EDITOR’S NOTE
By Andrew Tonkovich
Thanks for reading and sharing the summer issue of the Community of Writers’ in-house, invitation-only journal, this one a celebratory, grateful billet-doux to our staff, workshop leaders, participants, guests, elves, and the generous supporters of our annual Olympic Valley summer workshops and year-round programming. Here’s a lively and joyful collection of new work which speaks to the influence, impact, and meaningful context of our ongoing project. Special thanks to Hannah Ross for her editorial contributions and, as always, to designer and managing editor Leah Skoyles. I trust that reading the poetry and prose offered here will indeed make you proud to be a member of our community. Enjoy the rest of the summer, and please do share the Omnium Gatherum Quarterly with others, especially those needing encouragement, insight, and artful inspiration.
Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, OGQ
IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASY TO BE BOTH BLACK AND AMERICAN
The administration knows that subduing history as it is doing works to keep people
of color in this country disunited and at odds with each other.
By Keenan Norris
Thanks to The Nation and editor Katrina vanden Heuvel for permission to reprint this remarkable commentary by Community of Writers staffer Keenan Norris and featuring past participant Abdelrahman ElGendy. And much gratitude to Keenan Norris for making the connections. See the original article online, with links and more.
From The Nation, July 28, 2025
Reading Candacy Taylor’s Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel, I ran across this absurd remnant: In the 1950s and ’60s in Pasadena, California, Black people were banned from many public swimming pools except on “International Day.” Despite the reality that well north of 90 percent of Black Americans were native to the United States at the time, they were placed alongside marginalized, maybe even newly arrived immigrants into a second-class category, Americans for sure, but emphatically disallowed the privileges due white people, and not at all citizens of the country that they called home.
It has never been easy to be both Black and American, but today, as the Trump administration attacks the human rights and resident or citizenship status of immigrants, native-born Black Americans find ourselves vying against our government in order to invoke our history to understand this moment, while oscillating between the allyship which is the best antidote to MAGA’s assaults and some “I told you so” cynicism.
It is that latter oscillation that I find myself struggling against as I doomscroll down the injustices, ICE raids, that omnipresent Kristi Noem ad, the BBB’s tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy, cuts to Medicaid and food assistance. Christine Greer’s op-ed “Black Americans Are Not Surprised” explores this tendency, reporting on the postelection exhaustion of Black folks, 83 percent of whom voted for Kamala Harris, only to see Trump elected again. As the Trump administration’s agenda intensifies, it isn’t hard for us to side-eye many of our fellow Americans who are now expressing such surprise and belated anguish. Yet there’s more to that sideways look than “I told you so.”
At the same time that the administration has set out to violently suppress immigration, legal and undocumented, it has also taken aim at sites where Black American history is disseminated, from government web pages to school classrooms. This is not only authoritarian overreach but evidence of institutional cowardice, the imposition of raw power over the realm of ideas. MAGA’s intersectional attacks are no accident, of course, for it is Black (and Indigenous) American history and the transhistorical consciousness that our history begets which makes comprehensible our current crisis.
Black history is, in part, a record of this nation’s limitations, the lines that have been drawn to determine who is and is not American, who is and is not a free citizen. It’s sometimes tricky for me, a Black professor at a university that is neither a PWI (predominantly white institution) nor an HBCU (historically Black college/university), but instead where the student body is 36 percent Asian, 28 percent Latino, and 10 percent nonresident alien, to explore in the classroom space the limit points of this land. My students’ families, most of them anyway, arrived in the United States postbellum and many since the civil rights movement, often in an escape from communist governments. Historical references to the US’s foundational atrocities do not fit comfortably within a US-as-democratic-savior frame. Especially at our location at the epicenter of Silicon Valley, it is very easy for me and for them to submit to Big Tech’s accelerationist, hyper-capitalist MO that holds history irrelevant as we race forward toward an ever-better future.
Yet our past has a way of returning. We sometimes find that we can’t go forward, or even sit comfortably where we are in class, without looking back. This administration’s assaults are not abstract political issues to my students, but absent our history they can too easily be seen as an aberration, the product of Trump’s obscene politics alone.
The 14th Amendment, which originally granted birthright citizenship to formerly enslaved Black Americans, is one point of political pressure today as the Trump administration seeks to rewrite citizenship laws. It is too easy for MAGA to argue that this statute was meant solely for a non-immigrant group and thus should not be leveraged by immigrants, facing deportation, to attain citizenship. This argument ignores not just that Black people were not deemed citizens pre-Reconstruction but also that powerful forces in this nation wanted us gone. Commentators have cited the Immigration Acts of 1924 and 1965 as definitional points in our immigration history, the former having prohibited all Asian immigration while harshly restricting Southern and Eastern European immigration, the latter undoing those and other restrictions. Less remembered is the antebellum era Colonization Movement, America’s inaugural mass deportation scheme.
Contrived by a faction of white elites including Francis Scott Key and promoted by Abraham Lincoln, among others, the Colonization Movement was founded upon the thesis that free Black people were an imminent threat to the nation and thus must be deported en masse to West Africa. Founded in 1816, the movement, with its promise of opportunity in Africa, gained some Black support and ultimately several thousand people did self-deport, but the movement was always categorically rejected by the vast majority of Black Americans. Critically, David Walker, the leading Black abolitionist of the 1820s, passionately opposed African colonization, arguing that Black Americans should stand and fight for equality in America.
This history, contentious and complicated, created Liberia, but its recitation reminds us that a capricious elite may deny citizenship to a despised minority and even attempt to deport millions of them based solely on prejudice and poorly conceived policy (in the case of the Colonization Movement, that policy assumed that suddenly introducing vast numbers of Black Americans to Africa would be unproblematic; today’s mass deportation advocates assume that suddenly removing millions of workers from the American workforce will be unproblematic). We are reminded that not all Americans have been granted citizenship and that the American government, which grants and denies citizenship, can, through such denial and its consequences, criminalize an entire population, even one that has contributed to the nation for hundreds of years.
