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From the AP newswire story of 9/8/05:
New Orleans book project struggles
Hurricane dampens inner-city literary project
Updated: 4:20 p.m. ET Sept. 8, 2005
Hurricane Katrina has made an inner-city book project an even greater story of defying the odds.
A year ago, New Orleans high school teachers Abram Himelstein and Rachel Breunlin started the Neighborhood Story Project, a way for students to write about where and how they live. The idea came after a 2003 shooting at their school, John McDonogh Senior High, killed one student and injured three others.
McDonogh Senior High is virtually all black and the shooting seemed yet another sad, defining story of guns and gangs.
�The writers wanted to address the perception that our neighborhoods are only about violence and drugs,� said Himelstein, 34, co-author of Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing, a self-published novel.
�Our city and our world is so much more complicated. All of the writers in our series chose to address the negative parts of their lives, but they also wanted to show that you have people struggling to make beauty.�
Five student books were published in June by the neighborhood project and have been a great local success. Himelstein said that about 2,000 copies have sold through bookstores, corner stores and block parties, and that a print run of another 4,000 was set to go when Katrina struck. Himelstein has no idea what happened to the books, which were at a print shop in one of the areas hit by the storm.
�We had just gotten the money together to reprint them,� Himelstein said in an interview from his mother-in-law�s home in Houston. He has not been able to locate two of the student authors.
The manuscripts are preserved on computer, but Himelstein cannot afford to print and distribute them himself. An acquaintance of his, Brooklyn-based publisher Richard Nash, is trying to help. But Nash, too, says he cannot handle it alone.
�We�re trying to find someone who can print up the books for free, because we do not have the cash flow to do that ourselves,� said Nash, publisher of Soft Skull Press, which publishes a wide range of books, including poetry, art and graphic novels. �Our sales rep is running around to all the printing plants, trying to find someone.�
Examining a neglected past
The project�s motto is �Our stories, told by us,� a comment on the shallow headlines of the present and on the neglected side of the city�s past, Himelstein said.
New Orleans is predominantly black, but there are no author equivalents to Louis Armstrong, Fats Domino or the city�s many other musical greats. The city does have a rich literary history, from Tennessee Williams� A Streetcar Named Desire to John Kennedy Toole�s A Confederacy of Dunces to the novels of Anne Rice. But it has essentially been a story told by, and about, white people.
�It�s not surprising,� said Richard Ford, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day, who has lived in New Orleans and currently lives in Maine. �A lot of blacks didn�t get to go to school. They were kept from being educated. It hasn�t been a question of talent, it�s been a question of opportunity.�
�John Kennedy Toole is one of my favorite writers, but he�s not someone who means a lot to the kids I teach,� Himelstein said. �This is all about having other voices.�
For the Neighborhood Story Project, students interviewed and photographed neighbors, relatives and friends. The books run from 80 to 130 pages and cost $15, Himelstein said. The students each received $1,000 advances.
One of the students, Ashley Nelson, had already been writing poems when she heard about the book project. She said that she did a lot of interviewing and a lot of observing, and found neighbors increasingly willing to participate.
�It wasn�t easy at first, because a lot of the people did like not to get recorded on tape,� said Nelson, 18, who is staying with her parents at an apartment in Houston. �But now I have people who are mad at me because they�re not in the book.�
Nelson�s book, The Combination, includes vignettes, poems and photographs, and is set in the downtown Lafitte public housing complex. She had planned to write about her block, but started weaving in personal experiences. Noting that both her parents have had drug problems, and that her mother died four years ago, she said her family story is really a neighborhood story.
�The book is basically about how the neighborhood is one big community and how they took care of me when my mother passed away,� she said.
Nelson had just started 12th grade when Katrina hit last week and she doesn�t know when, or where, she�ll resume school. She loves to read � her favorite authors include Alice Walker and Sister Souljah � and is thinking about writing a new book, with an obvious subject.
�The hurricane,� she said. �That would be the main focus.�
� 2005 MSNBC.com
URL: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9258489/ |
Looking Beyond the Hood
by Michael Scharf in "Publishers Weekly" 7/11/2005
When Sam Wylie, 19, and his sister Arlet, 18, took the podium at the American Federation of Musicians hall in New Orleans' Seventh Ward late last month, the room was packed with well-wishers who'd gathered to celebrate the launch of five books about life in the sunny but troubled ward, written by local high school students. It should have been a joyous moment for Sam and Arlet, who co-wrote one of the books, Between Piety and Desire. But after Arlet finished reading part of an interview with Antoine "Twine" Dantzler that appears in the book, she broke down crying, telling of how Dantzler had been murdered.
