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The New York University Humanities Ambassadors seek to strengthen the voice of the humanities undergraduate student community with a special focus on exploring how a humanities education can prepare students for a wide range of careers.

WRITERS & CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph AckleyWilliam AdamsChris AlexanderZen AlnuweiriCacayo BallesterosLara BlackmanSara BradyJohn CasteenDavid FoxJay HartwellTom HartwellBrock McIntoshPaul MuldoonNaomi Shihab NyeJosh PaigeOlivia PepperTyler Richards

EDITORS

Thomas CollinsAlexandra Taylor

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Zachary FineAlyssa Matesic

DESIGN

Chris Alexander

COVER PHOTO

Alexandra Taylor

SPECIAL THANKS TO Chris Alexander Ulrich BaerGwynneth MalinJane Tylus

MADE POSSIBLE BY

The Humanities Initiative at New York University

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Welcome to Field Notes, a journal of the humanities published at New York University. Our core team formed in 2013 as the Humanities Ambassadors, with the mission of strengthening the presence of the NYU humanities undergraduate community. We are particularly focused on exploring how a humanities education can prepare students for a wide range of careers. In publishing this journal, our goals are to demonstrate the value of a humanities education for the development of professional skills and to show how the humanities transcend academia in helping us answer some of the most pressing questions of the human experience. We have reached out to individuals doing compelling work within their fields, and we have asked them to address how the humanities inform that work. Field Notes is their response. It is a testament to the energy of writers, teachers, artists, poets, and students…the thinkers, seers, and doers of the humanities.

Introduction

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The journal’s name is often used in the context of environmental science or anthropology; field notes are taken by a meticulous observer in the study of a location. We want to illustrate that the humanities are everywhere, functioning in a variety of professions across industries. What better way than to ask the people on the ground? This journal is a collection of notes from many fields, embodying the acts of observation, documentation and participation. The contributors to Field Notes are diverse: they are at various stages of their careers, and most are not following a prefigured, traditional path. Each is pursuing something vastly different from the others. And yet, they answer our question of the importance of the humanities in quite similar ways.

The journal features interviews, essays, poems, and images that engage with a range of disciplines including education, public policy, art history, the performing arts, visual arts, and poetry. Much like the interdisciplinary curriculum of a Humanities department, the journal operates with the belief that putting these disciplines in conversation with one another enriches the creative output produced by them all. We hope that Field Notes will facilitate dialogue among individuals across academic and professional specializations.

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We begin with a meditation by Joseph Ackley, an art history researcher at Columbia University. Dr. Ackley is interested in “the problem of the substrate”—the tension between what we see versus what we know. Dr. Ackley takes a look at a Thirteenth Century reliquary in the shape of an arm, housed at The Cloisters here in New York. He ponders how this reliquary, along with many others, has been essentially ignored by modern art historians despite its crucial relevance to the society in which it was created. After Dr. Ackley poses the question of what else we may have come to neglect, the image of the reliquary serves as a pause for readers to prepare for an answer. The first response is in the form of a conversation with William Adams, the former president of Colby College and current chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In his interview, Adams considers the meaning of the humanities beyond the academy, particularly how the humanities are broadly connected to the human experience in the ways that we interact with one another and the world around us. “The humanities speak to us as human beings,” he says, “who live lives in the world and have to make hard choices and have the challenging experiences of life, and that’s where they really find their anchor and power.” Chairman Adams remarks that scholars in the humanities can leverage their knowledge to positively

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transform their communities, and Brock McIntosh does just that as a community organizer and nonviolence advocate. Like Chairman Adams, McIntosh is a veteran of the armed forces. Reflecting on his experiences as a soldier through the lens of philosophy led him to renounce war as a viable strategy for conflict resolution. McIntosh discusses his education and gives us the unique opportunity to see the humanities from the perspective of a soldier-scholar-activist.

The next piece shows the value of the humanities in art and cultural studies. John Casteen, a poet and professor of creative writing, wrote “The Imaginary City,” a compilation of poems, images, and an essay on his travels in Shanghai. He compares the traveler to the artist, in that both begin by “looking—looking for, or looking at.” Examining privilege, sensory experience, and cultural difference, Casteen shares the complexities of documenting his journey and resolves to let the camera lead him toward “those glimpses that seem to cry out for preservation and remembrance.”

Having been a freelance journalist, fact-checker, copy-editor, and writer, Sara Brady details how her humanities background has enabled her to transition from one career to another. Her journey, which she sketches in an interview, demonstrates how taking initiative to

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learn new skills can lead to success. While Brady is more established, Lara Blackman approaches a similar topic from the perspective of a professional new to the field. Her essay addresses the importance of her humanities education in preparing her for a career in publishing.

In an interview, Tyler Richards speaks about his decision to study acting at private conservatories rather than at a university. Richards emphasizes the role of self-motivation in education and the importance of staying inspired, and he offers insight into his creative process.

Zen Alnuweiri responds to questions about her varied work experiences in the art world. Currently a curator at Castor Gallery in New York City, Alnuweiri relates trends she sees in the industry today and reflects on the curator’s responsibility to the public.

In an essay about the philosophy he has developed as an educator, David Fox comments on the importance of teaching students how to think so that they can become lifelong learners. Fox believes in moving beyond the simple acquisition of facts, and he challenges his students in order to foster their intellectual independence.

Jay Hartwell, a college media adviser and writer, offers a checklist of practical skills for students entering

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the outside world. Thomas Hartwell, an NYU student, poet and Jay’s son, discusses his writing process and the influence of his humanities education on his poetry. In response to his father’s list, Tom also addresses how a focus on practical skills has influenced his writing, which often draws from the environment.

Complementing the written texts, artwork by Josh Paige and Olivia Pepper responds visually to salient themes as they surface throughout the journal.

Paul Muldoon, both a poet and a member of the band Wayside Shrines, explains that his poetry and song lyrics exist in conversation. He advises student poets to be as imaginative as possible, and to aim to do unexpected things with traditional forms. He comments on the potentially great power of the cliché—the unexpected opportunity to subvert.

Naomi Shihab Nye, a poet, songwriter, and novelist, elaborates on themes of place and cultural identity. Writing is the means by which she aims to bring together disparate groups of people. She posits that empathy in the humanities can facilitate connection.

Detailing his approach as a bilingual poet, Cacayo Ballesteros explains the challenges of translating words

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with multiple meanings, but also the possibilities that lie in the language he is writing into.

Field Notes ends with an essay by Chris Alexander regarding his work as a sculptor. He emphasizes the importance of vision—not just in the humanities, but in a wide array of disciplines and industries. Alexander’s piece closes by imparting the value of an interdisciplinary foundation in the humanities.

Ultimately, Field Notes exists for our readers. We hope this will provide examples of the many possibilities the humanities offer. Thank you for allowing us to share with you.

Thomas Collins and Alexandra TaylorMay 4, 2015

New York, NY

Thomas Collins studies literature and fiction writing at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

Alexandra Taylor studies English Literature, Gender, and Media at the College of Arts and Science at New York University.

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Joseph Ackley

William Adams

Brock McIntosh

John Casteen

Sara Brady

Lara Blackman

Josh Paige

Tyler Richards

Zen Alnuweiri

David Fox

Jay Hartwell

Thomas Hartwell

Olivia Pepper

Paul Muldoon

Naomi Shihab Nye

Cacayo Ballesteros

Chris Alexander

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The humanities tackle the gray. This is what drew me to them—art history in particular. Whereas other disciplines quantify, measure, and determine, all in the service of making the world intelligible, the humanities remind us, insistently and repeatedly, that things like facts, truth, and knowledge are surprisingly wobbly entities, and that people operate not in black-and-white but in gray. Questions, confusions, and ambiguities abound, and it is into these issues, many of them unanswerable or endlessly debatable, that the humanities eagerly dive. I trained as a medieval art historian at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. My job is to access the world of the medieval West, a wonderfully messy, complicated space,

Holy Bones, Medieval Art, and UsJoseph Ackley

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through its objects and artworks. This is a tricky task, given that art as defined today is a modern, Romantic construct that, when used uncritically, is thrown back into the Middle Ages only with anachronistic peril. Furthermore, who is to say what a work of art signifies, what it means? Medieval people had their views, I have mine, and while I try to sensitively and responsibly reconstruct that medieval world, the sources are too few and too distant, the objects simultaneously eloquent and mute; this other world is sometimes commensurable, but sometimes incommensurable, with mine—and thus the task frequently fails. This failure, however, is a necessary, fruitful, productive failure: it exposes not only how medieval people defined and constructed their world, but also how I construct and define mine. Let’s address how medieval art history plays out on the day-to-day. My research focuses on metalwork, precious objects made of gold, silver, and a variety of copper alloys. Most of these things—chalices, for example—were made to service the Christian liturgy. The Christian liturgy envelopes one of the more peculiar pillars of medieval Christianity—that is, making the divine tangible, physical, digestible, both in the form of the Eucharist and in the form of relics. The Eucharist is eaten (what does it mean to generate, and then eat, your god?). Relics are pieces of holy people and things holy people touched, things left on earth and infused with a divine power; relics were typically

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housed within precious portable objects called reliquaries. A thirteenth-century reliquary in the shape of an arm, for example, here in New York at The Cloisters, displays today on its sleeve two empty rectangular cavities. Originally, relics (probably bone fragments with parchment labels) would have been sealed and made visible beneath rock-crystal windows (also missing today). This reliquary, whose medium evokes a glorified, resurrected body, would have been venerated by the faithful. Most of the year it would have been stored, locked up out of site—but on select, festive occasions, it would have been exposed to the crowds, perhaps processed publically on a cushion, surrounded by people eager to see and touch, to get as close as possible to the otherworldly divine objectified via the arm reliquary’s holy bones. It is a riveting object, in my opinion. Ironically, art historians on the whole have tended to neglect, relatively, such precious-metal objects as arm reliquaries. The arm reliquary is not a painting, nor a work of architecture; as sculpture it represents but a fragment of the human form. It slips through the categories that art history has historically prized, relegated instead to the problematic and conceptually flimsy category of the “decorative arts,” with the implication that it somehow warrants less attention than a large painting by Raphael. Many medievalists have rightfully restored things like this arm reliquary to a place of privilege and esteem—but still, what a curious hierarchy

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of value and significance we’ve saddled art with, one that has traditionally marginalized such objects as the Cloisters arm reliquary, an object once situated at the very heart of an entire society’s belief system and most important ritual practices. Therefore, beyond what the arm reliquary says about thirteenth-century medieval Europeans, what does our treatment of it today, microcosmically within art history and more broadly in real-world practice, say about us? Once we wedge open the door it quickly slams open. If we’ve neglected this arm reliquary, what other objects have we neglected, and why? This includes both objects and people from the past, and also objects and people today—in my opinion, a necessary and indeed urgent question.

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The Metropolitan Museum of ArtNew York, The Cloisters, 47.101.33www.metmuseum.orgArm reliquary, South Netherlandish, c. 1230Wood, partially gilt silver, gemstones, nielloHeight: 64.8 cm

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Joseph Ackley is a Western medievalist specializing in Carolingian, Ottonian, and twelfth-century art and architecture. His research focuses on both precious metalwork and the phenomenon of the medieval church treasury. He received his doctorate (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2014) with a dissertation entitled “’Offer him gold; that is true love’: Ottonian gold repoussé and the Western medieval church treasury.” His research interests include how metals were defined, understood, and seen by medieval subjects; how issues of material, medium, and object morphology can be incorporated into the art historical narrative of precious metalwork; and how the church treasury served as a site in which a variety of competing interests, among them liturgical, economic, and memorial concerns, intersected. More broadly, Dr. Ackley is interested in questions of matter, medium, material identity, object ontology, and what can be loosely termed “the problem of the substrate”—that is, the tension between what we see versus what we know.

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Interview with William Adams

In a December 2014 interview in Humanities, you describe your entrance into the study of the humanities as having to do in part with your experiences as a soldier. One of our other contributors, Brock McIntosh, describes how he experienced a philosophical shift toward nonviolence that led to his current work as a community organizer, and he also relates that to his humanities education. Can you elaborate on how the humanities transcend academia and provide insight into larger questions of the human experience?

I see it from a couple of perspectives. You mentioned my personal experience, which had to do with having been in the armed forces for three years, and experiencing during

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that time a lot of personal and intellectual turmoil, but also curiosity. The curiosity and the turmoil led me to think about a lot of questions. Some of them related clearly to my experience in Vietnam, but it wasn’t only that. Shortly after I got back to college, it occurred to me that the questions I had were really philosophical questions, and questions about what I had experienced and how to translate that into productive reflections on different things, and I was drawn rather naturally into philosophy. Though, I must say my education subsequently in the humanities was very broad. I attended an interdisciplinary graduate program, and I read widely in history and literature and anthropology, as well as in philosophy. My basic view, going beyond my own experience, is that the humanities almost always in some way begin in our experience and end up relating back to our experience in a reflected and somewhat illuminated way, and that anchoring in experience gives them their power. The humanities speak to us as human beings who live lives in the world and have to make all the hard choices and have the challenging experiences of life, and that’s where they really find their anchor and power. I think they transcend the academy in almost every single way and dimension since they always have to do with experience. Not everything one encounters in the humanities relates immediately back to something one has experienced, but in a more general way they always are seeking to illuminate

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human experience, and that’s, again, where they derive their power. Because they are not essentially academic, but are essentially about our lives, they always have potential relevance to things we grapple with, both as individuals and as groups of people doing things together.

How can scholars in the humanities leverage their knowledge to positively transform their communities? Do you see that as being another valuable aspect of humanistic inquiry?

Of course, and sometimes it happens deliberately, and sometimes it happens unintentionally—I wouldn’t say accidentally, but unintentionally. Humanities scholars are many and diverse in their talents and what they do, from history to archaeology to literature, and they all have specialties and forms of interest that take them into some very specific and sometimes very technical areas, which is fine. But, going back to our discussion just a moment ago, I think it’s possible for almost any humanities scholar to find her or his way back into some dimension of experience that is problematic or challenging or maybe just interesting, and to use their special skills and insights and knowledge to open up topics that we confront in everyday life. I think there’s always an opportunity for that, and it has to do with finding the things in the public world, or in the shared world, that are common to people and that present opportunities for the kind of work that humanists do

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very well. So, I think the opportunities for transforming communities really settles in this ability of humanities fields and scholars to open up, think about, and reveal parts of life that are common—common not in the sense of ordinary, but of shared—and to help us understand ourselves better. It’s hard to be specific about very particular topics, but the other day I was reading an article on new scientific techniques that geneticists have developed whereby they can now almost certainly create or foster genetic changes in individuals that will be inheritable, that will actually be replicated in offspring. The scientists themselves were saying, you know, we need to slow down here and talk about—think about—what this means, and whether this is a good idea or not. And if this is a good idea, what kinds of ethical considerations and other value considerations come into play? And they were talking about the importance of engaging medical and bioethical professionals in these discussions, and that makes a lot of sense. I think it also makes a lot of sense that everybody have the ability to think about these kinds of things, so it’s not just a matter for experts. I think we all need to be able to parse these very challenging, complicated opportunities and possibilities we have now because of technology, and biomedical technology in particular. So, that’s a for-instance of a way in which humanists could speak very powerfully to a community concern, and I think there are lots of other examples of

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that, where people with humanities training or knowledge can make a real contribution to their communities. This is the aim of a new initiative we have at NEH called “Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square”—to demonstrate how the humanities help us address the pressing issues of our day and contribute to the well-being of our communities. As part of this initiative, NEH hopes to encourage scholars to communicate their research and ideas to a broader public, and to foster public programs where people can come together to consider these sorts of questions.

What kind of trends do you currently see in the humanities? What do you think the future of the humanities may hold?

