This post has a very specific purpose: to ask those who might be interested to offer feedback on the draft vision statement that appears at the end. The statement is for a small literary reading series called First Tuesdays that I run in my neighborhood in Queens. While I am very interested in hearing people’s suggestions for and critiques of this draft, however, I am not interested in discussing whether people think such a statement is or should be necessary. I take its necessity as axiomatic, and so if you do not, I will ask that you please not comment. Thanks.
Background
First Tuesdays is an open-mic, featured-reader series, meaning that people from the community and surrounding areas come to share some of their work for the first hour or so and then we get to listen to a featured reader, who is usually (but not always) a published author, share her or his work for the last twenty to thirty minutes. I took over hosting the series three years ago, but First Tuesdays has been located at Terraza Cafe, a wonderful bar and live music venue in Elmhurst, NY for about ten years. The series, in other words, has a long history and, as you might expect, a core group of people has, over the years, coalesced into a strong and supportive community.
Last month, in November, I read on Harriet, The Poetry Foundation’s blog, an open invitation to meeting called “Enough is Enough: A Meeting on Sexism and Accountability in NYC Poetry Communities.” They called the meeting, they said, because they were
fed up with the reality of sexual violence, intimidation, and misogyny that continues to exist in our poetry circles. We are speaking out against the dominant culture that silences and undermines voices of dissent. We are questioning harmful power dynamics within the poetry community. We are determined to forge a more respectful, alert, and conscientious community.
When I read this, I was concerned. As far as I knew, First Tuesdays was not suffer from the dynamics the Enough-is-Enough organizers were describing. Nor had I heard even a whisper about such things in the literary community in Queens, in which First Tuesdays has played a pretty central role. Of course, the fact that I did not know about it, or had not been perceptive enough to see it, did not mean it wasn’t happening. So I decided to go to the meeting and see what I could learn.
What I heard was disturbing. From the story of a man who regularly introduced the women who featured at his reading series with lines like, “Please welcome so-and-so and her body to the stage,” to the story of an important male poet, a man known to harass and abuse women sexually, who is nonetheless promoted and celebrated throughout the New York poetry scene and at the literary organization where he works, to the story of a woman whose drink was spiked at the bar after a reading she gave and was then treated abysmally by the men whose reading series it was once they found out what happened, the Enough-is-Enough organizers–who made clear these stories were representative of many they had heard or experienced themselves–described a poetry scene that seemed at best indifferent and, at worst, openly hostile to treating women with the respect and dignity they deserve.
Still, the meeting seemed to be very Brooklyn- and Manhattan-centric, which served mainly to reinforce my sense of distance, geographical and institutional, from the stories I was hearing. Not that I thought for a moment Queens might be immune from the sexism being described, but I wasn’t sure how I, as the curator and host of a reading series not plugged into the network where these incidents were taking place, was supposed to respond to them. Then someone at the meeting suggested that one measure groups like First Tuesdays could take was to make public and explicit in a kind of vision statement our commitment to being safe and inclusive spaces so that the people who participate in our activities know what our values are and understand that they will be held accountable if they choose to violate them.
That made a lot of sense to me. Neither my predecessor at First Tuesdays nor I had given any thought to how we might structure the series to address not merely issues of sexism and misogyny, but any form of oppressive or discriminatory or violent behavior *before* it happened. Since it seemed to me willfully naive to assume either that such things had not been happening all along or that they wouldn’t happen in the future, preparing the groundwork for responding to them when they did was a good idea. The draft vision statement you’ll read below is the result.
Some Considerations
Rather than writing the statement as a response to a specific injustice or set of injustices, I have tried to make it an assertion of what I think is most valuable about us as a community. To do otherwise, I fear, would raise questions, at least amongst those of you who’ve been attending readings regularly, about whether or not I had knowledge of something specific that had happened either in the context of a First Tuesdays reading or of the Queens literary community in general. I have no such knowledge. I am open, however, to the possibility that this was not the most effective strategy. Indeed, I am open to the possibility that I need to chuck the entire statement and start again from scratch. As I said above, though, I am not open to suggestions that the statement, or some statement like it, is not necessary in the first place.
I have sent the draft statement, with a cover letter, to the First Tuesdays mailing list asking them for comments. My plan, once there is a final draft, is to post it to the First Tuesdays website and Facebook page—neither of which is fully set up yet, which is why the First Tuesdays link takes you to the page on my personal website. Then, any First Tuesdays publicity that goes out will contain the first paragraph of the statement with a link back to the entire text. I also think it’s a good idea to read it out loud at one or two readings per year.
