The Capitol Times’ reporter Lindsay Christians attended the January 15, 2017 Writers Resist event, where Madison authors read in support of democracy, compassion, fairness, decency, inclusion, freedom–all the things we hold dear–and writes about it in the article attached below. First, some photos from the event:

This one was taken by James Lee Phetteplace. In the first row are some of the writers who read, Natalie Eilbert, Sarah Fuchs, me, and Lissa McLaughlin. Behind us you can see Jamel Brinkley, Jean Ho, and Derrick Austin. Barrett Swanson is in the orange beanie.

And another shot taken from the balcony by the Cap Times photographer, where you can see the entire space and the beautiful bima of the Gates of Heaven synagogue:

And finally, the article:

MADISON WRITERS RESIST GIVES BILLBOARDS TO THE POETS
by LINDSAY CHRISTIANS | The Capital Times
PHOTOS BY MICHELLE STOCKER

19 writers read poetry, short essays and fiction at the Gates of Heaven during the Madison Writers Resist event.

Before Madison Writers Resist on Sunday night, poet Marilyn Annucci unearthed a few poems from a notebook and made some changes. As she did, she was struck by how that process of revising things from the past is much like the work of citizenship itself.

“Writing is really a form of democracy,” Annucci said. “It takes love and attention. It’s a process.”

Madison Writers Resist, a lively, well-attended reading in the Gates of Heaven synagogue, joined 90-some events taking place around the country and the world on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.

The stated purpose of these gatherings was “to resist the Trump administration.” But in Madison’s two-hour-plus event, 19 featured writers dropped the new president elect’s name less than a handful of times.

Many of the writers had ties to the university. Author/educator Kara Candito and artist Victor Castro organized Madison Writers Resist with Rita Mae Reese of Arts + Literature Laboratory and Ron Czerwein of Avol’s Books.

Sean Bishop from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s creative writing department opened with a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

The five-minute time limit made a good fit for poets like Derrick Austin, Natalie Eilbert and Jamel Brinkley. Brinkley read Ada Limón’s “A New National Anthem,” and Eilbert read an excerpt from a longer work of her own called “The Lake.” She read some of what she’d written after the election, “in the age of the autocrats.”

“The tyrant glides along, orange dander colliding with the brutality of naming us what we are,” she read. “Rust sprinkles in the long grass and I loop its belt around and around my waist.

“I have nothing to say to you, America. Wear your safety pins. Register. Safety. We have failed us.”

The assembled crowd heard from Madison’s poets laureate past and current, Fabu (a Capital Times opinion columnist) and Oscar Mireles, editor of three volumes of “I Didn’t Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin.”

Mireles read a poem that recalled his mother, his aunt and two of their friends picketing outside trains in Minneapolis that meant to deport Mexican immigrants.

“They were afraid to hold up the picket signs, yet were more afraid worse things would happen if they did not.”

Some writers read work not their own. Timothy Yu read Allen Ginsberg. Sarah Fuchs choked up during an excerpt of James Baldwin’s 1984 essay “On Being White … and Other Lies.” Marcela Fuentes read Albert Rios’ “The Border: A Double Sonnet.”

Araceli Esparza gleefully reported before reading that she’d just followed her poem’s author, January Gill O’Neill, on Twitter. O’Neill’s “Old South Meeting House” sounded like a powerful call to action, especially apt in Gates of Heaven: “We draw breath from brick. Ignite the fire in us. Speak to us: the language is hope.”

Novelist Dale Kushner read a bit of Walt Whitman, but opened with a story about her father. Kushner came to college in the 1960s, “when cities and campuses were battle zones,” and before she left her father took her aside and said, “don’t sign anything.”

“He was worried that I would be signing radical petitions,” she said, “assuming that I was a lot more daring than I was. But he was also coming from a lineage of persecution and exile.

“He knew well the power of the state to crush opposition, and the charisma of demagogues to lead the naïve into danger.”

Some poets, like SP Mulroy and Andy Gricevich, read their own work, exploring difficult compassion and shared vulnerability. Judith Claire Mitchell read an excerpt from her first novel, “The Last Day of the War.”

Especially powerful were two poems by Rubén Medina, a professor of Latin American literature at the UW.

“Applying for Citizenship” explored Medina’s relationship to “this, my nation of others,” the adopted country he has called home for four decades.

The poem took the form of a series of “conditions,” some humorous — TV commercials should be limited to one minute per hour — and others more serious.

“The White House should be moved to Puerto Rico, the Congress to Harlem, the United Nations to Wounded Knee,” Medina read. “Half of the billboards in this country should be given to poets or anyone who wants to imagine the nation, the other half to children.”

Medina followed that with a first reading of a poem called “Homeland” with the repeated refrain, “This country has never been mine.”

“Countries don’t have owners,” Medina read.

