Torn Screens by Abe Louise Young My mother is home with one breast, almost sleep-walking. Three decades of mercury, burning batteries, falling ash & all the plastic mysteries compacted into garbage bags– Trash incinerators downriver are still stitching torn stockings of smoke to the skyline, long legs of fire. A boat’s a hat on house;...
Queer Youth Advice for Educators: How to Respect and Protect Your Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Teenagers, by Abe Louise Young. Buy a hard copy or read a free download of the full collection of youth voices. This compilation of urgent youth voices is a critical reminder that sometimes the most important thing an adult ally can do is listen. Eliza...
Since 2010 I’ve offered a high-energy creative writing workshop circle for psychologists and psychotherapists. Memoir, poetry, fiction, playwriting and improvisation, with a focus on metaphor, symbol, and story. Meets biweekly, currently full at 6 members.
FORGET MAKING YOUR BED (for Emily Joan) Forget making your bed. Make your desk instead. Let your bed sheets lie rumpled on the floor with pillows underneath them like elephants in the bellies of snakes, with stuffed animals and a water glass tipped over on top. Forget the bed. Put the pages of your desk...
Our Lady, a poem by Abe Louise Young (Listen to this poem at Trivia.) La Virgen de Guadalupe flares up huge on the concrete block / wall of the El Milagro Tortilla factory / across from Liquor Depot and King...
Are there any qualities standard to liberation? Each book on the syllabus. How do I make rape bear fruit, little bear? The brain that contains the problem also contains the solution. We are in need of a worldwide Sabbath, a moment of absolute rest. Good night, little one. Dream me a forest...
Instructions on Softening Dream an envelope of earth, and fill it with blue morning glory seeds. Seeds need tenderness and a message of truth before they wake up. Weed a short section of childhood memory, plant bulbs that bloom in winter. Practice burning faces into your brain like names on a leather purse. Feed a...
This magical festival organized by my friends and I brings luminaries to the corn fields of Texas, where an odd genius has created a 20-acre artist’s retreat center complete with Roman follies, Victorian chapels, and Shakespeare’s herb garden. This year we’ll have Reginald Gibbons, Naomi Shihab Nye, Pattiann Rogers, and many other renowned voices. I’ll...
Published first in The Nation In the first few days after BP’s Deepwater Horizon wellhead exploded, spewing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words “Inmate Labor” printed in large red block letters. Coastal residents, many of whom had...
How can public school teachers best support LGBT Youth in elementary, middle, and high school? Join Abe Louise Young at National Louis University’s Educational Psychology Dept, College of Education, Chicago, IL for classroom lectures on Thursday, October 20, 2011 and Monday, October 24, 2011.
I’m facilitating two oral history workshops at Northwestern this week. Hands-On Oral History Practicum, October 27, 5:30 -8:00 pm. and Activist Oral History: Katrina as a Field, October 29, 1:30 – 3:30 pm. They will be held at the Program in African Studies, 620 Library Place, Evanston, IL, as part of the Oral Performance & Social Action...
The Ethics of Poetic Appropriation: Voices of Hurricane Katrina, Part 1 by Abe Louise Young (Published at the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet) When I launched Alive in Truth: The New Orleans Disaster Oral History and Memory Project in the week after Hurricane Katrina hit, my goal was to help restore authorship and narrative control to people who...
