Archive for the ‘Very Serious Posts With No Funny Business’ Category

Georgia Council for the Arts on the Cutting Room Floor

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The outlook is bleak for arts organizations in Georgia.  Today’s victim could well be the Georgia Council for the Arts (GCA).

Last night Georgia Boy Choir executive director Adisa Nickerson provided this update:

Today, ArtscriticATL.com (and Decatur Metro) posted this plea from the GCA:

“We have no documentation yet, but were told that the House Appropriations Committee voted yesterday to cut our budget for FY 2011 to less than $250,000. Most importantly, these funds are to be transferred to the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA). We don’t know if this means that Georgia Council for the Arts 1) will no longer exist, 2) we will become part of DCA, or 3) the funds will be used to close out the FY 2010 Final Reports and end GCA. Whichever, Georgia will be the only state and territory in the nation that will have no state arts agency.

It is urgent that GCA hear from you today, no later than 5 PM. There are only six days remaining in this legislative session.
By return email to me, please relate briefly how the loss of GCA grant funding (using this year’s award amount) will impact your Programs, Staff, and Audience? Will one or more of your programs have to be cut? Will staff have to be let go or furloughed? How will your audience (and the Legislator’s constituents) decline? Please give your best guess to answer these questions: numbers and brief explanations will be helpful.

GCA will collate this information tonight. We will send you an email tomorrow (and everyday until this legislative session is closed) asking you, your staff, your board members, and patrons to take a specific action based on the collation of this data and on other information.”

Georgia Council for the Arts and other government-run arts programs, like the Fulton County Arts Council and the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, allow places like the Wren’s Nest to survive.  It’d be pathetic if this were the way Georgia chose to lead by example.

I’m Leaving the Wren’s Nest in September

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The title pretty much says it all. I’ve accepted a job in Chicago, and they’ve graciously allowed me to phase out my duties here until just after the Decatur Book Festival.

When I started at the Wren’s Nest, my objective was to turn the organization around. Recall:

• • We didn’t have a website.
• • We didn’t have a brochure.
• • We had $112,000 in various debts to 19 different creditors.
• • We were only performing the Brer Rabbit stories 6 times per year.
• • We didn’t have any other programming.
• • The house — a National Historic Landmark — was kind of falling apart.

Today’s organization is very different from what I found in 2006.

• • We have a website courtesy of Lampe-Farley Communications. We also have a Facebook page and a Twitter account.
• • We have a sweet brochure courtesy of Huey + Partners.
• • We have only 1 debt now, and it’s a lot less than $112,000.
• • We performed the Brer Rabbit stories over 225 times each of the past 2 years.
• • We have a summer publishing program and are kicking off a middle school writing program next week.
• • We’ve put about $200,000 of work into the house.

Plus, people now know that the Wren’s Nest exists, which is helpful in terms of our survival.

In short, I felt like it was okay to start looking around for other jobs in fields where I’m better suited. I’ll always be involved at the Wren’s Nest in some capacity, but there are folks much better qualified for my position.

Over the next few months I’ll be working very closely with our board to develop a succession plan. Of course, I’ll keep y’all posted throughout the process.

It’s a little premature to thank y’all, but I want you to know that this blog and its readers have been such a great source of inspiration over the past few years. The Wren’s Nest is much better for your help, your comments, and your involvement. And I’m much saner for being able to have an outlet like this one.

So, thank you very much everyone. I really appreciate your help in making this organization viable again.

New Writing and Publishing Project with KIPP STRIVE — Volunteers Needed!

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I’m pleased to announce that next month the Wren’s Nest Publishing Company is starting a new program with the help of the Decatur Book Festival.

It’s like StoryCorps + 826 Valencia + the kids in our neighborhood.  Y’all with me?

KIPP STRIVE Academy is the new APS charter school just around the corner in the old J.C. Harris Elementary building.  Starting in late March, each week the Wren’s Nest Publishing Company will bring volunteers with significant writing experience to work 1-on-1 with about 25 KIPP STRIVE 5th graders. The goal is to help improve and broaden their writing skills.

