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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  Pilgrim - D.A. Navoti

  2017 Jack Straw Writer D.A. Navoti describes his piece “One Pima Pilgrim” as a love-letter/goodbye letter to the Gila River Indian Community outside of Phoenix, AZ, in the Sonoran Desert. In the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Anthology, Dan explores the beauty of the landscape and what it feels like to be an outsider in his own community. His conversation with Jourdan Imani Keith ranges from being inspired to create a version of Walden with an atheist perspective to Dorian Gray as a window into literary possibilities. “You’re born on the motherland; you’re supposed to stay there and that’s where you’re gonna die. But . . . ever since I was a kid, I just wanted to explore.”

  Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Salvage – Brandon Young

  2017 Jack Straw Writer Brandon Young spoke with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about hoarding and its range of meanings and expressions, from bountiful treasure to suffocating trash. Brandon and Jourdan explore the idea that hoarding can provide salvation from an emotional trauma and is often a sign of an insecure environment. For Brandon’s work, he interviewed people about their relationships with objects and discovered the memories and potential that can be contained in things: “She looks back and says, ‘I wore this then’”; “A coupon might be used one day. An old pair of shoes might be repaired.”

  Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Smoke – Steph Kesey

  Steph Kesey‘s piece in the 2017 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is an excerpt from a book-length memoir in progress about her father’s battle with mental illness. She talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about this experience, how she began as a sculptor and became a writer, and how she finds form by putting the brutal and the beautiful next to each other. “I think . . . mental illness hitting a family . . .  you have people at their most vulnerable, and the love that’s required to overcome something like that is the glue of families in those moments.”

  Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Rage - Jamaica Baldwin

  2017 Jack Straw Writer Jamaica Baldwin talks with curator Jourdan Imani Keith about finding her voice in poetry, adopting silence as a kind of armor, and the male gaze in art and literature. “Women’s lives are surrounded by violence; some of them endure it, some of them go through it, and I like the poets who don’t shy away from that. Where their skin is peeled back and their bones are exposed. I like that. . . . And I think it seeps into my own work.”

  Music by the Steve Griggs Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Apples – Shontina Vernon

  Jack Straw Writer Shontina Vernon‘s piece in the 2016 Jack Straw Writers Anthology is inspired by her youth in rural Texas and subsequent departure to the big city to attend a performing arts school. She talks with curator Karen Finneyfrock about this experience, her current work with youth through 4Culture’s Creative Justice program, and the importance of being able to tell your own story honestly: “If you haven’t really explored your own narrative, your own sense of what is true for you internally, I think it’s really hard to do it for your characters on the page.”

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Sister – Carolyne Wright

  2016 Jack Straw Writer Carolyne Wright talks with program curator Karen Finneyfrock about her current work in progress – a collection of poems about important women in her life, including her mother and sister – as well as her long career, global travels, and postgrad brush with the influential poet Elizabeth Bishop. “She said things like ‘. . . You’ve got to read all of the classics, and you’ve got to read all of the romantics and the Renaissance poets and the metaphysical poets and modernist poets and you’ve got to practice writing in form.’ So that’s what we did, we wrote in form. We wrote ballad quatrains, we wrote sestinas, I think I even tried a villanelle!”

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  A Lesser Love – EJ Koh

  2016 Jack Straw Writer EJ Koh found her calling as a poet at the very end of her college experience, after years of acting as her own guardian while her parents worked in Korea. She talks about her unusual adolescence and the sudden realization that she was a poet with program curator Karen Finneyfrock. “Everyone’s like ‘What’s happening to you? What’s poetry doing to you?’ And then I had to stop and think about it, and I said ‘I think it’s making me a better person, I think that’s what’s happening.’”

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Worst-case Scenarios – Ramon Isao

  2016 Jack Straw Writer Ramon Isao‘s short stories combine obsession, fear, and disaster with humor and absurdity. He talks with program Curator Karen Finneyfrock about his fascination with worst-case scenarios, his early realization that he could be a writer, and how he knows a story is finished. “I know that I’m done with them when I want them out of my life! Like, they’ve got to go.”

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Communication – Alison Stagner

  2016 Jack Straw Writer Alison Stagner‘s poems balance lyricism and beauty with threat and violence as she attempts to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between our internal selves and the outer world. She talks to program curator Karen Finneyfrock about this and other fascinations, as well her method of writing poems orally, often while walking her dog. “I think the walking helps me pace my poems and helps me syntactically. . . . Because when you’re not writing anything down, you have to keep track of the thought process that goes into the sentence.”

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.
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  Brother – Casandra Lopez

  2016 Jack Straw Writer Casandra Lopez has worked in several literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and essays. Her project during her Jack Straw fellowship was a hybrid work of creative non-fiction, crossing and blending genres to explore the grief and loss that followed her brother’s murder. She talks to program curator Karen Finneyfrock about making the transition from fiction to poetry, art as activism, and writing about grief.

  Music by Seattle Jazz Composers Ensemble, produced as part of the Jack Straw Artist Support Program.