One of the trends that’s occurring in a lot of different places and ways is that humanists have become much more interested in engaging in public domain kinds of issues, and in turning their own attention and abilities toward public issues, not with any particular political agenda in mind, but in terms of engagement of their own work. I think there’s a broad trend, in the humanities generally, in this public direction. And I think it’s a very good thing—I think it will be good for the humanities, and I think it will be good for the country. And there are lots of subsets of that. I think in the museum world, for example, there are lots of urban museums that are now thinking

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about their work and their responsibilities in new and more inclusive ways, and are involving communities much more actively in new and innovative ways in their work. I think this public humanities world, which is quite a big world, is extremely interesting. Another trend that’s very important—and we’re supporting this, too—is the intermingling of humanities work, scholarship, teaching, and learning with digital resources, and humanists are quickly catching up in terms of these digital resources. We’re doing a lot of work and supporting a lot of people in that field. That’s both a research agenda and a programmatic agenda that certainly will change the nature of humanities work in some ways. In the public space, one offshoot of that is the development of digital resources for teachers and schools in the humanities; we have a website called edsitement.neh.gov for teachers in the humanities in high schools. There’s a group at WNET, a public television station in New York, that has received grants from NEH to develop a series of digital games for young teens built around humanities themes—mostly historical themes—called “Mission US”. They just built a game about immigration—it’s about a young Russian-Jewish girl who migrates to New York in the 19th century, and the game is built around the situations she encounters as a new immigrant in the 1800’s in New York. So, there are a lot of interesting things happening in the digital space right now.

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Many media outlets have reported on a crisis in the humanities. Do you think a crisis in the humanities exists?

My thinking about it has changed a lot since I’ve come to NEH. When you’re in an academic setting you tend to think about the humanities a little differently than you do when you’re in a more public setting, and what I’ve been impressed and surprised by is how vital and alive the humanities are in a lot of spaces that academics don’t think about very much. So, the museum world, the library world, the world of historical sites, documentary filmmaking, these are all worlds where people don’t talk about the crisis because they’re too busy doing stuff, and they’re not getting measured on how many majors they enroll in Classics in a certain year. Now there are disturbing trends in colleges and universities, public and private, big and small, with respect to how vital the humanities are, as demonstrated by the way people make choices in their undergraduate careers. And those trends are certainly real, and they’re worrisome, but they’re only part of the picture, and I like to talk about the whole picture, which involves lots of other ways in which millions of people are involved in humanities work and appreciating it. So, for example, Ken Burns’ most recent film, The Roosevelts, which received major grant support from NEH, was seen in the first week by 33 million people on PBS. When you think about it that way, you have a little bit of a different feeling about it, and so I

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try to look at the whole picture, and I try to talk about all parts of it, and that’s a somewhat different approach.

What are some of the broader goals of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and what do you hope to achieve, as chairman, in the near future?

As chairman of the NEH, my principal goal is to make the humanities larger and more consequential in the public imagination. NEH’s goals, meanwhile, are several and include that, but we also are responsible to communities of humanists who are doing all kinds of different work, so we support research, we support the preservation of cultural heritage, and we have a very extensive education program where we enrich and help advance teachers in the humanities. Our goals are to build the capacity of the humanities and humanities organizations by supporting all of these different expressions of the humanities, in research and preservation and education. But, we’re also expected to be leaders of the humanities community, and that’s where I get back to my goal, which is to enlarge and make more consequential the public’s grasp of and engagement with the humanities. That’s a big goal, but that is what I think about when I think about my goal.

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William Adams is the tenth chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Adams, president of Colby College in Waterville, Maine from 2000 until his retirement on June 30, 2014, is a committed advocate for liberal arts education and brings to the Endowment a long record of leadership in higher education and the humanities.

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Tell us about your experiences while you were stationed in Afghanistan.

I deployed to Afghanistan after my freshman year as a History-Social Science Education major at Illinois State University. One of the odd features of modern war is that you aren’t entirely alienated from the conveniences of civilian life. I was stationed at a little firebase called Waza Khwa in eastern Afghanistan, but even here I could log on to Amazon and have books flown in a few weeks later. I didn’t let war interrupt my studies. Between missions, I continued studying history and philosophy. I felt that I couldn’t do an adequate job of serving the Afghan people

Interview with Brock McIntosh

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if I didn’t learn about their history, culture, and religions. I read Henry David Thoreau while cleaning my pistol on a table built by KBR, and wondered to myself, ‘How much could I learn about myself and the people I’m with if I just leave this base and view it from the outside? Why don’t I just walk into those mountains in the distance and reevaluate my place in the world?’ I read Lao Tzu while our convoy stopped on Route Viper waiting for the go-ahead to keep pressing on, and I couldn’t help but think Lao Tzu was right that sometimes retreating is better than pushing forward in a war that isn’t working. Reading Hunter S. Thompson while sitting on the roof of an Afghan police station alone in the middle of the night is enough to make you want to pack up, leave your post, and live the way life was meant to be lived to its fullest extent. The moment when I began to realize that I was in the wrong profession was when an Afghan bombmaker injured himself with an improvised explosive device he was building. He was brought to our base to be treated. We took turns watching over his body in one hour shifts. He was 16 years old, and I was only 20. He was sedated, so I could study his face and his hands up close, and I kept thinking about whether or not his mother was worried about him. A million questions passed through my mind. What was his biggest fear? What was his favorite joke? What did he want to be when he grew up? Was he secretly in love with a girl? What did he say when he prayed to

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God? By the end of my shift, I realized that I was rooting for him to live, and I didn’t dare admit it to anyone else. And that’s when I began to wonder if I was cut out for war.

What was it like to experience such a radical change in your beliefs while also having to carry out your duty as a soldier? How has your philosophy of nonviolence come to represent a confluence of your military experiences and your personal constitution?

I think people are often interested in the “transition” I went through from soldier to nonviolence advocate. There really was no transition. In fact, I view my two identities as a war veteran and as a nonviolence advocate as complementary components of a philosophy of warriorhood. In Afghanistan, I started reading books about war theory, including Art of War by Sun Tzu and On War by Clausewitz. These are essential readings at US military academies and are supposed to guide the strategy and tactics of military officers, but at the heart of these ideas are religion, philosophy, and the humanities. Sun Tzu was influenced by Taoism, while Clausewitz was influenced by German philosophers like Immanuel Kant. So I read Sun Tzu and Clausewitz like I was trained to do as a humanities student, and this training is really what helped me avoid getting sucked into some of the temptations of combat.

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Sun Tzu and Clausewitz taught me that war is a means, not an end, and war should always be a last resort policy option because of the myriad problems that come with it for both your country and the country you’re at war with. When you’re deployed to a war and in the thick of the fight, it’s easy to lose sight of the real end, which is the mission. On the ground, you don’t see the policy or the mission. You see people shooting at you and your friends. You see people planting explosives for you and your friends. And it’s tempting to disregard the mission and adopt a new goal: get home alive and make sure your buddies do, too. With the mission out the window, the war itself becomes the end. If you win the war, you vindicate the pain or suffering that you experienced or witnessed. Without that vindication, ending the war by withdrawing participation can be an unbearable thought. The only option is victory. So you keep supporting the war even though it means more lives are lost and even if it turns out that the war is not working, or is counterproductive to achieving the larger mission. Reading about war with a humanities perspective kept me from losing sight of the larger picture. Why was I in Afghanistan? To end the security crisis there and develop a government that effectively provided for its citizens and had buy-in from the Afghan people, which would undermine al Qaeda. How was I doing that? Through war. Was the war creating the outcome we wanted? No. As a soldier, I felt that I could no longer support the

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mission and the war at the same time, and I immediately began exploring alternatives that could reach the mission more effectively. A few months after returning home from Afghanistan, I began studying the Chicago Freedom Movement in one of my history classes, and I found the alternative I had been looking for: nonviolence. Distinct from pacifism, nonviolence describes a set of theories and practices that aim to confront conflict rather than avoid it, and to engage the opposition through nonviolent strategies and tactics that attack their sources of power. The theory, strategy, tactics, and discipline I read about appealed to me as a soldier, so I wasn’t surprised to learn some of the most famous nonviolence leaders were veterans: Francis of Assisi, Leo Tolstoy, Gandhi, Medgar Evars, Cesar Chavez, and many others.

How has your education informed your political organizing, your military career and your community work? On the other hand, how have these experiences affected what you draw from the classroom now?

The relationship between my classroom experience and my work in the real world has been a progressive ebb and flow. I take something from class, and then I act. After I act, I have some new experience that tells me what I need to learn next. Then I take the class I need to take and listen

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with a new perspective. And the process starts over. I realized two things when I started as a History-Social Science Education major. First, the history of social movements tapped into what moved me as a soldier and why I wanted to serve a higher good. Fighting for social justice issues through grassroots movements became the sort of thing I would want to make a career out of. Second, at the time I wanted to teach, and I felt that effective education in the neighborhoods I wanted to work in required both good teachers and fundamental changes in the socioeconomic environment. I wanted to figure out how to be both a teacher and a community organizer. So I left the classroom for a year. I went to community organizing and movement-building trainings in Chicago, Detroit, Tennessee, Rhode Island, Philadelphia, and Boston. I became actively involved in developing and implementing a grassroots campaign to curb the redeployment of soldiers with war trauma, and I built a network with organizers around the country and in Afghanistan. I moved to Washington, DC and interned for two organizations fighting for human rights and an end to war. And at the height of the Arab Spring, I flew to Afghanistan to learn how to support the work of local community organizers there. Around this time, I also applied for conscientious objector status, a process through which a soldier can leave the military on the basis of being ethically opposed to war. That application requires

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thorough descriptions of your belief systems and the evolution of your beliefs, so I spent about a year delving into philosophy. That process led me to abandon the idea of God and free will, and to adopt a physicalist outlook on the mind. When I went back to the classroom, I changed both my university and my majors. I decided I needed to be in a place where I could be more involved with change happening in the nation and around the world, and DC was the place to be. I transferred to the University of Maryland. Instead of going into teaching, I wanted to devote more time to improving my historical understanding of how social movements developed in the past, and how social change can occur now. So I dropped the education element of my degree and took on a dual major in history and sociology. Sociology can be misleading. It’s a subject typically not found in a humanities department, and some sociologists strive for scientific rigor. But my time reading philosophy helped me see that many of the sociological theories that some students take for granted were posed by thinkers trained in philosophy who based their sociological theories on metaphysical assumptions. I prodded my peers to think about what William James, for example, was really saying when he talked about the I-self versus the me-self. It’s an appealing sociological concept, but you can’t talk about what William James is saying without talking about

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the nature of consciousness or free will. We discussed Karl Marx without talking about the philosophy of Hegel, whom Marx was deriving many of his metaphysical assumptions from. A popular book in my sociology classes was always The Social Construction of Reality, but we never delved into what phenomenology really meant in terms of ontology. Though I wasn’t a philosophy major, I sometimes wish I had been. The limited knowledge about philosophy I did pick up helped me immensely in my sociology classes. Combining my two majors, my senior thesis in undergraduate school was about the history of sociological theories about the mind and how sociology might change if it adopted a physicalist interpretation of the world. Though it seems like these topics are deeply abstract, they actually informed my work in two important areas: improving veteran mental health and advocating against the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes.

What motivates you to share your experiences in person and in writing?

As a history student, I’ve often looked to the past for inspiration about how to think of my role as a warrior. In many traditional societies, storytelling was an integral component of coming home after war. I believe that it served three important functions. First, it gave veterans a chance to speak about their experiences, and in a way, it

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allowed the whole society to share the moral burden of war. Second, storytelling forces a person to interpret events that seem sporadic and thread them together into a coherent narrative. That helps veterans begin to make sense of what they experienced, and it can be a very healing process. Third, storytelling forces civilians to think about the consequences of war and to take decisions about going to war more seriously. The importance of storytelling is why I speak and write about war. It’s also why I support organizations that further the practice. I’m actively involved with the Veterans History project at the Library of Congress, an office that records and archives stories from veterans around the country. The Department of Health and Human Services recently created a program called “Storytelling for Healing” aimed at helping American Indian veterans experiencing symptoms of war trauma. There are wonderful nonprofits working on this as well, such as the Combat Paper Project, which converts uniforms into paper that veterans can write or paint on, or Warrior Writers, which hosts writing workshops for veterans. Classical literature is another humanities subject that I’ve drawn inspiration from as a veteran. In Odysseus in America, psychiatrist Jonathan Shay interprets Homer’s Odyssey as a story of veterans transitioning from war to civilian life. The process of coming home from the Trojan War was a lengthy journey that involved ritual,

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symbolism, and storytelling. In modern war, the process of coming home is a one-day flight without any meaningful ceremony or artful reflection. Inspired by Homer, I’ve been working on starting a program called Journey Home, where Afghanistan veterans return to Kabul and re-perform their journeys home. They are given time and guidance to reinterpret and express the meaning of what they experienced and their new roles after war, while being introduced to ways of reconciling with and continuing to serve both Afghans and Americans.

What are your professional goals moving forward?

My history and sociology background taught me that social change happens because different decision-makers are pressured. I wanted to know more about how decision-makers are pressured and how various types of power are leveraged to influence social change. So after I graduated from the University of Maryland, I got involved with the legislative side of government as an intern on Capitol Hill, and I worked on the programmatic side of government as a policy analyst in the Administration for Children and Families. Now, I’m back in school at NYU pursuing an MPA in Nonprofit and Public Management and Policy with a major in Management. I’m here to learn more about how to start, revive, and maintain organizations that are effective

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and sustainable. I had been working with another veteran named Jacob George on Journey Home for a few years. We got the idea after we both travelled back to Afghanistan as civilians to meet with peace groups, local advocates, and community organizers. As we talked about the idea, I felt woefully unprepared to get Journey Home off the ground and build it to endure. Jacob, who deployed to Afghanistan three times, committed suicide two months into my program at NYU, so now I’m involved with new projects to both honor the things that he accomplished in life and to build off of his legacy and the momentum of his work. For example, he was an extremely talented musician and wrote many songs about war, so one of the things I would like to create is an organization that cultivates the music of veterans. The weekend before he passed, he was giving fruit to friends and family that he had collected from local Paw Paw trees in Arkansas. He cared deeply about nature and how war affects the environment, so another idea I’ve considered is the Paw Paw Project, which would plant trees where war has caused deforestation. Although learning how to get ideas off the ground is a big reason why I’m getting an MPA, I probably won’t be working at any organization I manage to start. I’ve seen too many organizations suffer from founder’s syndrome. Community organizing has also taught me the importance of building leadership and trust. I need to be able to pass the baton off and move on to the next problem.

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If you were to ask me where I see myself working in five years or ten years, I wouldn’t have an answer. Some students know they want to be a certain type of doctor in ten or fifteen years, so they craft the linear path they need to take to get there. I don’t know what path I want to take. I know what I’m interested in: veteran support, advocacy, and mitigating the effects of war. So I’m continuing to do what I’ve always done. I learn and act, learn and act, and whenever there are opportunities that appeal to my wants or needs, I seize. My humanities background has given me an ability to see the bigger picture, to think critically, and to ask the right questions. Combined with the management skills I’m picking up with my MPA, I feel prepared for whatever opportunities present themselves leading up to graduation. I might be back on Capitol Hill working as a veteran or defense legislative assistant. I might be working for a large veteran service organization. I could be working for the Department of Veteran Affairs. There might be positions open in the Veteran History Project office at the Library of Congress or at the Vietnam Memorial Museum that will be opening soon. I could be working in the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch or at the War Resistor’s League. I might work at the US Institute for Peace or the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. My future is uncertain, but it’s purpose-driven, and it excites me.

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Brock McIntosh is a Master of Public Administration student at New York University’s Robert Wagner Graduate School for Public Policy and a 2012 Harry S. Truman Scholar. He holds a B.A. in History and Sociology from the University of Maryland. Brock has interned for the US House of Representatives, Center for International Policy, and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. In 2014, he was awarded a Truman-Albright Fellowship at the Administration for Children and Families. Brock also served 8 years in the Army National Guard, including a deployment to Afghanistan in 2008. He has been an avid proponent of veteran rights and advocacy through numerous organizations and campaigns, including VoteVets, HillVets, the Veterans History Project, and Iraq Veterans Against the War.

