Author: Caroline Hockenbury

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Arts

Articulating ‘Mexican Heaven’: Poet José Olivarez illuminates both bruises and bliss in Citizen Illegal

Openly exploring themes barred from traditional classrooms, like spirituality and sexuality, taught José Olivarez more about life’s possibilities than all assemblies combined. Publicity photo

Most people avert their eyes when the world gets messy: they scrunch uncooperative hair into the safety of ballcaps, kick dust bunnies conveniently under couches, and dunk ugly memories into their mental trashbins. It’s unusual to meet someone who sits down with disorder, shakes its hand, and engages it in honest conversation. José Olivarez is one such rarity—an artist who detects music amidst the chaos and spins unlikely rhythms into poetry.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Olivarez is an expert at manning the spaces in between. His work not only names the linguistic, generational, and cultural gaps in the first-gen Mexican-American experience, but it gives a body to each divide. Citizen Illegal—Olivarez’s first full-length collection—is an articulation of the Latinx experience in modern America that’s both gut-wrenching and musically immaculate. Each page is a testament to the “messiness…[of a] wound reopening at a moment’s notice and then being swallowed up again.”

A Chicago native, Olivarez will return to Charlottesville next week (he was on a Virginia Festival of the Book panel last March). He’ll set up shop at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, leading a community artist talk on September 11 and a youth poetry residency the next day. These events will kickstart Social Justice Through Creative Practice—a series of workshops and talks crafted by Creciendo Juntos, an organization leveraging resources and connections to serve local Latino families.

Olivarez completely reframed his relationship with literature when he joined his high school poetry club, which in turn introduced him to a citywide program known as Louder Than a Bomb. This tournament-style showcase and workshop series enabled him to unlock achingly authentic language, in contrast to the lofty, inspirational jargon pumped out at schoolwide gatherings. Olivarez recalls listening to adults preach about the promise of students’ futures, then heading to the cafeteria to bump into military recruiters where college ambassadors should’ve stood.

At poetry club meetings, he saw, for the first time, “adults being quiet and allowing teenagers to speak for themselves.” Openly exploring themes barred from traditional classrooms, like spirituality and sexuality, taught him more about life’s possibilities than all assemblies combined. The universe opened up when he realized he could command literature instead of passively participating as a reader. Over time, the network he found through Louder Than A Bomb expanded as he met key players at Youth Chicago Authors, the foundation responsible for organizing the festival.

He went on to Harvard, and though his initial plan after graduation was to teach high school English, YCA’s unofficial motto kept pulsing in his head: “It’s your responsibility once you learn the [poetic] craft to pass it on to somebody else.” He eventually wound up back at YCA, working as a teaching artist.

To Olivarez, poetry’s strength lies in its accessibility (“In 45 minutes, [you can] have the draft of a poem.”) and its limitlessness: “You never stop learning as a student of poetry; there’s always more,” he says. And when it comes to conversations of equity and justice, Olivarez believes crafting lyrics is a powerful means of polishing a subject’s emotional core. “Oftentimes, we don’t have time or space to delve into” weighty topics, he says, “[but poetry] allows us to put some of that messiness next to each other and see what feels true to us.”

Olivarez also makes sure to emerge from the messiness with fistfuls of joy: fingers—drenched in “golden goo,” reaching for more cheese fries; glimmering red lipstick applied by a mother before a night out dancing; and ’90s pop wafting through a favorite restaurant. He even pens odes to Cal City basement parties and Scottie Pippen. His words reverberate with the influence of great poets like Natalie Díaz, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ada Limón. A self-proclaimed amateur rapper who sometimes pins down a poem’s rhythm before its words, Olivarez additionally points to his musical influences throughout Citizen Illegal, ranging from 2pac and Kanye to Selena and the Backstreet Boys.

Perhaps the ultimate strength of Olivarez’s collection lies in the community ties that bind it. Not only do his parents, partners, and friends fold into the pages, but the structure of the text is the reflection of deeply loyal and deeply rooted relationships: All eight poems titled “Mexican Heaven” are evidence of a close acquaintance helping him split up one long piece the night before the manuscript was turned in.

