<h1>Archives</h1>
    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: “The Route” by Peter DeMarco

    November 15, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    The Route

    -Peter DeMarco

     

    I didn’t expect to see my first prostitute in a Manhattan bakery.

    Uncle Charlie said that we’d see them on the streets closer to lunchtime. He also told me they liked to wear mini-skirts. This woman wore a white dress and had a cast on her wrist. She looked like Cybil Shepherd from The Heartbreak Kid and could’ve been a schoolteacher who’d taken a bad fall on the ice.

    It was a chilly April morning in 1975. A lethargic fly had been buzzing around the glass donut case. Flies are slow this time of year, I said.

    She smiled.

    It was my first day working with my uncle on his 7-Up truck route. I was 13, on Easter break.

    Uncle Charlie had pounded the 7-Up truck’s long steel stick shift rod and clutch pedal for 25 years, through the hated cold and snow, and couldn’t wait until he retired and moved to Florida. He grew up in East Harlem when it was an Italian neighborhood, with an education that didn’t get beyond ninth grade.

    When we left the bakery, Uncle Charlie told me I had just seen my first prostitute.

    I felt grown up in a 7-Up company jacket covered with patches of the various brands they carried, like RC Cola and Nehi, and had wanted to believe that an older woman found me attractive and funny.

    But I didn’t feel so special now, and there was an odd sadness to discovering a prostitute in a quotidian moment, morning coffee and donuts with the rest of us.

    The 7-Up plant in the Bronx was a massive colorless structure. The warehouse contained dozens of trucks and endless wooden skids of soda. The soda was also made there, which surprised me. I thought it originated somewhere magical, and when I wandered into the area where it was manufactured I thought of Willy Wonka’s secret factory.

    The bathroom was an education, a perverse form of hieroglyphics. In the boys’ bathroom at my junior high on Long Island, the worst I’d seen was so-and-so sucks.

    The drivers were what my social studies teacher called a melting pot of New York: black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese. They prepared paperwork for their routes, drank coffee, smoked, read the Daily News, and cursed the weather, the city, and whatever sports team lost the night before.

    It was the first time I’d heard adults curse. I drank coffee with the men and memorized their dirty jokes. It topped homeroom.

    They asked if I had a girlfriend. Not at the moment, I said. They told me to go out with lots of girls and not to settle down for a long time. I just craved one girlfriend, a first kiss, I thought to myself.

    My first crush was on a girl who lived on a suburban street named for a tree that never lost its color. It would’ve been a nice metaphor for a future together.

    One day, during kickball, we threw furry caterpillars at each other on the field. Everyone screamed at us to get the ball. It was my initiation into love.

    She wore red hot pants that showed tanned legs. Her brown hair was cut with bangs, and her brown eyes had a sleepy look that opened wide when she saw me.

    A few days later, she began to pay attention to another boy. He had longish hair and a new bike with a banana seat. I said something mean about her in the cafeteria. She came up to me in the school yard and punched me in the cheek, a solid knuckle on bone shot which filled my eyes with tears, and in shame I pulled on her shirt until it came down over a small nipple, my first view of the female anatomy, and then her friends were kicking me.

    Recess ended and everyone walked away. I stood near the chain link fence of the backstop until the school aid waved for me to come inside.

    Another driver asked me if I was going to take over Uncle Charlie’s route one day. The kid’s going to college, Uncle Charlie said.

    I said that I thought of being a stunt man in the movies because I liked jumping out of trees, or a movie star.

    In the morning we delivered to a couple of Gristedes supermarkets and tiny candy stores. When we stopped for lunch Uncle Charlie passed me a brown paper bag that contained copies of Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Oui, courtesy of the vendors who wanted to satisfy an adolescent kid’s prurience.

    I was full of Christmas morning giddiness. I’d never seen pictures of naked women. Playboy was on the top rack of our stationary store’s magazine display, and I’d linger near the comic book rack with the hope of sneaking another peak at the barely visible woman on the cover.

    I stared at the photos and then looked out the open window of the truck to where the prostitutes were gathered. A bar and restaurant on the west side called Mifgosh appeared to be their meeting place, maybe to catch up on gossip or compare tips. The women on the sidewalk were not as attractive as the women in the magazines, but they were real. Some of them had shapely legs, which I liked best. Most of them had on high-heels but some wore boots that came all the way up their calves. The red lipstick was too garish on some.

    The prostitute from the bakery, with the cast, didn’t appear to fit in with the type of women who smoked cigarettes on the sidewalk in mini-skirts. She might’ve been what Uncle Charlie referred to as a call girl, someone who worked for more money in a private capacity. This knowledge about the city made me feel streetwise, and when school resumed I’d return with a stash of magazines and an account of what real life was like 50 miles from the maple tree-lined streets of suburbia.

    One of our stops on the truck was the Roseland Dance Hall on W. 52nd Street, Uncle Charlie’s favorite spot to dance to Big Band music during his bachelor days. That’s when people really knew how to dance, he said.

    I’d seen him dance at weddings, very graceful, the same dark blue rumpled suit for every affair. The Cha Cha, Foxtrot, Lindy, he could do it all.