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A Busman’s Holiday.

This story begins in early June 2012; I’m shoehorned into the cheap seats on a great circle flight from San Francisco to Shanghai. My available world has shrunk to half a narrow plastic armrest on each side, two inches too little between my knees and hips, and the leering twist of the air nozzle in the overhead. The loudspeakered pilot lays out a few points along the rhumb line of the flight: Anchorage, Siberia, the Kamchatka Peninsula, the Yellow Sea, Beijing. So this story begins in the perception of unlikelihood. I’m used to looking mostly at flat maps. My travel is mainly in contour lines, city grids, or interstate

Notes from the Imaginary City:On Travel, Privilege, the Visual Image, and Life in PoetryJohn Casteen

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highways. The route details and jet lag combine to deliver a clear and literally inescapable message: nothing I’m doing is quite what I’d imagined.

China was an unresolved curiosity for me, a country I’d visited the previous fall while teaching on Semester at Sea. My family and I spent a happy November week there—docking in Hong Kong for a few days, then an overnight sleeper train to Shanghai, then meeting the ship a week later to depart for Japan. China’s reputation for difficulty preceded it, but seemed to me not entirely justified—at least, no more than any other country, including the United States. Though I speak neither Cantonese nor Mandarin, I had been able to get by just fine in restaurants, on trains and the subway, and on foot. Most people we met were captivated by our children (we called them our get-out-of-jail-free cards) and helpful. I was intimidated by the prospect of figuring out independent travel in China; I felt completely ignorant about it, and nervous about navigating a place where I had so little background. But in the end, I enjoyed traveling here even more than I do traveling in Europe. So: with a one-year, multiple-entry visa and some walking-around money, I resolved to try to make a return trip, to spend more time in places that had spurred me visually, and to finish poems I had begun writing during that first, too-short stay.

In my pocket is enough traveling money to keep me in dumplings and bubble tea for many days running,

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a high-capacity memory card for my camera, a notebook, pencils. The tools of the trade. I honestly have no idea how anyone would think me deserving of such absurdly rich fortune. But of those to whom much is granted, much is expected. I’m here to work.

***

Because I am a poet, I insist that a real poem resists paraphrase. It cannot be summarized, parsed, or reduced. A bad poem can be. But a good poem’s assertion of its own integrity must necessarily confound any impulse to generalize. So the poems—the first third of my tripartite fascination with this place—will have to do for themselves, without their author to defend them.

But because of an idea I was given, China asked of me something I couldn’t give in poems at all; their ambiguities and layers are different from those of essay. A colleague of mine on the ship—Michael Williams, the South African managing director of the Cape Town Opera—had visited China in early 2007, and had told me that I’d find it easier to manage than I feared. He was right, of course, and I was eager to get his impressions of the place once we arrived in Shanghai. We both ended up at The Astor House, a gorgeous and down-at-the-heels 19th century British hotel at the north end of The Bund, Shanghai’s colonial stock market waterfront. When I ran

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into him at tea (Michael’s people are English) I made sure to ask what struck him most in returning to the city. Immediately, he said that he was taken aback by the change between that prior visit and this one. I asked why, knowing full well that the pace of eastern China’s transformation has become a commonplace, and expecting that Michael might first remark on the new buildings, the pollution, the inexorable spread of global retail culture. I thought he’d say what everyone says. He didn’t.

“It’s the sound,” he said. He recalled from four scant years before a city whose noise level was profoundly low, comprising mainly the aggregate sound of millions of bicycles and tricycles; plainly, it had very recently been a city of relatively few cars, because relatively few people had any money to buy them. The fall of 2011 brought a very different landscape in sound: motorbikes and the chirp and chime of their electronic horns, hype and hustle from the PA systems facing out onto the sidewalk from high-end boutiques, the purr and growl of the engines of cars from every luxury manufacturer we know in the U.S.

The new world, or some facsimile of it, had replaced the old in the space of half a decade, a time so brief it shocked my friend. The interval had been so short, it seemed to me, that the pace of change must obviously have sped beyond any individual person’s ability to adapt, or even to recognize the disappearance of the city in which they themselves had learned the sensory world. The new city is

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like a layer. It’s real, and right here in front of us, but laid over the old city, which animates the inner lives of those who recall it. To be in it is to inhabit the real, the present, but also to navigate the recent memories and unconscious lives of millions of other people. The sense of being there—in the physical space of so many other peoples’ perceptions and impressions—completely floored me.

The poems I began writing then sprung from the certainty, or at least the hypothesis, that the old city endures in its natives’ memories and imaginations, and from my own wish to write into that sense of things. Their experience of the old place endures. When they’re here in the present, they’re also here in the past, because each individual is one person with his or her own sensual memories that inflect every new thing that person encounters. “Between thought and expression,” as Lou Reed says, “lies a lifetime.” And this essay—this busman’s holiday, a writer taking time away from the teaching of writing to write—this essay is meant to acknowledge that imaginary city, and to define it in terms of the present, the concrete and haze and photorealistic confrontation of the real.

In seat 57F, sixth in a line of ten across the wide body of a 747 somewhere over north Asia, I work at teasing out the threads of a real essay, an attempt. In Hamlet, Polonius assures Gertrude, who has begun to suspect her son’s firmness of mind, “I shall assay him.” Not diagnose;

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not figure out. Not for certain. I shall try him, shall get as close as I can to that thing that’s ultimately unknowable: the mind of another person. To try to think it through—here, in this case, on the page.

It’s very frustrating, when thinking about travel, to feel, as I do, both a grinding sense of worry at the self-indulgence of it, and also a profound and unsettling sense of privilege and obligation. And I use the term privilege here carefully, since for me it has two different meanings. The first—the one I intend—asserts that the circumstances of my own life have made it possible for me to do this thing that most people will never have the opportunity to do. It is indeed a great privilege to find myself in this situation, with no obligation other than to write it out as well as I possibly can. I accept this notion of privilege. To do otherwise would be absurd. The second understanding of privilege, the one I do not intend, and which I hope does not at all fit me, is best described by the poet Jaswinder Bolina in his essay “Writing Like a White Guy,” published at The Poetry Foundation’s web site. In it, he describes privilege as “the condition of not needing to consider what others are forced to consider.” He continues to specify “the privilege of whiteness in America…to speak from a blank slate…to not need to acknowledge wherefrom one speaks,” and to describe this voice—this specifically poetic voice—as “the position of no position, the voice from nowhere or

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everywhere.” When I read his essay for the first time, I realized that much of the lack of affect I had so admired for so long in the work of many of my favorite poets may not have been as neutral or dispassionate as I had assumed. I realized, that is to say, that I had at least partially internalized the voice of that kind of privilege, had come to find it personally appealing as a style, and had failed to recognize it for what it was: not apolitical, not without a cultural inheritance, not universally approachable. It’s one thing to discover that one has landed in the country Seamus Heaney describes in his poem “From the Republic of Conscience;” there, the speaker, who thought he was stopping through on his way someplace else, discovers that he’s now a citizen, and that he’s been appointed ambassador-for-life. But it’s something else altogether to discover that that country is actually a foreign one, where one’s own culture and assumptions become very suddenly opaque. But like the traveler in Heaney’s poem “with my two arms the one length,” I embark on this particular trip empty-handed. I only insist that the substance of my work—here, anywhere—must contend with what others are forced to consider, with the vagaries and specificities of lives that are not in any literal or metaphorical—or writerly—sense my own. Artists do their best work when they’re a little off-balance. From where I sit, anxious about a trip that should stretch my ability to take care of myself and write my way

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into a new subject, two weeks traveling solo in China seems like a lot of off-balance. It terrifies me to think of getting sick, or getting hurt, or scammed, or hit by a car, so far away from everyone I love, so far away from anyone who could help me. Folded into the position of transit—six foot one of me, origamied into a container that’s about five-eight—I’m forced to ponder the idea of closeness, intimacy. I can’t not think of my children, almost immediately. The idea of two weeks without touching them—without stroking my daughter’s hair when I kiss her goodnight, or holding my son in my arms, his weight, the tint and scent of his skin, the apricot texture of his ear—seems more than unlikely, or even unimaginable. It seems intolerable. I don’t just anticipate the need for a little linguistic finesse in finding meals, train tickets, or hotel rooms. I anticipate the need for self-rescue.

Looking and Seeing.

In the past six years, owing to three stints teaching on Semester at Sea, I’ve visited 36 countries on five continents, many of them places that are more or less rapidly developing—changing. The nature of the development takes many forms, most often—and most necessarily—roads, water, and schools. But in terms of identifiable change, those aspects are hard for the newcomer, or the casual visitor, to notice. One might easily

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and unquestioningly take for granted that a road exists, or that clean running water is present, or that children have a building in which they may be taught lessons. One can see these things without needing to remark on their newness, because one is used to their existence in one’s own country. They simply appear to be a part of the world as one recognizes the world to be, a world in which roads, water, and schools are present. Easier to spot, and in some ways more dramatic in their day-to-day effect on peoples’ lives, is change owing to the rise of technological culture. It’s most visually jarring in places and among people who less than a generation ago were living without many of the tools—mobile phones, especially—that the people of developed countries have come to understand as a normative birthright, a natural expression of the condition of human beings in the world. Examples are easy—too easy—and many. In Egypt, a Bedouin tribesman in the garb and headdress of his people sits atop a camel next to the great pyramid of Giza, his mobile palmed against his ear. In Saigon, a woman wields a broom made by hand of bamboo to clean the sidewalk in front of a postmodern chrome-and-glass skyscraper. In Tibet, a room full of schoolchildren peers intently and with great humor into the depths of an iPad. The images represent a moment of continuity between those in far-flung places and the viewer; they take a moment out of context, but they never attempt to depict

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that context on its own terms, fully. These readily observed contrasts have become a visual cliché. They’re grist for the mill at many magazines because, like any easy reportage, the audience’s preconceived narrative is built into the image itself. The least imaginative approach would simply characterize them as “funny,” though it wouldn’t take the next step in sophistication to categorize them as funny-ha-ha or funny-strange. In American culture, whose main source of humor is irony, the distinction between the two becomes problematically indistinct.

These images are not the same, or not exactly the same, as the photojournalistic images Susan Sontag explores in her book Regarding the Pain of Others. That book’s title employs a brilliant double-meaning on the word regarding that’s worth pausing to explore. It tells us first that the pain of others is the subject of the book, but second that the book is also about the act of looking at that subject—regarding it. Photographs of misery—of the atrocities of war, of real calamities that befall people who are different from the viewer only by accidents of birth and history—have a redeeming social function. They bear witness; they educate or instruct; they imply an obligation to act. Insofar as these images make a moral statement that overpowers the voyeuristic and detached act of viewing them, they may announce themselves as works of art. They may not, though, be art that occurs in a vacuum. To interpret any such image is to construct a larger narrative of its context

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and meaning—to work against the second definition of privilege. It is to consider intentionally the situation of other people whose straits are much direr than one’s own.

Those images depict misery. These images—the technological contrast images—depict irony, albeit an irony of people whose lives are significantly less ironic than that of the viewer. When I first began running across them in travel, back in 2008, I felt no hesitation about making them myself. They articulated a narrative I understood, and, as I am not a particularly skilled photographer, I found it very gratifying to be able to generate any meaning in an image at all. Then I began to understand how ubiquitous they are, how easy, how done, and I rarely if ever make them anymore. I don’t find them offensive; after all, they’re real, and no artist should take offense at the reality of what’s real. (Another colleague of mine, the post-colonial literature scholar Rashna Singh, said, “The poor are not shocking. Poverty is shocking.”) I just find them entirely hackneyed, and more than a little simplistic, because they speak the one visual language in which the viewer is already fluent. They reduce the entire experience of the person in the frame to one easily digested, postmodern, highly and obviously privileged irony: Funny.

***

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Shanghai, June 2012

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So the flight back to Shanghai gives me twelve hours, not counting dozing off or pacing the aisles to work some fresh blood into my legs, to come up with a plan to use my time responsibly. I want to find, and to photograph, the real. Not the preserved artifact of the old, not the irony of the new juxtaposed against it, but the totality of what’s there. And I want to write poems into the experience of attaching my own presence in that imaginary city—the one that lives in the memories of the city’s people, the one I’ll never be able to visit myself, having arrived five or ten years too late.

On arrival, I’ll revert to form: walk the streets and get lost in their ebb and flow, take notes, make photographs, hole up by myself, write poems. For the same reason the alligator eats the frog in Aesop’s fable, that’s what’s in my nature to do. Life on the street here, once my feet are on the ground and I’m moving through the city I came to find, is lush, varied, quiet, sad, and utterly exhilarating. I rise before six each morning, walk and look until I’m hungry, and return to the hotel for breakfast and writing. The tourists are all still in bed, except me. This is the only time of day to get photos of these streets without a ton of people on them, to get a good sense of how public life here works—the texture of the street, the rhythms of people living in a place I’m only passing through.

Leaving my hotel and walking down The Bund is a little like writing myself onto the palimpsest of the

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city itself. The riverfront is studded with the colonial facades of hotels, banks, and government buildings whose various European founders’ names have been chiseled and wrenched away, literally. You can see the holes in the masonry; whoever hung the Five-Star Red Flags from the cornice never bothered to fill them. In morning light, older people—people old enough, I mean, to have been educated under Mao—perform ritual calisthenics and Tai Chi beneath his statue, and before the Monument to the People’s Heroes. In evening light, younger people, whose state religion is consumerism, pose for highly orchestrated wedding photos in front of the buildings that gave this part of China the capitalist history Mao overwrote. The choreographies mirror one another. The dances could not differ more dramatically.

The rest of the day is exploring other parts of the city, or working until the evening light comes along. It’s very, very common to see mothers, fathers, and grandparents walking their babies around working-class neighborhoods to put them to sleep. I can’t see one pass by without the nearly physical sensation of holding my own children, showing them what I’m seeing, feeling them feel the way public life involves the people who live here. I like to look for what people are up to—how they spend their time, what they need to do to get by, what the syncopations of daily life dictate.

Here and in other cities in China—Hangzhou,

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Suzhou—I’m constantly running across a variety of kinds of ordinary domestic work being done. Some I don’t photograph—people doing their laundry in communal tubs and hanging it out to dry, bathing infants, that sort of thing. The alleys here serve as a shared front yard. Similarly, in older neighborhoods, very few of the homes have their own bathrooms; there are toilet and wash rooms roughly on each block, which everyone shares. At six in the morning, people in the neighborhood are mostly in their pajamas, going out to the fruit market for breakfast, walking their dogs, and stocking up the little mom-and-pop stores and food stalls that constitute the bulk of the economic life of many areas. Over lunch several years ago, Natasha Trethewey told a group of writers a story once about her feelings of guardedness when a photographer accompanied her to visit her extended family in Gulfport, Mississippi. She said, “I had to be straight with that guy: I wasn’t bringing anybody in to take pictures of my people when they were looking all nappy-headed and fucked up.” And ever since, I have essentially decided never to be that photographer.

Almost all streets here—wide, narrow, commercial, intimate—are swept meticulously and often, and I’m struck by the brooms I’ve seen everywhere here, both for indoor and outdoor use. Every single one has been handmade. China doesn’t appear to have mechanized the process for manufacturing goods whose purpose is menial. Its brooms

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Brooms, Suzhou

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aren’t made in factories, because brooms don’t generate hard currency, which is what factories are for. Brooms are made near what they’re made of, which is bamboo plants. When you want a broom, you buy it from the guy who makes brooms. (He rides around every so often, on a bike, with his brooms stacked on the rear rack.) Likewise, on the inter-city train, when I see people working in the fields, they’re using handmade hoes, rakes, and so on. Moreover, it is people working in the fields. Many people. China, like the U.S., has a well developed industrial economy. As far as I can tell, though, unlike the U.S., its agricultural economy is not connected to its industrial economy. In America, farming is something small numbers of people do in huge fields with big machines and a lot of chemistry. In China, farming is something people do on small plots, without machines, with a shovel. See also: street sweeping.

