Using Community to Build Audience and Develop an Aesthetic

March 29, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

I am always interrogating the idea of what it means to be a creative writer today. I think it's important to consider one's role in the community. How can you create a space in which to work -- which will help you develop your vision and your writing practices. Outreach can help this effort, not only by helping to fertilize the intellectual desert that exists among young people, but also getting writers out of our cloisters and comfort zones. Frankly, sometimes we need a prompt.

Below is an interesting segment by Robert Glück from a class reading that speaks to this notion of community building. He's describing how he and Bruce Boone began to formulate what would become New Narrative in San Francisco.

"In 1976 I started volunteering in the non-profit bookstore Small Press Traffic and became co-director not long after. From 1977 to 1985, I ran a reading series and held free walk-in writing workshops at the store. The workshops became a kind of New Narrative laboratory attended by Michal Amnasan, Steve Abbott, Sam D'Allesandro, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, and many other writers whose works extend my own horizon. I would start by reading some piece of writing that interested me: Chaucer, Robert Smithson, Lydia Davis, Ivan Bunin, Jim Thompson, a book of London street games, Thomas Wyatt, Sei Shonagon. We were aspiring to an ideal of learning derived as much from Spicer and Duncan as from our contemporaries."

He later describes how that effort led to a "Left/Write Conference" that Bruce Boone and Steve Abbot mounted in 1981 at Noe Valley Ministry that brought together writers from disparate communities.

"We felt urgent about it, perhaps because we each belonged to such disparate groups. To our astonishment, 300 people attended Left/Write, so we accomplished on a civic stage what we were attempting in our writing, editing and curating: to mix groups and modes of discourse."

It's as if our external practices and dialogues can parallel often compliment our creative output on the page. I find that very interesting.