Art At The Community Center

In the early 1980s, I read Adrienne Rich’s book Of Women Born, in which she wrote about the importance of women writing their stories, no matter how painful—otherwise, she said, people won’t know the truth about women. 

At that moment my writing changed. I understood the value of my stories, my experiences, and that my writing was important work. 

I started creating narrative poetry about the struggles of mothering, the difficulties with not enough money, problems in my marriage. There was “On Feeling Like a Shitty Mother,” because I had let my kids go live with her dad. “Anger Art,” about discovering the other woman. “No Credit,” about dealing with the tax man: they levied my account today, the IRS took out all my money and I’m overdrawn. 

I wrote about these things and shared them because they happened. They happened to many of us. We need not be ashamed, I decided, and think we’re the only ones.

I attended the University of Kentucky’s Women Writers Conference in the late ’80s and listened to the guest authors talk about the importance of women’s writing. When it came time to take a break for lunch, they set up a special room for round robin readings. Awesome, I thought, as I and many other women started to cram in the tiny space they gave us adjacent to the larger dining area for the invited guests, where the glasses and silverware were tinkling. Something came over me. I stood up and said, “This is not okay,” and began to search for someone who could move us to a larger space. When we were set up in the new beautiful room, I went to the podium and said, “This will never happen again. I'm going to create a place for women to read their work in Lexington.” 

Soon I created the Working Class Kitchen, a forum for reading and performance. I crafted poems and never passed up an opportunity to read.  I wrote grants for writing workshops in various community centers.

Once a week, I’d go to a GED class in the Bluegrass-Aspendale Housing Project. I read my narrative poems about personal experiences and asked the students to write about theirs without censoring. They or I would read them out loud.

One week as I was leaving the classroom, Lisa asked me, “Ms. Laverne, how do I get a husband?” I smiled. The next week I went to class and as I was leaving, Lisa asked me the same question. Again I smiled. I didn’t really have an answer. I assumed she was asking me because I read poetry about three different husbands. The third week as I was leaving, Lisa asked, “How do I get out of the projects?”

A few days later I was driving to Louisville to teach a workshop at the University of Louisville Women’s Center and began to ponder Lisa’s question. What are you doing, Laverne, I asked myself, teaching poetry? These women are focused on surviving. 

And then I realized why I do what I do.

The next week I said, “Lisa, How do I get a husband? is a good question.” When we learn to write poetry, I said, we are learning how to listen to our minds and get what’s on the inside out. Later, when we are meeting people and getting to know them, we are more able to take risks and share who we are. When we go looking for a job and a potential employer asks, Why should I hire you?, we can have an answer. When we write stories, craft them and share them, we are developing those self-expression skills. 

In the early ’90s, the WWC invited the Working Class Kitchen women to come and read their poetry during their evening dinner alongside other invited published authors at the conference. Lisa hesitated. Ms. Jessie, their GED teacher, said, “Lisa, you don’t know what opportunities will happen for you by going to this conference.” 

Lisa and her friends took the city bus to the conference.