Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot; Graphic design: Chris Ware

In Chicago, a glimmer of the world that ought to be, in our midst: Elementary-age kids chatter, laugh, and hunch over their latest writing projects, jotting down what they know about superheroes. Tutors admire their writing or ask prodding questions. My Morning Jacket plays in the background. Then, the kids circle on a carpet and do some very painless literary analysis. They deconstruct a genre with giggles and exclamations, eager to contribute, since the genre happens to be superhero tales. Once they’ve grasped the basic elements of the genre – sidekicks, villains, fatal flaws – they’re ready to create their own characters. Some are gleefully gross (these are elementary school kids, after all), like a boy named Antonio’s “Armpit Hair Man,” who swings to the rescue from (yup. cringe.you guessed it) his armpit hair.

“We’re academic, but we’re also fun and academic,” says 826 CHI‘s Executive Director, Mara O’Brien, whose enthusiasm and welcoming presence shape this chapter of the 826 National writing and tutoring centers. O’Brien greets each Elementary Writing Camp participant, calling out, “Hello, Sweet Jocelyn!” or “Welcome, my friend!” She believes that 826 CHI’s mission is not just to improve students’ language skills, but also to introduce them to a community of adults who care about them.

At this tutoring center, caring means encouraging creativity, and that usually means thinking like a kid. “We try to trick them into writing,” O’Brien admits. O’Brien once had elementary students write narratives about imaginary vacations – reminiscent of Magic School Bus adventures – through space, inside the human body, or through Harry Potter’s world. O’Brien says that this subject matter inspired elementary kids to write one and a half pages and to tell their parents they didn’t want to leave yet – they were still writing.

The world 826 CHI creates might not otherwiseexist for Chicago students.Presently, says a June 2009 report from the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, researched by the University of Illinois at Chicago, about half of the students who attend Chicago public schools drop out or fail to graduate on time. Just yesterday, I listened as a mother interviewed on NPR’s All Things Considered described Chicago’s selective enrollment schools as a “lifeboat” for students, implying how rough the ordinary school experience is. CPS has long been a troubled system, but it looks as if the state’s budget crisis will worsen its problems: the state board of education cut its budget by $180 million and slashed foreign language, arts, and agricultural programs.

Knowing the arts could be cut, three Americorps volunteers have been bringing West Garfield Park middle school boys to 826 CHI’s summer comics writing workshop. Yara Shadid, Gretchen Oorthuys, and Rachel Bernkopf marvel that the West Garfield Park kids are so creative, drawing on every flat surface and singing their own rap songs. Yet “their in-school time is very strict and regimented,” says Bernkopf. When the arts are cut in public schools, character development, originality, and the feeling of membership in the school all suffer, say the Americorps volunteers. Students will believe creativity has nothing to do with their future success.

Near where the kids circled to deconstruct superhero tales, a Chicago map shows the 157 schools that 826 CHI serves. This doesn’t just mean that kids from 157 schools are tutored at 826 CHI. It also means that teachers plan field trips to the center and that 826 CHI sends volunteers to Chicago public schools to provide extra one-on-one help. “We want to help area teachers get their students excited about writing,” says their website.

Photo: Rebecca Tirrell Talbot
Store design: Chris Ware and Patrick Shaffner

Tutors’ help is especially valuable because if any place can remove the perception that creativity is unimportant, it’s this place. After all, 826 National was begun by Dave Eggers, author of six books including What is the What and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and founder of McSweeney’s independent publishing house, which publishes McSweeney’s literary magazine, The Believer magazine, and Wholphin short-film DVDs.

At Chicago’s chapter, the advisory board reads like a who’s who of the local literary scene: Roger Ebert, Alex Kotlowitz, Audrey Niffeneger, Joe Meno, and many other well-known authors. These are people who’ve made their living being creative, and this is what their participation is about. For older kids, having contact with published authors who care about them must seem almost imaginary – as unreal as a superhero world. But this is the world that 826 CHI is able to create for students, and it is a reinforcing experience for would-be authors.

These connections to published authors also pave the way for young writers to see their own work in print.

Right in Front of Us is one recent example. Published in 2008, it was written entirely by CPS ninth-graders and edited by Alex Kotlowitz, author of There are No Children Here, Never a City So Real, and others. Reading the introduction, it’s easy to see Kotlowitz’s respect for these kids. “I picked up these stories one night,” wrote Kotlowitz, “sat down on my living room couch and didn’t rise until I was finished. I don’t know that I’ve read anything quite like this before.”

826 CHI keeps publishing student work. Most recently, 826 CHI published the first volume of their compendium, featuring work from students ranging from age 6 to 18. In 2007, 200 second through sixth graders wrote a hilarious guide to Chicago called A Sunday Afternoon Hotdog Meal. Publishing student work is an essential aspect of 826 National – which has also published the 826 Quarterly and sought student input for the Best American Non-required Reading anthologies.

