Photo: Marcia Wilson/WideVision Photograpy

Camille T. Dungy was born in Denver, Colorado and grew up in California. She received her B.A. from Stanford University and M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, winner of the 2010 Crab Orchard Open Book Prize, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. Her poems and essays have been published widely in anthologies, print, and online journals. She is also the editor of several anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African-American Nature Poetry.

She is a two-time recipient of the Northern California Book Award, a Silver Medal Winner in the California Book Award, and two-time NAACP Image Award nominee. She was recognized in the Huffington Post Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry for her role as co-founder of From the Fishouse, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the oral tradition of poetry. Recently a professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, Dungy is now a Professor in the English Department at Colorado State University.

Candace Butler interviewed Dungy at The Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Candace Butler: What project are you working on right now?

Camille T. Dungy: That’s a good lead question, but a hard one to answer. It seems like it wouldn’t be a hard one to answer. And maybe a little bit later it wouldn’t be hard to answer what project I’m working on right now, but when I’m between books—as I am right now—there’s a period of time where I’m not working on a project. I’m just working on writing a poem and then writing another poem and then writing another poem. And then there’ll be a point at which there’s a kind of tractor pull that gets created, some sort of gravitational pull of all those bodies that make something clearly be moving in one direction. But I haven’t gotten there yet, so I don’t know. I’m just writing the poems one at a time, and I think that’s a really important thing to remember: that that’s what we’re doing. We think so frequently in terms of books—and that’s an important aspect of things—but it’s not where it begins for poets. For poets, it begins with each poem, one at a time.

CB: What have you been reading recently?

CTD: I am right now re-reading Ruth Padel’s book Darwin about her great-great-grandfather Charles Darwin, partly because I’m interested in the way poets use notes. And so I was reading a lot of books that are playing with footnotes or side notes or endnotes and incorporated notes and just the different ways that people can document their knowledge—so another book that I really am fascinated by is Jena Osman’s book The Network that often pulls in other information and there’s a poet named Tung-Hui Hu and the book is called Greenhouses, Lighthouses. All these books, in different ways, incorporate external material and have to create a way of citing those sources that I’m finding curious. You know, in Suck on the Marrow it took me the longest time to figure out how to make the notes for that book. And the long poem at the end, “Primer, Or A History of These United States (Abridged),” is the notes section. In original versions of the book it’s just a “Notes” section, and I was so bored by that; I knew there was information that needed to be there for people who weren’t going to know these details, but I couldn’t figure out how to incorporate that, especially since the characters were fictional set in real time. So there was this overlap between what really happened and what didn’t really happen but I wanted to feel like really happened, and how do you do that in the notes? And eventually I figured out that the “Primer” was going to be my way of conveying all the background information that you might need for the book. So I just have rekindled my curiosity in figuring out other poets’ answers to that question.

CB: You’ve mentioned the cover on the 1990 British edition of The Virago Book of Love Poetry “was part of the wonder of the book” for you, and you wrote that “it sent [you] scurrying to learn more about Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo at the same time [you were] discovering more about the poets featured within the covers.” Since the cover is important to you, as it is to many people, would you mind talking a bit about the covers of your books?

CTD: Sure. All of my books’ covers have presented themselves to me as undeniably my book covers. Each time, I’ve been really lucky with that. For What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison, my first book, I had a calendar back in the old fashioned days where you used to have desk calendars. You know, they’re journals, and they would have—every week or every month—they would have a different picture on the pages? I miss that, actually, because it was a way to be presented with art that I wouldn’t necessarily see. This particular one, I just flipped open a page—whatever that week or month was—and there was this incredible image by the collage artist James Denmark. I just loved it. It’s just—the book’s title is What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and there’s this woman tripping over air and through a garden with a bowl of lettuce in her hands. And it just seems—and there are other plants growing—and it just seems so perfect for the book. So I wrote to the artist, and he said, “Sure.”

And then, with Suck on the Marrow, I had an idea for what I wanted for the book cover, and my press didn’t like it. And they had an idea for what they wanted for the book cover, and I hated it (laughs). And so it was midnight and Mark Cull, the designer at the press—he’s also the managing editor at the press—said we’ve got to come up with the cover ASAP, so I’m just looking through, you know—the internet existed by that point, thank goodness—and I was just searching and searching, and I was at the Library of Congress website partly because I needed access to things we knew could be free. So I’m just looking at 19^th century images and I came across the one that is on the cover of Suck on the Marrow. It’s a candid shot essentially—it might’ve been posed, but it feels candid—of a man standing outside on a frame of what looks like a building is being constructed and it is so clearly central Virginia. I mean, so clearly like the landscape I was writing about. And so there was Joseph Freeman, one of the book’s main characters, standing there. So that was my image. It was chilling how that one image turned out to be so right. They did a beautiful job of the cover, I think, because they used a font that had a kind of old-timey feel and then they let the image completely fill the margins of the book cover so there’s no framing on the image. The whole cover is the image, which I love. And so that made me really happy.

And then I was working on my anthology Black Nature, flipping through a Gordon Parks book looking for writing—essays, right?—that could fit, and I bumped into this image that’s this little boy with a june bug on a string and a little fly is on his cheek and he’s lying in the middle of a field. It’s a complicated picture because the boy is torturing this bug, but there’s this other free bug on him. There’s this youthful innocence but also this violence; it’s perfect for what’s going on inside of Black Nature. And also, while I was searching through books for Black Nature, I came across this photographer named Dudley Edmondson, who had done a book called Black and Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places. It’s a photo collection of people who do really great things in the outdoors: a man who’s a falconer and a woman who’s a prize rock climber and a U.S. park ranger named Shelton Johnson who does a lot of work with talking about blacks in the old west and Buffalo Soldiers. So some really fascinating people who do things outside, and so that was my introduction to Dudley Edmonson. I started looking up his work online. His portraits are beautiful, and I was just interested in him as a photographer, and he had a whole portfolio on birds and my raptor shows up in one of his images. It just had to be this hawk in the middle of this blue sky. He’s coming down and you can see the talons sticking out, and it’s gorgeous; so that I knew had to be the cover of Smith Blue, which is a book about environmental degradation and rapture and horror and love and again the image on the cover seems to be exactly right. Each time I just had the feeling “that has to be the cover of my book and there’s no doubt about it.” So that’s the story of my book covers.

