CHAVISA WOODS

INTERVIEWED BY REGIE CABICO

he catchphrase for A Gathering of

Tthe Tribes is “Where revolutionary artists come together.” And where else in the East Village might you have caught the Sun Ra Arkestra, master satirist Ishmael Reed, artist David Hammons, and experimental poet Anne Waldman in its heady early days? Founded by the late novelist-poet-publisher Steve Cannon, the organization has lost none of its steam either. Cannon protege and current Executive Director Chavisa Woods is keeping Tribes' flame burning bright as recently evidenced at The Whitney Biennial where the organization is represented by a major installation on the sixth floor as part of the Quiet as It’s Kept exhibit. Regie Cabico, a National Slam Poet with his own rich history with the Tribes, spoke to Chavisa about her mentor's legacy, the current Whitney homage, and the wildest party to come out during her early days at Cannon's side.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Regie Cabico: My first experience with Gathering of the Tribes was in 1993. I was

reading at every open mic in New York City, after graduating with my NYU theater degree. I did cabaret open mics, stand-up comedy and at St. Mark’s bookstore, all I could see were anthologies by Gay & Lesbian (the Queer term was just being birthed) Asian American anthologies and while I never wrote poetry, I decided to write about my Asian American experiences growing up in Southern Maryland. The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, which stands adjacent to Tribes Gallery, had its Wednesday night open poetry slam. Steve Cannon and Bob Holman would gather before the Friday night poetry slams to workshop poems before performing at the Cafe. I believe Indigo, the official unofficial gay poet scorekeeper for Friday Night Poetry Slams, told me about the workshops Steve Cannon and Bob Holman held before the slams. This was my first time at Tribes being in the camaraderie of poets who appear in Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe anthology edited by Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman: Diane Burns, Jessica Hagedorn, Patricia Spears Jones, Paul Beatty, Willie Perdomo, Edwin Torres, to name a few. What was your first memory of Tribes and meeting Steve Cannon?

Chavisa Woods: You’re talking about The Stoop. Those workshops were literally held on the stoop of Tribes, at the 285 East 3rd Street space. They were open to anyone who wanted to attend. The theme was, “If it works on the stage, it should work on the page,” as Steve always said. The stoop informed the work of so many downtown slam poets when slam was big in NYC.

I heard a lot about The Stoop when I came to Tribes, but it was over by then. I came in 2003. I’d been living in a queer anarchist collective in Saint Louis called C.A.M.P. (Community Arts and Media Project). I’d moved to Saint Louis when I was 18, from a small, conservative farm town in Southern Illinois.

For someone like me, at that time, a queer, punk leftist from a working-class family; well one side is working class and one side has struggled with dire poverty for generations, Saint Louis cut two ways. I was able to find other queer leftists, many of whom also came from rural poverty, and we lived in a subcultural community, and supported each other in really innovative ways. I’ve never found another community like that, actually. But, at the same time, there was definitely a glass ceiling as far as what I would be able to achieve professionally or as an artist. Missouri is a southern, red state.

I was introduced to Steve by a poet I met in Chicago. I wanted to move to New York, but didn’t have any money, connections, job prospects, or anything but an old car and a cat. I came on a train for a week and met Steve. He told me he was looking for a live-in personal assistant, to help with everything Tribes related, and more. Because he was blind. He needed someone to read him the paper in the morning and work in the office and help with events and the magazine. I sat across the couch from him and talked to him for a few hours. He asked me everything about my life I could imagine anyone ever asking. He had me read him some of my poetry. He asked me to describe the art on the walls in detail. Then he told me I could live at Tribes for free as long as I needed, as long as I worked for him from nine to five every weekday and helped out as needed. And so I went back to Saint Louis, packed up my car, and drove it to East 3rd Street.

It felt like home. It always felt like home. What I’m saying here probably sounds strange in today’s world, and this wasn’t so long ago, just 2003, but that’s how it happened. I told him who I was and what I needed, and he told me who he was and what he needed—we introduced ourselves—and he invited me in. That’s how he was. RC: For those of us who were living the 1990s Friday Night Poetry Slam at The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, you would never forget Steve Cannon’s heckling, READ THE GODDAMN POEM! Can you tell me what Steve Cannon was like when he critiqued your writing?

