Felicia Rose Chavez is an award-winning educator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. She is author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom and co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT with Willie Perdomo and Jose Olivarez. Felicia’s teaching career began in Chicago, where she served as Program Director to Young Chicago Authors and founded GirlSpeak, a feminist webzine for high school students. She went on to teach writing at the University of New Mexico, where she was distinguished as the Most Innovative Instructor of the Year, th University of Iowa, where she was distinguished as the Outstanding Instructor of the Year, and Colorado College, where she received the Theodore Roosevelt Collins Outstanding Faculty Award. Her creative scholarship earned her a Ronald E. McNair Fellowship, a University of Iowa Graduate Dean’s Fellowship, a Riley Scholar Fellowship, and a Hadley Creatives Fellowship. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, she currently serves as the Bronfman Creativity and Innovation Scholar-in-Residence at Colorado College. For more information about The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, and to access (and add to!) a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color, visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, PANK, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. You can follow her work at ritabanerjee.com or on Twitter @Rita_Banerjee.
Writer, performer, producer Tavia Gilbert is the acclaimed narrator of more than 700 full-cast and multi-voice audiobooks. She is a Grammy nominee, Booklist Audiobook Narrator of the Year, the recipient of dozens of Earphones Awards, and a 12-time Audie nominee and Winner of the Best Female Narrator Audie. She produces several podcasts, including eight-time award-winner Stories of Impact, and teaches at Long Island University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Anti-Racism in the Creative Writing Classroom
Rita Banerjee:
During my own MFA experience, most workshops centered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop model, which silenced the writer being critiqued and allowed readers to interpret a text and suggest revisions to it without the input of the writer being reviewed.
Only one of my professors, Maya Sonenberg, utilized the Liz Lerman Critical Response Method, which offered a more concise and neutral way of presenting questions and comments to the writer and allowing the writer to speak and ask questions during the workshop and moderate the feedback they received in class. The Liz Lerman Method became my go-to workshop methodology as I tried to make my own creative writing classrooms more inclusive and more centered on the author being critiqued.
After my MFA program, I went on to study Comparative Literature for my doctoral studies because I found too many of my MFA program syllabi to be centered on white, male, cis-het, Anglo-American authors writing from the 1920’s to the 1980’s. As a young writer in the early 21st century, I wanted to read more authors of color, more queer authors, more authors who were engaged in spoken word and writing for performance, and more authors who wrote from multilingual backgrounds or international perspectives.
Although I had missed this kind of plurality, inclusion, and curiosity about the world in my MFA program, it was something that I found in my Comparative Literature program at Harvard. And it was an ethos that I adopted when I created my own creative writing workshops, craft of writing seminars, and literature courses for the MFA in Creative Writing program at LIU Brooklyn, which focuses on world literature, a multi-genre education, and on publishing.
I was curious about how Felicia Rose Chavez presents a new model for creative writing and the creative writing classroom, which centers student-lead workshops and student-lead conversations and definitions of craft. Her model de-emphasizes academic hierarchies and celebrates the culture, knowledge, and diversity students bring to the classroom.
Recently I had the good fortune to speak to Felicia Rose Chavez about her anti-racist pedagogy, and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, out from Haymarket Books this year.
Rita Banerjee:
I found your book to be incredibly brave and critical and necessary. Your book opens up a conversation about how we incorporate anti-racist practices in the creative writing classroom and also in the workshop.
One thing that struck me as I was reading your book was the idea of the white literary canon and the white masters and the texts that we often center in the creative writing classroom. In many ways your book calls attention to the construct of white supremacy, itself, and that, often, both white writers and writers of color forget that this kind of cultural dominance is a construct or rather, they are taught to accept white literary texts as a neutral or objective type of canon.
