Diversity at the conference

For lunch on Saturday, we picked up box lunches, took them to the large room upstairs which overflowed with writers. Nancy Sales Cash and I found a table near the stage. Close by were Cynthia Barnett, her husband who kept his camera ready at all times, Nicki Leone, Ed Southern and our own Al Manning.

The program consisted of a dramatic and startling monologue by black screenwriter and performer Nathan Ross Freeman, who discussed the problem of children coming home after school with no one there to talk to about their day. Freeman said the time between the end of school and bedtime was a vast void in the lives of many young people today and that was a particularly important time. He thinks all kids, regardless of race or economic status are at risk during those hours. He works with the Winston-Salem Youth Arts Institute. He brought five sharp, poised teens, 14 - 17, on stage. They did not want to be called performance poets, but I enjoyed their "performance." They wrote their own material and the words, rhyme, and rhythm in the stories they told, some brutal and some poignant, drew me into their poetry.
They recited together and individually. Then Mr. Freeman explained "rifs" to the audience and had each student give him a rif with no planning or preperation. "Peace" he said and one child stepped forward and said something like, "lying on the grass and staring at the sky." " Joy." Another stepped forward. "getting an A on my math test."

When the writers understood the rif, voices called out from the audience. "Watching my daughter sleep," a man said. And the process went on and on until it was too late for me to meet with Nicki and Al as I had planned. We postponed until 6:30 p.m.