The administration knows that subduing history like this works to keep people of color in this country disunited and at odds with each other. President Trump regained the White House in part by working the narrow rifts within communities of color. Whether it be the differences in experience between biracial Black people like Kamala Harris and those who are not directly mixed-race, or the divides between long-tenured Latino communities in the US and those more recently arrived. Our differences are real, but our allyship is more powerful, as I found with activist-writer Abdelrahman ElGendy.
As Steinbeck Fellows Program coordinator at San Jose State University, I had the opportunity to meet ElGendy at a pre-election moment when the America of extralegal deportations was still only notional MAGA rhetoric. ElGendy was one of our six fellows for the year, selected from a field of hundreds of applicants from across the country. Already, he had become a well-regarded opinion columnist and was working on his autobiography, Huna, about his six years as a political prisoner in his native Egypt, a nation where, specifically, he’d protested a despotic regime that, according to Human Rights Watch, “relies on naked coercion and the military and security services as [its] main vehicles of control.”
After his release, ElGendy had come to the United States, enrolling in an MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Pittsburgh, and it was via that program that he turned up at The Community of Writers writing residency in Olympic Valley, California. I was serving as faculty there, which became more about me learning than teaching anything.
I listened to ElGendy, read his work, and related to him, his art, his struggle, his truth, and I thought how he had come to the US, drawn by our institutions, to tell his story. It was improbable, inspiring, the kind of true story that this country has always told about itself to burnish the American brand. But the story was not over.
As ElGendy himself has recounted in the pages of The Nation, the detainment of Mohsen Madawi and other international students forced him to confront the fact that he was not safe on US soil. ElGendy’s story is his, not mine, to tell, but I can say this: That the United States, self-appointed democratic savior of the world, would force someone who has advocated for these very values under extraordinarily dangerous circumstances in Egypt to self-deport is a dizzying hypocrisy.
What can I do but be an ally? How but to bear witness not just to injustice, but to its continuity across time, ElGendy’s autobiography already sharing space in my mind with the literature of African American confinement that I have spent my life within, Ruth Gilmore’s deconstruction of mass incarceration, Malcolm X’s autobiography, Harriet Jacobs’s garret space?
The sad continuity between our history and our present should unite us all, and especially people of color, to advocate for fair and compassionate paths to citizenship for undocumented workers and students. Connections like the one between me and ElGendy are everywhere in America, not just at a remote writing residency but also in the working-class, heavily immigrant community where I live (and where, honestly, I need to do more connecting), in cities and in suburbs, at colleges and car repair shops, even if they don’t get much play in American media because they don’t involve white people as central heroes or antagonists—yet they are an essential American story, which speaks, as well, to the diverse ways Americans are understood beyond borders. International Day, indeed.
Keenan Norris’s latest book, Chi Boy: Native Sons and Chicago Reckonings, was published in 2023. He is the author of the novel The Confession of Copeland Cane, which received the 2022 Northern California Book Award, as well as the novels Lustre and Brother and the Dancer. Native to the Inland Empire, he now lives in San Leandro, California.
RIDING WITH DEATH
By Nick Makoha
Against men who need no solace. In the middle of
July they found the knife that killed you. The kill
was close. Death would not enter of its own
accord. It had to be coaxed like an old king. It did
not know their customs, only what my heart knows
as it searches for a word for enter. You know that
late reaction, that is unable to change in water but
readily burns in air “Why does a man do what he
does?” What is it that the spirits want with him? In
these last eight minutes of your life, you now
trespass on the earth and its furniture. Hold no
grudge. Those shallow breaths betray you and your
clenched wrists. Your dark eyes wish to be owned
again but look what they have become. Death will
not greet you with trumpets and drums. Watch
death and its small entourage!
Double Ekphrasis, the Black Gaze, and Riding with Death
Double ekphrasis refers to a layered form of artistic or literary response in which one artwork interprets another artwork that is already itself a response to an earlier source—essentially, an ekphrasis of an ekphrasis. Standard definitions of ekphrasis often frame it as a description of visual art through literary language, but I resist this. A true ekphrasis does not merely describe the artwork—it animates the chemistry between the artist, the subject, and the viewer. It creates a dialogue rather than a commentary.
Double ekphrasis occurs when interpretive layers stretch across time and media. For instance, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting Riding with Death (1988) may be read as a visual response to Leonardo da Vinci’s allegorical drawing Virtue and Envy (c. 1480–87), which itself was a philosophical meditation on human excellence and the hostility it provokes. In my poem written in response to Basquiat—I explore my own diasporic and exilic experience through this lineage of artistic dialogue. In this sense, my poem becomes a double ekphrasis: engaging with Basquiat’s painting while acknowledging its Renaissance source.
Leonardo’s Virtue and Envy explores a timeless truth: that greatness invites resentment. “No sooner is Virtue born than Envy comes into the world to attack it,” he wrote. His sketches depict this struggle allegorically. Virtue shown radiant and upright, Envy grotesque and masked, hiding malice behind the illusion of righteousness. More than allegory, Leonardo delves into the emotional and psychological complexity of envy, suggesting it stems from a desire to diminish the excellence of others.
Basquiat’s Riding with Death, painted shortly before his death in 1988, is a raw and prophetic meditation on mortality. A fragmented Black figure rides a skeletal white horse, a haunting image that evokes addiction, colonial trauma, and the erasure of the Black body. Many read the work as an expression of Basquiat’s own self-destruction, but that view is too narrow. It risks reducing the artist’s vision to a tragic premonition of death, rather than seeing it as a searing critique of the white normative gaze that fractures, silences, and aestheticises Black life.
