First Year
Still Waters in a Storm offers weekly group sessions in self-expression and compassion for all ages.
These sessions have rehabilitated voices damaged and discouraged by traditional schooling and released upwards of 30 new poets, storytellers and reporters into the streets. This has been accomplished by a process of spontaneous writing and listening.
In addition to the weekly meetings, the group provided assistance in reading and writing to area children and adults throughout the week, in private or small-group tutorials. All activities were free to everyone.
We made several public presentations of our writings, at no cost to the audiences, in Bushwick and in Manhattan. To close our first year and open our second, the group included people from across the city to join a regular session, which was followed by an open mic contest, at The Performing Garage, home of The Wooster Group.
The group made a number of trips: to Broadway to see the musical IN THE HEIGHTS; to the Museum of Modern Art; to Fort Greene, to attend a community meeting about gentrification; to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, to work with the Power Writers, a group similar to ours, from the Bronx; to the Bowery Poetry Club, to recite and compete in their open mic contest; to Long Island, to the recording studio of Oscar Flores, to make our first CD of poetry and narrative readings; to see Danny Hoch's show TAKING OVER at the Public Theater.
We also welcomed a number of guests, including writers Richard Price (LUSH LIFE, CLOCKERS), Willie Perdomo (WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME), Peter Carey (TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG, OSCAR AND LUCINDA), and Adrian Nicole Leblanc (RANDOM FAMILY), along with people who were real-life subjects of RANDOM FAMILY.
We read, discussed and mimicked LUSH LIFE, WHERE A NICKEL COSTS A DIME and RANDOM FAMILY. In coordination with our study of THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE WOLF, by Mark Rowlands, a real live artic wolf came to a group meeting, accompanied by people from the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York.
The group’s process is already being replicated, through the Center for Social and Emotional Education, in New York City Public Schools.
This fall, we are expanding to three group sessions per week.
All of this has been made possible by the extraordinary generosity of the cast of the CBS TV show COLD CASE.