Felicia Rose Chavez:
It’s so harmful in its invisibility—this neutrality or normalcy of whiteness. It's damaging in a couple of ways in the creative writing classroom. One of which is that we approach every text as though we are engaging with a white narrative. And we don't complicate that engagement with that text by critically unpacking what that even means, who these characters are, and what their context is as we do when we tag a character in a book with a racial identity or racialized body. In that sense, we're contextualizing that character within a history, with a geography, and with cultural traditions.
When we fail to do that, we normalize whiteness and in doing so, we center it. This assumes then a white readership. But when I pick up a book, I say, wait, is everyone in here—are all of these characters white? Am I to assume this is the world I’m entering into as a person of color? Am I to assume and to accept this information as the norm?
It also manages to erase very neatly people of color from an entire literary world. So not only are we erased within our graduate programs, in terms of representation on the syllabi and representation within the faculty, but our mentors are eliminated. Our literary mentors are eliminated. Our own narratives are sacrificed because we think we can't share that information. But we're forced to step back and see that we’ve been erased within the white imagination. So it's incredibly damaging and dispiriting, and in some cases, irreversible because writers of color will look at that [publishing] world, and say, this world is not for me.
Rita Banerjee:
There was the Lee and Low survey of the American publishing industry, which as recently as 2019 noted that 76% of the American publishing world is still white and thus that white publishing professionals are our literary gatekeepers in the United States. That's why books like American Dirt get through the American commercial publishing world with so much fanfare and are given an easy pass. Books like American Dirt present caricatures of what Mexicans should be rather than truly accessing and engaging with the Latinx imagination. In American publishing and in the creative writing classroom, often narratives of people of color are filtered through a white imagination or are presented as what is a satisfactory story about people of color. When writers of color bring in their own narratives into the creative writing classroom or workshop, they're often accused of bringing in "identity politics or catering to cultural criticism, rather than being focused on the personal or psychological. They’re seen as valuing culture over vulnerability. Last time we spoke, you mentioned that the centering of whiteness itself is a form of identity politics, that whiteness is identity politics, and I am wondering if you could unpack that further.
Felicia Rose Chavez:
In any treatment of any text, it's essential that we consider the identity politics of the author and the characters at play as a matter of craft. So it’s essential that we openly discuss identity politics as an additional craft element. It's embedded in every single text that we read.
So, there’s no whiteness without the larger cultural context of which whiteness is enacted.
Creative writing is sociology, is political science, is women’s studies, is gender studies. There's no pure art. To claim that there is a purity to art that is separate from political art is to fall into the same fallacy as a pure racial identity. This notion of white supremacy is a falsehood in and of itself. There's no such thing as this purity.
So we need to accept that, as creative writing instructors, we run political writing workshops, race-based writing workshops as is. We just happen to center whiteness within our workshops.
So we need to step back and say, how can I broaden my perspective so that I am treating each and every text with the same level of criticism and appreciation for the complexity at play? When it comes to identity politics, we only enrich our entire literary history and literary traditions because we’re broadening it.
Rita Banerjee:
In many of your chapters, you talk about this idea of disarming the master's tools and the role that writers of color and especially students play in redefining craft discourse in the creative writing classroom.
Traditionally American academia has been a very top-down model, as you note, with the professor often centered as the all-knowing master who treats their students as apprentices, especially within the creative classroom. So why are you calling to reverse that kind of top-down hierarchy? How do students contribute to building the language of craft with the creative classroom and workshop? Why is this kind of decolonization so important?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
I find that this disheartens some creative writing professors, cause they're like, “Hey, but I have a lot to share.” I’m not saying that we don't have an exchange of expertise, but I do believe that literary texts don't exist in a vacuum and neither do our students. They are not empty vessels when students enter our classrooms to be filled with our knowledge. They already bring in their own literary legacies without even knowing that they're doing so.
Sometimes they translate this expertise as thinking they’re just into this hip hop artist, or they're really feeling this spoken word poet or whatever it may be that they seek out. But I see this as such a rich opportunity to expand our notion of what a text is and what craft in and of itself is. And so they bring these legacies into the classroom. And when we convene, we have an opportunity to learn from one another.