I roam the city as it is—the apparently unchanged and probably unchangeable parts, and the obviously contrived and newfangled parts. They live cheek by jowl, more so here than in any other city I’ve ever visited. On Nanjing Road, for example, which is Shanghai’s bright and shiny version of Times Square, you don’t find much to confirm the conventional image of China as a rural and isolated country full of provincial and archaic peasants. You do find a Cartier store, a Hermes store, and any luxury or prestige brand one could wish. In a four-block walk, I fend off half a dozen aggressive and slightly off-kilter offers for

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whores. “Sexy lady massage! Very short girl! Very short!” one woman, a tout, offers me, in a manic and heavily accented stage-whisper. I can’t bear to tell her that she means very young, and that she’s translating badly on behalf of the women she’s exploiting, and inviting me to exploit. This China isn’t China as the guidebooks describe it. This is China as it has decided to become, at least here, on this street, in this city.

Saturday night, Nanjing Road is pulsating like an amplifier. The sensation of being out on the street, among thousands of people and the flashing lights of the immediate, feels like being part of a wave of reverb. I eat grilled octopus and steamed dumplings on the street for supper. The street food here is great, sort of like a state fair, but with duck and eel and watermelon instead of fried Snickers bars and funnel cake. They do have grilled corn on a stick, though, and green tea puff pastries that they fry in oil right in front of you. You just walk up, point to something yummy, smile, and hand over about a dollar. The cook doles out six or seven of whatever it is, you say xie-xie, and delectability commences. I have been one hundred percent careless about what I eat; I threw caution to the wind years ago, and I’ll never get it back. If I want it, I eat it. If I don’t, I travel hungry, which is fine, too. Especially on a busman’s holiday—a writing trip, which this is—hunger sharpens the senses measurably.

A scant block north, though, running parallel to

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Nanjing Road, Shanghai

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Nanjing Road, there’s a very different story playing out on Beijing Road. Where Nanjing is neon and vendors hawking knockoff Rolexes, Beijing is little family groceries, electric repair shops, bearing and pump supply houses. Men sell cherries and plums from pots hanging off each end of the bamboo yokes they tote on one shoulder. Scrap metal shops, tool and die works, locksmiths. A woman shaves the husk off a four-foot length of sugarcane with a hatchet; the shavings lie heaped in a perfect circle on the sidewalk. When I return later in the evening to find supper from the street vendors’ coal-fired grills, I see that she has crushed the cane in a hand-cranked mill, juicing its pulp to sell by the cup. It’s delicious.

The contrast could not be more proximate or more stark. Literally steps apart, these two streets might as well be in different cities. Different neighborhoods. Different centuries. Nanjing Road is an invented place without a historical context, a consumerist fetish, a collective fantasy-in-progress. It insists that the sound of the city Michael Williams knew—tires on cobblestone, chain on drive-sprocket—could never have been here, were never, in fact, here. Beijing Road insists they’ve never disappeared at all.

“What Sort of Man I Was.”

In preparation for this trip, I spent many mostly unhappy hours combing through travel guides in search, it

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seemed, of some wise principle that might guide me toward a single right approach to my time in China, some objective I could try to reach. But as I read through the guidebooks, little by little—Fodor’s, DK, Lonely Planet—I couldn’t shake the nagging sense that they described a kind of travel for which I had no patience, or, perhaps more accurately, no aptitude. I realized that the guides, perhaps by their nature, and probably unintentionally, were not so much describing what was possible in the country, but defining what was desirable in it. They seemed full of a language of conquest: discover this unspoiled place, explore that charming and timeless one. And that language seemed to prescribe a means by which the traveler should find any given experience in the country meaningful: no visit to China is complete without…fill in the blank. The supposition, it began to seem to me, was that one would have in some way acquired China once one had ticked off a certain number of must-see boxes. The guidebooks conjured a series of images to be attained, satisfied, and collected—to make the experience real. I found the consistency of this approach pretty striking; it’s simply the way such books are written. It defines the experience of the traveler exclusively in terms of his or own satisfaction of particular expectations, but it never contends with any issues in the lives of individual people in the country being visited. I knew already that life in the street was jarringly distinct from the language of the

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guidebook. But I could begin to grapple seriously with my discomfort only when I connected the conquest/collector language of the guides with Sontag, and Heaney, and Bolina.

The subtext of privilege is perhaps most clearly expressed in the books’ lists of sample phrases; if you’re rich enough to take this trip, they seem to suggest, here’s the kind of thing you’re likely to end up wanting to say. They’re practical, of course; one should know how to ask where the nearest toilet might be, or what time the train goes to some city or other, or what’s on one’s plate. But the lists essentially stop with those sorts of linguistic—meaning, economic—transactions. They orient the traveler toward a default posture of consumption or self-interest, toward what the traveler gets out of the bargain. They don’t teach him or her to ask about another person’s feelings, or welfare, or situation, or ideas. They don’t teach questions like, “What do I need to learn here?” And in leaving these questions out, they condition and train the traveler not to consider what the answers might be. The idea of going somewhere to look for something in particular—the intentional or iconic idea of travel—limits the range of possible resultant outcomes.

In that way, a traveler’s lot resembles an artist’s. Both parties can only genuinely see what it is that they happen to find fascinating. Everything else sort of falls away. An economist on vacation sees the economies of

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the places she visits; a teacher sees what is being done, or not done, when she passes by a schoolyard. The ways we read a culture—its language, history, food, arts—can only ever be seen through this lens of our own experience and predilections. And for the traveler, like the artist, there may be something useful to learn in exploring the idiosyncrasies and wrinkles of those fascinations. It isn’t wrong, after all, to want anything in particular, or not want it, in travel, any more than it is in art. Someone has to ride all those tour buses, just like someone has to paint all those inoffensive canvases that end up in hotel lobbies all over America. So if I were to decide in advance, as I did, that I wasn’t exactly going on vacation, and I didn’t want to write a collection of “poems about China,” and I didn’t want to make postcard photographs, then what, exactly, was I going there to do? What, in the end, was the point?

Among the books I’d picked up in preparation for the trip, in addition to the guides by which I felt so roundly let down, was a wild card, a volume I’d known only by reputation: the British novelist/critic John Berger’s and the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr’s collaborative book of essays and photographs entitled Another Way of Telling. It was obviously time to broaden my theoretical background in photography beyond Sontag, Roland Barthes, and so on. I’d always liked John Berger’s writing, and I really liked the idea of collaborative work between practitioners of different disciplines. So instead of re-reading the prescriptive

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Xinzang Road, Shanghai

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guidebooks, I spent several hours on my transcontinental flight working through this new and very different thing.

If being a traveler is like being an artist, the similarity begins in the act of looking—looking for, or looking at. For an artist, much of what’s to be looked for/at is the self; the poet Charles Wright, for example, who is a hero of mine, says, “All landscape is autobiography.” In that way, the artist/traveler behaves like the subject of, for example, a photograph. The Berger/Mohr book includes many useful and provocative sections, but the one most arresting to me is a photographic essay with a dairyman, Marcel, from the village of B , presumably in the Swiss Alps. The sequence of images depicts Marcel in his solitary summer home, high in the mountains, tending to his herd. It illustrates in luminous detail his affection for and connection to his dairy cows, his herding dog, his place, and his grandson, who visits him during the course of the several days photographed. We get to know him by detail as well as by temperament. He scolds Mohr, for example, for composing a photograph of one of his cows by focusing on the animal’s eye, framing out the remainder of her face and head. Marcel insists that a photograph ought to show all of a thing, ought not to presume to fragment it, or to decide which part is most worthy of inclusion in the frame. Marcel was demanding the kind of whole representation I sought in Shanghai. He insisted that no gesture of synecdoche could ever suffice. The thing had to

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be known in its entirety for the ethics of the image to be correct.

But then, at the essay’s very end, Marcel appears unannounced in the photographer’s kitchen, in a clean and ironed shirt, having shaved his face and combed his hair, presenting himself for a portrait he wants made for posterity. He looks directly into the camera, which views him from the waist up (Mohr notes that below that level he was clad in his usual mucking gear) and faces the eye of the lens, and the imagined future, with a slight smile and clear, bright eyes. Mohr writes: “When he saw the portrait, in which he had chosen everything for himself, he said with a kind of relief, ‘And now my great grandchildren will know what sort of man I was.’” But, of course, they—and we—having seen the photographic essay itself, with its full, loving, open approach to Marcel’s world and his life, have already seen—and adored—what sort of man he was. It wasn’t the audience that needed to see him more formally, any more than it’s China that needs a foreigner to follow the better-trodden tourist paths. He needed it. He required that the visual image, with its stillness, its silence, and its durability, depict him—from the waist up—as he imagined he ought ideally to appear. It’s increasingly rare for me to draw directly on my own experience for the subject matter in poems. Even as a very young writer, I was generally inclined to veer away from factual autobiography if the details of someone else’s

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experience, or of some experience I imagined, seemed more interesting, as was often the case. Through my twenties and into my thirties, I brought my own literal experience into the poems less and less, and felt increasingly suspicious of any impulse to do so. It smacked of the desire to be right, to be perceived as a person with particular kinds of understanding, or to have readers like the poem because they admired me, or felt bad for me. Or because they felt anything in general about the life outside the poem, out there in the real world. Because poetry done well is such an intimate encounter, thinking and feeling in the mind of another person, readers often feel they’ve gotten to know a poet as a person. Indeed, several people I’ve known for years tell me they find it uncomfortably intimate to read my poems. No matter how well they actually know me as a human being, the poems bring them, in some tangible way, just a shade too close. I’ve grown resistant to the idea that my own experience is of any particular interest as subject matter. And I’m not here in China—in Shanghai, specifically—to confirm or deny the existence of anything one might have seen in photos of the place, or to celebrate the many aspects of time spent here that justly deserve celebration. My own experience lies beyond what ends up on the page, just as China lies beyond what I’ve been able to say in this essay, and probably also beyond what I’ve been able to muster in the poems or images. It’s what the photographer Sam

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Abell—another giant, for me, as an artist and as a person—would call the back layer of the image, the horizon that determines how the foregrounded subject draws meaning. I’m here to travel against the prescription, to photograph whatever my eye lights on: those glimpses that seem to cry out for preservation and remembrance. I hope to imagine my way into the city of the poems beyond the city of the real. Art can never deny the realness of that city. But it can ask too much of it, or too little of itself.

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In isolation with one’s own language. In consideration of a certain urge to explore.In need of a street map, a phonetic alphabet, an offline translator. Of a capacious regard

for the integrity of lived experience.In a dream, the structure of the moleculeappeared to Kekulé as a snake, curledback and encircling its own body, as if

regaining its own past, eradicating it.This was intuition, or subconscious work, orwhy, as a screen memory of childhood, rain’s rivulets along car windows persist:

their vascular, knotting tricklets. Anythingcan become a subject: the way a lover notices a lover, the taste of cardamom, schoolchildren running in the afternoon

The Benzene RingJohn Casteen

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light beneath the trees. Ouroboros. It’s still tomorrow morning where I am. The dreamis awash in nuance. Awake, each edifice alongthe wide way stands as if snapped bodily

into its slot. The more closely we attend to the physical world, the more obviously irregular it is. Now I’m just moving inside like a firethat flicks its fir-and spruce-fired tongues.

Slick perceiver, come show me the ropes.There ain’t no nightingale in this territory.Just that invented image-before-language,looking for fish by looking for shadows

of fish, sleeping with one ear cocked.The particulars lose themselves—small coins in a dark pocket. The scent of eucalyptus.Let’s call it getting lucky. Let’s call it a night.

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two questions knitthemselves an opaque snarl:Is this what I actually saw? And

Is this the way I want it to look?Brightening the green of the rice plantswhose paddy breaks and shudders

as field hands bring their mattocks downto bear. Paring away the cell phone,the Prada, the knockoff Nike bags

and my own alphabet used for showalone. Vowels without their haleand hearty music, consonants hazed

in new ambiguity. A radical isotopeof language. It isn’t sadness, exactly—the obligatory catch in the throat’s

In Lightroom 3John Casteen

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curled back—it was justsomething I happened to say, a watchful stranger, wandering

by his own lights: the quiet drapeof evening’s plane trees in the park.Seed-heads of the first cutting

of hay in Free Union. Penang coffee.Mussels, black-fringed in their black shells and clean as concrete metaphor, objective

correlative of surf. I’m always everywhereon business; I’m always also everywhereon holiday. The crane follows its own

inclination, now refracting the Fresnel of the sun, now high-legged, stilled in shallows.Talking to myself. Saying how everything seems.

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Masala chai in the French hotel, in the small of the afternoon; three days in a quiet townto rest, work fractions with the kids. Bright birds overhead. On the sidewalks, kolam, turmeric-cream,

jasmine. The looming night storms in Pondicherry.Out of the noise, the attempt to distillthe essence of a single emotion. In the eyeof the temple’s elephant: memory, and nothing

doing. Like the five tip-touching reedy fingersof a small girl; they tap my hand’s open palm,then move to her own mouth. I have silencesto say in the face of a life that is not

In Tamil Nadu, Some Lines of Heaney Inhere(Hotel du Parc, Pondicherry, India)

John Casteen

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my own. Evening drops in like a strangerone meets anew each day. The Bay of Bengalveers along the promenade; streetlamps lighta place that doesn’t change. What one wants

in an image: Diogenes’ lantern, Diogenes’search. Walking home in the dark, I thinkLuck got me this far. What it is to make travel,to seek, with dream no recompense for waking.

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An incised pattern in the shape of cord.A stippled pattern in the form of grain,of thunder, of cloud, reed. Translucent,the vein-swept head of a jade axe.

And here, just left of the entry, two han, laid flat “on the tongueof the deceased,” hard by hereon the banks of the river Huang Pu.

The placard reads ca. 4000-3300 B.C.One floor down, a calligrapher regardsthe artifacts of his own art; his lipstwitch and purse, and his hand, his

hand, pirouettes and pounces. He’s memorizing pressure and release,the swirl and taper, learning from onewho speaks to him in scroll alone.

In the Jade Gallery(Shanghai Museum)

John Casteen

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Speaks through him. Today, at first light,those kite men, with bamboo reelsof string and vessels all aloft? Those octogenarians deep in tai chi and sword-

play? Those men with trundle-tricyclesloaded tall with demolition lumber, plums,bags full of bags, section lengths of PVC?They live there still, in the imaginary city,

where at this moment glaziers and masons hone the cladding of the chrome and the mirror-glassof now. And the calligrapher, his brush every bit as good as in his hand, fingers poised at its windings,

all speed and precision—he has to feelthe fluid way each stroke was struck in ink.Skyscrapers’ fingers slice the sky to ribbons.Five years ago the city’s sound was said to be

thin tires on asphalt, & the rolling oiled gaitof chain on sprocket. Remember, imagine; go softalong the street of tool and die shops near the close of the day, the bell above the Bund, the river, a wind.

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Departure morning slides by in its glycerinshadows. Afternoon is a pool full of milk.Each channel turns out to be channelthat. It would have been easier to say

nothing, to let an oriole be an oriole.The train station’s platform fills like a ladle,pours its sluice into the cars’ long vessel.My traveling bags grow threadbare at the corners.

A long hour gazing across the plain; ditchedand furrowed, little slash-piles smolderto the windward like funnels. I never shookthe odd certainty no one would remember

my face—which now reflects on me, piecemealacross the landscape of another country. Cheekbones, eyelids: they recede, wave-deflected in the ghastly twilight of smudge-smoke.

