Second Year
The group blossomed in our second year, growing from 12 to 24 to 35 people.
Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of private donors and foundations, we relocated to our own room in the neighborhood, at 286 Stanhope, Ground Floor, a beautiful new space in the heart of Bushwick, opening right onto the street. In addition to regular sessions, The Room is open weekdays for whoever walks in and needs help with reading, writing, speaking and listening, or a sanctuary for thinking and being. All ages, all needs.
Our guests this year included novelist and screenwriter Peter Hedges, people who are the subjects of the book Random Family, by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, who also worked with us, TV producer Terry Schaeffer, professional wrestler and Bushwick native Louis Torres, composer Kim D. Sherman, novelists Peter Carey, Russell Banks, Richard Price, and playwright Catherine Filloux.
Students from the Hunter College Masters program have joined other volunteers as our tutoring and mentoring staff during the week.
Still Waters in a Storm is corresponding with our sister group, Sistas and Bruthas, in the Bronx, with recently incarcerated youth in Newark, New Jersey, and with children at Mountainside Elementary School, in Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado.
Still Waters chief Stephen Haff gave the keynote address at the annual conference of the Arts, Business and Education Consortium, in Colorado Springs this April, and toured area schools, including Mountainside. Click here to read his speech.
The group has traveled all over the city in our second year, from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where we read our work out loud, to book launches for Peter Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America), Peter Hedges (The Heights) and Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried, 20th Anniversary), to a PEN panel on writing and prison, to the Wooster Group's revival of North Atlantic, to the 52nd Street Project, to a wrestling match way, way out on Staten Island, to ice skating at Chelsea Piers, to neighborhood dances.
Jocelyn Perez, a high school student and co-founder of Still Waters, had her solo play, "One Night," produced in Canada. The play was a critical and popular success.
The Room hosted a stop on the tour of Catherine Filloux's play Dog and Wolf, about the struggles of an immigrant woman seeking asylum in the USA, and the American agent who's trying to help her.
We're also collaborating with the Bushwick Starr theater, to produce a play with neighborhood children about environmental problems, and teaming up with Bushwick IMPACT, a family resource center for children under 5 and their parents, to nurture reciprocal arts and altruism between our people and theirs.
World-renowned Real People Theater returns, working with Still Waters on a show based on Alice in Wonderland, Dante's Divine Comedy, Wilde's De Profundis, and The Count of Monte Cristo, spoken in English, Spanish, French, Italian and Street. All of these stories are about people in dark places moving into the light.
Still Waters sponsored two popular online writing contests, one on the theme of "Home," in conjunction with our move to Stanhope, and the other a tree-naming, telling the story so far of our young friend who lives just outside the Room, near the curb.
Our major fundraising project, "Reading and Writing: Block by Block in Brooklyn," is an interactive, online and on the street mapping of Bushwick with poems, stories, thoughts, feelings, words, words, words. The definition of "neighborhood" grows.
The year closed with a panel discussion on literacy and poverty, called, "What to Read if You're Poor." Panelists include Richard Price, Peter Carey, Russell Banks, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Mark Rowlands and Peter Hedges, sharing the stage with Still Waters student co-founder Jocelyn Perez. The discussion was moderated by The Wooster Group's Kate Valk, and happened at The Performing Garage, in Manhattan, Saturday, September 11.