CB: Thank you. You have found inspiration in reading the works of other writers, have listened to Mozart while writing “Requiem,” and have talked about the many truths depicted in Picasso’s “Guernica” mural in your “The Truth’s Superb Surprise” lecture at AULA in June. Can you tell us more about the inspiration you find in other art forms? I know you just talked a bit about all the serendipity in your covers. Do you find more for individual poems or—

CTD: Oh, sure. We could go on and on. Part of the nature of being a poet, part of the nature of being a writer, but also part of the nature of being an artist, is being porous, being open to stimulation and inspiration and finding in unlikely places connection with the human spirit, with your own longing for passion. So I find companionship, I guess, with the work of other artists who are doing the same thing, and frequently I find that musicians or visual artists have found a way to express an interpretation—or a distillation of a hitherto unarticulated thought—in a way that gives me a pathway into being able to articulate it in language whereas they’ve done it in sound or visually; I now have to render that in English, but they help me towards that direction.

CB: Antioch University advocates social justice. Can you approach this issue from a craft perspective?

CTD: Maybe. Can you be a little more specific what you mean?

CB: Well, if you could just talk about how we can incorporate social justice issues into our poetry, into our writing.

Part of the nature of being a poet… is being porous

CTD: Okay. Yes. I don’t see any other more important thing to do in writing. As I said, I think that poetry is an articulation of who we can be in the world. Ben Okri says, “The writer writes because he believes that what he sees is not all that can be.” Or something close to that (laughs). (In an email message to the interviewer on September 16^th, Dungy said, “What he really says, in The Times in December of 1991, is “The poet is set against the world because he cannot accept that what there seems to be is all that there is.”) So why not use my poetry to try and make true that this world can be a better place? Why not use my poetry to try and make people uncomfortable with how things are so that they can move towards trying to change things towards something better? Or uncomfortable with how things were so they can move towards trying not to replicate them? Or see those things in their world? One of the most touching moments to me when I was touring with Suck on the Marrow, which is a collection about the abolition movement of the 19^th century, was being in a border town in Texas and somebody saying that they didn’t realize that a poem in the book was about the 19^th century until they got to the word “abolition.” They thought that it was about then, that moment, and that’s what I want. I want us to see where we haven’t changed, but could. As much as where we have changed, and for the better. Writing’s powerful; it makes the world. And so I think it’s important that the world I’m making is a world that tends toward improvement.

CB: What is your writing process like on a daily basis?

CTD: You’ve got a four year old; I’ve got a three and a half year old. She used to be a great morning sleeper. She’d sleep until eight thirty or nine and I would wake up at five thirty or six and get a good, solid chunk of writing done before she woke up, but…nothing gold lasts (laughs). So now I’m learning to write late at night again after she goes to bed. You know, you’ve just got to kind of wiggle around until you find a pattern that works. But then you’ve got to be willing to wiggle around again, because the pattern will change. You move, your family stops cooperating the way that it did, that coffee shop you used closed, your computer breaks down—you just can’t be completely tied to any particular routine because routines change and if the routine is what you need for the writing, and it changes, then you lose the writing. So I’ve never believed that I have to have a routine. I have what works, and what works for now is what I use. And then something else works, and then that’s what I use.

CB: I read your blog entry on Harriet about the relationship between the writing process and dreams. Are your dreams similar in structure or imagery to your poetry?

CTD: In that post I’m talking about a conversation that I had once with Richard Siken and Heriberto Yépez. We were all reading in the same place, and we had a long afternoon break, and I took a nap. And I got to the dinner and told them all about my dream and both of them are just staring at me like I’m a crazy person. My dream was this long, soap operatic, interconnected thing where there were all these characters showing up—it was like a little soap opera. And Richard Siken says, “If I dream at all, it’s like…green.” (laughs). And Yépez, too, he said that he dreamed in this entirely different way. But both of them, interestingly, the way they said they dreamed, to me, mimicked the way that I understood them to write. And so, I thought that it was intriguing to think that maybe the way our subconsciouses work were entries to the way we are able to write. And I do tend to write more character-driven work and at the time that I was having that dream, I was probably right in the middle of writing Suck on the Marrow, which was a long soap opera with a lot of intertwined characters who come in and out. So I was living in a world of imagined people; my brain was working through that. I still have a tendency to dream narratively, and that’s the way that I lean in my writing. Though I think that my writing is perhaps significantly more frayed narratives than it was when I was having the conversation about which I was talking. I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that. I haven’t thought about whether my dreams have changed or whether it’s just that my poems have changed. (In an email message to the interviewer on September 16th, Dungy said, “I’ll say, on further reflection, that my poems have changed a lot since I had my daughter, and my ability to dream has also changed a lot. My sleep is significantly more fractured, stitched together in odd and seemingly improbable ways. So maybe there is a connection after all.”)

CB: When you’re not writing, editing, or teaching, what do you enjoy doing?

CTD: That’s a really good question because those are very time-consuming occupations, writing, editing, and teaching. I like just being one of two things: either by myself or with my family. I should put “being with my family” first, and then “being by myself” because I like them. They’re fun people, and they give me a lot. And they’re very patient with me and the amount of time I spend with the writing, editing, and teaching (the former two of which require me to be by myself a lot). So I like to give back to them, too. I like cooking for said family and for friends and other people who pop by. And then I like being outside in a myriad of ways: hiking or kayaking or…I’m learning how to ski now. I just moved to Colorado—no, I know how to ski, but I haven’t skied in twenty years, so I’m going to relearn how to ski. I’m going to teach my daughter this winter because we’re going to live in the snow. We might as well use it.

CB: Do you feel like you compromise or sacrifice something in your life to write your poetry?

CTD: Sure, absolutely. Absolutely. I don’t think it’s possible to do anything in the world without compromising something. And certainly not anything that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy. I mean, I just said I value my family and I partly value my family because they give me the space that I need to write and to work. And then I know that that’s a sacrifice on their part to do that; I like to honor them for that. But I think, and they think, that I am a better person to be around when I’ve gotten enough writing done, and so it’s worth it to them, too. I actually waited a long time to get married and to a guy who has from the very start been supportive of me as an artist. And so, that was a condition of our relationship, right? I chose him as the person I would commit to because he was supportive of me in that way, but that’s a sacrifice for everybody in some way. I could have had a very different kind of relationship. I might not have been a particularly happy person, but I could have had a different kind of relationship. Yeah, no, writing takes time. Anything that takes time demands sacrifices.