CW: Oh wow. This is a really emotional question for me. A few weeks after he died, I finished a short story, and when it was done, I laid my head on my desk and cried, because I realized that for nearly twenty years, every single piece I finished, I would immediately read to Steve. Every piece. I didn’t even think about it until it was gone. It had become such a natural part of my process.

What was he like? It’s hard to put into words. It’s such an intimate thing. He was often the first person who read my stories and essays after I finished, which is when you’re most vulnerable, that first day you believe something is done, and therefore, good. I would read aloud to him, of course, because he’s blind, and when I read aloud to someone, I can feel them experiencing the piece. I knew without him telling me which parts worked for him and which didn’t. I could feel him responding while I read it. So, often, when I was done, he’d just say, “You know what I’m gonna say, don’t ya?” And I’d say, yeah, like “this one character isn’t flushed out,” or whatever, and he’d nod, and say, “exactly. You gotta fix that.”

He was a very clear editor. He was never shy about telling me when something didn’t work, so when he really loved a story, I knew it was actually good and he wasn’t just sparing me feelings. His honest criticism was one of the most valuable gifts he ever gave me.

Left: Chaivsa Woods

RC: What were some of his writing aesthetics & principles that you might have adopted?

CW: We’re very different writers. But when I was young, he drilled into my head, “SHOW! DON’T TELL!” Over and over again; “Show, don’t tell. Show, don't tell.” He would actually say it like that, just repeating the phrase when I finished a story when I first moved in with him, like he could chant the bad writing out of me. I thought it was a simple thing he was saying at first, but it really is the most difficult and the most important thing with fiction. It took me years to get a firm grip on it. He insisted I ground more in physical descriptions. He told me if the scene was set in a living room, that my readers should be able to smell the living room.

Steve was interested in including the grotesque and hyper-realistic aspects of humanity in his writing. In his famously dirty novel Groove, Bang, and Jive Around, there is a scene where a woman reaches into her pants when no one is looking and picks a dirty piece of toilet paper that’s clinging to her asshole, and then flicks it into the air. You read books and see movies that all claim to be realism, but very seldom does anyone take a shit, or masturbate or pick their nose. He notably included all that in his novel. It was a very deliberate choice. He had other mentees, of course, and the writer who was most influenced by that hyper-realistic philosophy was Jade Sharma. He was her mentor for many years as well. She died right after he did. Her book, Problems, which came out from Coffee House Press a few years ago, Steve read that as it was being written over the course of eight years, and you can see his influence on her writing in a big way. You should all read it. It’s a perfect book. She wrote one perfect book and died at 39, and a lot of us are still grieving. She followed Steve.

God, I could write pages and pages about what Steve taught me and what I learned about writing at Tribes, but I’ll just say this, read the authors he mentored, and you’ll see for yourself what he taught us. Above all, he encouraged us to find our own voices, and that really is the most important thing. Not being derivative, not trying to please the audience, or emulate what’s popular, but finding out what your own unique voice actually sounds like and what it needs to say, that is the journey every writer is on whether they know it or not. Steve made that clear to me from the beginning, for which I’m very grateful. I didn’t have to figure out what I was supposed to try to do before I started trying to do it.

RC: Which poets did you have a crush on?

CW: Ha! So you’ve heard about me then? I see. Well, I’m not going to tell you, but they already know who they are because I’ve never been shy about things like that. Poets are truly wonderful lovers! Let’s leave it there.

RC: Can you tell me your personal history of writing prior outside of your experiences with Gathering of the Tribes?

CW: Steve published my first book, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle or Kind when I was 27. I worked on the book for about three years with him as the main editor. It is a collection of short stories/a novella about a mother and daughter growing up in rural poverty, tracing both of their lives from childhood to adulthood. That book sold out within a few months. It was then picked up for a second print by The Unbearables imprint of Autonomedia Press.