Still, the event went on. Ashley Nelson, 18, had proudly introduced her book, The Combination, just minutes before: "I struggled most days I had to write, but I did it... I did it." Later, celebrants bought books and hit the jambalaya steam tables.
The mix of hope and tragedy, sadness and pride that filled the room was a microcosm of the lives chronicled in the books, which were written and published as part of the Neighborhood Story Project, a not-for-profit program cofounded by Abram Himelstein. The New Orleans
transplant is best known for writing and self-publishing Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing in 1998; it has sold 40,000 copies.
It's unclear whether these new books-printed with the motto "Our Stories Told By Us"-will have a shot at that kind of success. While appearances on New Orleans TV and in the local papers have been driving sales at local bookstores (and corner stores) and through the Web site, neighborhoodstoryproject.org, the books are not yet available outside the immediate area. Though 1,000 copies of each have been printed, the books don't have ISBNs.
Himelstein said he never intended to publish the books for national
distribution himself. He is hoping that their local popularity will result in a publisher offering to buy the rights to the books and release them to a wider audience. |
"First Run on the Seventh Ward"
DIY novelist turned publisher enlists rarely heard voices to tell more
complete story of urban life.
by Michael Scharf -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 5/9/2005
How do you go from hawking your self-published novel outside a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert to turning inner-city kids, many of whom had zero interest in books, into published authors?
An adoptive son of New Orleans, Abram Himelstein is drawing on the
innovative spirit he used to market his debut novel, Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing, to create a one-of-a-kind publishing program that gives a voice to urban teenagers-and puts the lives of entire blocks between covers.
For the Neighborhood Story Project, which he founded with urban
anthropologist Rachel Breunlin, Himelstein recruited seven high school
students from New Orleans's seventh ward to write books about their blocks. He and Breunlin trained the students to conduct interviews, take pictures, piece together the story and write the narrative. The first five books (one is a brother-sister collaboration) will be published under the project's own imprint June 23, with a sixth following at the end of the summer.
While these are far from the first books to focus on inner-city life, they are distinguished by the intimacy and immediacy of the writers' perspective. "People talk about 'oh, yeah, this neighborhood this, and that neighborhood that,' but that's just out of their heads. They don't live around here, and they don't know," says Sam Wylie, 19, one of the writers in the project. "So when I write this book, I can show you what it's about. I can interview a few people and let them tell you. Instead of going by what other people say, now you can see for sure."
By the same token, the books may appeal to hard-to-reach readers, including high school students and others who live in the neighborhood these young authors are portraying. Members of that community have been enlisted to act as a sort of combination writers' workshop and focus group. "They come in, and they read the books, and they're like, 'hey, this is working; this isn't.' That's part, I think, of our quality control," Himelstein says.
The books are slated for 1,000-copy first print runs and, it is hoped,
national distribution. Closer to home, the project is already transforming a neighborhood's relationship to books. "Everyone's stopping the students and saying, 'Oh, when's your book coming out? Are you going to put me in it?'" Himelstein says. Wylie notes, "Where I come from, and where I live, people aren't usually writing books. Most don't usually read or talk about them. All that's about to change. It's nothing easy, but it's fulfilling."
Himelstein predicts word-of-mouth promotion, and the distribution of fliers throughout the community, will help sell out the first printings quickly. And that could be just the beginning. "Part of it is that it's my job to be the dreamer, but part of it is also based on years of publishing experience. I think that a couple of the books will sell between 5,000 and 10,000."
A Need to Tell the Whole Story
That speculation gains credibility in light of Himelstein's past success. In the late 1990s, he sold 40,000 copies of Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing largely by driving around and talking to people. It was a little more complicated than that, but Himelstein, with his relaxed and relentlessly self-effacing manner, makes it seem almost that simple. Now 33, he has moved on from the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene on which he based Tales and is now, after a few other stops along the way, a white Jewish postpunk in New Orleans's heavily African-American seventh ward. "But I'm from Mississippi,"
he says dryly, "and it's kind of like being from southern Illinois and
making it up to Chicago-or getting to New York from Jersey."
