Mermaid House
Lebanon, Illinois

By Ryan Byrnes

For someone who only ever lived in Midwestern suburbs, I rarely encountered anything pre-dating World War II. Mine was a world of strip malls and gas stations and Arby’s drive-throughs (the quintessential post-church activity). But as a second grader, after packing into the minivan with my siblings for a thirty-minute haul to nearby Lebanon, I could travel two centuries into the past. It felt like what the Celtics used to call “thin places,” where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical meet.

You see, Lebanon is a small but historic town. With just under 5,000 people, it boasts the oldest university in Illinois and a preserved nineteenth-century main street complete with verandas and gothic windows and four blocks of red brick-paved streets. There, I first saw the Mermaid House.

According to the Lebanon Historic Society, in 1830, retired sea captain Lyman Adams built the Mermaid House, which he named after his professed belief in mermaids. A squat two-story house of hand-sawed oak, it is the ideal rustic prairie home.

Charles Dickens spent a night at the Mermaid House during his tour of North America from January to June 1842, when he traveled by steamboats, railroads, and wagons to speak at major American cities. During his visit to St. Louis, he made a quick excursion to the prairie country in Lebanon. He praised the inn in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, writing, “In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind.” Unfortunately, the nearby prairie did not leave such a lofty impression on him. He described the landscape as “oppressive in its barren monotony” and “scarcely one … to remember with much pleasure.”

Given the historic buildings and the town’s connection to Dickens, the main street took on a Victorian character in the local imagination, so it was only fitting that every holiday season the town put on a Victorian Christmas parade referencing Dickens’ most famous story, A Christmas Carol. Local high school drama clubs would sing carols in period costumes. Shopkeepers would decorate their facades with wreaths. As darkness fell, the town would ceremoniously switch on the Christmas lights, turning the whole street to gold.

One such Christmas, when I was a senior in high school, I took my then-girlfriend to the parade. We rode in a horsedrawn carriage, then I insisted on lining up to see Santa along with the local five-year-olds. In a shed behind the antique store, Santa would sit on his throne, and parents would take their kids to sit on his lap, say what they wanted for Christmas, and snap a photo.

At age eighteen, emboldened by my embryonic frontal lobe, the idea struck me that it would be really funny to get a picture sitting in Santa’s lap, so I dragged my unenthusiastic girlfriend with me. Dickens would have been proud. After waiting in line I finally reached the Big Man’s throne, and we ended up getting a portrait with Santa — me sitting on his knee and my then-girlfriend standing in the background looking like she was about to yell “Bah humbug!” (We did not stay together long.)

After seeing Santa, we walked to the Mermaid House, which the Lebanon Historic Society had preserved and furnished with donated period-pieces like chairs and dressers. Members of the historic society gave a guided tour, recounting the events of Dickens’ stay.

I had read Dickens in school — A Christmas Carol in seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade — and I always regarded him as so high above me in skill and fame, from another plane of existence. But when I stood in his bedroom just as he would have seen it, I felt connected, as if I might turn around and see Dickens hovering like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At that moment, I came to understand that the Mermaid House is one of those thin places straddling the border between this world and the otherworld, where if you listened carefully, the indelible whispers of the spirits occasionally broke through.

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in the New York City publishing industry and the author of two books: Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. Readers can also find his work in LitHub, Fine Books and Collections, December, National Catholic Reporter, and more. He also contributes to the show The Saints on Relevant Radio. Follow him on Instagram at @ryan.byrnes.writes.

Photo by Edward Moore, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress, HABS ILL,82-LEBA,2.

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Harvey Pekar Park
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

By Joseph S. Pete

The modesty is the point at some landmarks such as Michael Jackson’s shoebox-sized childhood home in Gary, Indiana, or the small brick ranch home where Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois. Harvey Pekar celebrated this modesty — he championed the average, the everyday, the quotidian. Known for the long-running American Splendor comic he wrote with the help of rotating guest artists, he was the bard of the banal, the elegist of the everyman, the master of Midwestern mundanity. It’s only fitting that the local landmarks where fans can pay homage to Pekar in his native Cleveland would be unassuming.