CB: I’ve noticed you have a great command of spacing and enjambment—especially in Suck on the Marrow and Smith Blue. How do you know when to leave blank space, and how much? Is it intuitive? Do you scribble it down that way from the beginning? Or do you find during revision that a poem needs more openness somehow?

CTD: A really good question. No, it doesn’t get scribbled down that way from the beginning, I can say that. And if it is intuitive, it’s not intuitive in that it’s unthought. A lot of it has to do with breath—figuring out how, where I want both the sonic pauses and the visual pauses, which can contradict each other. Sometimes I want a break to be forced where a break is not desired. I want you to stop some place you wouldn’t if you were just reading prose, and think about what it is that you’ve already experienced, and let that resonate for a little while, and then move forward; and that’s where an internal break or a line break can really push against breath, can push against how you would read it if you were just reading the sentence. So that’s one of the aspects. And then I think you’re right about space, I think that I often just—poems might come when I’m just writing them, they might come in blocks—and then I want to figure how to get room into the poem and how to give a lot more of that, and it might do alright. Actually, my newer writing has even more lines that are playing a lot like the poem “Five for Truth” in Smith Blue; you know, lines that are jagged across the page. That seems to be a direction I’m moving in more and more because it is about slowing down experience. When we are in a moment of heightened emotion—pain, terror—it feels sometimes like time slows down. But of course it doesn’t. The reason why it feels—it doesn’t, time doesn’t change, but there’s a physiological reason that it feels like time slows down, and it’s because more of your receptors are open because you’re stressed. And so you become more alert: you see more, you physically feel more, smell more, taste more than you would normally. Because normally we kind of go through life, and we shut down a lot of external responses. And when you’re stressed, you open them all up because you need to have all that awareness. So the reason time feels like it has changed is because you take in five external stimuli in a space where you would normally just take in one. And so you think, well, that must have been five seconds long, but it was really one second long, right? Okay. One of the things that I think spacing a poem can do when you kind of move it out across the page and create more gaps in it and more stanza breaks and indentation and—you’re stressing your reader a little bit. You’re demanding slightly more of your reader, and you’re asking them to see line breaks and changes and pay attention to more end words than they would. You’re creating more opportunity for more stimulus to come in, and time slows down. So if you do it right—they could also just get frustrated (laughs)—but if you do it right, it’s a way of mimicking this idea of time slowing down and more coming in and more responses happening and paying more careful attention to the words than they would if it was just kind of all piled together and they’re running over the language really, really quickly.

You’re paying attention to how the world organizes itself and to the possibilities of how that might be described.

CB: I want to ask you about a specific poem, if I may. The two narratives in “Lesson” are distanced by the white space and italics separating them, but the contrapuntal form confines them in the same place and time. How does a poem like this come into being? Did you have two separate poems that were eventually fused together? Or did you know you were going to utilize this form when you began?

CTD: So “Code” on the other side does the same thing but differently. And I think I might be able to speak to them together. That was a form I was very interested in. This contrapuntal form, or stichomythia, is a Greek term for a winged poem that operates in the way that “Lesson” does. And “Code” is a mutated version of that idea because the one longer narrative subsumes the shorter narrative. Conceptually, in the book, I wanted an understanding that these are two worlds that are living simultaneously and sometimes independently and sometimes not. So sometimes when I have those poems, you can read three poems, and sometimes you can only read two. Sometimes you can extract one side of the poem and get that whole thought, and the whole thought with the extraction removed, and then with everything together. Sometimes you extract part, and the extracted part exists, but the part from which it has been extracted collapses and doesn’t work. That’s sort of what happens when you’re talking about a slave society or a society that is really dependent on people’s labor. Sometimes you take those people out, and the other people kind of keep living without even noticing. Sometimes you take those people out, and it just falls apart. There’s a relatively contemporary movie called A Day Without a Mexican which is based on a W. E. B. DuBois story about “a day in Philadelphia when all the Black people disappear.” What happens at the turn of the 20^th century when you get rid of all the black people? What happens in California at the turn of the 21^st century when you get rid of all the Mexicans? Nothing happens. It all collapses, right? And so, this is really part of the process. So, yes, I sat down thinking how am I going to create a poem that has independent individual narratives that are self-sustaining but may or may not sustain that other narrative. It’s hard because you’ve got to be able to make the sentence that flows up to the one on the other side work and then—yeah, so it took a long time for me to write those poems. In “Lesson,” all the language is mine. “Code” and “Complicit”—there’s also a poem “Runaway ran away” where I tweak the language (it’s part mine and part ad)—but “Code and “Complicit” are ads that I found in period magazines. In 19^th century magazines and newspapers. So I’m using the actual language of the time and then I’m building around it my own. How do I write my own sentence where in that sentence, I’ll use the word ostler? That’s not a word we use today! What’s an ostler, right? And so I would have to kind of create my language to ride up to this 19^th century language, which is something I was really trying to do in the book anyway. I was trying to create a contemporary-to-us language that also incorporated—realistically, I guess—the 19^th century language. I was trying not to be anachronistic. I was trying to make sure that I stuck with language they would use in the 19^th century, descriptions that they would use. So a wealthy person is going to be drinking brandy whereas a poor person is going to be drinking whiskey, you know, and it’s those kinds of details that I wanted to make sure retained their period viability even though I’m not using, you know—there’s no ye’s, there’s no ye old shoppe with two p’s and an e (laughs). I’m not a hundred percent sure that I entirely answered your question.

CB: You definitely did. So what is your advice for an aspiring poet in today’s world?

CTD: I think it goes back to your original question of what my project is, and my advice is to just write poems. To remove yourself from—in the moment of writing—to remove yourself from the marketplace aspect of poetry, and just write a poem. And then write another poem, and write the best poems that you can, and revise those poems again and again. And then to read a lot. You have to read a lot to know what’s out there and what can be out there, but you’re not just reading today’s work. And you’re not just reading American poetry, and you’re not just reading poetry. You’re reading nonfiction. You’re reading fiction. You’re reading visual art. You’re reading music, you know. You’re reading the natural world. You’re paying attention to how the world organizes itself and to the possibilities of how that might be described. And then you’re going to write another poem.

