Free Writes and the Work of Magic

If I had to estimate, I’d say that I’ve yelled “Youth Speaks Seattle” in over a hundred middle and high school classrooms all over the greater Seattle area. In my year and a half of YSS outreach, I couldn’t approximate how many lunchroom spiels I’ve attempted or how many times I’ve performed my poems in LA classes or how many posters I’ve stapled to hallway bulletin boards. Throughout my journeys, I’m  honored to get to facilitate workshops with many rooms of brilliant young folks. To open up a creative and supportive writing space, I usually ground the room in a shared definition of a “free write”. I ask the room to shout out their ideas: write what you feel like!, whatever is in your brain!, write freely!

Building off the concepts already in the room, I usually add some key guidelines, like: Don’t judge yourself as you write. Let whatever is in your brain hit the page and don’t worry about it sounding good or poetic or cool or whatever! No pressure. This is just a place to experiment, play, get some ideas out in the air. I always share Youth Speaks Seattle’s only free write “rule” which is: keep your pen/pencil/writing utensil moving for the enPaperstripstire free write time. Even if you’re just writing, “I hate this” over and over, you never know where your pen might take you. I believe that free writes give us the potential to surprise ourselves with ourselves.

With a collective definition of free write to draw from, we then move into constructing some constraints, prompts or guidelines to get a free write sparked. Write whatever you feel like! is exciting but also the scariest freedom possible. A blank page with no starting point is intimidating to even the most prolific poet. While it’s important to push ourselves to write without self-judgment, a container can be helpful for stream of consciousness to take shape in. That in mind, I design curriculum with many variations on constraints. My challenges to students often include starting lines or required images or words.

As I develop curriculum, I always return to the idea that writing is the work of magic. To cultivate that magic, a workshop must serve as a powerful ritual. Ritual involves trusting the unknown and making space for it in our writing practice. In the classroom, this manifests as having each group of students generate unique constraints for our workshop. For example, I’ve asked students to write a specific shade or color in the corner of their paper. Once the room is filled with lime greens, ripe watermelon reds, indigos and eggshells, I ask each student to rip the color out and pass it to their neighbor. I encourage everyone to believe that this is the color that they are meant to write with today. The randomness of receiving a color is a form of magic, all part of our shared ritual. And once students share, it feels that magic led them to create the exact free write they were meant to, bursting with color and inspiration.

Similarly, I’ve asked students to write 5 words on slips of paper that describe their identity, before we throw them all into the center of the room and draw back out 5 words, randomized in a flurry of paper. These identity words go on to spark complex and courageous free writes. In another workshop, I challenge students to write a letter to a person or thing in their life. To determine who or what we need to write to most in this particular moment, we often do a ritual spinning of our notebook and random pointing on a brainstormed list of important items or people.

Through these acts of divination, I’ve witnessed youth read authentic, fiery and heartbreaking poems. I’m continually in awe of how free writes give way to such raw vulnerability. They make a place for all of us to trust the magic inside of us and dive head first into the unknown. Constraints, like ritual, give us a shape to land in. Once we go there, the piece may even seem to write itself. When I witness the power of young poets speaking truth, it’s a collective discovery of what they needed to say all along.

 

– Shelby

Teen Artist Program Co-Coordinator

 

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Black Art-ivist

Once again the country has shown it’s behind and we are in another state of chaos.
Youth from around town have been asking me “Donté what do I do as a new community organizer and artist in this time of deep pain”
I wanted to say “Take the streets, block the roads, make them hear us, let everybody know that we have been crying and afraid and ashamed for too long and its enough its BEEN enough”. But I couldn’t even answer back, I thought about the question so intentionally but I was like as an artist and activist living with depression and anxiety I don’t feel safe enough to be in the streets and protest even though I feel like I should be there and I had to meditate on what is my role in this movement? I had to remember that activism doesn’t look any one way. It takes multiple different approaches and actions and kinds of things that adds to a movement including taking care of the people in the movement which I feel like can be my role reminding folks to take care and to hold space for all the black folks who are actively hurting every day watching the full out attack on our people.
There are artistic video projects in the works, and more and more folks feeling the call to action. Figuring out the many ways we can be vocal about our needs, below is my first step into how I do activism:

 

 

A List Poem for the way my body reacts to the death of Black People

  1. Freeze, Eye lids fading, Eye lashes tickle eye brows in an attempt to feel anything besides melting

  2. Mouth and throat going Sahara as your eyes lose focus on tracking motion

  3. You feel the burn of a solar eclipse passing in your throat

  4. Freeze, and you do, the word seems to rattle in your head till the tinnitus  sounds just like the last phone call you made to your mother

  5. Freeze, and they did until they spilled,

    watch the blood pool in the dark of every unlit street

    visualize how they cleaned them off the floor

    read facebook till you cry

    read articles till you cry

    Pick corners for you to die

    I wear all black most days because I don’t know when I’m gonna go

    But Capricorns anticipate everything, so I wear my face like a veil, wear my skin like a red delicious dress at a funeral, the crisp bite into death as flames fuck my flesh into ash

  6. Count breaths,

    Like loose change

    in attempt, to regulate breathing

    Asthma, holding Fourth of July in your lungs

    Another Black body,

    Evaporating into social media rants and swept under consumerism and white supremacy

  7. Freeze, that’s what they screamed, trying to mask murder with lies,

    Tryna mask murder with mock justice and Christmas carols

    Freeze, because everyone knows it’s easier to hit a target when it don’t move

    You have read another article about a Black body turning sunset

    You feel the light fading from their mothers eyes, it feels like a heart coming to a halt

    You haven’t moved in hours as if you were obeying the law, as if they had already killed you

  8. You find comfort in knowing that if you were dead you wouldn’t have to watch them kill your family

  9. Your mouth begins to thaw, you feel the heat of carbon dioxide between your teeth, your teeth dance like a tambourine in full explosion you can barely make a sound but the only thing you say is

  10. If all lives matter, then why aren’t you dying-

    To save me.

