Art For / From All

I wake up most mornings with headlines filled with war, violence, destruction, and all kinds of devastating news. What kind of times are these? I owe what little hope I have for this world to the New York Writers Coalition (NYWC), a bright point in the overwhelming darkness. NYWC lived up to their mission of empowering and enriching the lives of New Yorkers of all backgrounds and experiences through the art of creative writing. Unfortunately, after 22 years, the non-profit has shut down, adding to the long list of losses that occurred during this relentless pandemic. Another loss, but also another attack against people who were equally deserving of art. Since its inception in 2002, NYWC hosted free and low-cost creative writing workshops throughout New York. Participants were overwhelmingly from communities that were considered disenfranchised or underserved, and the workshops became an accessible space for 9/11 victims, seniors, various slices of the city’s queer population, cancer patients, the formerly incarcerated, and people trapped within the limitations of Rikers Island. Over the years, NYWC expanded its offerings to include workshops in public libraries and city parks, which was where I first encountered them. NYWC is no longer in existence, but I want to share my experience with this organization with the hope of spreading its lessons far and wide, because even though it is gone, the ideas of NYWC remain transformative. 

New York Writers Coalition lived up to their mission of empowering and enriching the lives of New Yorkers of all backgrounds and experiences through the art of creative writing.

I first started writing with NYWC in Fort Greene Park 19 years ago while sharing tattered quilted blankets with other young writers. Every Saturday morning, underneath the bountiful sun, we sat on the lawn with our adult facilitators. I sat in the circle with the other teenagers, but we could hear the budding creativity from the elementary school children who sat a few feet away. We had much to say that summer, often about how society deliberately ignored us because of the varying hues of our skin, and how taxi cabs never reached the parts of the city where we lived. 

There were only three NYWC workshop guidelines, which were designed by the late writer, poet, and activist Pat Scheider, making the workshop a nurturing and encouraging space for all. First, writers generated new writing during the two hours of the workshop and, depending on the number of participants, there was time for either one or two sharing periods. Generation and creation came first. As the years went on, I continued to scribble in my notebook about how my personal ideology was taking the form of feminism and socialism and how both were influenced by my natural Afrocentrism. I told myself I wanted to be like bell hooks when I grew up. It was in these workshops where my political voice first emerged, and it would flourish overtime. 

Second, all work was considered fiction. In truth, people were free to write in whatever genre they chose, but this guideline ensured that writers could create freely without worrying about judgment. If somebody wanted to illustrate the challenges of abortion, for instance, they could write a story about such and not have it interpreted as a personal revelation. The workshop’s focus was always on supporting the writer in expressing their truth.

Third, and perhaps the most consequential, feedback was limited to positive reflections. Nobody was required to share their writing, but if they did, fellow workshop participants were asked to comment only on what they liked or what was working in the piece. All writers know that writing is really re-writing, but the NYWC workshop model sought to steer writers toward possible areas of revision in a way that honored their creative process by helping them see what was successful in their writing. 

This model provided me with the protection I needed in my early years as a writer. Loud and outspoken, I was already provoking teachers and fellow students about the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, rampant homophobia, and the many injustices of the Bush Administration. I was very grateful for those Saturday mornings spent in the park that summer because I was free to express the tension between myself and the world. And by the end of the summer, I was ready to take my words off the page and speak them aloud. The NYWC facilitators sensed this desire and set up the opportunity for me and all of the other young writers to attend the Fort Greene Park Literary Festival, where we shared the stage with Sonia Sanchez, Staceyann Chin, and the late Amiri Baraka. My signed copy of Somebody Blew Up America remains one of my treasured artifacts. This experience taught me about the powerful combination of writing and politics and showed me that both teenage New Yorkers and founders of the Black Arts Movement had the right to speak their minds. I opened my poem “Too Soon” with: I’m not ready to be seen, which can be considered typical teenage angst. But more discerning are the lines found near the poem’s ending:

You hope that them fancy words can shield me from your trepidation
Empty like the lots sprinkled across Queensbridge
You are empty
Your words are empty
Too light to push the boulder forward
Too weak to climb the mountaintop
Too insignificant to inspire
To impress me
From your spark came fire
That can’t be put out by
Your dreads or incense
Because Blackness is more than symbols
And our struggles are more than books. 

I don’t remember what events inspired “Too Soon,” but, after working with NYWC, writing became my place of refuge, where interwoven inner and sociopolitical turmoil could be safely processed. And the more I wrote, the more I viewed myself as a writer. The school year after I joined NYWC, motivated by the confidence I gained, I won my school’s African American Heritage Contest by writing an essay about my father’s upbringing in the Jim Crow South, and Mr. McGeever, an English teacher who organized the event, gifted me with my first journal as a prize. The reward for writing was more writing, and I was fine with that.

After working with NYWC, writing became my place of refuge, where interwoven inner and sociopolitical turmoil could be safely processed.