Candace Butler is an MFA candidate at Antioch University of Los Angeles. She is a writer, artist, and musician residing in her hometown of Sugar Grove, Virginia, a small town in the mountains of Appalachia. She holds dear her family and the beautiful Jefferson National Forest that adjoins her backyard.

Photo: Sasha Stone

Patrick O’Neil is the author of the memoir Hold-Up (13e Note Editions, Paris, France). He is currently in the process of writing a second book chronicling his former career as a roadie/road manager for several major punk bands during the 1980′s (Dead Kennedys, Flipper, TSOL, Subhumans). His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including: Fourteen Hills, New Plains Review, Weave Magazine, Sensitive Skin, Razorcake, and Word Riot. As a filmmaker Patrick has made two documentaries: Girls on Girls and The YAA Girlz and the Deadly Sparks. A new untitled film project is currently in production. His former band, ON-X—a collaboration that produced the CD It Just Get’s Darker…—unraveled in 2008. Another music endeavor is in the works. Patrick lives in Hollywood California, holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, teaches at a local community college, and facilitates writing workshops.

LT‘s Visual Art Co-editor Ashley Perez interviewed O’Neil on August 18th, 2013, at his home in Hollywood.

Ashley Perez: What inspired you to make documentaries in addition to your writing?

Patrick O’Neil: Well I got my BFA in film from the San Francisco Art Institute. So I originally started as a visual artist in film. I also drew, and my drawings lent themselves to movement, so that moved into animation, then film. It was a long process. I was a printmaker at first, making etchings. That was back in the 70s. I got into storytelling in film. But, I basically stopped making films until recently. The old way of doing film with 16 mm and splicing and cutting and AB rolling and doing all this weird stuff is unbelievably time-consuming and technically a hassle. Whereas now with digital filming on computers and Final Cut Pro and programs like that, it’s so cool and easy. It’s my first love, so I got back into it. I started doing films for this show called Skate This Art in San Francisco. The two films I made were for those shows. It was a benefit for a local charity in San Francisco where people painted art on skateboards and auctioned them off. Local artists did that and I would make a film and show it and a band would play. That was my original motivation to make films.

AP: You had a behind the scenes role in the punk rock scene. You were a tour manager and roadie. At what point did you transition from doing that to writing and film making. Or, were you always writing?

PO: No, I wasn’t. I’m dyslexic. I have a learning disability. I transpose words when I’m writing and I transpose numbers verbally. I was a visual artist. At some point in time, I was a punk rock kid in art school, I went into music. I played with a bunch of horrible bands and other people were playing in real bands and doing well. I didn’t have faith in my own self to go out and do it but I enjoyed the limelight and started getting into the production end of it. At that point that’s when I became a roadie and a road manager and toured for a while. When that all fell apart I went back to doing art work for Alternative Tentacles, which was Dead Kennedy’s label. All that was visual. Then drug use, addiction, and crime got in the way and I didn’t do anything artistic, musical, anything for 10 years. When I was eventually arrested and then incarcerated, that’s when I began writing. I started writing in journals on my own, then going to adult education classes in jail, which was in 1997.

AP: Tell me about the memoir you are writing now about your years as a punk rock tour manager.

PO: I’m trying to write that thing (laughs). I’m having a hard time writing that book. Some parts come and it’s really easy to bring up the memories and some are lost in the fog. It’s the kind of thing I keep working on. It comes in chunks. I binge write on this one and I’m not a binge writer. I’m someone who’s really structured and puts in the work every day. This book, I open up the manuscript and look at it and all of a sudden it’s not there. I don’t have it for the day and I work on something else and do other things. It’s been a tedious and slow process.

AP: Was it harder being the road manager for some of these bands or writing about being the road manager for these bands?

PO: It was really easy being the road manager for these bands, even though they were pains in the ass musicians and being on the road is incredibly bizarre. All kinds of crazy things happened. All the things you’ve heard about touring. There was an amazing amount of alcohol and drug abuse going on. I was a strung out junkie the whole time. It was the height of punk rock. It was an amazing time. I never regret any of it. It was just easier to live than to write about it.

AP: Before we talk about Girls on Girls, are there any other projects besides the memoir currently going on?

PO: Right now I’m writing fiction. I’ve never worked on fiction before. I just read a piece of fiction, “Her Name Was Martha” in San Francisco and at Beyond Baroque for the Poets and Writers event. So I’m working on that and I work on dialogue on a daily basis. I’m trying to get my dialog together. It’s one of those things I’m really happy doing; it’s getting more attention than the book I’m supposed to be writing. Which is how it works, you know. But at least I’m doing something. I’m also playing music again, which is interesting.

AP: Is that something that’s been on hold for a long time?

PO: It comes and goes. The last CD I recorded was in 2007. The band was just two of us. We played all the instruments. It’s been six years. I actually recorded the CD as my field study for Antioch University. I wrote the lyrics and with a friend of mine, we recorded the whole thing and put it all together.

AP: Nice! Girls on Girls came out in 2010. Did you create this just for Skate this Art or was it already in the works?

PO: The first film I did was The YAA Girlz and the Deadly Sparks and that was for the Skate this Art benefit and it was about women skateboard teams in San Francisco in the ‘80s. It opened my eyes to what I wanted to do. I got interested in women’s stories that juxtapose the men’s version of those stories. There are all these men skaters that had their stories told. There were all these women skaters, underclass kind of thing so I was interested in that story. Plus, I knew all of them from San Francisco, so it was readily available. Later when I had the idea to make the other film, it was the same idea. These women and their bands that I was interested in, most of them were readily available, so it was another story of something that needed to be told. I felt it was going on the same idea, so I didn’t do it just for the project and it was more of an undertaking than I had ever done before. It was almost 23 minutes; the first film was a real short short documentary at 13 minutes. So this project was much more involved. And then using the band’s music and videos I had to get permission and deal with copyrights. It was a way bigger project.

AP: That answers a question I had about what inspired a man to do a documentary on women in punk music. It is still a controversial topic. Women in metal or punk music are still fighting for equality.

