Four local organizations rework the arithmetic of reading and writing
By David Moisl
READING MIGHT BE America's favorite pastime if not for the fact that "reading a book requires a degree of active attention and engagement," as Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, puts it in the introduction to "Reading at Risk," a survey about America's reading habits. Released last June, the survey concludes that we are facing an imminent cultural crisis. The percentage of adult Americans who read literature has dropped dramatically over the past 20 years, with not quite 47 percent of Americans saying they engaged in literary reading in the past year. The NEA study reckons this decline foreshadows an erosion in cultural and civic participation (in the arts as well as in volunteerism and political engagements), since it finds readers play a more active and involved role in their communities. "As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent-minded," Gioia writes.
In the Bay Area, reading rates are above the national average, and even though our public schools are just as bad as anyone else's, we have several dedicated local organizations that are in the business of teaching literacy skills to youths. The written word remains the medium in which the highest level of discourse is possible, and it provides a much needed counterbalance to the pervasiveness and influence of TV in our culture.
Streetside Stories is a 13-year-old organization that aims to "foster educational equity through the power of storytelling." The program takes its name and origin from a bike ride that the two founding brothers, James Levy and Seth Levy, made in 1989. The East Coast brothers rode their bikes across the United States, stopping at schools where they did storytelling activities with youths by day and slept on the gym floors by night. After a couple of these rides, they ended up moving to San Francisco and lived right across the street from Everett Middle School, where they began offering an in-school program called Story Telling Exchange. The brothers have since moved on, but their legacy continues.
Streetside primarily focuses on middle school kids, as a sort of preemptive educational strike. "It's not the time when you drop out, because you can't drop out when you're 12 years old," Streetside executive director Linda Johnson says, "but it's often the time when students 'give up' and identify themselves as someone who doesn't like writing or reading." Also, since much of San Francisco's arts and education resources are allocated to elementary schools, it was a given that the organization would concentrate on middle schoolers. "At the middle school level, we are often the only arts program that students have all year," she says.
Facilitators go into middle school classrooms and hold two-hour storywriting workshops with students every day for two weeks; in these workshops the students learn about the elements of a story, such as settings, dialogue, and characters. After some free-writing exercises, students write their own autobiographical story, and at the end of the year about 25 percent of those stories end up in Streetside's annual anthology. The anthologies are self-published and are produced entirely in-house. At an event last year several kids read their works from the book. Jonathan Woo, 12, read from "Stopping Anger," about a confrontation with a bully; Laudenia Zuniga, who gave her age as "12 and a half," read "The Boy I Like," about her crush; and Todd Booker, 13, who proudly announced that "small kids have big dreams too," read a story about getting stalked by an older man. Later he told me that he wasn't really into writing before Streetside came to his school, but that he now might be interested in pursuing it further. "Generally, I'm more of a sports guy," he said. "But now I like writing too. When I'm older and play in the NBA, I'm gonna write my autobiography."
Unlike the other organizations, WritersCorps is not a nonprofit but is part of the San Francisco Arts Commission. Originally, the program developed out of AmeriCorps, the Clinton-era domestic equivalent of the Peace Corps, with San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the Bronx selected as the three initial sites for WritersCorps. "We grew out of a national movement, which saw that arts needed to be on the front lines of dealing with America's problems," WritersCorps project manager Janet Heller says. Heller, who used to be a high school teacher, is also a poet, so "WritersCorps is a great combination of my passions and my skills."
WritersCorps places writers in community service programs that encourage youths to read and to write. "We give them a chance to experience what writing can be and to grow as writers, which is a transformative act," Heller says. "At WritersCorps we see writing as a vehicle for growth and human development." The teachers do in-depth workshops with the same group for at least eight months. What also is unique about WritersCorps is that it's not volunteer-based, and the teachers are actually paid surprisingly well (up to $28 hour).
In addition to 11 sites in the city (including the San Francisco Main Library and the Bay View Branch Library), WritersCorps works at Log Cabin Ranch in La Honda, 50 miles south of San Francisco. The rehabilitative facility is operated by the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department. Young men age 14 through 18 will usually spend one year at the former ranch. "It's a good place for them to reflect on their lives and work on their writing," Heller says.