Olivarez is at work editing the fourth volume of The BreakBeat Poets (forthcoming, March 2020), a multi-installment anthology highlighting “work that brings the hip-hop aesthetic to the page.” Meanwhile, he’s just starting to jot down “little pieces of languages,” progressing toward his next collection. Looking back at the art he’s already shared, Olivarez’s takeaway remains the same: “Individually, it’s very hard to progress. If you’re working communally and are really there for one another, I think that makes the journey a lot easier and a lot more rewarding, too.”

José Olivarez appears at The Bridge PAI, where he will host a community artist talk on September 11 and a youth poetry residency on September 12.

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Made In C-VILLE Magazines

Carving out community: Woodworking enthusiast teaches traditional technique

Joshua Farnsworth’s Earlysville woodworking school, Wood and Shop, is the result of a reignited childhood passion. Photo: Sanjay Suchak

Stepping into Joshua Farnsworth’s Wood and Shop schoolhouse is like wrenching open a time capsule. Traditional woodworking instruments, including saws and handheld shaving tools, dangle from pegs and hug the surrounding white walls. Walking among the homemade workbenches and rustling up a rush of sawdust, you slip back a few centuries.

Farnsworth began to home in on his handyman identity as a kid. The youngest of 10 raised on a farm in rural Utah, he learned to program resourcefulness into his daily routine (an inclination that persists). In fact, he repurposed the very room he teaches craft courses in, remodeling an old RV garage into a vast makerspace boasting soaring ceilings and brimming with natural light. This Earlysville lodge, an addendum to the lot he lives on with his wife and four children, backs up to the front porch, where he often shares conversation with students over supper. The Wood and Shop experience is homegrown in more ways than one.

Farnsworth’s fascination with traditional woodworking sprang from youthful admiration: He calls his brother-in-law, also an artisan, his “childhood hero.” Farnsworth, too, was propelled by a calling to create, later tinkering with woodworking in secondary school vocational classes (“That’s what I loved about growing up in the ’80s and ’90s,” he says). Even then, though, he couldn’t imagine this passion blossoming into a profession.

Photo: Courtesy Joshua Farnsworth

Fast forward past college and into the middle years of a real estate career. “The economy crashed out West, and I still had a company that I’d started with some people [in Virginia],” he says. After returning East, the other business buckled under similar pressures, nudging him back toward carpentry. “I think I was glad because it pushed me back into what I love doing,” he says.

But Farnsworth didn’t set out to make money from woodworking exactly. His inherent enthusiasm and thirst for intellectual exploration naturally propelled him to the peak of the niche scene. He accrued introductory materials, assembled a site, launched a YouTube channel, and recorded tours of renowned furniture makers’ and tool collectors’ workshops. The money followed.

Gaining ground

Farnsworth has amassed an international following, drawing in emails from fans dotting the globe. One eager student even jetted cross-country from Colorado to take a class with him in person. Farnsworth eventually found himself in the same space as his second childhood hero, Roy Underhill of PBS’ “The Woodwright’s Shop.”

Despite his indisputable celebrity, Farnsworth oozes humility. He credits his entrepreneurial spirit and situation in the present media moment as the primary factors driving his success. “When I first started getting really interested in hand tools, there weren’t a lot of resources available, especially online,” he says. “I jumped in at the right time.”

He also uses his platform to shine a light on other talented artisans who lack marketing and/or digital media skills. He offers other experts teaching slots at his school, features them on his site, and is expanding a digital marketplace to connect them with potential customers. “There are a lot of unsung heroes out there,” he says.

Farnsworth reflects on how his professional journey—though at times turbulent—resulted in this gorgeously unexpected outcome. “I guess everybody over time is kind of making a tapestry,” he says. “There [are] some dark threads—hard times in your life or struggles—but then at the end, I hope you look back and say, ‘The tapestry wouldn’t have been this beautiful without those times.’” He underscores the joy of teaching—of pushing people past fears of failure and granting them temporary refuge from the dizziness of the digitized world.

