by William Reichard

When I was 17 years old I discovered the film Cabaret while flipping through channels on late-night TV. Seven years after its premiere, I hadn’t heard of the movie.  Something about the film’s style and mood drew me in and held me. Although I usually didn’t enjoy musicals, I kept watching. Michael York’s character seemed so familiar, but I couldn’t articulate why, at first. A gay teenager in rural Minnesota in 1980, I was as clueless as Sally Bowles, and lacked her bravado. As the film came to the scene where Michael York’s and Liza Minnelli’s characters discover they’ve been sleeping with the same man, I experienced the revelation just as Sally did, in real time, and I was just as shocked. For me, however, the experience was also one of unmitigated joy, as this was the first time I’d seen a gay man portrayed on television, in the movies, anywhere. For a closeted and fearful teenager, the experience was profound. I’d never seen myself reflected in anything I’d watched or read before, and I was a voracious reader, an avid watcher. Or if I had, I wasn’t ready until that moment to recognize it. I was hungry for any kind of affirmation, any sense that I wasn’t alone in the world, and there was Cabaret, broadcast right into my living room by ABC late on a Friday night.

 As the film ended, I grabbed a pen and paper and planted myself close to the screen, determined to find out who had written the film script and whether or not he had written anything else. As the credits scrolled by, I found that Cabaret was based on Goodbye to Berlin, a collection of short stories by Christopher Isherwood. I wrote down his name and hid the note in my desk. I was leaving for my freshman year at the University of Minnesota soon and already knew what I was going to do once I settled into my dorm and found the campus library. By the end of my first term, I’d read all of Isherwood’s stories and novels, and through his work, I found other writers, artists, filmmakers, a world full of queer people. The chain of association was endless. I was still a shy country kid, but I knew I wasn’t alone.

Finding Isherwood’s work was a liberating experience. It was the first time I recognized, in a conscious way, the immense transformative power of literature. I went from feeling isolated to feeling a deep kinship with a writer who had started publishing decades before I was born. No matter that Ishwerwood’s milieu of Weimar Germanywas as far removed from my circumstances as possible. What mattered was the essence of his characters, their self-confidence and sense of belonging in the world. For anyone who has never experienced, through social, cultural, or economic forms of oppression, what it feels like to be on the outside, excluded, or discriminated against, it might be hard to imagine finally finding yourself reflected in the world when you’ve lived without such positive reflection for so long. Most people bumble through life and see themselves reflected everywhere, in movies, in popular music, in the papers, on TV, or at least, they think they do. If nothing compels you to look any deeper, why rock the boat? For many, status quo is just fine. But what about the rest of us?

Creative writing, at heart, is issue-based. When was the last time you read a novel or a short story or a poem in which everyone was happy and nothing bad happened and no characters were challenged in any way? That would make for some very dull reading. From the start, we’re shaped by the stories we’re told and the books we read. Fairy tales and children’s stories are all about learning and growing, and adversity is usually the engine that propels characters forward toward some kind of positive change. Raised on such work, we acquire a taste for it, we seek it in the literature we read and write as adults. Whatever else compels anyone to read creative literature, I suspect the desire to know oneself better, to learn and grow, to understand others, and to follow E. M. Forster’s dictate to “only connect,” is at the root. Good literature entertains—no small feat—but it also nourishes, oftentimes in sly, subtle ways, forcing our souls to grow. We like our lessons served with some wit, some heart, and a great deal of intelligence. Most invested readers don’t respond well to pedantic work, and we know it when we see it. When creative literature works, it changes readers by teaching us something new, providing a fresh lens through which to see the world and our role in it. Literature challenges us to see things as they are, not necessarily as we’d like them to be, and to work for change and justice if we don’t like what we see.

