September 25, 2020
Dear writers,

If you’re anything like us, you can’t believe that we’ve already reached the end of September. Although the sun is still shining, there is a slight chill in the morning air, and the oak leaves are just beginning to turn brown outside our windows. Today, we are acutely aware that, in the words of George R.R. Martin, “winter is coming.”

We have no doubt that this will be a fall to remember: the pandemic is still part of our personal and professional lives, the presidential election looms on the horizon, and many of us are still struggling to respond to the racial inequities that have been exposed in our communities. There is a lot going on in our corner of the world. And that’s probably why writing matters.

A friend of ours once said, “I know that my writing doesn’t change anything; it just changes me.” We think she is right. Every time we put our fingers to the keyboard or a pen to a piece of paper, we are attempting to reclaim a version of the world that is true to ourselves. A résumé, a poem, a paper about The Great Gatsby, or a memoir about our childhood—all of these are attempts to understand and interpret a part of our lives. And this is hard work. But at the Community Writing Center, we believe it doesn’t have to be done alone. Often people envision writing as a solitary activity, but it really is a collaborative one. Even when we write by ourselves, we write to an imagined audience, a reader who listens carefully to the words we put on the page. And when we’re able to share these words with another person—through a reading, a workshop, a writing consultation—we are able to share our version of our truth with another person. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

We are excited to be able to offer opportunities in the next few months for you to write with us. We’ve got a great “Write Your Future President” postcard campaign going on (you can fill out an electronic postcard to be shared with the next U.S. President on Inauguration Day here). We have our Poet’s Group, which continues to meet and share works-in-progress, and there is an upcoming workshop on writing political letters in October and one on writing memoir in November. And, as always, we have writing consultants that are happy to talk with you about any writing project via email or Zoom. You can sign up for any of these workshops or writing consultations on our website.

And because writing and reading are interconnected in a variety of ways, we wanted to share some of our favorite reads with you this month. A fiction book that reads like a memoir (and reads well!) is Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, a new release. A great book on writing is Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir, which contains short chapters of various writing tips. And an old but favorite poetry collection is Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets. Please email us at ccw@svsu.edu and let us know what you’ve been reading—we’d love to hear from you!

Finally, we want to use this space to feature writers in the community. Donny Winter teaches writing at Delta College, and he’s released his first poetry collection, Carbon Footprint. A summary of the collection from Amazon reads, “In his first full-length collection, Donny Winter takes readers on a journey through his experiences as a gay man living in rural Michigan. His confessional poems, framed in both experimental free verse and tanka styles, use multiple nature-themed metaphors to create commentaries about LGBTQ+ healing and mental health, while also weaving a pro-environmental narrative acknowledging our planet’s trauma. Together, our bodies hold history much as our planet does, and Carbon Footprint acts as a written fossilized record mapping a way toward healing through unearthing our own histories.” You can find more information and order a copy here.

Thanks for reading. We wish you the very best over the next few weeks, and we hope to see you soon in a workshop, Zoom meeting, or even out in the world. In the meantime, take care, stay safe, and keep writing.

Sincerely,
Helen and Chris

A huge thank you to all the community members who came out to the Saginaw Art Museum on Thursday, September 17th, for our Poetry in the Garden event! This open mic poetry reading was attended by 45 community members, and a number of local poets from a variety of ages and backgrounds had the opportunity to share their poems.

In addition, the freshly painted Roethke bus (painted by muralist Pauly Everett) was open to the public to view, while poems written by the winners of our Saginaw I Believe Poetry Postcard Contest were displayed on panels inside the bus!

Check out the Saginaw Art Museum's Facebook page for more photos from the event!

Dear Writers,

It’s hard to believe we are at the end of August. As the Grateful Dead would say, “what a long strange trip it’s been.” While we are grateful for the yellow blooms of the Black-eyed Susans and coreopsis in our backyards, the long summer twilights that stretch into darkness, and the walks though the meandering trails and paths around our two cities, we also are aware, at all times, of COVID-19 and its deadly effects on our region.

We are both teachers, and, like most teachers, we spend much of the school year dreaming of summer; it is our time to unwind, to travel, to spend time with family and friends. But this summer has been decidedly different: there has been no travel, limited contact with those we love, and little chance to relax. We suspect the same is true for many of you.