We’ll be working on a creative nonfiction project — the students will identify a great story told to them by a significant adult in their life, be it a parent, grandparent, neighbor, whomever.  Volunteers will guide the students, helping them craft the story to the best of their abilities.

The stories will be compiled for a book to be released at the Decatur Book Festival.  We’ll have a big book release party to celebrate at the DBF.

Our mission boils down to the fact that everyday people have remarkable stories, and that these stories deserve to be heard. We’ve got an opportunity to tell the stories of our community, and you have the opportunity to help these students find their voices.

StoryCorps and 826 Valencia in particular have been inspirations in demonstrating the power of story and the power of 1-on-1 tutoring.  See for yourself –

We’re looking for enthusiastic volunteers to join us in this venture, starting… now.  Interested?

Check out the details below and then email Amelia (amelia@wrensnestonline.com) with “Writing! Woo!” in the subject line before March 12th. She’ll send you a (very brief) application form.

• Orientation sessions (2 hours maximum; beers to follow) will begin in mid-March
• Tutoring sessions will be held Tuesday afternoons from 3 – 4 pm, April – early June
• Volunteers must be willing to commit to 10 hours of service over a 2 month span.
• Volunteers must have experience in some sort of writing (you need not have written a book, mind you! We’re merely looking for good writers. If you think you qualify, you probably do. Amelia, for example, wrote a lot of literature papers in college and now writes this blog. She counts!)

Finally, we would deeply appreciate it if you would forward this opportunity to anyone you feel would be great for this project, but isn’t smart enough to regularly read our blog.  Assembling 20 – 25 volunteers is no small feat, but with your help, we feel up to the task.

The Potential Customer is Always… Right?

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Here’s a quandary for you:

A woman calls to ask questions about visiting your museum.  She’s surprised her friends want to visit, given all the controversy surrounding the place, but is intrigued by their interest.  She’s on board, seemingly, but hesitant.

With me so far?  Sounds pretty typical if the museum in question is the Wren’s Nest, which would be a fair assumption.  Onwards!

The woman, as your conversation continues, is very, very up-front about the fact that she doesn’t like the person your museum honors.  In fact, she seems to, uh, hate him.  Still, she appears to like the idea of coming in to have a verbal throwdown, if nothing else.

Someone has an ill opinion of Joel Chandler Harris… or, uh, someone else?!  Wouldn’t be the first time.

As she goes on, it becomes clear that the things she hates about this historical figure are, you know, completely false.  It’s obvious why she would hate this guy, based on the history she knows, but it’s completely misinformed.  And she is SURE of its validity.

Do you correct her?  Or do you do what it takes to encourage her to come to the house of someone she hates, but on false pretenses?

I have a lot of respect for Joel Chandler Harris and like to defend him.  Usually, the easiest way to do that is to give accurate information. “No, Joel Chandler Harris didn’t write Song of the South — he had been dead for 38 years,” and so on.

But her claims were so out of left field that there would have been no defending.  Examples:

• JCH’s otherwise ignored illegitimate child whose existence is proven by his mention in Harris’ will (this sounds like how his (non-existent) will claimed that he wouldn’t let African-Americans enter the Wren’s Nest)

• The forsaken history of Atlanta’s wealthiest freed slave (who wasn’t the same as Atlanta’s actual wealthiest freed slave)

 It would have just been me telling this woman, as nicely as possible, that she was completely wrong.

I want her to come to the museum, not only because we like visitors and the entrance fees they pay (let’s call it like it is, folks), but because the legacy of Joel Chandler Harris is an important one.  We take the educational component of our mission for, like, serious.

So what do you do?  Throw JCH under the bus to get someone in the door, assuming the tour will set them straight?  Or correct them immediately, knowing they may be so put off by your perceived “attitude” that it justifies their stance?

Go on, I’m listening.

1967 Editorial Condemns Segregation at the Wren’s Nest, Praises Uncle Remus

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This week I happened to read Malcolm Gladwell’s  “Atticus Finch and Southern Liberalism” and Kevin Kruse’s White Flight: Atlanta and the making of modern conservatism.