The white gaze frames the Black figure as spectacle, threat, or object of pity. Basquiat refuses this. Riding with Death resists the white gaze by centring a Black body in motion, fragmented but still in command of death, or at least in confrontation with it. The ambiguity of the rider’s control forces the viewer to question whether this is a surrender to mortality or a struggle against it. The painting makes visible the invisible histories—those of violence, resistance, and the politics of the body.
When I viewed the Codex Arundel, a bound manuscript of 283 folios, at the British Library in 2019, I encountered not just Leonardo’s intellect but his unfiltered curiosity. His pages leap from hydraulics to the moon, from anatomy to metaphysics. There is no hierarchy, just a mind in motion. That moment stayed with me. I didn’t want to write a thesis or construct an archive. I wanted to write a poem. A capacious one. A poem that could hold uncertainty, contradiction, memory, and knowledge. That encounter gave rise to a long poetic project I called @codex, which became the core of my second collection, The New Carthaginians.
A “codex poem,” for me, is one that attempts to embody the messy logic of thought jumping disciplines, collapsing time, following image and memory rather than argument. Just as Leonardo described the codex as “a collection without order… from many papers,” my codex poems try to hold escape and memory side by side. They record, without necessarily resolving, a personal history of exile.
In this way, Riding with Death also gave me a visual vocabulary for a difficult memory: the 1976 Entebbe hijacking, which took place in my homeland, Uganda. The popular Western retellings of the event centre Israeli heroism, often ignoring Ugandan lives, local complicity, and the geopolitical tensions that underwrote it. My poem reclaims this narrative, not to erase the Israeli perspective, but to challenge its exclusivity. I write through the Black gaze, which reclaims the position of observer and participant. I write to excavate the African gaze, buried beneath global headlines and military mythologies.
In Homer’s Iliad, the Shield of Achilles does not exist outside of language. It is rendered through poetic ekphrasis alone. Similarly, the “whole” story of Entebbe may never exist but poetry allows me to infer it, to render the lives that were not part of the official record. Basquiat’s painting, like the shield, becomes a visual allegory. My poem is an echo of that shield. A second ekphrasis. A double gaze.
To me, Riding with Death is not only about dying. It is about surviving systems that have long tried to erase you. It is about naming what has been silenced, and about forging artistic lineages that stretch from the Renaissance to New York, from a hijacked airport in Uganda to a folio case in the British Library. Basquiat’s painting offers a visual vocabulary for a personal historical moment: the 1976 Entebbe hijacking in Uganda. Official narratives often omit Black and African perspectives. In my poem, I reclaim the African gaze, centering the bodies and stories ignored. Through double ekphrasis, I attempt to render what exists only in fragments like Homer’s Shield of Achilles, making visible the lives left out of dominant histories.
And like Leonardo, I, too, am trying to sketch what cannot be finished.
Explore the artworks and my collection:
- Leonardo da Vinci, Virtue and Envy (Royal Collection)
- Jean-Michel Basquiat, Riding with Death (1988) gallery98.org+7artfilemagazine.com+7jean-michel-basquiat.org+7artchive.com
- British Library Codex Arundel Collection
- The New Carthaginians, Penguin UK
Nick Makoha is a Ugandan poet and playwright based in London. Makoha’s The New Carthaginians was published in July. His debut 2017 collection, Kingdom of Gravity, was shortlisted for the Felix Dennis Prize and was one of the Guardian’s Best Books of the Year. His poems have appeared in The New York Times, the Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Wasafiri, Boston Review, and Callaloo. He is the founder of Obsidian Foundation, winner of the 2021 Ivan Juritz Prize and the Poetry London Prize. He attended the Community of Writers in 2021.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED
by Vishwas Gaitonde
‘Tis a lesson you should heed,
Try again.
If at first you don’t succeed,
Try again.
~ Edward Hickson
Frank McCourt taught English in New York high schools for 27 years, during which there was a book struggling inside of him to come out. He wrote his memoir, Angela’s Ashes, after he retired, saying, “I refused to settle for a one-act existence.” It was published when he was 66, and went on to win the Pulitzer. He wrote two more memoirs and a children’s book during his last years. His writing career was barely half as long as his teaching career, but the important thing was this: he did not die unfulfilled.
When someone deeply believes in why they’re doing something they’re more likely to keep going, even when things get hard. Like McCourt, I am a late bloomer, at least as far as getting a book published. And like Harriet Doerr, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Delia Owens, and Penelope Fitzgerald, my first book of fiction will be published in the sixth decade of my life. No two authors have the same career path and so I won’t draw other comparisons with them. In my case, the keystone to getting the book published at all was persistence.
Trumping up sheer willpower to keep one’s nose to the grindstone does not work. If anything, it hastens the process of giving up. But when you see perseverance as part of who you are—a core value or identity trait—you are more likely to push forward, even when progress is slow or invisible. And I see myself firmly and irrevocably as a writer.
I had published short stories, essays, feature articles, op-eds, even the occasional verse, and next on the list was a book. But while desire and determination are propellers to success, there is this inconvenient thing called “life” that can and often does interfere with well-laid plans. The death of my father and its aftermath took away years of writing life. I now faced the prospect of advancing into my senior years without what I had hoped: at least a couple of books under my belt.
A perennial headache for writers is carving out writing time. It can be especially galling if your day job is stressful and draining; when you come home, precious time is spent unwinding before you can write. I had to work my way out of that situation. It helped that I had managed to save a decent sum from my paycheck. It enabled me to move from working full-time to working on contract, which afforded flexibility. I adopted a Spartan lifestyle, living in a rented room with a family for several years.
Next to writing came community. I applied for scholarships to writers’ conferences and got a few, among them: Tin House Summer Writing Workshop, Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Community of Writers Summer Writers Workshop. But in most cases, the scholarship was awarded on the second or even the third try. If there was a conference I really wanted to attend and there was no financial aid, I went anyway, considering it an investment.
