hoped that I would, and I wondered what I would sound like.
As an artist, I’m interested in different ways of making meaning, and poetry has been a set of forms that is capacious and expansive and allows me to investigate a number of different kinds of questions and to think about language in a particular way, and so I always value poetry for that. But, I also admire the way that essayists, whether they are lyric essayists, investigative writers, or personal memoirists, have been able to tell stories that also evoke emotion. I’m mostly a lyric poet, in the sense that I want my poems to evoke an emotion. Sometimes I tell stories but the stories are meant to make the reader feel what I am hoping that they will feel. More and more, I’ve become interested in the actual stories themselves, and prose might be a place where I can actually say what happened and also find language for talking about how it felt to be in that story or to guide the reader toward some kind of emotional impact. And that’s why some of the tools of lyric essay writing, such as juxtaposition or contrast or braiding—placing two stories next to each other so that the reader can understand the relationship between those two stories without the essayist having to explain it—are the kinds of prose forms that I’m interested in, because they actually link back to things that happen in poetry.
What led you to structure Bright around fairy tale interludes, and how do you hope that shapes the reader’s experience?
I am interested in the way that fairy tales are allegorical. Bright is a memoir that tells the story, in part, of my own life living as a Black American of interracial background. And because my external appearance announces that fact, what I often encounter, especially when I first meet people, is that I can tell that there is a story about me that they’re telling themselves. And those stories may or may not match up with my lived reality. In a society where, historically, the optical marker of race has been so determinative of someone’s experience, I wanted there to be a place where I talk about how I came to be but also how it feels to be this self. And so the language of fairy tales seemed to overlay quite well onto the kind of investigation I was making.
I also just really enjoyed writing one- or two-sentence fairy tales, and it was fun, over time, to be able to piece together a fairy tale where some parts of the story are told and a lot of the rest of the story is submerged into silence. For me, writing is not necessarily about explaining everything so that the reader can draw a map to where I want them to get. Often, with writing, I want to point a reader in a direction, not deliver them to the exact destination.
You write that, “To write a poem is to assert one’s attachment to the materiality of language, but it also requires the poet to assume the openhanded posture of a questioner.” What questions did you grapple with through this work?
I wanted the reader to understand the term “brightness,” and that it is both a physical description of someone’s appearance but that it also has these other meanings. It’s a superficial term that doesn’t speak to the interior life of the person being described. I wanted to ask what does it mean to me to have this descriptor applied to me and what relationship do I have to the term … to see if the memoir could allow me to claim that term in a way that is resonant for me and doesn’t necessarily connect to what other people say brightness is. As a person moving through the world, I want time to think about what I mean to myself. Being able to think explicitly about what my journey through the world has been was really rewarding because I went down some paths of inquiry that I wouldn’t have predicted.
As you explore the lives of your Black ancestors in Bright, you continue your work to examine the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, which is also a recurrent theme in your poetry. How has that evolved over the course of your work?
I continue to approach Jefferson with fascination and curiosity. That doesn’t mean I take an uncritical view of him, that I don’t see what his vision excluded as much as what it included. It means that I walk a line between those two modalities. For me, the generative place—the place where writing can happen—is in the space between absolutes. Jefferson is an incredibly complex figure. To read him solely as a hero or solely as a villain excludes other things we could be learning. And I always want to be in a position of learning.
His archive is so extensive, and so much of his archive is right here in Virginia and at UVA that his legacy also becomes an opportunity to explore what an archive can contain and exclude, and to listen carefully to how, for better or worse, an archive may “stand in” for or represent the legacy of a person who is no longer here in a physical sense. Archives also change, so I don’t feel that Jefferson is static in terms of his legacy. My relationship to that legacy continues to gain complexity, and I think that is exciting. It’s not a simple story.
Bright also explores your Italian grandfather’s life and death by suicide. How did you decide to include his story?
In White Blood, I have a sonnet sequence that talks about my student days at UVA, and my grandfather completed suicide during my second year at UVA. So that material is in those poems but I approach it in the way of poetry—it’s built and braided into this sonnet form.
In the memoir, I wanted to talk about how I would observe my Italian grandfather’s relationship with nature. In thinking about his influence on my life, I couldn’t not also talk about his death and how that affected me. Also, as it happened, I was majoring in English but minoring in Italian, which I had started studying because I wanted to learn his language. So, while I’m trying to learn this language and read the literature—encountering Dante’s Wood of the Suicides—in my memory, that corresponded to that particular moment of my grandfather’s death, and so it also points to how my literacy was shaped. It isn’t only the high points that have gone into making you who you are, but it’s also the grief. All of those things are marbled into experience and so I could not leave that out of the memoir.
What drew you to include the specific and wide-ranging literary references that you did?
What’s interesting is that when I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself pretending to be a kind of scholar—in the sense that I’m not a trained historian—and going into the archive, learning what the techniques of documentary poetry are. When I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself reading works of history, looking at primary sources. When I was writing the memoir, I was putting this together during the height of the pandemic and all the archives were closed. So what I had was my memory of what works of literature were in my personal lexicon, my own firmament of referentiality. I encountered Dante at a pivotal point in my literary education, so that work became entwined with my literacy. The same with Beowulf, with Shakespeare. So I wove together the memoir not having to do, and not being able to do, outside research, but thinking about the tangle of literacy that I could tell. Those are the works that came out.
Being able to attend the reading that Seamus Heaney gave in 2012, in London, was one of the most wonderful moments that I experienced as a poet. Being in a London audience listening to Seamus Heaney, especially reading that one poem, “Digging,” that’s probably his signal poem. Those are moments that, as a writer, I continue to think about and remember. They’re just these moments of luminous attention that have stayed with me.
Is there anything in particular that you’re excited to share with local readers at your upcoming event?
For me, writing becomes complete when it’s shared with other people. To be able to share this work that I was putting together during a time of really close quarantine and lockdown, and all the isolation that many artists felt, it’s going to be meaningful to actually bring that out into the world and speak it in words. And the audiences at New Dominion are always so wonderful. It’s going to be an honor to read there for the community.
Amanda Shires performs at The Jefferson Theater on September 10. Supplied photo.
Take it like Amanda: Award-winning singer-songwriter Amanda Shires is doing things her own way. Take It Like A Man, her seventh studio album, is a fearless confessional in the form of 10 intimate songs that offer musings on what it’s really like to turn 40. Grounded by Shires’ sultry voice and virtuoso fiddling, something she’s lent to collaborators John Prine and hubby Jason Isbell, the record features songs like the sex-positive “Bad Behavior” and the title track “Take It Like A Man,” which ends with the clever play on words, “I know I can take it like Amanda.” Says Shires: “You can try and do what they say and take it like a man and show that you can withstand anything. But truly, you can only take it like yourself.”
Saturday 9/10. $27-149, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. jeffersontheater.com
Tyler Burkhardt performs at The Garage on September 9. Supplied photo.
September reveries: There’s nothing like listening to the strumming of an acoustic guitar on a warm, late-summer evening. But fingerstyle guitarist Tyler Burkhardt does more than just strum—he creates the sound of an entire band by hitting, tapping, slapping, and thumping the body and strings of his guitar. A Chesterfield native who now lives in Charlottesville, Burkhardt puts his own unique spin on songs like “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley and “Talk” by Coldplay, showcasing his versatility with a guitar.
Friday 9/9. Free, 7pm. The Garage, 100 E. Jefferson St. thegaragecville.com