At 826 CHI, kids join a circle where the arts have been crucial to success. Mara O’Brien says this shows the reality of what it is like to survive as a writer. Young writers see that even professional writers work many jobs to support themselves. Though earning success by your wits is hard work, 826 CHI is incredibly hip, and above all, the staff create an environment where it is cool to be academic.

Consider, for instance, that from the street, this doesn’t look like a tutoring center at all. Instead, the front of 826 CHI is The Boring Store, Chicago’s finest purveyor of secret agent supplies. When students come for tutoring, they pass through a portal that looks more like an art gallery than a store and sells such tongue-in-cheek items as a dropper-and-bottle called “Eve’s Dropper.”

The store has proved a good idea for many reasons. Not only does it sell quirky items and 826 National’s books, it takes away any stigma kids might feel about going to a “tutoring center.” It also brings in foot traffic. People wouldn’t walk off the street into “the place with all the tables,” says O’Brien, but they do come to The Boring Store, and this increases people’s familiarity with 826 CHI.

Though it’s been a benefit, Eggers didn’t plan it this way when he started 826 National. He simply wanted to start a tutoring center, but when he found the perfect place in the San Francisco Bay Area, the city told him, “That’s not zoned for tutoring; it’s zoned for retail.” As O’Brien tells it, Eggers replied, “Fine! I’m opening a pirate store.” And thus, Eggers began selling a whole lot of lard and tutoring centers came to be tucked into the backs of stores that sold anything you’d ever need for Space Travel, Bigfoot Research, Time Travel, or – of course – your secret job moonlighting as a superhero.

Places where creativity is free, rolicking, and communal may always be rare. But one such place exists at the corner of Milwaukee and Paulina here in Chicago, and it stands as a reminder of what ought to be – and a testimony to what can be.

Two hundred people fill a sparsely furnished sanctuary, singing at the top of their lungs. They are untrained singers with plenty of vocal eccentricities. No instruments give the right key or take the edge off the voices’ peculiarities. Stumbling upon a scenario like this would make many people flee for the exits. And, knowing that the lead singer of Chicago-based indie band Cains & Abels had grown up in this tradition, I thought of the torturous a capella as an experience he would have had to overcome to get on with his musical life. Far from it, he told me. David Sampson, Cains & Abels’ front man, considers the unaccompanied hymn-singing foundational to his music making. In fact, these experiences have woven the ethos and sound of Call Me Up, Cains & Abels’ first full-length album.

Sampson grew up Plymouth Brethren. For this denomination, a capella singing was a symbol of the way members craved direct, simple communion with God. “You could sing your head off,” Sampson recalls. You were purely accepted and simply free to participate. “Obviously, sometimes it could get weird, with nobody in a church who officially knew anything about music. We could end up singing really really slow, or sometimes we could lose pitch at every verse and end up singing in a different key. Overall, though, I think the way we sang was very honest and direct,” he reflects.

“I actually like to think about it as kind of punk rock. Like Beat Happening. You should have heard how some of these people sang. This one old guy would start all of the singing. Someone would suggest a hymn to sing, and then he would start it off. Sometimes nobody knew the tunes, so he would just make something up on the spot. It was amazing. He had a loud voice. You could hear it out in the parking lot. If a note was too high for him to hit, he would go for it anyway.”

The authenticity of those voices is still in David Sampson’s head when he makes music. “I remember being young and figuring out from those people how to use my voice in that way,” he says, adding that the Brethren style influences the harmonies he seeks. Authenticity is important to the whole band – they proudly use words like “pained” and “raw” when they describe the music, and their MySpace page proclaims, “We are trying to make the most real and honest music we can.”

Josh Ippel
Photo: David Sampson
 

Call Me Up doesn’t sound much like church music – it is layered, folk-infused rock music with lots of reverb and instrumental solos (think Neil Young & Crazy Horse).Nevertheless, the honesty and simplicity of the Brethren style are evident lyrically and musically throughout Call Me Up.

The album builds to moments where sound practically swallows you. Jonathan Dawe and Michelle Vondiziano’s background vocals are soothing and pretty, like a lullaby from another room, and Josh Ippel’s guitar is eerie, ringing thick with distortion.These blend with Vondiziano’s cello and keys, the primal sound of Dawe’s drums, and Sampson’s bass to form lush, engulfing instrumentation.It feels oddly similar to how Sampson describes church conferences as a kid, where a thousand people filled a rented high school auditorium and sang hymns a capella.”The silence in the moment right after the last note was an amazing moment. It was like the trough of a wave. You could hear a creaking chair in the corner in a place where a second earlier, you couldn’t even talk to your neighbor.”