CeladonJohn Casteen

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By a canal, a clatter of roof-tiles, stacked &weathering. Oleander. A texture in the air; a grit.A knowing people are thinking of me, elsewhere.I need to show them the color of celadon, its quiet.

I am away from away. Longjing green tea andtiny bubbles rising from its leaves; to noticeeverything’s a poem’s aim, the way it holdsits candle to the sun. A small flicker, smaller

shade-trace on the path. It pays to eat lightly;it pays to walk hungry. Midlife acts on the bodylike a kiln, on the mind like a crucible. The densityof colors deepens, fills. Wrong lines diverge,

and bad haze I photographed in haste. Leaving, the skyline of the city crinkles and cants in jet-wash.This was my land of milk and honey, my windowon within, my way of leaving and returning home.

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John Casteen is the author of two books of poems, “Free Union” and “For the Mountain Laurel.” His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate.com, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, and other magazines. Casteen has taught on Semester at Sea three times, and focuses his teaching and writing on global citizenship. He also partners twice each year with Sweet Briar’s Outdoor Program for reflective retreats in Shenandoah National Park. He is the founder and director of the Sweet Briar College’s Creative Writing Conference, which takes place each spring. His recent work includes essays and poems combined with still images and video footage from travel in China and Peru.

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What was your motivation for pursuing a master’s degree, and how did it advance your career?

Honestly, I started my master’s degree because the company I worked for at the time offered partial tuition reimbursement, and I thought having the degree would help me get promoted. The SCPS program also fit into my schedule—I didn’t want to quit my job and go to school full-time, so evening classes were ideal. I was an associate editor at a monthly magazine, writing, copyediting, and fact-checking, and I sort of willfully ignored the fact that a master’s degree wasn’t necessary for the promotion I wanted. That turned out not to matter very much. (An advanced degree also just felt like something I should

Interview with Sara Brady

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have—my mom, dad, and stepmother all have master’s degrees, and my rotten overachieving brother has two of them.) My master’s degree focused mainly on the business side of publishing, with courses on the financial aspects, circulation, and advertising. I was in graduate school during a transitional time for the magazine industry (from 2005 to 2008), but the program was geared entirely toward the traditional model of magazine publishing. That model still exists, but even seven years ago it was becoming less relevant—I took just one class on digital publishing, and my final project, which was a business plan for a magazine launch, included a discussion of the cost of paper and ink but not of servers or web hosting. The main benefit I got from my master’s degree was the people I met and worked with in my classes. The magazine I worked for ceased publication in 2007 and I lost my job. But one of my classmates hired me to do some freelance fact-checking, and one of my teachers connected me with someone who needed a freelance copyeditor, and I was gradually able to resume making a living in a slapdash, patchwork fashion. In retrospect, my master’s degree is an expensive line on my résumé that did help get me some work through the people I met in class, and may have helped me negotiate for more money when I accepted my current job. I’ve never needed to know how much ink costs, though.

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Did you feel that your degree in English Literature adequately prepared you to make the transition into journalism? If so, how? Where did your minor in Business Marketing come into play?

Nope! My English degree helped hone my abilities to speak and write intelligently, and it gave me a grudging respect for John Milton, but it didn’t involve any formal journalism training—I learned how to be a journalist by working at the student newspaper and then on my first job, at Premiere magazine. I made a lot of mistakes—I still cringe remembering some of my more awkward interviews. I also learned to copyedit and fact-check on the job, and those skills have been crucial to my ability to earn a living as the magazine industry imploded over the last eight years or so. I picked up my minor, no joke, because of September 11th—it happened at the beginning of my junior year, while I was the news editor of the student paper, and after covering the impact of that event on our campus, I realized I didn’t want a career reporting hard news. I wanted to cower with the blankets over my head like any sane person during a national calamity. I’d been planning to minor in history (because it was basically eighteen more credits of reading-based classes, which I figured was a piece of cake), but as a result of my terrorism-induced realignment of life goals, I decided it would be smart to have some practical qualifications

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coming out of college. So I picked up the business minor. (I took one computer science class, too, and was comically terrible at it. I’ve tried to learn to code since then, and I continue to be terrible at it!) I found those classes—statistics, consumer behavior, marketing—really helpful in teaching me different ways of thinking than I learned in the English building next door, even though I had to take accounting at 8 a.m. on Fridays because I added to the class two weeks into the semester. Toward the end of college I was interviewing for marketing jobs, thinking that’s what I would do with my life, when my college held a weekend seminar that brought alumni to campus to talk about jobs in publishing in New York. If I remember correctly the speakers were an author, an editor, an agent, and a publicist. The college also had a scholarship for several introduction-to-publishing programs (two in New York, one in Denver) and I applied to the Columbia Publishing Course, was accepted, and got the scholarship. CPC is a six-week immersion in all aspects of the industry, both books and magazines, and it basically gave me the life I lead today. I met several of my best friends there, got my job at Premiere there, and was able to find a place to live in New York because I had the cushion of six weeks in a dorm to figure out how the subway worked and what neighborhood I might want to live in. (My parents thought I was going to come home at the end of the program. I did not.)

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You’ve had a wide variety of work experiences in various industries over the years, from supervising photographers in food-focused photo shoots to contributing original Olympic content for ESPN.com. What skills have most contributed to your versatility in professional endeavors as a journalist?

A lot of the opportunities I’ve gotten in my career have been because someone else wanted to save money. When I was hired at Premiere, it was as an administrative assistant. After I’d filed everything they gave me and handed out the mail and filled out time sheets, I asked the copyeditor and the research chief if they needed any help; they taught me how to copyedit and fact-check. (I knew how to look for typos and check spellings, but this is where I got my formal training in the work I do to this day—using a style book, rigorous checking of sources, that kind of thing.) Later on, other editors offered me writing assignments. Similarly, at ESPN the Magazine, where I was a fact-checker, I capitalized on my lifelong love of the Olympics by pitching an editor on a web feature—focusing on one winter Olympic athlete from each U.S. state. When I was working for Prevention, the photo editor quit suddenly and wasn’t replaced, so I eventually got to commission and supervise a photo shoot (I was also the prop stylist, because again, we didn’t have the money for one). None of those functions were in my original job descriptions,

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but I was there and already getting paid, so adding more responsibility for me saved the company money. After I got laid off in 2007, it was much easier for me to find work as a copyeditor and fact-checker than as a writer or editor. I had tuition and rent to pay, so that’s what I did. It wasn’t really a conscious career choice, steering away from editorial and toward the more support-oriented jobs—I was still writing here and there, but the money I made writing became a smaller and smaller fraction of my total income. One of the main lessons I took away from my years at Premiere was that I am a better copyeditor than I am a reporter and/or writer, so that’s the skill I focused on to make a living. Writing is hard and time consuming and financially unrewarding, so while it may sound more romantic to say “I’m a writer,” it’s more lucrative for me to be a copyeditor most of the time.

You recently joined Inside Higher Ed as a copy editor. How does being a freelance journalist compare to working at a structured organization in terms of day-to-day experience, job security, and creative freedom? 

My full-time-freelance years (2007–2010 and 2011–2014) were always a combination of jobs—copyediting, fact-checking, and writing—that added up to a pretty decent living. As I said, I could never support myself (especially in New York) solely as a writer. A freelance

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career has its drawbacks, of course—when you’re self-employed, it’s very hard to stop working. Your taxes are a nightmare. And the cash flow is maddeningly, terrifyingly inconsistent. There was only one point in my career when I was offered the choice between a full-time job with benefits and continuing to freelance, and I turned it down to keep freelancing, first because it would have been a 50 percent pay cut, and also because after being laid off twice, I have some skittishness about trusting one employer with my whole livelihood. I started at Inside Higher Ed in January after leaving New York last fall, and the transition back to a full-time job with benefits has been a relief, actually. It’s very nice to get a paycheck every two weeks rather than whenever Magazine X’s CFO decides to sign the stack of checks that has been accumulating on his desk while he was on vacation, or net ninety days after publication. In terms of creative freedom, I realize many people wouldn’t think it’s particularly creative or freeing to write a style book, but that’s one of the tasks I’m going to be doing here; as the sole copyeditor on a small staff, I have a good amount of latitude to set style and work with writers to make their copy as lucid, readable, and consistent as it can be. I’m also hoping that the more regular hours and the clearer division between work time and not-work time will let me get back to some actual creative writing. I haven’t written fiction in a long time and I’d like to do that again.

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What are your thoughts on the Oxford Comma? We have to ask! 

I love it. It’s the organizing principle of my life. Inside Higher Ed doesn’t use it, though, because our style is derived from the New York Times, and while I understand the reasons why, I want to carry around a little box of commas and stick them on my coworkers’ computer screens and cubicle walls.

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Sara Brady joined Inside Higher Ed in 2015 as copy editor. She is a graduate of the College of William & Mary and earned a master’s degree in publishing from New York University. Her work has appeared in Premiere, ESPN the Magazine, the Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, Latina, and on the websites Television Without Pity and The Billfold. She has also copyedited and proofread books for publishers including Abrams, Macmillan, Harlequin, RosettaBooks, and Kirkus Media. Sara enjoys cooking, soccer, and the Oxford comma.

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I studied creative writing and history at Gallatin because I love to read and write, particularly about things that really happened. These aren’t necessarily “marketable” skills, in the traditional sense, and I did worry about finding a job and supporting myself after graduation. But, I didn’t worry enough to abandon what I love in favor of something potentially more lucrative. My junior year, a friend told me about an internship she’d had at a literary agency, where her job was to read books that agents were considering for representation. I didn’t know anything about the publishing industry, but I thought that getting four credits to read all day sounded like a pretty good deal, so I applied. A year later, I’m still at the agency as a full-time assistant.

A Humanities Education for a Publishing CareerLara Blackman

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My humanities education not only helped me become a better writer and critical reader, but it also helped me learn to ask the right questions. Finding, editing, and selling books to publishers is, in a way, all about asking the right questions: am I approaching a work from a variety of perspectives, and with an open mind? What connects this work to works that come before it, and what sets it apart? How do you reconcile craft and creativity with the demands of business and target audiences? As I pose, and begin to answer, these questions, I consider myself lucky to enter the field with my humanities education.

Lara Blackman graduated from the Gallatin School at New York University in December of 2014. She’s now the assistant to Myrsini Stephanides, a literary agent at the Carol Mann Agency

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AzealiaInk on acid free paperJosh Paige

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Homage to the DesmoisellesAcrylic and spray paint on canvasJosh Paige

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Josh Paige was born and raised in Brooklyn, and is currently completing his B.F.A. in Illustration at the Fashion Institute of Technology. His artwork has always reflected and been inspired by New York. He draws inspiration from the city’s dynamism, as well as fashion, graffiti, graphic design, film and music. New York is a melting pot of different ethnicities, cultures, and personalities, and he draws inspiration from the many facets of this vast city. Although this city has been his muse throughout his artistic life, he also draws inspiration from his travels throughout the United States and abroad. Art is about expression; he lives through the daily expression in his photography and painting. Artists that have had a profound influence on his art are Basquiat, Monet, Caravaggio and Clyfford Still, among others.

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How do you describe yourself in terms of your profession?

I’m an actor, I’m a musician, I’m a bartender, I was a dancer—I like to think of myself as an entertainer, if you will, which encompasses all of those things without necessarily mandating a specific career. I think the great thing about the arts is that there are so many different outlets and so many ways of creatively expressing yourself that you don’t have to feel like you’re confined to just one identity. If you’re into music, you don’t have to be just a singer, or just a guitar player. Actually it involves a lot more than that just to create one song, which is something a lot of listeners don’t realize or take for granted.

Interview with Tyler Richards

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How did you get into acting? I was probably about seven years old, and my mother owned a store in Princeton—the town I grew up in—right next to the university. A student came in one day and asked my mother if I’d be interested in being in the The Who’s Tommy. That was my first taste of the business. I wouldn’t call it acting, per se, because I was a child and I didn’t really understand what I was doing, plus I was playing a character who was deaf, dumb, and blind… But, the musical is just incredible—there’s dancing, there’s rock and roll, there’s love—and I was lucky to be exposed to that at such a young age. I asked one of the other actors in the show how he’d become such a good dancer and he told me he took ballet, which is how I got started in ballet as well. I danced for about thirteen years, and in the midst of that I got into acting.

What made you decide to go into acting professionally? How does one transition from taking a few acting classes in high school, or playing in community theatre, to deciding to pursue it for a living?

I think that the only difference between professional acting and acting as an extracurricular is the money that’s involved. If your heart is in it and you believe that acting is what you were put on this Earth to do, you’ll be bringing

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the same thing to the table at the small community theatre that you’d be bringing to the table on Broadway. Personally, I hope to be fortunate enough to do what I love to do and get paid enough to support myself.

What motivated your decision to pursue an acting career immediately after high school, instead of attending college? It was a tough decision for both my family and me. Not because they wanted one thing and I wanted another, but because it wasn’t the traditional path, and I wouldn’t have the support of a college degree. Growing up, going to school is mandatory; it’s just what we do. When all my friends were applying to college I felt like I had to do the same. My parents and I had a lot of long discussions about how getting an education—which I believe is extremely important—doesn’t necessarily mean going to college for four years. There are many paths you can take to achieve your dreams. I believe that any type of success involves learning but it doesn’t always mean doing what everyone else is doing. So, just because I didn’t go to college doesn’t mean that I didn’t have an education. Also, for what I’m doing, I don’t feel that a college degree is necessary. You don’t go into an audition with your college diploma in hand; it’s not the same as a corporate job interview. Now, if you graduated from Yale School of Drama, that’s definitely going to be listed on your resume and the casting directors

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are going to see that and be impressed. But if two actors who look alike go into an audition for the same role and the one who went to Yale School of Drama is a bad actor, his degree doesn’t matter, and he’s not going to get the part.

How would you describe your education? Do you consider yourself to be self-taught?

I study at different private conservatories and take private coaching. I don’t consider myself to be self-taught: I know what I love to do, but I can’t get there on my own. I’m fortunate to be surrounded by people who have achieved success by not taking the traditional path, and I trust these people. Especially in the creative fields, everything is about collaboration.

How did you learn to establish your own routine? What advice would you have for someone considering a route similar to yours?

Establishing a routine was and continues to be a challenge for me. I need to stay as motivated as everyone else, if not more so, because I need that extra edge in order to succeed to the degree that I want to succeed. My advice to someone considering opting out of the traditional college route would be to create a path, to create a code, and to create a schedule, so that you are constantly being productive and making sure that you’re growing and

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learning what you need to be learning. What type of acting do you subscribe to?

I’m a method actor. The first studio that I studied at was the Lee Strasberg Studio, which teaches a form of method acting. It all stems from the guru, Stanislavsky, and then there are four major branches within, which all reflect different interpretations on how to break down a role and how to be an actor. The most important thing for me when I get a script is to build who the character is; at the same time, as the actor who is going to be portraying that person, I need to pull from my own experiences. That’s where intent becomes very important. Sometimes when I get my sides (the specific scenes that I’ll be doing for an audition), I’m lucky enough to get the script. But sometimes I get nothing, which means I’m working only from the factual evidence about my character that’s in the specific scenes that I have. In that case, I have to create the character so that their story is believable, so that they carry weight, and so that I’m not just reciting words from paper. As an actor, I need to be coming from the same place that the character is coming from at any given moment in time.

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Is there a particular reason why you choose method acting? When I first went to Strasberg it was for a summer course, and I was probably about fourteen. I was relatively green at the time—I was a young actor, so essentially I was just being myself. I was memorizing the lines and saying them how I would say them…there was no work put into a role. At the beginning of the first class I took, we were all sitting in a circle and the instructor told us to pick an emotion, to pick an animal that corresponded to the emotion, and to become that animal. There were some people in the room who legitimately became an animal—a peacock, a monkey, whatever they wanted to be. I sat there with no idea what I was doing, but I was blown away watching other people transform themselves. It took me a while to figure out that was important was letting the experience take over my body. I needed to forget about everything except the animal that I was being. I needed to think about the physical nature of the animal, its characteristics, its shape and size. It didn’t need to be loud or showy, it needed to be real. When I figured that out I realized that anything, even an animal, can be turned into a character. I may never play a lion on stage, but I can play a person who has the characteristics of a lion. It’s about finding the truth of something, putting it in your back pocket, and letting it become you.