Pekar lived in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, which posthumously honored him with Harvey Pekar Park at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, a drag he often frequented. The modest park, located at the end of a sidewalk, has some benches and painted beach chairs, a small plaza, concrete steps that double as amphitheater seats for outdoor performances, and a few banners featuring panels of his comics. It could easily be overlooked by a passerby.

Pekar’s old stomping grounds lie far from I.M. Pei’s glittering, glassy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum on the Lake Erie lakefront or Frank Gehry’s splashy avant-garde building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Pekar’s native Cleveland is a humble Rust Belt burgh that inspired the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video to joke “come and look at both of our buildings.”

The city has been so snake-bitten by misfortunes like the infamous Cuyahoga River fire that there’s an entire book called Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters. The “Mistake by the Lake” has produced some great comic artists, including Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Derf, who penned the alt-weekly staple The City.

A Veterans Affairs clerk by day and graphic novelist by night, Pekar advanced the art form of comics like Superman had before him, even though he only did the writing and not the illustrations, penning scripts the cartoonists brought to life. Superman propelled flights of superhuman fancy to new heights of popularity while Pekar grounded comics in gritty novelistic autobiography that appealed to adult readers, helping pave the way for future generations of confessional zines and graphic novels often both written and set in coffee shops.

He was inspiring to fledgling writers like me, showing that it was possible to be ordinary in daily life and extraordinary on the page, that everyone’s story could make for compelling writing.

Pekar collaborated with accomplished artists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, Alison Bechdel, and Ed Piskor to elevate the pedestrian into the epic, imbuing lofty meaning into stories of workplace drudgery, vinyl record hunting at garage sales, and trudging through the snow with a haul of library books. His work reached a wider audience with the American Splendor biopic that starred Paul Giamatti and featured a scene of haunting melancholy in which Pekar stood hunched over the rail on a pedestrian bridge, watching the river of headlights flow on the highway below.

I’ve visited many of the landmarks associated with Pekar over the years. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I usually visit Cleveland at least once a year and once swung by both Cleveland and Detroit in a weekend.

I’ve seen the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center where he worked, the Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights–University Heights Public Library where he read and checked out books almost daily, and the grand Lake View Cemetery where he is buried near tombstones commemorating the likes of Elliott Ness and President Andrew Garfield.

But the best place to pay homage is Coventry Road, his old haunt where one Redditor described him as “just another guy you’d see around the neighborhood doing normal stuff.” It’s not only home to Harvey Pekar Park, but also to two of his favorite hangouts: Tommy’s Restaurant and Mac’s Backs–Books On Coventry.

The neighboring businesses are connected, so one can browse the stacks for books in the three-level bookstore while waiting for a table. The funky bohemian restaurant blends classic deli favorites with hippie-ish vegetarian fare. When I visited the restaurant, I could imagine Pekar grousing in his cantankerous, curmudgeonly way over a corned beef or tuna salad sandwich. Mac’s Backs has crowded floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves crammed with used books on every subject imaginable. Fliers, posters, and zines plastered on the stairwell down to the basement serve as a cultural history of concerts, plays, author appearances, and other bygone events.

One can envision Pekar hunting for new reading material or gathering material over coffee and conversation next door. One can picture the disheveled everyman striding stoop-shouldered down the sidewalk, absorbed in whatever mundane matter he would next alchemize into art. It’s almost like a living history museum for one of America’s most splendid graphic novelists.

The descendant of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock, and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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34th Street & Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard

On Tuesday night, January 6, 2026, the lesson at the Introduction to Judaism class my girlfriend, Greta Gaard, and I are taking was “Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Before the Tuesday night class at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we’d started watching Shoah. In the interviews of Polish villagers in Chelmno and Treblinka, we saw that they knew what lay in store for their Jewish neighbors when the gas vans came to take them away. The Polish women spoke openly about their envy of the beautiful Jewish women, of the wealth their families had accumulated, of the homes that they had. After their Jewish neighbors were crammed into gas vans and rolled off to be cremated, the Polish villagers moved into Jewish houses and apartments and took over their businesses.