Sampson’s voice rides on these waves of backing vocals and instrumentation, a voice that hits the emotions of the song perfectly, without requiring itself to hit a perfect pitch.(Of course, isn’t this what the folk tradition is all about? It reminds me of when Bob Dylan goes all out on The Rolling Thunder Revue, or when Will Oldham sings “Madeleine-Mary.”) “I’m not trying to sing in a traditionally beautiful way,” says Sampson. “I hope that the way I’m singing now has the most in common with the voice I used when I was five to sing the alphabet.”The result is a “super-acquired taste,” Sampson admits, but it has power to grab its listeners.Jonathan Dawe confesses to singing the tunes in his head before realizing they’re Cains & Abels songs. “It’s got it’s own charm,” he says.

Jonathan Dawe
Photo: David Sampson
 

Seeking to make honest music, Cains & Abels embrace both harshness and beauty.Visceral, image-driven lyrics, reminiscent of Neutral Milk Hotel’s physicality, combine with memorable melodies. Michelle Vondiziano says she often forgets she’s harmonizing to disturbing lyrics, because she is so focused on creating beautiful harmonies.

Take these lyrics from “Metal in my Mouth”:

I shoved my hand into a crack in the road

And let cars and trucks roll over my body

I tore a piece of skin off of my finger tip

And gave it to a squirrel to take to her.

Or this imagery from “Killed By Birds”:

For the stone to be thrown

For the bone to be lodged in my soft neck

Each time I pull back the skin

I find the feathers within…

Killed, killed by birds

Killed killed by lady birds

If the lyrics seem violent, it is because the band is trying to communicate something about intimacy. Intimacy is the Rosetta Stone for this album, making lyrics like “lay a hand on my hand” and “I’d dive into a fire if it lit up the phone in my pocket” come together into what Sampson describes as “a big fat universal plea.”

Reaching out, to anyone at all, is a theme throughout Call Me Up. The startling lyric about tearing off skin is actually about prayer, about just wanting to be able to give a piece of yourself to God and know that it got there.The album’s title is also a reference to intimacy.”Call Me Up” refers to what Sampson wanted most in 2006, when a relationship was ending. “I wanted to send that to the universe.”

There are times in the album when pain is quenched, when an answer comes:

And you can never be alone

You are loved by me

And I cling to your heart

I cling to your heart.

Michelle Vondiziano
Photo: David Sampson
 

Interestingly, Vondiziano singles out this song, “Never Be Alone,” as one of the album’s most musically pained and raw. This makes sense, because harshness and beauty become a push and pull within Call Me Up, and the album reverberates between extremes.The dichotomies are not by accident, because even the band’s name describes a dichotomy.It describes the band’s belief that each person is literally a Cain and an Abel simultaneously: both a cruel, rebellious person and a kind, generous person.

All along the spectrum, beauty slips in. It’s a haunting, engulfing beauty that, because it grows from painful authenticity, avoids anything saccharine. Interestingly, that’s just what happened in Brethren church services, too. “They weren’t bringing beauty to the services in an intentional way,” says Sampson, “but beauty was able to slip in through the cracks.”

Because they have pursued authenticity and achieved a rare kind of beauty, Cains & Abels’ Call Me Up is well worth checking out.Call Me Up is available May 19 through iTunes, States Rights Records, and Southern Records.

Photo: Wally Gobetz.

“Shoot,” I mutter, looking at the clock on my computer. It’s 4:30 p.m. in Oak Park, Illinois where I’ve just finished teaching, and that slates me for a 5:15 transfer to the Brown Line train in the Chicago Loop. Which means I won’t get a seat. Which means I’ll be shoved into a space more precariously crammed than my closet. Which means that I will be practically hugging about five other commuters for 20 minutes, saying “sorry” at least a half-dozen times as I lurch into them on our journey. I often wonder why people willingly submit to conditions that might otherwise be a human rights violation.

I guess you’d have to be a sicko to say you liked being so close to other people, but I do have to wonder why I find it quite so obnoxious and awkward. I mean, on other occasions, wouldn’t I claim that I love my fellow humans? Don’t I celebrate the faith that claims God became a human not too different than the guy chewing gum in my ear? Public transportation has a way of making the abstract concrete.

According to the Chicago Tribune, the CTA is the United States’ second largest web of public transit. Each day, says the Tribune, the CTA gives 1.6 million rides – 500,000 on the trains alone. A crowded train car in this system is kind of like a laboratory. Throw something interesting into the mix – say, a pigeon flapping around inside a train car – and you can marvel at the individuality of each person’s response.

In three years of regularly riding Chicago Transit Authority trains, I’ve learned that the CTA can illuminate a lot about human nature. I’ve learned that people will give a fifty dollar bill to a stranger if he has a slab of wood, three cups, and one pea.I’ve learned that different colored plastic prayer cloths are purportedly good for different kinds of illness.But sometimes this clunking laboratory of human experience teaches bigger lessons.

Contentment is Transferable

It was an early morning, and I opened the station door for a man with crutches and one leg, walked beside him on the stairs, lost track of where he was, and then ended up boarding the same car. I sat diagonally across from him while he stacked his crutches on the seat beside him. He placed a plastic cooler on the floor by his one foot. I smiled at this man in his paint-splattered sweatshirt, a smile both wistful and bumbling.