Over the years, as a writer, teacher, and student, I’ve encountered transformative writing at every turn. The Introduction to Literature anthology required for my freshman English course introduced me to authors whose work I still read and teach today. Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle, in the time of these plays’ creation, was part of a complex religious ceremony. They told stories that resonated with the ancient Greeks because they spoke of characters trapped in a powerful game being played by the gods, characters who could only do what fate had dictated from birth. Reading and teaching these plays now, 2,500 years after they were composed, we explore the ways that every citizen is faced, at one time or another, with a crisis of allegiance, whether to follow the dictates of one’s heart, the pull of family ties, or to follow the law of the land, even when it contradicts what we know in our hearts to be true. In Antigone, the title character chooses to defy law and bury her dead brother, thus forfeiting her life rather than following a royal dictate that’s issued in order to preserve civil peace. She’s driven to this choice because she’s self-reflective, someone who must weigh all her options and allegiances before she decides what is right. A great deal has changed, politically speaking, since Sophocles lived, but human nature, and our deep-seated need to understand it, hasn’t really changed at all.

My freshman literature anthology also contained a powerful short story, “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason, about the slow disintegration of a marriage, one partner hanging on to a past that is no longer possible, while the other seeks out a future that will, inevitably, pull her away from her husband and the world she’s always known. As the first in my family to attend college, the first to choose a life outside of the factories and farms that employed most of my family, this story was utterly transformative. Barely 18 years old, raised in working-class poverty, and now sitting in a classroom at one of the largest research universities in the country, I saw in “Shiloh” the power of personal choices, changes I knew I would undergo. Literature helped me glimpse the future, the unavoidable fact that my experiences would take me away from the world I’d always known, and in this sense, pull me away from my family roots.

As a child, writing had saved me because it had provided a way to understand the world and thus shape and control my life. I knew firsthand the immense power of creative work. Mark Doty writes in Firebird, his honest and searing memoir about his early years, about the power and absolute necessity of telling one’s own story: “We live the stories we tell; the stories we don’t tell live us. What you don’t allow yourself to know controls and determines; whatever’s held to the light ‘can be changed’—not the facts, of course, but how we understand them, how we live with them. Everyone will be filled by grief, distorted by sorrow; that’s the nature of being a daughter or a son, as our parents are also. What matters is what we learn to make of what happens to us.”

My early encounters with literature and its profound power to inform and transform are part of what led me, three years ago, to undertake an anthology project of my own. For several years I’d been teaching City Arts, a semester-long, college-level, off-campus study program that explores the role of arts and artists in working for social justice and social change, with the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). This interdisciplinary work inspired me to develop a new course that focused on the study of literature and the craft of creative writing.

With the support of my colleagues at HECUA, I designed and launched a new semester-long seminar, Writing for Social Change. With the same pedagogical goals as City Arts, this new course focuses on the role of creative literature and individual authors in the struggle for social justice. Part creative writing workshop, part literary study course, the seminar invites students to engage in the life of the local literary community, to write and workshop their own work, critically and analytically read the work of others, and complete an in-depth internship with a local literary arts nonprofit organization. The seminar is an experiential learning opportunity, a chance for students to study ideas and theories, and test them in “real world” scenarios outside the traditional classroom.

After I designed Writing for Social Change, I went in search of an anthology that would be useful for the course. My search wasn’t completely successful. I found one, Upton Sinclair’s seminal 1915 anthology, The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Great Social Protest Literature of All Time. It was a wonderful collection of classic social justice literature, but much of the work felt dated (even though most of the issues explored remain unresolved). I also found Ishmael Reed’s wonderful From Totems to Hip-Hop: A Multicultural Anthology of Poetry Across the Americas, 1900–2002, but it contained only poetry, and I needed a collection that also included fiction and creative nonfiction. I wanted a collection of new work, focused on issues that would be of vital importance to my students. I found a variety of other excellent anthologies that focused on one issue or one identity-based aspect of each author included, but none that moved beyond these monolithic structures. I realized that I would need to create my own anthology. This is how American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice was born.

