'Outlaw Poet' Alan Kaufman was a featured participant at opening of Greektown reading series at the Acropolis Restaurant this week.
IN THE ‘VOICE’ OF HER MOTHER
‘The Wire’ writer Rafael Alvarez
and poet Dean Bartoli Smith
are featured participants
By Alan Z. Forman
“There’s something I have to tell you,” the 18-year-old Israeli soldier mumbled, fidgeting nervously as she spoke to the father who hadn’t raised her but with whom she’d had a loving relationship since the age of nine.
“I’m a lesbian.”
“Well thank God!” answered her father. “I was afraid you were going to tell me you had an incurable disease or something.”
That was five years ago. The woman was the only offspring of the acclaimed American memoirist, poet and novelist Alan Kaufman, who was in Charm City last week to help kick off a monthly series of literary readings organized by Baltimore writer Rafael Alvarez in association with the Greektown Community Development Corporation (GCDC).
The readings are scheduled to take place in Greektown — the first, on Thursday night, was at the Acropolis Restaurant on Eastern Avenue at Oldham Street — and will feature local writers, poets and musicians, according to Jason Filippou, executive director of the GCDC, who told Voice of Baltimore “the idea is to welcome people to the Greektown neighborhood and to showcase local talent.”
Locations for the readings will “rotate” among different Greek restaurants, Filippou said, culminating in what the organization hopes will become its home in the Plateia, in the 700 block of Ponca Street, a community/cultural venue being constructed by St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and featuring an outdoor mini-amphitheater.
“I can live anywhere in the world,” Alvarez told the large audience that attended the opening reading at the Acropolis. “But I choose to live here, I have an affinity for this neighborhood,” he said.
WRITING FOR ‘THE WIRE’
He described living in Los Angeles for five years while he was writing teleplays for “The Wire,” the acclaimed TV series created and produced by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon.
L.A. was okay, Alvarez said, but it was good to get back to Baltimore, to the comfort of a home on South Macon Street that was owned by his grandparents and where he had grown up.
Alvarez read one of his short stories, “Just Another Band from L.A.” and introduced the master of ceremonies for the event — another local writer and poet, Dean Bartoli Smith, who read a poem he had written especially for the opening, then introduced the remaining two guest readers, Kaufman and former Greektown resident Betsy Boyd.
Baltimore novelist Betsy Boyd read from her work in progress, ‘Anatomy of My Mother,’ a novella written in her ‘mother's voice,’ Thursday night in Greektown.
‘ALL THE POVERTY’
She observed that Baltimore has “a sad side, because of all the poverty,” but that “the arts community here brings a lot of vitality — and promise — to the city.”
Boyd, who won a coveted Pushcart Prize in 2009 for her short story, “Scarecrow,” read from a work in progress, “a novella in my mother’s voice,” she explained, a work of fiction based on sayings and observations of her mother.
She regaled the Greektown audience by mimicking her parent’s voice as she read passages illustrating how her mother always supported her no matter what:
“On the Bag Boy at Kroger: He’s in love with you!
“On the New Boy at Sunday School: He’s in love with you!
“On Alex Perkins Who Dumped Me in Ninth Grade: G-A-Y!”
Her mother is a “one-of-a-kind gal from Jackson, Miss.,” Boyd told the Voice in an email following the reading. “Born in 1933, she sees the world quite differently from anyone I know. Her good (and wild) advice lives inside my brain and body, and I love the challenge of writing in her Southern voice.
“That’s what I’ve tried to do in my ‘Anatomy of My Mother’ manuscript.”
WRITING FICTION IN FRANCE
Boyd has also received an Elliot Coleman Fellowship in fiction writing and a James A. Michener Fellowship in screenwriting. As an Alfred and Trafford Klots artist-in-residence last summer, she spent a month writing fiction in Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany (France).
And she is the 2010 recipient of an Individual Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council.
She moved from Greektown to Roland Park in 2010 and teaches writing at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) while serving as the senior editor of BaltimoreFishbowl.com, an online publication that “reports the fun, factual and sometimes controversial scoop on local schools, real estate, money and power, culture, lifestyle and community.”
Boyd has also taught writing at Johns Hopkins University.
Rafael Alvarez organized a monthly series of readings in association with the Greektown Community Development Corporation (GCDC) which began last week. (VoB File Photo/Edwin Remsberg)
As described by Alvarez, Kaufman’s new memoir, Drunken Angel (published by Viva Editions of Cleis Press), is “a long and somewhat sordid story — beatings, chronic intoxication, homelessness and violence — sprinkled with what some say is the true definition of a miracle: unexpected grace given to an unlikely prospect.”
EDITED MANY ANTHOLOGIES
Kaufman has also edited many anthologies, most notably The Outlaw Bible of American Literature, which was favorably reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review in 2005. His anthology, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, was published in 2006.
The son of a French Holocaust survivor, he was born and raised in the Bronx some 60 years ago, moved to Israel and served in the Israeli defense forces in the late 1970s, and relocated to San Francisco in 1990.
His well-received coming-of-age novel, Jew Boy, is described by Amazon.com as telling “the story of a young boy growing up in the complex shadow of his mother’s survival of the Holocaust [who] struggles to comprehend what it means to be Jewish as he deals with the demons haunting his mother and attempts to escape his wretched home life by devoting himself to high school football.
“He eventually hitchhikes across the country, coming face-to-face with the very phantoms he has fled.”
In the mid-1980s Kaufman attended City College of New York, where he studied with Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22; Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange; and Holocaust survivor/Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, he told the Voice.
He described the “hallowed halls of CCNY” as being filled in those days with “passionate discourse and gifted writers.”
WAS ‘HEAVILY ALCOHOLIC’
He was “heavily alcoholic” until 21 years ago, he said, and described for the Greektown crowd how he woke up one morning in an alcoholic stupor, turned to the “very beautiful blonde-haired woman lying in the bed next to me, and asked, ‘Who the hell are you?’ and she answered, ‘Your wife’!” thereupon discovering that he had gotten married “during a blackout.”
Long divorced, Kaufman describes his relationship with his daughter Isabella in Drunken Angel, for which he is currently on an Eastern United States book tour.
He said she was quite surprised to discover that he was unconcerned about her sexual orientation, having expected him to be shocked, but delighted that he was “down with it.”
This is his “first time in Baltimore,” he told VoB, having been invited to Greektown by Alvarez, but had to return to New York to continue his book tour following the reading.
He said however he “hope[s] to come back to Baltimore again” when he has more time to see the city.
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
