 Green Windows has recast how I see myself. Yes, I am a writer. Yes, I have a community to draw from. Yes, my words have a place. - Catherine  You like me best when it's cold out. Something sexy about more clothes over less. That gray shirt with your coiled strength below it: that thin barrier smooth against my pushing shoulder blades.
You like me best, but you love him most. "He's my best friend, mama." He likes me best when he's giggly. It turns out that the most base human state is polarity. Within ten minutes, gleeful hee hees and ha has, wailful mourns and utter ambivalence.
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 Lena (between Jordan and Alec) at the monthly GW workshop Oct 2018 I’ve been writing with Green Windows for about 4 years now. I met two of the regular attendees at a coloring club meetup. I was feeling brave enough that day to venture out of my normal routine to do something like that, and holy hell am I glad I did. My first night there I heard writing like I’ve never heard before. Not like the crap they made me read in school, not the forced-to-sound-like-this writing from my creative writing class in college, not what I always thought poetry “should” sound like. I heard real, raw, authentic voices from real, raw, authentic people. We were writing at Chapter 510 then, and being in a space that could hold the creative energy for youth helped me work through some shit. It also inspired me to start a group at the elementary school where I worked using the same method that we use at Green Windows after reading Pat Schneider's book about the AWA method. Listen to some writing by an inspired 10-year-old sometime. It changed my world. This group of people has become more than just a creative outlet for me. It’s where I sort out all the things inside and around me and find a way to feel all the feelings and have other people witness me doing it. It’s become a group of fellow soul travelers, friends, mentors, and family. I honestly cannot imagine my life without it. When Peggy offered to take me on as her apprentice, I was beyond honored. I told her that no matter how busy my life can get, I’m learning how to make time for the things, the spaces, and the people that feed my life. What would be my life be without them anyway? Green Windows and the community of people that are part of it fit all those categories. As a therapist and someone who’s participated in and facilitated healing spaces for years, I can confidently say there’s something really special going on at Rock Paper Scissors every 4th Sunday of the month. Writing a blog post means I’m sharing my work, too. I thought about adding a fun poem, one that invokes a laugh or at least a chuckle. Maybe one of my short pieces about my mom’s tomatoes or my brothers’ paper towel karate belts or how my dog looks at me when she pees or the time I met a human bunny rabbit on the Lost Coast. But the bravery of folks to speak truth inspires me everyday to speak mine more, and lately I’ve been encountering too much of that bravery to keep crawling back into my cave where it all feels easy and protected. I shied away from true tales of horror inflicted on women and children for many years, because it reminded me too much of mine. Maybe that’s where you, reader, need to be right now, and so I’ll give the disclaimer that this is not a fun piece. It’s a part of a journey, the part where it’s all super thick forest with no map, no machete, no rope. Hopefully, hearing a piece of my story will give you strength to write yours. (more about Lena)  men teach me to like rape
by Lena Nicodemus fingers pressing ferns & nitrous ice fog on the cold sand a fallen tree trunk lifting up on hips & lifting up of t-shirt a stupid fucking visor hat and when you look at me you look nervous but I don’t say no your hands are cold up my shirt & you push your tongue too much into mine but I don’t say no you stick your hand down my pants root around for whatever loose change you’re looking for and I remember we’re at where people who go off trails can find us, not far from the shit food of the national parks lodge and I still don’t say no later I say no and I laugh but I’m not sure I’m joking and you hardly stop to check I’ve been taught for my whole life to say yes yes yes I don’t imagine myself saying no or why I would the stories I hear from the couch are always the same men getting robbed at gunpoint and women getting raped and then there are the stories where it’s little boys and girls and the guns are your cousins and I guess both guns could be your cousins and I used to be scared of the word rape and have to spell it out when asking friends if movies had r-a-p-e scenes before I could watch them and I don’t watch anything other than the office it feels like anymore because getting surprised by a rape scene in a movie I thought was rated PG-13 and really 13-year-olds can watch this? it’ll knock me out and before long i’m scared to go out or even ride my bike anymore because all the hey baby’s and looks feel like rape because when i feel triggered it’s like I’m being raped but since I was young, men teach me to like rape men teach me to call nonconsensual sex “kinks” and “it got a little rough” and stopping to ask me once for a safe word neither of us use isn’t consent and anyway girls can’t consent to sex only women can and you didn’t invite a woman back to this apartment, did you?  