    Uncle Charlie had remained a bachelor until he was 53, when he married my aunt, who worked as a secretary in Rockefeller Center. They lived in a condo in Jackson Heights, Queens, which Uncle Charlie had bought when he was single.

    After work he’d turn on a Charlie Chaplin bar light and make a gin and vermouth martini, happy hour he called it, a tradition he’d begun when he was single. Then he’d put a record on and read the paper while my aunt cooked.

    I’d read a Spider-Man comic on the couch and think about a girl I liked who sat in the row next to me. In the bathroom, I’d stand with my shirt off and flex my skinny biceps. They seemed to look bigger from lifting cases of soda. I noticed a few more hairs under my arms that didn’t appear to be there at the beginning of the week.

    In the Roseland’s kitchen, the manager made me an ice cream sundae, which I ate alongside a dark dance floor.

    I asked Uncle Charlie how old he was when he had his first girlfriend. He didn’t remember, but his advice was to always leave a woman smiling. You never know when you might need each other again, he said.

    My first kiss wouldn’t happen until I was 17, which felt like a lifetime.

    It didn’t occur in the way I had idealized it. I still had not been on a date, had not met a girl’s parents, had not opened a car door and escorted a girl to her stoop.

    Someone from school, who had turned 18 and was celebrating in a bar, asked me for a birthday kiss. She was a sarcastic class clown type who hung around with the popular crowd, and had never acknowledged me.

    I kissed her on the cheek but she grabbed me and put her tongue in my mouth, where it remained for the next half hour. Then her hand found my erection and rubbed it through my tight jeans under the bar.

    She left with her friends to visit another bar and said we could continue this on Monday, after school, but when I stopped by her locker that day she walked away.

    I felt used. But I was out to use her too. I’d been lonely, desperate for so long, manipulated by images and fantasies, unaware of how blurred the line was between what was real, and illusion.

    Uncle Charlie and I had steak sandwiches for lunch everyday at a restaurant called the Shandon Star. One afternoon I needed a break from the cloud of cigarette smoke in the restaurant and went outside, where it had begun to rain.

    I saw a young woman who looked to be a prostitute on a pay phone. I wondered if these women were runaways, and if they made a choice, New York or Hollywood, actress or prostitute, or both.

    The girl hung up and waited out the rain in the booth. I had a crazy fantasy of getting an umbrella out of the truck and escorting her to someplace dry where she’d thank me and say her mother agreed to wire her bus fare back to the mid-west so she could finish her high school education, and then she’d admit to still being a virgin and tell me I was mature for my age and she’d give me her phone number and say how she’d wait for me to get older and even if I never used it I’d remember those numbers for the rest of my life.

    Many years later, I saw my first crush in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, only a mile from that same kickball field, with two small children. I’d heard stories about drugs and divorce. She had the look of someone who smoked cigarettes incessantly and worked in a bland insurance office or travel agency.

    I doubt she remembered that moment with the caterpillars. Girls like her never remembered the stuff that guys like me placed in that sacred memory closet.

    I thought of her street sign, named for a tree that never lost its color, the first sign I remember being aware of that was not my street.

    It was the first time I’d looked closely at her since that day on the kickball field, because after that day she faded away into the cliques and crowds of adolescence that I could never be a member of, and I’d avert my gaze whenever I passed her in the hall.

    She had tired eyes, wrinkled skin, bleached hair, the appearance of someone who had a hard life.

    I never followed Uncle Charlie’s advice and left them smiling. My relationships with women had been full of anger, jealousy, possessiveness, self-hatred, and abuse. All of it came from me.

    I was about to move into the city, after remaining a commuter and visitor for so many years, but it was a different place. The theaters and peep shows on 42nd Street were boarded up and the prostitutes were ghosts.

    It’s about time, Uncle Charlie said, when I called him in Florida and told him.

    During my week on the truck, I became adept at weaving my hand truck through office workers and tourists, the spaces of hotels, restaurants, bars and bodegas, like an apparition, as if I’d become part of the city through osmosis.

    Our final delivery was a famous steak house. Giant lobsters flopped around in a tank. My nephew from the suburbs, Uncle Charlie told the manager, and rubbed my hair.

    Back on the sidewalk, I put my hand truck into the 7-Up truck’s bay for the last time, watched by the half-naked woman from an Oh! Calcutta! theater poster, who seemed to possess secrets of how life was really lived.

    I’d miss seeing the prostitutes, with whom I felt an odd kinship. One day, when a stack of cases had fallen off my hand truck, and I’d cursed, two of the women had laughed. But I saw it as a symbolic acknowledgement of a bond, that even though we were all bereft in some way, and unknown to each other, we shared a perverse kind of intimacy.

    On our way out of the city, we bounced through potholes and coursed through the taxis that covered Broadway like a yellow blanket.

    The sidewalk in front of Mifgosh was empty.


    img_0807

    PETER DeMARCO was first published in The New York Times when he wrote about hanging out with his idol, writer Mickey Spillane, during his previous career in book publishing. Peter published a Modern Love essay in The New York Times where he wrote about how his path as a love addict led to being selected to the first cohort of the New York City Teaching Fellows in 2000. Peter has been teaching English and film at the High School for Media and Communications in Washington Heights for the past 16 years. Peter’s fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a storySouth Million Writers Award.