The only requirement for the WritersCorps program is the ability to write. So in some workshops, such as the one at Mercy Housing, a low-income nonprofit housing program at Sixth Street and Folsom, the kids can be as young as 6 years old. "Even if they are just starting out learning to write, they still form stories," Heller says, "and some of the youngest kids are very excited about writing." At the end of the school year, each of the groups puts out a book called "the wraps." The neat little chapbooks are self-produced and aren't really intended for sale to the public. Their purpose is to build a community of young people in San Francisco, since they get circulated at other WritersCorps' sites. "So if I'm a 12 year old at Everett," Heller says, "my book is getting read by a high school senior at Mission, a kid who's incarcerated, and a 6-year-old in South of Market."
For the general public, WritersCorps, which just celebrated its 10-year anniversary, recently published an anthology of its best material. The book, City of One: Young Writers Speak to the World, was financed by a grant from the Isabel Allende Foundation (the same grant that 826 Valencia received). The collection deals with the subject of peace and provides a fascinating and at times depressing peek into today's youngsters' bleak environments and how they view the world. It is impressive to read how they struggle with various issues, from violence and poverty in their communities to the almost surreal differences between the first and the third worlds.
When you walk into the offices of Youth Speaks, it immediately becomes apparent that the poetry program has a cooler edge than other literacy organizations. Hip-hop is blasting, and on the walls there are posters with graffiti graphics advertising upcoming spoken word events. And although the level of discussion among the trendy-looking youths is very intelligent and the kids are extremely articulate, approval for a good poem gets expressed through remarks like "Yo! That shit is tight!"
Youth Speaks was started in 1996, when executive director James Kass was pursuing his MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University and became very frustrated with the way poetry was taught. "There was a real lack of diversity," Kass says, "in terms of race, but also in the way people thought about writing." So he decided to start his own program to teach poetry to teenagers. "This was in the early dot-com days, when everyone got a new computer every six months. I got 30 donated computers, and I told the kids if they came to 40 hours of workshops, I'd give them a computer – that's how we got the first kids involved." Soon thereafter, the program took off.
Youth Speaks hosts several programs, the most popular being an after-school drop-in creative writing workshop. There are also Youth Speaks workshops in Bay Area public middle and high schools four days a week. Even the teaching methodology takes its cues from hip-hop subculture. "We do a lot of free-write exercises, which is like freestyle rapping, only you don't stop writing," Kass explains. "I say, 'Go,' and you have to write for 10 minutes nonstop. The pen moves the whole time; there's no editing or crossing out, only moving forward. It's a way to let the subconscious seep out through the pen." On top of hands-on writing practice like this, students also learn about the history of poetry to "understand where we are in the literary continuum," as Kass puts it. "If you want to get better as a writer, you have to read. There's just no way around that."
Youth Speaks prides itself on being a youth-run organization. Youths are involved in every aspect of the organization's operations. There is a youth advisory board called Spokes, with different committees such as ones for publications and events. For example, the kids get to chose who is ready to work on their First Word Press book, a half-size, single-writer anthology series Youth Speaks puts out. The board also has a vital role in putting on the organization's numerous events, from open mic sessions to the "Spoken City" intergenerational reading series, which pairs up two established writers with two teenagers.
Its best-known event is the annual Teen Poetry Slam. "For people who don't know about poetry slams, it's like a mock Olympic tournament basically," Kass says. Go to one of these and you will be dumbfounded by how grown-up these youths sound. During the San Francisco finals at the end of February, the scope of subjects included domestic violence, racism, the sexualization of teenage girls, and the war in Iraq. When you listen to these young poets pour their hearts out, you realize that Youth Speaks' slogan, "Because the next generation can speak for itself," is more than just a tagline. The way these teens tackle the relevant issues of the day head-on puts our timid national media to shame. Add to that the fact that the poems are performed with a raw, unjaded, hormone-filled energy, and you can imagine what a mind-blowing experience a Teen Poetry Slam can be. After regional finals in more than 36 cities across the country (hosted by various organizations), the best four poets of each region go on to the national slam, called "Brave New Voices."