Both works tackle mid-20th century perceptions of “racial justice.”  For African-Americans, this meant equal rights.  For many whites, this meant “freedom of association” (or, in other words, the freedom to maintain segregated neighborhoods).

Yesterday I stumbled across a 1967 Atlanta Journal editorial about the Wren’s Nest by the esteemed journalist Reese Cleghorn.  It’s about racial justice at the Wren’s Nest, which had sided with the “freedom of association” camp even well after 1967.  Yikes!

The editorial is a damning criticism of the Joel Chandler Harris Memorial Association that ran our museum until 1983.  But it’s also an eloquent defense of Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus that is just as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

I love how Cleghorn points out that Harris’ desire for “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks” was later completely ignored in the name of (the white version of) “racial justice.”

We Distort Them: Of Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus

Reese Cleghorn, December 8, 1967

IT IS A grievous thing that Atlanta’s major memorial to Joel Chandler Harris is among the last of its public places to be segregated.

A suit has just been filed in federal court asking for an order to end racial discrimination at the Wren’s Nest, Harris’ home in West End.  The home is now a museum operated by a private association in memory of Harris and in honor of his “Uncle Remus” stories.  It has admitted Negroes in the group, by special arrangement, but it turns them away individually.

The courts will have to determine whether a private association may do this even though it is open to the general public.  But whatever the outcome, it seems in order to contemplate what Harris himself would have thought.

I am very glad that a granddaughter, Mrs. Mildred Harris Camp Wright, has now publicly expressed herself on that.  In a letter to The Constitution, she has refuted a report that Harris’ will required a policy of segregation at the Wren’s Nest.

*    *    *

“GRANDFATHER HAD no will–everything was left to his widow,” she wrote.  “He had no idea that there would be a memorial to him–and if he had, he would not have required such a policy.  His stories were about the Negro, and were written with affection, sympathy, and understanding. “

I think Harris would have been appalled that such a practice could be followed even now, in 1967, at the Wren’s Nest.

In 1905 he wrote to his friend Andrew Carnegie that he would publish an Uncle Remus magazine, and that its purpose would be to further “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing.”

*    *    *

HOW THE PRESENT directors of the Wren’s Nest can look that attitude in the face without blushing is beyond me.  They and their predecessors have performed a a great service to the community by keeping this museum alive when it otherwise would have been neglected, but they seem not to fully understand about Joel Chandler Harris and Uncle Remus.

Many people do not.  The man and his stories have been enshrouded in the fog of the new white supremacist period that began, in earnest, at just about the time Harris died in 1908.  That was the year that Georgia embarked upon forced segregation.  Within two years, the legislature had done its deed, fastening that system upon us for half a century.

*    *    *

TOO MANY PEOPLE look back through that fog from which we just now are emerging and think that a man who lived in Harris’ time must have though in the same way that many men of 20 or 30 years ago thought.  They would make congenial and gentlemanly bigots of men like Harris and, for that matter, Robert E. Lee (who, it is now forgotten, rose from his pew and went to the communion rail of his church with a Negro when no one else would).

People have forgotten, also, that the stories Harris put down in his “Uncle Remus” books were not his own, and he was always the first to say so.  They were the authentic lore, wisdom and folk poetry of Southern Negroes of that time.  They are today one of the worlds’ greatest collections of such literature.

*    *    *

NOW SOMETIMES PEOPLE praise them as the inventions of a fine writer.  But Harris himself wrote of the stories: “Not one of them is cooked, and not one nor any part of one is an invention of mine.”  He was a man of great artistry who faithfully collected the stories wherever he could find them, usually from ex-slaves, and presented them in their true dialect.

*    *    *

THE DIALECT VARIED, depending, for instance, upon whether he gathered them on the Georgia coast from “Gullas” (people apparently with origins in Angola) or in North Georgia from people who had come from other parts of Africa.  The stories were probably of remote African origin, he thought; folklorists, such as Dr. Stella Brewer Brooke [sic] of Clark College, have confirmed the African origins and the connections between these stories and others to be found in Asia.

