Welcome to Rolling Call
Always in transition, in search of "prophetic organization"
It’s August 13th, the day before I begin two weeks of teaching up here in Massachusetts for the Bard Care Center. This work will conclude my 20th year of being a teacher, and will be the fourth situation for me as a teacher in 2023 so far—first, the spring semester working with first year architects at Pratt Institute; then spending late-April through June fully absorbed by the New England Literature Program; and for the first time in what I hope will be many, planting myself mid-July in the beautiful dirt of a week-long free school in the woods of southern Vermont, something I co-organized with my friend Iemanja (and which I’m planning to write about extensively soon). In total, I will have been away from “home” in Brooklyn for more than three months this summer, and a few things are being re-cognized in me:
I am an itinerant teacher. Moving around is important to me, my life, my ability to financially sustain myself, but also the aliveness of my work. In fact, the older I get (I’m 44 now) the more movement itself is at the heart of everything, and the more I need to move as a body, as a reader, as a writer, and as a teacher. I like moving around and adapting to different people and contexts, entering and exiting different flows of life, being in places in ways that make me something more than a visitor but something less than a settler. I know I’m not alone in this, and never working alone in these places, but there’s so much experience and learning in it that remains solitary.
I need to struggle more to name the elements of this life process I’m in more regularly—that is, how what I am and how I feel is what I am doing and where and with whom. All inseparable, now and for as long as I can remember. My commitment to following the experience of being called to do certain things. The gravity of the stillness involved in listening for the call. The faith involved in locating and delivering one’s life value to something other than remuneration, and declining the drag of an ego committed to never-ending and multifaceted inflationary self-description and self-promotion. My belief that education and learning should always and forever be free, and my commitment to making more and more of the teaching work I do free for others to be a part of. And asking, deliberately and with force, where the money is coming from that allows us to do what we do and what kinds of power result from the structures that determine its flow and construct the boundaries of so much meaning, the territories of viable life chances.
I need help doing what I do—I need readers and singers and witnesses and interlocutors; I need to find new ways to carry and process the energy of my own devotion and rage and the tensions and relationships that are initiated and grow and blossom and transition and give their immediate life up toward the seeds of the unpredictable and the unforeseen. I need to gently think of the future from my position as a person who chiefly owns debt and would rather not be paid for her work ever. (I would prefer to be paid in love, touch, and vegetables, but that’s not the world most of us currently live in.)
The desire, as my beloved friend Lara Mimosa Montes has assured me, is to write a book. The book that I need to write. I’m here to invite you to share in and also support a little more of my work, my heart, my brain in the process in the hopes that it will bring some pleasure to you as well as maybe spur and energize your own work and movement and desires. And my plan is to post some mix of the following at least twice a week, with a couple of the postings free and available to all but the remainder available to subscribers:
Open letters to writers and people who matter to me
Direct descriptions of and reflections on the ways I shape time and action in the space of the “classroom,” a.k.a. examples of the kinds of exercises and flows of work I create for my classes
Ekphrases of my embodied experiences within the role or position of “teacher” or “facilitator”
Writing on the interpersonal politics of academic institutionalization that will seek to occupy the cuts and cleavages across roles and classes
Audio files of readings of my own poetry and prose (older and newer) and probably other things I can’t predict
Sharing pieces of my new weird research in movement, as a body teaching in the world, as a newborn dancer, and from the perspective of my time doing Somatic Experiencing therapy
I really hope you’ll consider joining me here as a witness and collaborator in the way that makes sense for you, and hope you’ll consider sharing this thing with people you think would be into it! Sending out a lot of love and hope for a peaceful transition into fall.