SoundPages
SoundPages is produced by Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of the Jack Straw Writers Program. This podcast features interviews and live readings from artists in the Jack Straw Writers Program. Each year a series of twelve episodes is produced featuring the current Jack Straw Writers and curator.-
Shoes - Catalina Marie Cantú
2017 Jack Straw Writer Catalina Marie Cantú has been working a on a series of short creative non-fiction stories as a way to speak to young women about feeling okay with who they are in a Photoshop world. Her conversation with curator Jourdan Imani Keith covers bullying, the influence of teachers, and the ubiquity of “Buster Browns,” the title of her piece in the 2017 Jack Straw Writer’s Anthology. “We have to build bridges with each other in order to move forward in this day and age, despite the political rhetoric that would have us do otherwise.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Divination – afrose fatima ahmed
After a series of personal transitions, 2017 Jack Straw Writer afrose fatima ahmed went from “running around and achieving” to spending a year and a half on the Olympic Peninsula to be with herself in nature. Her collection of poems blood gold and honey, which grew out of poetry commissions at farmer’s markets and festivals, has become an intricate tarot deck with accompanying rituals. When she sat down with curator Jourdan Imani Keith, they discussed the idea of poetic divination being a tool to reach into your subconscious and experiencing connection and reflection through the work. “If somebody buys the deck and chooses to use it as a tarot deck, or to pull a card for inspiration or contemplation . . . they’re continuing to create the story of each poem. They’ll be embodying it, and the meaning that they draw from it will be theirs.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Pilgrim - D.A. Navoti
2017 Jack Straw Writer D.A. Navoti describes his piece “One Pima Pilgrim” as a love-letter/goodbye letter to the Gila River Indian Community outside of Phoenix, AZ, in the Sonoran Desert. In the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Dan explores the beauty of the landscape and what it feels like to be an outsider in his own community. His conversation with Jourdan Imani Keith ranges from being inspired to create a version of Walden with an atheist perspective to Dorian Gray as a window into literary possibilities. “You’re born on the motherland; you’re supposed to stay there and that’s where you’re gonna die. But . . . ever since I was a kid, I just wanted to explore.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Salvage – Brandon Young
2017 Jack Straw Writer Brandon Young spoke with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about hoarding and its range of meanings and expressions, from bountiful treasure to suffocating trash. Brandon and Jourdan explore the idea that hoarding can provide salvation from an emotional trauma and is often a sign of an insecure environment. For Brandon’s work, he interviewed people about their relationships with objects and discovered the memories and potential that can be contained in things: “She looks back and says, ‘I wore this then’”; “A coupon might be used one day. An old pair of shoes might be repaired.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Smoke – Steph Kesey
Steph Kesey‘s piece in the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is an excerpt from a book-length memoir in progress about her father’s battle with mental illness. She talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about this experience, how she began as a sculptor and became a writer, and how she finds form by putting the brutal and the beautiful next to each other. “I think . . . mental illness hitting a family . . . you have people at their most vulnerable, and the love that’s required to overcome something like that is the glue of families in those moments.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Rage - Jamaica Baldwin
2017 Jack Straw Writer Jamaica Baldwin talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about finding her voice in poetry, adopting silence as a kind of armor, and the male gaze in art and literature. “Women’s lives are surrounded by violence; some of them endure it, some of them go through it, and I like the poets who don’t shy away from that. Where their skin is peeled back and their bones are exposed. I like that. . . . And I think it seeps into my own work.”
Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Apples – Shontina Vernon
Jack Straw Writer Shontina Vernon‘s piece in the 2016 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is inspired by her youth in rural Texas and subsequent departure to the big city to attend a performing arts school. She talks with curator Karen Finneyfrock about this experience, her current work with youth through 4Culture’s Creative Justice program, and the importance of being able to tell your own story honestly: “If you haven’t really explored your own narrative, your own sense of what is true for you internally, I think it’s really hard to do it for your characters on the page.”
Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Sister – Carolyne Wright
2016 Jack Straw Writer Carolyne Wright talks with program curator Karen Finneyfrock about her current work in progress – a collection of poems about important women in her life, including her mother and sister – as well as her long career, global travels, and postgrad brush with the influential poet Elizabeth Bishop. “She said things like ‘. . . You’ve got to read all of the classics, and you’ve got to read all of the romantics and the Renaissance poets and the metaphysical poets and modernist poets and you’ve got to practice writing in form.’ So that’s what we did, we wrote in form. We wrote ballad quatrains, we wrote sestinas, I think I even tried a villanelle!”
Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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A Lesser Love – EJ Koh
2016 Jack Straw Writer EJ Koh found her calling as a poet at the very end of her college experience, after years of acting as her own guardian while her parents worked in Korea. She talks about her unusual adolescence and the sudden realization that she was a poet with program curator Karen Finneyfrock. “Everyone’s like ‘What’s happening to you? What’s poetry doing to you?’ And then I had to stop and think about it, and I said ‘I think it’s making me a better person, I think that’s what’s happening.’”
Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Worst-case Scenarios – Ramon Isao
2016 Jack Straw Writer Ramon Isao‘s short stories combine obsession, fear, and disaster with humor and absurdity. He talks with program Curator Karen Finneyfrock about his fascination with worst-case scenarios, his early realization that he could be a writer, and how he knows a story is finished. “I know that I’m done with them when I want them out of my life! Like, they’ve got to go.”
Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