     

    Blog, NYCWP Blog, Past Events

    Remembering Nancy Mintz

    October 14, 2016

     

    It is with enormous sadness that we announce the passing of Nancy Mintz, dear friend, respected colleague, and former Director of the New York City Writing Project, after a valiant battle with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family and friends, but also to Nancy herself, who loved us and all we stand for.nancy-mintz-bio

    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: Three Poems by Jinnette Caceres Schaudt

    October 11, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    I BE …

    I be the teacher who doesn’t conjugate the verb “to be”

    Purposely

    So you can feel me

    I be being the hands that hug the boy who wants to be a good man

    But sings in class when he can

    He be starring while I be reading because he can’t

    I be talking with my hands so she can reach for them

    Because she be the flower growing on the pavement

    I be the one you roll your eyes to

    Because I know you

    Being busy with your body

    When your mind deserves care too

    I be the teacher who would buy time

    For dreams deferred like they are mine

    So I be planting seeds to see you grow

    And hope that you do know

    The laughs I be

    The ear I be

    The hope I be

    The love we need

    I be.


     

    THE MOST EXPENSIVE COMPLIMENTS

    Some lovers still come to place flowers on their graves

    Now it is your turn to pick a good quote

    For a tombstone.

    My heart is a cemetery.

     

    You want to love me, I know.

    You want to clear the dust and bones,

    Pry the fingers from my mouth because you say you like my smile,

    but I am hiding.

     

    Your presence does not respect my mourning,

    or how I’ve come to like the lonely

    fingers on my keyboard

    because I can trust myself better this way.

     

    So if you are here,

    Don’t come shaking your cup asking for change,

    or wanting my kisses when I let you stay,

    I am complicated.

     

    You want to love me, I know.

    You want to unbury the bones

    And split the remains

    To help me sort the contents,

    But I am not a victim.

     

    Your hands are warm and inviting,

    And you pay the most expensive compliments

    to have this friendship.

    … I like your interest.

     

    I’m just too afraid I’ll take it all

    Just to hide it like the rest,

    Bury you and your intentions In a mass grave.

    Right now, I am selfish.

    Right now, I am. I am. I am.


     

    EVERY WOMAN ON A MIND’S MIND

    She is the excess

    God promised men who could not find their own way

     

    That nasty piece of art

    A fatherless condition left un-medicated

     

    Daughter of soul

    Hurting inside brown skin

    With a counterfeit smile

    Wondering where her soul’s been

     

    She is the dust collecting

    between album covers

    on dressers

    and in chests too occupied

    to offer her some notice

     

    she is again the nameless loose strand

    looking for one hand

    to blow a kiss her way

     

    The digression many want to put their stress in

    She is the type that’s sought after at night

    that lay you keep on standby

    sugar-coated and bloated on one too many lies

     

    A child growing on secrets

    The love tongues slave for

    but hearts deny

     

    The unpainted Mona Lisa

    priceless until she’s tried

     

    Her love means less

    Too often circumcised by some misfortune…

     

    She is the prescripted bitch

    you take between off and on relationships

    with the mother of your children

     

    The clandestine

    fruitless brood to purposely amuse you

    She looks far too good to be a thief

    but that’s how she’s been casted

    so she’s gonna act like it…

     

    This woman knows to tuck her wishes

    Between kisses

    Comes in through little sips of sin

     

    She who was born from a pardoning in heaven

    mutilated by one too many heartbreaks

    Too numb to give two fucks about whose separation she caused next

     

    She is

    every woman

    on a man’s mind

    begging for the right to be loved right.img_5462 JINNETTE CACERES SCHAUDT is a Dominican writer, poet, educator and social justice activist. She is a graduate of New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences where she earned a Bachelors of Arts in Communications and Latin American Studies. She earned her Masters in Urban Education from Mercy College’s New Teacher Residency Program. In 2011 Jinnette was selected as a fellow with the New York City Writing Project. Her poetry has been featured in the publication Off the Subject: The Words of the Lyrical Circle of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol, a collection that also featured an introduction by Sekou Sundiata and a closing from Nikki Giovanni.For the past 8 years, Jinnette has taught 10th grade English and middle school literature at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science. In the 2016-2017 school year sjoinedthe Special Education and English Departments at the Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont, NY.

    Blog, NYCWP Blog

    Stories of Impact

    September 6, 2016

    The NYCWP is very excited to announce the publication of Stories of Impact! This ebook is a collection of essays that chronicle the work and impact of the New York City Writing Project’s on-site teacher-consultant program. Since 1981, the program has placed full-time teacher-consultants in schools across New York City to work closely with teachers in a variety of ways: planning lessons, team teaching, coaching, and providing resources, as well as working directly with administrators to advance support for writing instruction.

    A free PDF of this publication is available at The National Writing Project’s site. Those who prefer to read on Kindle (or the Kindle app) may purchase an .mobi file for 99 cents at Amazon.com.