Greta said, “How is it that the Jewish families out-earned their Polish neighbors? Weren’t they also Polish?”

“I’ve never heard of a Jew described as a Pole.”

“What else would they be?”

The next morning, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good at 34th and Portland Avenue. Portland Avenue is a southbound one-way street with a wide bike lane and on-street parking, that, at 34th Street, features duplexes, apartments, and single-family houses: domiciles, private residences, homes. The people who live in these homes are White, Native, Asian, Latine, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They are poets, visual artists, prose writers, sculptors, musicians, political activists, family members, friends, neighbors.

For many years, I lived in this neighborhood, and I still know people who live there. Three miles east, where I live now, everyone was affected by the aftermath of George Floyd’s death by cop-suffocation on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue—only a few blocks away from 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Less than two miles from my house is the torched police station, still surrounded by a fence festooned with signs promising a new Democracy Center and mocking graffiti next to the signs. When it burned, I could smell it.

What I understand now is that, like my dad’s Jewish family in Eastern Europe, I live in the Bloodlands. Today, the Twin Cities are occupied by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). All that is missing are checkpoints.

When the news and videos began to circulate, especially the video from the poet and musician Lynette Reini-Grandell, a Portland Avenue resident, we learned a more detailed story about the latest murder event in the Minneapolis Bloodlands.  Renee Good’s son is not an orphan, as originally reported. Renee, her wife, Becca, and their dog had just dropped off their son at school and pulled over to check out the commotion caused by ICE vehicles and agents on Portland Avenue.

We also learned that Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a poet. Soon, the link to her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” was posted everywhere, easily accessible  via “Poem-a-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.

Dissecting fetal pigs is a standard assignment for many high school and college biology students. Beyond the title, fetal pigs do not appear in Good’s poem, but they do not have to. The mere words in the title evoke fear, panic, and revulsion. Fetal pigs stink. What’s the point in cutting them to pieces? I can just hear the students at my big suburban high school complaining and clamoring until the assignment was removed from the curriculum. In my biology lab at the Catholic women’s college in St. Paul, we also didn’t dissect fetal pigs—probably because of the fetal implications. Renee Nicole Macklin did it and wrote a poem about it. In her poem, the consonants hiss and pop-pop-pop like gunshots in phrases such as “tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches” and “the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures.”

Now, I’m wondering if there’s anything more traif — more unkosher, more unfit for human consumption— than a fetal pig. Certainly, the ICE agents, with their masks and their guns and their light-brown outfits, are law enforcement traif, outnumbering the police forces of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

Even so, in the Minneapolis Bloodlands, people are not looking away. We are not moving into our neighbors’ houses or apartments, taking over their businesses, or turning their places of worship into furniture warehouses. We are blowing whistles, holding up signs, marching, protesting, cussing at the masked thugs in ugly light-brown shirts, witnessing and recording and testifying.

On the Sunday morning after Renee Good was murdered, Greta and I stopped at our neighborhood Target—the one that was looted and rebuilt. We were both trying on sunglasses, looking in the mirror and at each other. Greta found a pair she liked, and we turned toward the store’s main aisle toward the check out.

Then, we heard voices, wafting like plumes of pepper spray, saying, “ICE is here. ICE is here.”

A young person in a red Target T-shirt was pushing a cart down that main aisle. “ICE is here. ICE is here. ICE is here,” she said. She was not shouting; she was not raising her voice, but without being alarming, she was speaking at a pitch that got everybody’s attention.

“ICE is here,” I repeated. I thought, “What are they doing here? They’re not coming after me, but they weren’t going after Renee Good the other day, and they shot her in the face. They’re coming after all of us. Who is ICE targeting in our Target?”

Two of the front-end people were patrolling the area between the self-service section and the check-out lanes. Neither one looked panicked nor even disturbed, but they never, ever do. Nearby, an employee huddled with a Somali dad and a few other nonwhite folks.

