Dreams+Memories=A Beautiful Remix
A publication of LaGuardia Community College's Creative Writing Club
Creativity…What does it mean to draw on each other for inspiration and to push forth our new visions? Our spring issue examines creativity as a collective process. LaGuardia Community College is home to several wonderful publications including The Lit, New York Stories, Asian American Voices, In Transit, and more. Published by LaGuardia Community College’s Creative Writing Club, Dreams+Memories is a playground for all forms of creative writing. This spring, we conducted a roundtable interview with Dr. Kimberly Ramirez, Professor Michael Dinwiddie, and Professor Peter McKay; that interview will appear in a future issue. During the month of April, we held FREE virtual weekly write-ins with prompts based on work from Jina Ortiz and Janeé Bolden, virtual speakers at LaGuardia Community College’s You Can Do Anything (YCDA) with an English Major event on Wed., May 7.
The event featured Dr. Michelle Pacht, Dr. Jason Hendrickson, and Dr. Deirdre Flood and was organized by Dr. Jesse Schwartz, Dr. Thomas Fink, and Dr. Rochelle Spencer; it explored how critical reading and writing allow us to become problem solvers. This issue of Dreams continues to explore that question through powerful work by Dr. Michele Simms Burton, Dr. Thomas Fink, Shizue Seigel, and Yvonne Dacres. We’ve included prompts and playlist inspired by YCDA presenters and “remixed” in Dreams+Memories. — The Editors — The Editors
Creative Writing Prompts: For inspiration, consider this poem from Jina Ortiz and this interview from Janeé Bolden, which describes writers, artists, and musicians who have influenced her work. Then write about complicated family lives, as Ortiz does, or consider writing about your influences, the writers or artists who inspire your work, as Bolden does. (Videos from Jina Ortiz and Janeé Bolden)
Call Me Sarah by Michele Simms Burton
Excerpt from Call Me Sarah by Michele Simms Burton
The maid’s locker room on the lower level of the Wardell hotel at 15 E. Kirby Avenue swelled with thirteen young women. The smell of drugstore perfume, coal, bacon, and the April coldness from outdoors oozed through the air. Eleven young women, Carrie, and Sarah stood or sat on oak benches worn smooth, in various states of disrobing from their street clothes to black hotel uniforms. Located not downtown but across the street from Mr. Ford’s Museum, this grand apartment hotel in Detroit had opened in 1926 with great promise. But six years later, its prospects narrowed as the hum of the automobile industry threatened silence. (For more, visit the rest of Call Me Sarah in this issue and in our next installation of Dreams+Memories.)
Anachronisms, Mission Statement, and Dust Bowl Intimacies 40 by Thomas Fink
Dr. Thomas Fink
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“Take Care of Yourself: HIV Prevention Campaign: Samples from original HIV prevention Campaigns” by Shizue Seigel includes“ Peer Volunteer T-Shirt,” “Family Reunification Story,” “Beverly,” and “Newsletter”
Shizue Seigel
In 1995, during the height of the AIDS and crack epidemics, I got a job co-writing HIV prevention stories with Black women living in public housing. During an era when folks were still reluctant to talk publicly about sex, it was imperative to get the word out to marginalized, at-risk communities that AIDS was no longer just a gay white man’s disease. Women needed to protect their health by understanding and employing safer sex strategies.
I was a middle-class Japanese American living on the opposite side of town, but I was hired as a media specialist because of my experience in writing and producing print advertising, and because I had often lived and worked among African Americans since childhood. In the 1960s, I’d sorted parcels with them at the Fleet Office just below the projects, between the meat-packing plant and the taxi yard. In the 1980s, we’d been token BIPOCs in glossy corporate offices. I definitely had more life experience with the “target population” than with the jargon and hierarchies I would encounter in the nonprofit sector. Over the next three years, in my bitterest moments, I thought of the badly inverted social service system as “workfare for overeducated white women.”
Principal investigators who complained about their paltry $50-an-hour salaries dreamed up multimillion-dollar programs without once stepping foot in the communities they were supposed to serve. They hired community outreach workers to actually go out and do the work for $9 per hour. The bosses demanded deliverables that looked good on paper but were impractical in a world where young men died every month of gunshot or overdose, and teenaged girls were kidnapped and raped if they walked home alone after dark.
The office rang with arguments. “No, we did not do our five contacts apiece today. The two of us spent all day supporting a pregnant homeless girl who needed to get connected with Planned Parenthood. We didn’t have time for your dam’ stages of change! She needed help now!”