ETA in response to Grace’s and Matthew’s comments below: The paragraph in the vision statement about accessibility is the one that has given me the most trouble. It is clumsy and inadequate. I know this. I want very much to acknowledge the limitations of the space at the cafe where this reading series has been held for the last decade, and I want to acknowledge as well that, were I originating a reading series I would be sure to choose a venue where everyone had access; but I also want to acknowledge the fact that, right now, I don’t see a viable option for changing the venue:
- There are, as far as I have been able to tell, and I have looked, no other viable venues in the neighborhood. Viability would include
- Enough space to accommodate anywhere between 15 (our average) and 45 people (the most we’ve had), depending on the night
- Availability of a sound system
- No charge for use of the space: I am unpaid for this work and I rarely collect more than $70 or $80 in donations, which is not enough to pay for a venue for the night. And even if it were, it would mean having nothing left over to pay the featured reader, which I am obligated to do in order to receive the funds I get from Poets & Writers—and those funds must go to the featured reader and no one else.
- I am reluctant to move to another neighborhood for several reasons:
- Such a move would exclude people who have been attending First Tuesdays for longer than I’ve been hosting.
- It would mean taking on the risk of building a new audience in a new place, which could very well spell the end of the series.
I am not trying to make excuses. If I could see a viable alternative, I would have no problem moving the series and dealing with the difficulties that would entail. I am struggling in this vision statement to acknowledge all this. And maybe a vision statement is not the place to do that. I am just not sure how to proceed with this, which is one reason why I have put this draft out here for comments.
Finally, I want to stress that this is a draft text. It has not been published anywhere as anything official connected to First Tuesdays, and I will ask that you please treat it that way in your comments here and, should you choose to tell other people about it, in your remarks to them. Thanks.
Draft of the First Tuesdays Vision Statement
(Bold and italicized text represent edits I have made in response to comments.)
First Tuesdays is an open-mic, featured-reader, community reading series that meets at Terraza Cafe in Queens on the first Tuesday of the month, September through June. The people who share their work with us, whether as featured readers or open-mic participants, reflect the diversity–in age, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, religion, and more–that one would expect from our location in the most diverse borough in the country. By calling ourselves a community reading series, we at First Tuesdays mean to say that we care about each other and each other’s work, and that we take collective responsibility for making sure our events are safe, welcoming spaces for anyone who comes to read or listen. The easiest way to define that safety, of course, is by making a list of behaviors that have no place at First Tuesdays, including not only the generic ones like rudeness and violence, but also those that target specific groups of people, including racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, ableism, and classism. Important as it is, however, this list focuses primarily on what we as a group aspire not to be. It does not tell you very much about the vision we have for who we are.
First and foremost, First Tuesdays is motivated by the idea that the making and sharing of literary work is a truth-speaking and therefore transformative, progressive and therefore humanizing, ultimately liberating act of community building. We believe that the integrity of this community requires an ongoing and conscious process of inclusion, encompassing the writers who are invited to feature, the writers who are generous enough to participate in our open mic, and also those who come each month just to listen, because literature gives them something they don’t get anywhere else. As curator and host of First Tuesdays, it’s my job to make this inclusiveness happen, which also means–when I know about it–making sure that behaviors like the ones I listed above are not tolerated. Part of your job, if you choose to become a member of this community–in addition to holding yourself accountable to the spirit of this statement–is to hold me accountable for the consistency and effectiveness with which I fulfill my role.
In keeping with that accountability, I want to acknowledge an element of exclusion at First Tuesdays that I inherited when I took the series over. The stage where we hold our readings, which is at the top of a narrow, winding staircase on Terraza’s second floor, is not handicap accessible. Were I starting a reading series from scratch, I would make sure to choose a venue where everyone would have access, but since that is not an option in this case, I want here to commit First Tuesdays to addressing the issue of inaccessibility as soon as is feasibly possible and to communicate publicly and in a timely manner the details of that process. Clearly, it would have been better if this issue had been addressed earlier, and it is awkward to include in this vision statement a way that First Tuesdays does not live up to the spirit of that vision’s inclusiveness, but I also do not want us to be perceived as pretending the issue of inaccessibility does not exist.