He smiled back at me.”It’s hard having three legs,” he told me. I laughed, and smiled some more. The message was clear: he didn’t have less than me, he had more.For the rest of the day, I kept remembering the short, black-haired man with his lunchbox by his foot and his crutches on the seat, and it was like somehow his words had multiplied the things I had: I felt like I had more of the things I loved, more appreciation for my home, more love to give my friends.

During the months surrounding that encounter, my morning rush-hour commute would frequently land me on “The Blessed Train” – a Red Line run operated by a cheery driver many Chicagoans appreciate. “Good morning,” he would say. “All aboard the Blessed Train. The Blessed Train is the best train.”He had a hearty voice that boomed over the speakers, and his appreciation of his work let me recalibrate.It became the omen of a good day ahead.

Photo: Lee Bey

“Bad” Trains Offer Impromptu Community

I’ve moved since then, and instead of the Blessed Train, I ride the Green Line, a line of track with a bad reputation. The second time I rode the Green Line, a friend told me a girl had been stabbed right on the train.Also, the Green Line is not the site of the only CTA disaster, but its operator had one of the most outrageous responses. When a Green Line derailed last year, the operator ordered everyone to stand on one side of the cars so the train wouldn’t plunge off the elevated track. Despite the dangers and past catastrophes, the Green Line is one of my favorite to ride (in the daytime).

The thing is, people talk to each other on the “bad” trains, and ignore each other on the “good” trains (like the Brown Line, which runs northwest from the loop through wealthier neighborhoods). For instance, a few months ago I was reading Gregory Wolfe’s The New Religious Humanists just as the Green Line rolled away from the station, and someone asked me, “Hey, is that a good book?” Then it was, “Where’d you get that?” which eventually led to another scrutiny of the title and the sigh, “Man, I should get myself to church.”

This brief exchange did not pressure me to keep talking; it was merely a pleasant way for both of us to begin the trek home. When people talk to me on the Green Line, the feeling is not that someone is flirting, or getting ready to follow me home, or scam me (okay, well, except for the guy hawking prayer-cloths). Instead, the feeling is that, by boarding this train, I am now part of an impromptu community.

We Aren’t Easily Threatened

It’s the mantra of CTA riding: “If you see someone acting suspiciously, please inform CTA personnel immediately.” The thing is, if we took that mantra seriously, we’d be on the intercom every five minutes or so. There’s always someone talking to himself in the corner, or looking protective of some oddly-shaped package, or glaring at us unnervingly. But I was amazed the other day at just how much suspicious or even aggressive behavior people will witness unperturbed.

I was riding the Brown Line (that’s right – the “safe” one), and from my vantage point it looked as though someone was lying down in the aisle. I could only see the tips of battered white sneakers sticking out from behind the metal dividers by the doors. I whispered to the guy next to me, “Is that person okay?”

“I think so,” he responded, no doubt pegging me as a tourist, “though you never know with people these days.”

When I leaned over to look more closely, I knew why he wasn’t as concerned as I was.The man wasn’t lying in the aisle. He was just sitting on the floor with his back against one of the dividers. Odd enough, though. He stayed like this for a few minutes, mumbling to himself, then hiked himself up and paced the aisles, glaring at everyone and still muttering.His eyes were sinister and his hair was wild.He paced right out one of the emergency doors and stood between the cars, wild hair blowing, like he was on the boardwalk enjoying the ocean breeze. After a few minutes, he came back to my car and continued pacing. As we neared the Loop, I heard what sounded like a muffled explosion. The guy had taken out an Aquafina bottle and was slamming it against the divider, muttering louder and looking at us like we had all been his tormentors since childhood.

To me, what was even stranger than this guy’s behavior was that every passenger but me seemed oblivious. They kept reading. They kept their earbuds in. They hardly glanced at this guy or each other. As for me, I decided I wasn’t going to wait for the guy’s next move, so I followed another CTA mantra: “Move to the next car if your immediate safety is threatened.”

Reflecting on it, I suppose the passengers’ response wasn’t abnormal. It’s already taken a whole lot of trust just to live in a city, because, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a city is a place where strangers live very close together, most of them bargaining not to hurt each other. Urban existence means that we have given each other a generous dose of trust. It’s not the sort of trust where we’re making eye-contact and talking to each other all the time, but it’s the kind of trust that it takes to have the same entryway key as five other strangers, or where we’re hopping into a vehicle a stranger (be it a cab driver, bus driver, or train operator) is driving. In some cases, though, maybe this daily trust means our danger sensors are corroded.

CTA Stories

Another thing I’ve noticed in my three years here is that Chicagoans love CTA stories. When the RedEye version of the Tribune has a column about the CTA, emails to the editor pour in.The Decider section of The Onion ran a series on what it’s like to ride certain lines of the CTA round trip. There are whole blogs dedicated to sightings on the CTA and rants about it.