 I said to the Somali dad, “Where are they?”

Was ICE was getting ready to nab somebody, or were they in our Target to grab a coffee at Starbucks before they nabbed somebody in the parking lot, as they did the other day at the Target in Richfield, about six miles away? Was somebody going to get killed?

The dad said, “They’re here.”

In that moment, everybody in the store clicked into action mode. We looked at each other, nodded, and moved to the front of the store.

Ellen Lansky lives in Minneapolis and taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Inver Hills Community College.  Her fiction includes Golden Jeep and Suburban Heathens, and her essays on literature and addiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

Greta Gaard’s creative and scholarly writing emerges from intersections among ecofeminisms and queer studies. After 35 years in academia, she is completing a creative nonfiction narrative, She UnNames Them: Mindfulness, Ecofeminism, Dementia.

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12th Street Beach
Chicago, Illinois

By E.N. Couturier

Standing at the concrete edge of a Chicago beach, you can almost rest your eyes from civilization.

As a teenage wannabe farmer feeling trapped in the city, I loved the lake for this reason. Behind me, the apartments and factories and train tracks weren’t just chaotic; they were a puzzle I couldn’t solve and a hand I couldn’t grasp.

I recognized this terrain of postindustrial memory immediately in the first story I read by Stuart Dybek, who’s written numerous collections about the city in the 1960s and 70s, cataloging and untangling a change I sensed, a lost world that stabbed at me.

His work consistently hits home, but none more than “Undertow,” which connects to my own family history while echoing my younger experiences of turning away from the roaring city humans had built to the organic strength of Lake Michigan.

In this chapter of the 2003 novel-in-stories I Sailed with Magellan, 13-year-old Perry rides through Chicago with his father, “Sir,” and younger brother, Mick, toward 12th Street Beach on a summer day.

Sir drives their rattling junk car past lumberyards, an electric plant, Chinatown shops, shabby streets, El stops, the telephone book printing factory where workers stare from the windows like inmates and the open-air bazaar on Maxwell Street where on Sundays he takes Perry to hunt for scrap wood and used plumbing fittings among frightening characters.

Then, sudden cold air and the beach, where the breeze “blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan.”

The family has always come here to swim, but today their father plans to take them into deeper water, to the Rocks. Sir swam there as a boy, picking rocks up from the lakebed and carrying them back to the concrete beach with Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic swimmer who went on to play Tarzan onscreen in the 1930s. The old-time swimsuit Sir still wears gives Perry a weak feeling, memories before their mother got cripplingly nervous.

“You shoulda seen this lake,” Sir tells his sons. “… when I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”

Before I’d ever heard of Dybek, I heard similar stories from my father, who was raised in 1960s Chicago.

All four of his grandparents and their extended families left farms in the old country for this city. Some never adjusted; they planted backyard gardens their kids were ashamed of, couldn’t hold factory jobs, raised hunting dogs that paced the kennel fence unblinking when grandchildren came over.

Wandering Chicago beaches and parks alone after school, I thought about them and tried not to remember that I was at least an hour’s drive away from any working fields. I was drawn to a life out there, with the physical world beyond people, but couldn’t figure out how to go, if it was still possible for me.

My father also wanted such a life, but he never got it. First, he needed the money, then he had the job, then people depended on it, then there was my mother, then there was me, then the three of us moving between other cities. We tried the country once, a mostly empty tract of desert where few people lived and little could grow. We left it to return to Chicago when I was 15.

I’d heard so much about the city, riding the train, running down the sidewalks, knowing the neighbors; I wanted all of it to still be real.

Sitting in someone’s mother’s SUV on a summer weekend, listening to friends argue over the white boy rap on the stereo, I could almost detach from the moment and step into another, of my father’s Chicago and the one known by two generations before him.

They swam with Weissmuller too, I’d heard.

In truth, their world was gone, the families and the factories and the people they knew. My dad said so himself with no audible disappointment. Driving through his streets and going to mixers after basketball games at his all-boys Catholic high school, I wanted to understand what had once been there and what it meant that it was lost.

