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.-
Fireflies - Suzanne Warren
Suzanne Warren’s 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program project is a collection of short stories called In the Country of Husbands that marries domestic realism with magic realism and focuses on the lives of women and girls. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss her background in experimental film, themes of rape culture, and the outsider status of single women. “At one point I actually said to a friend, ‘It’s not like I’m going to go in their houses, fuck their husbands, and drown their babies.’ . . . That kind of satiric, hyperbolic statement—this kind of frustration and rage and paranoia — was the seed for this story.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Survivor - Putsata Reang
Putsata Reang’s project for the 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program is a memoir that chronicles her life growing up in rural Oregon and her family’s journey escaping the war and genocide in Cambodia. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss the difficulty of writing a memoir involving people who are living, displacement in its many forms, and Reang’s mother’s love of the television show Survivor. “Growing up, I didn’t really understand why, of all the TV shows, she loved this show so much. . . . I thought, you know, Mom’s, just, being crazy. Well, after I heard the story of how we escaped Cambodia and survived — Actually, I do think she can win.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Birmingham/Mars – Gabrielle Bates
2019 Jack Straw writer Gabrielle Bates spoke with curator Kathleen Flenniken about her collection of poems about growing up in the South. In their conversation, they discuss her array of projects, including a poetry comic collection, surrealism in her writing, and finding patience during a project. “I keep going back, lately, to this great quote in Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, wherein he talks about being an artist isn’t ‘about the day’ . . . It’s about ‘ripening like a tree’ and ‘letting the sap come as it will’ and trusting that ‘the seasons will change.’”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Comedy – Josh Axelrad
Josh Axelrad began his storytelling career on The Moth, and his Jack Straw project is a collection of short stories meant to live in the world of prose rather than performance. In his conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss his circuitous path to becoming a writer, the way we present our lives online, and testing new work in front of a live audience. “The audience really doesn’t lie to you. If there’s something there, they’re going to be with you . . . And if there’s not or if what you’re saying doesn’t seem true emotionally, you’re going to feel it physically.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Empathy - Michael Schmeltzer
Jack Straw Writer Michael Schmeltzer spoke with curator Kathleen Flenniken about his poems that explore the line between good and bad, and his own history as a biracial Japanese-American man. In their conversation, they discuss the juxtaposition of tenderness and atrocities, the conflicting narratives about the Japanese during war, and the value of empathy and compassion. “You can stand up for what is right and you can fight for justice and equality and all these things that are very much needed — but if you do that at the cost of your own humanity, whatever you were fighting for is lost.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Wet - Leanne Dunic
Leanne Dunic’s project for the 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program is a book of lyric pose called Wet that takes place in Singapore, inspired by the thick haze of forest fires during a writing residency. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss rolling with the punches, the influence of nature, and the overlap between Wet and songwriting for Dunic’s band Deep Cove. “I guess, if I have some themes in my head and . . . some sort of topic I want to write about, I will write about it in all the ways I can write about it — So, songs or poetry or fiction or nonfiction.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Suzanne - Christianne Balk
2019 Jack Straw writer Christianne Balk spoke with curator Kathleen Flenniken about her series of poems of early 20th century voices inspired by her grandmother’s life as a young nurse serving in France during WWI. They discuss the importance of research in her writing, her background as a biology major, and inspiration taken from naturalists like John Muir. “I said, ‘You know, I don’t want to write papers. I want to enter these people’s lives and write poems.’ . . . And, so, I just started writing . . . inspired by their writings, and touching, perhaps, on things they never touched on in their writings but were autobiographical or emotional journeys that they took.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Lena – Samar Abulhassan
2019 Jack Straw Writer Samar Abulhassan’s poetry project unites several different bodies of work: in particular, a project called “Lena,” set near bodies of water. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss the relationship between writing and listening, writing and movement, and the parts of our identity that sometimes stay hidden in the background. “How do we open up space for the parts that we send away or are just too way deep for us to even know that they are missing?”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Oblique Sonnets - Rena Priest
Jack Straw writer Rena Priest spoke with curator Kathleen Flenniken about her poetry project Sublime Subliminal, inspired by Jim Simmerman’s “20 Little Poetry Projects.” They discuss the richness of languages, where poems start, and expectations of identity. “In a way, language, using it for poetry or powerful prose that changes a person’s mind or changes a person’s relationship to the world, is like a type of magic.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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Selves - Sylvia Byrne Pollack
Sylvia Byrne Pollack’s project for the 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program is a collection of prose poems written from the perspective of two fictional characters who deal with disability and mental illness. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss Sylvia’s history as a scientist, her return to writing, and personification as a tool to grapple with one’s own struggles. “It’s been clear that if I want to be of service, one way I can do that is to use my poetry to talk about these issues and to, hopefully, pull back the curtain for other people so that they can see what it might be like to experience some of these things.”
Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