The stories, and Harris’ care in setting them down, are part of a great heritage which is still not fully recognized by white or Negro Southerners.  To some, Uncle Remus is only Uncle Tom, and the use of dialect is offensive because of the racist manner in which dialect often has been used.

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HARRIS DID NOT like the confusion between his authentic use of dialect and the minstrel-variety use of it, which usually simply amounted to the telling of racist jokes.  He said he once intended “to apologize for the plantation dialect,” but then he realized that some of the greatest of English literature–in Chaucer, for example–is in the form of authentic dialect.

In his best days he paled when what he did was confused by the attitudes and prejudices of others, who seemed to be hearing something he was not saying.  The worth and humanity of the people out of whom the stories came was clear to him, and as evidenced in his letter to Carnegie, he hoped for the “obliteration of prejudice.”  His own words would be the best text for the Wren’s Nest.

Same Old Story — Justine Larbalestier’s US Cover of Liar

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Have you heard about the recent controversy surrounding the cover art for the novel Liar by Justine Larbalestier?  Me neither until about 20 minutes ago.  Here, allow me to fill you in:

Larbalestier wrote a Young Adult novel with an African American protagonist — a compulsive liar who decides to stop, but finds doing so more difficult than she imagined.  Bloomsbury Publishing picked up the novel and chose a cover for the novel featuring a picture of a white girl.

Commence controversy.

Larbalestier, who is white, speaks gracefully about the situation, but is quick to concede the following: authors do not have final say on their covers.  But to say the very least, she is openly displeased.

Now, hold onto your britches: this isn’t a new issue for authors.  In fact, none other than Joel Chandler Harris faced the same problem when it came to illustrations of his black, fictional protagonist, Uncle Remus.

The Uncle Remus that Harris created was a tribute to the slaves he admired and respected during his youth on Turnwold Plantation.  Harris considered the original illustrations of Uncle Remus to be condescending caricatures that didn’t do his character justice.

Doesn’t exactly conjure up thoughts of wisdom and worldliness.  Publishers believed that a minstrelized Uncle Remus would sell better than a more authentic illustration.

Over 100 years later, the same problem persists in a big way.   Novels featuring African Americans on the cover are usually promoted differently, and thus do not sell as well as novels with covers featuring white folks, perpetuating the issue.  Frustrating.

I urge you to read Larbalestier’s blog post — she discusses the situation thoroughly.  And just for the record, the Australian cover has nobody on it at all.

UPDATE, August 8, 2009: Here’s the new North American cover.  (h/t @russmarshalek)

Inman Park Properties Faces Foreclosure on Historic Buildings

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Fresh Loaf, an excellent Creative Loafing blog, published a fascinating story last week about the implosion of Inman Park Properties, a real estate company that owns quite a few historic properties around Atlanta.

After years of sitting on many otherwise abandoned properties, Inman Park Properties is facing a number of foreclosures.  Quoth Boyd Coons, director of the Atlanta Preservation Center –

“His buildings may have been in terrible condition, but at least they were still there.  We now have real fears about what’s going to happen with all these properties.”

I can only echo Boyd’s concerns.

I hope these properties will fall in the laps a few preservation-minded developers.  It’s a shame so many are rotting and empty, but it’d be awful if we lost these buildings for good.  So often developers will see the bottom line, but fail to consider the irreparable (and admittedly less visible) costs of tearing down a neighborhood landmark or rending the urban fabric.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also weighed in on the situation.  Be sure to read the posts by Terminal Station and Atlanta Unsheltered, too.

Related: The Georgia Trust’s Places in Peril (2008) included “The Castle” on 15th Street, home of Uncle Remus-inspired gardens and woodwork.

Paste Magazine in Trouble — You Can (and Totally Should) Help!

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The award winning and totally awesome Paste Magazine is struggling to release its next issue.  They may put out a phenomenal magazine, but they haven’t been immune to the recession.