Residents of the projects lived in one of the world’s most beautiful cities with a great transit system, but most rarely ventured outside their immediate neighborhood because they felt judged and unwelcome by the glares of the privileged. They told the outreach workers they didn’t care about their health because they didn’t expect to live past 25. Sixteen-year-olds welcomed getting pregnant because if they had a baby at least there’d somebody to love them.
The outreach workers and I decided the first order of business was to capture the beauty and strength of the community and reflect it back to them. The residents needed to see themselves as people worth taking care of. Shavonne, one of the outreach workers, said simply: “Ain’t nobody gonna love me better than me.” Another woman declared, “I don’t want to contract HIV and leave my daughter without a mother.”
Our initial campaign included calendar pages, which the residents requested so they could keep track of appointments and other special dates, and wallet-sized cards with personal stories inside and HIV prevention information on the back. The wallet cards were very popular.
People carried them around just because they thought the portraits (shot by photographer Nan Phelps) were beautiful.
For the next campaign, we switched to illustrations by Lori Mirmesdagh to preserve the anonymity of the storytellers. It took months of my attending community meetings and walking around the neighborhood to build trust and inspire women to tell their stories.
I taped their words and transcribed them carefully to keep the flavor of their language and outlook. In 18 months, we produced 24 role model stories that were circulated to the community by peer volunteers. Neighborhood women felt that they were making a difference as they donned the program’s signature hot pink and black T-shirts and handed out stories, condoms and lubricants to their friends and neighbors.
By the end of the program, 12 year-olds were stopping me in the street to ask what herpes was, and drug dealers were pointing out girls that needed condoms. Unfortunately, the program’s success was hard to quantify, so the program disbanded. But I stubbornly returned to the neighborhood without pay once a week, passing out condoms cadged from the clinic and writing and rewriting proposals for more funding. When I got a small grant a year later for perinatal education, few women were pregnant because condom use had become widespread.
For me personally, working on this program was life-changing. I turned my back on advertising and spent the next thirty years working on community-based writing projects that give voice to the marginalized….
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Excerpt from Keys to Empowering Our Voices Through Life Experiences by Yvonne Dacres (ISBN: 979–8–88759–551–1 (paperback) and ISBN: 979–8–88759–552–8 (ebook))
In my late teens, I decided that I wanted to sharpen my skills and keep my vocal ability strong by taking on a voice tutor. This was quite a different experience because I went from doing gigs at many different events to only singing when I went to my voice lessons. I stayed with Jilly, my voice tutor, for a couple of years, and upon reflection, I probably did this because I believed it to be the next best thing to fine-tune my vocal instrument. There was a lightness and loving feeling that I experienced when again, I was doing something that was for my benefit and enjoyment. I eventually decided that I wanted to do something different. That turned out to be applying to audition for Sky Star Search, which was a TV talent competition. In this program, I had a very big wake-up call: being in a room and singing with my voice coach would not give me the experience of singing to the world. I intended to sing at big events and become famous. Sky Star Search was one of my most embarrassing experiences ever, as the performance was televised to a large audience. I looked so well-groomed and made up, yet this was the worst I had ever performed the song because my nervousness destroyed my actual presentation. This was when I discovered that I needed to gain experience performing in front of audiences. After this act, I thought I could never show my face or perform in public again. I was so wrong because this forced me to attend a vocal school that would bring out the real badass champion in me.
Image Caption: This image depicts the singer with a microphone, mouth open in joy and triumph. Courtesy Yvonne Dacres.
Streatham Guardian Series, Thursday, September 21, 1989
I joined the Aria School of Voice after speaking to many vocal friends. I shared with them what I classified as my nightmare performance and that Ineeded somewhere new to voice train. I discussed with my tutor what I was going to do. Then I visited the school. From day one, I loved everything about it, even the drama. It was great. I was doing what I loved most: interacting vocally with a group of singers and improving my craft. I learnt how to stay focused, be disciplined, love our group like a family, show up fully committed, get paid, and be professional. We all learnt that you are as strong as your weakest link, so if one of us failed, we all failed. A failure would be deemed as not learning your song when you had to do a duet with someone or run up and down the stairs for eight sets when you knew ten sets were required. It was a very rigid process, as all newcomers would have to do the basics of singing for three months before we even sang a note. This would entail breathing, diction, posture, drama, and body conditioning. Looking back, I guess this sifted out the singers that were serious about their craft.
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Enjoyed reading Dreams+Memories? Look for our next issue featuring a tribute to Alice Walker, work from Keenan Norris, Dr. Adrienne D. Oliver, Dera R. Williams, Michele Simms Burton, and more!