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How do you sense when you need to make a change in your creative process? The minute it becomes boring, the minute there’s a lack of energy, the minute I’m just doing something to do it is the second that I know something is wrong. We’re not actors because we want to be superstars, we’re actors because we like the rush it gives us, the feeling it gives us. The minute it becomes a chore is the minute you’re doing something wrong. That’s why I stopped dancing; I learned so much, and I don’t regret a minute of it, but there reached a point where my passion and love for it weren’t there anymore. I’d be going in for a twelve-hour day, and the excitement was gone. Life is short, but it’s long enough to make things happen. If you don’t love what you do, why are you doing it?

Who are some writers and thinkers you turn to for inspiration? One of my favorites is Martha Graham. There’s a quote from her that I have on my wall: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it.” I like this because it perfectly sums up how unique we all are. If you don’t trust that, if

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you don’t trust yourself and what only you can bring to the table, no one else will. There are tons of acting books out there. While I love them as opportunities for education, I more broadly view everything I read as an acting lesson, a different way of looking at people and at life. An autobiography can be just as educational as a book on acting, because we are all inspired by different things.

How do you feel that your typical acting class experience may have been different in a university setting?

I’ve never taken a class at a university before, so I can’t compare them. What I do know from years of conservatory classes is that it really doesn’t matter what institution you’re in as long as you have a teacher who inspires you and opens your eyes to new things. I think that’s true for college, and for everything else. To a certain extent, though, private classes allow for more flexibility. If you don’t like your college professor, who you may have for one or two semesters, often there is no other outlet. Conservatory classes give you the opportunity to constantly refresh your skills and regularly study under different teachers. And, like I said, the worst thing you can do is become bored, because then you’re not learning anything any more and the work turns stagnant.

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What are your career goals?

I would really like to be able to make a living as an actor. I want to live as a creative person and see where that takes me. Specifically, I really admire and am inspired by film and television actors. I did stage acting for a long time, and there is definitely something unique about that rush that you don’t find anywhere else, but there’s a power behind creating a movie that comes from your ability to change a mass audience’s way of thinking. If you take on a controversial topic, and you know it’s going to reach millions of people, that gives you a certain amount of power. I’d be grateful for that opportunity. Film and TV acting also gives you the chance to work with different actors on different projects all around the world, where you get to see different ways that other people live. That’s another thing I love about acting—you’re never doing the same thing. When you get a new character, you get to learn a whole new lifestyle.

As an artist, what do you see as the value of the humanities?

As an artist, the great thing about the world that we live in is that anything can be an inspiration. We can look at what surrounds us, the people we see and the events of daily life, and educate ourselves from those observations. We learn by watching others, by seeing what others create

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and the decisions they make. The humanities are important because they show what you can learn from everything that’s around you. You don’t need to sit in a classroom and read a book that someone else wrote about an experience that you could be out there having for yourself.

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Tyler Richards is an actor, musician, model, and bartender in New York City. He danced with American Repertory Ballet for 11 years, and has studied acting with several studios including the Lee Strassberg Institution and pierStudios NY. He has appeared on the television shows What Would You Do and Law and Order, and in the 2013 film Delivery Man. He has also been featured in national advertising campaigns for Powerade, Merrill Lynch, and Estée Lauder, among others. In addition to pursuing his career as an actor, he is actively involved with Centurion Ministries, a non-profit organization in Princeton, New Jersey that works to free wrongfully incarcerated individuals from prison.

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How have your studies prepared you for the different work experiences and internships you’ve had over the years? Has anything surprised you? What skills have been most valuable to you? 

I earned a B.A. and M.A. in art history from the American University of Beirut, and throughout my studies I interned for a variety of different arts-based organizations including museums, galleries, and auction houses in a total of four different countries. The trajectory of my educational path became clear to me when I decided I wanted to pursue a career in the art world. I knew that without a strong foundation in art history, I would be less valuable to

Interview with Zen Alnuwieri

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museums, galleries or auction houses that typically employ people who are very familiar with art and its discourse. Today I still rely on many of the skills that I learned in school, such as the ability to write press releases, critique art shows, and understand the fundamentals of artistic copyright. One of the things that surprised me most when I was first exposed to the industry as an intern is the role of women in the upper echelons of the art world. Despite how female-dominated the arts industry may appear to be, there is still minimal representation of female artists in galleries and museum shows today, especially here in New York. I’m familiar with an anonymous feminist art collective in the city called Pussy Galore that works exclusively to expose sexism in the art world. They recently conducted a study that revealed that only five of the city’s top thirty-four galleries have artist rosters that rise above 50% women. To me this elucidates a very interesting, yet disappointing, relationship between the visual arts and women. I’m amazed that men so clearly continue to dominate the industry. I am also continuously shocked by the amount of substance abuse that is still present in the art world. As a curatorial assistant, a lot of my work is done personally with the artists. I visit their studios and get to see some of what goes on behind the scenes, and I can say with confidence that substance abuse is still an issue that many artists really

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struggle with. The arts industry, just like many other creative industries, is tough and cutthroat. My best advice to someone pursuing a curatorial position is to always have your game-face on, to never let anyone see you sweat, and to learn to grin and bear it without complaining to your boss (or your coworkers). My time at Christie’s auction house in the post-war and contemporary department groomed me into a polished professional, and it taught me curatorial skills that have proved vital. In my opinion, speaking a second language in the art world is also crucial; technology has made it possible for us to work with artists from all over the world, and the ability to connect with someone solely based on shared language is invaluable.  How does work at a corporation like Christie’s compare to that of your current gallery? Is the interaction with artists and/or patrons significantly different? Where do you envision yourself in the future?

Although Christie’s deals with fine arts among other luxury goods and products, at the end of the day it is a multi-million dollar corporation and their most important successes are their sales. At Christie’s, the specialists are always after the highest quality and most expensive pieces. There is a lot of interaction with clients, but inevitably less interaction with the artists themselves. In a smaller,

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privately-owned gallery such as Castor Gallery, where I am now a curatorial assistant, we get the best of both worlds. Most galleries have smaller teams (while one department at an auction house can have upwards of 45 people) which fosters more meaningful relationships with colleagues. Another plus is that small galleries are proactive about looking for talent. My role involves looking for new artists, helping to plan out our gallery’s program, and organizing and conducting studio visits among other things. It’s truly rewarding to see an artist’s progress from the very first idea, to a sketch, to a study, and then finally into a work of art. We have a different relationship with clients than a typical auction house would, as we offer clients an experience that centers around the artwork itself rather than negotiations between high and low price estimates. Having worked in both an auction house and a smaller gallery setting, I’ve most enjoyed working with young collectors because I can genuinely share in their excitement when they acquire a new piece, and I’ve come to love that part of the job.

Do you view your work at the gallery as having educational benefits for patrons? What are your thoughts on the extent to which art is intended for edification? Are curators or artists themselves beholden to any such obligations to the public?

My education provided me with the ability to help collectors understand art better, and to understand the

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influence behind artworks themselves. I definitely believe that some art is intended for edification, and I also believe that artists and curators alike have a responsibility to the public—not solely for the purpose of intellectually educating people, but also for moving them emotionally and inciting their passions and interests. In a world that is so jaded and bombarded by imagery, it has become increasingly difficult to attract someone’s attention. If we can captivate someone through the art that we put in our gallery, that is a success. Furthermore, as a curatorial assistant I have the opportunity to organize artist talks as well as studio and gallery visits for people who really have an interest in learning about the gallery and our artists. The most recent event I organized was an artist talk for Soho House members with one of our artists, Lala Abaddon. It was a great way to introduce a new group of people to the artist’s work, and it was also beneficial for the gallery as it created the opportunity for growing relationships between the gallery and new patrons.

What do you see as the value of a humanities education?

Although many people seem to think that students graduating with liberal arts degrees will not be able to find jobs, creative fields continue to expand and new jobs continue to be created. Just a few years ago there was no such thing as being a “gallery liaison,” and now because

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of online resources like Artsy that provide comprehensive information about local art opportunities, there’s a burgeoning community of gallery liaisons who all come from different liberal arts backgrounds. While there are never any certainties, I personally decided as a freshman in college that I would rather be in a profession that I love rather than a profession with a veneer of promised financial security. I couldn’t be happier with my decision. 

Zen Alnuwieri received her B.A. in Art History with a minor in English Literature in 2012 from the American University of Beirut. Throughout her undergraduate career she worked at Agial Art Gallery, which specializes in contemporary Middle Eastern art. After she graduated in 2012, she moved to Dubai and worked for Canvas Magazine, the premiere magazine for art and culture in the Middle East. Zen then decided to move to New York to pursue a M.A. in Art History and the Art Market from Christie’s Education in 2014. Zen is currently the curatorial assistant at Castor Gallery, a Lower East Side gallery specializing in young contemporary artists.

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The process of formal education should encourage every student to discover her or his own voice, talents, and thoughts. Fostering intellectual independence, it should provide both the knowledge and the climate that will allow students to develop their own informed ideas as they learn how to determine what is significant. Students should be encouraged to criticize and, as Donald Harward, the former President of Bates College, has said, “given access to frameworks for interpretation.” Formal education should offer students entrance into the world of argument, understanding, commitment, engagement, and action. Schools must teach students to think, not simply to acquire facts. Teachers must focus on broad

A philosophy of an EducatorDavid Fox

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concepts and ideas while engendering learning through classroom discourse and individual contemplation. Before we can improve the quality of what occurs in the classroom, everyone concerned—parents, teachers, and students—must realize that worthwhile education is not a compartmentalized box delivered to a student who navigates it, part by part, until graduation. Instead, education should focus on the methods of opening the box. When students conclude their formal education, they should be prepared to continue learning, unassisted by teachers; after all, education should occur throughout life. Students must be stimulated to discover their own interests and then must be able to apply what they have learned to their lives beyond school. In order to stimulate students to want genuine education, teachers must provide not only knowledge and focus but also passion. They need to love the material. I have been told about a now-retired English teacher who, after five or six years of engaging students in Hamlet, walked into the teachers’ lounge and announced, “You know, that really is a pretty good play.” How well had she engaged students before she had discovered the worth of Hamlet? During my first semester of teaching, I used Of Mice and Men only to realize that I did not like that novella. Since I did not like it, my students did not. In contrast, I have the most success with The Sound and the Fury. I worship every word, and, in turn, my students love this novel. Because they love it, they

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are willing to engage with this challenging work. Once they have engaged, and learned to appreciate Faulkner, they can navigate almost anything they choose. This independence is what learning is. Too often, the classroom prompts learning on only a superficial level. Some of my former colleagues, for instance, introduced freshmen to The Tempest only because it is relatively easy and they believed students should be “exposed” to Shakespeare. I do not regard “exposure” as sufficient. Students in my courses study great literature because I think it shows them ways toward intellectual independence. They read all of Invisible Man, Beloved, and Don Quixote. They study excerpts from Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Butler. Some suggest that these works are too long or too boring or too difficult. In such moments, I recall a profile in the New York Times of Mark Taylor, who said, “It has never occurred to me not to teach a text because it was too hard. Why should I teach William James when you can read and understand it yourself ? But if you read Hegel, you’re not going to understand it. That’s something I can teach.” Indeed, why should educators ask students to study something they can understand on their own? I believe class time is much better spent walking students mature enough to appreciate Shakespeare through King Lear, for example, scene by scene for five weeks. This play provides the depth of meaning and diversity of interpretation students need to develop and exercise their

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critical thinking abilities. Once students have thoughtfully read, questioned, and discussed a work such as King Lear, they will have new interests to pursue on their own and the ability to understand on their own what they discover. Only then will they be intellectually free: free to pursue their own passions, free to challenge society’s assumptions, free to question everything—even the extent and value of their own freedom. This freedom should be the goal of formal education. Only those who have learned how to open the box, how to think rather than regurgitate, can challenge everything known to us in an effort to steer us towards the better. Along that path lies improvement for us all.

David U. Fox is the Harris Family Instructor in English and Art History at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.

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Many parents want the best futures for their children and try to create opportunities to make that happen. Some fathers and mothers lead the effort; others share the responsibility with scouting programs, sports clubs or after school activities. This process, and whatever happens in the home, impacts our life choices more than the education we experience before and during college. What is harder to assess 37 years after a liberal arts education is how classes in sociology, literature, history, political science, economics, biology, philosophy, anthropology, astronomy, theater and business broaden my view of the world and enable me to see and act on connections that may be invisible to pre-professional majors.

Shoot, Knots, Burn, RideJay Hartwell

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Rather than mandating a humanities curriculum, my checklist for students entering the world focuses on items for their survival within buildings and forests. They need to learn to:

1. Manage a budget with a checkbook and credit card. 2. Catch, clean and cook fish.3. Drive a standard shift car and handle basic maintenance. 4. Sew by hand. 5. Tie these knots: clove hitch, figure-eight, sheet bend, bowline, square and slip. 6. Avoid unwanted pregnancy. 7. Keep current with news. 8. Converse with adults like an adult. 9. Build a fire. 10. Cook three dinners from scratch. 11. Launder and iron clothes. 12. Hold a job. 13. Display manners. 14. Shoot and clean a gun. 15. Fight or flee for self-defense. 16. Perform CPR and first aid. 17. Handle basic plumbing and electrical work. 18. Appreciate the arts. 19. Ride a bike and maintain it. 20. Master an activity.

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As editors of a weekly paper in what was then a small town in the early 1960s, my parents tried to make sure their four sons learned these tasks while writing about issues impacting Scottsdale. I remember conversations and articles that addressed zoning, development, education, politics, undergrounding utilities, banning billboards. I became curious about community while learning how words can bring about change. Through high school in Hawaii and college in Colorado, I worked on commentaries before becoming editor of the campus newspapers. This gave me the experience necessary for an internship, admission to graduate school, a job as a reporter, a stint as an author, and now 17 years advising student media programs at a university. For a lecture to English students, I was asked to summarize lessons learned from a life in journalism and added 10 items to the list:

1. Express your own voice.2. Seek mentors throughout your life.3. Keep working and getting feedback.4. Recognize when it’s time to move on.5. Be persistent.6. Compete for awards that validate your work.7. Develop side projects.8. Embrace the future.9. Remain curious.10. Follow your passion.

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Jay Hartwell is the faculty adviser to student media programs at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Viet Nam (2013-2014), a reporter for The Honolulu Advertiser (1980-1988) and the author of “Na Mamo: Hawaiian People Today,” an award-winning book on native culture. The College Media Association gave him the Reid H. Montgomery Distinguished Service Award in 2012.

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When did you begin writing poetry, and why?

I first started writing poetry in the fourth grade, for a poetry unit. I remember I wrote a poem about the morning sun shining through the leaves and the dew on the plants in the garden. I thought it was quite good at the time. I started reading Bukowski, intensively, in the seventh grade. Then, in the ninth grade I began receiving positive feedback from teachers in response to a couple poems I wrote, and I started writing again. At first, I think I was primarily trying to create “good” poetry, work that would receive praise and would be lauded by my teachers and peers. As I’ve become more serious about my writing,

Interview with Thomas Hartwell

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I’ve shifted my focus to finding the most accurate way I can convey my experiences, so that they are emotionally accessible to readers.

How has your academic work impacted your development as a poet?