To Farnsworth, artistic integrity means simplicity, and beauty equals imperfection. He mainly focuses on Shaker furniture, highlighting how neutral designs transcend time and constantly oscillating trends. It is this trade he works to sustain, an act of cultural and environmental influence. Although only one man, he recognizes his ability to have an enduring influence—to usher in continued artistry, in-craft connectivity, and furniture functionality for years to come.

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Made In C-VILLE Magazines

Comfort in calligraphy: Local artist disseminates hope with engraved jewelry

Photos: Courtesy Laurel Smith

One night when artist Laurel Smith was sleeping, her mind projected her future onto the backs of her eyes. She dreamt up a whirring dremel tool, a jewelry-making instrument then somewhat unfamiliar to her, and awoke with a newfound sense of purpose. A D.C.-based event planner in her 20s at the time, Smith sensed she was on the cusp of a major career breakthrough.

Smith is a Charlottesvillian through and through, from the maternity wing of Martha Jefferson hospital to the halls of Albemarle High School. She graduated from James Madison University with a degree in studio art, then relocated briefly to Washington, D.C., and Hoboken, New Jersey, before returning home.

Just as Smith cannot divorce her hometown from her story, art is integral to her existence. Creating has always pointed her toward comfort and confidence—a happy mashup of emotions she first remembers experiencing as a young Spectrum summer camper at Tandem Friends School. In fact, this is where her fascination with calligraphy first sprouted.

Photo: Courtesy Laurel Smith

Decades later, Smith is the frontwoman of a celebrated, self-launched jewelry brand, “laurel denise,” which features bracelets incorporating inspirational messages engraved in beautiful calligraphy. She leads a fully female staff—including her full-time assistant, Nancy Cronauer, and a map-scattered crew of bracelet makers (aka “Mama Elves”)—in the quest toward artistic excellence. Smith is two women in one: She jokes that she’s “40 percent artist and 60 percent business.” Her online shop offers a sweeping array of accessories and home goods, including options for product customization, and her pieces put multiple mediums into conversation, including leather, metal, and glass.

A mother of two, Smith cites “time” as the most pressing part of this gig. Between caring for and carting around her kids, she hunches over worktables in her home, where her makeshift studio is based. Although her team attends two large wholesale events in New York City each year, most of her sales are shipped directly from her home address. These large-scale trade shows, while excellent opportunities to showcase new work and make human connections with customers, take a toll timewise and financially. “My lights alone cost $2k to rent,” Smith says. “I find that I reach more people through the internet.”

Smith sees her career as a calling to serve others. Her handwritten messages adorn the wrists of assault survivors (“Be you bravely”), breast cancer battlers (“She walks in beauty”), mothers enduring miscarriages (“Dwell in hope”), missionaries (“Be strong and courageous”), and general accessory-lovers alike. Although her curling calligraphy and dainty bracelets may be geared more toward women than men, she points to the drip-down effect of her art’s influence: The messaging behind it all unfurls like a song, and everyone will want to sing along.

“Even if [my jewelry] is just empowering women, all the women I know are empowering everybody else around them. We’re the doers. We lift up our husbands. We help shape our kids,” Laurel says. “It trickles down to empowering people in general.”

With her delicate calligraphied bracelets, jewelry-maker Laurel Denise taps into the bigger picture.

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Arts

Writing past wrongs: Author Jocelyn Johnson looks for new American truths

On October 26, Jocelyn Johnson will read an excerpt from “Control Negro” at New Dominion Bookshop. The story was selected by Roxane Gay for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2018. Publicity photo

When local author and teacher Jocelyn Johnson started receiving Twitter direct messages from literary giant Roxane Gay, she thought to herself, “Something good is going to happen.” Just like that, a series of emphatic pings announced her arrival into a rarefied sphere: Johnson’s story, “Control Negro,” was hand-selected by Gay to be featured in Best American Short Stories 2018. The collection, which is compiled and introduced by a different guest editor annually, celebrates the year’s best work within the form. Only 20 pieces are deemed worthy of inclusion, and Johnson describes the accolade as being simultaneously thrilling and surreal. For many, acceptance into the anthology is commensurate with reaching a career peak—an artistic endpoint. Johnson has a different mentality: It only goes up from here.

