Prompted

Prompted

Stories ~ Poems ~ EssaysFrom Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio

Edited by Alison Hicks, Elizabeth Mosier, and Therése Halscheid

Alison Hicks is the author of a novella, Love: A Story of Images, and a chapbook of poems, Falling Dreams. She has held fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in fiction and creative nonfiction, and her work has appeared in Pearl, The Ledge, Eclipse, Main Street Rag and other journals. Further information: www.philawordshop.com

Elizabeth Mosier is the author of the novel, My Life as a Girl (Random House). Her short stories and essays have appeared in Seventeen, Child, The Cimarron Review, Puerto del Sol, and Poets and Writers among others. She teaches fiction and nonfiction writing to audiences from elementary school to adult, in a variety of settings. More information is available at www.elizabethmosier.com

Therése Halscheid is the author of Powertalk, Without Home, Uncommon Geography, and a chapbook award, Greatest Hits. Her work has been widely published in literary magazines. She was awarded a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and is a visiting poet in schools. For the past decade, Halscheid has been house-sitting while traveling widely. Learn more by visiting her website: www.ThereseHalscheid.com

ABOUT THE EDITORS:

Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio presents Prompted, an anthology that explores the human condition via poetry, personal essays, and fiction. From internationally published author Julie Compton (Tell No Lies, Rescuing Olivia) to first-time poet Marsha Pincus, Prompted’s connective tissue lies in a deep love and respect for the craft of writing.

Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio (GPWS) began in October, 1996 when Director Alison Hicks gathered five people for three hours once a week at a church in Center City, Philadelphia. The process was the same then as it is today, and the Center City workshop still meets at that same church. Hicks began a similar workshop in Delaware County/Main Line in 1999.

“I did not create the process,” Hicks says of the GPWS approach. “It is the Amherst Writers & Artists method, brainchild of Pat Schneider, with whom I studied in the early 1980’s. The core beliefs underlying it are simple and true: everyone has creative genius and a unique voice and vision to offer the world. The workshops aim to cultivate that voice.”

Stories ~ Poems ~ Essays from

Greater Philadelphia W

ordshop Studio

Philadelphia Stories93 Old York Road, Ste 1/#1-753

Jenkintown, PA 19046www.psbookspublishing.org

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used

fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

ISBN 978-0-9793350-5-1

Published by PS Books, a division of Philadelphia Stories, Inc.Philadelphia, PA

© 2010 by Philadelphia Stories, Inc.All rights reserved

Design by Derek Carnegie

All proceeds for the sale of PS Books titles go to support Philadelphia Stories, a free nonprofit literary magazine publishing

writers and artists from the Delaware Valley.

Cover Image: “Sonnet #3”by Anne Buckwalter © 2010

A Biography through travelBy Jennifer J. Beaumont

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Frequent flyer miles. Hotel points. Overseas teaching assignments. Conferences. Study abroad programs. Vacations. They all make it possible. Exotic restaurants? Sometimes. Room service? Infrequently. Unusual foods? Mostly. Cultural awakenings? Always! Connections—economic, historical, political, social? Incredibly so.

Of course it didn’t start like that. Growing up in rural Jamaica, a trip meant the family of two sons, four daughters, mother and father piling into a car in the wee hours of the morning, driving hours across three parish lines to visit family. Most memorable were the trips to visit my maternal grandmother. My brother, who follows me in birth order, and I would stay up the night before, too excited to sleep, only to fall off once the motor started. Songs, counting license plates, tongue-twisters paled to the thrill of the food vendors along the way. Street food! The delicacies being offered in a particular place were the victual GPS. Porus, Manchester: juicy oranges, ripe, never yellow, never perfectly round; tangerines, large, intensely orange, skin never needing to be coaxed off the succulent segments; tree-ripened star-apples, purple, sometimes grass-green, readily giving up the milky white flesh with a gentle squeeze. Middle Quarters, St. Elizabeth: shrimp, heads still on, fried, each bite crunchy, peppery. Bluefields, Westmoreland: fish, fried, crispy on the outside, moist and tender on the inside, and festivals, the cornmeal hush puppies, steamy hot, fresh from the frying pan.

Travel, then, was to connect with family and to enjoy foods that were not cooked at home.

Then one day, as a teenager, riding in a mini-bus, owned and operated by a returnee from the United States, the Bronx to be specific. I was enveloped in a conversation, like that of a beauty salon, all about the opportunities for personal and professional advancement “abroad.” Very soon after, my family migrated to Brooklyn, New York, prompted, I’m thinking, by both the seeds of political change and the desire to improve the life chances of their children. Brooklyn, a rented apartment in a large building

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connected to all the other buildings on that side of street, two blocks away from the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens; a five minute walk to the Ebbetts Field apartments, built on the former home of the Brooklyn Dodgers; a fifteen minute drive from Fulton Street at one end the protest in support of inmates seeking humane conditions at the Attica Prison, at the other end in foods, music, and artifacts from my home island-nation, the wider Caribbean, and other countries within the African Diaspora.