Alec at Green Windows' monthly workshop 3/2017. I heard about Green Windows on an aimless walk through downtown Oakland at dusk one Spring. I remember the sky was pink and I was climbing my way up from rock bottom and pure Hell. I think I was only a few months sober. Back then, Green Windows was hosted at the original Rock Paper Scissors Collective art workshop on Telegraph Ave. I opened my mouth for what seemed like the first time since I was a kid and spoke about what was really important to me. We sat on unassuming chairs in a paint-splattered room and people listened to me. I never did AA or any kind of structured help program. Green Windows was it for me. Every month I would join a friendly assortment of colorful people, I would write, I would share and I would listen. In this way, I built myself up from broken, devastated pieces into a positive member of a tangible community for the first time in my life. In Green Windows, you always have the option to pass on sharing a piece of writing. I have never done this. I have written pieces of writing that scared me into shaking, pale-skinned jello in these workshops. Sharing them in a safe, confidential space with warm, loving people who all share their stories in turn has brought me healing that feels divine. Again, you don’t have to share if you don’t want to, and plenty of people choose not to, but I have made serious progress emotionally and spiritually just by saying what I need to say, even if I’m terrified. After a while of coming to these workshops, you start to see the same people. You admire their writing and then get to admire them as people. None of us are big-shot prestigious writers (at least not yet). Almost everyone is available to talk or share a ride home or a slice of pizza after the workshop. The community of people I’ve met coming to Green Windows over the years is what keeps me rooted in the Bay Area. It brings me pride in my home and I feel like I’m releasing stagnant energy and rejuvenating by writing, reading and listening. As long as I live in the Bay Area, I’m going to keep coming to Green Windows workshops. This community has played no small part in making me the person I am today. Peggy, her helpers, and all of us do a lot of work to keep the space open to truly anyone who wants to come through these doors and write. The participants in these workshops feel like a cross-section of Oakland and the greater Bay Area and I haven’t seen this diversity in one space anywhere else. Green Windows writers have the privilege of coming to awareness of what life is like for people different from us. This work is important for keeping myself humble and keeping myself engaged in the struggle for justice and in building community. Here, I have the space to dig into myself and find veins of painful, traumatized gold to bring into the light and inspire others. I am grateful to live in a time and place where this is possible. Below is a piece of fiction I wrote in a Green Windows workshop. I hope you enjoy it.  Different Kitchens, Different Friends by Alec West The refrigerator makes a sound that most people don’t hear. My friend Charles grew up on a boat and said that when he had to live in a house he hated the refrigerator. It was so loud, it kept him up at night. He wasn’t used to it. My friend J used to come over and raid my fridge. He showed me how to cook tortillas on the stovetop. Years later, he admitted that he’d had a gun on him in our house. Old friends were trying to kill him, and he had to protect himself. My friend Basil also used my kitchen. He is dead now. I remember him standing in my kitchen, having a conversation with my Mom about yogurt-coated granola bars. “These are actually sweeping the nation as one of the best new things!” he said. His wide eyes were shifty and unfocused, his blond, box-springed hair was like a brillo pad under a wool cap or a hoodie. We went on that afternoon to get drunk in an alleyway with fresh green grass growing. It was springtime, and we were enjoying being young and the bold, deep flavor