Gay had praised Johnson’s work to her half-a-million Twitter followers in August 2017 (“‘Control Negro,’ in Guernica, is one hell of a short story.”), so the minute Johnson learned Gay was assembling the anthology, she jumped to submit the piece. A few months and a stuffed inbox later, Johnson would finally be able to answer “yes” to her parents’ most persistent question: “Can we get [your work] in a Barnes & Noble?” She is now folded into the pages of an industry standard, a text she had personally devoured “for years and years.”

Just as Johnson has always been an avid reader, she has always pressed her pen to paper. There has never been a time when she wasn’t an artist—a multimedia envisionist with a penchant for producing drawings and manuscripts alike. When she was still teenager, Johnson set to work on her first novel, typing pages on the keyboard of her IBM personal computer after devouring The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton.

Johnson teaches visual arts in Charlottesville public schools, which grants her life-inspired fodder for her writing. Being a full-time art instructor and mother means her craft truly hinges on self-discipline; she carves drafting sessions out of summer months and rare pockets of weekend quiet.

Johnson studied art and education at James Madison University, but a year of international exploration with her husband, and the creation of a related blog, allowed her to envision writing as a viable complement to her teaching career. She credits travel with reframing her artistic brain because it affects writing and how you “interact with things when you’re taken out of place.”

Johnson’s writing does just that: It grasps the reader and jostles her into a separate reality—often, the reality of a person whose voice is traditionally and systematically repressed. She opts to embody the brains of characters harboring “troublesome” mindsets, as in the protagonist of “Control Negro,” an elusive black father and scholar who scrutinizes his unknowing son from afar and uses him as a pawn in a race-based social experiment.

Such an exercise, Johnson says, affirms the “power of fiction,” drawing on the writer’s and reader’s ability to align herself with an alternate perspective and see the world through someone else’s eyes.

This is precisely what Gay means in the anthology introduction when she says, “I am not avoiding reality when I read fiction; I am strengthening my ability to cope with reality.”

Johnson’s fiction employs real and universal themes, such as surging water as a metaphor for swelling life pressures. But, each piece she writes also offers its own set of truths—ideas that put strain on the lopsided, majority-favoring realties many citizens sustain.

“As a mom of a child of color and as a woman,” she says, “…I want to have an influence by sharing ideas that let people…have [more]…awareness or even just a little bit more empathy for someone they might feel distant from.” This desire to establish a new American truth has contributed to her rise in the writing world. Johnson credits her work on August 11 and 12, 2017, including her article in C-VILLE, with helping propel her career. Those essays, like her short stories, responded to questions sweeping the nation: “Who are we, and how do we want to respond to things that we may disagree with strongly? How do we feel like we have power and agency?”

In the next phase of her career, Johnson plans to complete her first collection, Virginia Is Not Your Home, and continue grappling with socially relevant themes. She finds an artistic identity in braiding together a moment’s lingering strings —in “making something that’s bigger than [herself]” through writing.

Johnson considers her craft a rich gift, an opportunity to seek out the spaces and faces in her community that are routinely ignored and hone in on their truths. While she acknowledges such a task is not always easy, it’s indisputably worthwhile. “I would rather the world be more comfortable for everybody, honestly,” she says, but, “if it has to be uncomfortable, I think we should take that opportunity.”

On October 26, Jocelyn Johnson will read an excerpt from “Control Negro” at New Dominion Bookshop. The story was selected by Roxane Gay for inclusion in Best American Short Stories 2018. 

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Arts

Homegrown hero: Lucy Dacus on newfound fame and trusting the process

Lucy Dacus performs at the Jefferson Theater on October 11. Publicity photo

Lucy Dacus is as humble as they come. For starters, she recently secured an address in her hometown of Richmond. A move to a major arts hub like L.A. or NYC? Not on the radar. She exclusively speaks about her self-titled act using the plural pronoun “we,” naturally tugging her bandmates into the conversation and habitually deflecting conceit. She remains dazed by the premise that fans around the world seek to engage with her tunes, citing her rise to fame as a dream come true rather than an obvious artistic progression.