I resumed writing the novel that I had shelved a decade back when life interfered. Simultaneously, I wrote essays and short stories, and then came the chore of sending them out to literary magazines for publication – the dismal process of having each submission rejected 57 times (or was it 73? I honestly don’t remember) before it was accepted and published. Then two online magazines that had published me over and over folded up, and all of that was lost. These were tests of perseverance, and lines from Edward Hickson’s Moral Song (written in 1857 but as relevant today) became a mantra: ”’‘Tis a lesson you should heed, Try again. If at first you don’t succeed, Try again.”
When setbacks accumulate, it is easy to sink into self-pity, the quicksand that snuffs you out. Psychologists say that people who have overcome adversities in the past often develop a mental conditioning that they can survive difficulty, making them more confident to grab the reins again and pick the best of the available options to proceed. All those years of rejection by literary magazines came into play now. Despite the string of rebuffs, those stories had eventually gotten published because I had “tried again.” A series of small wins is progress. And once you have a network, you also get people who believe in your art. Another win. And onward ho!
It took two decades to build up a portfolio of publications. This included literary magazines whose names drew eyes: The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Santa Monica Review, Bellevue Literary Review. But they also included little-known magazines that I liked, both print and online. There is a slew of literary magazines out there, including a bunch of fly-by-night publications. If publication, and only publication, was the aim, then one could submit left, right and center, and get fast acceptances. But that was sacrificing quality for quantity. Whether the magazine had any kind of name recognition or not, it had to be one where I was comfortable in seeing my byline even if it took longer to grow my list of published work.
Then once more came the time to think of the book. Conventional wisdom held that short story collections do not sell. So I focused on the novel and went about trying to get an agent. Which—as those who have tried it well know—is a Sisyphean task. After years of struggle when the boulder always got the better of me, I set the novel aside. I had enough stories, the majority published, enough for two, maybe three, collections. Again, the conventional decree is that there should be a theme that runs through the stories, whether that’s loss or resilience or marital discord. And while I understand that a story collection should not be a hodge-podge affair, I have often spent good money on a collection only to feel I’m reading the same story over and over.
I kept that in mind while choosing the eleven stories for my collection. These stories are set all over the world — North America, Europe, Asia, Africa. Along with Americans and Indians, there are Moroccans, Pakistanis, Britons, Sri Lankans, and yes, a New Zealander too. What could be a common thread for such a disparate mix? This: that no matter where we live and what situations buffet us, we all long for a slice of heaven to brighten up our patch of earth. Thus, On Earth As It Is In Heaven came together to gently point to what connects us all, no matter where we’re from or where we find ourselves.
Now the manuscript needed a home, and there was no realtor—oops, literary agent—to find it one. The path forward appeared to be through contests. Most submissions sank without a trace, but there were some successes. The collection was a finalist in the Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction, and a finalist as well as a semi-finalist (in different years) for the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. It would have been easy to wallow in defeatism (always the groomsman, never the groom). But I chose to focus on this: although the manuscript did not win, clearly it was highly thought of by the contest administrators out of the hundreds of submissions. Its day would come. And it did, when it won the fiction prize in a contest held by Orison Books. Publication was part of the prize; the book will see the light of print this September.
Had I been a little younger, I might have been disconsolate that the book did not come earlier in my life. But if age underscores anything, it is the importance of time. This is no time to fret, but to keep on keeping on — for the best is yet to come.
Vishwas R. Gaitonde’s prize-winning story collection ‘On Earth As It Is In Heaven’ will be published by Orison Books in September 2025. Among his distinctions are residency fellowships to the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (Minnesota) and the Hawthornden Castle International Writers Retreat (Scotland). https://www.vishwasgaitonde.com/.
ESSAY
by Lisa Alvarez
I listen to the moon but it doesn’t say much about my life.
Quiet night is for my cockatoo. He keeps chattering
until my neighbor comes over to complain. Then I read
a local newspaper: no murder, no robbery, one grandmother
fell down the stairs and broke her hip. I lick my inky fingers
and order my imaginary chauffeur to get ready—I’ll visit her
and comfort her. I’d say, I read about you, I’m terribly sorry,
this is my cockatoo, he’s twelve and loves carrots.
We’d share her hospital dinner and be happy.
Other sick people gather around us, admiring my cockatoo,
who looks proud in his cage, unfurling his light-pink wings
like stage curtains, and I’m his assistant. Grandma,
worried that I’ve become silent, tells me how tired I look.
“I had a series of nightmares,” I say, “my boss returned
from the grave and fired me, bats attacked me like slow bullets
but bigger, I was bleeding.” She says: “When I’m alone,
I paint eyes on a pear and whisper, I’m watching over you.
That makes me stronger.” Back home, my body thin and healthy,
cooling my feet on a crystal ball like a psychic out of business,
I look out the window: I don’t know which leaves will fall first or why.
There aren’t many trees left. Not much is left of this little town.
Note:
“Prognosis at Midnight” is the opening poem of my first full-length collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). I wrote it shortly after moving to Austin, and it was the first piece I brought to workshop with the late Dean Young, who also taught at the Community of Writers.
The poem’s title echoes Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” where a father addresses his sleeping child, ending with the line: “Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.” But for my speaker, the moon is irrelevant, and instead of a child, he has a noisy parrot. The poem was inspired by one of Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes, which features a cockatoo and a newspaper as its background.