At the same time, I missed living on open land as I knew they once missed it, though in the past I had hated the isolation – hearing insects, seeing animals other than the remarkable coyote. There was so much I had not learned, so much I feared it was too late to understand, about life in nature

Perry experiences something similar in “Undertow” watching his father search for scrap lumber: “His ability to gauge instantly the dimensions of things both mystified and intimidated me. It was a gift I seemed to lack completely, one expressed in a language I was ignorant of, with a vocabulary one needed to gain admittance into the practical world of men.”

His father has another language of secrecy — Polish — and, later in the story, speaks inaudibly to his son under the water at a life-and-death moment.

Perry is afraid at first to jump into the lake, where Sir is washing himself with laundry soap after a hair-raising “torpedo dive.” Mick is more interested in climbing a pile of limestone on land. Out beyond the Rocks blink lights that Sir says belong to an ocean liner.

A bystander warns Perry that the undertow is strong, says that someone went down and never came up earlier that day.

In the water, Perry loses his nerve once and then calls for his brother to watch as he dives, peeling through cold layers until he sees rocks, the ones his father saw when he swam with Tarzan.

No ancient history to be seen there; only seaweed and beer cans. Perry lifts a rock, but the current pushes him in, toward a cavern beneath the beach walkway where he fears he’ll disappear under the city forever.

He accepts he’s about to die, but Sir appears, pushing him up, appearing to say something his son can’t hear.

Could I understand my father? Could I know what people I never met had felt, in a city far from a home they’d never return to, when they looked out at the water and could catch a fish again, could feel a current or a fresh breeze?

Approaching shore, Perry realizes the beach is a solid wall. He shares a smoke with two Mexican boys on the concrete. He thought the big ship was coming in over him, he tells them. They laugh and say it’s only the pumping station. Even the real Tarzan wouldn’t swim out there.

In the dark, the lights appear to be slowly moving.

In time, my own memories — on top of other people’s — started to bind me to the places I passed walking toward city beaches: the sidewalk where I slipped on ice and skinned my knee after softball practice, the park we sat in to watch fireworks on the fourth of July. I listened to music on the public high school’s radio station and imagined something was knitting these sights into a larger whole, a dome of meaning containing my life or a current determined to carry me somewhere. Reaching the water, I would look out over it and think, like Perry, that I could see the forests of Michigan on the other side.

In a 2016 interview with The Rumpus, Dybek said each story in this book is built around a song. At first, I couldn’t locate one in “Undertow,” only a fragment Sir sings in the car, seemingly in passing. His singing embarrasses his sons, who laugh and cover their ears:

“Workin’ on the railroad, workin’ on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm…”

“Looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin’,” he goes on.

E.N. Couturier is the author of Organic Matter (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in jmww, Farewell Transmission, Offrange and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Photo by John H. White, 1973. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, NWDNS-412-DA-13844.

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Black Youth Healing Arts Center
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Chandler Peters-DuRose

It was March 2023, a week after my 19th birthday. We were in the McClinton room of the Black Youth Healing Arts Center (BYHAC), located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. Even though the building is now home to the BYHAC, it was previously Red School House, a Native American charter school founded in 1972.

That day, we were sitting at one of the grey classroom tables donated to us by the school. Despite it being a classroom table, it lacked the writing left by burnt-out students or the gum underneath that a student couldn’t be bothered to throw away.

Now we sat, the poet Danez Smith, about seven other students, and me, imagining the shape of what we now know as ‘Poetry Lab’.  Danez started the conversation by asking what we wanted to work on. That led to someone asking, “what even is a poem in the first place?” We had no concrete definition. Danez said they didn’t even know, that a poem could be whatever we wanted it to be. I was confused — how could someone who has been writing poetry my entire life not know what constituted a poem?

We dreamed the question that ultimately became the heartbeat of the space: “How do we get people to cross the boundaries of their imagination?” Writers are so often told what should be written, and we did not want to restrict those young writers who engaged in the space. We wanted to address what was possible.