-Donté Johnson, Teen Artist Program Co-Coordinator

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Bring on the Funk…Power of Words at the Northwest African American Museum

This blog was written by guest contributor Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, Program Director of the Northwest African American Museum’s Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program (pictured below second from the right). 

Daemond Arrindell and Arts Corps are totally hip in the opinion of the Northwest African American Museum 2012 Youth Curators…count me in too.  The Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program at NAAM is a community outreach program targeting teens age 14-18yrs old.  Teens join a team for twelve 2-hour sessions to explore museum philosophy and develop their creative abilities as they complete a themed project that coincides with a current gallery exhibition.

The 2012 project and exhibition, First Impressions – Inner Expressions was all about self-awareness and articulating the discoveries. Daemond led the Youth Curators in a series of exercises, inspired by the exhibition Xenobia Bailey: The Aesthetics of Funk.  Throughout this process, creative writing skills and individual expression evolved into the power of spoken words…heartfelt, questioning, passionate and humorous…all encouraged by Daemond.


The Youth Curators presented their exhibition and poetry to a full house on April 7th.  In the crowd was Kathleen Flenniken, WA State Poet Laureate, who called their poetry “gold”.  Kathleen supports young poets and has already posted two of the poems to her blog, The Far Field with more to follow.  Youth In Focus, captured photo portraits of each Youth Curator for the gallery exhibition, thank you Sherry Loeser with student photographers, Duyen and Jennifer.

You can check out this fabulous exhibit that attributes much of the success to Daemond with support of Arts Corps; I look forward to a long and lasting friendship with both.  The First Impressions – Inner Expressions exhibition is on view through Summer, 2012. Visit the NAAM website for hours and events (www.naamnw.org).

A huge thanks to all at Arts Corps…your fan for life,

Stephanie

 

Stephanie Johnson-Toliver, Program Director

NAAM Dr. Carver Gayton Youth Curator Program

 

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Make some cents!

Find some cents, will ya? Literally. Like, on the sidewalk or in a couch.  We found 80 cents hiding at the office.  See:

The physical Arts Corps office space donated!  And now, you can too!  So, here’s the challenge-

1) Go digging for change wherever it’s free to be harvested.

2) Snap a pic and post on our FB page the picture, the amount, and where you found it.

3) Drop by the office and add your cents to our cents so we can make a bunch of cents!

We are launching the Make Cents campaign to raise funds for Youth Speaks Seattle to send the Youth Slam Team to the Brave New Voices International Poetry Slam & Festival.  If your more comfortable paying with plastic, click to link to our online campaign.

Every cent adds up to hella cents.  So go and MAKE SOME CENTS already!

 

 


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Stepping Into My Power

This story was written by Henry Luke, Arts Corps alumni and Youth Speaks Seattle coordinator.  Youth Speaks Seattle became a program of Arts Corps in 2011. This article was originally published in Arts Corps’ latest magazine and annual report which can be found here.  

In 2008, I walked into my first poetry slam. I had never been to any event featuring spoken word. When I heard the word poetry, I thought of dead white men like Shakespeare and Robert Frost. I never expected to enjoy poetry, let alone perform it.

Henry at the 2011 Grand Slam Finals. Photo by Kari Champoux

When I arrived, people were laughing, dancing, and freestyling. I wanted to know them! Itwas an atmosphere of spontaneous energy and emotion that I had never experienced before. At the time, very little felt sacred in my life, but when the poets began performing I felt a kind of reverence for the power of their words. The audience clapped and snapped their fingers, gasped and shouted, even cried. I was moved by the power of a poem to pull me into a story, make me feel so many emotions in a few minutes. I had never seen anyone declare themselves like that, to get onstage with nothing but their story and say “This is who I am! This is what I believe in!” I saw nothing ironic or self-conscious in their celebration of life and love. Each word was a piece of their truth.

My introduction to Youth Speaks Seattle coincided with a massive change in my worldview: I realized I was a part of many massive and unjust systems that disconnect and silence people I know and love. At the same time, I came to see myself as a fragment of something even larger, an interconnected universe filled with meaning and mystery. Poetry became the piece that tied everything together: when writing, I never had to compartmentalize the personal and the political. Performance gave a sensation of release, speaking my stories into existence made them that much more real.

At Brave New Voices International Poetry Slam (the national Youth Speaks gathering), I met poets from Philadelphia, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York, and Guam. I sat twenty feet from Bobby Seale as he spoke about the founding of the Black Panthers and compared it to the work Youth Speaks does today. I have realized spoken word is not just an art form. It is a movement. There are young people across the world speaking their truth and creating spaces where that is safe to do. We are storytellers of our generation.

Today when I hear the word poetry, I think of my friends, I think of myself. And my journey continues in my new position at Arts Corps as the Youth Speaks Seattle Coordinator.

I am honored to hold space for other young people across Seattle to express themselves and step into their power, whatever form that takes.

Youth Speaks Seattle’s 2012 Slam Series Info:
Feb 10, 7pm @ Harambee: 316 South 3rd St, Renton
 
Mar 2, 7pm @ Theater Off Jackson: 409 7th Ave South, Seattle
Stay Tuned for Details on the Wild Card Slam and Grand Slam Finals here!

 

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