Lisa Alvarez’s debut collection of short fiction, Some Final Beauty and other Stories was published in August 2025 by the University of Nevada Press, as part of their New Oeste series. Her poetry and prose have appeared in journals including Air/Light, Anacapa Review, Huizache, So It Goes, and in anthologies including most recently, Rumors, Secrets and Lies: Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice (Anhinga Press) and Dear California: The Golden State in Diaries and Letters (Stanford University Press) edited by David Kipen. She has edited three anthologies including Why to These Rocks: 50 years of Poetry from the Community of Writers (Heyday). She teaches at Irvine Valley College where she co-directs the Puente Program. She co-directs the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers and serves as Assistant to the Poetry Director.
OLYMPIC VALLEY
by Charles Douthat
On holiday I woke early, stepped out to see
morning come to the mountains. The valley’s
quiet before dawn was the idea of night
I love best. Somewhere birds were thinking
of singing. And from the cabin’s deck I felt
everywhere drawn up through a blue-black,
star-backed crown of trees. All week had been
a year since the third funeral. Now daybreak.
And it seemed only fair, only natural that
the weight of sad times should be lifting.
Along ridged mountain-dark stretched a lining
of chemical fire. And as morning heavened
east to west, a watercolor wash of blues and
corals bled skyward. Don’t ask for too much,
I told myself. Fair has nothing to do with it.
Yet I held to that sky later, to the chill night
passing, how stars went out one by one by
one and a new sun rose over the valley.
A Note on Finishing
I’m a visual artist as well as a poet, and more than once, about my large abstract paintings, a person has asked, “How do you know when it’s done?” Only half-jokingly I’ll answer, “When my artist wife comes into the studio and says, ‘Don’t touch it.’” But of course, there’s more to it, which almost always involves more time. For even when I think a painting’s finished, my practice is to put it aside—perhaps for a few days, sometimes for months or even years—and when I come back to it, if it still moves me, I’ll know my work is done. Unfortunately, time doesn’t always tell me what I hope to hear. Often, returning to a painting, I’ll see that it’s weak in some area or obviously derivative or that it fails the beauty test altogether.
Occasionally, a painting or a poem arrives in one sitting, as perfect as it will ever be. Most artists have such lucky days. But poems have an inner, word-rich mystery to them that paintings usually don’t. As Paul Valery famously said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Which is a way of admitting that meaning and feeling are elusive and the work of writing is often long, with much revising before finally abandoning the struggle. Yet for poems, my process is not so different from the way I finish a painting. Again, time is a major player in it.
As an example, from my new book I offer a poem whose course to completion illustrates how unpredictable and maddening finishing a poem can be.
“Olympic Valley” was started one summer for a Community of Writers workshop. It ran sonnet-like, about 14 lines. And I thought it all but done, a descriptive piece, a recollection of coming out on the deck of a cabin in the valley and watching the dawn. I liked it. I was proud of it, in the way one is when poems come quickly, almost seeming to write themselves. So I put it away during what proved to be a busy, difficult time in my life—my aged parents were ill and soon to pass away—and only a few years later did I return to the poem, which to my mind belonged in the “almost finished” file.
But reading again, I was disappointed. Perhaps because I’d been through several years of family drama, the poem seemed emotionally slight at its core. And I thought, if I don’t much care about dawn coming to a valley, why should anyone else? I tried to imagine what words or images might enter the poem to enliven it, a process not so different from coming back to a painting after time and seeing what was lacking. Eventually, I realized that recent events in my own life could be layered into the poem to build a more personal edge of feeling. With that in mind, I allowed myself to play with the time of the poem, to move the sunrise forward in history—and after my parent’s death—and allow that natural setting to represent a stage of the narrator’s grief.
So time was crucial to finishing “Olympic Valley.” First, by letting time pass until I was able to see the poem’s shortcomings more clearly. Second, by changing the time of the original poem and allowing future events and the narrator’s feelings to enter and complicate the natural scene. Of course, the revised poem is no longer true to life; its moment of seeing has been restructured and events have been rearranged. Among other things, this revision allowed the poem a place in my manuscript, as it now fit within the book’s themes of family losses and sorrows.
Whether in finishing a painting or a poem, for me, time is fundamental for both making and remaking. Artists create in the moment but out of past moments, memories, and feelings, drawing together elements of experience—whether by words in a poem or brushstrokes in a painting—into a new order. Then comes the waiting and the reworking and the trying to be sure. But at least for this poem, Valery was right. When I read “Olympic Valley” now, well after publication, though I see minor points that might be improved, I let the poem be. Having been abandoned, it’s found a place in my book. Meanwhile, time has turned me toward the next thing.
Charles Douthat is a poet, retired litigator, and visual artist. A second-generation Californian, he attended Stanford University and UC College of the Law. Since 1982 he’s lived in Connecticut where he practiced trial law and was honored by peers with membership in Best Lawyers in America. He began writing poems and painting during a long, midlife illness. Since then, his poems have been published in many magazines and journals and his prize-winning paintings have been widely exhibited. Charles’ first book, Blue for Oceans, received the 2011 PEN New England Award as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England author. His second book of poems, Again, was published by Unbound Edition Press in 2025. He lives in a small town in Connecticut and is married to the artist, Julie Leff.
BEING A SANCTUARY PERSON
by Amy Shimshon-Santo
I come from a family of immigrants with immediate relatives on four continents. Our migration legacies have inculcated in us extrasensory perception for detecting despots. My elder says she starts her day by cursing the dictators six times in rapid succession using ancient root letters הָרַג, then spits to the left and the right to seal the deal. Tphoo! Tphoo! I don’t have adequate curse words in English for this regime. “Fuck ICE” is a start, but insufficient to calm my epigenetic body. The unconstitutional antics of the executive office trigger myriad traumatic memories: Nazi Gestapo tactics, the Duterte dictatorship, Executive Order 9066 and internment, Jim Crow and slave catchers, colonial violence and dispossession.