Travel was now about ways of living, recognizing that my and my family’s way of living was simply one of many different ways in which different people lived. Who knew that people would live in homes that they didn’t own, that had only one entry door, that were connected to the other homes, all in one building, that were stacked one on top of the other? How do you tell uptown when you are five levels below ground? Travel was now about discovering art, making decisions to enter and participate in new communities, mastering the NYC subway system. Awakening to the politics of race, of class, of language, of gender, of nationality, of geography.

A trip to my ancestral continent came about by way of a project involving researchers in the United States and researchers in Western and Central Africa. A trip that was much more, so much more than work. A trip to Senegal and The Gambia. An eleven hour transatlantic flight, four hours ahead of home time, an opportunity to test this notion of “getting back to my roots” found me landing in Dakar, Senegal, home of Leopold Senghor, its first president. Visiting Goree Island, seeing one of the many doors of no return for enslaved Africans, was emotionally wrenching. Standing there apart from, yet one of, the visitors, reading the history, noting the designation as a World Heritage site, made me question the politics of economics, selective religiosity, and the history of pain as artifacts for tourism.

Senegal is Francophone Africa. The Gambia is Anglophone Africa. Two countries sharing a border, citizens speaking two different colonial languages, French and English, but the same ethnic language—wolof. Travel became recognizing artificially created barriers and the perceptions associated with those barriers. I’m from the Anglophone African Diaspora. I was not from the Motherland. There, I was perceived as Black American, yet, in America, where I had resided, more than twenty years, I self-identified exclusively as Jamaican. Yes, travel was about identity. By self. I looked like them. By others. I didn’t move like them, even if I attempted to dress like them.

Travel is also about finding the familiar, about making connections, finding commonalities. Listening to wolof being spoken I heard the foundations of many of the words making up the Jamaican patois. I am at home in the market with the cacophony of sounds emerging from the vendors of fabrics of the traditional African

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prints, mud cloth, and bogolan; succulent mangoes, juicy melons, prepared foods, produce; amid the beseeching tones of youngsters seeking candy, pens, and coins. I smile at the pyramid created by cones of warm roasted peanuts hand-wrapped in butcher paper—just like they did when I was growing up. Missing was the whistle that accompanied the peanut vendor meandering through my childhood neighborhood.

And so it continues. Travel fostering new appreciation for uniqueness—like standing at the Cape of Good Hope, seeing the Indian Ocean on my left and the Atlantic Ocean on my right, meeting directly in front of me. Each trip releasing inhibitions, about the sampling of new and different ways known foods are prepared. Remembering that small restaurant, on the banks of the Danube in Slovenia, where the specialty of the day was ink of squid risotto; tasty, yes; the dark almost blue-black color, somewhat off-putting. Each trip stretches my spirit of adventure—spelunking on Vancouver Island resulted in a happy me with wet, muddy pants, seat and all. Each trip sharpens my understanding of major events in world history and the impact of those events. Learning in Eastern Europe that a person born in Slovenia in 1918, living in the same house until 2004, would have been a citizen of Slovenia, Yugoslavia, Croatia, and again Slovenia. Each trip deepens my sensitivity to the shared human experiences, such as “belonging” to different colonial powers, to the shifting of power relationships within a country, to the temporal nature of historical peoples. My place of birth was initially inhabited by Tainos who met Christopher Columbus, representing the government of Spain in 1492. Traded, as spoils of war, to Britain in 1656, its political independence was gained in 1962. The Tainos are now extinct. What other indigenous peoples have been lost in the quest for dominance? Each trip forces me to strip away another slice of otherness and accept oneness. Sitting in a lecture by a Chinese anthropologist in China’s southernmost province of Yunnan, hearing that there are twenty-seven recognized ethnic groups in China, each group advocating for equal standing on the spectrum of citizenship was my catalyst for linking the movements for self-efficacy, freedom, and autonomy there with civil rights movements in the United States and other regions of the world.

Travel is about absorbing the stories of the people being visited. So it was with great interest that I listened to the Mon griot tell how his people were given the island of Koh Kret in the 1800’s, by the King of Thailand, as an expression of gratitude to them, the first inhabitants of the Burma-Thai region of Southeast Asia, for fighting with the Thais against the Burmese. After 200 years of being a part of Thailand, their language, styles of architecture, and craft of pottery making are proudly sustained.

Travel makes indelible the knowing, the cognition, that while we make superficial distinctions based on location and, while there are differences in the names, places,

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and maybe nuances of the stories, the underlying human experiences of love, war, the quest for peace, stability, and identity are uncannily similar.

Jennifer J. Beaumont is an educator, supporting schools in the delivery of educational services to students with a special focus on addressing issues of equity and diversity. She is also a travel writer with a focus on history and culture as well as exploring places off the beaten path. Her work has appeared in Pathfinders Travel, Odyssey Couleur, and Romar Traveler (www.romartraveler.com).