Himelstein, who has been teaching high school English for the last eight years, has been living and teaching in the seventh ward for the last three. Every year he would stock his classrooms with a variety of carefully chosen books for leisure reading, but he found almost no takers. Backed by the University of New Orleans (where Breunlin is affiliated) and the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans, Breunlin and Himelstein have adapted punk's DIY approach to get students on to books. But Himelstein says the inchoate need for an outlet and desire for authorship were already there.
Along with the everyday problems of a hard-pressed community, the students and faculty at John McDonogh Senior High, where Himelstein and Breunlin teach, had recently been through a major trauma: in April of 2003, gunmen wielding an AK-47 and a handgun fired more than 30 shots into the packed school gym, killing one student and wounding three others. The media treated the incident as a gangland retaliation story, which tainted the entire community. "The experience of being brought into the national spotlight for something negative was incredibly frustrating and part of the reason that we wanted to tell our stories, because there is so much more happening in our neighborhoods and at our school," says Himelstein.
In developing the program, Breunlin and Himelstein found a model in Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago (rebound by Sagebrush, 1999), a book written by two teens from Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project, who culled the narrative from the series of radio documentaries they did with NPR producer Dave Isay. Breunlin accompanies the students on most of their interviews, and she and Himelstein do all of the transcribing work, partly for expedience and partly for consistency. "New Orleans has
like 7,000 different dialects," notes Breunlin, 27, "and we all decided that we really want the way people speak to be preserved." Breunlin then works closely with each student to piece together the book and do follow-up.
The result is a mosaic of the seventh ward. Ashley Nelson's The Combination
centers on the Lafitte, the 66-year-old housing project where she lives, and on the combination of people (mostly women) and roles that define it. Brother and sister Sam and Arlet Wylie focus on how the struggles in their home mirror the struggles on their block; their book, Between Piety and Desire, is titled after their two cross streets. Waukesha Jackson's book (still untitled) delves into the idea of urban loneliness and centers on an interview with her mother, a recovering addict. All of the books feature a variety of voices, along with often beautiful photographs the authors have taken.
Doing interviews, taking photos, and writing and editing a book takes an enormous amount of time; the students receive a $1,000 advance that covers the first 1,000 copies sold; after that, they will receive royalties. Payment attempts to foster a sense of real authorship and acknowledges that it's a class privilege for teenagers to spend their afternoons on an activity that doesn't bring in any money.
There are precedents for paid writing programs. Since 1991, Chicago's
Gallery 37 has hired professional teaching artists from the community, "and we hire youth in Chicago age 14 to 21 to come and work for us-it is a job; they do earn minimum wage and a paycheck-to create artworks," says Melissa Farrar, director of Gallery 37's jobs training program. Creative writing and performance poetry are part of the mix, along with visual and performing arts, and two anthologies have resulted: I Represent (Tia Chucha, 1996) and Describe the Moment (Third World Press, 2000). Himelstein was unaware of
Gallery 37, but cites the Dave Eggers/McSweeney's project 826 Valencia, in San Francisco and Brooklyn, as an inspiration. The two sites offer tutoring and workshops with local artists on writing and publishing.
Tales of a Punk Rock Marketer
Himelstein and the students have set up distribution for the books, $15 each in paperback, at corner stores all over the neighborhood. Nationwide distribution, says Himelstein, "will happen in the same way that I put the distribution for Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing together"-i.e., by having the book in hand, and moving outward from a local market.
Himelstein was not always so knowledgeable about supply and demand. He and fellow Washington, D.C., punk Jamie Schweser went through "the usual cycle" of thinking themselves rejected geniuses before deciding to self-publish Tales in 1998. "Like all of the punk rock records that I was ever a part of making," says Himelstein, "I thought there'd be 400 in my closet, and maybe 100 that my friends would buy out of obligation or that I'd end up giving away to girls that I was courting."
A road trip with Schweser from New Orleans to Iowa City, Iowa, then to
California yielded a quite different result. "We would stop in all these small towns and ask, 'Where are the kids with green hair?' And we would go to some little cafe and say, 'Hey, we're on book tour,' and we got to be kind of decent at talking about it." The first run was sold out by the time they reached L.A.
Other editions followed, each one a bit more sophisticated in design than the last, with Ingram eventually picking up the book. A mass publicity query yielded an NPR story on Himelstein's brush with the law: he had been arrested for selling Tales in the parking lot of a Colorado Red Hot Chili Peppers show, with the ACLU quickly stepping in. "We were number 37 on Amazon for a couple days," he says.
