~
Literary Program Fosters Writing, Bridges Urban/Suburban Divide
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 Linda Arntzenius
The man seated at the head of the large table in the Trenton Rescue Mission has come voluntarily. The man to his right is in drug court and has been told to come, as have several others, whose real names can't be used in this report. Another, taking his seat on this cold Wednesday afternoon, is struggling to get his GEDs and was glad of the opportunity offered by this new program from People & Stories/Gente y Cuentos (P&S).
Like several others, he has already attended similar literary sessions in Trenton's Bo Robinson Correctional Facility (a moderate security facility for men over 21), participating in the Mutual Agreement for Early Release From Prison (MAP) Program.
"Crossing Borders with Literature" is a pilot program from P&S, sponsored by the Princeton Area Community Foundation and a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts — one of only 13 New Jersey organizations to receive such funding.
"This is a classic example of local philanthropy working with a national organization," said Pat Andres, Executive Director of People & Stories, the group formed on the principal that access to literature is almost as important as access to clean water and air.
People & Stories
If literature is a nourishing resource that hasn't been well distributed, P&S is a faucet that allows more people to tap into it. "Literature is free and it's powerful," said board member Henry Reath, expressing the belief that underlies the organization founded by Princeton resident Sarah Hirschman in the early 1970s.
Since then, P&S has grown to include several programs in France and in South America. "The program has given birth to all sorts of programs that I never thought of originally, such as intergenerational programs and mixing African American and Latino students," commented Ms. Hirschman.
"You don't have to have a Ph.D. to talk about love, children, relationships, violence. The coordinator has to find the little knots in the text that will produce a spark. We don't want to teach the story; we want to motivate people to hear their own voice. That's what the whole discussion does for people; it helps them be more self-assured; it gives them permission to fly."
The Trenton Rescue Mission is one of four sites piloting the new program that includes a writing component; the other three are in Philadelphia.
Besides the added writing component, the makeup of the group is a little different, too. The emphasis is not just on bringing literature to those who have had minimal exposure to it, as in classic P&S programs, but in bringing together two groups that might otherwise never have run into each other, bridging socioeconomic, racial, urban and suburban divides — individuals from the Trenton area, primarily black men, and suburban professionals from the Princeton area, primarily white women. Literature spans all of those differences. That's the idea.
It was an idea that P&S board member Georgia Whidden was skeptical about at first. Traditional P&S programs serve people who have had little access to literature. With Crossing Borders, half of the participants, the suburban half, have had no such barriers. "It's crucial for the group to come together," she said. "How would that work with an urban/suburban split?"
If the comments of the participants are anything to go by, the answer is a resounding yes.
"I had to come here because of drug court," one man volunteered. "But now I love writing. When I was in school I wasn't interested. Now it's more than a hobby. I'm learning grammar, where to put commas."
Having participated in a P&S program at Bo Robinson, Princeton resident Aline Haynes rearranged her work schedule to take part in the Trenton sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. "I feel like I live in a bubble in the world and I would like to get to know people from a totally different environment," she said. "I would somehow like to be able to bridge the gap between our economic classes more often."
Ken from Trenton said that although his initial involvement in the program was involuntary, he has no regrets. "I love to read and this fits my personality," he said.
"I'm here to better myself," said another, a prison inmate. "My son has just graduated college and I am going back to school to work toward my education."
Lawrenceville resident Liz Hagen hails originally from South Africa and describes herself as a student for life. She is a voracious reader who loves to discuss books. Ms. Hagan retired as communications director for the New Jersey Press Association in December 2000. "I thoroughly enjoy the wit and wisdom of the other participants," she said. "They have been through tough times and have keen noses for whatever is genuine and insightful in the stories we read."
According to Mary Gay Abbott-Young, Executive Director of Trenton Rescue Mission, having members of the community spending time with people who are homeless, who are hungry, who are addicted, or who have just come out of prison is priceless. "You can't buy that kind of service," she said.
Reading Aloud
When copies of the story have been distributed, the facilitator, Ms. Andres, read aloud "The Man Who Found You in the Woods," by Catherine Ryan Hide, a contemporary author best known for her book Pay it Forward, made into a movie starring Kevin Spacey.
For as long as the story takes to tell, there is nothing but the story and the images in ones own head. The Rescue Mission, the freeway ramp, the back streets of Trenton disappear. For a brief period, separated worlds are forgotten. There is just the room, the group, and the story. After the reading, there was immediate discussion. One of the group's most eloquent participants responded to the story by composing a poem on the spot that gave voice to the child abandoned by his mother in the woods. "No contact to my flesh besides a multicolored knit cap and an over-sized sweater … moist leaves …. No one to hold me, beside things that have no feeling."
Born and raised in Jersey City, and with an in-and-out of jail history, one listener enjoyed the way the story connected to thoughts about his own life, his mother, and to his own children, about whom he wrote: "They learnt to walk and talk while I was on the phone." Relating to the story's theme of abandonment, he wrote "It's been 42 months since I've laid eyes on my children. There's 3 months to go before I see them again." He described lying in his gray-walled cell playing and replaying tapes of his life in his head, fearing that his kids will leave him. "Will they love me, or will they reject me." At the end of his own mini-story, he wrote that on seeing his kids again, after the initial hugging, his kids asked eagerly, "can we have ice-cream."
The discussion focused on an aspect of the story open to interpretation, one man taking heart in the fact that the mother who left her child in the woods under a pile of leaves had first wrapped the child in a larger sweater and a knit cap.
One participant focused on the bond between the boy and the man who found him, and the aspect of fate working in the story.
Through the entire session, the focus was on the story, sharing an understanding of it, to be sure, but also, what is more important, on each person's unique response that draws as much upon their own lives as upon the extent of their formal education.
If the latter might be used as a yardstick to divide the group neatly down the urban suburban divide, the former serves as a unifying link. By reading and discussing the story, the group's members become aware of their own connections to a narrative and to the lives of the others in the room; they discover common threads that transcend the physical and socioeconomic boundaries that define communities.
Typically, the short stories read don't exceed ten pages in length: stories such as "The Shawl" by Louise Erdrich, "Mountain Birthday" by Annie Lamott, "A tree, A Rock, A Cloud" by Carson McCullers. The list of authors is wide ranging and includes Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Edwidge Dandicat, Raymond Carver, Nadine Gordimer, Elmore Leonard, Alice Munro, John Updike, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, and Shay Youngblood, to name just a few.
"These are beautifully written stories that reveal how complex life is," said Ms. Whidden. "They don't make things easy and when you listen to people connect with these powerful stories, you can see how moved they are — by the substance of the story, by the values and by the ideas — you can see them looking at people around the table in a new way, just as I did when an amazing point was made by someone, and this is terribly arrogant thing to say, but I might have made the assumption that that person wouldn't have been able to see that in the story. I left a humbler person and with respect for these stories."
Crossing Borders
Honestly exploring one's assumptions is an inescapable part of "Crossing Borders." Wondering about the lives of the urban participants she meets has made Ms. Haynes question the justice system. "I've seen that these guys are just like me but that they somehow, for whatever reason, got off on the wrong track."
Ms. Haynes feels that her "urban" counterparts gain respect for themselves when they find how good they are at discussing the short story. She has seen them blossom when reading their own writings to the group. Ms. Hagen, who was worried initially about being seen as a suburban do-gooder, quite irrelevant to the lives of the others in the group, found that under Pat Andres's even-handed leadership, that hasn't happened. "Literature is the central theme and everyone's contribution counts. Seeking common ground is automatic and people strike sparks off each other," she said.
link to information on the Crossing Borders Project