JERICHO BROWN

JERICHO BROWN

Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.

MASTER SHI HENG YI

MASTER SHI HENG YI

35th Generation of Shaolin Masters
Headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe

Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all, it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentences, in the beginning, is: With your thoughts, you are creating the world…So it’s very rarely clearly stated that it is the thoughts that are creating the world. Nevertheless, if you are now looking at the practices that the Shaolin Temple offers, that is quite physical. There is a lot of physicality in there, so you might think but why are you saying with thoughts you create the world, but you have so many different physical activities. It is because if you want to have mental freedom. If you want to approach freedom, you cannot just approach freedom by doing things or trying to chase freedom. The freedom that we are looking for is the type of freedom that is derived and that is very closely related to its counterpart, which is very hard restriction or very hard structure. So if you want to experience what freedom is, look at the restrictions of your life.

REBECCA WALKER

REBECCA WALKER

Award-Winning Writer, Producer & Co-founder of Third Wave Fund

The idea of writing memoir is about listening carefully. The way to find a story or, at least the story that needs to be told is that moment that you’re writing is the emerges from a deep kind of inner listening and finding the memories that are charged that don’t want to leave that have a certain kind of energy to them and, if you listen to them, and you allow them to be born in the writing, you discover your own story because your story is basically made up of all the memories that continue to hold the charge for you. All the memories that are lodged in your mind that you’ve secreted away and when you can excavate that story and you can write it down, then you can make sense of it and you can understand why you’re living the way you’re living and why you feel the way you feel. And you can also decide to to release those memories so that you can have new memories that can define and can shape your life.

(Highlights) ANA CASTILLO

(Highlights) ANA CASTILLO

Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

ANA CASTILLO

ANA CASTILLO

Award-winning Xicana Activist, Editor, Poet, Novelist, Artist
Author of My Book of the Dead
One of the things that is dying is our planet. We hear these sirens every single day. We’re being warned daily by experts and concerned people how vast that squandering is going. It’s a case of urgency and it’s astounding and a very sad, a very pathetic comment on modern life that most people are ignoring those signs. As a poet, it seems to me that one of the tasks that the poet takes on, it’s a vocation that’s born with it, it’s this consciousness, this serving as witness.

(Highlights) MARGE PIERCY

(Highlights) MARGE PIERCY

Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

MARGE PIERCY

MARGE PIERCY

Novelist, Poet & Activist

People who take care of sick people and AIDS and teachers and garbage collectors and people who work in daycare…all the things that have to happen in society we pay shit for. We pay an enormous amount of money to people who can throw a ball through a hoop. We pay an enormous amount of hedge fund people. All the people who take over corporations go in and destroy get immensely rich while the people who do what we actually need doing, what we must have to survive, the people who grow food, the independent farmers that used to exist…

(Highlights) DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

(Highlights) DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

Pushcart Award-Winning Poet

When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.

DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ

Pushcart Award-Winning Poet

When I was younger, I never really thought of living past twenty-five…I felt like I was in a movie. I thought that I was living this movie idea of things and there’d be gunshots around you. You hear it hitting the concrete, and you’re like ‘Oh, shit’. Seriously, I didn’t think of it as real life. When you’re young, the idea that I’d known people that were killed early, you go to prison. These just felt like matter of fact. They seemed to be this part of life and you just accepted them.