An analytical approach to reading and writing was heavily emphasized at my high school, Iolani. Texts were not necessarily explored with the intent of seeking pleasure or an emotional response, but rather to find evidence to support a thesis. As someone who had previously read only for pleasure, this was a strange switch for me, but I think learning to read in a different way was valuable. Looking at poetry in this way allows me to dissect what is making a poem work, both in my writing and in that of others. This has helped me improve as a writer, because not only am I able to identify specific techniques other poets are using, I’m also able to really dig into my own poetry when editing. In writing workshops at NYU, I’ve begun to share my work with as many people as I can in order to received varied feedback. Overall, my academic work has shown me the power of editing and how much poems can improve in successive drafts.

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Your father also has a piece in the publication, and in it he emphasizes the value of an education rooted in acquiring practical skills for everyday life. Has this practical education taken hold with you, and if so, has it led to any of the preoccupations of your writing?

As a child, my father pushed me to join Cub Scouting. I think a lot of the practical skills he values are taught within the Scouting program. I didn’t realize at the time, but in his mind, what I was learning as a Cub and then later as a Boy Scout are some of the basic life skills that he values so highly. He has always emphasized respecting the environment and understanding its importance. Being from Hawaii, the preservation of the natural habitat seems very important, as nature and the beauty of it constantly surround you. But it isn’t enough to merely admire the aesthetic qualities of nature. To really know what makes a place special, you need to feel the power of the ocean, camp in the forest for a few days, envelop yourself in the culture, and I don’t think this only holds true for Hawai`i. To appreciate where you live, it takes more than just being somewhere; it requires a concerted effort to assimilate your surroundings. Respect for place is something that has carried over in my writing. I often find myself trying to ground my poems in one location and dealing with the emotion attached to that place.

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What is it like to write about a place in which you no longer live? How has your relationship to Hawai’i changed since you’ve left? I definitely did not appreciate Hawai`i as much when I was growing up as I do now. In fact, when I was applying to colleges, the closest school I applied to was in Colorado, and everything else was on the East Coast. I am glad I went as far away as I did, because it’s helped me realize what a special place Hawai`i is, and how lucky I am to have grown up there. I feel an intense longing to return whenever I am gone, and that emotion is easiest to tap into when it is occurring naturally. For that reason, I find it much easier to write about Hawai`i when I am not there. When I am there, I try to exist as much as I can in the now and just absorb the good vibes. If lines of poetry come to me while I’m home, I will jot them down, but I tend not to develop them as much until I am back in New York. My relationship with home has only strengthened since I left, and the appreciation I have for my upbringing has grown significantly. They say, “Hawai`i mo’ bettah,” and it really is hard to disagree.

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You gut me cross abdomen,spill the sea water from my belly.Wave spray spits on my back.

I gasp, “My water!”

It billows forth in heaves through my fingerslike the Hoover bursting.

I feel the limu run out, a flicking papio, a tasteof east side sand.

“I love you.”

“You love her.”

My Bulging Eye Staring at GodThomas Hartwell

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I am across from you, the last dripsof Makapu’u wasting into the shore.“I amdrying out.”

“Then go back.”

Your hands bruise my chest,leave rotting purple prints,mudgold at the edges.You watch me fall backinto the break.The clear envelops me, rushesinto my gut. The salt stings.

I open my eyes, your footprintslead you away.

You look back as a barrelcrashes around me. My hollowcoffin closing out, burying mein the surf. I subsist.

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Craig Craig Anderson. Rendered from photograph in Surfer Magazine. Watercolor. 16”x20”Olivia Pepper

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Olivia Pepper graduated from NYU Gallatin in 2014 with a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies, with a focus on cinema’s influence on revolution in China and Chile. Post-graduation, she moved back to her native Los Angeles, where she currently works in the Fine Arts Department at United Talent Agency. Throughout her time at NYU, she studied abroad in Florence and Shanghai, and speaks both Italian and Mandarin. Additionally, she blogs for the Huffington Post. Olivia’s art was shown most recently in the fall of 2014 at 11:11 Gallery in LA. She looks forward to expanding her career in fine arts and entertainment.

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Mud pond past the fence of eucalyptus:storm gray stretches from makaito the observatories. They should gleam,high noon, sparkling eyes looking towards heaven.God—it is modest today.

My father tells me a beast lives in the pond. A fish, the size of a dog, with poisonedfangs, stony scales.

“I don’t know how long it’s been there but I’ve seen it.”

I throw stones,and stones.

“Don’t try to disturb it. Respect its home.”

Mud Pond, KamuelaThomas Hartwell

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I sit and stare, seeking just a ripple. Fatherleft, mother brought a jacket.Fire is in the air, magenta flameslicking the dust, filling the skywith ash.Ripples;

A tail

splashing under.

Years gone, the pond is dry nowwith only whispers of green.I search the grass for bones, any signof what was.

God is watching today.Maybe you are hiding, burrowed in the mud,breathing in the still wet slop.

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WaveInk. 6.5”x4”Olivia Pepper

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Wrap me in your splaying hillslike you used to in the summer.

Reading every comic from the libraryunderneath the bay window,watching the livestock graze;I wondered which of the calveswould be at the branding later,which sheep would be sheared;their wool already lostin the meadows.

Steak smells better searing once the hideand hair are skinned. Pair after pairof gangly legs squirm under the weightof two ranch hands.I grab a docked lamb’s tail and chasemy sister, squirting blood at heruntil she hides in the Isuzu Trooper.

Dear Kamuela,Thomas Hartwell

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We hang a bull’s head in rubbish bags from a eucalyptusand smell it dripits putrid flesh.Six months dripping off the boneso Po Po can have the skullfor a country club decoration.

I want to wear your dewey grass andold growth koa as a paniolo wouldhis boots and hat at the Parker Ranchrodeo. The whole town gatheredroping and riding on the slopesof a shield volcano.

Bury me underneath the barn ordown by the eucalyptus treeslike you used to in the summer.

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Thomas Hartwell was born and raised in Wailupe Valley on the island of Oahu. He always wishes he was in the waves at Makapu’u beach. Thomas is a student at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, and he is constantly searching for the connection between places and the human spirit imbued in them.

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In your 2013 interview for The White Review you discuss your preoccupation with the cliché, particularly in your book The Word on the Street, which is a collection of rock lyrics written for your band, Wayside Shrines. What are the importance of clichés in writing, especially in lyrical form? 

We abhor the cliche, of course, in most contexts. Yet it’s very difficult to avoid the overly familiar expression. In fact, to say “we abhor the cliche” itself sounds quite cliched. However, the revisited, and revamped, cliche is a powerful thing. One of my favorite poems (though I can’t remember who wrote it), is about pearl divers and it includes the line “the oyster is their world.” The subversion

Interview with Paul Muldoon

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of the phrase “the world is their oyster” suddenly becomes a witty apercu. In the business of writing lyrics, there’s a lot more relaxation about conjuring up a familiar scene with a few familiar touches. One of my songs includes the lines “you say you’re just hanging out/ but I know you’re just hanging in.” I’d never dream of allowing that through the velvet rope of a poem. In a song, though, it becomes quite wistful, maybe even wise. I don’t mean to suggest that standards aren’t as high in the song milieu, only that they’re different.

When writing lyrics, do you tend to think of rhymes first or do you mold your ideas into rhymes as you write? 

Perversely, the song lyric is one of the few poetic modes in which rhyme is pretty much mandatory. For most poets rhyme is a thing of the past, a hangover from a distant, dusty era. In my case, almost everything I write rhymes. It’s just how the world presents itself to me. That’s in both poems and song lyrics. I’m writing a song at the moment which is called “Shy About Cheyenne” and I have to confess that the title presented itself to me like a fifty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk in Greenwich, Connecticut:

As she juggles blue skies and a 5 year planYou know there’s nothing shy about Cheyenne. 

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What does your creative process entail? 

First of all, I try to be ready for the poem. I was at the Met the other day to hear Placido Domingo conducted by James Levine. Domingo wasn’t well and was replaced by Luca Salsi. It turned out that Luca Salsi had got a phone call 30 minutes before the curtain went up. He had never met James Levine. The last time he sang the role was 2 years ago. But he more or less walked off the street and onto the stage. One has to be Luca Salsi, waiting for the call and then trying to rise to the occasion.

What are the main differences between poems and songs? 

The big difference is that the poem is finished and the song isn’t. The song is almost necessarily imperfect. That’s why cliches are more common.

How do you transition between forms in your writing? 

I write something every day. I almost always owe somebody something. A poem, a lecture. So I pretty much plug away day in day out at whatever is on the stovetop. It’s a bit like a chef moving from a pig’s foot to an octopus. The big difference is that you discover that what you’re cooking is a pig’s foot only as you’re plating it.

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You’ve previously discussed the importance of doing unexpected things with traditional forms. Along these lines, what advice do you have for student poets and lyricists?

Every piece is at once like everything you’ve ever seen and nothing you’ve ever seen. Don’t leap to conclusions too early. It might not be a pig’s foot after all. Maybe, after all that, it’s a sow’s ear. And maybe that 50 dollar bill that found you on the sidewalk in Greenwich, Connecticut, is actually a 3 dollar bill.

You’ve been poetry editor of the New Yorker for several years. What do you look for in poems?

I have no aims, no ambitions, except to try to find some of the most interesting poems about. I say “some” because we publish only 100 poems a year so there are always lots of good poems we simply can’t take. The only depressing thing about the job is having to turn things down. I’d much prefer to be saying yes to everybody.

How does your Irish heritage and childhood in Armagh influence your own writing? 

It’s still a huge part of who I am and what I do. It’s home.

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Is that an underlying theme in your most recent book One Thousand Things Worth Knowing?

It’s one theme. But I like to write poems about everything and anything. My favorite reading is the encyclopedia. And I do want to try to write a few more poems set in New York City. I haven’t lived here for more than 25 years so I want to try to allow more of the day to day aspects of living here into my poems. Of course, I may end up writing about cows and cowslips.

What moved you to start writing poetry? 

The first poem I remember writing was written when I was 12 or so. By the time I was 16 I was writing in earnest. I started out by writing about the world I knew outside the window of my bedroom. It was a world in which what loomed largest was a hedgehog that came around each evening to eat scraps from the dog’s bowl by the back door. That timid hedgehog became the subject of one of the first poems that ended up in my first book. I compare the spiny hedgehog to Christ with his crown of thorns, and I assert that “never again will a god trust in the world.” 

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Who or what are your biggest inspirations? 

The single biggest poetic inspiration was, and is, John Donne. On the music front, Cole Porter.

What do the Humanities mean to you as a poet and an educator? 

What an interesting question! It’s interesting that we either blithely think of posing it or blithely think of answering it. We don’t ever ask about what the Sciences mean to us. It’s as if we accept the rather simplistic idea that science is obviously meaningful, being all about “facts,” and therefore the question needn’t arise. The popular feeling is that the realm of the Humanities, meanwhile, is a realm in which all bets are off. The simplistic view, yet again, is that the Humanities don’t deal with “facts” but opinions. The common view, I suppose, is that we need astrophysics but Astrophil and Stella, the sonnet sequence by Philip Sidney, is optional. I think we need both to understand who we are and what we’re doing here. Again, we’ve got to give up the idea that astrophysicists know precisely when the Big Bang took place but whether or not Astrophil and Stella is any good is anybody’s guess. 

Paul Muldoon is the author of 12 books of poetry, most recently One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, published By Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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What motivated you to start writing? What skills have been most important to you throughout your career? 

I was attracted to the way the language of poetry floated in the air, differently from the way conversation floated (or thudded). Even before I could read, a poem on the page seemed deeply attractive to me—that space around it. I loved the way the language felt selected, carefully chosen, more hinting than explanatory. As for writing skills that are most important: Regularity of practice. Flexibility regarding revisions, changes, etc. Curiosity. Persistence. Humility. Energy.

Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye

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Do you have a loyalty to any particular form of poetry, or do you prefer to experiment with different forms?

I love the quick transporting nature of poetry—and all styles of it—written, spoken word, everything. My loyalty would be to open forms but it’s possible to like, appreciate and respect many things we don’t do ourselves.

Place seems to be an especially strong thread that weaves throughout much of your poetry. Tell us about the places that are most significant to you. 

Because my father was a Palestinian refugee, and I grew up in pre-integration Ferguson, Missouri (my dad was the only Arab in that town then), there was a lot of curiosity in my home about belonging and not belonging—connecting to the gravities of place or floating disembodied…mixtures and mysteries of rootedness. My father remained homesick all his life. All Palestinians are essentially homesick. They have been booted out of the place they loved and belonged to. Why this anguish is so hard for Americans to understand baffles many of us. Places most significant to me would be…every place we ever have a simple human experience. Every place we are privileged to go and meet other human beings, and interact, and remember how regular people are everywhere. But also, Ferguson—the current sorrows so

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evident there—and Palestine—the injustices abiding since 1948—and nutty lovely Texas, where we have lived a very long time. Don’t believe all the headlines, you nice people in other states. There are a lot of liberal, artistic, down-to-earth genuine people in Texas, for sure. (And the Planned Parenthood lunches always sell out.)

Much of your poetry has a spiritual, healing element to it. What is the value of poetry in today’s culture in terms of bridging gaps between seemingly disparate groups of people? 

Thanks for saying “healing.” People need more beauty in their lives. They need more slowness, pause, and quiet attention. Poetry can bring disparate groups of people together through listening/reading exchanges.

What do the humanities mean to you as an educator and as a writer? 

The humanities mean everything to me! All of the myriad studies of human experience—the humanities aren’t declaring war, they’re examining mystery and tradition, all the magnificent paths of thought and ways of being. They aren’t trying to conquer anything. William Stafford’s posthumous collection of writings (edited by his son Kim), Every War Has Two Losers, helps a reader examine issues of war and peace with thoughtful consideration. I think it’s

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one of the most necessary humanities volumes printed in decades. Look at all we’ve wasted—as a country, as a world. Studies of humanities—any discipline at all—rebuild our spirits.

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Older than old people now.Older than the auntie in the bank who saysI just come in here so someone will sayGood Morning to me. Older than the shiny-headed rotund Englishman at the end of the table.Seriously he seems like Grandpa and you are older than he.Than the paint-peeling flowerpot,the faded sign, the birdseed storethough it looks a hundred yearsfrom any angle you try. They have feed for birdsyou never heard of. They will scoop it intobrown paper sacks and weigh it on an old-fashionedscale. Older than the scale. Down the streeteverything is changing. They don’t care a twit foryour opinion, your resistance, you are

Happy BirthdayNaomi Shihab Nye

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a spike in a railroad track, a bundle of rotting leavesunder the climbing rose. Turn them under, over,be brave enough to disappear as you promised you would when you were young and clumsyand strong as a roof.

Naomi Shihab Nye is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book is The Turtle of Oman. She lives in San Antonio, TX.

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Interview with Cacayo Ballesteros

Can you describe your writing process?

I work on my writing throughout the year, whenever I can fit it in between preparing for courses I teach, teaching, grading, attending meetings and raising my boys. The only time I have left is either really late at night or really early in the morning. On top of that, I am not a disciplined writer; I don’t sit and write original work constantly. So I end up depending on waves of creativity that are short, intense and sporadic. During these moments it seems easier for me to distill experiences, thoughts, and emotions into verses that I find compelling enough to keep. During those moments, words come to me in either

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language. The language of that first thought or utterance determines the language I use initially for that particular piece. I can’t emphasize how natural this is for me. I’ve never sat down before writing a poem and thought, “do I want to do this in English or Spanish?”

Your poetry exists simultaneously in English and Spanish. Do you find it necessary to write with the translation process in mind?