For his next book, Himelstein asked the people he encountered in New Orleans to write "what they think all day but never say out loud" on a T-shirt, which he then photographed them wearing. The 100 T-Shirt Project was published by New Mouth from the Dirty South, the company that Himelstein and Schweser eventually formed to sell Tales, and whose operations they turned over to G.K. Darby (who also runs New Orleans's Garrett Country press) in 2002. To have New Mouth publish the Neighborhood Story Project's books would be a conflict of interest, Himelstein says, so he formed the new imprint.
Among the lessons from his own past that he's passing along to his student authors is how to deal with the media, a skill he learned through making mistakes. The students took a workshop with Davy Rothbart, who started Foundmagazine and is a major contributor to the radio program This American Life, as well as local author Kalamu Ya Salaam (who helped put the program together), photographer Alan Chin, who appears in the New York Times, and others. The students also do mock interviews, where they practice staying on message. "That's come from the students very organically, but definitely also part of why we started the project in the first place: we were tired of seeing only our negative things on the news. They're pretty media savvy, in
a good way."
Whether because of training or enthusiasm, the students speak eloquently about the project. "As we got deep into the book and I started passing out fliers about me writing a book-ev-ery-body started coming to my grandmother's house and saying, 'I want to be in the book,' " says Nelson. "Three weeks ago, a lady came to my grandmother's house early, like around seven o'clock, to catch me before I went to school to ask me, could she be in my book. Having people in front of my door asking me to be a part of my project... that's amazing." | |
The Neighborhood Story Project: Complete Set
Ebony Bolding, Jana Dennis, Waukesha Jackson, Ashley Nelson, and Arlet and Sam Wylie
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| Paper | 8 x 9 | 0 pgs. | ISBN: 1-933368-33-0 | List: $75.00 | 10/1/2005 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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Featuring: The complete set of all five books from New Orleans' Neighborhood Story Project. Please note: we are working as fast as we can to get these books printed--your order here is a pre-order; we will ship the books to you as soon as they are printed. Many thanks for your patience as we work to get these books reprinted.
About the book: Descriptions of all five books follow:
In her book Before and After North Dorgenois, Ebony Bolding examines life in the Sixth Ward. She talks to her neighbors on North Dorgenois, interviewing newly arrived doctors, members of the church on her block, and a neighbor who has returned to the block where her mother grew up. From her porch near John McDonogh Senior High, she looks at the ways the block is changing, and writes about her mother�s decision to move the family deeper into the Sixth Ward after a new landlord buys their house. Ms. Bolding interviews the new landlord and discusses life in the Sixth Ward with the Bayou Road Boys.
In their book Between Piety and Desire, brother and sister team Arlet and Sam Wylie talk about their regular and irregular life living above a neighborhood store. They remember a childhood of parents keeping them inside to avoid the struggles of the neighborhood around them. They interview the people who hang out on the block, weaving the history of the street through their own history living upstairs. Unusually candid and self-reflective, the Wylie's detail their "inside life," including Sam's new fatherhood and Arlet's new home.
In The Combination, Ashley Nelson paints a nuanced and lyrical portrait of one of downtown New Orleans� oldest public housing complexes, the Lafitte. She begins with her own family, weaving their history through the daily life of the community. Ms. Nelson�s interviews let the reader hear from voices rarely engaged, from the owner of the corner store, to the Residents� Council, to the members of the community more often profiled than listened to. She writes about and photographs much of Lafitte, from second lines to ward signs, from the Wild Side to the Real Side, from Dooky Chase to Southern Scrap, it�s all here.
Waukesha Jackson�s book is an examination of loss and recovery. Starting with her relationship to her mother, Ms. Jackson writes about the struggles that have been a part of many of the lives of women in the Ninth Ward. In particular, she examines the frequent role of women as caretakers of the community-- in their homes, social clubs, barrooms, and churches. Through interviews, photography and reflection, Ms. Jackson captures the tough times and victories of her family and neighbors.
Jana Dennis examines one the most diverse blocks in New Orleans in her book, Palmyra Street. Located in the heart of Mid-City near the new Streetcar line, her block of Palmyra is rich with many typical and not-so-typical New Orleans stories. Through interviews, photographs and vignettes, Ms. Dennis paints a thorough and intriguing portrait of a block in flux. The reader watches Jana�s family construct community not only on their block, but also through their participation in church life and the Golden Arrows Mardi Gras Indian Tribe.
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