     

    Screen Shot 2016-09-06 at 12.41.46 PM

    From the book’s introduction:

    The intent of this effort was to articulate for ourselves and others what we knew experientially—the value and potential of professional development in writing and reading across the curriculum that (1) is situated in long-term relationships with teachers formed around their work and (2) views the agency of each teacher as a key component of these professional relationships. Stories of Impact, begun in earnest in 2007, is one result of that effort.

    The chapters that follow, grounded in the day-to-day realities of professional development in urban public schools, make visible the small but skillful acts of “good workmanship” (Berry, 1981, pp. 275-281) that comprise the craft of working alongside one’s colleagues over a sustained period of time. Each narrative demonstrates the importance and complexity of being responsive to the particulars of context, place, and person; of allowing teacher and TC time for the slow altering of ideas this work often demands, and of the negotiation not just of ideas but of standards, which this work is so often about. The writers also portray what they must grapple with and rethink as Writing Project TCs given the data-driven accountability that determines much of what goes on in our city’s schools and classrooms.

    -Elaine Avidon, Editor

    The NYCWP is excited to see this publication available to the public, and we would like to congratulate everyone who contributed by writing their stories. Find out more about Stories of Impact and its contributors here.

    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: “The Power in Memoir” by Marcus B. McArthur

    August 26, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    The Power in Memoir

    -Marcus Brandon McArthur

     

    I walked through the door of my first interview in New York City public schools and, after a beguiling conversation about my resume and skill set, walked out of the building with a job offer for the school’s sole special education teacher position. I didn’t understand at the time that receiving a job offer after a fifteen-minute chat in the principal’s office was a poor omen for what was to come. I didn’t know that in competently run buildings teachers did crazy things like interview with other teachers, write essays about their pedagogy, and even discuss the curriculum materials they developed throughout their career and training. After all, there is only so much that fast-track certification programs, like the one I enrolled in just two weeks prior, could do to prepare naive aspirant teachers like myself for navigating the motley crew of personalities that comprise the largest bureaucracy of America’s rawest city. But, being oblivious to the salivating of exploitative administrators over untenured fresh meat and knowing nothing of how much money was being saved by hiring me instead of a veteran, I happily accepted the offer in a building that seemed like a fairly decent place to be.

    My first three years teaching would be spent in a building, where on the first day I reported for work, a defiled classroom awaited the school’s union representative in retaliation for his advocacy on behalf of the school. This is the same building where my colleagues and I would stand in the echoed hallways of first period, each one of us hoping that our class would attract the school’s first student that day. In this building, I watched letters go into the teaching files of those who spoke up; this is the place where I received my first file letter as a warning shot to stay away from the rebel rousers. It is here where I witnessed the bewildered adolescent faces after the departure of 50% of the staff. This is the place where in just three years, two of my students were snatched from me in New York City streets.

    Enduring in the profession after the seasoning of those three years sowed seeds of discord from which I am still recovering. Staying and remaining, rather than opting for whichever flavor of exit enticed on any given day, required acceptance of what I was and what I was not. To survive in what, at times, felt like a windowless asylum, was my greatest test. While maturity and distance from the experience proved revelatory, my personal growth was no substitute for the professional development I desperately needed in the fundamentals of the teaching craft. Beyond the few little pedagogic experiments implemented in my resource room each year, my progression in teaching practice was minimal. Pedagogical growth wasn’t on the agenda for the administration at which I served. Instead, remaining a neutral party in the brewing war over the soul of the school and fueling the data machine with special education paperwork completion rates that masked the uninspiring education we offered our city’s most vulnerable were the utmost priorities.

    I departed the school after my job came under threat of excessing with the consolidation of our school’s satellite campus into our building. After consulting with the school’s union representative, he assured me that it was best to go, but also mentioned that he’d put in a good word for me at a school he used to work at in which he thought I’d be a good fit. After a back and forth dance with my potential suitor, I was offered a job, immediately accepted, and would reset my teaching career in a quirky little school located in the heart of Greenwich Village.

    I like to start off with memoirs. These were the words first shared with me by my co-teacher during our first planning meeting for the semester long Humanities class we would co-teach in the fall of 2013. While familiar with the genre, I had never considered its pedagogical utility. My resource room experience cultivated a skill set that was more tutor than teacher—more counselor than classroom manager. The following day, he dropped on my desk the provocatively titled “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America” by Kiese Laymon. I think we should read this. I think they’ll like it. I green lighted the piece without reading a sentence.

    *

    I’ve had guns pulled on me by four people under Central Mississippi skies — once by a white undercover cop, once by a young brother trying to rob me for the leftovers of a weak work-study check, once by my mother and twice by myself. Not sure how or if I’ve helped many folks say yes to life but I’ve definitely aided in few folks dying slowly in America, all without the aid of a gun. – Kiese Laymon

    A crisp silence blanketed the room. Laymon’s prose captivated the class. As we proceeded through the text, we paused often to grapple with themes students elicited: racial violence, white supremacy, suicidal thoughts, redemption. I teach in a New York City public high school. My students are the Trayvon Martin generation. They are the victims of Bloomberg-era Stop and Frisk.

