Interview by Aislinn Pulley

World renown poet, author, and educator, Tara Betts, released her first collection of poems, "Arc & Hue" by the Willow Books imprint of Aquarius Press, September of 2009. Tara's debut collection of poetry explores themes of love,gender, identity, the body, culture and joy.  While exploring issues of domestic violence, memory, Jena 6, music and birth, Tara leads the reader on a journey absorbing imagery of literary lyricism replete with wit, reflection, sensation and rhythm. 

I first met Tara while a member of the youth performance ensemble Edges, when she was interviewing the group for a college radio show. In the tradition of serendipitous happenstance, I now my find myself holding a literary microphone  interviewing her.

I first would like to ask you to talk about your relationship/history with Insight Arts.
I started volunteering with IA in the mid-1990s, maybe ’94-96, somewhere in that time-frame when I was still in undergrad at Loyola University, I helped outwith a few events and recorded and edited footage for a radio show pilot featuring Rogers Park youth, especially from IA. This is how I met Craig, Anita Alcantara, Kim, Anita Dacanay, Nicole Garneau, and you, Aislinn Pulley! I also got to know karen g. williams and Davida Ingram better by working with these bold, intelligent women.

In addition to Insight Arts, I was very active in writing for The Loyola Phoenix. I was at my part-time library job, where I was reading random books and The Chronicle of Higher Education, an academic journal directed more toward faculty and staff than undergraduates.  I was very intrigued with what we could do as tuition-paying students and community-minded young adults to shape university and public policy around a number of issues. One of the items that I noticed in The Chronicle mentioned that 501c3 organizations were eligible to hire college students who received work-study as part of their financial aid.IA is a 501c3 organization, so I wrote an editorial to urge students and the university to take advantage of this policy, and many students did. A few ended up at IA.

Craig and other people at Insight Arts were very encouraging, and I got to collaborate with events such as the Annual Women’s Performance Jam. I should have some flyers still from these various events. When I still lived in Chicago, I felt honored to share in the running and curating an all-women’s open mic and performance space called Women Out Loud at various venues in Wicker Park. The series ended in 2004. In 2008, Lani Montreal, one of the former Women Out Loud features who is on staff at IA, wrote to me and asked me and the other founders of the series if they could reprise the concept of the show, which was to offer a consistent paid feature in the Chicago area for women writers and performers.In 2009, I featured at Women Out Loud where I read from my book Arc &Hue.

How did you first discover your passion for writing?
I think my passion is derived from me feeling like writing is the one thing I feel I’m supposed to do, but the spark that started it was reading and wanting to find a place for the story of people that I knew or that I felt were missing from the stories that I was taught and the stories that are forced upon me and lots of other people. I started writing around the age of 12 because of this.

Please explain what you believe are the things necessary to sustain one's creative process.
To sustain one’s creative process, you have to keep feeding your mind. Not just by being healthy through nutrition and physical exercise, but by reading, looking at art, and gathering information. You have to learn about the craft, devices, and history of your art form to learn what’s been done before and what you want to do differently. I’ve often told people, how can you write a sentence when you haven't read one? How can you play saxophone if you don’t listen to Coltrane? How can you paint if you haven’t studied Van Gogh or Georgia O’Keefe?

What are some key elements essential to encourage young people's literary creativity?
I’ve tried to be a good listener and understand where my students are or have been. I tap a variety of influences and share parts of my own process. Sometimes, I have them sketch out their ideas, listen to music, or exchange stories in our sessions together. I share writing that offer models of their experiences or qualities that they’d like to use in their own writing, but I do try to get them to see writing as a practice and a discipline, even if you learn to love it, like playing basketball, playing piano, or rhyming in cipher. Practice and learning will make you better at any art. Pedagogy-wise, I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and June Jordan’s Poetry For the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. In short, what you teach doesn’t mean much if people cannot talk about their experiences and their needs. If they can use a metaphor or ethos, logos, and pathos to make their argument,then it helps them make better writing and address whatever is urgent or pertinent in their lives. 

What barriers exist that you find challenge some of the youth you have worked with in developing their creative voice?
I’ve found often that I find myself “unteaching” what other people have taught as the way to learn. Part of this is a result of standardized testing that limits strategies that deviate from test preparation. I’ve been in classrooms where college students don’t even know how to speak to each other because they are trying to find the “right answer” for a creative writing assignment. On the other hand, there is a lot of self-criticism and self-censoring. People say, “I can’t write.” or I can’t write poetry.” Inevitably, these kinds of statement unravel into “My teacher said” or “My mom said” or someone else telling them it wasn’t important or just something they couldn’t do. I try to “unteach” that censoring, offer encouragement and constructive criticism, and point out the victories, even if they’re small ones. So many people rarely get that.