of loneliness when you have someone to share it with. Then Basil bought a bottle of vodka from a homeless man with my money, and we blacked out in the bathroom of a drug store. This kitchen, on Lake in Piedmont, by Beach Elementary, was the first place I discovered alcohol. I remember coming home in a nice button-down shirt from the freshman dance and finding the liquor cabinet open. Vodka and Gin. I filled up two plastic water bottles full, one red and one blue. My friend Red covered the stairs at the Morcom Rose garden with orange, green, white, and yellow puddles from the paints in his stomach. They were inkblots spilled over a page. Somebody was holding their pen up too long thinking about what to write and splotches ran through. Back then there was less loneliness than hope and excitement. I felt like I could still be part of something here if I tried. Red was my first drinking buddy. Years later, I find myself in my brother Gabre’s kitchen in Eugene, Oregon. He has liquor bottles displayed above the cabinets where he keeps plates and dishes. He was a teetotaller all through high school, and now that he is in college, he is drinking. He felt that he had earned the privilege with his success. My friends and I taught him all about top shelf bourbon and scotch. Now he is a connoisseur and a snob, and at six pm on a weeknight he is shaking the cocktail mixer, fixing a drink. My friend Hombre’s Dad’s kitchen looks out over the whole of San Francisco. You can see the city shimmering with light and heat and fog and silver and gold during the day and shining with purple and orange at night. It was the perfect place to enjoy a blunt with some close friends. My friend Hombre had sixteen pot plants growing on that back deck in high school. At first, his Dad didn’t notice, then he didn’t care. Tall, fragrant bushes, sticky flowers and phosphorescent leaves. Orange hairs, white hairs, purple hairs. Acid and mushrooms and looking at the clouds. Hardcore music. Drum and bass music. Dubstep. A State of Trance. We found a vast, dark basement full of all flavors of people who did drugs in San Francisco, from hardened criminals to kids like us. Hombre wanted to wear sweat pants and a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. We told him to go for it, but he didn’t do it. We were too young for ecstasy, we felt, so we took trucker speed, those pills you buy over the counter at the gas station for like five bucks. That and a lot of marijuana, and we didn’t sit down for six hours. All this is what I remember of my childhood in the East Bay. What were we gonna do? We were making the best out of a teenage situation in suburban California. No, you’re too young to get into the club, but there’s this alleyway and this bag and this homeless guy who agrees to buy you alcohol. I’m not joking when I say that homeless guy became my best friend. His name was J, he was only a few years older than me, and he taught me a lot. Alec West is a Bay Area native and has been writing and publishing since he was twelve, when a fierce middle-school teacher taught him that he was worth something. He has been published in Slingshot Magazine, The Anthology of Poetry By Young Americans, The Moon, and The Highlander. His first book, “What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV” will be available in print and e-book in December 2018. Follow Alec on Instagram.
 Once again, I'm thankful for the opportunity Green Windows has afforded me to share a vital part of myself. A request was made for an upcoming post, and I jumped at the chance. The following is a story that I feel captures the elements of writing and inspiration that I enjoy. As always, a hearty thank you to those who choose to humor me in my strange, literary journey.  Pockets Picked Clean
by Philip Staley 4 pink, oblong capsules; a handful of .40 caliber bullets; a half-box of Sugar Smacks cereal and $32. Jacques wondered how his life had taken this wrong turn and ended up here in this bad joke of a roadside motel. His brother, Anderson, lay sprawled on the sparse carpet like some hideous, squashed bug. Their new companion, Lacey, slept so angelically, curled up like a child in the cheap, poster bed. Jacques looked over again at the rickety table and the articles resting on its surface. Why were the most dangerous objects in life always shaped like cylinders? He had minutes before Lacey woke up, to consume her “morning cocktail” of several 500mg Depakote tablets and the most burnt convenience store coffee in the Tri-state area. After their desperate breakfast, the trio would have to move again. Anderson doing the breakneck driving, and their drug-fueled siren earning her keep by getting them into those unspeakable places