While in graduate school, I was often assigned to teach sections of a course titled The Literature of American Minorities. I enjoyed introducing students to authors whose names weren’t familiar because they hadn’t yet migrated into the canon. I made full use of the myriad anthologies available. I made photocopied packets of work that wasn’t anthologized, some that had only seen print in small journals and magazines. The course was good for what it was good for: exposing students to “minority” writers, teaching them, through the voices of those who knew best, what it meant to be essentially different in the United States. Still, this didn’t seem to take things far enough. While such classes provided a venue through which underappreciated and relatively unknown authors could speak, they still kept these writers from being understood within the full context of what it means to be an American writer. They created, in one sense, a literary ghetto where such authors were relegated, thus protecting the traditional canon from infiltration. Although they were a step in the right direction, these classes also had the potential to be literary and cultural dead ends, a place where any writer who didn’t fit the narrow confines of what had defined writers of “quality” literature could be safely contained, very separate and not very equal.

It’s been many years since I believed in such simplified categorization. I still have the books I used in those courses, and I take them out when I’m looking for a particular story or poem or essay that’s exquisitely written and addresses issues related to social justice. I want to know who wrote them, and when, and where. Literary criticism itself has come a long way since the New Critics—historical and social contexts have become accepted for interpretation of the “canon.” I apply this standard to new writing as well. I strive to read new works, and teach with them, within the full context of their making. I want to know who wrote them, and when, and where. To ignore this aspect of any work is to engage in a form of injustice, because it strips the work of its full context, and reduces the richness and complexity each work possesses. I teach my students to look for the whole story, the bigger picture, and help them realize that art and literature don’t exist in a bubble.

The silos we’ve constructed to discreetly contain each part of our society, our culture, our educational system, are not real. All educational disciplines are related. Science and math can inform our understanding of art and literature; literature can give a more subtle and complex understanding of the raw statistical data gathered in the social sciences. Theater and its history are inextricably linked to religious studies, to the grand scale of the development of contemporary religious rites. All cultural work carries encoded within it the specific contexts of its maker, and thus provides a focused picture of one moment in time, yet this same work also exists and functions within the culture as a whole. Successful work provides any reader a mirror into her own life, a life that might be very different from that of the author, but one linked by the emotions and narratives and constructs of the piece.

American Tensions is based on the long-standing tradition of using literature as a tool for societal critique, as a means of calling for civic change and justice, and as a tool for cultural transformation. Using fiction, essays, and poetry to delve deeply into social justice issues, American Tensions puts a human face on what otherwise can become an abstract set of statistics, names, and historical facts. The anthology’s title grew out of my search for the perfect word to describe what I wanted to bring together in this volume, and why it makes sense to do so at this time. A friend suggested I look up the word tensegrity. It’s an architectural term, coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, that captures the same quality I wanted in this anthology: “The word ‘tensegrity’ is an invention: a contraction of ‘tensional integrity.’ Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder.”

“The world is a harmony of tensions,” wrote Heraclites of Ephesus, and he might have been describing one of the primary energies that holds the United States together. There are so many competing interests, economic and social philosophies, that constitute our nation. Although he was naming the mood of the world’s first industrial nation, England, William Butler Yeats’s famous line from “The Second Coming” often seems to apply to the United States: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Yet, our center does hold. The basic structure of the nation is dynamic and strong. Of course, things are not perfect. I undertook my anthology project because they are not, and because I believe that literature can teach us about some of the causes of the injustice that is endemic in our society. A good book can do a lot of things. It can help an isolated boy better understand himself. It can simultaneously entertain and teach. It can challenge and provoke. Reading isn’t a passive act, and literature isn’t a passive art. A change of perspective can move anyone to action. If a poem or story or essay or play can change one reader at a time, then it can change the world.

William Reichard is a writer, editor, and educator. He is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Sin Eater (Mid-List Press, 2010) and This Brightness (Mid-List Press, 2007). His anthology, American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice, was published in April 2011 by New Village Press. Reichard directs the Writing for Social Change and City Arts seminars for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.