    Laymon’s recounts of encounters with trigger happy cops, black-faced frat boys, and the seeds of American violence offered my students an entry point to ask real questions that adults are too often too afraid to ask. Real questions that require Americans of age to hear the fears, hopes, and spirit of America’s youth. Real questions that sift through the bewildering myths that acutely impact their daily realities. Real questions that force us all to consider our own place in the enduring contradiction of the American project.

    Perhaps, for some, we provided one of few chances in their schooling experience to share their voice with the guarantee of it being heard. For others, the text avowed their belonging in a school community that too often clouds blacks and brown bodies in an unwelcome haze. For all, we taught five specific writing skills—authentic voice, introspection, dialogue, vivid description, and paragraphing. As we read, students quietly annotated their texts for examples of the conventions they sought to emulate in the writing of their own memoir essays.

    *

    Just take a pull. I never smoked in my life. I looked at the cigarette as I smelled it and touched it. I was afraid of so many things. What if I go back home and my mom smells me? Especially that I cut class the whole day, what if they call her from her cellphone saying that I was absent? I was with nina. The girl who’s popular, who has a lot of cute boys that like her. I liked the way she dressed and acted. She was so cool and nice, but she did things I never knew she’d do. I took a pull and inhaled it into my lungs like she told me to do. I took like 7 pulls and got that dizzy feeling. I liked it. Ever since, I started smoking. I made a year, just yesterday. – J.A.

    Jaws dropped as Josephine, the first student in our class to share, read an excerpt of her memoir during our class’ Memoir Cafe. The laughs, gasps, tears, and interpersonal revealing that proceeded solidified my belief in the power of memoir. I felt pride in their poetic truths as they staked claim to inheritance of the American literary tradition. They reaffirmed my equivocal faith that their survival stories will be the catalyst that jolts America’s faint pulse to tenuous stability.

    Writing is intuitive, intimate, and belies attempts to bottle it into a universally successful formula of expression. It is more truthful to acknowledge the uncertain evolution of language, genre, and craft. Just as adult generations of past misunderstood the linguistic shifts initiated by black and brown teens in the South Bronx in the 1980s, today’s teachers can only hope to begin to understand Generation Z’s ascendance to cultural supremacy. If the pioneers of Hip-Hop waited for validation of their expression the most significant cultural movement of the 21st century would not have been born.

    Too often, we teachers of writing, serve as saviors of expression and we coach conformity. Too often, the bureaucratic pawns, have successfully reigned in our revolutionary pedagogies that proclaim the literacy of the postcolonial subject superior to that of the metropolitan descendent. Too often, we teachers of writing, have acquiesced instead of revolted against the corporate coup signified by the mandated performance of standardized writing in public schools.

    The inherent creativity of putting pen to paper—of translating abstraction to enduring language—is being sacrificed for outcome based thinking that has more to do with parental tax brackets than the instructor that stands at the head of the classroom. The waves of depression I experience throughout a given school year stem, in part, from those uninspiring weeks leading up to those days when we jail our young people’s expression under the guise of assessment. As I train my students to regurgitate the formulaic essays that will be used to justify or deny them opportunities that are their divine right, I despise the hypocrisy of which I am the primary ambassador. I am the messenger that preaches the infinite possibility of creative expression while simultaneously coaches its destruction.

    That is not to say that today’s teacher plays no role in exposing students to the technical form inherited from centuries of literary heritage. Undoubtedly, part of our job is to establish a link to tradition. However, the most powerful and transformative opportunity we can offer our students is to open the doors of exploration to the individualized writing process and allow students to write for themselves and audiences they seek to engage, rather than blindfully conform to mandated form and scripted audience.

    It is from this place that students begin to tap the refreshing well of expression that will nourish their survival struggle. It is here they will locate the expressive arms that will defend their ascendance in a supremacist society. It is from within that they will cultivate the discipline of precise control, the integrity with which they wield their own power and the experience of peak freedom manifested by their radical acts of creation.


     

    ISIMcArthurMARCUS BRANDON McARTHUR is a New Jersey native and Brooklyn based writer, educator, and political activist whose work focuses on race, economic inequality, education, and cultural politics.  He received his B.A. in History from Morehouse College in Atlanta where he focused on the shared historical plight of African descendants through studies in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, South Africa, and Brazil.  Marcus received his M.A. in Latin American History from Penn State and M.S. in Special Education from LIU-Brooklyn.  He has published works with the Mellon-Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Journal and the M.O.R.E. Caucus blog of the United Federation of Teachers.  He currently teaches English and Social Studies as a Special Education Teacher at City-As School.

    NYCWP Blog, Past Events

    From the Director’s Notebook: Post-July Update

    August 4, 2016

    NYCWP Director's Notebook

    August, 2016

     

    Dear NYCWP Community,

     

    For many reasons, 2016 was another great summer at the NYCWP. This July saw a shift in thinking about how we structure our summer programming and what we offer teachers; I continue to be amazed not only by the flexibility of this community, but also by everyone’s willingness to reflect on their practice, to grow as an organization, and to expand our understandings of who we are as educators, writers, learners, teacher-leaders, and teacher-consultants. There has been so much growth for the NYCWP over the last few years, and none of this would be possible without the hard work of so many dedicated people.

