Guest blogger Soheil Rezayazdi reminded us several weeks ago that there are more New Yorkers without a home today than at any other moment in recorded history. Soheil and his coalition, United to End Homelessness, are focused on making homelessness a prominent issue in New York City’s 2013 mayoral election. United has developed a clear agenda to guide the conversation, and to make ending homelessness and expanding affordable housing a mayoral priority. All New Yorkers have an interest in the coalition’s important work.

Another powerful collective working to end homelessness is POOR Magazine, an Oakland, California based organization led by poor people and indigenous people. Through grassroots organizing, POOR creates space for silenced youth, adults and elders to tell their stores, to advocate for themselves, to share their art, and to develop their vision. Concerned that even city policies that strive for fairness are redirecting financial resources away from the community and into an ever-expanding shelter and subsidy bureaucracy, POOR members took things into their own hands. They turned homelessness into “homefulness,” a sweat equity, permanent co-housing, education, arts, micro-business, and social change project for landless/houseless and formerly houseless families and individuals.

Homefulness is a poor people-created vision of good housing, where home, garden, childcare, education, community, and art- and media-making are fluid and shared. It is housing that is permanent, that offers a balance of privacy and community, and that you can have access to regardless of how much money you have. Homefulness is worlds apart from shelter beds, or transitional housing for low-income people that comes with paternalistic strings attached.

You can learn more about POOR Magazine and the Homefulness Project.

Chelsea Lemon Fetzer received her MFA in fiction at Syracuse University in 2008. Her work has appeared in Stone Canoe, Callaloo, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. Currently she is also an instructor for the PEN American Center’s Readers and Writers Program. In 2009 she founded The Create Collective, Inc. a non-profit organization working to bring collaborative arts projects and workshops to community based organizations. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on her first novel, Rivermaps.

I have been writing poems a long time too but…a poet?  I didn’t think I’d earned it.  I hadn’t studied it the way I studied fiction in school/college/grad school.  Sitting down with a poem felt like a selfish act. I didn’t know or care if I was doing it well.  I wrote poems when I needed a break, whether from the novel I’d been writing or the constantly unfinished narratives of life.  I wanted the satisfaction of endings and poems arrived at them so quickly.  I could end three in a month! For me that is amazing.  I also love the exercise in economy, creating a story or new kind of narrative in just a few lines.  I love how the form has so many possibilities, so many ways to break the rules of grammar.  I interloped in one of Michael Burkard’s open poetry classes at Syracuse.  This began a study.  Soon after, I had three poems selected for publication and I added “poet”, sort of tentatively to the bio the journal requested. I really began seeking mentors after that.  I had the great opportunity to study with Ruth Forman at VONA, as well as Linda Susan Jackson through Cave Canem.  I call myself a poet now, not for any accomplishments, but because I am on the path.  I’m studying.

Despite all the warnings, the fears, and the half-baked explanations, one fact remains: we are still here. Although nobody will ever be sure when the world will end, the long history of apocalypse predictions, and the new ones that spring up all the time, illustrate humanity’s continued fascination with the end of the world.

For today’s prompt, write about the day after a supposed apocalypse. Has your prediction come true? How do people react? What happens (or doesn’t)?

Lazarus kinda/sorta/definitely killed it with her sonnet ”The New Colossus“, an excerpt of which is immortalized on a plaque that sits nestled at Lady Liberty’s Foot. You’ve probably heard those famous lines, because they’re kind of a big deal:

Give me your tired, your poor

your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

There’s much more to that poem, much more majesty and beauty than those lines can even begin to convey. Seriously, you should really go read it.

As for your own writing, we ask you, this week, to write from the perspective of Lady Liberty. If you get stuck,  return to the images and phrases of Emma Lazarus’ powerful poem/statement on immigration, freedom, and compassion.

In the course of the film, family secrets come to light: Sarah’s dad is not her biological father—her mother, a charismatic actress who died when Polley was 11, had an affair while away from home acting in a play.

Polley not only learns the identity of her biological father, but also hears one of her interview subjects reveal that her mother considered having an abortion when she got pregnant with Sarah. She unfolds these events on screen through shifting points of view and stories told by multiple participants, including: her father, her biological father, siblings and family friends. She herself stays mainly behind the camera, asking questions, directing the action.

Polley has described the film as an experiment in storytelling, a meditation on the shifting nature of memory and truth. It’s more about “why we need to tell narratives about our lives,” she has said, “than about my family and the nitty-gritty details about us.” Even so, “Stories We Tell” is also an investigation aimed at ferreting out precisely those nitty-gritty details.

