Interview: Marshall Walker Lee

At the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Denver this week, I ran into a bunch of former classmates from the University of Arizona MFA program. I spoke with one who heard of my interest in Detroit and referred me to speak with Marshall Walker Lee at the "Poor Claudia" literary journal table in the book fair. Among other things, Marshall grew up in Detroit, studied at the University of Michigan, worked for an arts organization in various rural locales in South Africa, and helped start a well-regarded literary journal in Portland, Oregon. Detroit Ho! recently decided to start interviewing people with expertise on Detroit and/or the process of establishing a creative community, and Marshall is our first "expert" in this series. Oh wait... I can't disregard Spike Lee... Marshall is the second expert. And the second Lee.

Detroit Ho!: What exactly is the arts scene in Detroit right now?

Marshall Walker Lee: One of my best friends in Detroit works for an organization called "Inside/Out," which is something that Detroit Public Schools (DPS) are doing to bring artists and writers into middle and high school classrooms. The literary and art scene has really taken off since the opening of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), which is in the shadow of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). It's an artist run co-op with concerts and arts programming. When my older sister moved to Detroit after going to the University of Michigan, nobody from her class moved to Detroit. But when I graduated six or seven years later, around fifty people from my class ended up moving there. It is cheap to live there, and abandoned spaces make everything guerilla. There are huge non-profit grants to lure young white artists from the suburbs. Last year, there was a $25,000 grant for photography. This year it's for writing. Everybody is applying for it.

DH: Damn...

MWL: Because it is dirt cheap you can do so much there with practically nothing. You can start a restaurant with a full liquor license for something like $60,000. But there is no infrastructure to maintain it. I love the idea of living there except for the winters. And there is always a necessity to drive. But the city attracts self-motivated artists who don't need to rely on an institution or school system to sustain them. I mean, Wayne State's radio station is shutting down. But twenty-five to thirty-year-olds work easily part time at a job, and part time at a non-profit or library program, with plenty of time to do their art. My friend's dating the co-director of the city's NPR station.

DH: How long has this all been going on?

MWL: I think the city has been building toward a new beginning since the opening of the Renaissance Center in what, 1977? But they've been waiting for the right mayor and legislature to bring this about. It seems like Dave Bing may finally get things done. He is aiming to cut the footprint of the city in half. One of the best proposals being considered now is that they build a green belt around the city, but that probably won't pass. So they are trying to move one neighborhood at a time to the city-- which is what they have to do. And it's now or never. If the auto industry leaves completely, it'll be like Berlin in the 1980's. It will have to start over again.

DH: So what all is going on art-wise, specifically?

MWL: My friends do something called "Theatre Bizarre." A bunch of artists go to the state fairgrounds, which have been abandoned. And for one night they turn on all the rides, and it's like Mardi Gras for one day. It's this burlesque carnival.

DH: What are your thoughts on gentrification as it relates to Detroit? Does it have to have the same effect as has been the case in Brooklyn and Portland?

MWL: It's strange to say this about gentrification, but in Detroit the areas least gentrified are the ones shutting down completely. Because they are 50-70% unoccupied. In east Detroit, 20% of the areas are unoccupied and they've turned into an urban prairie land, which people are romanticizing. But there are wild dogs roaming around. You have to go out with a baseball bat.

DH: Tell me about the work you did in South Africa.

MWL: Well, I'd gotten a grant to go there and write. And eventually I ended up doing work with this bookbinding press about 40 miles outside of Johannesburg. Between Durban and Johannesburg. The CreACTive Center. I worked with a woman named Gabisile Nkosi, who is a pretty famous South African artist who grew up in a township and really made herself. She built her own house and her life from just doing her art. But she was killed by her ex-husband. It was really horrible. She died just after I left.













She helped set up centers around the country in rural bush schools to teach classes to kids and adults in practical crafts. Things like teaching weaving to women, bookbinding for record keeping. It was part of Caversham Press, which was started under apartheid. It was the first printmaking press for both blacks and whites-- "open," they call it. Some major names in the South African art scene came out of there.

DH: What was it like?