Most 23-year-olds are fresh out of school, scrambling to kickstart their careers and start carving life paths. How many can say that they have landed a record deal, dropped two-and-a-half albums, and been pegged as “a new favorite” by a vice-presidential candidate? Despite the artistic accolades, the university dropout maintains an age-appropriate swagger and unassuming spirit.

Dacus connected with C-VILLE by phone to discuss her musical breakthrough, brand new band, and songwriting secrets.

C-VILLE Weekly: Can you point to a moment when you realized you were destined to be a musician?

Lucy Dacus: It wasn’t a dream I let myself dream as a kid. I wanted to be a filmmaker, and before that a therapist, a professional diver, and a construction worker. I always loved music, but it never occurred to me that I could really do it. When my first single, “I Don’t Wanna Be Funny Anymore,” came out I had a flood of emails. I think it took a mass affirmation like that to show me people would actually want to listen.

What’s the extent of your formal music education?

I took music through elementary and middle school, but I haven’t taken any classes past what they provide in public schools. I taught myself how to “play guitar” (and I put play guitar in quotation marks because I don’t really know how to play). But I’ve always sung, and my mom—an elementary school music teacher—sings. She has little catchy songs for [everything]. She’ll call me while I’m on the road and be like, “Oh, you’re in Kansas? Here’s the song about Kansas that I know,” or, “Oh, you’re at a gas station? Here’s a song from the ’50s that’s a jingle from a gas commercial.” So music…doesn’t feel separate from the rest of my life. That’s why it’s hard to [pick] an aha moment.

Is collaboration a huge part of your creative process?

I write all of my songs alone, but more recently, I’ve been writing more with other people. I just started this band, boygenius, with my friends Julien [Baker] and Phoebe [Bridgers], and that was a completely new experience I didn’t know if I was capable of.

How hard it is to merge personal experiences and artistic inclinations when writing in a group?

All three of us have dealt with weird fans, or feeling homesick, or the strain of a relationship while…on tour. That’s why it was easy, we’re in similar places in our lives. Songwriting is really dependent on trust, and I think that’s why people do it alone so much because it’s hard to trust other people with something so personal.

Has it led you to trust more openly in your personal life?

In a way, yes. Every time I write a song, it’s like I’ve polished a truth I can look at externally from myself. If there’s confusion in my head, barfing up a song sometimes will help me see what I think. A lot of trust is understanding, so when I understand [myself] more, I can understand the people around me, and that leads to compassion.

Were you ever worried about being taken advantage of as an emerging female artist?

When we were being approached by labels, one said, “We’d love to sign you in half a year or a year because we just took on a lot of women, so I don’t know if we have space on the roster [for] another.” And I was like, “I’m definitely not going to sign with you guys if you think that you have too many women.” And the truth was that less than a quarter of their bands had a woman in [them]. But I think slowly but surely that mentality is becoming outdated. I’ve felt safer with each new music industry person that I‘ve met. You find your right crew and end up walking down paths with people that you trust.

What is it like going on stage, pouring out your lyrics, and hearing a room sing along?

That’s the best thing about this. Hearing people say the words that I wrote—it’s the highest compliment because they’re showing me that I’ve taken up space in their lives and they’ve given time, energy, and thought to my music. And not only that, but I value some of these songs for the meanings that they have taken on through the eyes of strangers. —Caroline Hockenbury

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Arts

Travel guidance: Erika Howsare channels a late Victorian explorer for her new book

Erika Howsare’s work serves to jostle answers to two of her most pressing questions: “How can you take a journey and make a document of it that’s a work of art?” and “Can the journey itself be a performance?” Photo by Meredith Coe

Author Erika Howsare first made acquaintance with Isabella Bird as an undergrad, while sifting through a reading assignment. Bird, a Victorian British traveler, had lived and written nearly a century and a half before Howsare sat studying; still, she felt akin to the historic figure, making note of their mutual affinity for travel. Years later, Howsare would render their relationship tangible, etching Bird onto manuscript pages as her imagined travel partner in an escapade out West.