sure to come up on the journey. Jacques couldn’t help but muse over Lacey. Despite the deficiencies in her brain biochemistry, she was a knockout that “looked like California.” She was the perfect face of the operation, which included negotiations with hard men that had even harder problems. This particular job was revenge, which coincidentally always tasted so viscous and metallic; similar to the tang of an empty shell casing or a stale mood stabilizer on the end of one’s tongue. Lacey shot up from the bed as if she’d been touched by a faith healer. Her eyes were wild with the last traces of somnambulism and the myriad hells inflicted by her subconscious. Jacques hurried to the table to assemble her morning offering, fumbling and knocking several bullets to the floor. Anderson stirred on the thin carpet, his half-asleep face a twisted mask of post-indulgent contortions. The dingy room itself was sweltering; a literal hotbox. Lacey appropriately was covered in a sheen of slick sweat, and not much else. Even the walls were scorching as Jacques moved to peer through the raggedy blinds, taking in the bleak, white-hot landscape of the desert ahead. The real trick would be making the proverbial “dollar out of fifteen cents," as the trio sped through the blasted highways inching ever closer to their fractured goal. Slumbering Anderson wasn’t without his problems either, not venturing too far from his dirty syringe and the trail of the dragon he was currently chasing. There was no one else, thought the reluctant ringleader. This is how it had to go down. With nearly two score dollars and an ill-conceived plan, Jacques continued to appraise the scenery and the shopworn,’72 Fleetwood convertible that somehow got them this far. He’d inherited it from his Uncle Ray; a flim-flam man who pretended to have so much soul, but was as alabaster as the rest. He too had a penchant for dangerous cylindrical therapy. But this was it, the cost of freedom; Off the grid and out of consideration. 2 bit hustles being the order of the day when the ink on your ID was still wet. Jolted from waxing philosophical, the happenstance shepherd recoiled slightly as Lacey slurped her foul, room temperature coffee. She eyed him and the cereal hungrily, making Jacques wonder how far her appetites truly extended…  MAP Seminar. ATD NYC June 2018 Green Windows: Art of Interchange was founded, in part, with principles I learned in anti-poverty projects when I was a full-time volunteer with the International ATD Fourth World Movement in the U.S. and Europe in the nineties. For example, with ATD I learned techniques for bringing people from very different backgrounds together as equal actors in social justice projects. One of these techniques is the Merging Knowledge participatory research method.   Nancy (middle) at Green Windows' monthly workshop, May 2018 A friend told me about Green Windows. I had been in writing classes before but not done writing to prompts. I loved it. I like not knowing what will happen--either what kind of prompts we will get or what my pen will do when it gets one. Mostly it pours out some familiar story from my life but sometimes, and I am grateful for those times, the prompt sets me off on something I would never have thought to write. Even when I write a story I’ve told before, there may be a new insight or I will like the way a group of words sit together. I’ve been in other prompt-writing groups since, but Green Windows stands out for the variety of writers and writing in it: people of many races and classes and several genders, immigrants and native-born, drop-outs and people with post-graduate degrees. It’s in Oakland, it’s sliding scale, and Peggy so completely welcomes everybody to bring their whole selves in. I’ve met such good people at Green Windows, and heard such amazing writing, poignant, playful, profound. I met Renee Garcia at Green Windows, and joined her on-line prompt-writing group. Late one night, one October thirty-first, Renee challenged us to start writing a novel at the stroke of midnight, the moment when National Novel Writing Month would start. I wrote for twenty or thirty minutes about why I couldn’t write a novel. The next morning I started writing a novel--a fantasy for older children--which I am still rewriting over three years later. I love working on it. Peggy encourages us to write either as ourselves or as a character, and I sometimes respond to prompts as some character in the novel. This has either given me material I can use in the novel or insights into my characters that will inform my further writing about them. One prompt was to write about a familiar or habitual walk. So I had a character, Margaret, talk about hers, and it’s in the manuscript now, and here, below:  Excerpt of novel-in-progress