MWL: It was a positive experience for me because of who I was with.

DH: What exactly did you end up doing?

MWL: I was able to teach and develop programming. They were a kind of medium for me to understand what was going on culturally. One thing we did was, if we were there for two or three days, we'd ask people to establish a community newspaper. They had to go home, write a story, and illustrate it. One kid went home and asked his grandmother for a story he didn't know. And she told him about the time his grandfather had beaten her so badly he broke her eye socket. When he came back and told us, all the other kids just nodded. I mean, every Saturday you go to funerals. There is something like a 90% AIDS rate in rural east South Africa. Johannesburg is kind of like Detroit in some ways.

DH: What you're saying reminds me of an NPR story I once heard about funerals being a kind of recreational activity in Detroit. That kind of culture of violence. What else do Detroit and Johannesburg have in common?

MWL: They are both sparsely populated. Land laws are such that residences, businesses and factories can all be in the same place. But Johannesburg is also unique. It's the only major city with no body of water. It was built because of the gold deposits, and it has no sense of itself. It's much more violent. It's not really a city. I've heard that in the next 20 years, it will join with Pretoria to make a city of 55 million people.

DH: Where will Detroit be in 20 years?

MWL: It's possible that it is going to die before it gets better. There is just such an endemic lack of government. So much corruption. It may have to fall apart. And perhaps young people might move there and form a resistance. Already, everyone under thirty living in Detroit is really involved in politics. Everyone knows the name of the president of the school board. You have to be involved or you'll feel powerless.

DH: So when did you start "Poor Claudia"?

MWL: It's one year old.

DH: And you are a printmaker?

MWL: No, both Drew (co-founder) and I are just lit nerds. I'm a writer. We just taught ourselves this stuff.







Marshall, Gabisile and the people/organizations he described are an excellent example of what my friend Daisy has deemed "Nouveau DIY:" a new phase in the era of "Do-it-Yourself." With a motivation that goes beyond redoing the living room... Watch out TLC.

For more info on Poor Claudia, check out this article from the Portland Mercury.

Detroit Ho!'s Exclusive Interview with Director Spike Lee

OK. Maybe this isn't an exclusive interview. Maybe it's the "exchange" that took place between members of Detroit Ho! and Mr. Lee during his recent visit to the University of Arizona's Centennial Hall. But there was still a back and forth... Our dialogue began after a brief discussion of Mr. Lee's history as a film student, getting a student Academy Award at NYU, living without electricity in Fort Greene, failing at his first feature, and finally succeeding with (my personal favorite) "She's Gotta Have It." Here's the transcript:

Spike Lee: There was an audience for that kind of film... it was "She's Gotta Have It" along with "Hollywood Shuffle" by Robert Townsend. You should check it out if you haven't seen it. Those two films brought about the so-called "Black Renaissance" in film.

Detroit Ho [Aisha]: (Laughter...lone laughter).

SL: Why you laughin'? It was a big thing back then.

[time passes]

DH: I know New York is your city. And you've done some work in New Orleans. But, what would you do in Detroit?

SL: Ooooh. You from Motown?

DH: All my family is.

SL: The Motor City? You know, Detroit is really the most depressed city in the United States of America. There's definitely stories there. And uh, it wasn't once like that. We had the car industry there, uh, things went downhill after the riots. Your mayor... Kwame Whassisname?

DH [Miro]: Kilpatrick.

SL: That wasn't a good look. (Laughter). There definitely is... I'll bet you could do a good TV series, like a Detroit version of "The Wire." Also, all those fans of "The Wire," David Simon's next new show is called "Treme" and it's about New Orleans. But definitely, there's a lot of good stories in Detroit.

Thank you Mr. Lee. We look forward to our next interview...

Travels with Pen Reading Sunday

This summer, a group of artists, designers and writers are heading to Detroit for the First Annual Seminole Street Artist’s Colony and Exhibition. We plan to transform an historic house, with a literary past, into a residence for artists and writers—not unlike Casa Libre. Part of our mission is to disrupt the poor image that Detroit has earned, over time, as the nation’s failure—and in this spirit, our first Tucson event this spring will be an attempt to raise awareness about the ways in which we conceptualize of our environments: “Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place.” Please join us! If you’d like to learn more about our endeavor, scroll down! We’ll be hosting various events, and an art auction/fundraiser in the coming months.