At its core, our vision for First Tuesdays is of a place where language and the work it does in the world as poem and story matters. In that vein, we have welcomed to our open mic writers as young as thirteen to read their work next to award-winning poets and novelists. Writers getting up to read their first published works have done so together with writers getting up to read in public for the very first time. People who write simply because they are moved to do so, who never intend to publish their work, read us their poems and stories along with people who bring us the work of other writers, like the woman who has been sharing a few of her mother’s poems nearly every month for the last five years, just to keep her mother’s memory alive. And we have borne witness at our open mic to work that not only refuses the depredations of racial, sexual, and other oppressions, but that also offers the possibilities of healing from those traumas.
This is the vision to which we at First Tuesdays are committed and which it is my privilege to facilitate every time we meet. We welcome anyone who would like to share this vision with us.
Cross-posted on my blog.
Richard,
I think that such a vision statement is an excellent idea. In other circles, such a statement of intent and principles might be called a covenant, in that you are expecting all participants to agree to abide by it.
So, here is how I would critique what you have written.
1. I think it’s great that you were able to recognize the lack of access. I think it is a HUGE value statement that you go on to say, in essence, “but because it’s been that way for a long time and it would be hard to change, we’re going to tell all the people who can’t come to our event that they don’t matter enough to us for us to do anything other than acknowledge that we will continue to reject them.”
That statement is echoed shortly thereafter, when you say, “Were I starting a reading series from scratch, accessibility is certainly something I would take into account when choosing a venue.” That’s not the same as, “I would make sure that everyone had access.” And while I’m not currently handicapped, if I can spot that message, I’ll bet you that it’s plenty obvious to someone whose daily experience includes dealing with decisions made by people who weighed access against other priorities.
So, it’s excellent that you acknowledge the problem. Now, if your vision statement is going to mean something other than, “Yeah, our inherited venue is inaccessible and, at the end of the day, we accept that,” then you need to follow up with a plan on how to fix it, and then follow the plan.
Otherwise, when I got down to, “And we have borne witness at our open mic to work that not only refuses the depredations of racial, sexual, and other oppressions, but that also offers the possibilities of healing from those traumas.” …I would be profoundly unimpressed.
2. “…welcoming spaces for anyone who comes to read and listen…” Don’t be afraid to name the space as a moderated space. Like an online forum, if you welcome “everyone”, the loudest and the most numb will be all you have left after the shouting is done. In your space for diverse voices, there must be some acknowledgement that it is exclusively for people who are able to make and maintain space for diverse voices… including the voices of the timid and the wounded. So, perhaps you are intending to welcome anyone who comes to read and listen …and abide by the behaviors outlined in this vision statement.
This is a good thing you’re doing. Good luck.
Grace
It seems bizarre to produce a statement that explicitly calls out ableism as unacceptable while admitting that your venue is not handicap accessible, but that you won’t change the venue because that would be ‘difficult at best’. Wow.
I imagine that it would be ‘difficult at best’ for those other, less enlightened, poetry communities to change their longstanding traditions, too. Or would it be acceptable for them to continue in their current vein because [insert here a link or a footnote to your reading]?
Also, “foreground the fact that”? Ugh.
Grace and Matt,
Thanks to both of you. The paragraph on accessibility is the one that has given me the most trouble. I have made one edit already in response to Grace’s comment, and I will be working on others in response to what you each have said.
Part of the dilemma I face is that there is no other venue in the area—and I have looked—with enough room for a reading, with a sound system, etc., with owners/managers who would be hospitable to hosting a reading series like mine once a month, and who would not charge me for use of the space. (I am unpaid for this work, and the only venue that might be okay—I am not 100% sure of this—charges something like $100 for the night. I take a $5 suggested donation, which a lot of people who come can’t always make, and I have collected $100 maybe twice since I started hosting.)
To move the series to another neighborhood—given how rooted in my neighborhood and this cafe the reading is—feels as wrong to me, in its way, as the lack of access, because I know there are people who attend regularly, and who have been doing so for longer than I’ve been hosting, that such a move would exclude, not to mention the risk such a move would entail in terms of building a new audience, etc.