Regardless of what becomes of our sanctuary city, I’ve already decided. I will be a sanctuary person. Writing and dancing give me a modicum of personal sovereignty during challenging times. Being attentive to multiple species, biotic and abiotic phenomena, and languages became Random Experiments in Bioluminescence, a book of ecopoetry. Piecework: Ethnographies of Place is a compilation of my essays on community arts praxis in schools, communities, and families.
Dance Lessons for Writing
I fell in love with dancing when I was a child, hiding behind trees to watch a dance company rehearse beneath a lofting green parachute. Heaven, I thought. People get to do that?! I followed my passion for movement and danced for decades until a series of events I won’t discuss here pushed me from running a dance company toward teaching and writing. Poetry became a haven for my heart. It was easily accessible, requiring only a pencil and a notebook, rather than rehearsal space and a cadre of dancers.
Two key lessons from dancing shaped my writing life. The first is personal responsibility to prepare your vessel. Develop a relationship with yourself, with your body. This has meant being attentive to health and mindfulness for emotional self-regulation. The second lesson was the importance of ensemble work (or being able to create in community). Dancing taught me to balance personal practice with social practice.
Earth Citizenship
Writing eco-poetry gave me a sense of belonging and responsibility to our planet. I felt naturalized as an Earth Citizen. There are an estimated 7000 living languages spoken today. Migration and immigration are natural and not to be weaponized.
Random Experiments in Bioluminescence includes plurilingual poems. Humans coexist with orixas, oceans, and aviary murmurations. Poems partner dance across languages in duets, trios, and a large chorus. English moves with Spanish, Portuguese, Mazateco, Chinanteco, Twi, Igbo, Japanese, Ewe, Tagalog, Sesotho, Ancient Chinese, Otomi, Nigerian Pidgin, Hebrew and Arabic.
Writing and co-translating with friends around the world opened many opportunities to share space on the page, online, in community arts sites, on the radio, and at international literary festivals. The poems are conversational across species, habitats, and languages, with only one argument arising: “never underestimate the power of the weak.”
Plurilingualism evokes the sheer beauty of languages and has a visceral effect on the body. We slow down. Convivencia seeds curiosity about the human family, our contexts and sounds, how we name things, and communicate.
Making a plurilingual book was a choreographic challenge to design. While the World Wide Web has certainly connected people, colonial, monolingual language norms still dominate publishing technologies. Designing the book required using multiple keyboards and typefaces. If a keyboard didn’t recognise a font, it rendered the letters an illegible line of boxes. When the computer rebelled against me, the outcome was sometimes an error poem like “eekspay achurnay.”
i stolisten to the teninsects
and shed birds their rrrrrr-rr
cheep, brrrrwirl
Some tech errors were visually or sonically fun. “Shabbat cryptogram” began when the computer refused to format text in Roman and non-Roman letters to move from left to right and right to left on the same page. It buried the English language lines between numbers and signs.
38 .576793 9349 —- #. ^ 597t49t 99030”
run after her, says the wind
tell her the city shall have no walls
it will be home to all living things
“678482> < 374@54577487 74 || 858575 01439
After the print book was finally complete, I made an audio archive of the translations in mother tongues from family and friends, and recited the hard-to-decipher multi-vocal quartets and cabalistic mandalas. The book lives in print and audiobook for accessibility.
El Mundo No Se Conoce
Piecework: Ethnographies of Place are stories of real-world community action in schools, neighborhoods, and households. Examples include reflections on teaching poetry, music, and youth development with my son; outcomes from a regional brainstorm of BIPOC community arts spaces facing gentrification, and a story about my grandmother’s peace activism. These essays reveal behind-the-scenes stories of community agency: arts education projects, community research projects, and intergenerational family legacies.
“Most people in the world have been written out of the archive. And, as a result, el mundo no se conoce. The world doesn’t know itself. Certainly, we do not know each other on our own terms.”
I learned by working with popular educators in Central America, Mexico, and Canada to create memorias, or memories, of community arts praxis (theory and practice). Writing ethnographies became a way to honor phenomenal people, places, and processes. Working in community, and trying to write about how we do this, shaped who I am, how I move, and what I have come to know.
Hopefully, ecopoetry readers will enjoy the playful experiences of land and languages in Random Experiments in Bioluminescence, and readers of Piecework will feel energized by stories of people creating change on the ground with devotion, ingenuity, and endurance.
Dr. Amy Shimshon-Santo is a writer, educator, and culture maker. She is the author of Random Experiments in Bioluminescence, Piecework: Ethnographies of Place, Catastrophic Molting, Endless Bowls of Sky, Even the Milky Way is Undocumented, and has edited various collections including: Writing Braille With Chocolate, Canciones de la Tierra / Songs of the Earth, Et. Al: New Voices in Arts Management, Arts = Education, and more.
LIVING IN RESISTANCE
by Tara Dorabji
Coming back to the Community of Writers for the alumni reading with Eugenie Montague was a special joy – a home coming I hadn’t anticipated needing. In 2013, I sat around these same tables, granite mountains shading us, convinced my manuscript was almost there. I workshopped the beginning of Call Her Freedom over a decade ago with authors including Alex Espinoza, Gregory Spatz, Dagoberto Gilb, and Gail Tsukiyama. At the alumni reading, I read from my debut novel, which took me fourteen years to complete. The alpine air was tinged with cold from the patches of snow. The landscape was oddly reminiscent of the passage I read. Dappled sunlight splashed from the page to our arms. The scent of pine trees permeated the membrane between fiction and reality.
Call Her Freedom is guided by the question: How do people live in freedom when their rights are eroded? How do we choose hope? Call Her Freedom is a sweeping family saga and love story following one woman’s struggle to protect her culture and home amidst the backdrop of military occupation. Published the day after the inauguration, the novel reflects the moment we are living through, with eroding civil liberties and rising authoritarianism.