PO: Right. Well first, I find women more interesting than men. I was raised by women, not a lot of male role models in my life as a child. Second, for lack of a better word, it’s an underdog story. Women never got respect in rock and roll. There are very few bands that are all women for one, and then very few of those bands that aren’t considered a novelty act. However, I had to do a bit more research with this film. Most of these bands I didn’t know. I knew Antonia (Crane) but I didn’t know her band, Dirtbox. I didn’t know Grass Widow (the last band in the documentary) until Rob Roberge introduced me to them. The other bands were friends of mine and I used to see them struggling in this male dominated industry, still do. Basically, it was unfair. It’s just odd to revisit it years later and to take a look at it and its odd because nothing’s changed.

View “Girls on Girls,” Patrick O’Neil’s 2010 documentary about women in punk rock (32 min.)

AP: Yeah, in a day and age when we’re supposed to be progressive.

PO: What’s strange is that punk rock was fighting against these established codes and ethics and so forth, but sexism was still there. As much as people wanted to say there wasn’t, there was. It’s odd that you have these movements that are so anarchistic yet they still hold on to outdated and stupid ideas. Or phobias or fears or whatever the hell it is.

It’s odd that you have these movements that are so anarchistic yet they still hold on to outdated and stupid ideas.

AP: What’s your creative process like as a writer and a filmmaker?

PO: As a nonfiction writer, I know the story. So my creative process is making an interesting story out of the story. I think that’s the creative of creative nonfiction. It’s the author’s job to put beautiful language into their story. I’m not saying I make beautiful language, but I attempt to at least. Hopefully the story is already interesting enough but you have to make the language as interesting as the story. With filmmaking, I just go and shoot a shitload of film and interview people and then work it all into the original idea and it all comes through at the end when I edit it and put it together. But, I don’t know what I have until then. Like with Girls on Girls, the film starts out with a clip from Sid and Nancy that I took off the Internet and then a bunch of still shots, interviews, music videos, and a soundtrack I compiled, and it all came together at the end. I have a friend, Patrick McCormick; he did the post-production and fixed up all the mistakes I made. He is a professional filmmaker and I am self-taught on the computer. I never had any real training on any of that stuff. His help was greatly appreciated.

AP: On your website, it said you have another film project in the works. Tell me about that.

PO: I have two, but not much work has been done on either. They’re both in the planning stage. I haven’t found the ability to do them, one is a bit more advanced than what I’m used to doing. The other film I’m working on is about online dating and love.

AP: I can forward you some OKCupid messages from my friends.

PO: That’s one of the venues I want to use. The problem is finding people who will go on camera and be interviewed. I want to find a sex worker that’s on craigslist. I want to find someone on OKCupid and maybe a successful relationship that’s come out of there—have the subjects all talk about what love means to them in that respect. I also want somebody who goes online for casual sex, not a sex worker, just someone who has casual sex online. Have three or four women talk about all that.

AP: What attracts you to a subject as a writer and visual artist?

PO: It’s all the same thing. This may sound cheesy, but finding beauty in what isn’t beautiful. I am attracted to the dark side, attracted to sleaze and unpleasantness and awkwardness and anger and violence. I’m attracted to the dejected, the homeless, the streets, criminal activity. There’s an unbelievable comment on human nature that pervades everything. That’s what I’m trying to portray in my work, although maybe not my films yet.

AP: Wait for the online dating one.

PO: Exactly.

AP: What prompted you to enter an MFA program?

PO: I had started writing when I was locked up. I was writing all the time, writing stories about crimes and people. When I got out, I kept it up. I was writing a lot of angry stuff. I was an angry guy in those days, angry at the world. I felt I had been done wrong. Through working on myself, I started figuring out that wasn’t the case. My writing started to shift to writing stories, vignettes of daily life and I started a blog in 2004. I didn’t know what computers were until I got out of prison and I learned from scratch. I made myself post 2,000 to 3,000 words a week. I wrote stories about my neighborhood and people. I did it as an exercise and a commitment. At the time, I was a drug and alcohol counselor working at a rehab center. I was there for five to six years and the Feds came in and said you have to go to school for two years to get certified as one and I was already doing it so it seemed stupid. I would have learned more things but the kicker was did I really want to be a drug and alcohol counselor the rest of my life? Did I want to do two years of school to keep doing what I was doing and get paid the same amount of money? Was I that into it? I was kind of burning out by then and I was a drug and alcohol counselor to pay back my sins of my bad behaviors of the years before. My dad, who is a linguistics professor at MIT was really encouraging me to write and liked what I was doing. He’s my editor and is really supportive of me. He said, “If you’re going to go to school for two years, why don’t you do what you want?” I already had a BA. He was like “Why don’t you be a writer?” and encouraged me to get an MFA. I thought, you’re kidding me. I hadn’t been to school in 20 years and didn’t know if I wanted to. I kind of needed to just make the plunge and see what happened. I applied to three schools. Two of them accepted me. Antioch was low residency and it sounded like the perfect thing for me. I liked Antioch. I’ve always been supportive of their social justice mission and their politics. They were a better fit and I went with them. It gave me an opportunity to find a community that I needed to say I was a writer. I kind of thought I was a writer and felt I was a writer, but it gave me the voice to say I was a writer, to feel comfortable with it.

AP: Is there anything you want to add that I didn’t cover?

PO: No, maybe not.

AP: Thank you.

Ashley Perez holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She is an intern at The Rumpus and runs the literary blog, Arts Collide. Ashley’s work has appeared in The Weekenders Magazine, BLEED, and the anthology, First Time: an Anthology about Lost Virginity.

Photo: D.Zapa Media

Luis J. Rodriguez has emerged as one of the leading Chicano writers in the country with fifteen published books in memoir, fiction, nonfiction, children’s literature, and poetry. Luis’ poetry has won a Poetry Center Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a Paterson Poetry Book Prize, among others. His children’s books—America is Her Name and It Doesn’t Have to be This Way: A Barrio Story—have won a Patterson Young Adult Book Award, two Skipping Stones Honor Awards, and a Parent’s Choice Book Award. Luis is best known for the 1993 memoir of gang life, Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (paperback by Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster). His latest book is the long-awaited sequel to Always Running, entitled It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing (Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster), released in the fall of 2011. Luis is also known for helping start community organizations such as Chicago’s Guild Complex and Tia Chucha Press, one of this country’s premier small presses. He is co-founder of Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural—a bookstore, performance space and workshop center in the Northeast San Fernando Valley, which also sponsors the “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung” Literacy and Performance Festival. In addition, Luis is a renowned gang intervention specialist in Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities as well as Mexico and Central America.