After I finish a draft of a poem during an inspired moment, I put it away. I return to edit it later, typically during times when inspiration is harder to come by. Once the poem is done, I begin to think about a possible rewriting of it in the other language. I say rewriting because I don’t see my own poetry as existing in one language and then being translated into the other, but rather as art that co-exists in two languages. I truly feel this way. It’s funny...translation in literature tends to get a bad rap, especially in poetry where even great translations are seen as kind of “ugly step-children” compared to the originals. When I bring up my being a translator, people of all walks of life (including those who don’t read poetry, let alone translations of it) love to remind me of the ultimate futility of my task as a translator of others’ poetry. It’s just not the same, they say. This, of course, has to do with the originality and expertise employed by good poets in their

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native languages. But we consume translations all the time and really take them to heart as if we were reading the original. Think of our relationship to sacred texts, philosophy or classical western poetry. Plus, working within translation creates some really interesting moments. A phenomenon I’ve noticed translating contemporary poetry is that sometimes the so-called “translation” ends up being much more original and interesting once it exists in its new language. We have, for example, Latino and Latina poets in the US whose work exists in both languages. Some of their poems in English are considered really cutting edge and innovative, while the Spanish version may not be contributing too much innovation within Spanish letters. The type of symbolism or rhythm from, say, a translated current Guatemalan poet may sound really fresh and interesting to an English reader, but old news from the point of view of a reader well versed in Guatemalan letters. Also, I’ve been involved in several translation projects, both within my own press Zozobra and elsewhere, where authors have confided in me that they like a particular translation of one of their poems better than the original! There is a poem by Carlos Parada-Ayala titled “Salt of Poetry” (La luz de la tormenta/The Light of the Storm, 2012) that makes the poet, even when reading publically, mention how he likes the translation better. This is despite the fact that he did not translate it and that the original, “Sal de la poesía”, is partly untranslatable because the poem

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in Spanish makes use of both meanings of the word “Sal” (salt and get out). The English translation can only make use of one of sal ‘s meanings given that salt and get out are not the same word in English. The same goes for my own poetry. Sometimes my rewriting of the poem in the other language produces a poem that has much more to offer to the field of poetry in its new language than it did in its original. For this reason, as a practice, I always rewrite my poetry into the other language. Because of what I’ve expressed to you about the translation question, I rarely share what language I wrote the poem in originally. I do this on purpose so that interested readers will ponder some of the linguistic complexities and opportunities of being bilingual, bicultural, etc. Of course, that also comes with greater responsibility than poets that only write in one language because bilingual poets must demonstrate a deep understanding of at least two poetic canons if they care at all to produce work that is appealing and original in both languages.

How has your education and continued role in academia influenced your creative output?

This is a much tougher question than it seems. When I was in graduate school, I would have projected for you that my professional academic life was going to be

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filled with time used to support my art. In college, campus life, including the great classes I took, contributed so much to my intellectual life that I romanticized my life as a professor as a continuation of that. But the hard reality is that current academic life leaves very little time for reading, contemplation and artistic output, given its demands as far as service and research publications, not to mention because of the technologies that make faculty available for constant interaction with others at the institution (of course email, but also Blackboard, Facebook, etc). I say all of this as someone that has been blessed with tenure track and then tenured full-time employment. Heck, most faculty I know even barely have enough time to prepare for their classes, let alone carve out the time needed to really be an author that makes an impact. So the achievements of most artistic faculty today come despite the demands of their academic jobs. It really takes a lot to be able to find time during the academic year. But, if you are lucky enough to have summer and winter breaks you can do a lot with that time, not to mention, dare I say it...sabbaticals, which fewer and fewer of us are privileged to have. Of course, if art is your calling, you will do it no matter what, regardless of what you need to do to pay the bills. That said, the angst to find time to make art is balanced out by getting to witness the transformational experiences that student writers and intellectuals go through in our best classes. I teach at St. Mary’s College

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of Maryland, an honors public liberal arts college that offers an extraordinary and relatively affordable education through small courses with excellent faculty. The faculty to student ratio allows us to really get to know our students and experience intimately their own journey to becoming independent thinkers. This can be an extremely energizing process that inspires great work reciprocally.

Why did you choose to write under a pen name? What meaning does it hold for you?

Cacayo is my nickname on my maternal grandmother’s side of the family. I also think it reflects well a certain self-deprecating affectation that I see in myself. My middle name is Ricardo and when I was growing up I could not say José “Ricardo”. So I would say José Cacayo. For my Spanish-speaking cousins, this was funny because the name included the Spanish word caca. So it stuck with those sons of guns and soon aunts and uncles joined in. Cacayo does have a nice ring to it all by itself–kind of like when Brazilian or Portuguese soccer players just use their first name on their jerseys (think of Kaká, for example; but Cacayo was first!). This footballing aspect would have made my maternal grandfather, Teté, proud. He was a professional footballer who played on the Ecuadorian national team. Whenever he wasn›t rooting for Ecuador he would go for Brazil. Years later, when I was coming out of

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the closet as a poet, I thought I›d revive the name publicly as an homage to my grandparents. My grandmother, Vekia, is still alive and continues to inspire me every day.

What advice would you give to young or beginning poets? My advice to anyone interested in making art is to work hard. In our case, that means reading and writing a lot, and editing even more so. Also, if you care at all about originality you must study the poets that came before you. I don’t feel too much pressure to know what my contemporaries are doing, though I enjoy their work and try to support them as much as I can. I do, however, feel it is really important to understand deeply what earlier generations of poets have done before, so that I have something new to contribute. Those of us who are writing in more than one language have double the responsibility because we have to situate our work within distinct traditions. Those traditions sometimes intersect and artists become canonical in both (think Whitman and Neruda); but other times, even the best poets seem to have little influence in other literary traditions as is the case with, for example, a César Vallejo or a Langston Hughes. The only other advice I can give that has served me well, is to be kind and apply the golden rule when considering your fellow artists and critics. It›s amazing how cutthroat the artistic world can be and how petty people

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can become about art, particularly their own. Fight the insecurity you may feel about getting recognized or praised by keeping busy helping others in the field. If you feel you›re not getting the critical attention you deserve, make an effort to give public critical praise to the work of others that move you. If you feel the publishing options for you are limited, work hard to help others get their work published. The singer-songwriter Danny Pound (Lawrence, KS) has a line in a song about despair that talks about getting sugar for sugar and salt for salt. I have found that artists that really give themselves to both the work and to championing the efforts of others get tenfold back compared to those that walk around bitter about the lack of attention they are getting. Your time will come, until then work hard and help others.

What have been the most challenging and the most rewarding aspects of founding your publishing house?

The founding of Zozobra Publishing along with the Paraguayan graphic designer Fernando Mancuello (Brooklyn, NY) has been incredibly rewarding. Zozobra was created to translate and publish writers who are writing in Spanish in the US. Specifically, we are interested in artists whose poetry reflects a deep understanding of the poetic traditions that it comes from, but also attempts to innovate within the world of Spanish letters. Our goal is

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not only to publish the most cutting-edge poetry in Spanish within the US, but also to choose artists whose art can go toe-to-toe with other poets writing in Spanish in Spain and Latin America. This sounds kind of competitive and it is. We really want to put US Spanish language poetry on the Spanish letters map. I think our first publication, Carlos Parada-Ayala’s La luz de la tormenta/The Light of the Storm is a great start for us, and we look forward to continuing to do this for many years. The only challenge we have encountered thus far with Zozobra is finding the time to run a press given all our other responsibilities. I would love more time to promote our books. That said, our first publication has been successful: the quality of the book is impressive thanks to Fernando’s design elements, English-only and bilingual readers are quite happy with the translation of the poems, and we feel that the editorial input made Parada-Ayala’s work even stronger than it already was. Most importantly, we’ve made enough money from book sales to both pay very competitive royalties to our first author and have enough money left over for our next publication. In truth, it’s a break-even endeavor that allows us to give voice to authors that we believe are really bringing something new to the craft.

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I.

She sicks your agony’s dog on me, but I’m not runnin’ this time. In dreams, I tell your momma why I leftand you are saved.

Ella me suelta los perros de tu agonía, pero ya no voy a correr. Sueño que le digo a tu vieja por qué me fui y tú te salvas.

Our Disappearing Ink/La tinta secreta de lo nuestroCacayo Ballesteros

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II.

Those without burnt bridges are praying for you. I sit on the shore of doubt watching waves like wagging fingers.

Los que no quemaron las naves están rezando por ti. Yo me siento a la orilla de la duda donde las olas me apuntan con el dedo.

III.

No photos remain, memory’s cataracts squinting at what was ours: a gray negative on the window that won’t show me your eyes.

Ni fotos quedan y la memoria catarata bizquea sobre lo nuestro: negativo gris puesto a la ventana donde no te puedo ver los ojos.

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IV.

They say the whole town is coming out to lay you to rest. I can’t join them. I want your dusty roads all to myself.

Todo el pueblo seguirá a tu cuerpo camino al camposanto. Yo no me uno. Quiero tus senderos empolvados para mí solo.

V.

Months ago, I disappeared your ink about us. T’was long ago. Days ago, someone wrote that you had disappeared. Me too, hours ago.

No hace mucho,desaparecí tu tinta de lo nuestro. Fue hace tanto...Me escribieron que tú habías desaparecido hace poco.

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VI.

The cop asked, you lookin’ for somethin’? After the Garden of Eden, with tomato beers, we celebrated your life by losing all shame.

El paco preguntó ¿qué hacen por aquí? De ahí al Garden of Eden y en un bar celebrando tu vida perdí mi vergüenza por siempre.

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Cacayo Ballesteros (José R. Ballesteros, Quito, Ecuador) is an Associate Professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He has a Ph.D. from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas. Ballesteros’ poetry has been published in several journals and has been anthologized in Al Pie de La Casa Blanca: Poetas Hispanos de Washington, DC (Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española, 2010). His first book of poems Lovedust/Polvo enamorado (Izote Press), was published in early 2014. He is the co-founder and chief editor for Zozobra Publishing (Hyattsville, MD; Brooklyn, NY), an independent press that publishes bilingual poetry in the US. Ballesteros is also a published translator of Latin American poetry. He is a co-author of the Spanish literary anthology Voces de España (Cenage, 2013) and has published several articles about the influence the contact with the “New World” had on Spanish letters of the XVIIth century.

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Fahrenheit, that is. It’s the temperature required to melt bronze—an alloy composed mostly of copper and a sprinkle of other ingredients. Bronze has played an important role for humans for thousands of years. As a material, bronze has taken on many roles. It has been jewelry, a symbol of opulence. It has been weaponry, destroying lives on ancient battlefields, and equally so preventing bloodshed in the form of shields and armor. It has been crafted into vessels to store food, and cups and plates to nourish families at the dinner table. Not unlike the oxygen we breathe or the water that lives within the cells of our bodies, bronze at one time had a close relationship to humankind from birth to death. It’s more than a metal. It’s

One Thousand Eight Hundred Degrees Chris Alexander

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something to be respected. Perhaps even revered. I felt the full heat of this bubbling, melting bronze as an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz. It is a university as much “in and of ” the California redwood forest as New York University is in and of New York City. I majored in studio art because, after exploring other classes that interested me, such as creative writing, anthropology and journalism, the path always led back to art. Metal sculpture particularly intrigued me. The art department was constructed as a meandering series of small buildings resembling a nomadic camp. Each camp nurtured an artistic specialty—the photo students worked here, the print making students worked over there. And at the top of the hill, tucked away among the trees was a small foundry, and beside it a metal workshop. I spent many nights and early mornings working as a student monitor in the foundry and metal shop, sometimes entering at night with a backpack full of PowerBars and energy drinks, and emerging when the sun came up, clanging shut the workshop doors with my clothes speckled with wax, soot and an array of tiny burns. In the foundry, we would spend the first half of each semester building shapes in wax. First came the ideas, then an aggressive accumulation of sketches on Strathmore pads, shop towels and ripped cardboard panels. The task of nailing down your vision is a messy one. It’s an exploratory

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OneBronzeChris Alexander

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process. I used to spend time sitting quietly in the shop, imagining what my final sculpture would look like from the top, from the side. Would I be able to fit my fingers around it? How heavy would it be? Would it require two hands to hold, or one? Next, we melted new, fresh wax into sheets, and added it chunk by chunk to a blob of old wax. And slowly, as hours progressed, a sculpture would reveal itself. Eventually I’d reach a point and step back to examine my nearly-fully-formed work. Was this the image I had in my head? Was I happy with this work? In just a few weeks, I knew that the wax in front of me would be replaced with bronze and be locked into existence for thousands of years. The choices and decisions I made in those moments had an air of permanence that statistical problem sets or double-spaced research papers could never bring about. This object, the result of my work, would outlive countless generations of my own family. Would I be proud of what I made here? Twice each semester the entire art department would gather, like a tribe to a fire, to witness “the pour”. We’d use a crane to lower a crucible full of glowing liquid metal, like a bowl of stars, and pour the bronze into our molds one by one. And like that, in a matter of days, my piece transformed from a delicate shape of wax —so quick to disintegrate with the smallest dose of sunlight —to a thirty-five pound hunk of bronze. Metal sculpture taught me the importance of having

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a strong imagination and vision. I’m referring to vision not in the fluffy sense, but entirely rooted in the practical —like a muscle you need to tone and strengthen in order to perform an athletic activity. Vision is the ability to understand and take ownership of your present, to clearly see your future objective, and to plot a course backward outlining the steps you need to follow. It’s the ability to imagine your dream home so clearly in your head that you can show me a sketch of where the water pipes might lie. I learned that without a mastery of vision, sculpture is impossible. I see the importance of vision emerging in many arenas spanning diverse disciplines. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, is famed for pioneering a corporate culture driven by a strong vision. When a team proposes a new product, before writing a single line of code or building a prototype, they first write a press release. This means they write the words they would use to describe their product to a customer – a task that requires a clear vision of the end product, and an understanding of exactly how (and why) it’s worthy of being built. Italian polymath, painter and sculptor, Leonardo da Vinci, was known for having such profound mastery of engineering and unbounded imagination that he could design, prototype, and test his inventions in his head before hammering a single nail or pressing a blade to wood. His biographer Giorgio Vasari said, “he taught us that men of

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IkaikaBronze, AluminumChris Alexander

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genius sometimes accomplish most when they work least, for they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands”. He used vision as a means to eliminate poor performing inventions and shift his attention to more meaningful projects, such as developing scuba gear, crossbows and parachutes. In Walden, American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau encourages imagination as a starting point when we says, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” It’s within one’s ability to plot a series of practical, actionable steps from the future to the present where vision demonstrates its power. As a designer and digital marketer, I use media to tell stories in a variety of professional applications from education to publishing to business. Vision is an integral driver of virtually every project I work on. Through the process of creating sculpture, I, like the teams at Amazon, have learned to focus on the end-goal objective sitting upon my horizon. When designing websites, I ask myself, who am I trying to reach? What is the message I want to convey? Am I educating them? Am I asking them to take an action? Am I entertaining them? Often the objective is some sort of a combination. In my career and in life, I challenge myself to use vision to define my future. Where do I see myself in two years? In five? Ten? What

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activities, causes and achievements will bring me a sense of fulfillment? Then, following Thoreau’s words, I devote each day to building that foundation, one brick at a time. Sculpture and vision are one in the same - it’s simply a process of crafting the future, starting with today.

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Chris Alexander holds a B.A. in Studio Art (Metal Sculpture Emphasis) from the University of California, Santa Cruz, an M.A. in Graphic Communications Management and Technology from New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and is currently pursuing his M.B.A. from New York University’s Stern School of Business with a specialization in Digital Marketing. His experience includes web design, communications and digital marketing for universities, publications, small businesses and independent professionals.

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The New York University Humanities Ambassadors seek to strengthen the voice of the humanities undergraduate student

community with a special focus on exploring how a humanities education can prepare students for a wide range of careers.

The Humanities Initiative at New York University draws on the diverse talents and interests of NYU’s humanities faculty

and students while taking advantage of the university’s location in New York City. The Initiative is committed to bringing

NYU’s humanists together as well as to exploring the role of the humanities in the larger university and global community.

Field NotesThe Humanities Initiative at NYU

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Book designed by Chris AlexanderCover photo by Alexandra Taylor

© 2015 The Humanities Initiative at NYU

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