Author: Elizabeth Derby

It takes a village to raise a writer, or at least it did in my case. When I was in eighth grade my best friend applied to a local performing arts high school, where she was accepted as a creative writing major, and I—propelled by love of adjectives and X-Files fan fiction—did the same. Four years of group critiques, genre experimentation, and contest submissions led me to discover my voice, its value, and eventually you, dear reader, by way of this article.

More than a decade after I first opened a journal, the creative cycle begins again as a group of young writers from Charlottesville and Albemarle County celebrates the publication of its first anthology. Crossroads II is a collection of essays, poems, and photography, the culmination of a year’s worth of workshops, craft discussions, and literary projects led by Tupelo Press Teen Writing Center (TPTWC).

The fledging group on a mission to “foster, discover, and develop emerging writers, and connect them as a part of the larger writing community” and open to all high school students in the area. Members include local and regional award-winning writers and participants of in school and community programs. They write in a range of prose and poetry, including lyrics, slam, and other modern and more formal styles.

“If we only teach writing as a skill, we miss the opportunity to provide our children creative expression as part of the problem solving process. That’s the key to unlocking the kind of world solutions we need,” said Kirsten Miles, the director of the Teen Writing Center. She’s connected the program with McGuffey, The Bridge, Piedmont Council for the Arts, the Virginia Art of the Book Center, and WriterHouse, where the group has met throughout the year. 

“The Teen Writing Center aims to support existing programs and encourage the community to send a vote to our young writers that creative writing is a valued art,” said Miles, who found “phenomenal support” for the idea of nurturing young writers. In her work as regional director for TPTWC, Miles has met writers locally and from across the country who aid the mission.

One such poet is Cecilia Llompart, a graduate of UVA’s MFA in Creative Writing program and author of The Wingless, a recently published book of poetry. In March, Llompart led a discussion on poetry and women with students and judged the TPTWC’s first writing contest.

With submissions from across the area, Llompart said, ”The decision was a very, very difficult one to make. There was excellent work here.”

She chose a piece by Albemarle High student and TPTWC intern, Mike Dolzer, as one of the runners-up.

Dolzer said he appreciated having a friendly and safe environment to practice his work. “Creativity allows students to express themselves in a way that is not all too common in any other aspect of their life,” he said, “so I think having a place like the Teen Writing Center where you can nurture that is such an amazing thing.”

What’s being nurtured is the illumination of inner lives, the type of exploration and observation that can be clouded by age. And Crossroads II asks perceptive questions, tackling love, alcoholism, and the Landmark Hotel, among other subjects.

“It is one of the most exciting things to see students emerge with a sense of confidence,” Miles said.

It’s also a glimpse into a very local zeitgeist. “This is our offering to the community for an opportunity to hear the voices of our young writers,” Miles said. “This is our future speaking.”

Hear author readings at the reception for Crossroads II on Friday at 5:30pm at New Dominion Books.

“Who I am is not really defined. Most of the questions you asked I’d probably answer differently two weeks from now,” said Raven Mack, smiling under his long beard. “I always reserve the right to change suddenly.”

Mack’s a poet without pretension, scribbling sonnets on his lunch break and supporting a wife, three children, and their home compound on “four dilapidated acres” in Fluvanna County.

“I grew up in the country,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m disgusted by society, but I’m not enchanted by it. I like to disappear.”

Working largely in metered forms, Mack writes about train yards and talking to birds and digitalization as domestication.

“I spent a lot of my life being self-destructive, so I try to turn it into writing you can stab people with—writing that’s real,” Mack explained. His work tends to pitch (or combine) philosophical challenges to contemporary ideology with everyman imagery and offbeat humor. To wit:

Identifying

birds by yelling “What the fuck 

is you?” doesn’t work

He’s self-published three books [under Workingman Books] and countless zines, including Football Metaphysics: World Cup 2014, Vehicular Tankacide, a volume of Japanese tanka poetry, and 1,000 Feathers, a series of pamphlets with titles like Primordial Traditionalist and Naked Polaroids.

Mack rejects the idea of ownership and intellectual property. “A lot of times people have a selfish notion of what creativity is,” he said. “My thinking is it should be a party for everybody. We don’t need to create the creative 1 percent.”

He promotes this artistic cross-pollination through Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts, the bimonthly haiku poetry slams he hosts in Richmond and Charlottesville.

Last month, the event—a single elimination tournament in which participants present traditional 5-7-5 syllable pieces or 17-syllables-or-less poems to three judges and the audience members—featured some off-the-cuff creativity.