Jamie Moore: What do you consider to be your driving themes? Are they different between genres and/or who your intended audience is?

Luis J. Rodrgiuez: My themes are primarily the reality and morality of the times, my own grasping at essential truths, and the imaginative/creative impulses. I grew up highly marginalized in America—from Mexican parents, of indigenous descent (Raramuri-Mexikah) – and among the laboring migrant communities of South Central and East Los Angeles (mostly black and brown). This country—as rich and resourceful as it is—has a built-in value system. Men are over women. White skinned over dark skinned. Straight over gay. The rich and powerful over the laboring masses. My books touch on these aspects in one form or another and against the value system but also from in-between them.

Most of the world today, due to the global rule of powerful interests, has similar value systems. But in the United States there has been a long and heroic struggle to bring parity and equity to everyone – to end the value system that is mostly illusion, man-made and based on lies. We as a people have done much to remove these from our laws and land. I continue to pull on that braided and rooted thread.

The different genres tend to tap into different facets of language shaping: poems draw more from voice and the musicality of words, novels and stories from narrative, essays from ideas and issues, scripts and plays work with the visuals and dialogues that stories produce, and on and on. My audiences are both everyone and the particular people I write about, conveying their authenticity, flavors, and circumstances as skillfully and truthfully as possible.

JM: You elaborate on your relationship with your father and your son in your memoir It Calls You Back. How do those experiences inform how your approach fatherhood? Does this parallel with how you approach mentorship with youth?

LR: I had a bad example of a father—he was emotionally detached, uninvolved in the vital needs of his wife and children, but also attracted to status, material things, and, as we found out later, little girls. He was a pedophile. This is an extremely hard thing to admit and write about. Yes, I had a father, unlike most of my friends and homies. But one I wished I didn’t have. His example came to me in the relative way I detached. When I broke up with my first wife after three-and-a-half years of marriage, I pretty much abandoned my son, Ramiro, then two-and-a-half years old, and my daughter, Andrea, 10 months. I loved them, but I didn’t know how to fight for them. I learned the hard way—after both Ramiro and Andrea came to me as teenagers—resentful, troubled. I largely failed, but in time, when they were already young adults, (and my son was in prison), I became the father they couldn’t let go.

Sobering up helped—I now had to face all my demons, responsibilities, fears. I also had two sons with my current wife Trini. For Ruben and Luis, I learned rapidly to be the father they needed. I thought about what my father did or didn’t do, and did the opposite. I never yelled at my boys. I never struck them. I didn’t over-embrace them either. They know me as a stable presence in their life, much as their mother has been in the nurturing, holding way that a mother can be. My oldest kids expressed some feelings about this, but in the end they realized it was right. I’m now in a good place with all my children. And I have five grandchildren and will be a great-grandfather as well. Ruben and Luis are now university students, as is my oldest grandson Ricardo. Andrea is director of a pre-school cooperative and a recent mother (she also has a teenage daughter). And Ramiro, with three kids of his own, did a total of 15 years in prison and is now released and out of parole—gang-free, crime-free, and drug free.

My mentoring work with youth demonstrates much about what I’ve learned about fathering—so that these youngsters have strong, consistent and caring men in their lives. Most of the youth I work with, in gangs or not, have no fathers or bad examples for fathers. A mentor is not a father-substitute, but it does help to show that a man, even with a violent and addictive past, can be trusted, multi-dimensional, emotionally complex and steady.

JM: One of your books, It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way, is the only children’s book I have seen that includes a character that gets shot. What is the feedback you’ve received from this book? Did you have trouble publishing it?

LR: After Always Running, my memoir of gang life, (which has sold around 500,000 copies), It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way is my best-selling book. I believe it has sold more than 40,000 copies. The book was actually requested by the publisher, Children’s Book Press (it’s now with Lee & Low Books)—they wanted a children’s book to deal with gangs. It’s popular in inner city schools where children have witnessed gunfire, domestic abuse, and even death. Yes, it’s hard to fathom that any illustrated children’s book would have a character that is shot, but my books are situational. They thrive in the situations in which these realities need literature to push through healing, mentoring, transformations. This book may not be for all children. I’ve long conceded that students, parents, teachers and administrators should use both books wisely. For one thing, the violence is more prevalent than adults may appreciate. I also give children and youth more credit than most parents, teachers or administrators tend to do. These youngsters are quite capable and resilient. However, everything depends on the conditions, time and place. The books should be appropriate and meaningful to its readers.

JM: You founded a cultural center and bookstore, Tia Chucha’s. How has this organization grown over time? Has anything surprised you about the experience?

LR: Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore is a blossoming cultural space that I’m convinced should exist in one form or another in every neighborhood. We teach culturally relevant traditions—from Mexikah traditional dance (what is often called Aztec) to Son Jarocho music from the African/native/Spanish state of Veracruz, Mexico to indigenous language (Nahuatl) and cosmology. We provide classes in music, writing, theater, photography, puppetry, and more. Author readings, art exhibits and community dialogues. We also hold several yearly festivals, including the only outdoor annual literacy & arts festival in the San Fernando Valley: “Celebrating Words: Written, Performed & Sung.” And we have a youth empowerment project (Young Warriors), a mural collective, and our own publishing house (Tia Chucha Press). In twelve years, we raised more than a million dollars and have received support from government, foundations, and donors, including well known persons like Bruce Springsteen, John Densmore of the Doors, Cheech Marin, Lou Adler, and others.

My thanks to my wife Trini, who has shepherded this space through a dozen years, with many setbacks, but much more triumphs. And her amazing staff, all young people, all people with big hearts, from community, active in the deep soul changes needed in people and in our society. I also thank our board and a ton of volunteers. Tia Chucha’s is more an art project than a nonprofit; an imagination made into a practical reality.

It’s a surprise that we have thrived during these difficult financial times. But I’m also convinced that the arts are indispensable. They can help engender new economies, new politics, and new social relationships. As others have said better than I, a complete human being is a complete artist.

Eeverything depends on the conditions, time, and place. The books should be appropriate and meaningful to its readers.