Here are some of the bios of writers participating... stay tuned as the list will grow!

Arianne Zwartjes' first book, The Surfacing of Excess, won Eastern Washington University's 2009 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and a box of copies just arrived at her house. Her 2008 chapbook of prose poems (Stiched) A Surface Opens: Essays was published by Diagram/New Michigan Press, and her writing has appeared in literary magazines including The Pinch, Cue, Caketrain, Front Porch, Diagram, Blue Fifth Review, and Word for/Word. Zwartjes teaches at the Poetry Center and in the English Department at the University of Arizona; she is also an EMT and wilderness medicine instructor, and has just completed a book-length collection of lyric essays entitled (Detailing Trauma).

Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in 2005 by Ireland's Salmon Poetry; his next collection, Bloom, is due from Salmon in late 2010. Recent work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Isotope, Orion, Hawk & Handsaw, and Southwestern American Literature. Look for new work in High Desert Journal, ISLE, Freshwater, Spiral Orb, Salamander, and Versal. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Leftrick Herd had to leave Oregon one year after his birth because his parents feared he might be getting "webbed feet" from all the rain. He grew up on an 80-acre ranch in western Colorado where his main sources of transportation were horses and an old Willy's Jeep. Joining the Navy only whetted his appetite for adventure and he has been on some sort of trip ever since.

Ben Quick served as Beverly Rodgers Fellow in creative nonfiction on his way to a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arizona in 2008. He lives with his son in Tucson where he writes and teaches at the U of A. The recipient of a 2010 Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction, his work appears in Orion Magazine, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments and other publications. He smokes. And he likes it. Especially after coffee, sex, food, exercise and any combination thereof. He doesn't like lectures. He will live to be 100.

Beth Alvarado, who has lived in Tucson since 1968, loves the desert and often writes about it. Her stories are collected in Not a Matter of Love (New Rivers Press). Newer work has been published recently in Seattle Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and Third Coast.

Timoteio Padilla is a universal artist who is not from one particular place. He is of the stars, and the red dirt, and all the elements. He is here and he is there. He was physically conceived in this plane in New Mexico, and was raised in Tucson. He is an artist who utilizes the medium of Hip-Hop, and lives what he speaks.

Lauryn Bianco would live her life to a soundtrack of music from the 70's and 90's if it were possible. This bio, in fact, should be read to the tune of Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" or any track recorded by TLC. Lauryn once ran a half marathon while wearing a tiara and hoop earrings. She has since completed a full marathon, and she no doubt will run her next one backwards and in heels. Lauryn is from New York, which you might not notice until she gets angry or drives. Lauryn has a BA in English from SUNY Fredonia, a master's degree in Gender and Women's studies from the U of A, and a black belt in femme fatale from an undisclosed credentialing agency.

TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice. S/he earned his MFA in Poetry from UA in 2005 and currently teaches Composition at Pima Community College. TC is the Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana and is a member of Movement Salon, a compositional improvisation group in Tucson. S/he is a collective member of Read Between the Bars, a books-to-prisoners program, and s/he spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. TC's poems can be found in Volt, The Pinch, Drunken Boat, Shampoo, A Trunk of Delirium, and jubilat.

Daisy Pitkin lives in Arizona, grew up on a farm in Ohio, and at fourteen coerced her friends to read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" on a roof. Her job as a union organizer kept her moving around the world, and for ten years she rarely spent more than five days in the same place. Her most recent nonfiction manuscript contemplates themes of memory, maps and family.

Lisa O'Neill is a writer, teacher of writers, and a graduate of the University of Arizona's program in Nonfiction Creative Writing. In addition to teaching students pursuing undergraduate degrees, she co-teaches writing workshops with incarcerated writers in Pima County, Arizona through the program Inside/Out. Although she lives in Tucson, Lisa often centers her writing on the place where she grew up and the geography closest to the heart, Louisiana. She recently completed a nonfiction manuscript, Vessels, which explores the physical, cultural and historical landscapes of her home state as well as her home town, New Orleans. Lisa appreciates people who experiment and play with sound, language, color, texture and light in whatever form this play takes.