Here’s how you can help.  Below are just a few self-absorbed reasons why –

• The Wren’s Nest was featured in Paste in July ’08, accompanied by the toughest picture of Lain ever taken.  We love the article, Dummies in the Attic, and it was a treat to work with the writer.

• Paste has long been a strong supporter of the literary community in Atlanta and neighboring Decatur.  You know the our wonderful partners at the Decatur Book Festival?  Their offices used to be in Paste.  Plus, when Wordsmith’s, an independent bookstore, was hurting, Paste hosted a fundraiser.  Community oriented indeed.

• For the past two years Paste has been the highlight tour of our Publishing Company program, according to our Editors, who are known for telling it like it is.

And that’s just us.  We’ve barely touched how great the actual magazine and website are (answer: very).

You can read the letter from Paste’s Editor Josh Jackson (pictured above) to readers here, find FAQs here, and most importantly, donate here.  Be sure to check out all the music you get in return for donating.  Good deeds can be rewarded!

Lain has already donated $25, and I’ll be doing the same shortly.  And remember — we’re but poor nonprofit folks.  Show us how it’s done, please.

Atlanta History Center Lays Off Most of Margaret Mitchell House Staff

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The AJC reports that 7 of 8 staff members at the Margaret Mitchell staff have been cut.  The Atlanta History Center, which oversees the Margaret Mitchell House, let go 15 members of its 74 person staff.

Wow.  What a bummer.

I mean no disrespect to the Atlanta History Center — they are a fine institution — but this is one reason why I never seriously consider the many suggestions that the Wren’s Nest should try to align itself with them (or any other large institution).

Many have told me that the Wren’s Nest will never be able to survive on its own.  Fundraising for house museums is too challenging or we’re on the wrong side of town or not enough people care about Joel Chandler Harris or whatever.

And maybe some of that is true, but Margaret Mitchell wrote the best selling book this side of the Bible and her house sits in the heart of Atlanta’s signature boulevard.  If they can’t maintain a staff with the Atlanta History Center, there’s no way we’d be able to.

The article stresses that the house isn’t closing.  The staff of the History Center will merely manage the Margaret Mitchell House and “the public won’t even notice the transition.”  Maybe so, but I’ll bet that the seven employees who have dedicated themselves to the Margaret Mitchell House sure will.

On behalf of the Wren’s Nest, I’d like to wish the staff, past and present, of the Margaret Mitchell House all the best.  Y’all have been a great inspiration, and we have enjoyed stealing many of your ideas over the past few years.

Related:

• Margaret Mitchell House Land Sale Approved
• Atlanta History Center to Acquire the Wren’s Nest, Move It To Buckhead
• The Southern Literary Trail

Cyclorama Hits Hard Times, Remains Totally Awesome. So Go!

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I’ve never made any secret of my overwhelming love of the Cyclorama, the largest painting in the world that’s just down the street from us in Grant Park.  It is so awesome, guys.

Unfortunately, it rarely makes it into the news unless there’s trouble afoot, so it’s with a touch of displeasure that I mention yesterday’s article in the AJC.  Although, publicity!  Good, right?!

The actual news, however, isn’t so heartening.  Director Keith Lauer has been let go and his position has been “frozen” after the staff had already been reduced to a skeleton crew.  Naturally, visiting hours have been affected.  In short, things are rough for one of the country’s most unique attractions.

To put that in perspective, the only other cyclorama painting, the Gettysburg Painting, recently underwent a multi-million dollar restoration and has a brand new museum to house it.  Lucky.

A seemingly noteworthy difference between the Gettysburg Painting and Atlanta’s Cyclorama is the fact that the city of Atlanta owns the latter painting and employs its staff, whereas the National Park Service runs the former.

Is being run by a federal agency is the way to go?  Or perhaps they should become a 501c3, a la Grady Hospital or countless other nonprofit institutions?  What do you think?

No matter what, you should visit the Cyclorama.  It really is one-of-a-kind and super neat, and it misses you.