Whether ranting or celebrating, chances are that part of the draw of public transit stories is that there are unusual things to be learned about human nature when we’re all crammed together. The quirks, threats, or homilies in motion that we notice on the train are merely the quick emergence of a million stories of the people riding packed together above Chicago.

Rita, a student of mine, came to my office last week to discuss an upcoming paper. “How’s your research going?” I asked.

“I am a bad writer,” she said.

At the start of the semester, Rita wrote an essay describing the shame she felt whenever she sat down at the computer. Sentences conspired to reinforce her feelings of inadequacy. When she asked people to help her, they labeled her a “bad writer.”

Rita spoke Spanish with nearly everyone she cared about, yet the page made her push her fluidly-dancing ideas into the boring English sentences she knew were the “right” structure. When she wrote informal assignments – letters to a friend in the class – she created scenes where life “got out of control like a car in the snow” and a drunken man’s expression changed like “flipping channels on the television.”

I don’t know what you’re thinking at this point, but this sounds like an excellent writer to me.

This is why Mike Rose matters so much to me. Rose, an award-winning author and professor at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, argues that people who have been shut out of education or labeled as remedial have vast knowledge that educational structures don’t tap. He urges educators to value thought processes that academia typically does not embrace, and to see that even error reveals learning.

Coming from a blue-collar background, Rose esteems the intelligence that he saw growing up. On his blog, Rose says:

I am troubled by the way we as a society readily acknowledge the intelligence required for white-collar and professional occupations, but rarely honor the thinking involved in physical work.

His mother, a lifelong waitress, saw restaurants as “laborator(ies) of human relations.” Anyone who has been a server can concur that waiting tables means reading social cues from other workers and customers while keeping your own emotions in check. This combination of perceptiveness and self-regulation is literally called emotional labor. “There isn’t a day that goes by in the restaurant,” Rose’s mother always said, “that you don’t learn something.”

Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary

Since Rose values the intelligence needed in work dubbed non-intellectual, he argues for the potential of students who struggle in higher education.

In his classic, Lives on the Boundary, he describes his own education in south Los Angeles, where the school switched his files with another kid named Rose, and sent him to the lowest-level classes for his first two years of high school. His biology teacher discovered the error, and from then on, teachers pushed him at every step of the way: a teacher who had “found a little school” in south L.A. and wanted to “teach his heart out,” a professor who invented classes just so Rose and his friends could “read and write a lot under the close supervision of a faculty member,” professors who gave him “a directory of key names and notions” in their disciplines. Teachers carried heavier loads just so one or two students could succeed.

Rose reflects:

We live, in America, with so many platitudes about motivation and self-reliance and individualism – and myths spun from them, like those of Horatio Alger – that we find it hard to accept the fact that they are serious nonsense.

Living in south L.A. or Chicago’s south side or “any one of hundreds of other depressed communities,” he says, will require “support and guidance at many, many points along the way.”

But Rose also mentions that many kids from depressed communities have learned to “daydream . . . to avoid inadequacy” or to “reject the confusion and frustration [of grasping complex ideas] by openly defining yourself as the Common Joe.”

This makes me think motivation has to be part of achievement, too. Sometimes a teacher catches students when they are still openly motivated. When I asked Rita if she’d like a tutor, she said, “Yes! I want to get better!” But sometimes the right chemistry of individual motivation and teacher prodding isn’t there yet; or, maybe when I’ve been at it longer, I’ll learn to recognize it better.

For Rose, the alchemy was there when it needed to be, and if this much was given to him, he knew he would need to teach his heart out, too. In Lives on the Boundary, a gripping blend of memoir and analysis, he explains how he began to cultivate a love of language in his students, and also began to teach students how to “pick the academic lock.” Teaching veterans who had just returned from the service, he realized that so-called good students have certain ways of thinking and articulating, while other students become marginalized because they haven’t learned basic tools of academic thought: summarizing, classifying, comparing and analyzing. He designed his course for the veterans around these tools of thought.

Later, tutoring at UCLA, he discovered that error reveals learning. He tutored a woman named Suzette who kept writing in fragments because she wanted to vary her sentences. She didn’t want to keep starting sentences with “‘She . . . she . . . she . . . I . . . I . . . I . . . ” she said, “It doesn’t sound very intelligent.” Suzette was not making grammatical blunders – at least, not just – she was trying to find a more intellectual voice.

Rose’s pedagogy urges what I’ve been hearing again and again as I’ve taught a sophomore ethics course this semester – valuing the other. For Rose, it means valuing a student’s individuality. It means holding the carefully-planned assignment a little more loosely when a student offers an idea that lets her build on her knowledge. It means seeing error as an opportunity for progress. It means understanding the gaps in a student’s academic repertoire and figuring out how his experience, or some extra teaching, can fill those gaps.