by Nancy Schimmel: On the evening before landfall in England, Annika said, “I’ve never been in a castle, much less lived in one.” “The trick is not to stay in the castle much if you can help it,” said Margaret. “You leave the castle early in the morning before somebody thinks up something for you to do. First you go down—down the path to the beach and along the beach to the trail, then up the face of the heugh, back and forth like lacing on a bodice, to the grassy top where the sheep are. Or where they are supposed to be if they haven’t done something stupid like one wander over the edge and another one go to see what happened to the first one and go over the edge but not on purpose and therefore badly, and you may have to stop and do something about it. “If all is well with the sheep, you go through the meadow. By and by you will come to a hut with smoke coming out of the chimney. However early you have left, Tom will be up and dressed and making tea before you get there. Bring him some honey, he likes that. Sit with him and sip the hot strong sweet tea and listen. Tom will tell you a story about himself and the sheep or his brother and the sea or his grandfather and the Norse raiders. He tells true stories, or truly as he heard them, but he doesn’t dither about exactly what happened or who was there or what day of the week it was, he keeps the story going.” “I know what you mean,” said Annika. “We had one of those ditherers in the village.” “Janet’s father is like that,” Margaret replied. “Maybe that’s why Janet likes ballads. No room to argue with yourself about what happened. Anyway, then you tell Tom your story, like you told it to me. I tell him stories I read in a book or heard from the cook or from some traveler.” “But now you are the traveler,” said Annika. “That is so,” said Margaret. “I’m a princess, but I’m a traveler, too. I used to hear travelers say things that either made me want to jump on the next ship leaving or be glad I stayed home where there’s hot tea and honey every morning.” “Are you sorry you are a traveler?” asked Annika. “Not at all. But I will be glad to get home again.”  Green Windows monthly workshop at RPSC May 2018  Green Windows monthly workshop at RPSC May 2018 Green Windows started partly at the Rock Paper Scissors Collective (RPSC), a grass-roots community arts organization. RPSC, with other galleries and arts organizations, turned "Uptown" Oakland into a vital, thriving, arts destination. And then they were priced out of the neighborhood they helped revitalize while remaining deeply rooted in the existing community. Green Windows held monthly workshops in RPSC for seven years, When RPSC lost their space, our monthly workshops tried several different spaces, none of which felt like home. Green Windows and RPSC have overlapping missions supporting the creativity of Oaklanders while remaining affordable, accessible and deeply focused on the importance of creativity for those who are the least heard. RPSC continued to do arts workshops in schools, libraries and various community spaces. And now they have found a new home at Warehouse 416. Which means Green Windows has found a new home, too. We had our first monthly workshop there on May 27th and it did, indeed, feel like coming home. We are so grateful for the ongoing partnership with RPSC. Come write with us next month!  Green Windows monthly workshop at RPSC May 2018  I’ve been telling stories since I was three years old. The best years of my childhood were spent guiding my friends on narrated adventures in my backyard (which I would later learn is called “live-action role-playing”). Unfortunately, not all of the stories I told were, in truth, my stories, spun out of my own head, nor written by my own hand… The truth is I didn’t master handwriting until I was 12 (and before the widespread use of personal computers, this was a serious set-back), and a good majority of the stories I told were based on movies and TV shows I had watched, memorized, and faithfully replicated in my own little voice. In retrospect, I suppose I had to start with the oral tradition before I could move into transcription. There was a good several years of my life where I was able to recite the entire poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, by heart and without prompting, not because I fancied myself a poet, but because my grandfather used to read it to me every night that I stayed over at his house, and it became stuck in my head. It took me a long time to figure out how to tell my own stories, or at least to perfect my own voice when I told them, but if I hadn’t practiced with the masters, I wouldn’t have learned that every idea