     

    Each year I say that the participants in the Invitational Leadership Institute (formerly the Invitational Summer Institute) are increasingly exceptional, but I think this is in large part due to the incredible efforts of Jen Ochoa and Priscilla Thomas, who again facilitated the ILI this year. This year, the program saw substantial revision, and Jen and Priscilla’s willingness to constantly re-think, re-write and re-create the summer experience constantly amazes me. This shift stemmed NWP encouragement of Project sites to reconsider the ways “summer” could exist in digital spaces. We combined this idea with a school-year component, so that we could continue to engage Fellows in their classrooms. As the program continues into the school year, Fellows will create and put into practice classroom inquiry projects to be shared with the NYCWP community at the Teacher-to-Teacher Conference in the spring.

     

    The Second Year Fellowship, now in its third year, was also revised. This year’s 2YFs were supported by the tireless efforts of Grace Raffaele and Christy Kingham. Grace coached the Fellows and engaged them with cornerstone NYCWP workshops; the Fellows all agreed that Grace’s ability to share the work of the Project was a great example of the type of mentoring they will now engage with. Additionally, Grace and Christy supported the 2YFs as they co-facilitated professional development workshops for teachers and student-leaders in the Peer-Enabled Resource Classroom (PERC) summer schools at Lehman College and Juan Morel Campos Secondary School in Brooklyn. PERC’s is a fascinating model that engages students and adults as co-teachers, and we were excited to be a part of helping these teachers and students think about their pedagogy. We also established a strong connection to a program within the Lehman College community. The 2YFs will also continue their work throughout the school year; they will support the first-year ILI Fellows as they craft their inquiries and plan their workshops.

     

    This summer again saw the facilitation of Open Institutes for teachers of grades K-5 and grades 6-12. In the summer of 2015, the NYCWP revived the Open Institutes in response to the need to provide summer PL to new and novice teachers.This year, Marina Lombardo and Mayra Negrón co-facilitated the K-5 Open, while Christy Kingham and Melicca McCormick worked with the 6-12 Open. The feedback for these programs has been very positive, and, through the efforts of these teacher-leaders, the NYCWP’s approaches will now enter many classrooms and schools in the fall. Equally excitingly, many of these teachers have already expressed interest in participating in the ILI next year!

     

    In addition to the K-5 and 6-12 Opens, we created an additional Open for teachers of New Language Learners. This emerged out of feedback received in 2015, when participants expressed a need to further explore how the NYCWP’s student-centered literacy practices could be used to specifically support NLLs. The NLL Open was facilitated by Jenny Adelman and Molly Sherman. Like the grade-band specific Opens, the feedback for this program was very positive.

     

    This summer we added an offering to our summer programming for teacher-writers: The Summer Writers’ Residency. In the style of Bread Loaf and Yaddo, we brought together seven NYC teachers who spent two weeks with Mallory McMahon workshopping their writing and  studying the work of established writers in a variety of genres and forms. Our teacher-writers responded to the two weeks by asking to expand the program to three weeks next summer. The writers capped the experience by reading their work at KGB Bar to an enthusiastic audience.

     

    Everyone’s hard work has more than paid off. Participants across all programs were so happy about everything they learned; the feedback has been incredible; and we met the needs of record numbers of teachers and students, which means we will change learning for so many NYC children. We can move into September knowing we’ve provided opportunities for teachers as writers, teachers as learners, and teachers as leaders, reflecting the NYCWP’s core beliefs. We facilitated workshops both established and newly-designed, identified the things we continually do well, and, in the reflective practice that is foundational to the Project, continued to move forward with new innovations and make shifts where needed. To everyone who made these developments and this summer possible, thank you so much. To everyone in the NYCWP community, have a restful August, and stay tuned for more updates in the fall.

    JkH signature_email_size copy

     

    Jane Higgins

    Director

    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: “The New Economy,” fiction by Charlie Keyheart

    August 2, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    The New Economy

    -Charlie Keyheart

    AND HERE IS Main Street. Just minutes from the hotel, best shopping on The Island. Hermès, Burberry, Apple—oh, Miss, don’t stand there. Fingers come up sometimes through the grating. See? Here, just step aside and let me handle…it. There! See if that one comes back.

    Yes, we’ve ordered fine mesh sewer covers. But with the new economy, factories run only two months a year. Oh, they work the two months. Assemblers glad to be back on the line—imagine! All part of the deal.

    We tried the long workweek in fashion now, over sixty hours at one point. So many issues a permanent workforce creates. Honestly, who needs it? We’re entirely self-sufficient. Come Christmas, The Island will be churning with industry. Just have to wait a little longer.

    An oversight? Perhaps. I see it as a lesson. A pioneer community like ours learns along the way. But many are the days, most in fact, passed in utter and complete tranquility. You may see actual skipping.

    It helps if you keep road-center.

    Moving on, then. Yes, the streets on The Island are remarkably clean. Sparkling? Why thank you. Believe it or not, we have no sanitation staff. I attribute the tidiness to three causes: no homeless, no roving gangs of troublesome youth—you can add yet-to-be incarcerated criminals to the category—and especially, no vermin. There were. Native species of rat, cockroaches—size of small lobsters, I’m told. And stray dogs. All gone now.