A short open mic section followed the main event, though most folks cleared out before that began. James Lee Phetteplace got in several pertinent zingers to the president-elect: “They may like the cut of your jib now, but when the winds shift they’ll cut that jib.”

Readers and listeners at Madison Writers Resist raised more than $2,000 for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. Another similar event, not associated with Writers Resist but in the same vein, is set for March 18. Nasty Women Reading is taking submissions through Feb. 3 and will be a benefit for Planned Parenthood.

“Giving writers something to do, to look forward to, is really important,” said ALL’s Rita Mae Reese. “But also I think people need to hear the voices in their community.”

When Dale Kushner got up to speak, she put it another way.

“This inspiration is what feeds us, is what we need,” Kushner said. “I’m happy to be here today to encourage all of us to imagine together how we can create public spaces that feel safe for controversial discourse.”

I know I often write about how honored I’ve been to have received this award or that nomination, to have been invited to this reading or that lecture, to have my name mentioned alongside the names of other writers I admire. I never use the word casually. I mean it sincerely every single time. I always wanted to be a writer, but I began writing seriously later in life, and I’m still amazed that my work has been published at all and that I’m a member of a creative writing program, much less one as respected as the University of Wisconsin’s. Both those things–being a published writer and teaching–were beyond my wildest dreams, so when someone acknowledges my work when there are so many better and more prominent writers around–well, that’s even farther beyond those dreams, and I’m not kidding around;  I am truly, deeply honored.

But having used the word honored in all those other contexts means that I’m now in need of a word that means “honored and then some.” Honored-plus? Super-honored? Full-fat honored? HONORED in all caps? Because that’s how I feel about having been invited to be a featured reader at the Madison Writers Resist event on Sunday, January 15: extra honored with a cherry on top. If you want the time and place, you can jump to it by clicking here.

But in this post, I wanted to say a little something more about this reading.

As a great many American citizens are aware, Writers Resist is an international movement that was conceived after the US election by the poet and activist Erin Belieu. The idea is elegant and powerful: on January 15, 2017, the date of Martin Luther King’s birthday, writers, readers and citizens seeking solidarity and inspiration will gather in their cities and towns to hold what is described as “a ‘reinauguration’ of our shared commitment to the spirit of compassion, equality, free speech, and the fundamental ideals of democracy.”  To date readings are being held in about 75 locations, from New York and Boston to Seattle and San Francisco to Zurich and Hong Kong.

The Madison event, which is a fundraiser for the Wisconsin ACLU, takes place from 6 to 9pm. It  was organized by Sean Bishop, Kara Candito, Ron Czerwien, and Rita Mae Reese, four formidable poets who live here in Madison. The readers have been asked to read briefly from relevant passages of either their own work or the work of other writers who inspire them. After these readings there will be an open mic.

The featured readers in Madison include Masood Akhtar, Marilyn Annucci, Moisés Villavicencio Barras, Araceli Esparza, Fabu, Dale Kushner, Lissa McClaughlin, Rubén Medina, Oscar Miralis, SP Mulroy,  Timothy Yu, and me, as well as all 6 of this year’s Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellows, Derrick Austin, Jamel Brinkley, Natalie Dawn Eilbert, Sarah Fuchs, Marcela Fuentes, and Barrett Swanson. I know many of these writers and am genuinely excited to hear them read, one after another.

Making it all just a little more special is the location of the reading, the beautiful Gates of Heaven, a former synagogue adjacent to James Madison Park. It helps make this feel like an almost spiritual event. I believe it will be a consoling event, a healing event.

My teacher Marilynne Robinson (talk about honors–not much beats having Marilynne Robinson as your teacher) once told us that the English who colonized this country did not celebrate Thanksgiving once a year as we do today or as suggested by the traditional Thanksgiving stories we were told as children. Rather, she said, whenever the religious leaders believed something had occurred that gave them particular reason to express gratitude to their god,  the colonists would gather together in church and as a community give thanks. These were known as days of thanks-giving and they occurred frequently throughout the year.

We have had many days of coming together in fear and despair of late. I see the Writers Resist readings as a worldwide day of thanksgiving. We give thanks for our voices, our convictions, our ferocity, our freedoms, our intellects, our imaginations, our power. That we in Madison will be gathering in the once-sacred Gates of Heaven to read to one another on this day of thanks-giving makes our event all the more moving.

And so, once more, the details: Sunday, Jan. 15, 6 – 9pm, the Gates of Heaven Synagogue, 302 E. Gorham St. Featured readers will begin at 6pm and an open mic will follow.

Along with fellow Wisconsin authors Michael Perry and John P. Riordan, I spent a lovely morning with 75 supporters of Racine, Wisconsin’s public library at the Friends of the Library’s annual Breakfast with the Authors.  I addressed the group and then got to chat with many of the attendees individually–including this budding author who showed me her own first book.