So fun! Here's what we did: 

​Here are some of the prompts: 

- calculated perforated holes
- blue glow
- riveted soaking trousers
- overlooked misgivings

As always, we were struck each time by how differently each writer responded to the same prompt! 

Many thanks to Salesforce Park and Intersection for the Arts! 

Stay tuned for more FLASH workshops! 

I love working with teenagers because I learn from them.  And it's fun! 

I started working with teens in 1995, with the ATD Fourth World Movement in a vacation house for poor families outside of London. Teens said, "No one is working with us. Will you work with us?" I said, "Sure!" having no idea that I was making a career choice. One of those teens, Bea, and I continued to work together for several years within the youth branch of ATD Fourth World and she continued to work with teenagers well after she no longer was a teen herself.  Bea and her mother, Moraene, both work as anti-poverty activists, as experts with first-hand experience of poverty. When I recently saw Moraene, at a conference in France, she introduced me to one of her colleagues: "Bea might have gone down a dangerous path if she hadn't met Peggy when she did."  Youth workers often don't know the effect we really have, so that was wonderful to hear. But what was remarkable for me is that it's thanks to Bea that I've been working with teenagers, and loving it, for 24 years. Bea and I changed each other's lives, and those are my favorite stories. 

Teenaged Bea showed me around her Hackney neighborhood, told me stories about her life, introduced me to her friends, answered my questions and helped me figure out how to work with teens. She began my understanding of the struggles many teens face that I never had to face, but also of the strength, creativity and profound sense of justice that teens can bring to that struggle.  

After London, I spent four years working at the international center of the ATD Fourth World Youth Movement, outside of Paris. The Youth Movement brings young people from very different backgrounds together, as equals, in social justice, anti-poverty projects. I was working with young people from different countries, with different first languages, with widely varying formal education and literacy levels and facing very different kinds of challenges. There was Richard who lived with his Roma ("gypsy" or "traveller") community in a camp with no running water outside of Paris; Luke, who was going to University in Berlin who had had family on both sides of the wall; Marie who was learning circus arts to entertain children in hospitals in Brussels; and so many more. We brought them together very carefully and intentionally with a methodology that has been developed over decades and is now called Merging Knowledge. But even with this methodology and other techniques such as Theater of the Oppressed, and our purposeful facilitation, much of which I recognized later in "Restorative Justice" practices, I was consistently impressed with the capacity of these very, very different young people to overcome the barriers between them to fight for justice for all youth. That capacity gets dimmed as we grow older and I knew I had a lot to learn from it. This knowledge, of how much there is to learn from bringing very different youth together, was solidified after a group of Slovakian, French and Belgian youth I was leading on study trip in Bratislava was attacked by skinheads on a public bus. This is a story for another time, and one I have written over and over without ever being satisfied [we all have those stories]. But the most important part of the story, for me, was the incredible way the young people, who had not had an easy week, came together and supported each other in the days after the attack. 

In 2002, I moved back to the States, very much motivated by the desire to learn from young people in my own country like I had been learning from youth in Europe. While waiting in France for visas to come through for my French husband whom I had met in the Youth Movement, I put together a data base of youth-serving organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. When we finally settled in San Francisco, we both found very interesting jobs in youth organizations and we were both shocked by how youth from "disadvantaged" backgrounds were being treated. The bar was consistently being lowered for them. Staff were condescending and preachy. And no one seemed interested in learning from the youth themselves. We had been trained to keep the bar high for all youth, knowing every youth would need different kinds of support to get there. We'd learned to be patient and persistent, creative and team-focused. Most importantly, we'd learned to listen to the youth themselves, as the experts on their own lives. My (now-ex) husband (and still best friend) eventually gave up on American non-profits which are overly guided by grant cycles and which put so much financial investment into executives who, especially at that time, seemed so far away from the lives of the youth they were meant to be serving.