My second book, a novel, The Albino Album was then picked up by a larger publisher, Seven Stories Press which aslo published my subsequent collections of short fiction Things To Do When You’re Goth in the Country, as well as my most recent memoir, 100 Times (A Memoir of Sexism).

Steve died the day the New York Times reviewed that book and that broke my heart because I didn’t get to tell him about it. In the hospital, he was still selling my books. I came to visit him and he somehow had many copies of my book (which again, was published by a totally different press by that time, Seven Stories Press). He had them on the nightstand by his bed and was strong-arming people who were visiting him in the hospital into buying them. This was just a couple of days before he passed away, so no one told him no. Everyone bought one. I mean, they had to. It was humbling and so sweet and also completely ridiculous.

He was a fierce advocate and mentor. I’ve never seen anything like it before. The things he did for you sometimes you feel like I don’t deserve this. Why are you doing this?

I have a contract with a great press now, and that is because of A Gathering of the Tribes. So, it’s hard to talk about my writing outside of Tribes completely, even though I have my own independent writing career.

Steve gave me a chance by publishing my first book. It was a chance that, as a queer writer coming from rural poverty, I don’t think I would have had access to so easily with any in the other institutions in New York City.

He gave me a chance to prove myself as an author, and when the book sold out, I got picked up by larger presses, and then a larger one.

That is the mission of A Gathering of the Tribes; to support traditionally underrepresented artists and writers.

Steve showed me what that really meant, what it looked like in real, human terms, and it changed my life. I know how important it is to continue to do the same for the writers who don’t see themselves represented by mainstream institutions coming up today.

RC: What was your wildest Gathering of the Tribes party moment ever? CW: Oh man. So, okay. I’d been living at Tribes about a year. I’d been working very hard on the Charlie Parker Festival. And sometimes Steve would do this thing with the young people at Tribes. As a bonus for hard work, he’d like, give you Tribes for a day, and see what you’d do with it if you were in charge. Like, he gave the Sarah Lawrence interns the gallery for a day and let them curate and install wherever they wanted and host an opening, when their intern semester ended, as thanks for their work.

He gave me Tribes for a day at the end of the Charlie Parker Festival. I was in my early twenties. He told me he’d give me a budget of a few thousand dollars, and that I could have the building, the garden, whatever I wanted, and that I should curate the event that closed out the festival that year.

At that time, I just really wanted a parade. I loved parades. I loved art parades, and New Orleans style second lines. I loved weird, avant-garde art parades. I told Steve I wanted to throw a parade, and he seemed delighted by that, and so I hired the Hungry March Band, and put out a press release about dressing up in costume, and celebrating the legacy of the Lower East Side, and whatnot. We invited some poets to kick things off with a reading outside of Tribes.

Also, there was this club that I went to all the time a few blocks away called The Apocalypse. One of the former owners of the Limelight opened it, and it definitely had that party-kid, punk glam, wild vibe. I told him I was going to be leading an art parade around the Lower East Side and wanted to end it at The Apocalypse and have the festival after party there. I told him I needed to reserve the whole club for the night. He said he would reserve it for me, but I guess he hadn’t actually believed me, because he only reserved a section of it. I showed up at his door around nine pm with about three hundred people, and his jaw literally dropped.

We’d led a parade all around the neighborhood, and the Lower East Side being what it is, half the neighborhood just came out and joined in the fun and followed us to the party. That’s one thing I love about parades, how they expand. People were dancing and the band was playing. Some people from the neighborhood grabbed their instruments and joined in. We took over the streets, an entire block and a half with no permit or anything, in complete ravelry.

One of the strangest parts about it was that somehow the parade ended up being led by a very large, nude man with a tiny penis and enormous testicles. He was some sort of performance artist, I believe. He probably weighed around 400 pounds, and he didn’t wear any clothing, except an arm band. He was very sweet, and he attended and it was sort of a natural progression that he be in the front of the parade, leading, so that’s the first thing people saw, this naked man and all of these costumed freaks and hula hoops flying in the air followed by the band and all.