Mike Rose expresses an ethic of care, directly wanting the good of “the other,” and as a model of this ethic, Rose is an exemplar for more than just teachers. Anyone who seeks to understand another person’s needs could use Rose as a model, particularly in their day-to-day vocation.

Teaching one’s heart out is just one way of living life to the fullest, breaking through a self-centered outlook, and living a life that centers on other people’s needs.

Quotations are from:

Rose, Mike. “The Intelligence of a Waitress in Motion.” Weblog post. Mike Rose’s Blog. 22 Aug 2008. <http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/search/label/work%20and%20intelligence>

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. 1989. New York: Penguin Books, 2005.

Anyone who has ever had a dog and a skunk on her property at the same time, loaded hay into a loft in July, or contemplated the best way to catch a horse that just took off through the woods knows that rural life has its challenges. While cities provide their own complications, it’s time to set the record straight.

Our cultural imagination has us thinking the country life is the good and simple life. But it’s hardly the only simple life. The city has vast potential to provide an uncomplicated way of life – much more potential than it gets credit for.

“Living in the city is the simple life, when the city’s potential is maximized,” says Aaron Opalka, who has lived in Albany, New York for two and a half years. “One with a rural mindset might argue that the density, chaos and noise of the city are antithetical to the simple life. But my vision is one that permits walking or public transit to most, if not all, daily requirements.”

On his lunch break, Aaron can walk to the bank, retrieve his dry-cleaning, go to the barber shop, stop at the pharmacy, get a bite to eat, or even grab a new shirt and tie. “Naturally, not all at once. But the idea is I can walk to each of those things in five minutes. Think about the sprawling suburbs and all the time and resources wasted to accomplish each one of these errands.”

This is part of Kim Howe’s definition of the simple life, too. To Kim, who lives in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago’s lower west side, the simple life means “few intermediaries between me and the things I need.” Kim’s vision includes growing her own food, someday, and having “about seven possessions.” She does own more than that, but her walls display artwork from friends, and much of what she and her husband Jeremy own has been found, not bought.

Nicole Miano, who lives in Chicago’s East Garfield Park, points out that the nature of the city motivates people to avoid consumerism. “Since things are so concentrated,” says Nicole, “it motivates you to make sure you are reusing.”

Implementing some aspects of this vision will come naturally, because, as Aaron argues, the city is the simple life. But some of this simplicity means knowing how to find what you need and being willing to capitalize on what you find.

Ways to Simplify

In Chicago, most people use public transit. Though most Chicagoans have a love-hate relationship with the construction-burdened and disaster-prone CTA,we find that for the most part, it makes life easier. Jeremy Howe appreciates that he can do something else while on the train – reading, or listening to his iPod. “I like my life better for that,” he says. Getting a little farther in a book or getting a paper drafted for work or school means there’s less work to bring home, and listening to music, reading The Onion, or even getting the chance to stare at a sunset without distraction might mean that riding public transit lets us relax more than driving would have.

Then again, riding the L isn’t convenient for all Chicagoans, since there are many underserved neighborhoods without any lines close by. Nicole Miano, for instance, cannot walk to the L from her home in Chicago’s west side. And in other cities, riding public transit could mean that you don’t fit in with your demographic. Using Albany’s buses, for instance,isn’t considered normal behavior for a young professional. The feeling, says Aaron, is “why would a young professional climb aboard those rolling asylums?” Aaron, who scrapped his vehicle almost a year ago, has seen single-passenger cars drive by with their occupants gaping at him unabashedly. Recently, when gas reached $4 a gallon, he noticed more young professionals joining him.

Usingpublic transitrather thancars is one of the most significant paths to urban simplicity, but the proximity of shops, restaurants and jobs encourages other modes of mobility. Nicole “would never bike in the suburbs,” where she grew up, but she often bikes in Chicago.

When other wheels are necessary, it’s easy to rent cars in the city. Zipcars and Chicago-based I-Go cars are an excellent deal compared to the cost of parking, insurance, maintenance, city stickers, and the enormous frustration of finding parking, shoveling snow, and bickering with your neighbors about why they moved the lawnchair you used to save your spot.

Another key to urban simplicity is being willing to take what you find. This means using nearby resources. It means buying clothes at theneighborhoodthrift shop instead of the mall out in the suburbs, or grabbing a few needed items at the corner store instead of driving to the supermarket, where you’ll face the temptation to fill your cart. It means signing up for yoga at the park district for freeinstead of $50 for four weeks at the trendy place down the street.

Kim Howe advocates a paradigm shift when it comes to the urban simple life. The city “provides a lot of free shit,” she says, but you have to change your thinking before you’ll accept a lot of it. Instead of shopping, which she says means “I need this; I will buy this thing,” you’ll have to take things as they come. Flexibility is an avenue to simplicity.