How important is study in your creative process?
I am always reading and looking at other writers. I try to different methods of writing, read about all kinds of topics, talk to different circles of people, watching movies, listening to music, travel. All of this activity feeds the writing. I’m also trying to do things that have nothing to do with writing, like experiment with cooking, going back to yoga. I think if you keep learning throughout your entire life, you can keep doing other things. You have to keep your mind active. Study is extremely important,whether you earn a degree for it or not. I went to college and graduate school,but those were not the only places where I learned important lessons.

What is your relationship with social justice?
I’ve been engaged with a number of issues that relate directly to issues of social justice,including reproductive rights, countering violence against women, literacy, the prison industrial complex, and cases of political prisoners like Mumia AbuJamal, Fred Hampton Jr. and Sundiata Acoli. When I lived in Chicago, I was involved with the campaign for increasing the number of jobs for youth in summer job programs. At that point, young people made up the majority of the population in Chicago. For me, I’ve felt that it’s important that people aren’t mistreated and they have ways to get their basic needs met. There’s so much wealth here, and it is benefiting an increasingly smaller number of people. I think I’ve always had an issue with bullies, in one form or another.

With the publication of your first book, and subsequent tour, what are some of the most impressive experiences and lessons you have had thus far?
Since Arc &Hue was released in September 2009, I have done about 35 readings in 10 cities. The most important lesson I’ve learned from this whole experience was not expecting my publisher to put the book in people’s hands. Although I am happy with my press, and I’m proud that my work is on a press that’s giving writers of color another outlet, I knew that they didn’t know my audience the way I did, so I have been very hands-on in terms of cover design, event organizing, promotion pieces like postcards, radio spots,and other details that get the book out into the world. It has been a lot of work to coordinate the travel and still teach, but it is doable, especially if it’s planned out in phases, like “This is the month I focus on contacting people and updating my website. Next month, I focus on updating the mailing list, until you complete your tasks before the deadline of your book being printed and available for sale. It’s not romantic, but I do really believe in being self-sufficient when artists still don’t earn a truly livable wage from their art.

What artists/theorists/revolutionaries/writers have influenced you and why?
Toni Cade Bambara has been a big influence on my thinking in recent years. I keep going back to her book of essays Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions for motivation, insight, and clarity. Her fiction is excellent too. Most people who know me know I’ve drawn a lot of inspiration from Patricia Smith, Lucille Clifton, Pablo Neruda, Marilyn Nelson, Anne Waldman and many others. Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Yuri Kochiyama, the entire INCITE movement, all of this activity has inspired me in terms of pairing art with critical thinking and direct action. Just because I know what the word “hegemony” means does not mean that I don’t know people need to be able keep their lights on, how to read a bill, or stay safe and healthy. In terms of theorists and literary criticism, I’ve been meaning to read Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Henry Louis Gates, Houston Baker, Hazel Carby, Patricia Hill-Collins, and Paul Gilroy. I’ve read bell hooks, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Augusto Boal, Paulo Friere, and Helene Cixous. These are all vague names to most people. I find myself having a longer list of things to read than those that I have read. I want to keep reading and finding new influences, not just for enjoyment or knowledge or teaching material, but to connect these thinkers and creators in an expanding web of history, literature and politics.

Please create a quick poem with the following words: youth, insight, praxis, class, liberation.

A Sense of Purpose
for Insight Arts

Gauge the mint of youth
free from price tags. Reach
into experience stacking
tablets of history,ancient
and electronic. Find books

that have been burned
muddied by crushing boot
or left in neglected corners.
Unearth the insight to build
undiffused light linking new

solutions that shun puzzles
of well-placed greed. Class
could be the place where
the choruses of plants rise,
where numbers and words

translate into food and air,
unlike the red F,detention,
suspension, just enough
to avoid  buzzing cell doors,
or enough to be behind them.

When crushed coils of ringing
epithets spiked with thorns
are still too faraway, praxis
will begin in people’s hands
with no fumes from dreams.

Patch against holes seeping
cold into shoulders. There is
a need for firm ribs unfolding
a new umbrella, a dry shelter
arching to spell out liberation

To discovermore about Tara Betts, please visit her website.  You may purchase a copy of "Arc & Hue" by visiting Amazon  as well as Willow Books.