But the strange part was, and you’re not going to believe this, but I can have it verified by others, when we got to the bar, well, the owner hadn’t reserved it for us, and there was an artist there doing a drink and sketch night, and reclining on a bench in the window was

Chavisa Woods with Steve Cannon, 2013

Girl in the museum, New York, USA © Eric Akoto

a second, very large, totally nude, bald man with a tiny penis and enormous testicles. The nude man from our parade and him immediately locked eyes, and everyone squealed like we were witnessing some long-fated meeting. They did not know one another. It was a total coincidence. They looked like tweedledee and tweedledum.

We all crammed into the club, hundreds of us, and partied all night like heathens. The two nude men became inseparable throughout the party and got a lot of attention, I might add, from the glam rock kids who were there. Someone even ripped their shirt and tied an arm band around the second one, so they matched. I remember, this glittered covered girl was flirting with them and her friend came up to her while she was talking to them and asked, ridiculously, “Oh, my god! Are they actually like totally naked,” and the girl giggled and told him, “No. They’re wearing armbands.”

Steve made me describe them to him over and over again, and it really made him laugh. He loved stuff like that. WHITNEY MUSEUM

RC: How does Gathering of the Tribes connect with The Whitney Biennial? Certainly, Tribes also showcased visual artists as well as writers. Is the connection based upon the artwork as well as the writers who were published by Tribe’s own Fly By Night press?

CW: The exhibition at the Whitney is a sort of meta-re-creation of the 285 East 3rd Street space. It showcases Tribes simultaneously as the artist, Steve Cannon’s life’s work, a collaborative project between hundreds of artists and writers over 30 years’ time, and a collection of archival materials including David Hammons’ red wall, Steve’s personal library, as well as the books and magazines published by Tribe’s Fly by Night Press, which add up to something much greater than the sum of their parts.

RC: Steve Cannon’s literary Rolodex (they were a ’90s thing) is impressive. One of the reasons I write poetry is because of an NYU production: for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Steve Cannon knew ntozake shange, Thulani Davis, Robbie McCauley all iconic writers and theater artists who spoke of their gender powers and Black identity. I knew that I could connect my birth as a poet to ntozake shange and Filipino writers Jessica Hagedorn and Cyn. Zarco. Steve Cannon gave me a historical womb to be birthed as a poet. I do think it is this history that made me feel safe and that I would be welcome. Can you tell us a little about where this hospitable and magnanimous space that is Gathering of the Tribes comes from?

CW: Tribes 285 East 3rd Street Salon was always open, literally 24/7, though I’m not sure it was hospitable. It was never a safe space. It was actually a space fertile with provocation, heated debate, potentially offensive statements and material awaiting you at every turn.

Steve was a multiculturalist. In some ways, Tribes was like the opposite of canceled culture. He rarely kicked anyone out for anything, even when I sometimes thought he should have. Even if he did kick someone out, they could still return the next day. I don’t think he ever 86-ed anyone.

This is complicated to talk about. He did something so special with that space. He really believed diversity could change the world. He felt that people who had experiences of oppression in this society were stronger together, and that in order to work together, we really had to deal with each other.

When I first moved in with him, he asked me what I was reading. I gave him the list and he asked me, “Why are you only reading white people?” He said, “You’re only reading white, gay authors, like you.” I was 21, coming from the rural Midwest and South, and hadn’t really thought about it before, but as soon as he said it, I knew it was true. He gave me a list of authors to read, and I did. He expanded me intellectually because of that. He didn’t cancel people for their xenophobia, conscious or unconscious, but he also wouldn’t let it stand. He confronted it. We confronted each other.

I remember, a friend of his was sitting at dinner with us and saying some really homophobic things, specifically about lesbians, and he said, “Why don’t you ask Chavisa how she feels about what you just said.” He made me confront the man. We argued. He bristled and left in a bad mood, but a few days later, when he came back to Tribes, he apologized to me and told me he thought about what I’d said and had never talked to a gay woman about those types of things before. It’s different when you are in a space with a human being, looking right at them, saying “Your bigotry hurts me,” than when

you’re calling someone out online, in text, so separately.