For me, the most moving moment came near the end when Polley’s dad, the man who raised her, gently asks if one of her motivations was to have a pretext for asking the very specific questions that were on her mind, to get an accounting of some sort. Polley simply assents and moves on. Even though this exchange contradicts her stated rationale for the project, she is honest enough to include it in what we see.

The scene serves as a reminder that artists’ purposes and desires are mysterious, often even unto themselves. This may be especially true even when the subject matter is autobiographical and yet it scarcely matters.

What counts is the work itself.

‘Homophobia’… What does that word actually mean?   We take it to mean ‘afraid of homosexuals’ or ‘afraid of homosexual activities’, but it can be given a literal translation of ‘afraid to be gay’.  When I do stand-up, I remark that I believe that I am, in fact, literally homophobic.  I then explain that I studied theater at University and thus was terrified that I was gay, but didn’t know it!  Most men around me were and seemed perfectly happy!  I felt like the black… I mean gay… erm, I mean straight sheep, separate from the flock.  I got over my foolish fear and am happy to come out and say, I did theater, and I am straight.

Jokes aside, the difficulties faced by the LGBT community are very challenging.  I, for one, can’t imagine what it must be like to feel compelled to hide who you are, day in day out.  I am proud of all my gay friends, my gay boss, and people of all sexual orientations who have the strength to face this adversity.  If the US continues in the direction it is headed in accepting homosexual individuals and couples both culturally and legally, within our lifetimes we will hopefully see members of the LGBT community treated as complete equals, the stigma of their sexual preference gone.

For this post, I’d like to explore a selection of 5 recent moments that have affected, or will affect, the gay rights’ movement in the US.

1)   Obama’s ‘evolving views’– This was something that Obama’s liberal base had been begging for for some time.  Hurried a little by the un-coachable, but honest and delightful Joe Biden, Barack Obama finally came out and announced his support for gay marriage, including it in his first State of the Union address of his second term (a first for any US president).

2)   Repeal of ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ – One of Obama’s first acts since announcing his ‘evolving views’ was to repeal Bill Clinton’s military law ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’.  With its repeal, gay and lesbian service members cannot be disciplined (or discharged) for their sexual preference.  Though it will take some time for all gay and lesbian military members to feel completely comfortable being open with their sexual orientation, this is a start.

3)   Supreme Court considering DOMA and Prop 8 – The Supreme Court is reviewing two of the most hotly contested laws being considered in the gay-rights arena: ‘DOMA’ or the ‘Defense of Marriage Act’ that defines marriage as between a man and a woman; and ‘Proposition 8’ that outlaws gay marriage.  Public opinion is pushing for a change on this divisive issue with more than half the country, including a disproportionate number of people under-30, supportive of gay marriage.  In site of a number of very vocal hate groups, most notably the Westboro Baptist Church, polls show that the majority of people support the repeal of both DOMA and Prop 8.  A decision should be announced this summer.

4)   Jason Collins coming out – The first active male athlete of a major American sport announcing ‘I am an NBA center.  I am black.  I am also gay’ is being heralded as a turning point for gay athletes everywhere.  Members of the NBA and the community at large have been very supportive of Jason’s announcement, and hope that the admission from an athlete in one of the most demanding and ‘masculine’ sports will help decrease discrimination suffered by homosexuals everywhere.  The significance of his second sentence ‘I am black’, indicates perhaps that there are certain social groups, such as African Americans, where prejudice will be harder to overcome.  Hopefully Jason’s courage will inspire others to be more accepting of people of all sexual orientations.  It should be noted, however, that Jason is by no means the first athlete to come out of the closet.  Most recently, the number one pick in the WNBA draft, Brittney Griner,  casually announced that she was a lesbian.  Though Jason’s announcement is significant, the courage of other athletes like Brittney should be remembered.

5)   Gay marriage becoming more prominent – this is a general observation rather than a definitive point.  More and more gay couples are getting married.  Though we live in a fairly liberal hub, New York City, it is no longer unusual to see couples of all sexual orientations getting married.  This was clearest to me when my rugby coach recently got married to his longtime partner, and not a single person on the rugby team batted an eye.  We were all as happy (or as sad ) for him as we would be for any other newly weds.

Happy International Day against Homophobia.  I hope that an article like this one will soon seem antiquated and irrelevant.

For Schneider, writing is an inherently spiritual act; a kind of prayer:

“Both prayer and writing invite us to explore the full range of human awareness, out to the edges of what we have experienced and beyond, out to the edges of what we can intuit, and beyond. Both invite us to imagine, to be brave in what we imagine, and to keep the doors of our imaginings open.”