Eventually I found two organizations and one new methodology that would allow me to work with youth in a way I believed in outside ATD Fourth World: The Beat Within, The Oakland Public Library, and the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop method. I've been volunteering with The Beat for eleven years in the local juvenile hall, and for the last year in San Quentin State Prison.  The purpose of The Beat is to get the experience, thoughts and creativity of youth, especially incarcerated youth, out into the world through writing workshops and a magazine. The public library, for which I've worked, mostly part-time, for over ten years, is all about seeing the full complete person in front of you, finding answers to their questions, and being a gateway to knowledge sources and community they might not find elsewhere. The AWA method sees every person as a creative person and sees brilliance as being rooted in one being true to oneself. I've been using AWA in Green Windows workshops since 2008.  

Through all these jobs, bits and pieces of work cobbled together to almost make a living in the Bay Area, I have learned a lot from young people in my community. The boys killed on the street in the "bad" parts of my town (parts I live and work in, happily) aren't just boys, they are our boys. I know the shooters and the shot and know choices they face and choices they do not have. Thanks to The Beat, I know a lot of their hopes and loves and dreams and I've seen those turn to despair when their future is no longer imaginable. I bring these hopes and these despairs into everything I do and they make up one basis of my understanding of my community.  I am not the same person when, for example, on the same day, I hear news that a 24 year old I've known since he was 15 got his sentenced reduced from 84-years-to-life to 2 more years in the state juvenile facility and news that another, age 19, a youth worker himself, was shot and killed sitting in his car with his girlfriend. I don't want to not know this. I want to know these young people and I want all my decisions to be affected by these events, these youth, these victories and these losses. 

Thanks to working with the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program for the library, I get to listen to youth speak out on race, gender and justice in ways that my generation cannot manage with such articulation and honesty and respect. And being able to witness teen writers support each other in Green Windows workshops has taught me about listening, about imagination, and about what being true to oneself means today in ways that deepen my trust in the future of our society, if these youth can continue to be themselves and be safe. 

Today's youth give me hope. Not because they are simply the future, nor because of their own hope. Youth give me hope because they are brilliant, because I can see social progress made within them, because I have so much to learn from them, which means my own life is still evolving. We need to support them, trust them, believe in them, but not step back, not give over. As an adult, I want to continue to listen, to learn and to then see how I, with the wisdom and skills I've gained over fifty years, can help. Let me know if you, too, want to help. 

And I truly do simply enjoy the company of teenagers.  And I am deeply grateful to be doing work I love. 

- Peggy Simmons

PS -if the skills and experience I've gained working with teens over the years could be of use to your group - of adult or youth - please let me know! 

Every Wednesday in August, The New Parkway Cinema will give 20% of its ticket sales to Green Windows!  It's Karma Night so you can also pay what you want for that ticket! 

We also need some help to table and talk about Green Windows workshops! From 5:45 - 7:30.
Let us know if you can come. 

Why do I support Green Windows: Art of Interchange? 

I hope to provide the Green Windows: Art of Interchange community with a drop of what it has given me – deep connections to folks with whom the daily rhythms of my life would not otherwise come into unison, a reconnection to how I cast myself as a child (as a writer) and a model for how to comprehend the world.  Spaces like Green Windows are elusive in our face-in-screen society. How we participants write in Green Windows reveals and validates how we live. Some follow prompts with extreme fidelity, some throw them aside. By accepting the diversity in writing approach that others take, we see and honor their uniqueness, and in turn our own innate uniqueness. Green Windows inspires an authentic day-to-day curiosity, a wondering what each person we come into contact with would say if given a pen and paper and brought to our circle. 

In my new role, what will I do for Green Windows: Art of Interchange? 

I hope to increase the chances that someone comes into contact with the various offerings of Green Windows. The social media world can be a scary one, but I want to ensure Green Windows has a presence that increases the connections and long-term viability for its important work. I want to push the wheels on the grinding details, like data-keeping and grant-satisfying, so that Peggy can move the integral product, authentic connection and community-building, forward. 

How can I combine my passion for the issues of education equity, prison abolition and youth solidarity in one poem written in one thirteen-minute sitting? If you had asked me before 7pm Sunday night I wouldn’t have been able to tell you, but as the sky changed hues we all straggled into a warehouse in North Oakland and sat down in semi-comfortable chairs for the Uniquely Yours workshop. We opened our notebooks and Peggy started feeding us prompts. A few new folks but most of us veterans of this workshop, coming almost every month and forming close-knit bonds around shared expression. I had something on the tip of my tongue but I couldn’t taste it, couldn’t form it into the words that I wanted. My muse felt like an astronaut suspended in deep space with nothing to hold on to. 