JM: You also founded Tia Chucha Press and have published with small presses. Can you talk about the importance of independent presses to you—especially considering the consolidation of big publishers and the depersonalization of mainstream publishing?

LR: Publishing in this country is big business. This tends to push many voices and stories outside of the mainstream. Now more books are sold in Wal-Marts and Sam’s Clubs than in bookstores—and they are oriented toward white audiences. People of color, of varying sexual orientations, or espousing revolutionary ideas are de facto blocked and censored. Small presses always took chances. I was first published in small presses, such as Curbstone Press, but also in Tia Chucha Press that I created for voices like mine. Since my first book, Poems across the Pavement, came out 25 years ago, Tia Chucha Press has published around 60 other poets—including African Americans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Japanese, Native Americans, Jamaican Americans, and others. We are now doing nonfiction books featuring art, photography, interviews, and essays. With the Internet, books can be published by anyone and are also accessible to greater numbers of people. Small presses can still lead the way, even online. We need to move forward incorporating the new technology, but also expanding on the voices, stories, and expressions.

Publishing today is in deep crisis. I’m not sure how it will survive the digital revolution. Perhaps there will come a time when everyone can have their own book. Everyone may end up having their stories, their thoughts, their hopes for others to access. For my part, I continue using Tia Chucha Press to present new and vibrant writers to the world.

JM: How do you believe an organization or institution can fully live up to a social justice mission?

LR: As mentioned above, there’s a thread I follow—the thread of social justice. I grew up in the tumultuous ‘60s when society thundered with cries for equality and fairness. Much of these efforts were attacked, undermined, and/or absorbed. But many changes did occur: civil rights laws for African Americans, Chicanos, Natives and Puerto Ricans; improved labor laws for the working class; a terribly destructive war stopped; greater women’s suffrage and gay consciousness. Nothing was given to any of us. There are people who died from that time. I think of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ruben Salazar, Medgar Evers, Harvey Milk. Also those unjustly imprisoned since then, such as Leonard Peltier, Oscar Lopez Rivera and Mumia Abdul-Jamal. This very government used its powers and our tax dollars to destroy legitimate movements. Then by the 1980s, as production shifted from industry to digital technology, guns, drugs and prisons overwhelmed the poorest communities. Tens of thousands of people have been killed or set up during this time. It has taken billions of dollars to keep people poor and disempowered. The struggle for real justice is not over. We must now align our governance, resources, and relationships toward cooperation, sustainability and equity for all. In 2011, I helped create the Network for Revolutionary Change to bring together thinkers, writers, leaders, organizers, and dreamers so that the illusions established by the capitalist social and economic order (of wages, of mortgages, of borders, of trumped up wars, of drug wars, etc.) can be replaced with essential common agreements. The main thrust of our efforts should be the healthy wellbeing of anyone is dependent on the healthy wellbeing of all.

We are living in a time of completion—not just plans and actions that are piecemeal, band-aid or inadequate. We have to finally go where all our aspirations and visions have been trying to take us. The power source of any social justice organization today is the very community that gave it birth. And in connecting to the revolutionary and inventive energy emerging from the crises and uncertainties. The answers are in the problems.

JM: Do you feel responsible to write about your community/ experiences–as most of your work reflects? Do you think a writer is at their best when they “write what they know?”

LR: My writing, like my life, is keenly conscious that I’m woven into the fabric of other lives, of families, communities, and nations. This connectiveness is why I deal with aspects beyond my own day-to-day dramas. Why my work is intertwined with the issues and concerns of others. There is an ancient Mayan concept called In Lak Ech. This means, “You are the other me.” While the powerful sense of being separate is real, it can also be a dangerous pull away from the greater good. Our culture is aimed in this direction—individuality at the expense of these connections. Organized responses are belittled and even infiltrated. The point is to be independent and interdependent. To find one’s own passions and purposes, and then link these to community, schools, institutions, spiritual practices, and other social entities so that our innate gifts are given meaning, responsibility and legacy.

As for writing from what I know, yes, my community is the main palette from where I get my words, stories, flavors, and images. But what I know is both experiential and imaginative. So re-configuring my world, the people, and lessons in stories are also primary to “writing from what I know.”

JM: Do you feel there is enough space given to minority voices in the publishing industry? Has this changed since you began writing?

LR: Books are geared to, as one publication once said, “white-haired ladies in Iowa.” This may be an exaggeration, but you get the point. Although most books are sold in multi-culturally rich cities like Los Angeles, New York City, or Chicago, they tend to still speak to a “middle America” that few can actually point to. In addition, education geared to literary production is much more pronounced in mostly white, upper class communities. Schools in relatively poor working class areas—be they white, black or brown—tend to push reading as a functional exercise: To read a bus schedule or the headlines and words of a newspaper or advertising on billboards. The “standards” that these schools must meet are 7th grade reading level, the exact level which reporters and advertisers are told to write to.

Literary reading is more complex and referential. When writers of color get better educated, they tend to do quite well—winners of major prizes and even high book sales. But they are few and far between. The big publishing world is still about the blockbuster book. And that’s usually not a powerful literary read. They are largely created for a “white” market, which nobody talks about because they use terms like “mainstream,” “middle America,” or “the average reader.” People of color are now more than 25 percent of the population. In books we are probably less than 1 percent. Again, when books are sold in general markets like Wal-Marts they are not including writers of color. My book, Always Running, is doing well in spite of this—in spite of having no more advertising dollars or reviews. It’s word of mouth in America’s inner cities that have contributed to the book’s sales. You’d think publishers would want to know more about this, but they continue to tout their own tired refrain—nobody reads in urban core communities. I helped establish a bookstore in a working class mostly Mexican/Central American community that a major bookstore chain said they wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. We took a risk and the bookstore has been around for 12 years and is growing. Again, regardless of stories like ours, the big publishers stay with the narrow and limited parameters. And everyone, including so-called “middle Americans,” is shortchanged.

Let’s have a spectrum of voices, stories, and truths. Literature and books would come alive instead of declining in this day and age. Same for other media—America is where the world meets. Let’s build on that.

JM: I have read that you are planning to run for Governor of California with the Green Party. What do you foresee for the future of California?