Kim was able to live on a half-time salary after college and spent time gleaning and networking her way into many comforts and pastimes. She has found free entertainment by ushering, and she’s been known to scope out suburban trash days to find furniture and sometimes bubble wrap to decorate dorm elevators and relish some very confused looks. “I guess you could think of that as ‘simple entertainment,’” says Kim. (I should add a bed bug warning here, just in case your city is in the throes of an infestation: glean carefully! Now, back to the joys of city life . . .)

Kim also discovered that Chicago has a paint depository, where she could get free paint. “I needed free paint, so I looked it up!”

Community Supported Agriculture provides another way to enjoy taking things as they come. Nearby farms offer “produce subscriptions,” where people can buy a share in the farm and receive a weekly basket of produce during the growing season. Subscribers can also buy cheese, meat, and egg shares and have these delivered to a nearby pick up spot along with the veggies. Catherine MacRae Knox of the Lincoln Square neighborhood on Chicago’s north side is thinking about joining a CSA. She cautions that one of the challenges is that you may end up with an awful lot of, say, radishes or kale, and will have to be creative, but she is excited at the thought of fresh vegetables for 20 weeks.

If you can’t just take your groceries as they come, but still want to ditch the car and shopping cart, companies such as Peapod and FreshDirect offer grocery delivery in many cities. It’s a good way to avoid impulse buying, and some companies accept manufacturer’s coupons and provide their own, too.

What the City Can’t Give

City life certainly has its problems, and the discussion of all the merits above focuses on what Nicole Miano calls “our age, white person existence,” a twenty- or thirty-something’s voluntary paradise. For those in marginal neighborhoods (beyond the reach of grocery delivery servies, car-sharing and even most public transportation), city life may not be easy, working one job may not cut it, and simplicity may not be so voluntary. We need to keep this in mind; voluntary simplicity is a luxury in its own way, and social justice should be a motivation for any downsizing we do.

But even when we embrace simplicity of our own accord, complications arise. One such complication is that it is hard to leave the city.Erik Chubb, who lives in Lincoln Square, regrets that it is really hard to get out “to the quiet wilderness.” Aaron also points out the limits of mobility. “By its very nature, public transportation is not tailored to any one person’s schedule.”

The cost of living and limits of space are also complicated aspects of city life. They mean that in many ways, simplicity is a requirement. I’d still argue that it’s a freeing requirement. I daydream about having a counter wider than a dictionary, but I like that we don’t have room for an entertainment center. There’s simply a limit to what you can acquire in the city, and that’s freeing. “In the city,” says Erik, “I don’t have to fill a big house with fancy stuff. I don’t need a fancy car.”

Sometimes, though, space issues mean that you really can’t live as simply as you want to. Kim was foiled when she tried to realize her dream of growing her own food. “We got one tomato and six green beans. We didn’t eat them because we were so proud of them.”

City life may have its difficulties, but a simple life is possible here, and seeing the skyline from a rooftop can be just as satisfying as diving into a mountain lake.

It didn’t surprise me when Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement and host of the Uptown Poetry slam, told me that ministers sometimes “lurk in the shadows” of the Green Mill Lounge, a prohibition-era Chicago speakeasy, during the Sunday night poetry slam. When I first moved to Chicago, I, too, lurked in the flickering light cast by tabletop candles. I entered the Green Mill as hungrily as church and found fragments of meaning that sparked and floated down like ashes from a campfire.

There are few public spaces in which it is safe to be real, and this is a large reason the Uptown Poetry Slam draws crowds.

Perhaps this dearth of safe public spaces is a remnant of Victorian codes of etiquette that chided us not to “introduce politics, religion, or weighty topics for conversation when making calls.”¹ While our age bristles at Victorian morals, this etiquette has made it tactless to be curious about others and difficult to broach “weighty topics.” It sanctions our resistance to vulnerability, and so, growing up and growing respectable become processes of boarding up the delicate aspects of one’s identity. Becoming accustomed to city life, too, is a process of letting less and less of one’s private self show on a face that pushes through crowds.

And so it’s rare to find a public space, much less an urban space, offering a sanctuary where people can reveal the selves that so many of us quarantine-brittle with unanswered questions, restless because of broken relationships. Revelation is what poetry slammers do in the Uptown Poetry Slam Sunday after Sunday.

Marc Smith yells, “Hey, turn that jukebox off!” or cues the band to a lull, and launches into an interactive shtick (beginning, more or less, with, “I’m Marc Smith,” met with a resounding, “So what?!!”). After that, performance poets step onto the stage with jazz musicians who will improvise along with the poems if poets want them to.

Marc Smith, founder of the poetry slam movement.
Photo: Sean Talbot

The slammers dive right into pieces about rejected marriage proposals, questioned destinies, lost childhood and contemplated abortions. One poet read about the night he murdered his wife.²

It’s baffling. How can people stand in front of strangers and say things they could hardly stammer to a close friend?