“This sweet little soul from Richmond who wrote about plants made it to the final round with my bearded tattooed friend Benji,” Mack said. “During the battle, he read one about being broke or broken or something, and she actually stopped and wrote one on the spot about how he’d used poor grammar in his haiku. The room just erupted in laughter. She definitely had the highest moment of the night even if she didn’t win the battle.”

Mack hosted his first Rojonekku (a term that means “whatever someone wants it to mean,” he said) during his 40th birthday party. Borrowing elements from fringe poetry slams to create something he wished existed, Mack made every partygoer participate. The series has grown over time, morphing from a “drunk hipster type of crowd” into a “family friendly-ish” event with teenagers and adults.

“When I was younger I still had dreams of being a professional writer,” said Mack, who started making zines in high school. “I’m not as controlled by the notion of a career doing that now. I try to be not too serious about what I do, but it is kind of serious.”

As host and organizer, Mack considers himself less an owner of the event and more of a space keeper, a host that promotes a safe space for all and shares weird, funny stories that break the tension for newcomers.  He’s making  “uncomfortable people more comfortable.”

“I call it Word Fighting Arts because I wanted to take the notion of that world I was in, the cultural poisons that some of us are born into, and reframe it. Instead of destroying myself, I’d screw with the world,” he said. “But I try to make things fun and inspiring and keep it light. If you get too serious about anything, it kind of sucks.”

He grinned. “There’s a reason medicine is sugar coated.”

Rojonekku Word Fighting Arts hosts its Hand-to-Hand Haiku Tournaments in Charlottesville every second Thursday of the month. Join the competition on June 12 at BON Café.

http://vimeo.com/77660026

In a world increasingly dependent on text messages, two-sentence emails, and other abbreviated missives, why do artists do what they do? Why slave over word choice or perfect lighting, or attempt to sculpt poetry from the confusion of everyday experience?

As she edited the new ebook anthology Back Talking on the Mountain of God, author and founder of indie publishing group Still Mountain Bookworks Deborah Prum decided to find out. “I asked each person [with work in the book] to give me one word as to why they write and two sentences to expand on that,” she said in a recent interview.

With answers like awe, beauty, and faith, a central theme became obvious. “Everybody is contending with issues of the spirit,” she said. “These are not necessarily about one religion or another, but about communing with God.”

Poet Elizabeth Bohlke, for example, said her writing “addresses God” in the same way the psalms of her childhood seemed to. “In the confusing sea of the Old Testament, [the Psalms] was guttural and desperate—a place to put longing, a way of working out why God allows pain.”

Similarly, poet Stephen Hitchcock described his work as a form of welcome, “writing existing on the threshold of prayer and correspondence.” Susan Cunningham, another contributor, imagined her poetry as a one-way conversation “to express my heartfelt, ongoing search for meaning in this life,” she said. Kaili van Waveren described writing as a compulsion driven by awe, “the sudden awareness that the voice of God resounds everywhere if we listen.”

Back Talking pairs the work of five poets, including Prum herself, with images by photographer Stuart Scott. He, too, described the impetus of faith in art, triggered by encroaching deafness in one ear and limited hearing in the other. The handicap, he said, “has prepared me to see the glory of the world around me, to capture portions of God’s beauty and to give back through my photography.”

Scott chose tangentially analogous photos to illustrate the three poems by each poet. Prum encouraged non-linear thinking throughout the process, believing that “when you bring together two unusual ideas, things get interesting,” she said. “When you get people in a room jamming together, you get something beautiful, a synthesis rather than a blurb.”

Prum’s ebook also includes audio recordings of each poet reading their work. “You think you know what the poet meant, but when you hear them reading you hear something different,” she said. She hopes the multisensory appeal of the iBook format encourages greater appreciation of the work. “A person that might have trouble decoding normal words on a page can have multiple ways to absorb information.”

Ultimately, Prum said, she likes to bring people together, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. “I feel that people have gifts, and frequently they labor in obscurity and their gifts are never bestowed on the world,” she said. On one hand, writers who work full time as therapists or homeless shelter directors do not market their work, and on the other, reluctant or disabled readers can be stymied by traditional publishing formats. Back Talking tackles both sides of the issue, creating a little more room for everyone to engage with art.

It’s also the final answer on why Prum herself creates. “What fuels the writing, regardless of how bleak the stories, is my belief that good can be found in the rubble of life,” she wrote. “That, for me, is redemption.”

The book and corresponding exhibit, Back Talking on the Mountain of God, launches at CitySpace on Friday, June 6th with an evening of readings and music.