That wasn’t the main goal of Tribes. The Tribes Salon was, above all, an intellectual space. It was a creative, experimental space that allowed for some of the most avant garde artists to play however they chose. But I will say, the multiculturalism that was foundational to the mission when it was founded in the ’90s did provide a bit of a different template for dealing with the politics of intersecting marginalized identities than much of what we see today, even though today, it gets more lip survive than it did back then. I personally prefer Steve’s way. There was more of a humanity to it.

AESTHETICS AND FORMS

RC: I’m at the MLK library in Washington, DC, and outside my study room is an anthology published in 1968, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American writing edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal and inside the book are poems by David Henderson who is a Gathering of the Tribes board member with me. I am impressed at the power and legacy of an anthology and its ability to freeze a moment in time.

Describe some of the range of books that Fly by Night has published and what you are looking to publish in the future.

CW: Fly by Night press specifically publishes debut books and emerging diverse authors of diversity. For traditionally under-represented authors, those first and second books are so pivotal in getting their foot in the door of the literary world. About 89% of books published in the U.S. are written by white authors.

That’s unacceptable. All authors of color published only account for about 11% of books that get published each year. Then when you talk about female authors of color, it’s smaller. Queer authors of color, smaller still. And even the white authors who are getting published, the majority of them are straight cis people from affluent backgrounds. Representation matters. It matters for the working writers who deserve to be given a chance to fund their audience. It matters for the readers who have never seen themselves in the pages of a book.

I would like to start up Fly by Night Press again, and I am currently seeking additional funding to do so. But the A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine Online brings in more than 60,000 unique readers each year, and also provides financial incentives to many of the diverse writers published on our site. We have some amazing fiction, features, and poetry up right now. Give it a read at tribes.org.

RC: How can an emerging artist writer find their way to Tribes and say I am part of this. In what ways can we sustain and continue Steve Cannon’s legacy through A Gathering of the Tribes?

CW: A Gathering of the Tribes has many current programs that build on the original mission. Tribes is committed to serving traditionally under-represented artists and writers of diversity, amplifying the emerging and established revolutionary voices of our time.

Right now, A Gathering of the Tribes Magazine Online employs many diverse artists and writers, connects our published authors to a wide audience, and provides stipends for creation and publication of new prose. Our reviews specifically focus on increasing visibility of books by traditionally under-represented authors as well. Submission guidelines can be found on our website.

Tribes Spotlight Series is a virtual reading series that occurs five times a year, featuring diverse authors, connecting them to wider audiences and also providing financial stipends to our readers. Our limited, in-person pop-up events, like the Marathon Reading at the Whitney Biennial, function with the same goals.

This summer, we will be publishing the first print issue of Tribes Magazine since Steve left us. Tribes #16: The Black Lives Matter Issue, edited by Ishmael Reed and Danny Simmons, with assistant editor Margaret Porter-Troupe, is coming out very soon, so stay tuned for that!

And recently, Tribes launched a fiscal sponsorship program for individual artists and artist groups. The low-threshold entry design of the application process and qualifications is specifically geared to traditionally under-represented artists and writers of diversity. You can apply at the Tribes website.

We are of course looking to increase our offerings of financial incentives and resource supports. I took over as Executive Director in April of 2020. It has been difficult re-starting our programs during a pandemic, to say the least. I am deeply grateful to all of our major donors, including, of course, David Hammons, the donors who support CoSA, of which Tribes is a member, Poets and Writers, The Amazon Literary Partnership, the Christopher and David Murray Fund of Stonewall Community Foundation, and which just today, awarded us additional funding.

I would be remiss if I didn’t pass the hat. Steve always made sure I passed the hat at the end of everything we did. If you believe in our mission and the artists we serve, of course we would love for you to donate, either directly, via our GoFundMe Campaign, by purchasing an artist-designed T-shirt, and even just sending it via Venmo.

We’re working hard to keep his legacy alive and help ensure a diversity of voices are able to find representation in the arts. ●