When we think about all the ways our lives have changed, it becomes easy to feel disconnected and disempowered. But there are moments that push back at these feelings, and many of these moments take place through our Community Writing Center. When we sit on a Zoom call, hearing to a poet read his work, watching the other faces on the call listening carefully with attention and purpose; when we talk with a writer about her novel-in-progress, seeing her face light up when she sees a possibility for further revision to strengthen her work; when we talk with other people in our community co-creating poetry readings, college scholarship workshops, postcard-writing campaigns – this is when we feel connected and empowered. It is the reason we are grateful to you, our writers who make up the Community Writing Center. In these various settings, we get the opportunity to hear your stories, and through your stories, we hear you.

The activist adrienne maree brown says, "I suspect this is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world." She is right. Thanks for being a part of our present—and our future.

As writers, we also want to share our current reads with you. Swarm Theory by Christine Rice is a collection of interrelated short stories set in Michigan and is a wonderful example of carefully crafted short fiction. And old but good book on writing is Annie LaMott’s Bird by Bird, which breaks down the writing life (and life in general) in brief, practical lessons. And a favorite poetry collection is Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iria, a great exercise in voice. As always, we’re interested in what you’re reading too; particularly books that you think our other writers might enjoy, so please send us your recommendations to ccw@svsu.edu, and we’ll pass them along.

Thanks for reading. We wish you the very best over the next few weeks, and we hope to see you soon in a workshop, Zoom meeting, or even out in the world. In the meantime, take care, stay safe, and keep writing.

Sincerely,

Helen and Chris

Dear Writers,

When we first started talking about the Community Writing Center some years ago, we spent a great deal of time thinking about where it would be located. After all, we live in the tri-cities, with lots of other cities that surround us– what town should we choose to do our work? What kind of building should we use—a community center, a local school, a library? If we chose a library, what branch should we pick? And inside the library, what spaces should we select to hold our writing workshops and individual writing consultations?

In all these deliberations, we agreed that we wanted an accessible community location where people would feel comfortable and safe sharing their writing. We were lucky. The Butman-Fish Library in Saginaw and the Wirt Library in Bay City opened their doors to us and have been great spaces (and great community partners) for our writers and our tutoring staff. In these two libraries, we have loved meeting with all of you, sliding our chairs close to one another as we spread a working draft of your essay or short story across one of the oak tables, leaning in together to read and talk and think about writing.

And then the pandemic happened. We lost the ability to meet with you in-person—actually, to meet with most people in-person. We cancelled all our planned sessions and workshops, and, like everyone else, we waited to see what would happen.

What happened was remarkable. In May, we started offering writing consultations via email. You sent in writing. So far, we’ve seen novels-in-progress, resumes, poems, scholarship essays, grant applications, and short stories. In May, we also began offering our “Poets’ Group” (a group of writers who meet to share their work-in-progress), and this month, we’ve held a series of pre-recorded creative writing workshops on fiction, a grant-writing workshop, and a workshop on college scholarship applications through Zoom. You came to these workshops. Since the pandemic began, we’ve worked with over 80 writers online.

Here’s what we’ve discovered: The Community Writing Center isn’t about the space; it’s about the people. It’s about gathering folks together who believe that writing is important and valuable, and forming a community of writers who support one another. This, of course, is implied in the title of our Center. It has just taken us awhile (and a pandemic) to really understand this.

Please know that we plan to come back into our libraries to work with you in-person; we’re just not able to do that right now. So we’re going to continue to create opportunities for you to share and connect through our new website, communitywritingcenter.com. Here, you’ll find information on signing up for a writing consultation via Zoom or email, see a list of our upcoming writing workshops and be able to register for one or more that look interesting to you, and browse our upcoming writing contests and events.

In the meantime, we will be working on sending out a monthly update to all of you, featuring writing tips, our favorite writing books and resources, and our musings on writing and our world. And because
we want to keep the conversation going, we’ll be asking for your favorite reads as writers, so feel free to drop us an email at ccw@svsu.edu.

After all, the world is far too interesting right now not to write about—and so are all of you. As Natalie Goldberg says, "We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in our hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us.”

Take care of yourselves and one another, be well, and keep writing.

Helen Raica-Klotz / Chris Giroux
Co-Directors, The Community Writing Center