I’m not trying to make excuses. If I had a viable option, I would have no problem confronting my regulars with this issue and doing the work of making the change. I am looking for language that will acknowledge the problem, while making the clear the limitations I outlined above, and that would still be acceptable for a vision statement, rather than a disclaimer, which I realize that paragraph about accessibility essentially is. Perhaps that is not possible, and perhaps I need a separate statement—something linked to from the vision statement—that will go into more detail about this issue.
Also, Grace, regarding what you said about “mediated space.” The reality is that the space where the reading is held is not mediated, in the sense that it takes place in a local bar, and I can have no control over who comes upstairs when the reading is in progress. Nor do I have any control, in the sense that I cannot know before the fact how “loud and numb” they are, over who signs up for the open-mic. Once I know, obviously, I can do something about it, and I think the bar’s owner will support me.
This is why I wrote: “Part of your job, if you choose to become a member of this community–in addition to holding yourself accountable to the spirit of this statement–is to hold me accountable for the consistency and effectiveness with which I fulfill my role.” Were you suggesting that I should make this somehow more prominent, obvious, explicit?”
Inappropriate comment deleted by the moderator.
—Richard
Pete, if you have something to say that actually contributes to this discussion, you’re welcome to say it. If not, please stay away.
Thanks,
Richard
I have edited the paragraph on accessibility. I wonder what people think of it.
There are two types of do-gooders that I see in this world.
There is the first kind described in the Bible. A poor woman made a big contribution anonymously without making a big show of it. She wanted to help people for altruistic reasons.
Then there is the other type, who makes a big show of his helpfulness – with other people’s time or money.
Barbara Streisand (saving power is for the little people), Al Gore (with his Bigfoot-size carbon footprint), Jim and Tammy Fae Bakker, Joel Osteen. You get the picture. Appearance and little substance.
Price acceptable alternative paid venues. State that you’d be happy to move there if only your attendees shell out the money necessary to cover a full year’s costs up front. Explain that you need the full year’s costs because otherwise you’re afraid the club will fall apart when you have to take up significantly higher monthly collections.
When no one opens their wallet, the blow-back won’t be on you.
Otherwise, people will assume that the real reason you didn’t find a better venue is because you’re a bad person who doesn’t care about the disabled, and they’ll operate on the “hit him with sticks until he solves the problem somehow” theory of charitable institution management. That will continue until you either DO come up with an alternative, or someone replaces you, or your local chapter gives the middle finger to the larger organization and the entire concept of accessibility.
Source: been here before.
On its own without the post, it isn’t clear whether you are attempting to state what you believe to be already true (i.e to proactively prevent a problem starting while acknowledging that it isn’t actually happening yet) or whether you are attempting to announce a change in how your group will act (i.e. to fix an existing problem.) Without some statement to that effect I think it may confuse people a bit.
Also, the rules don’t distinguish between different types of actions. Do you tend to apply the same level of scrutiny to someone’s actions both as a spectator and participant? That’s an inherent conflict to what you’re trying to achieve: people to write their “truth” but that is rarely the same truth as everyone else; one person’s “truth” or “lived experience” can be offensive to others who disagree with it. That means that to a large degree the judge is as important as the dispute.
Whether you’re using “same rules everywhere” or whether you’re loosening the rules for readers, you may want to clarify.
As long as it is about behavior, that’s fine. But I am concerned that this statement
could lead to censorship of the content of the poems read, or limitations as to what can be read.
Hi Norman,
Thanks for leaving a comment. Do you mean that you think it might lead people to censor themselves, or do you think it implies that I might, as host, censor content? Or both?
Perhaps the better way to express the accessibility might be:
– We wish to be a community that is accessible to all. However our current venue has known accessibility problems : (Here are the current limits of our venue/ accommodations we already make as standard: ) ; please get in contact if you want to discuss this in more detail with reference to a specific condition. We are actively seeking a more accessible local venue that meets our needs, please contact if you have suggestions.
Also worth remembering as a general rule: Always ask the venue about accessibility, then include the information as part of your standard event information. Access info should be as easy to find as the date and location of the gig.
?
In regard to censorship, I think both. I am particularaly concerned about charges of sexism in the content of poetry that are often a matter of interpretation. Also, other controversial issues that may stifle expression for poets who write against prevailing opinions and attitudes and have a right to do so. This also has particular application to comic poems. Some people are easily offended and are looking to be offended. The group “Enough is Enough” is highly suspect in this regard. In regard to behavior and the examples given, however, I agree with them.