As the years went on, I became more active in NYWC. I interned with the organization, helped out with community events, and joined their Board of Directors in 2023. When the pandemic started, NYWC’s brilliant, tech-savvy staff were able to quickly transfer programming into the virtual space, allowing for participation by anyone who had internet access. We immediately witnessed the potential of grassroots writing workshops. The horrors of the world were being documented far more earnestly than what was being reported on the news. Plus, we were less isolated when we were writing together. I even gained new pen pals from Washington, California, and England––all of which was made possible by the click of a Zoom link. These online workshops provided a space to process the myriad challenges of those dark times. I remember a particularly lousy week in 2023. The brutal beating of Tyre Nichols was released to the public like it was a mixtape, and the nation was reeling over Governor Ron DeSantis’ removal of Black history in public schools. Since then, the efforts to effectively erase history from education have only intensified across the country. Grassroots writing workshops may not have been enough to address the manifestations of mounting bigotry, but they were a low-cost way to counterbalance the attacks against literacy.

It was also during the pandemic that I first began leading workshops. I started Pushing Through, first as an emergency writing workshop for people who needed an additional space to process the events of January 6, 2021. Thankfully NYWC agreed to host the workshop, and it turned into a weekly meet on Sunday afternoons. For me, NYWC workshops didn’t just create more writing, they created a desire to expand my community. Although none of the writers were expected to ruminate on ongoing crises, the writings largely reflected the political foundation of the workshop, and I engaged with poetry that was reminiscent of Aracelis Girmay’s evocative power, flash fiction, Afrofuturism, and everything in between. I marveled at the beauty of people’s kinetic imaginations and their knack for holding-on-to-the edge storytelling. The cross pollination of stories was therapeutic, thought-provoking, informative, or sometimes just silly and fun.

It was not just the writing coming out of NYWC, I took note of the proliferation and the resiliency of other grassroots artistic communities, especially in New York. Jazz musicians were hosting jam sessions in brownstones, many friends took up sewing and jewelry making, and protest graffiti was ubiquitous in the streets of Brooklyn. More people were retreating into their creativity. In 2021, I donated part of my unemployment check to Roundabout Theater, and in their thank you letter, playwright Charles Randolph-Wright asked us what we were going to do with this renaissance? We would not have had a Civil Rights Movement had it not been by the Harlem Renaissance, so I immediately implored people to grab paint brushes and their favorite dancing shoes because we were entering the Roaring 2020’s. At NYWC, we believed community support was especially vital during times when there was tremendous effort to tear us all apart. So we came together to write, releasing our buried truths. 

Voices of the unheard have always paved the path forward during times of struggle, and NYWC gave a place for those voices.

For years, the creativity, learning, and support I found with NYWC sustained me—and many others—as both writers and activists. Where do we go now that NYWC is no more? As our community copes with this loss, we are trying to figure out how to keep the work of the organization alive. One thing we know is that accessibility is essential. Some participants are working on getting published but others are writing letters to friends, personal books to leave their children, or even in their journals. Deprioritizing publishing removes the competitive nature while leaving space for the connective power of storytelling.

For teachers, I hope that they can be inspired by the NYWC and know that positive reinforcement can also be infused in the pedagogy of all teaching. Education does not solely consist of critique and correction. Beyond that, workshops improved people’s technical skills like listening and reading comprehension. And then, by sharing, we learned about each other. We were never prescriptive with who wrote or what they wrote about. It was all valid. And so we learned each other’s previously untold stories, which transformed the way we saw the world. Voices of the unheard have always paved the path forward during times of struggle, and NYWC gave a place for those voices. But while the NYWC may have shifted into memory, I can pass along their lessons and approaches here in the hopes of expanding their legacy.

Who gets to enjoy art is just as political as who gets to regard themselves as an artist. NYWC abolished this gaze so effectively. It was a space where professional writers and young children were both given the same platform. A space where we published chapbooks featuring writing from at-risk teenagers and the formerly incarcerated. Setting the trend by being fundamentally anti-capitalist by nature, NYWC’s ethos was that anyone who picked up a pen and decided to write a story of any kind was automatically and unequivocally a writer, no matter their background or experience. The osmosis of creativity was boundless and always welcomed at NYWC. I believe that everyone should all enjoy access to the beauty of life’s offerings, including the ability to participate in arts and culture.

As for me, I never received the pikes and pitchforks I asked Santa for, but my writing has sufficed as the next best thing. It’s been almost 20 years since my first NYWC workshop, but my cluttered countertop living room table has become my workplace. Since the pandemic started, I have been on a writing frenzy and have cranked out poetry, but I also have written op-eds and memoir. Pretty much everything I write is political, and thanks to NYWC, I understand that no matter how radical or whacky my worldview may be to others, my voice deserves to be on equal footing with others. The organization is now cemented in the past, but its influence will always be an inspiration to my craft and whatever community I build around writing.

Featured photo by DS stories.