20 years in

a strange, wonderful ride it has been...and a sad one too.

Hi all,

I hope you’re doing well. I’m feeling okay. As I write this I’m sitting on a plane en route to Seattle for the AWP Conference. AWP is the sort of big professional conference for writers and writing professors and literary people in the US. I have a funny relationship to it as a space (which is maybe true for everyone who goes to AWP or things like it). One of the particularities of my funny relationship to AWP as a space is that I have just been going to it for… a lot longer than most people my age.

I first went to AWP my senior year of high school. It was in New York City and my mom came with me. I was attending as part of a mentorship program I got to be part of because of my involvement in this kind of odd scholarship program I was part of from about 13 through college (The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation). The notion of the scholarship was basically to take “talented” students of limited means (i.e. broke kids) and give us resources somewhat akin to what the wealthiest families might be able to give their children in order to cultivate their gifts and interests. This scholarship program paid for my school fees and bought me a computer in middle school and high school but they also did things like buy me subscriptions to the New York Times and the New Yorker as a 15 year old coming up in the hood on the South Side of Chicago. It was a strange existence but I got some things out of it including the ability to work with a creative writing mentor for a year and write stories and poems and go to this conference I had never heard of with my mama. It was kind of a life-changing time. I remember watching the poet Martín Espada read and sitting in the back of the reading writing him a letter about how much his poems meant to me and to my homie José Olivarez. I remember my mentor setting up coffee with her former professor whose work she had got me deep into and that was the first time I got to meet one of my favorite writers, A. Van Jordan (who would eventually become my grad school professor). I remember going to an off-site reading and party I somehow ended up invited to at a very cool loft in Soho where Yusef Komunyakaa read and Tyehimba Jess played the harmonica. It was a moment in my life that profoundly opened my eyes about the kind of possibilities there might be to make this writing thing into a kind of life.

As I write now it’s early March. In the midwest that means that it might be starting to peak into spring, if we’re fortunate. For me, from the age of 13 on it also meant that it was my favorite time of the year. For my adolescence up through my early adulthood this time of year meant that it was time for the youth poetry slam in Chicago, then known as Louder Than A Bomb (LTAB). That space was, for me, not only a life altering space but really a life-defining space. So many of my best friends, even to this day, I first met there. Even those that I didn’t meet there, often if you knew me long enough and we were close enough you just ended up going to poetry slams or open mics and sometimes even performing in them yourself.

Given now that I live as a writer and a professor of writing, my reflection on those spaces is kind of weird. I don’t think it’s that common that what you were up to and most passionate about as a 13-year-old is still the driver of your professional life 2 decades later. In graduate school I was the youngest writer in my cohort but in some odd ways I sort of wasn’t because I had been writing and studying writing and involved in writing communities for a decade at that point, even though I was only 23.

The other night I was talking to a friend and we were discussing our personal journeys with poetry and the poetry slam and I sort of came around to naming that I existed in poetry in some ways as a “child star.” Now let us be clear, with few exceptions there really aren’t stars in poetry. And even when I got more attention than my peers in my late teens there was no financial renumeration for that attention. But still, it is true that from about 18-25 I existed as a kind of wunderkind in this particular strange space of first the spoken word community and then the literary publishing space. It was weird as hell. It offered me lots of opportunities. It also damaged me in ways that I think I’m still unpacking and fully understanding. It also means that on some level my “professional” life reaches back to when I was a weird, stupid, and brilliant teenager doing all the things that weird, stupid, and brilliant teenagers do.

I think I’m thinking about this because in so many ways I was pegged from early ages as “special” or “smart” or “gifted.” It offered me a lot of resources that all young people should have by virtue of being young people. It offered me things like well-funded schools and teachers who gave a damn and people who were looking for my talents and interests and how they might be cultivated. I don’t have a big takeaway except that it all kind of makes me sad. I was made to be special from at least the age of 5 or 6. That directly led to me being encouraged by a teacher at 13 and then published at 16 and then platformed at 18. It led to me going to all these fancy schools I went to. It led to me now teaching at some fancy schools. It’s led to me being able to make a life for myself and my little family. I don’t think you should have to be special to be cultivated and poured into and offered opportunity and support in the ways I was and in other ways. It really shouldn’t take all that.

Peace,

Nate

PS. I originally thought I was going to write this thinking about the absurdity of having been on a professional trajectory for 2/3rds of my life despite still being pretty young but I guess it went in a different direction slightly. Writing is a strange technology in that way. Ah well.