Field Report From Field Report: Robin Tremblay-McGaw on Bay Area Event With De’Ath, Tamayo & Troyan
Robin Tremblay-McGaw continues her turn as the best field reporter in the Bay Area, with this blog post on X Poetics about the March 1 meeting of feminist minds, co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic and Mills College and featuring Amy De'Ath (Vancouver, by way of the UK), Jennifer Tamayo (New York), and Cassandra Troyan (Chicago), there to speak on the subjects of gender and sexual violence in the poetry world. "The Bay Area writing scene has been grappling with these issues as well. Artists Television Access (ATA), where the event was held, was packed with people standing, sitting on the floor, and spilling on to the stairs." The premise of the event, from SPT:
Join us for an info-share with poets in, from, and moving between Vancouver, Chicago, New York, and London. How are other scenes, institutions, editors and curators responding to rape and sexual violence in writing communities? Amy De’Ath, Jennifer Tamayo, and Cassandra Troyan will share their experiences organizing meetings, potlucks and online interventions, in a discussion of the dynamics, difficulties and benefits of their respective locations, action taken and not taken. What does feminist solidarity look like? What might it look like? How can we take better care of one another? What kind of socialities and spaces do we want to create?
More from Tremblay-McGaw's report:
Each of the three presenters spoke for 10-15 minutes, informing attendees about recent events, the work they and others are doing, and articulated their own questions, doubts, and concerns about actual and potential possibilities for action, change. After Jennifer (who went by JT), Amy, and Cassandra spoke, the audience was invited to ask questions while Samantha Giles and Stephanie Young recorded these questions on large sheets of paper. Each speaker then addressed some of these comments and concerns, the event culminating with all present invited to offer up ideas for action. Below I've tried to capture some of what I heard the participants saying. There have been a number of sexual assaults and gendered violence in writing communities and various public discourses around these events, many of those under discussion in the last year or so. Some of these I was hearing about for the first time. I've done my best to reflect a small portion of the content of this urgent discussion. For more info on this event and the discussants, please see Small Press Traffic's web site.
Tremblay-McGaw goes on to provide her notes on each speaker's presentation, and follows up with some questions and concerns had there by the audience, such as:
Some of the Questions/Comments Proposed by Attendees:
How do we surface unconscious bias?
How can people support individual work?
What can we learn from what others are doing?
Someone wanted to know why JT read off the list of names of the 72 attendees at the first Enough is Enough meeting.
How do we respond in the moment? How to call shit out!
Exclusion and transformative justice and how these are related to systems of incarceration
What are the limits of gossip?
How does information move?
How to differentiate between aesthetic preference and closed communities
What is the link between aesthetic difficulty and class, gender, race?
How to dismantle white supremacy in poetry circles?
The problem of indigenous issues not being able to be made present. An attendee mentioned someone who did not come to the Sunday event because of this concern. There is simply no space to address this issue, given the community. Another participant underscored this claim noting that race cannot be addressed precisely because the community is largely white and cis.
More details at X Poetics. Photo of Jennifer Tamayo by Sean Patrick Cain.