And so when we bring our minds together, how can we define what a craft element like voice is? How can we look at that hip-hop artist and that spoken word poet and Moby Dick and step back altogether and say, “What is voice?
And then let's all come together and collectively define it for the purpose of revealing to ourselves what we already know. We can complicate each other’s notions.
And together we collectively decide upon these craft definitions so that when we use a word in service of each other's work, when we say I really was engaged by the “voice of this piece,” we all know what that means. We can recall the definition we’ve created together and it empowers all of us to have that same base level of information and reference.
Rita Banerjee:
In poetry, Anglo-Saxon meter and forms are still centered in American graduate writing classrooms. And yes, there's an acknowledgement that spoken word might be a popular form of verse, that’s performed in cafés or on HBO or on Instagram, but it's seen as still existing outside of academia, or is seen as being “lesser than” because it’s often associated with writers of color, and with popular artists and commercial performers. So there is this odd dichotomy that there's one kind of poetry that's meant for the classroom and literary awards, and one that's meant for popular consumption. It that dichotomy a result of the white supremacy culture? If so, how do we reverse that?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
Creative Writing being placed within an English Department is problematic because the English department itself has a certain standard that prioritizes its own history and literary traditions. A second very troubling pattern in academia when it comes to creative writing courses is that there are the required courses, and then there are the elective courses. So what you’re speaking to is the required information, the required text of study. And then there’s the elective maybe if we get to it, or if you want to enroll in that special class, which may not count towards your major. There's the prioritized study and then the secondary study. And so it definitely is damaging as a subconscious message to students of color that—my preference, my culture, my interests, my self, my own story—those are secondary and not the prized or the required narratives.
As a student myself, as an English major, I struggled with iambic pentameter. But I did it because I was forced to do it, and that’s what it feels like. It’s not what we imagine in our minds, as professors, as this apprenticeship. It’s a lot of students forcing themselves through and struggling to recite and memorize texts in the hopes that we can ultimately parrot and ultimately re-enact a long history of whiteness and white authors, instead of engaging with a joy of discovery, this true love of texts — engagement, passion. For fear of what? Of a loss of authority? A loss of culture?
I don't understand when I speak to my colleagues where the fear to change comes from because the fear is real. This is the question I get: “Can this anti-racist model truly exist in academia?” And I want to ask back, “Can you step up academia? Can you be what the 21st century requires you to be?” That's going to take massive structural change, large-scale retirements, and pointed hires in order to honor what our young people truly want.
And so when we broaden our conceptions of history, of time, of traditions, we really understand that we have a rich legacy to pull from globally. There's so much happening and we're staring through the window with these blinders on, with this very narrow conception of what it means to write and to be a writer. How do we take those blinders off? Imagine the possibilities for all writers, for all writers, we will all benefit.
Rita Banerjee:
Not only is whiteness used as a filter at the heart of the American creative writing classroom, but whiteness becomes the filter for the language of translation by which other writers of color or people of color have to speak to one another. And we have to go through whiteness in order to have a frank conversation with another writer of color from a different ethnic group or an international writer of color. Do we always have to go through that mode of translation or codeswitching, or is there a way around this? It feels critical to anti-racism that writers of a color can speak to one another.
Felicia Rose Chavez:
I've had mentors of color, very few, but who will almost like come down harder, and be a little bit harsher in their mentorship, conveying “Oh, I'll identify you as the student of color in class. Come here. Why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you on point? Because don't you understand you have to be on point in order to succeed?”
And so we're projecting our own experiences onto our young people of color. It's a gift and a warning simultaneously. And that is really confusing. It was confusing for me because it felt like a person of color was there for me to help me, and yet it was harmful at the same time.
