So R. and I decided it would be a good idea to tutor some of the students who we had been volunteering with at Green Youth Farm. R. gave an inspiring talk about college admissions process, it revved everyone up to get ready. We decided Sunday afternoons we would head down to Washington Park to have some tutor sessions. Students could bring HW questions, essays they were working for class or college admissions or have R. help them study for the ACT. Simple as that. Students wanted tutoring. We wanted to tutor. But then it occurred to us, we needed to BE somewhere while doing said things.

The libraries are closed on Sundays. We emailed the Park Field house contact. I visited the Field house, wrote a note; I called churches. I visited the cultural center and emailed the director. I showed up on churches door steps ringing doorbells. At the baptist church, they laughed, Oooh, We are too full on Sundays. No room. Although, they didn’t ask for the details that I wanted a room for only about 10-15 people in the afternoon. I tried to slide my details in between their excused, but I could tell they were not interested. Try the Catholic Church across the street! They used to be a high school.

That sounded promising. I crossed the street, I walked to the courtyard. It was silent, but for the wind churning the dead leaves. A statue of saint, face tilted toward heaven, hands in prayer stood alone in the courtyard. I walked around until I found the church office doorbell. An old nun with drooping eyes, and a limp answered. Yes. I told her my plight. A room, just one sunday a month, maybe two. Oh, we don’t have any students here, we had to close the high school. I explained that we had the students, we had the tutors all we needed was room. Oh no, oh no. I don’t think so. Someone would have to clean the room, the bathroom, light the boiler. I offered to clean the bathroom, and wouldn’t the boiler already be lit on Sunday? Maybe. Call Father R. But I don’t think so. 

I called Father R. the next day. He also was uninterested in hearing the details. But gave a litany of excuses. If we rent out the building we won’t be able to offer it anymore. 

So R. and I are meeting at Starbucks which has room enough for us, but even it is not quite as close to the high school as we were hoping to be. I hope students come on Sunday, but not too many.

Perhaps it was unfair to expect people to offer us a free room. But I was quite irritated and mostly disappointed by the attitude of the church representatives I spoke too. One church was too full of Christian activity to make room for a few high school students. The other one too empty.

I suppose we went about this all wrong. In my previous experience I had been living in the area where I wanted to be of some kind of use, give some kind of service. So I had more connections with the people in the neighborhood and might have known who to ask. We will see.

Okay, maybe not quite famous, but you can find a photo shoot of me, posted on the talented photographer’s blog. Thanks, Lisa!

In the spirit of my last post (doing what you love for free) I have accepted an internship at this awesome Chicago org called Open Books.  I am excited to be part of an organization that is working to combat the literacy crisis in Chicago. Did you know: 53% of adults in Chicago low or limited literacy skills? (I stole that fact from the Open Books website–where you can find more about literacy in the U.S.)

While I hope to learn about how Open Books works as an org, build some great relationships with the students and with teachers and staff, I also hope I learn about the landscape in Chicago. Who and what is where and how.

It’s funny. Biking around Chicago actually makes it feel smaller and easier to navigate. I think it has something to do with being a part of the landscape you are traveling through (whereas in a car you separated). I hope that this internship does a similar thing– that through relationships I will create a network that make Chicago feel less like black hole into which I have been submitting my resume and work applications. And more like a city of Big Shoulders.

Chicago has a lot of nicknames. Big Shoulders come from Carl Sandberg’s poem “Chicago”:

Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the big shoulders.

1. Networking, verb: looking for people to help you get ahead in the business, any business.

2. Networking, verb: A. getting to know people who have similar interests to you or someone you know. B. taking the opportunity to geek out with people who share the same peculiar knowledge set.

I used to think of networking as defined above definition #1. And, it made me feel greedy and little slimy and generally unpleasant. So I decided I was bad at it and did not want to work to improve. However, a friend– more of an acquaintance really, Grace, redefined it for me as above definition #2. This felt like something I could get behind, a skill I wanted to learn. While similar to small talk, networking has the opportunity to open doors to new friends, jobs, definitions, and avenues.

So I’m working on my networking skills. Today, when I bought a couch off craigslist I had a nice chat with the fellow, an owner of a brand marketing graphic design firm. It was an overall enjoyable experience. He was jovial, and I worked to be outgoing. I’m also sprucing up my LinkedIn page.

Here, here to networking. 

Today, I began volunteering at Green Youth Farm. And let me just say an obvious axiom about poetry: It doesn’t happen just on the page or in the classroom or when reading a book curled up on the couch or in an airplane seat. It happens in the garden. Poetry is a kind of magic. And so is garlic. You dig a hole for a clove of garlic, you cover it with dirt, with hay, you wait and wait, it grows and grows a mathematical white dress in the unseen places below the dirt near the earwigs and the worms, the green shoots and scapes escape through hay signaling life, life, life. Then you assign a group of teenagers, and an odd poet to pull up the garlic, to tie it in bundles and hang it to dry from the hoop house. There are a fifty or so poems right now in a hoop house in Washington Park on Chicago’s South Side marinating in the summer heat, drying into the kind of poetry you can eat.

a kind of magic

I tell myself not to worry about this onslaught of rejections by post and by email. At least some of the rejects are what I term “nice” rejections. The second or third tier rejection slips with comments and signatures. I remember back to the manuscript-overflowing shelves (both literal and virtual) at IR and know not to take it personally. Rejection season leads to summer, which is also known as manuscript editing, revising, polishing season, and summer leads to autumn when school and journals are back in session and postal workers (both literal and electronic) everywhere are delivering those shiny new pages of stellar poetry.