In Call Her Freedom, I follow the lives of strong women. The central characters Aisha and Noorjahan are a mother and daughter who live in complexity and choose love, hope, and each other. Noor is a midwife and healer who teaches her daughter the ancient arts and ensures she receives an education in school. The book asks: What do we pass on to our daughters? – and traces the generational legacies of love, resilience, loss, forgiveness and endurance. The women of Call Her Freedom forge paths of justice, protect their culture and show up for one another. They live in resistance, and they live in freedom.
Inspired by the independence movement in Indian-occupied Kashmir, research for my book took me to one of the world’s most densely militarized zones. In Kashmir, I had the honor of meeting women demanding cultural sovereignty. One woman, whose husband disappeared, held his photo each month in the square as an act of resistance, love, and memory. Her love endures and makes his story visible. At the time I visited Kashmir, the state verified the finding of mass civilian graves. She told me that she wanted to climb into the grave and hug the bones, because these are our fathers. Brothers. Sons. She told me that knowing that her story was heard by others outside of the region gave her hope.
As a community of writers, we have the capacity to create the conditions for powerful stories to be told – stories that break through silence, pierce hearts and imagine collective healing. It’s not something that any one of us can do alone. It is through our networks, relationships, and courage to stand up and unapologetically shine light on atrocities that these stories are born into the world.
When I started my novel, my twin daughters were three. Call Her Freedom came into the world the same year that my daughters are headed to college. My journey raising them as a single mom is inextricably linked to the text. The most important thing that carried me through my journey publishing my first novel, is the community I built that allows me to create art and tell stories that break through censorship. A community that brings my life purpose into focus and lights up the path towards a more just and equitable world.
There is no simple straightforward road to publishing a novel – each of our journeys is different. After attending The Community of Writers, I was agented. My manuscript was pitched and rejected by editors and my agent left the industry. The manuscript was considered “dead.” So, I turned to my second novel, which was read and rejected by agents, who “didn’t fall in love.” There was no clear path 
forward. Yet, the powerful stories at the heart of Call Her Freedom called to me.
In 2018, I returned to Kashmir. This time with filmmakers. My research took on a life of its own and transformed into community storytelling, directing and producing a series of documentary films on human rights defenders in Kashmir. We filmed during Ramadan, in a small hot office, with no fans. When the battery on one of the cameras went out, the woman I was interviewing said, “I am used to being on the other side of the camera.” In those few minutes it took to change the battery, we connected as storytellers and became lifelong friends. Our work weaves together and reaches new levels. This is the biggest blessing of my path as a storyteller – the wisdom, love, and relationships that it brings.
At my return to the Community of Writers, I was again greeted by a powerful network of writers, published, emerging, and creating. We ate, talked story, and filled each other with inspiration. At the staff picnic, I was struck by how oddly reminiscent it was of the passage I’d read at the alumni reading – tall pine trees, warm sun punctuated by the promise of cold nights. In a seasoned ritual, we fled to the river, letting the water wash over us. We, as artists, friends, and community, spent time bathing in the Truckee River. Cleansing our spirit, washing the dust away. But in Call Her Freedom, the couple is stopped on the way to their picnic by military – the surprise treats, lovingly prepared, are confiscated. Still the couple sits above the river, imagining the land without the military. The rivers they see flow across borders and cannot be contained. In the novel, Aisha tells her husband: “The beauty of the water is that it knows no borders; it flows across the nations. Paint the rivers.”
At our picnic, we are not stopped by military, though we are living in a time and in land where thousands of people are being detained and kidnapped from our streets — every day. In June alone of this year, 36,737 people were taken by ICE. On the way to picnics, graduations, doctors’ appointments or in the park. Under “The Big Beautiful Bill,” ICE gets an additional $75 billion, funding it at a higher level than most of the world’s militaries. ICE’s budget is roughly equivalent to India’s soaring annual military budget (much of which goes to the occupation of Kashmir).
Our power as writers is rooted in our capacity to reflect the injustices that are too ugly and hard that many turn away from, but we also open portals of possibility. To breathe hope into our collective consciousness. And it is only with love that we can do this. A type of love that challenges our own beliefs and capabilities. We are offered a choice: between beauty over power. Between fear and courage.
In this moment, we each have an invitation to love more fiercely. To deepen our relationships with each other and with the earth. To choose harmony over chaos. And while living in resistance can take us from those we love, it is the commitment to our love and interdependence which creates possibilities of a different kind of future, where families aren’t torn apart by borders.
Tara Dorabji is the author of Call Her Freedom, winner of the Simon & Schuster Books Like Us first novel contest. She is the daughter of Parsi-Indian and German-Italian migrants. Her documentary film series on human rights defenders in Kashmir won awards at over a dozen film festivals throughout Asia and the USA. Tara’s publications include Al Jazeera, The Chicago Quarterly, People.com, Huizache, and acclaimed anthologies: Good Girls Marry Doctors & All the Women in My Family Sing. She lives in Northern California with her twins and rabbit.
THE PINES
by Larry Ruth
In a stand of pines, my fingers
run over plates of mottled armor.
Pinus jefferyi, I say the name.
Scent of vanilla in my nostrils,
aroma teases with memories of trees,
this place, a family vacation decades ago.
I inhale again, the odor stronger,
the memories more vivid. Next
to the stream, another kind of pine.
a different odor, more pungent, somehow
familiar, I can’t think why this might be,
or why I can’t remember this smell.
No answer comes, but images surface
a child, four years old, laughing, looks
down at his feet planted on the tops
of his father’s shoes, wanting to be held
in the powerful arms, reaches for the big
smooth hands, hands too big to hold, so
he grasps the thumbs, the two of them swing
to the beat of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
They dance around the living room,
laugh, dance again, this time to Louis Armstrong
playing, “When The Saints Come Marchin’ In.”