The only Youth Speaks anthology so far, My Words Consume Me, comes with a CD recorded live at the national slam in 2000 and showcases the astonishing breadth and quality of these young writers. Last year's co-champion Emiliano Bourgois-Chachón, 17, is featured in the book with a stirring poem about sharing his body with cerebral palsy. Bourgois-Chachón got interested in Youth Speaks when they did a presentation at his middle school. He said he wasn't really into writing before but ended up "falling in love with it completely." "Youth Speaks really is a great outlet to say what you have to say," Bourgois-Chachón explains. "You learn to mold your words well."
Youth Speaks has close ties to 826 Valencia, the writers' center for kids founded by Dave Eggers in 2002. In fact, Youth Speaks was 826's fiscal sponsor and acted as its umbrella organization for the first year until 826 was ready to stand on its own feet. "I met Dave about three or four years ago," Kass says. "He contacted me with his idea. He just wanted to make sure he's not stepping on any toes. He didn't have to do that. I really admired that."
From the outside, the space at 826 Valencia Street looks puzzling, with its bizarre shop-window displays. When I visited, there was a little boy with headphones attached to a turtle looking at a chart of the "ocular lobe of the brain," which said, "explore the uncharted territory of this ancient landscape."
The mission of 826 is simply to teach kids to express themselves by writing. While this often happens in a very playful manner, with workshops on comic books or mad-science stories for example, program director Nínive Calegari thinks that the workshops are "actually incredibly academic; the kids just don't see it that way." There is a class, for example, that culminates in writing a music review for the radio. "When they do that, they are actually composing essays, writing a thesis, devising a structure, and paying attention to all these things, like coherency, detail, and evidence. They're doing all that work, but they're writing about rock, and they get to be on KFOG, and how cool is that?"
The projects at 826 range in length from a two-hour workshop to something that lasts all year. It's a popular field trip destination for first graders through fourth graders. There also are specialized workshops on poetry and journalism, author meetings, an after-school drop-in program (Sundays through Thursdays, 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.), and long-term classes that usually culminate in something such as a play. The 826 Quarterly, the organization's regular publication, draws from all these workshops, which many times are hosted by various "star" authors, such as Po Bronson, Erika Lopez, and Michael Chabon. In addition to programs for teenagers, 826 also hosts a monthly adult series of workshops on different issues concerning writing and publishing.
At Everett Middle School, 826 has taken the in-school model "to the extreme," as Calegari puts it, and has established itself permanently in a classroom there. A one-of-a-kind project so far, the Writers' Room can lighten the load of a teacher by taking half of his or her class, for example.
On top of supplementing English classes, the Writers' Room is where the school's paper SUN (Straight Up News) gets produced. Every Monday, professionals from various related fields volunteer to put their expertise to work. For example there is a syndicated cartoonist who helps the kids with the paper's illustrations, several freelance writers, and a former Newsweek staffer. Jwelea Rivas, 12, who wrote an article about friendships for the paper, thinks the 826 teachers are very helpful and give good advice. Ripa Saha, 13, who mostly reviews horror books for the SUN, says next year she would really like to write for her high school paper.
The project also puts out thematic student anthologies. The latest one, Waiting to Be Heard: Youth Speak Out about Inheriting a Violent World, was written and produced by students at the Thurgood Marshall Academic High School. The students were given the assignment to write about peace and have come up with a multitude of ways of approaching the subject. Many take personal experiences of violence (ranging from being bullied to losing a father to a bullet) as their initial inspiration to confront the issue. The essays explore society's expectations on males, racism, police brutality, the war on terror, and more.
The next book is already in the works, this time with sophomores at Balboa High School. The subject is the immigration history of their families. With a foreword by Amy Tan, the book is due out in late May. "This is our biggest project yet," 826's Alvaro Villanueva says. "There are 120 kids working on their essays right now, and we will publish everyone who finishes, no matter how much work it is for us."
David Moisl is a writer who lives in San Francisco.
City of One: Young Writers speak to the World
Aunt Lute Books, 239 pages, $10.95.
My Words Consume Me: An Anthology of Youth Speaks Poets
Youth Speaks/826 Valencia, 133 pages, $18.
Waiting to Be Heard: Youth Speak Out about Inheriting a Violent World
826 Valencia, 138 pages, $12.