comes from something before it, that “new” stories are essentially built upon pre-existing narrative structures, and that it is physically and metaphysically impossible for creative impulses to exist in a vacuum. My father worked for IBM for 30 years, so we were among the first in our neighborhood to own personal computers in 1994, which served me well in my transcription practice. One of the first writing programs I used to transcribe my stories was appropriately called “Creative Writer,” which you could tell was purposefully designed for small children because it was full of colorful cartoon characters that cracked lame jokes and stale puns, as well as weird-shaped buttons that made squishy fart-noises when you clicked on them. Other than that shameless bit of pandering in the software’s design, “Creative Writer” basically functioned like Microsoft Word, with many spacing and font options for each project, plus much fancier-looking clip-art to use as needed. Thankfully, I took to typing much faster than I took to handwriting. My middle-school teachers were disappointed that I continued “hunting and pecking” for the keys I needed, despite their pathetic attempts to cover my hands with a thin (but not thin enough) box over the keyboard. I’m pretty sure they only wanted me to master QWERTY-style so that I could become somebody’s secretary, and if I’d been allowed to curse, I would have gladly advised them to “fuck that noise,” but the truth is that I wasn’t allowed to curse until I got to high school and then all bets were off. Instead of embracing social milestones for most teenage girls—like learning about makeup, armchair-studying fashion in magazines, and/or getting a boyfriend—I spent the vast majority of my high school and college years absorbed in story-driven computer games, like “StarCraft,” and writing fanfiction for multiple other writers’ stories. The important thing, again, was getting as much practice as possible; I wrote before classes, I wrote at lunch, I wrote at the library, I wrote after dinner, and I wrote well into the small hours of the night, and yet still managed to get up in time for school. Jordan was one of my best friends since I was three, and she introduced me to Green Windows in 2015. These workshops have allowed me to challenge my time-use, to focus on staying positive, and to hone my narrative voice, as well as to listen for that which resonates with me, even if I don’t immediately understand why… It feels to me as if we are essentially building on pre-existing structures and adding our own flourishes in order to express the ideas we generate, with the goal of learning how to share them with others. While most of my computing experience is centered on word-processor use, I figure if the process of writing is at all like I hear coding can be, then Green Windows must be one hell of a hack-a-thon. Below is a piece from a previous workshop. Enjoy!  EXCERPT FROM “THE HEARTSCAPE FACTS” THREADS ON WWW.MAPPING-THE-HEARTSCAPE.COM, DATED 02/02/1998
By Rachel Golden FACT Frank Riordan, the guitarist for Heartscape, is not just musically competent – he’s also an astrophysics prodigy. When he was 16, he was placed in an advanced mathematics course where he composed a 10-page essay on the practicality of faster-than-light travel as featured in the classic film, Barbarella. Within a year, this work earned him the attention of the Canadian Space Agency, which offered to pay for his university tuition if he helped them develop a perpetual motion machine. He even took time to help a fellow musician—Philip Taylor Kramer, the bassist from the band Iron Butterfly—on a Top Secret time-travel experiment in the U.S., but good luck getting him to break his non-disclosure agreement with the CSA and NASA. HighPriest: OMG MIND BLOWN! BigNo: LOL! Howitzer: LOL! Diogenes: Holy shit. I don’t even. LunarRover: Sounds plausible. I mean, the guy is a genius, after all. Diogenes: Where to start? I mean, it’s total bullshit, but I have to say it’s the most entertaining bullshit I’ve read this week. Kudos to whoever posted this – you’re a funny bastard. Howitzer: Dude, it’s not bullshit—don’t ever say Frank Riordan isn’t a goddamn genius, because he totally is. Anything else is fightin’ words! LunarRover: Whoa, down boy! Diogenes: Are you seriously polishing his balls right now, Howie? Howitzer: They never found Kramer’s body! He fucking disappeared off the face of the earth! How the hell do you know Riordan didn’t help him with a time-travel experiment? Diogenes: The same way I know that Riordan didn’t write a goddamn paper on FTL travel in Barbarella. The premise of undertaking such an endeavor is absolutely impractical, completely insane, and totally stupid! LunarRover: Jane Fonda is a total fox, BTW. Diogenes: Don’t get me wrong, I love the shit out of that movie and yes, Jane Fonda is a total fox, but good goddamn, it’s called SCIENCE FICTION for a reason! RocketSauce: But at least the post is funny, right? You did say it was funny, and that whoever posted it was a “funny bastard,” right? Yes? Diogenes: Thanks, Rocket. You actually made me smile today. Congratulations are in order, for that is no easy feat. RocketSauce: Fuckin’ sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet! BigNo: Wow, and here I thought Diogenes might actually secretly be Frank Riordan, posing as an average poster and getting his jollies by trolling the crap out of everyone. LunarRover: No, no, that’s me. RocketSauce: HOLY SHIT LUNAR ARE YOU FRANK RIORDAN?!!!!!??!! LunarRover: No, I’m the average poster that’s getting his jollies by trolling the crap out of everyone. I like to think it’s basically my job. Howitzer: OMG, if Frank Riordan actually posts on this site, I’m going to freak the fuck out and literally shit myself. RocketSauce: You and me both, man! BigNo: Gotta say, Howie, you are a class act. HighPriest: I think you mean, “clact ass.” BigNo: No, I don’t, King Pothead. Get your eyes checked. LunarRover: …the hell does that even mean? BigNo: It means HighPriest has been hitting the bong too hard and needs to drink some coffee. HighPriest: Fuck you too, Biggie. InfinityPrincipal: All right, all right, enough of this. This all has gotten simply too silly. Thread is locked. Now for a complete change of mood… On March 17 we commemorated our 10th Birthday and our 100th monthly GW workshop by launching a collection of writing from the workshops. Writers, friends, and loved ones filled The Octopus Literary Salon to listen to 14 voices delivering a range of styles from poetry, to science fiction, to lyrical prose. We will be posting more about this event. Stay tuned.
  Steph Yun, Green Windows Advisory Board Member I recall being an unusually keen and observant child, and there seem to be a myriad of stories and memories confirming such. For instance, I was told that from birth until about the age of two, I seldom spoke beyond uttering the Korean words for mother and father, or other short, one-word phrases. Over time, my parents grew concerned and considered taking me to a pediatric developmental specialist, but one day, I requested a glass of water in a full, complete sentence. While I myself have no recollection of this happening, it also doesn't surprise me in the least. I like to collect and gather bits and pieces of things before deciding what to do with them. I especially love stories and storytelling---stories are how I understand myself, others, and the world around me. I was also a child who experienced extremely intense emotions and did not know what to do with them. I had intrusive thoughts that I knew were troubling and abnormal. There was a lot of yelling in my household, both around me and directed at me. My mother in particular would fly into fits of unpredictable and unrelenting rage. One reason I really enjoyed school and learning was because I could see my friends, my teacher, and get away from my traumatic home environment. And in my mind, school comprised of two distinct parts: writing, and everything else that wasn't writing. The act of writing itself brought me such great joy. As silly as the stories and poems were, sometimes unoriginal in their content, they were something I got to make myself. I never wanted to stop. Writing was a place where I could let my creativity and odd thoughts be, and sharing my work with others felt fulfilling. I was proficient in other subjects, sure; advanced, even, but I quickly grew impatient waiting to review yet another example for concepts I already understood. I did like reading to an extent but often felt dissatisfied and crushingly disappointed with most of the books I encountered. They simply couldn't hold my interest. Life continued on and I found myself writing poetry on occasion. Different topics, but usually something abstract and vague. However, my reintroduction to poetry came during my sophomore year of high school. I had just left therapy and was still struggling with depression and thoughts of suicide. After talking to a friend about my feelings, he admitted that he didn't understand what I was going through but wanted to, so he suggested that I try writing a poem. I wrote this very personal poem on the topic and ended up competing in a youth slam where I received a perfect 30. Scores aside, what moved me most was the overwhelming support I received afterwards. People I didn't know showed me love, said they liked my poem. Some of them even thanked me, saying they were