Manuel Munoz is the author of the short story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. He has received numerous honors, including the 2008 Whiting Writer's Award, a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A graduate of Harvard University and Cornell, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train and on NPR. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.

Gillian Drummond is a Tucson-based freelance writer. Her articles appear every Sunday in the Arizona Daily Star and on her blog, www.homeisafourletterword.com. Gillian came to Tucson in 1998 from London, where she had spent nine years working on business and consumer magazines, and freelancing for national newspapers. Her credits include The Guardian, The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times Scotland. She is working on her first novel.

Cesar Diaz lived the fragmented life of a migrant boy: divided. conflicted. uprooted. in-between. in constant argument. unforgiving and in a bind. His work is not a figment of his imagination but a construction of the imagination of a boy (now a man) who uses language, memory, and his own words as a glue to understand the situation he was in. Cesar Diaz is a writer. A journeyman. An essayist with an urge to work with language as a method of searching. He strongly believes in the power that writing has on youth and has worked as a creative writing teacher and mentor for outreach nonprofits such as Badgerdog Literary Publishing, Breakthrough Collaborative, The Austin Academy and The GEARUP project. He is a second-year MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and hopes that some of his journeys find their way into a literary magazine. In the meantime, he'll settle for introducing undergrads to the power and fecundity found in essays.

Ruth Hillman is a third generation Tucsonan and has been a semi-secret writer and artist since the fourth grade. She has worked to help people most at risk or living with HIV/AIDS for the last eight years and is starting a soon-t0-be famed new business, The Paper Theory.

Lucy Simpson grew up in East Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, England. Since then she has lived in Paris, Geneva, New York City, Long Island, Dayton, Ohio, Charleston, SC and lately, Tucson, where she intends to stay awhile because moving is hard work and Tucson is nice and warm and slightly weird, which is good. Lucy has a degree in French from the College of Charleston and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona. She is currently working on final revisions of her first novel, and teaching English at Pima Community College. The glamor and mystery just never stop. Lucy lives with two unruly stray children, three beautiful, inspiring, talented dogs, one cute fluffy husband and a wonderful, gruffly sexy, supportive hamster.

Remember! Casa Libre, Sunday March 28th at 4pm.

Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place

In order to start generating awareness about The First Annual Seminole Street Artist's Colony and Exhibition, Detroit Ho! is going to host a few Tucson events this Spring.

The first will be a literary reading at Casa Libre on Sunday, March 28th at 4pm. "Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place" will feature a collection of readings that delve into the nuances of the relationships we form with a particular environment. The goal is to spark thought on how we shape and are shaped by the places we inhabit. I'll post a list of readers soon! Stay tuned...

Re: Re: Blues People

Awhile back, my dad stumbled on what he calls, "Blues in an open field." Vacant land where folks have come together on the east side of Detroit to play and listen to the blues. "At first you wonder, Is this OK?" he said, "but then you realize that there's something sacred about this space. Nobody's going to bother you here."

He called yesterday and asked, "Have you read 'Blues People' by Ralph Ellison?" It is an essay from the collection, Shadow and Act, discussing (then named) Leroi Jones' work of the same name. This was, as my friend Radhika would say, a bit of kismet, as we just finished reading James Baldwin's "The Uses of the Blues" in my composition class a couple of weeks ago. I've since re-read some other responses to blues music, and I am going to let James Agee, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and a student from my class discuss the blues alongside the photos my father took of this summer Blues festival, to lend a bit of historical context.