How Is Travel a Folded Form? is the published result of Howsare’s invented intersection with Bird, whose book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, deeply influenced her and is sampled throughout her pages. Howsare, a poet who writes frequently for C-VILLE, can still recall the cross-country road trip at age 19 that launched her own relationship with the American West.

In her new book, she weaves her own experiences with Bird’s quoted notes. What ensues is an experimental poetry-prose hybrid (Howsare cites this “formal playfulness” as the text’s standout strength), a purposefully incomplete travel guide, and an intergenerational conversation.

The guiding premise for Howsare’s paperback dates back to her girlhood. As a child, she created poems and tiny homemade books in her Pennsylvania home, often wondering what it would be like to walk and work alongside her literary hero Laura Ingalls Wilder. As an adult, she found a more resonant connection with Bird, who was also a pilgrim “passing through” spaces rather than settling down—an insatiable explorer propelled by “recreation…and curiosity.”

Howsare’s passion for nature is central to her life in Nelson County, where she lives with her husband and children. They often venture through the woods, to the creek, and into the garden in an attempt to establish an unfiltered, multi-sensory relationship with the neighboring ecosystem—to move away from screen time and tired, pixelated landscapes. Even so, Howsare says it’s almost impossible to shirk the pervasive influence of modern technology. “The line between nature and technology is very blurry in the era of climate change and many other conditions that we are all living with, whether or not we spend a lot of time on Twitter,” says Howsare.

Howsare’s published works range from delicate poems to investigative prose pieces, from architecture-based articles to ruminations on groundhog songs, and she derives pleasure in mashing numerous written forms together. “I’m always interested in mixing genres,” she says, “…bringing history and quotations from biographies and theory and philosophy into poetic work.” How Is Travel a Folded Form? is a testament to that artistic tendency.

She also expresses her artistic prowess in a performative sense, pursuing walking as a live art form. As a college student, she trekked across the state of Rhode Island, jotting notes, logging measurements, and taking photographs. Similar trips followed in New Mexico, where she completed a residency and an art installation, and along the Lewis and Clark path. Her work serves to jostle answers to two of her most pressing questions: “How can you take a journey and make a document of it that’s a work of art?” and “Can the journey itself be a performance?”

Howsare’s and Bird’s journey is equal parts inviting and unpredictable. Boxed-in pages, whose headers are scrawled in Howsare’s own curling handwriting, “are meant to be the notes that Isabella and the narrator are gathering.” A waffling between fonts and Howsare’s unprocessed inscriptions distinguish different registers within the book and signal “a messy, unfinished space” akin to the inner folds of a travel journal. The manuscript is incomplete, Howsare sometimes leaves out entire chunks of text, replacing them with fillable blanks and inviting the reader to participate.

The book also grapples with travelers’ expectations and impressions of a place. “So much of the language of tourism is about stepping into another time or place, and promising that experience of getting out of yourself and in to some other era or some other person’s experience,” Howsare says. “There isn’t one truth and the experiences we’re having are…mediated by the experiences of people who have been there before and have told us what to expect.”

Different definitions for the words “circle,”  “line,” “form,” and “reflection” cycle through the pages as footnotes. As travelers, Howsare notes, “we think we’re traveling in a line, but really, we’re often moving in circles.” Progress—both historical and personal—is not linear. “There’s always myths that are informing our experience in the moment, and none of that can ever be really codified. It’s always fluid. This book is trying to just dwell in that space for a period of time.”

The book offers an indisputable truth in its display of female fortitude. “We often think of so many generations of women who came before us as having lived very constricted lives, [so] it’s heartening to discover a 19th-century woman who seems to have commandeered considerable freedom.”

Howsare is a female trailblazer herself. She is set to expand her current list of published works, including a full-length collaborative poetry collection and multiple chapbooks, by wrapping up an investigative project on architecture and global interpretations of homebuilding. Her pen is scurrying as quickly as her wandering feet, and shows no sign of stopping.

Erica Howsare will read from How is Travel a Folded Form? at New Dominion Bookshop on October 13.