SoundPages

SoundPages is produced by Jack Straw Cultural Center as part of the Jack Straw Writers Program. This podcast features interviews and live readings from artists in the Jack Straw Writers Program. Each year a series of twelve episodes is produced featuring the current Jack Straw Writers and curator.

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  Naia - Helen K. Thomas

  2020 Jack Straw writer Helen K. Thomas’s project is a collection of short stories that feature Black girl protagonists from the Pacific Northwest. In her conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss Young Adult fiction and expanding representation of young Black girls in those stories. “To be a part of that and to choose to be a part of that is something that I don’t take lightly and is something that I really, really honor because . . . I see how it’s changing the world. And I see how it’s creating compassion. And I see how it’s really moving the dial forward and moving our culture forward.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  A Resurrection - Rob Arnold

  Rob Arnold’s project for the 2020 Jack Straw Writers Program is a poetic memoir that tackles the complex legacies of familial trauma. In his conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss cross-genre writing, the distance and connection created by language, and matching linguistic precision with visual expansion. “I started thinking about these things in a much more in-depth way. Every single noun became like a hyperlink, like I could dive in deep into the history. So, I was able to kind of turn my poems from these tiny, little jewels into much more developed pieces.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Breath - Ching-In Chen

  2020 Jack Straw writer Ching-In Chen’s project is a series of experimental prose poems inspired by their relationship to breath, and the Texas Tax Day Flood of 2016.  In their conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss their process of creating in a hybrid genre, representation in art, and creating within community. “What surprised me is I never knew what people would get out of my work. The people who I never would have imagined would respond to my work, would start talking to me and coming up to me . . . it sparked these conversations with other artists or with community members or, you know, folks.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Giant - Michelle Goodman

  Michelle Goodman’s project for the 2020 Jack Straw Writer’s Program is a creative nonfiction piece that deals with dying and grief. In her conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss navigating the balance between telling the truth and what remains untold, shaping nonfiction, and writing as an act of understanding. “I’ve always liked telling true life stories. I think it helps us make sense of life and the world and helps other people feel less alone when they read and relate to a story that speaks to them.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Insubordinate - Ebo Barton

  2020 Jack Straw writer Ebo Barton’s poetry project is both a printed work and an audiobook. In their conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss the differences between spoken word and page poetry, the pressure on artists to constantly produce, and what it means to share work aloud. “When I say the stage is my church, it actually is my church and that’s what I’m doing for me at that point in time. And if somebody grabs onto it, cool, but I’m gonna keep going.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Body - Wrly T. McCutchen

  Wryly T. McCutchen’s project for the 2020 Jack Straw Writer’s Program is part of a “drag-a-licious” show of “of weird, solo, interdisciplinary, poetry-fueled content.” In their conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss the physical nature of their work, their destructive poetry practice, and the importance of sharing one’s work. “Poetry offers the opportunity to use language in this way that breaks it and messes it up. . . . And also there’s often an emphasis on what’s not there or what’s been taken out . . . it’s something that I’ve been thinking about, in terms of life values and political values, too. What do we build . . . what do we remove? What do we take down? What do we destroy?”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Ezekiel - Elaina Ellis

  2020 Jack Straw writer Elaina Ellis’s poetry project could be described as a book-length exploration of the story of Ezekiel, but that’s just the beginning. In her conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss bringing one’s whole self to the creative process, love-bombing, and the multiple resonances, from the erotic to the traumatic, that can be found in both sacred texts and modern life. “That is how the book of Ezekiel opened up for me this etymological rabbit hole — and then this image of an angel lifting somebody up by a lock of his hair. But it wasn’t like that story isn’t about punishment, necessarily — It’s like he gets lifted up to talk to God about something.”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Future Myths - Maisha Banks Manson

  Maisha Banks Manson’s project for the 2020 Jack Straw Writers Program is “myth building in the future.” In their conversation with curator Anastacia-Renée, they discuss their strategies for making a life in the arts, the speculative/narrative nature of their work, and reimagining fairytale narratives. “Part of it is taking how I feel, right now, about a story in the past and then, giving it to a future self. And then, having that be . . . how can I project care or worry or change to a version of me, or a version of family and kin and society that isn’t there yet?”

  Music by SassyBlack, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Fireflies - Suzanne Warren

  Suzanne Warren’s 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program project is a collection of short stories called In the Country of Husbands that marries domestic realism with magic realism and focuses on the lives of women and girls. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss her background in experimental film, themes of rape culture, and the outsider status of single women. “At one point I actually said to a friend, ‘It’s not like I’m going to go in their houses, fuck their husbands, and drown their babies.’ . . . That kind of satiric, hyperbolic statement—this kind of frustration and rage and paranoia — was the seed for this story.”

  Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Survivor - Putsata Reang

  Putsata Reang’s project for the 2019 Jack Straw Writers Program is a memoir that chronicles her life growing up in rural Oregon and her family’s journey escaping the war and genocide in Cambodia. In her conversation with curator Kathleen Flenniken, they discuss the difficulty of writing a memoir involving people who are living, displacement in its many forms, and Reang’s mother’s love of the television show Survivor. “Growing up, I didn’t really understand why, of all the TV shows, she loved this show so much. . . . I thought, you know, Mom’s, just, being crazy. Well, after I heard the story of how we escaped Cambodia and survived — Actually, I do think she can win.”

  Music by The Bird Tribe Orchestra, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.