Table Of Inclusion

What made me to be what I am at this moment

In a continuation of the work I did with the Creative Minds Project comes this work. With the same grant from the Department of Cultural Affairs we setup a situation where we could meet with people from PATH and the People's Concern as well as people who are not affiliated with any organization. We met at a recreation center in Brentwood, CA in the art room behind the gym. There we served meals which we sat and ate together and wrote and discussed. After 12 weeks I gathered their writing, same as before, and we produced this book of their unedited pages. The group combined people with out homes, people housed with disabilities and people interested in this population, like therapist, teachers and artists. This book has no central theme because that is what this group chose to do. During work on this book, the Table of Inclusion came into being. We are now a loosely knit collective, some of us have gone back to our families in other states but many of us are still friends, still gather and will write together again in the future.

Paperback: 204 pages
Publisher: Kindle Direct Publishing
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1986705587
ISBN-13: 978-1986705585
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.5 x 9 inches

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the stormy seas guidebook

For my work as a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator, sponsored by an artist-in-residence grant from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and with the expert help of The Creative Minds Project, I gathered a group of homeless veterans, UCLA students, and community members to meet weekly in PATH West Los Angeles, a facility for homeless veterans on the path to housing.

The book was created in ten weeks. We decided the first day to tell a ‘sea story,’ a tall tale on the high seas. It begins with an angry shark, and what follows is a host of sea creatures, sea captains, islands and sea vessels. Add to that cats, an herbalist, a moon goddess, and the sea police. Threading in and out of everything, in fine poem form, and serving as the backbone of the piece, is one veteran coming to terms with his need to leave the life of the streets for the life of housing and a job.

Paperback: 162 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 20, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1547104988
ISBN-13: 978-1547104987
Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.4 x 9 inches

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The Wonderful World of King Royale

The Wonderful World of King Royale was an important discovery for me. It came about in my workshop for The Creative Minds Project at Step Up on Second in 2013 as I was training for my CAPF. After a year of writing poetry with homeless and neurologically diverse adults, one very prolific member decided she wanted to write a fairytale, but she didn’t think she could do it all by herself. So we did it together. Eight months later, we had seventy pages of a very unusual, humorous and anachronistic tale about King Royale and the kingdom of Zodwalk.

We all noticed the transformation the characters underwent, and it started to affect our lives positively. I applied for a grant to do a group story like this again. With the grant, I planned to hire some of the original SUOS members as assistants. I have now just received this grant for a second time. The form of the Group Story can be done anywhere with any combination of participants. But I will always remember this very first one and the genius of its creators.

Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 20, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1547252022
ISBN-13: 978-1547252022
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches

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A Book With Many Answers

Working as a CAPF for The Creative Minds Project and Daniel’s Place, I edited this collection of riddles and poems from homeless youth and the UCLA students who came to volunteer with me. We met from 2013 to 2014, and it helped keep wayward and neurologically diverse youth in one place long enough to get to know the social workers at Daniel’s Place and to receive therapy from them.

To create the riddles, we started with a book of riddles called “A Man Without Bones: Riddles from the Oral Tradition, by British poet Emmanuel Williams. Williams says of riddles, “They appeal to our love of puzzles, of playing with words, of creating challenges for one another. They’re a precious part of our oral tradition, an ancient form of language play that deserves to be revived.”

One of our young people from Daniel’s Place observed this: “I once heard writing riddles helps in constructing better poetic metaphors. Reading these riddles, you might think I’m amusingly making you guess stuff. But really I’m only working on improving the metaphors in my poems. Given the right opportunity, I can be very selfish.”

Paperback: 64 pages
Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (June 20, 2017)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1548099201
ISBN-13: 978-1548099206
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches

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