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Kelly Writers House:
Where Everybody Gets Involved
by Jessica Powers
If I ever move to
Philadelphia, I’ll visit Kelly Writers House before I even finish
unpacking. And even though I don’t currently live in Philadelphia, I
intend to become part of the Writers House community. Why? Because I’ve
never seen anything like it anywhere else I’ve visited.
Twelve years ago, nobody had conceived the
idea of Kelly Writers House, much less tried to do it. But when The
University of Pennsylvania’s chaplain retired in 1994, he vacated his
residence at 3805 Locust Walk on Penn’s campus. As different university
officials pondered the possibilities for its use, the president of the
university suggested that it should be used for something experimental.
“A
couple colleagues of mine took me to lunch and asked me what they had
heard about this possibility,” says Al Filreis—Faculty Director of the
Writers House, Professor of English, and Director of the Center for
Programs in Contemporary Writing. “And I instantly suggested it should
be a writers’ house.”
Filreis met with the
president and provost and they gave him the key to the house to check it
out. “I brought in all the way-out writers and faculty members who were
risk-takers and said, ‘What should we do?’ I suggested strongly that it
should be as communal as possible and we should use the rooms to bring
writers. We sat there at one in the afternoon and the next thing we knew,
it was dark. There were no lights in the house so we sat in the dark,
having planned for eight hours.”
The writers and faculty
members agreed that the house should be given over to students and
faculty members who were writers, that it should be “a free space or
literary incubator not affiliated with any department,” says Filreis.
The president and provost
were so charmed—and likely bowled over by the excitement that the plan
had generated among these writers—that they agreed to the idea. Paul
Kelly—CEO of Knox & Co., an
investment banking firm,
as well as a Penn trustee—provided the money to fix the house up. Hence
the name: Kelly Writers House.
The house was a shambles.
“This was free digs for the chaplain’s family, and they were a little
reluctant to call the university for maintenance,” Filreis explains. “It
hadn’t been fixed up since at least the 40s, and it was over a hundred
years old by then.”
The house is an 1851 Tudor
style Victorian cottage. Even when it was built, the architecture
invoked earlier periods. Thus, Filreis suggests it now holds a “double
nostalgia.” “We were able to upgrade it completely, that is, wire it for
the fastest Ethernet that you can imagine, while not compromising the
Victorian feel to it.”
The old-fashioned feel
promotes intimacy, while advanced technology allows Kelly Writers House
to offer workshops that require the most advanced equipment, as well as
produce worldwide webcasts.
“Writers are very communal
people, despite the myth that they’re loners. So we’ve built a social
organism,” Filreis says. “Something tells me that writers appreciate
that in particular because they tend to be very Internet savvy but at
the same time they like a place where they can come to talk.”
With 300
Events Per Academic Year, Everybody Does Something
The Writers House offers
300 literary events throughout the academic year—averaging more than one
event per day during the school year. Those events range from poetry
readings with literary giants to small workshops led by Penn students or
writers in Philadelphia who have ideas they want to pursue.
When I visited Kelly
Writers House, it was at the behest of a Penn History professor who
realized instinctively that I would bond instantly with the place. He
was right. And ten minutes after I met Al Filreis, Filreis suggested
that I could run a workshop or class if I came to Penn for graduate
school (even though I would have been majoring in History). How often do
you get invited to do something like that within ten minutes of meeting
somebody, especially without showing your publishing vita?
In an interview posted on the House’s website, the director of Kelly
Writers House, Jennifer Snead, states the vision she has for such a vast
outlay of literary events: “We want this to be a truly interactive
learning community, where you come [to] get involved and have an idea
for a program and you help run it. I want to reach out to members of the
student community who might not necessarily consider themselves writers
or English majors. Everybody writes something in their life. Everybody
reads.”
She adds that she loves working at the House because it’s
unpredictable—no day is ever the same, but each day brings with it
friendship and community. “A lot of people drop by my office during the
course of the day, or just drop by the House, hang out, have coffee,
read on the couch. That’s very important to us—that people do feel
comfortable enough to just come in and read or work on a paper or check
email as well as for a program. That’s the one thing that we’re not—just
a theater or a venue.”
This is something Al Filreis emphasizes as well. “Our mission is to
build community and use writing as an excuse to build community,” he
claims. “We love writing, of course, but it’s a means to an end.
Universities tend to be very hierarchical, with good reason, because the
Brahman of the University have knowledge and the students who come
don’t. [At Writers House], we assume that everyone who walks in the
front door has something to contribute creatively. This isn’t liberal
blather; we actually try to enact it.”
This enacted “liberal”
blather allows them to accomplish an extraordinary number of events. For
a sample month’s offerings, follow this link:
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~wh/calendar/0305.html.
Nobody (including Penn) Owns Us, Thank You Very Much
At its very inception, Kelly Writers House
was intended to be communal in nature. “From
the start, we left the apostrophe out [of Writers],” says Filreis.
“We’re interested in the collective and not the possessive. It’s just
Writers House, without any possessive.”
And as such, though
technically the University “owns” Kelly Writers House, it operates
autonomously from Penn. “Some 500 people use this space each week and
about half of them are not affiliated with the University of
Pennsylvania,” says Filreis.