LR: California is a crucial state when it comes to the economy, politics and culture. It is the richest state in the union and the world’s eighth largest economy, surpassing Italy and the Russian Federation. It is not, as many people perceive, a totally progressive place. Several retroactive laws have been enacted here over the years, including three strikes and you’re out, anti-gay marriage, anti-bilingual education and against public services for the undocumented, the first national tax rebellion that cut millions out of poor and working class communities. The state is 49th in education funding and dead last in arts funding. Yet it’s number one in prison construction, holding the distinction of housing the world’s second largest prison system (after the U.S. federal prison system). Presently, Democrats dominate the California’s governorship as well as the legislature. But they are continuing devastating austerity cuts and budget crunching, detrimental to key services, programs and resources, especially for those least able to take part in the economy: The Democrats often out-Republican the Republicans.

I’m running for state governor in the June 2014 primary to bring a stronger voice for a clean and green environment; to reform the prison system and address the rehabilitative, restorative and transformative needs of the state’s prison and parolee population; to establish neighborhood arts policies where anyone can have access to books, arts, music, dance, theater, murals, festivals, and more; also to open up the democratic process so candidates are not beholden to corporations and big money as well as to open up the mass media and communities to new ideas and strategies. And I’m committed to ending poverty in California.

I’m seeking the nomination of the Green Party in their state convention later this year. Right now I’m running an independent campaign that should be broader and more encompassing than the Green Party, but should help the Green Party as well. I’d like to work with other progressive candidates like Cindy Sheehan of the Peace & Freedom Party. My aim is to get the issues out to all Californians and give them a wiser and clear choice for equitable and environmental changes.

Young people should be empowered to be creative and expressive. Give them the tools, and let them rebuild their own communities.

JM: In light of your political involvement, how would you describe the connection between literary arts and politics? How do they intersect in your life and your work?

LR: For the most part, the United States is one of the few countries of the world that tries to push out politics from the academy and from literature, from the mass media and book publishing. Writers are often admonished for delving into political themes and subjects. I see everything I do as political. In fact, politics are chemically bound in everyone’s household, work, and spiritual life. I do agree that skill in knowing how to write and be socially and politically active should always be a consideration. But we cannot really be removed from political matters any more than we can shed our skin.

Rap, for example, started out as an underground political expression, decrying injustices and a class society that used race to divide and conquer. But when commerce and big recording companies got involved, it became about sex, violence, wealth, and personal drama. This is also true for reality TV shows, sit-coms, and movies. Of course, there are exceptions. The point is trying to remove “politics” from popular art and expression is a political act in itself.

I’m upfront about my revolutionary politics, my native spiritual practices, but I am also rigorous about craft and the literary form. Always Running is a memoir of gang life, but it has literary and educational value while also bringing a political perspective to this issue of urban peace, healing, and a fully engaged autonomous life.

That’s a strong political stance. I’m convinced these issues are incompatible with the current political and economic system. That in trying to achieve these, many structural changes will be required. That’s revolutionary.

I’m not advocating for violence or destructive acts. But I know a truly just and equitable world cannot exist within the clutches of the global capitalist reality, which is tied to one primary law: the maximizing of profits. In the fight for change, for clean and green jobs, for ending poverty, for providing resources to everyone so they can thrive, not just survive, we end up strategizing on how to build a new economic/political reality that can hold and sustain the full and adequate development of all.

Poems, art, songs, dance, stories, and more are not enough to get us there, but they can help point the way.

JM: How can we continue to encourage youth, as you do with your work, to support creative expression and community building?

LR: We need cultural storefronts, public arts projects, festivals and block parties, cruising sites, musical events, workshops in all the arts, and independent bookstores everywhere. I call this a neighborhood arts policy. Presently in Los Angeles, the arts are relegated to museum row, in tourist areas, in and around downtown—places like Hollywood, Live L.A., Disneyland, and the beaches. We need to break the concentration of the arts in well-off communities. The city is known as the creative and entertainment capital of the world, yet for miles on end there are vast sections of South Los Angeles, the Harbor, the San Fernando Valley, East L.A. and parts of the Westside where no cultural spaces, art galleries, bookstores, or even movie houses exist.

In L.A., the hotel tourist occupancy tax only gives one percent to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, which I understand they have to match on their own accord. There are only $26 million for gang intervention and youth development programs. Yet more than a billion dollars goes to the Los Angeles Police Department. The social energy is being directed toward more incarceration of the poor and working class members of the city. Even schools, which once looked like factories when L.A. had more manufacturing than any other city in the country, now look like prisons (some have metal detectors, police sub-stations, and use terms like “lock down”). Zero tolerance policies have pervaded schools and neighborhoods. Some 40 anti-gang injunctions, where communities are “arrested,” not just persons, now impact around 70 communities. All of these are geared against our youth, and to be clear, our black and brown youth (there are no anti-gang injunctions in white or Asian neighborhoods).

City development today is really about one thing: gentrification. People with money, mostly white, are now re-conquering the urban core. Poor people are forcibly being squeezed out. Laws, police, and developers are in collusion with this process. I say keep our communities intact. Provide educational and job opportunities and allow our youth, our mothers, our fathers, our community members to re-imagine and remake their own neighborhoods. The arts are key to all of this.

Young people should be empowered to be creative and expressive. Give them the tools, and let them rebuild their own communities. Give them training, mentoring, paintbrushes, sports, intellectual development, and see how a city can get re-seeded and blossom. I’ve taken this message to stark and violent places all over the United States but also to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico (most recently called the murder capital of the world), El Salvador, Guatemala, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, England, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, and Sarajevo.

The arts work. They save lives. It’s proven over and over again (how more evidence-based can this be). Yet the arts are constantly on the chopping block.

Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore, Tia Chucha Press, Young Warriors, Celebrating Words Festivals, my own books… I’m constantly creating (with others, of course) institutions and examples that prove this point over and over again. I won’t stop. It’s time for the rest of the world to align to this truth, to a new imagination. Why not make government an art project, with everyone contributing from their own gifts, passions, dreams, and capacities. That’s a world I want to live in. A world most people need. A world worth fighting for.

Jamie Moore received her MFA in fiction from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her fiction can be found in Blackberry: A Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, and Moonshot Magazine. Jamie writes about multicultural literature on her blog, Mixed Reader. Her debut novella, Our Small Faces, was published by ELJ Publications.