That night in bed the little boy cups
his hands, inhales. A deep scent, rich
and strong. Something from outdoors.
His father used it to wash his own hair.
Packers Pine Tar Soap.
The Original. Since 1869.
PREFACE TO SMALL HANDS, SMELL LIKE KEROSENE
by Jamie Ford
If a family is a circus, we were the carnies. We were the drifters, the never-belongers. Even now, as I stare into that funhouse mirror of memory, cracked and spotted from desilvering, I can see that our joy was as abundant as it was itinerant. My parents chased it from town to town, littering the highway with their hopes and dreams. During our familial odyssey, my mother learned to swallow pain, my father learned to breathe fire. Leaving us––their children––to spend every night sleeping on a bed of nails. That was my childhood, standing alone in the shadow of my family’s ragbag revelry, with strawberry ice-cream melting through my fingers.
But that seedy midway of life, where the games are rigged, the darts are dull, and the balloons underinflated, was a fairy tale compared to the origin stories of my parents.
My mother was a promising child of the Ozarks. That is to say, she was a red-headed contradiction, an oxymoron in a hand-me-down dress that came in two colors: dirty and clean. Her grandfather outfought the British in the War of 1812, earning a land grant in Missouri which he traded with another soldier, sight unseen, for a parcel in Arkansas. My mother grew up in the highlands, amid the fragrant white oak and shortleaf pines. Not large enough to have the austerity of a dot on a map, Witts Springs was a group of dirt farms with aspirations of township. Where the number on the hand-painted population sign, originally 263, kept shrinking while the cemetery kept growing. She was so removed from modernity that when my grandmother went into labor, a cousin saddled his horse, a Missouri Fox-trotter, and rode twenty-four miles to the town of Marshall to fetch a doctor who had probably delivered as many foals as newborns. This scene from the Reconstruction Era was played out in 1953. While most families in post-war America were baking casseroles in their starter homes––Cape Cods and Ramblers––painting their picket fences white, my mother had the luxury of sleeping inside a cabin built by homesteaders, without indoor plumbing or electricity. She shared a bed with her sister, while her brothers slept outside on the porch, with the dogs. As babies boomed in the cities and families traveled in the chrome stylings of a Plymouth Cambridge, a Ford Customline, or—if they were daring—a Kaiser Dragon, enveloping themselves in jade green leather and stardust cream, my mother’s family had a farm wagon with a broken wheel and not enough money to repair it.
I’ll ask you to indulge me now.
Picture an apple orchard in spring, blossoms white and pink and fragrant. Now picture the ripening fruit, firm, but vulnerable when the temperature meets the dew point, creating a killer frost. Now picture smudge pots between each tree, the flames, the dark smoke, the smell of burning kerosene or used cooking oil. Can you feel the radiant heat that cuts through the chill? Do you see the workers, their backs stooped, the fog-like condensation of their breath mixing with the smoke? What color are they? What languages do they speak? Today they might speak Spanish, in dialects from Honduras or Guatemala, but back then, many were white and spoke with a southern drawl. My mother’s family was among them, having grown weary of breaking less than even on the family farm, they sold it. Traded their home for a car and a map.
Meanwhile, my father was growing up a world away in Seattle’s Chinatown. His grandfather, born Min Chung, had the audacity to change his name to William Ford after he settled in Candelaria, Nevada in 1865. Leaving my father—thanks to the 14th Amendment––as a red-blooded American.
My father was part of a generation of Americans who were destined to partake of the sweet, ripened fruit of prosperity, carried on the bent backs of those who toiled in blue-collar ranks so their grandchildren could have better lives. Could go to fine colleges and universities and have laudable careers like doctor, lawyer, or engineer. But since my father inherited the unavoidable fact that he was a Chinaman, prosperity meant doing something other than his three pre-ordained vocations: restaurant, laundry, and gambling.
Unfortunately, he failed to escape the gravitational pull of his race, spending the prime years of his life in the back of a restaurant, in a neighborhood that even the police avoided. Seattle was a city that––if not in love with the Orient––at least had an adolescent infatuation, a crush on the exotic world across the Pacific, and celebrated it for their amusement. Women in the sundown neighborhoods of Bellevue, Magnolia, and the aptly named White Center, would go to elegant parties in silken cheongsams. The 5th Avenue Theatre was designed as an imitation of a Beijing temple, complete with an Imperial Dragon on the ceiling and foo dog statuary guarding the entrance. The once great timber town embraced all things Asian except Asian people, creating anti-Japanese leagues atop the still smoldering embers of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Ironically, my father was too Asian for my grandmother as well, so my ngin ngin sent him to Chinese school after public school, because she was ashamed of our country dialect. Because of that, my father was the first in his family to speak city Cantonese instead of Toisanese, the Chinese equivalent of the smoky phonetics of Appalachia.
Or the Ozarks.
My parents changed states, changed names, changed lives, but could never get beyond the reach of the stereotypes of their two communities, conjoined twins separated at the birth of a nation. In a strange way, my parents’ childhoods were two sides of the same coin of working-class poverty, a penny in the mud, regarded as having little or no value to anyone.
While one mere cent won’t get you very much, there is luck in the finding.
So, I keep writing, looking for it on every page.
Jamie Ford is the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His other bestselling novels include Songs of Willow Frost, and more recently, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. His work has been translated into 35 languages. Jamie is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer, Min Chung, who emigrated from Hoiping, China to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations.
ABOUT THE OGQ
Omnium Gatherum Quarterly (OGQ) is an invitational online quarterly magazine of prose and poetry, founded in 2019 as part of the 50th Anniversary of the Community of Writers. OGQ seeks to feature works first written in, found during, or inspired by the week in the valley. Only work selected from our alums and teaching staff will appear here. Conceived and edited by Andrew Tonkovich. Submissions will not be considered.