“We all need public validation of who we are,” says Smith. “To speak in front of your fellow human beings is very important.” Performance poet Molly Meacham adds, “If you air a wound, it will heal.” In presenting poems that are personal, wounds are out in the open, and poets can say things the audience may feel but can’t yet put into words. Competing in the national slam, Meacham has experienced this. There is an instant communication, and an instant gratification as the poet sees his or her words grabbing the audience.

Meacham cautions against being too raw, however. “I was lucky enough to have a thick skin,” she says. Poets who don’t have a thick skin, or who gush emotion without crafting it, aren’t likely to survive the demands of frequent performance, where they are susceptible to critique.

“The stage is not therapy!” said slammer Robbie Q. one night after a sentimental performer left the stage one night. You have to purchase credibility, he told me. You have to get the audience to relate to you, with humor, for instance, “or by making fun of Marc.”

Poetry slams started in 1987 with honesty as a goal. Smith had found chemistry between poetry and acting. He decided poetry readings should no longer be what he calls “bogus affairs” controlled by the literary elite and leaving everyday people scratching their heads.

Early on, Chicago’s literati derided the slammers as “just a bunch of drunks in a tavern,” says Smith, but when he asked the audience their occupations around that time, he discovered a group of physicists sitting smack in the front row. At the time, turning poetry into a performance was taboo, but Smith wanted poetry to have the vibrancy that only acting could give it, and people from all walks of life came to crave it.

In the early days, he felt that slam was akin to folk art, where it’s not precision but honesty that defines art. “Slam is not about making stars,” Smith’s website affirms. “It’s about everybody all together in a room with their hair down and their feet up.”

It reminds me of sculptor Claes Oldenburg‘s credo that he is for an “art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top… an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary.” Slam embroils itself with the everyday crap, and it uses whatever means necessary.

Poet Emily Rose at the Green Mill
Photo: Sean Talbot

There is no telling what a night at the slam will be like. It is poetry meets Vaudeville meets Gong Show meets, well . . .

“Is this like the Rocky Horror Picture Show?” one newcomer asks Marc as he makes the rounds to talk with members of the audience.

“Yeah, it’s like that.”

The first portion of the show is open mic. Anyone-amateur or pro-can walk in, meet Marc, and add his or her name to the list of performers. If it’s their first time reading in public, they’re dubbed a “virgin virgin,” which is often the only razzing they get from Marc, who may encourage the neophyte to join the slam competition, the third and final portion of the show, where slammers compete for a whole ten dollars. The middle section features a performer or group of performers-anyone from a local singer/songwriter, to a man who performs It’s A Wonderful Life in ten minutes, to a professional slam poet.

On any night at the slam, the audience can catch at least a few fragments of meaning. Fragments like these:

From the poet Stella, whose name Smith yells like he’s Stanley Kowalksi: “There is a river flowing backwards from death to life.”

Photo: Sean Talbot

From poet Tennessee Mary: “Our best laid plans are there for God’s amusement.”

From Smith, performing George Cabot Lodge: “This is the song of the wave, that died in the fullness of life.”

From poet Derek Brown: “In death, I’ll resemble more a pilot light than a man.”

On a night when every aspect is “on” – which is in itself a strange alchemy, since so little is planned – the present seems more palpable and immediate than usual, crammed full of meaning. Moments brim full of other moments in life. Lines of poems spark with the audience’s unanswered and unanswerable questions, their satisfying and ecstatic moments of life, fears and fumbles, and frenetic quests for meaning. I’ve experienced a few such nights there.

The night, for instance, back in my days of faithful slam attendance, when Smith started off with Carl Sandburg’s “Skyscraper“: “By day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul.” When Marc performs, he may walk through the audience, pat them on the back, whisper, shout, sing, bang out a few chords on the grand piano, raise his hands to the ceiling and gesture twinkling stars. The traditional podium of poetry readings must be side-stepped, the audience captivated with drama and interaction.

The night continued with professional slammer Derek Brown, who used phrases structured like a Hebrew psalm: “It was the dawn of weird, the morning of strange.” He told us he couldn’t explain “why I’m feeling God more in a pool hall than in a church.” Then in a crescendoing passage, he listed ordinary occurrences – a clumsy first kiss, a drunken night with friends – and after listing each, he took the tone of a priest offering benediction, saying, “holy” in rising momentum after each ordinary occurrence.

And so, the everyday people, the ministers, poets, actors, ex-cons, newsstand owners, teachers, physicists and hot dog vendors, gather in the candlelight, tapping along to the jazz beat, eyes reflecting the glow of the neon Green Mill sign on the stage, all looking for meaning, and on some nights, finding more than we can hold.

¹ Hill, Thomas E., The Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette. San Francisco: Bluewood Books, 1994.

² He tells us he spent many years in prison, where he met Chicago’s legendary “Killer Poet,” also once a Green Mill regular.