Social Practice

I was born in New Orleans, Louisiana and grew up listening to people speak to strangers with love and abandon, pleasure and pain.

I also grew up listening to intolerable inequities in power, wealth and freedom. At 12, I joined a group called ERACISM that met at the public library and got my first taste of mutual aid and creative, neighbor-to-neighbor activism for cultural change. It was an interracial, cross-class group of people from 12 to 78, figuring out how to resist racism. I was hooked.

Very young, I was aware that I was different—queer, lesbian, backward. To be openly gay was to risk your skull in that era. This led to me wanting to find all the old lesbians and gays I could and listen to them talk and laugh.

My childhood home had equal measures of love and violence, nurture and abuse. I got solace by sitting in Charlene’s, a French Quarter lesbian bar after school, drinking orange juice and doing homework. I ran away from home at age fourteen. After some time on the street, I was invited to live at the New Orleans Zen Center, an urban monastery. I stayed there as a resident meditation student while I finished high school.

I received a scholarship to Smith College and left Louisiana for rural Massachusetts. There, I was fortunate to be mentored by poet Elizabeth Alexander and to help establish The Boutelle-Day Poetry Center in 1997. Every few weeks, we got to listen to and dine with a poet who burned with intense personal needs to speak in image, to stitch metaphors and offer them as music, to keep broken things. I got to see what it meant to live your truth. I got to witness vulnerability being a gift, not a danger.

My independent course of study focused on arts and literary resistance to 2oth century totalitarian regimes. This brought me to Denmark as part of a human rights fellowship to interview elderly fishermen who’d saved the lives of their Jewish neighbors during the Nazi Holocaust by rowing them to Sweden.

The fellows on this project studied oral history collection at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. I never forgot the voice of a woman who hid in a barn for two years when she was small, mothered only by a cow. After the war, she wore a cow pin on her blouse every day for the rest of her life. She fingered it and her voice cracked, an eighty year old recalling being eight.

The next year, I created a volunteer literacy program using creative writing as the teaching modality in a medium-security men’s prison in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I thought people might learn to read and write more easily if they were telling their own life stories. I knew by then that using words to make sense of trauma did healing work on multiple levels.

It wasn’t just the writing, telling, or hearing — it was the electrical conductivity between the person sharing the story and the person recieving it. Like putting the particles of the experience into a solution that became light between them. Light that let to movement, an increased sense of trust and safety in the arms of life.

After college, I worked at a homeless shelter in Oakland and spent a year on a lesbian land trust in Mendocino, California, being in home community with women activists in their elder years. It was healing to live under the redwood trees, sing feminist songs shirtless around the campfire, drink well water and learn about aging in poverty and freedom.

I was lucky to have been named a Beinecke Scholar, however, and needed to skedaddle back to school to use the graduate award. Use it or lose it. I moved to Chicago and got an M.A. in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, studying Black Feminist Theory, political theater and contemporary women’s poetry. I lived in a tenement held together by duct tape and volunteered at the Marjorie Kovler Center for Survivors of Torture. I wanted to learn how to talk with people who’d undergone things impossible to explain; how to make space for sharing without ever asking a direct question. I learned a lot about avoidance, dark humor and how to make space for emotions beyond control, mine included.

I left Chicago for Austin to pursue an MFA in Poetry at the James Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. I worked as an education journalist for a nonprofit media newswire that increased positive representations of teens of color, and taught writing workshops in public schools from Alaska to Alabama. I graduated from the MFA program and published my first anthology of work by young writers just as Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.

It seemed I couldn’t run away from my past or family; they came to me. Unable to rest, I got friends together to set up community listening stations with survivors and volunteer therapists. This became an oral history and relief project called Alive in Truth, documenting the full lives New Orleanians in public housing before the flood, and helping chart their path in Texas. We were able to assist more than sixty families in getting apartments, furnishings, FEMA aid, clothes and bus passes, as well as little essential things like dentures, glasses and picnics with other evacuees.

After a year of this relief work, the FEMA money ended and most of these families were made homeless again. The donated furniture was repossessed. I had a nervous breakdown. To stay alive, I had to crawl into a trauma treatment center in New Mexico for six months. My own loud early wounds became deafening when my promises to others couldn’t be kept. I had to be still, feel pain and learn my limits.

Sitting in silence with others, then putting words to shame and buried selves taught me patience. I learned that almost everyone has suffered indescribable loss. The naughty human mind is infinitely creative. It coming up with endless ways to ignore fracture and keep going on. In time, I recovered enough to feel I had the right to stay alive. But I had to do it with the currency of stories.

My path was set ~ I wanted hold space for people to talk about what they’ve loved and lived through and find reasons to keep reaching on. I could help put words down, bring the words to others, make them public; build truthful power together to make structural change.

We hunger to communicate the same way fruit hungers to be eaten, kids long to be watched doing their fancy jump and money hungers to be shared in its smallest denominations. Poet Marge Piercy writes, The pitcher cries for water to carry / and a person for work that is real.

Right now, I’m focused on talking to people living outside, without a roof besides a tarp. Without a sense of safety or continuity in place or people, what do they do? What help do they need? (Besides economic justice, racial justice, gender justice, migration freedom, freedom from violence, education, food, water, medical care, and all of their human rights?)

I’m grateful to have the chance to still listen and learn from people speaking about their specific unique lives with love and abandon, pleasure and pain, honesty and hope. I hope to be a faithful witness and to share as many voices as I can