And so in my own classroom, I just stopped talking and I start listening. So when it does come to that mentorship with students, I ask, “What do you want to talk about?” My students set the agenda for our meetings so they can say what’s on their minds and ask me how I can best help them. That's my strategy for breaking the cycle of top-down mentorship because it is embedded within my own psyche. How do I resist that? As writers and mentors of color, we can resist that model by starting to listen instead of talking.
Rita Banerjee:
Being a faculty member of color, so much of navigation within academia means sitting back quietly or assimilating or accepting whiteness. So how do faculty of color navigate that space of listening when so often on a professional level you're asked to not speak up or not speak too much at all? Can you say a little bit more about that model centering listening, especially for faculty of color?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
Listening—it’s a pedagogical point within my own classroom. So when I am engaging with students, I advocate for the pedagogy of deep listening, of mindfulness, of generosity. I aim to practice that on all levels with my students.
So, this is the Dialogue on the other side of listening. Too often we tell ourselves, “Oh, I'm not going to say that because there's five minutes left in the meeting. I'm not going to say that because this person is really unpleasant to engage with. I'm not going to say that because of the ramifications. I'm not going to say because that means I have to leave with the emotional and psychological weight of this moment. That may last me my entire life, right? It may last me more, 3:00 AM sessions than I'm willing to take on right now.”
Rita Banerjee:
As a faculty member of color, if you're reading a student text that has racial bias or expresses sexism or homophobia, how do you bring it up to a student in the classroom or during office hours? And if they react badly, how do you navigate that?
Felicia Rose Chavez: So often in the traditional model, you have a piece of work that's a private, prized kind of document that's in this silo of the writer's computer. It's something that is separate from the workshop at large, which is just kind of running on its own. And then that person brings that sacrificial work and places it in everyone's hands to accept. In this anti-racist version and with many other folks that are experimenting with the workshop model, there’s workshop from day one. And so the work is not a private work. It's not something that everyone in the workshop is not familiar with by the time we get to a large-group formal workshop. So the brainstorming of the work, the initial attempts at the opening scene, the excerpts from rewrites around the work, we're engaging with it on a daily basis.
So by the time formal workshop comes around, students have a real idea of what it is that this work is about, which means there are many, many, many points before the formal workshop where we can engage in dialogue about the work. Not only am I able to engage with a student one-on-one in pre-workshop conference, but within the class itself, we're able to talk about the work in its various stages with this motivation of asking questions about the work, with the idea of having a real engagement about what the writer is aiming to accomplish. I find that when you consistently ask writers questions about the work and they are forced to articulate answers, they're truly thinking over their choice-making, they’re thinking over their motivation. And that is a window. That's an opportunity to have somebody step back, instead of telling them this is wrong.
So it is a form of dialogue that I think enables a safer sense of community. Everybody's asking questions and engaging with various drafts of everyone else's work. So it's not just one person against the class. There are opportunities within this model to identify these things early on and really engage with them.
Rita Banerjee:
To me, it sounds like this anti-racist workshop model is neither a call-out culture or a call-in culture, but much more curious, inquisitive, and dialogue-based. It's questioning, but not in an interrogating in style.
Felicia Rose Chavez:
It’s about “what are you trying to do, and how can we best get you there?”
Rita Banerjee:
I would love for you to talk about the way that you utilize the Liz Lerman method. Because the one that I've been taught the moderator has a really big role in helping navigate the conversation. But in your model, it’s the artist is the one who's really propelling the conversation forward.
Felicia Rose Chavez:
Yeah. I go to the extreme where students are seated in a circle to workshop when it comes to formal workshop and I'm actually seated outside of the circle. So I will be in the corner of the classroom. I'm not even participating as a restraint to myself because my impulse would be to turn towards dominance and control of the classroom. I'm not immune to these impulses as an educator. It takes great work for me to step back and say, “that's not warranted right now. Nobody cares what you think right now, let them learn from one another.” So I do advocate that the student is the one who leads the workshop. They have a timing device and they walk their fellow students through the five steps of the Liz Lerman model in which I add a kind of unspoken sixth step in which they write an artist statement to the group.
