This weekend a diverse group of D.C. writers will lead a city-wide conversation about how Washingtonians experience public space and each other. On Saturday, a groundbreaking event designed to map the city through personal narrative, Washington Write-A-Story Day, plans to unite the literary community and the general public and encourage D.C. residents to tell their tales of the city.
More than 40 free, public creative writing workshops will be offered across the city, from Anacostia to Georgetown, and in locations from the Mohammed Masjid Islamic Cultural Center and the D.C. Jail to Lydia’s House, a haven for survivors of domestic violence. The workshops will be led by prize-winning literary novelists, bestselling authors, memoirists, journalists, poets and storytellers.
Both teachers and students will write short stories about an encounter in a D.C. public place: on a street, at a monument or institution, or even in the subway. The following evening, a public reading of stories selected by Washington native Jonathan Safran Foer will take place at George Washington University.
Washington Write-a-Story Day is the brainchild of writer Joyce Hackett, who stops by today to explain her vision about this extraordinary project. Hackett is a writer and activist who served as the 2004-05 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University. Her work has appeared in many publications, including Harpers, The Paris Review, and the Berlin Daily Der Tagespiegel. Her first novel, Disturbance of the Inner Ear, won the 2003 the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. In the Spring, she will be the Holtzbrink Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, researching a novel about Frederick Douglass and his German-Jewish mistress, Ottilie Assing.
Washington Write-a-Story Day, by Joyce Hackett
A few years ago, my first novel had stretched into its second decade, I was living in the neighborhood of Columbia University, from which I'd received an MFA. Harlem was 13 blocks away, but I had no friends there; my community consisted of people like me: writers, editors and scholars, nearly all of whom were white. In a lame civic gesture, I had joined my block association: that duty was discharged by gathering with six neighbors to drink beer and look at catalogues of trees we didn't order and didn't plant.
Then Columbia attempted to build a building on our block that ignited widespread neighborhood opposition. In the process of persuading the University to construct it to another site, I fell down a rabbit hole of community service that transformed my thinking and life. Instead of attending readings and parties, I found myself looking forward to evening meetings in shabby community rooms in the projects I had always avoided. The implicit goal of so much of my education, I came to see, was to keep me from having to spend much time the rooms I was coming to love. I was appointed to that community board, which was 1/3 black, 1/3 white, 1/3 hispanic: it was the most democratic place I've ever been a part of.
As I worked with my neighbors, I came to see my alma mater not just as a place of serious, valuable inquiry, but also a behemoth that challenged and in some cases degraded its surrounding local communities. And I was forced to reconsider the unspoken assumption of so much of my education, which was that the goal of my training was to compete and excel as an individual, just as the universities I attended put massive resources into competing for the best US News and World Report rating. The focus was on talent, and genius, on distinguishing oneself from the pack. The word service was not mentioned.
These days I juggle two bankrupting professions, community service and fiction writing. My novel, after being rejected by over forty publishers, won the oldest womens' fiction prize in the country, the Kafka Prize. After I was appointed as the 2004-05 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington, I dug up Jenny Moore's book about ministering in the slums of Jersey City just after the war. Moore and her husband threw themselves at ministering in a way startling to their patrician peers. After the couple settled into the parish house, they offered assistance to a first group of needy neighbors, in the form of shelter and odd jobs. When a second wave arrived, one of the first men they'd helped grumbled, asking why the Moores had to continue their open-door policy. After recounting the episode, Moore tossed off an asside hit me like a missile: If we define our community as "everybody", we are all enlarged.
It was a thought that crystallized a stance I'd been leaning towards for years, a stance that freed me from the need to compete and win, freed me to give rather than to think about how I could take, and take more. And it made me determined to leave something behind in DC, to create a project that brings the resources of the literary community to people who may not often experience them, that will to excavate stories that may not often get told in DC — stories of "the other DC". Washington Write-a-Story Day combines my two obsessions, land use and public space. And in a sense, by engaging Washingtonians in a massive, city-wide conversation about how they experience each other, it will also knit them together and create a sort of public space via writing. I hope people will come and help map the city via narrative!
Friend of the blog and visiting iPod programmer, Jami Attenberg will be in town this weekend reading with Tammy Greenwood at the Writer's Center on Sunday.