    Occasionally guests report hearing a yip, a snarl, a piercing verminy shriek from underground. But listen again, I always say. You’ll never hear it twice. Just your imagination.

    Moving on, here’s a three-star restaurant, one of several. There’s the new Apple store. Smallest island in the archipelago to have one. Forbidden fruit? I think not!

    What’s that? Ah, the fencing. You will have noticed, no doubt, the high fence with razor wire ringing The Island. We get many questions about it. Yes, it is electric, but don’t worry, you won’t get shocked. The approach is barred on both sides by recessed anti-personnel reactors. This is a loose-soil island, you see, easily permits of tunneling, burrowing. Not to worry! Our engineers have paved the surface with the most unyielding of materials. But at the shores, and even, sometimes, from the seafloor new tunnels find egress. Can never predict where. A problem. We’re working on it. The fence is merely precautionary.

    I’m sorry? Paint it blue? To blend with the horizon? Hmm. Instead of the black? I’ll bring it up at the next council. Thank you.

    So the end of our tour brings us to our beach ferry, known affectionately as “Imelda.” Yes, The Island has some of the most attractive white sand beaches in the world, strewn with marvelous marine specimens—not a foot of which is accessible. You see, now, why this is so. But feast your eyes on our solution. Glimmering in the distance, that blinding hump in the sea? We call it “The Mushroom.” Largest artificial beach on the planet, and only twenty minutes by ferry. A deep-water trench there, good thousand feet of strong ocean current separates sea floor from swimmers.

    Even if a tunnel were extended to that outrageous length, no one would survive the ascent (we tested it). And if someone did somehow survive, the current would have long washed him past. Next stop, Cuba!

    Yes, there are security towers on The Mushroom.

    As today is Sunday, you may wish to begin your perambulations across the square, opposite our exquisite baroque fountain (real coup landing that) at the Cathedral of St. Lawrence. More of a chapel, really. Great story about St. Lawrence. He was a young deacon, charged one day by a ruthless Roman prefect with handing over all the riches of his church. Failing this, he would be killed—roasted alive on a gridiron. Can you imagine! Anyway, he spends the next three days distributing all the church’s treasures to the poor, then he sets off for Rome—heard this one?—and tagging along behind are—

    I’m sorry? There are a dozen security towers on The Mushroom. Each fifty feet high. Oh, they use a sniper rifle—not sure which. Something Navy Sealish. If you like, you can ask the mayor. He’ll be dropping by to discuss our students’ dazzling test scores. The hot topic around here, lately. Everyone wants to know why our students perform so well, what’s our secret? My own son, for example—never a mathematician—has been acing pre-calc. His scores are so high, in fact, that I actually suspected him of—

    What? Good heavens, no! In my six months here, they have never fired once.

    Ladies and gentlemen, there is no, I repeat, no threat to you from our economic system. On the contrary, we are currently being vetted by a Chinese-led international team, hope one day to be a model for the global community. The World Bank is “cautiously optimistic.” If you take stock for just a moment, I’m sure you’ll appreciate how safe, how fortunate, how…oxygenically elect we are.

    There is little—no doubt, in my humble opinion, that this island is paradise.

    On that note, I ask that you help preserve our little heaven on earth. There is an auto-recycling program on The Island. Just dispose of your litter at the fern-colored sidewalk chutes. The fern is a nice touch, isn’t it? Can’t tell you how long we wrangled over that one.

    Rest assured, the litter will take care of itself. But I must remind you not to linger at the chutes.

    And for God’s sake, keep road-center!


    NoPhotoCHARLIE KEYHEART teaches at the Adult Learning Center at Lehman College.

     

    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: Three poems by Kruti Suba

    June 17, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    Given Name

     

    The day she was born they called her her grandmothers’ reincarnation.

    Same smile, same face, her presence

     

    Just a few breaths old she was defined as the past born again.

     

    As she grew older they pampered and coddled her. Hugs and presents. Time and attention.

    Soon she learned to get her way.

    Only a couple of years old then, she was defined as a princess from a fairytale.

     

    Time flew by and every so often she would hear a new name, a new title, a new recognition. Some stayed, some

    didn’t.

     

    With new relationships came more definitions a dancer, a friend, a girlfriend, a foe, an ex; until it became

    difficulty to keep up. Confused, flustered, desperate to be, to find herself in those names, she kept looking for

    the person she was supposed to be, wanting to do justice to her many names.

     

    Trying not to let anyone down or prove anyone wrong. Trying hard to be what they saw in her, she worked and

    worked to be all of it, all at once, until the weight of her being was too much to carry. She fell, no longer being

    able to hold the burden.

     

    Then they looked at her fallen, broken and called her a loser, a failure. So she looked up once again, gathered

    every last bit of courage she could find in her and started all over again to be what they said she was. And as she

    stood up again she smiled to herself because she knew there were more names she’d have to keep up to.