Richard, this might be easier to explain if you use a common example:
However you feel about the use of the word “crazy,” it remains a common term. People vary highly in their views of it, from “completely ableist and horrific” to “no big deal.”
For most people it’s just semantics. So it could easily be that a reader talks about feeling crazy or having a crazy morning. It could easily be that someone else feels offended. And it certainly would be a technical violation of your rules.
So the question is whether you actually intend to restrict people from using the word in any presented work (i.e. to adopt your preferred set of semantic choices), or whether you’re more focused on having people speak their piece as they would do, without being forced to use your language.
Richard:
What about doing a thermometer? “To make this event happen regularly, we need to cover expenses. It costs us $100 to rent the space. Please donate what you think the event is worth, to you. Anything we collect which covers more than this month will go toward next month.” Let people donate on the way in. Tally the count during the event. Announce the result at the end and ask if anyone wants to make up the difference.
Also, set up small web presence, so that you can refer to it, and it would not surprise me if someone with money casually drops a month or two of expenses on you.
A précis of the problem can go up on the web site, and you can take five at the beginning, intermission, or end of the event, to lay this problem before the attendants. Many heads are better than one, especially when it comes to finding resources in a diverse and complex city. The best people to solve it are the people who live in the neighborhood.
I meant to write “moderated” rather than “mediated”. (I blame my cold.) But you do have a moderated space, similar to this one: pretty much anyone can post, once, and if their behavior turns out to be a problem, you can address it.
In essence, with this document, you are outlining your moderation policy.
No. It seems clear enough to me.
Grace
Norman:
Thanks, Norman. I agree. (Though, having been to the Enough is Enough meeting, I am not sure I agree with you about the group as a whole, though they are open about the fact that not every individual in the group speaks with the same voice on this subject.) Others of our regulars have emailed me with the same concerns, and I will edit the text to clarify this, since I am not interested in appointing myself censor, nor do I want people to feel that they have to censor themselves. Indeed, one of the things that I value about our readers, and you are one of them, is that people are comfortable enough to read work that takes on difficult and risky subjects, that pushes at limits or challenges us as an audience in any number of ways.
At the same time, though, I am conscious of a responsibility somehow to speak up when people read—because I have seen it happen at other venues, though to-date not at ours—work that is openly racist or sexist or what-have-you. Work, in other words, that, when it is read, turns into the kind of behavior that we both agree is not welcome. Freedom of expression, after all, does not mean freedom from reactions to, or the consequences of, what you choose to express.
I say this not to hedge on what I wrote initially about valuing freedom of expression and of making that clear in the vision statement, but to raise a question that I have been thinking about since the Enough-is-Enough meeting: How and when do I, as the person responsible for First Tuesdays, become accountable to the group as a whole—and to individuals within the group—for drawing the line between the two kinds of work I have just described? I’m not suggesting that I know where that line is in any definitive way, since where I draw it as a personal matter might be different from where you draw it, etc. and so on. But I am aware that the line exists and that it is important to take into account where other people draw it when thinking about this.
Thanks for your response, Richard. I trust you on this.
Grace,
Thanks for those suggestions. I’m waiting to get more responses directly from people on the First Tuesdays list, and I will, after the holidays, being to pursue what I need to pursue.
The question of how moderated the space is, and the comparison you made to this blog, is kind of interesting to me. The open-mic readers are less like the commenters here, I think, and more like post-writers. In other words, they are not responding to something someone else has said; they are coming to have their say about something, some of them for much longer than I have been host, and there is a way in which the space of the reading series “belonged” to them before it “belonged” to me, and I put belonged in quotes because I think the fact that I did not start the series means that the space of the reading doesn’t belong to me in the same way that Alas belongs to Amp. More than that though, as people who post here on Alas, you and I take risks and have levels of authority that the commenters do not and that Amp—having given us permission to post here—takes (and has in the past taken) into account when thinking about certain aspects of policy on the blog. (I am remembering an email conversation a while back having to do, I think, with how to handle decisions about banning people from individual threads, from the blog as a whole, etc.)
I’m not sure where I am going with this—my mind, frankly, is split between this response and the set of papers I have to finish grading so I can be done with this semester—but it feels to me like a difference worth thinking about in terms of what it means to call the reading series a moderated space. Which, of course, I agree with you that it is; I’m just wondering about the nature of that moderation.
VK,
Thanks for that suggestion. Your wording will be helpful as I think through further revisions.