As a reluctantly spiritual person, this comparison made by Schneider initially made me uncomfortable. I’m a bit of a cynic when it comes to prayer, to thinking about a higher power, or to worshipping some larger, unknown force. Perhaps this is because on my own bumpy path through our often crazy world, I have come to take comfort in the fact that at the end of the day, I must rely on myself. When things feel impossible I tend to turn inward to the reservoir of strength I’ve come to realize I possess, rather than reaching outward to a mystical presence. But this, in some sense, is Schneider’s point.

Writing is about what Schneider calls “mystery,” as is prayer. Schneider explains that this mystery need not necessarily take the form of a conversation with a deity, but could be found in our relationships with nature, with loved ones, or with the larger universe. When we sit down to write, we reach as much internally as we do to something much larger than ourselves. This practice takes both courage and honesty – as does the act of prayer. How the Light Gets In successfully bridges the gap between the two, ultimately leaving its reader with both an intimate knowledge of the author’s spiritual path, as well as a deeper understanding of their own inherently spiritual writing practice. Part memoir, part manual, How the Light Gets In offers signposts along the sometimes scary path we attempt to carve for ourselves as writers and as humans.

Because I lead writing workshops for the New York Writers Coalition, I knew when I opened Schneider’s book that what she offered would resonate with our work. Reading this book left me with the distinct impression that writing is, at its core, a very brave endeavor. This is the same impression I try to cultivate for participants in workshops for NYWC. Every workshop we lead throughout New York City is modeled after Schneider’s inclusive and supportive method, as detailed in her excellent book, Writing Alone and With Others. This method is founded on the principle that everyone is a writer, and that these writing workshops should be safe spaces that emphasize creative expression over criticism. Schneider has devoted her life to this practice, and in doing so has invited writers all over the country to share in the quest for mystery she describes so ardently in this latest book.

Each time a New York Writers Coalition workshop leader sits with a group of writers – in prisons, in libraries, in shelters, in hospitals, and in many other settings – they are practicing what Schneider preaches. The contours of our workshops are formed by guidelines that aim to respect the vulnerability all writers feel when they put pen to paper, which is why workshop leaders write along with participants. In How the Light Gets In, we feel that Schneider is writing alongside us. She speaks to the experiences of writing—and of living—that are frightening, painful, and also beautiful, and reminds us that writing is its own kind of light through that darkness.

Join us at Greenlight Bookstore tomorrow night, Friday, May 17^th, to see Pat Schneider read from How the Light Gets In, followed by a reception. You can purchase How The Light Gets In here.

The mall is like a ghost town. Some stores are closed, and those that are open remain empty. Booths that were once surrounded by people are gone. Of the few that remain, only one person lingers there. The food court is quiet. Some of the popular restaurants are closed, including the Harbour Lights Restaurant. People congregate outside where the Brooklyn Bridge is seen in the distance. Damage to the exterior of the pier is still evident.

In spite of its ghostly appearance, there are signs of improvement at the Seaport. Plans to launch a new summer program during Memorial Day weekend are in the works. The Howard Hughes Corporation, which manages the development of the Seaport, plans to host events that will highlight culture, food, and new retail. These events will go on throughout the summer season. This is an effort to rebuild businesses and bring revenue to the Seaport after Sandy. The corporation also has plans to revitalize and create a new South Street Seaport.

But this change is not sitting well with some business owners. A business owner I spoke with told me the redevelopment of the Seaport may force small businesses like his candy shop to move. “Where are we going to go?” he asked. “We have to move. This place won’t be the same anymore.” When asked how it would affect his business, his reply was abrupt: “Not good.”

NYWC’s summer writing program for youth honors the power of the written word to build inclusiveness and give voice to the thoughts and experiences of everyone, not just the privileged and powerful. Past Lit Fest readers include Amiri Baraka, Jennifer Egan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rick Moody, Gloria Naylor, Sapphire, Sonia Sanchez, Colson Whitehead and many others.

Due to funding cuts by the National Endowment for the Arts, NYWC must raise $6,000 before the summer.  It costs NYWC $25 per young writer (per week) to provide the Fort Greene Park Summer Youth Workshops free of charge to the public, totaling $150 per writer for the summer.

Please consider making a contribution here so that we may continue to provide this program to the dedicated and talented writers of tomorrow — and remember to join us for this year’s Fort Greene Park Summer Literary Festival on August 24!

Here, a few of NYWC’s dedicated workshop leaders and participants discuss the work, share their writing, and remind us of the importance of bringing voice to the voiceless in New York City.

Special thanks to Louise Crawford, Erick Fix, and Marian Fontana for their hard work in making this video happen, as well as to all the writers and workshop leaders who appeared in the film. Enjoy!