     


     

    The Cursed One

     

    Don’t touch her

    Run away

    Be as far as you can

     

    She knows no love

    She knows no feelings

    She has ruined many a precious moments

     

    You can’t love her

    You can’t keep her close to you

    She will ruin everyone who lays even a finger on her

     

    No, she can’t be liked

    No, she can’t be in your life

    No, not even behind closed doors

     

    So what if you once liked her

    So what if you once thought her to be worthy of your love

    No, she is not the one for you

    Not today

    Not ever

     

    Hide her

    Throw her

    Please, please, please don’t wear her

    Yes, this green dress

    No. No you can never wear it.

     


     

     

    An Ode

     

    We met under the most unusual circumstances.

    I hadn’t prepared for you, wasn’t expecting you.

    Then suddenly out of nowhere there I was, in your arms,

    you by my side all night long, nursing me to health as if it was what you had always done.

    Me with my head on your shoulder, comforted by your warmth,

    a feeling I had long forgotten.

     

    We met under the most unusual circumstances.

    I hadn’t prepared for you, wasn’t expecting you.

    Then suddenly out of nowhere we were walking hand in hand around this city of dreams as if it were just the

    thing we’d been doing all our life.

    You with your smile and insights into your life, small peeks into your heart,

    a happy day thus far.

     

    We met under the most unusual circumstances.

    I hadn’t prepared for you, wasn’t expecting you.

    Then suddenly out of nowhere I am being pampered like never before.

    Coffee in bed, breakfast at the table, chocolates in teal wrapping-

    small things you do, no words needed.

     

    We met under the most unusual circumstances.

    I hadn’t prepared for you, wasn’t expecting you.

    Then suddenly out of nowhere we were sharing dreams and hopes and aspirations and fears.

    Holding each other close,

    revealing ourselves to another,

    and now here comes the bumpy ride.

    You can see the crazy and let me find it in you too, but

    at the end of the day when I lay by your side and you hold me tight,

    I fall asleep to your heart beating right next to mine,

    to that rhythm I sleep

    knowing there’ll be more of you on the other side.


     

    IMG_7793Born and raised in India, KRUTI SUBA has always been inspired by the strength and determination of women in her life – her works reflect that. As an ESL teacher at Sunset Park High School in Brooklyn Kruti empowers her diverse class to tell their stories and take pride in their culture.

    NYCWP Voices

    NYCWP Voices: “Stockings” by Richard Ploetz

    June 2, 2016

    Once monthly, the New York City Writing Project celebrates the teacher-as-writer by publishing works of poetry and prose written by its teachers. If you are interested in submitting your work to NYCWP Voices, please read the submissions guidelines and submit your work by email to voices@nycwritingproject.org.


     

    Stockings

    – Richard Ploetz

    “. . . he’s shy, kind of nice . . .

    We exchanged phone numbers . . .

    He gave me a present,

    A pair of stockings.

    Why would he think I’d want . . . The kind you’d

    Hold up with a garter belt. Yes.

    Why would he think . . . Yes, I

    Gave them back. Did he think I’d

    Wear them? For him. No, I

    Gave them back. Why do you

    Think I’d want these?

    Do you know what he

    Said? He’d exchange them.

    He could get me a red pair. Who

    Does he think . . . Red? I don’t know

    If they were the correct size, I

    Didn’t . . . No, thank you, I said.

    A pair of stockings, he doesn’t

    Even know me. No, I said, don’t

    Call me. Really, why would I . . .

    The embarrassing thing is . . . we

    See each other every day.

    We work together. He’s, he is,

    he’s kind of nice, but . . . stockings?”


    RGPheadshotJournalRICHARD PLOETZ, Playwright, has had plays produced in New York City at the WPA Theater, Playwrights Horizons, Theater Genesis, LaMaMa ETC, Ensemble Studio theater, Emerging Artists Theater, Theater for the New City (Deceit 2013, Versailles 2014, Old Flame 2015) and the Kraine Theater. He studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama and received an MFA in Fiction from Columbia. Richard teaches composition and playwriting at NYU. He is a long term member of the faculty at Lehman College in the adult degree program. Richard is a member of Emerging Artists Theater and the Dramatists Guild. www.RichardPloetz.com

    NYCWP Blog

    Alison Koffler-Wise receives BRIO Award, 2016!

    May 20, 2016
    url alison web
    The NYCWP is thrilled to announce to our community that our very own Alison Koffler-Wise is the 2016 recipient of the BRIO Award for Poetry from the Bronx Council for the Arts! Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) provides direct support to individual Bronx artists who create literary, media, visual, and performing works of art. 25 BRIO grants of $3,000 each are awarded to Bronx artists. BRIO award winners complete a one-time public service activity. The awards are based solely on artistic excellence. Winners are selected by a panel of arts professionals representing the award disciplines. BRIO awardees must complete a one-time public service activity to receive their complete cash award. Known as the ACE (Artists for Community Enrichment), this activity is an essential component for all BRIO recipients and must be performed within the one-year period of their award. The ACE provides artists with additional visibility and demonstrates to the community the wealth of artistic talent available in our borough.
    We are incredibly proud to have Alison as part of our community and to celebrate this fantastic accomplishment with her.