Eric Nguyen and M. Evelina Galang
On June 22nd I visited the Berkeley to attend the Voices of Our Nation Arts (VONA) Writers’ Workshop. This workshop is a week-long conference for writers of color with workshops led by award-winning writers in a variety of genres, including fiction writer M. Evelina Galang, poet Patricia Smith, memorist Andrew X. Pham, and novelist Junot Diaz, among many others.
The organization was founded in 1999 by Junot Díaz, Elmaz Abinader, Victor Díaz, and Diem Jones. Each envisioned an arts organization that could change the landscape for writers of color by supporting individual writer growth, creating a platform for community engagement, and providing a workshop and mentor focus to expand writing opportunities. Fifteen years after its founding, it has become one of the most esteemed writers’ conferences in the US.
By some twist of luck, I was accepted into M. Evelina Galang’s fiction workshop. M. Evelina Galang is the author of several books including the short story collection Her Wild American Self, the novel One Tribe, and most recently, the novel Angel de la Luna and the 5th Glorious Mystery. We dived into the workshop straight away, where we picked apart each other’s works—what’s working in this narrative? What isn’t? Are the characters sympathetic? Does the language sing? Does it move the human heart?
We soon found out that despite coming from all across the country and from different artistic backgrounds, we had many similar experiences as writers and as persons of color. One writer had an experience in another workshop where the leader refused to comment on her work because of her ethnicity; he said he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. Another writer said she was once told to change the foreign language phrases in her work because a critic didn’t like having them in the text; she, on the other hand, thought they were a natural inclusion for her characters. Another was once questioned over the authenticity of her characters; they didn’t fit neatly into the stereotypes of the ethnic other.
As we came to understand, writers of color often face challenges that hinder their artistic progress to express themselves freely. We are often told to write certain types of story, to avoid certain topics, to tell “universal” stories that erase the nuances of identity.
VONA Writing Workshop
As VONA alumna Kima Jones writes: “For too long, writers of color have been told there is no audience for our work. That unless we write towards the universal human—which, of course, is code for white person—our work would not be understood, or read or taught. We are told that regardless of the work the poem is doing, we should codify it in a way that it is accessible and understood and praised by the universal human.”
Junot Díaz echoes this in a recently published essay in The New Yorker, in which he highlights the exclusion and erasure that takes place in traditional workshop settings that can, at times, work against art and its power, particularly as it is linked to survival.
In her essay, “Create Dangerously,” Edwidge Danticat writes about how, under Duvalier’s dictatorship and his executions of dissidents, Haitians used the works of European playwrights in order to express themselves. “After the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, as images of their deaths played over and over in cinemas and on state-run television, the young men and women of Club de Bonne Humeur, along with the rest of Haiti, desperately needed art that could convince. They needed art that could convince them that they would not die the same way as Numa and Drouin did. They needed to be convinced that words could still be spoken, that stories could still be told and passed on.” Danticat goes on to advise writers to create dangerously: write “knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.” In short, write as if the lives of others depended upon it—because, one day, it might.
For writers of color, this need is perhaps more immediate. We write for ourselves and, to a certain extent, for people like us, those whose stories have not yet been told or have been erased. At the same time, we write in hopes of reaching those outside our own communities—that kid in the inner city Harlem, a closeted middle-aged lesbian in rural Wyoming, a teenager coming of age in a war zone. The arts should be boundless, touching as many lives as possible, including those who are often marginalized. In this way, writers of color are not different from other writers. What is different, however, is that we often must do so despite the unique challenges that might stand in our way of telling stories that must be told.
VONA, at least for one week, takes away these challenges, creating a safe space where writers of color can write freely and openly—to write like our lives depended upon it, to write as if the lives of others do, too.