As we talked, we realized we couldn’t do that without remembering where we came from, which prompted the idea of studying the past, present, and future of Black poetic history. Every week we read work from the ancestors who came before us, our contemporaries who were writing into our current conditions, and still others who took it on themselves to write into the possibilities of tomorrow.

I don’t think any of us predicted just how much this would impact the BYHAC community. In the same way the BYHAC started as a twice-a-month program in the basement of a church and grew so much it needed its own building, Poetry Lab became a years-long weekly meeting of poets. Some of them had been writing for decades and some had only written one poem in their life. Then of course there was Danez, the poet who got me into poetry and was my mentor in the craft all the way from first poem to first publication.

For three years Danez showed up weekly with two poems and a writing prompt. The rest of us came with a notebook and the audacity to write vulnerable and healing poems and share them. The core group of poets came regularly despite it being a walk-in class. Trust grew. We would delve deep into the hurt, grief, and healing that make us humans and poets.

Through some of the hardest times in my life, poetry was there. The community was there when my roommate died unexpectedly and there when I was trying to form my own adult identity. When I had to drop out of college, they were supportive. At times when the last thing I wanted to do was write, I showed up. Weekly.

Danez worked to allow us a space to show up as we were, and we held that space sacred.  What is more sacred than artists creating amidst the horrors of the world?

In their most recent book Bluff, Danez writes in the poem “principles,”

Let us not be scared of the work

because its hard

let us move the mountain

because the mountain must move.

After Trump was elected for a second term, the urgency of the poems grew. While watching multiple genocides take place and fascism in this country becoming more and more overt, our poems needed to match that urgency. What was a political pulsing vein turned to a steady heartbeat. I had started by writing extremely personal, heartbreaking, and at times retraumatizing poems but during this time shifted into a political conversation.

As my poems developed, so did my confidence. In the beginning, Poetry Lab felt hard. I could barely read without anxiety and was constantly comparing my work to the poets around me. Then in August 2024, Danez was curating for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. They asked me and a handful of other poets to publish our work. I was honored to say the least, and on August 9, 2024, my poem “Rest Stop” was published. While I believe I would have been published at some point, without BYHAC I don’t think I would have had the opportunity so soon to share my work this widely.

The year prior, Danez had helped me put together my first zine, titled Transplant after a poem I had written and edited in that space. A few months after the book came out, Danez and I were in the car, and they asked if I could read the poem. I thought they meant as an artist share. But no, they wanted to teach it. In that moment, I was no longer in their car. I was 16 finding poetry for the first time, 18 meeting Danez at a coffee shop for the first time. Back in the car, at 20, I said yes.

Later, at the center, I was reading, expecting feedback. I got nothing but praise for my work and the book. A week later, a poet from the space came back to me and said they wrote a poem after “Transplant.” I had felt like I had succeeded as a writer, in every way.

Now, I’m 21 and have three publications. I’m working with Cave Canem and writing my second play. I attribute a lot of my success to not only Danez’s mentorship but also the work I and other poets have put into making the BYHAC a space for poets — especially poets of color — to thrive. Danez and I talked extensively about how spaces for poets don’t exist like they used to, especially after lockdown, when everything moved online. While we have a robust poetry scene in the Twin Cities, opportunities for community are few and far between. The places that do exist are often inaccessible financially.

Poetry weaves metaphor with meaning to create art. I have learned to make poetry a place where my politics and ethics can grow. I’ve learned the ways in which words and images work together to create something nothing less than magic. I’ve seen poems manifest into my daily life. I have built community around writing. I have felt my words resonate with people in ways I never would have imagined. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment in a coffee shop with a good mentor to show what is possible. That possibility can lead to enough audacity to ask, no really, what if…

Chandler Peters-DuRose (they/them) is a Black Queer adoptee poet and the author of Transplant (2024). Their work appears in Poem-a-Day, from the Academy of American Poets. They reside in the Twin Cities.

Photo courtesy of Irreducible Grace Foundation and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center

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