So they write a letter, and they write about their fears about the piece they write about their successes of the piece. They write things like “God guys, I am dying right now. And I don't know what to do when I feel so vulnerable. And so here's what I need in this moment.” They also have an opportunity to articulate a future draft, saying things like “Here's where I want to be. Here's what I need to get there.” They enumerate three craft-based questions. Again, we all understand what those craft terms are. So we're all speaking to the piece and we can engage with those craft concepts on equal footing that serves as their foundation. And so they have about 30 minutes and they read the piece aloud. Everyone reads the artist statement silently. They read the piece aloud and they're able to walk through the Liz Lerman steps beginning with “I welcome your statements of meaning” and everyone offers what was challenging and beautiful and exciting to them.
Then they offer an opportunity for responses to their enumerated craft-based questions. They offer an opportunity for neutral questions, what Liz Lerman calls, neutral questions, and then they offer an opportunity for permissioned opinions. They also have the opportunity to say, “Hey, I have 20 minutes after reading my piece or 10 minutes after reading my piece. And I don't want to do steps three and four. So I'm just going to do steps one and two now.” And they look at their timing device and they say, “I've heard enough statements of meaning, let's move on.” This is all to say that they're in control of their experience. They own it. They take it very seriously and they feel such pride when it's over. They feel like it truly was theirs. I think that there's something beautiful that happens when we stop talking and allow our students to step in and lead. And they will rise to the challenge.
In the anti-racist classroom, they have gotten what they needed from a conversation, which may be the first time in academia they've ever gotten what they needed from a conversation that they themselves have led.
And we will speak to the artist's work about where the artist wants to take the work and what the artist’s concerns about the work are. So if a writer brings in a work about sexual assault and is speaking to that experience on the page, but has concerns about the title, has concerns about the mom character, and has concerns about the conclusion, that's what we address. And we limit ourselves to talking about those things. So there is not room to air our personal negotiation with the text in relation to what we've experienced, our own traumas, what we bring to the page. I'm adamant about this, that we step back and contain our own egos and our own experiences and allow the other person to truly be the center.
Rita Banerjee:
As a faculty member, how does your feedback on student work factor in? I know you warn against using the red pen and marking up a student’s work from your own aesthetic point of view. So as a faculty member how do you approach feedback on student’s work?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
It’s surprising to a lot of people that I don’t write on student’s work. I don’t take it home. I am so over that era of a stack of papers on my desk that I'm dreading to engage with, not because the writing’s good or bad, but because it's something that I have to do.
So in my book, I talk about what got me from the initial point of the stack of papers at the desk to where I am now, which was a true learning process. In my current iteration, which will be bound to change and evolve as time goes on, I talk with the students. They bring in their work for a pre-workshop conference, and we talk about best articulating their craft-based questions, any concerns that they have about their work, emotionally or psychologically, about sharing their work, what their process is, and how that process of writing is best serving this particular piece.
And then post-workshop conference, we break down how they felt the workshop went and how we could improve the workshop for the next writer and the next day or the next time we gather. We talk about what they gleaned in terms of what they want their revision strategy to be.
My model of assessment is not the traditional means of rewriting on the student's essay or story or poem, and then anticipating the next draft in which they correct all the things that I told them to correct in order to make it better. Instead at the start of each class, I articulate three goals. So for my recent creative nonfiction class, it was confidence, vulnerability, and truth. And those were our guiding goals for the class. Every time we met, we discussed how those three goals were articulated in each student’s assignment. So they would ask, “How did I do on this thing?” And I would ask them, “Does it exhibit comfidence, vulnerability? Does it exhibit truth?” And they defended, “yes, it exhibits confidence in that I did A, B, and C. It exhibits truth and vulnerability.” And I would say, “Excellent. Then you achieved the assignment.”