In fact, not all of the
people who somehow use the House live in Philadelphia or the surrounding
vicinity. “We have gotten a following, as of today, of about 1600 people
who are regular members of the large community [but who live] beyond
Philadelphia, which is not huge, but this is not mass mailing, this is
one-on-one.”
Kelly Writers House Outside of Philadelphia
There are two significant ways writers
outside of Philadelphia can participate in the community.
First, all of the poetry
readings held at the house are archived on the website through Penn
Sound (http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/). Writers can also listen
to these webcasts live if they tune in at the right time. Of course, the
effect won’t be same as the intimate setting they try to achieve at the
House, with dinner at a round dining table after the reading. But, after
all, how many chances do you have to hear Adrienne Rich reading her
poetry?
Second, people outside of
Philadelphia are welcome to make proposals for workshops or other
programs. And Kelly Writers House will look at those proposals seriously
and accept them should they fit within the House’s vision.
But they’ve had to say no to some very
interesting writers, not because they didn’t respect that writer’s work
or because the proposal was unworthy. “If the proposal doesn’t quite
align itself with the interest of the community at the moment, we will
sometimes say no with regrets,” says Filreis. “People who look for us
know us. They tend to write proposals that make sense to us. The
proposals that don’t make sense to us are those written by people who
don’t know us and assume we’re just a literary program.”
One thing writers can’t do is abuse or
exploit the Kelly Writers House for their own personal writing gain.
“We’re not a booking agency,” says Al Filreis. “We don’t have publishers
who create a city tour and include Writers House on that. What we do is
create a sense of what the community wants and we receive and make
proposals for projects and programs based on that.” Hence, writers who
receive invitations to speak or read at Kelly House usually get invited
because a member of the House loves their work.
So, whether you live near Kelly Writers
House or not, get involved. Listen to the taped poetry readings and
participate in the live Webcasts. Make proposals, even if you live in
Florida or Minnesota. Just make certain, if you really want your
proposal to be accepted, that you know enough about the House that your
proposal fits within its vision.
All the Extras
Of course, Kelly Writers House isn’t just
for writers who want to take workshops and hear readings, or for writers
who want to run a workshop or bring their favorite writer to the House.
It’s involved in a host of different activities. For example, “Write
On!” is an after school literacy program for elementary-age school
children who attend Lee Elementary School in Philadelphia.
Members of the Writers
House community and Penn student volunteers meet with students every
week and do creative writing exercises with them.
The House also supports or
is actively involved in several publications, such as Combo (a literary
journal for poets under the age of 35) or Mosaic, an Asian-American
literary journal produced at Penn. Freshbuckets was another such
literary magazine, published last year because an undergraduate student
decided she wanted to start a literary magazine.
Perhaps the longest
standing publication affiliated with Writers House, Xconnect (or
Cross
Connect), traces its roots directly to the beginnings of Writers House.
An ongoing anonymous donation, filtered through Writers House, allows
this publication continued life. Still, it is both independent of
Writers House and mutually interdependent. For example, it employs
primarily Writers House community members to edit and market the
magazine.
“I envision the magazine as a publishing arm
of the Writers House and would like the magazine to help document the
history of visitors to some degree, while maintaining our own
sensibility of contemporary writing,” says David Deifer, Editor-in-Chief
and Publisher.
“In the same way that
Writers House promotes all literary arts and supports a place that’s
devoted toward that goal, we strive to provide a place on the printed
page,” he adds. “It’s our purpose to review and publish the best of what
we receive without judgment leaning toward a particular genre or school
of poetics, it’s just all writing. And I believe that’s the way we need
to operate since it’s our goal to serve the broader community rather
than, say, academics.”
Tenth Anniversary Celebration
On May 13, 2006, Kelly House will celebrate its 10th Anniversary,
although technically they’re in their 11th year. Al Filreis says that everybody
will be there, all the founding members, right down to Paul Kelly.
He describes the founding members with
pride, claiming that most of them left and went on to do, “quite
frankly, great things.” There’s Carrie Sharon Wright, for example, who
started her own version of Writers House at
Franklin and Marshall
College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The first Webmaster at the House
went on to work for Amazon.com in web design. Another Penn student and
founding member of the House, Elliot Whitney, whom Filreis describes as
a “firebrand” and educational reformer, first became involved because he
loved seeing students empowered to take charge of their own education.
Today, he’s the principal of a hugely successful charter school in
Houston, Texas, called KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program). He brings some
of his students to the House every year to see what he helped create.
The 10th
anniversary celebration will be a chance for people to reconnect to the
community, although many of them have remained in touch throughout the
years. It’s also a chance to uplift and uphold the values of friendship,
creativity, and entrepreneurship that built the community. Last but not
least, quite simply, they deserve a huge party after all of the obvious
hard work they do. Just looking at the Writers House whirlwind schedule
each month makes me tired.
“Everyone will be there
[for the celebration],” Filreis says. “It’s been a wild thing and…a
strange and exhilarating experience to create something from scratch and
watch it grow and see it succeed.”
Jessica Powers is a freelance writer. She may be reached for
comments at jlpowers at evaporites.com. You can read her
African History column at
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/african_history.
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