In preparation for one of the most beautiful books of nonfiction ever written, (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939) James Agee and Walker Evans went to the homes of sharecroppers in the South to see how people lived. At one point, an impromptu serenade is arranged on their behalf. They watch with discomfort as three black men in their twenties are ordered to sing. After the singers finish the first tune, Agee asks them to sing another, and writes, "I had a feeling, through their silence before entering it, that it was their favorite and their particular pride; the tenor lifted out his voice alone in a long, plorative line that hung like fire on heaven, or whistle's echo, sinking, sunken, along descents of a modality I had not heard before, and sank along the arms and breast of the bass as might a body sunken from a cross; and the baritone lifted a long black line of comment; and they ran in a long and slow motion and convolution of rolling as at the bottom of a stormy sea, voice meeting voice as ships in dream, retreated, met once more, much woven, digressions and returns of time, quite tuneless, the bass, over and over, approaching, drooping, the same declivity, the baritone taking over, a sort of metacenter, murmuring along monotones between major and minor, nor in any determinable key, the tenor winding upward like a horn, a wire, the flight of a bird, almost into full declamation, then failing it, silencing; at length enlarging, the others lifting, now, alone, lone, and largely, questioning, alone and not sustained, in the middle of space, stopped; and now resumed, sunken upon the bosom of the bass, the head declined; both muted, droned; the baritone makes his comment, unresolved, that is a question, all on one note: and they are quiet, and do not look at us, nor at anything."


In "Blues People," published in The New York Review in 1964, Ralph Ellison writes, "Bessie Smith might have been a 'blues queen' to the society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues were part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man's ability to deal with chaos."


In a 1964 issue of Playboy Magazine, James Baldwin wrote, "Gin House Blues is a real gin house. Backwater Flood is a real flood. When Billie says, 'My man don't love me,' she is not making a fantasy of it. This is what happened, this is where it is. This is what it is. Now, I'm trying to suggest that the triumph here-- which is a very un-American triumph-- is that the person to whom these things happened watched with eyes wide open, saw it happen. So that when Billie or Bessie or Leadbelly stood up and sang about it, they were commenting on it, a little bit outside it: they were accepting it. And there's something funny-- there's always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster."


After we read "The Uses of the Blues" out loud, I asked my students to find quotes from Baldwin's text and respond to them. One young man picked out this quote: "People who in some sense know who they are can't change the world always, but they can do something to make it a little more, to make life a little more human." The student responds, "I believe that if everyone does this the world can be a lot more human. But to do that you must have some sense of who you are and I don't think its just me but I sometimes feel as if I don't even know who I am so how can I do my part?"

Detroit Poet Wins an Award!

Wayne State University professor and poet M.L. Liebler has just been named the recipient of the Barnes and Noble "Writers for Writers" award. He is the author of thirteen books, including the award-winning poetry collection, Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream, and he has done a great deal to promote a literary life in Detroit. I noticed that a photo of Junot Diaz was linked to the article and this is because Diaz and Maxine Hong Kingston, (two authors I've seen speak in the last three years who are incredibly generous with their time and energy... especially to you, Laura-- remember that?) are also recipients of this 2010 award.

According to the Detroit News, he is a busy man-- always rushing off to Russia to perform or collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan. But it would be phenomenal to have him do a reading at our exhibition/festival this July. Congratulations!

Brainstorming Idea # 8

One thing I hope we are able to accomplish this summer is to have some kind of affiliation with "Detroit Summer." The organization is a "multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit," that attempts to transform the Detroit community through "youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties."

One summer, they had a "video intensive" that resulted in a project called "Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Dropout Hip Hop Audio Documentary." After conducting research on why students drop out, and more importantly, how they can be encouraged not to, they created a series of videos that focus on three themes: "Cooperative Economics" "Alternatives to Criminalization" and "Respect."

I am told that they also focus on urban gardening and volunteer work...

One of the major interests I've had in the last year or so is to collect all of the education-minded people I know (who are also at their wits end with regard to America's educational system) and put them to work in a dynamic environment with people who want to learn. It would be fun to conduct community and youth-focused workshops on our respective interests, such as bookmaking, printmaking, photography, journalism, bike repair/art (with The Hub of Detroit?), writing, composting, etc.

From the looks of their blog, it seems that most of the young folks affiliated with Detroit Summer probably have more to teach us than us them... but maybe we can team up and do some work together? I don't even know what's possible! But I'd like to find out.