So, they write their writing fears, they write their first artist's statement, they share with the class. They do a next draft in which they write an artist's statement to me, and they talk about what changed in the draft and why. And then they write a final letter to the class in celebration of what all we've achieved and what they've learned. And I take those letters. I take that free-write and I take those letters. And I say, let me look at this person's individualized learning journey from those initial fears through the celebratory letter. And that's how I gauge their progress, not through the texts themselves, not through the product, but through the process. And to me, it's the process that tells me whether they've passed the class or not passed the class. And so that's my way of writing on their work is really to get them to write about their work. So it's not coming from me. It's again, it's coming from them. They're assessing themselves along the way again and again and again in a truthful and vulnerable way, in a way that's sincere and not, “Oh God, I've got to do this thing, the teacher's making me do this thing.” But instead, really sitting back and personalizing it. What we achieve is really quite beautiful in their willingness to stop being so cool and instead be sincere.
Rita Banerjee:
In one of your early chapters, you talk about centering mindfulness and engagement and generosity, and you talk about this idea of mothering. Mothering is such a gender term and it's seen as a negative within academia or within the professional workplace. How might faculty members, regardless of gender “mother” their students?
And then beyond that, there are so many studies where faculty who are women or writers of color, or who are queer, are expected to give more energy to their students and emotional support in many ways. So what are the boundaries of mothering? What is the positive aspect of it? And then how does one set boundaries?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
The example I give in the book is equating mothering with coddling the students. And I was in that particular context, talking about listening to them air out their emotional relationship to writing.
I think that we like to forge ahead with writing as a masculine adventure in masochism. You know, writers are prone to alcoholism and suicide is just a natural par for course, and I don't buy into that. I think that's bizarre.
And I think that when we just address that we as writers carry a lot of emotional and psychological baggage with us. And when we sit down to take a moment to really unpack what that means. What we’re afraid of when it comes to writing, what we’re motivated by, and contorting ourselves so that we can publish in this journal or that journal or with this publisher. So how to truly come to terms with where we're at as writers, what we're motivated by, what we're afraid of is an important element in any creative writing classroom as a first step.
And when I was practicing that with thesis students and juniors and seniors across all disciplines, not only did their advisors think that that was a waste of time, but that it was gendered as mothering the students, because I was taking a moment to have a conversation with them outside of the product, outside of what it was that they were writing, and instead talk about the writing process.
I think that owning or reclaiming this term as mothering is quite powerful in that mothers are so far from this soft pushover that we imagine. To be mothered is to be challenged, to be supported, to be listened, to be pushed.
Were we all to be mothered in its truest sense, we would discover what we're capable of in such exciting, nuanced ways beyond just “here, I made this product that you told me to make, that you half wrote for me so that it can look like what you want it to look like.” Mothering is saying, “what can you do? How can you listen to yourself to best achieve that? I'm going to challenge you to do it now, are you ready? Go.”
I think that was the biggest lesson for me as the new mother...I've never, ever experienced anything harder. And I think just as this normalcy with whiteness, there's this normalcy when it comes to parenting and gender roles as though, because I am a woman, it's going to be intuitive, I'm going to give birth and, and have this baby on my chest.
And that myth that I heard over and over that the love is just going to be pouring out of you and everything you do after that moment. It's just going to be motivated by that love.
No, no. And I'm sorry to say it but no. It was so, so, so hard to do. And I think it's important to be honest about that. And I think that this sacrifice, that women of color, our first-generation professors, our queer professors give on a daily basis, is a sacrifice we need to start expecting that of everyone.