going through something similar or knew someone who was. It was the first time I felt heard and realized my voice was powerful. As a sad young person, it meant the world to me. Thereafter, I became very involved in an organization called Youth Speaks, who also hosted the slam I first competed in. I attended countless writing workshops, open mics, slams, and shows, all free, and served on their youth advisory board for three years. I loved every moment of it and had the chance to apprentice under teaching artists who mentored me. From time-to-time, I performed poems, helped out at events, and sometimes facilitated a workshop here and there. In college, I found my place in CalSLAM, a student-led writing organization, and June Jordan's Poetry for the People program. During this time, I was also named the first Oakland Youth Poet Laureate and received an award for my writing. Since then, I haven't really prioritized my own writing but I'm hoping to change that. My last year of college, I felt extremely burnt out and all I wanted to do was write again. I veered away from the career path I was set on and at this point in my life, I'm thinking of pursuing my writing professionally. Where does Green Windows fit into all of this? Everywhere. I met the founder, Peggy, through the various organizations and spaces I've been involved in. She has been one of my fiercest proponents, one of my greatest mentors, and one of my most thoughtful friends and sources of overall support. We see each other in passing at the Oakland Public Library, an opportunity she encouraged me to apply for, and in our work with youth. Peggy invited me to write with Green Windows sometime last year and it has been my most favorite writing group of any I've ever participated in. Peggy's passion and skill as a writer/facilitator are unrivaled, and I love Green Windows for the community it brings together. I've never written with such a dynamic, diverse group of writers not only from different walks of life but also across styles and genres. This alone has helped my writing grow. Every writer that graces the space is serious about their craft, and hearing others' work as well as receiving feedback on mine has allowed me to develop and challenge myself in invaluable ways. My writing is the best it's ever been and I know that this is in part due to the work at Green Windows. So how might I describe my actual writing process? I find that I write in small bursts and need to have several projects going on at a time. I'm quite touch-and-go and my focus shifts quickly. Some ideas float around and some are forgotten but I try to capture those thoughts before they're beyond summoning. Sometimes I know exactly how to start, what to write, what I want to say, and other times I start with a freewrite, tapping into something my conscious mind is too busy to notice there. My style has been changing and that's exciting. I'm excited to try something new. I have a lot of stories, a lot of thoughts, a lot of feelings and curiosities, and my writing allows me to explore them all together.  this poem does not contain the word queer by Steph Yun i've always wanted to buy one of those flavored lubes; artificial, viscous greens & blues little need for them, really; i can lick & suck just fine, but this pretty sex store all recessed lighting & frosted windows gave out samples when i was 17 oh what fun we could have on skin & sweat, a palette in surrender of its usual proceedings, its measured complaint to feast on the body before me but whose body do i dream of exactly? --- there is something curious about everyone saying that they already knew. everyone, that is, but you. you once developed a great interest in breasts and their form before you felt ready, even before fully understanding that in time, you would grow them, too. the lust dissipated somewhat, and for a short while, you disregarded all the bodies and persons similar in some ways to you. you fell in love with a nice boy, and all the nice 아줌마 that remind you of your mother in a certain way said you were lucky to find a good man so young. you smiled, knowing they saw their daughters and nieces in you but never with you. |
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Green Windows: Writing Groups is a Member of Intersection for the Arts. Intersection provides resources, community and cultural space in order to contribute to the sustainable practices of artists and arts organizations the San Francisco Bay Area. through. Intersection is San Francisco's oldest alternative arts space, providing fiscal sponsorship, networking, consulting and presenting opportunities to artists. Visit www.theintersection.org. |
Website by Jessica Liu from Hack the Hood 2017 Bootcamp