Rita Banerjee:
If you're a woman, if you're a writer, if you're a person of color, you become the default listener in the department. The student comes to you because they understand that you two have been marginalized or harmed in some way. It can be a very personal conversation that's happening and it can veer away from a text. So where is that boundary with mothering?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
I find that for years when I opened my door, this very thing would happen over and over and over again. I remember where a student knocks on the door and inside the head, you say, no, like, no, I've got to prepare. I've got to protect myself in this moment. But instead I say, yes, come on in. But I advocate that sometimes we do say no. Sometimes we do say I'm not available right now. Sometimes we do say let's have that conversation at a time when I'm prepared to have that conversation. But again, as the current anti-racist model that I'm advocating for in the book, it's that this student is setting the agenda. And maybe that's an agenda item. I'm really afraid of talking about race in my essay because of these reasons, this is my second agenda item. And let's have that conversation knowing that there's a third agenda item and that we're moving along. It's one thing among many that we're discussing in this moment. And it's just as equally important as everything else that we're going to talk about, but we're not sitting in it. We're not dedicating an unresolved amount of time to this moment. Instead, we're addressing it and moving forward. So I am here for you, I am listening to you, but there are boundaries on this conversation and in our engagement with one another.
Rita Banerjee:
I love that in the back of this book, there are all of these dependencies and resource guides. One of them being “Platforming Writers of Color,” a living canon of 21st century authors, which is available on your website. But all of these writers of color who may come from the Philippines or Mexico or from India, for example, how do we access the cultures of these writers and the intellectual thought from which they have inherited so much? So rather than just looking at contemporary authors in the United States, how do we let our syllabi go backwards in time?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
I love this idea. And there's so many of these questions of how do we tackle ableism in the creative writing classroom. And I get that question a lot. And I'm like, yeah, write that book because I'd like to learn from those resources. I am a work-in-progress. And I think that the more we dream up these texts, the more we're going to enrich the creative writing classroom and the genre as a whole. But as a quick fix, I think that the purpose of the living document is that one, it's something that I use within my own classrooms. So I wanted to model it as something that's available to the public, because in my own classrooms, I have a living document in which students add their own texts to the syllabus. They add their own texts as texts for study, so that when we turn and we say, okay, what is voice, they have a database online that they could pull from that they've also added to. “Oh yeah, Kanye West is on here because I added Kanye West on here. And now I'm going to study Kanye West because that's what I want to study.” So in that same vein, I've created this Alison Rollins is this poet who fabulously helped me curate this list of contemporary writers of color, resources for whiteness, online literary journals that platform and support writers of color. Add to it! Add a category! The whole idea is that anybody can go on to that Google doc and add their own name. Put yourself on there and add a category such as “going backwards in time.” Because I’m far from an expert and have a lot of learning to do, too.
Rita Banerjee:
If we are able to start or cultivate a truly anti-racist creative writing classroom, what do you imagine the future of creative writing and publishing to look like in this country, and maybe it’ll trickle out into the world as well?
Felicia Rose Chavez:
So it's generational in the book. As I say, you have the current cohort of creative writing students, who's going to trickle into the leadership roles in publishing. So it's going to take a bit until we infiltrate the system at large—such classroom and undergraduate classroom and graduate classroom community workshops, and then we have access to the systems of power and publishing and production.
I almost don't even allow myself to hope beyond just the contained classroom. I say that often that if just one classroom can change that to me is a success. And I say that every time I do a faculty training. I'm looking at 20 Zoom boxes. And I say, “that's all it's going to take is that one not just leave with ‘Oh, that was interesting’ but to leave and go work on your syllabus now and do the work.”
I think that as a reader and as a lifelong reader, as a lover of books, there's an excitement there about what texts can challenge me and make me grow as both a reader and a writer. Something new that's so old at the same time, as you say, looking back, but as we move forward, imagine this wave of voices that are enacting what has happened in the past or enacting what is occurring globally, but that is new for us. Again to challenge us as readers, but to enrich us as writers, to open our imaginations. This exciting empathy that we could experience as a result—to have these insights into one another's narratives that expand our idea of what it is to be this citizen.
Rita Banerjee:
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Felicia Rose Chavez. For more information about The Anti- Racist Writing Workshop, and to access a multi-genre compilation of contemporary writers of color and progressive online publishing platforms, please visit www.antiracistworkshop.com.