Then Peggy read the poem “Purple” by Alex Rotella and gave us the prompt, “Write about a moment when you were discouraged, or encouraged, or when you discouraged or encouraged somebody.” In this workshop it is assumed that everything we’re writing is fiction, even if it’s not. This gives us the freedom to write the truth while maintaining anonymity in our own experience. In other writing workshops I will write a piece and people will ask me about it as if the narrator is really me, Alec West, in real life, and the story I wrote was something that happened to me. Outside of Green Windows, I have to stop people and say, “This story is not about me.” 

I don’t want what I say in a story or a poem to affect the relationships I have with my friends, my family, my readers, or the community at large. Outside of Green Windows, this happens whether I like it or not, but within the safe space that we all create together, I can write whatever I want, plumbing the pits of my soul for something I would never admit to my closest friend. When I share those secrets with the people around me through my writing, they nod and listen and tell me what they liked about it, then we move on. It never has to enter the relationships I form with those people outside of the workshop and it never leaves the room. With the safety afforded by Green Windows I can write freely and do the kind of self-exploratory work I need to do among others in my community who are doing the same thing.
​
I wrote this piece that night, based on that prompt. I thought about how discouraging it is for a teacher to have one of your students, someone much younger than you, die. I’m not revealing whether I’ve had that experience or not, but you can judge whether my writing resonates with you, and you can feel it if it is authentic.

To Be Judged
by Alec West
​
At twenty-four I was young to be a teacher whose student had died.  Ricardo had what you would call a magnetic personality. He was tall and solid with long hair that descended to his shoulders like the coned branches of a pine tree. He wore the jail uniform like any piece of clothing you would wear. He seemed to have an air of acceptance of where he was and hope for where he was going. Both of these combined with patience, faith that he would get there, that took confidence. I only remember him really writing one piece in all of the writing workshops we had. He attended a lot of them, as he was in jail for six months after I got there and I don’t know how long he was in before.

Press play. Three months after he got out, a car crash. Ricardo was a passenger and he was dead. I’m not sure if he was 18 yet or not. I wrote in his obituary: “Almost as sad as his young death was how long he had to spend in jail.” Overall, Ricardo spent two and a half years in jail after he skipped out on probation to get a job so that he could support his family. A vast number of the people you will meet in jail are not there for their original crime, but for a violation such as staying out too late, or not checking in with their PO, things that are not illegal but could wind them back up in the system. Often these people are leading positive, productive lives and trying their best, but one misstep led them off track. 
How many people are lost to parole violations, not even real crimes? How many are trapped behind walls when they could be connecting or creating with us? What if you were judged and your whole life was determined by what you did or what happened on your worst day?

There is a scene in the movie, “The Mustang” when a therapist asks a group of prisoners incarcerated for violent crimes, 
“How long from the idea of the crime to the committing of the crime?” 
30 seconds. Fifteen seconds. Ten seconds. Less than half a second. The men answer with certainty as though a game show is asking them what they had for breakfast. 

Can you judge the entire character of a person for an action committed without making a decision? 
Do you feel safe?

I’m young in my teaching and I’ve only had one student die. I’ve known teachers who have lived through the deaths of several of their students. The loss we feel is mixed with blinding injustice as the world becomes a little less colorful, a little less vibrant, and we all become a little less powerful, despite the efforts we as teachers put out every day to keep the fire burning in our students’ hearts. Our students get snuffed out. We put our dreams into these children, and these children give hope back to us. Then, the system takes these children, takes them away from the rest of us. I am a teacher and I am in my twenties and I’ve had a student die. You can judge whether I am too young or whether this is too much, but this is the world we live in. I’m not ready to make a judgment about the world, and Ricardo will always remain perfect in my memory. 

Do you feel safe?​

"Creative Dialogues" is a new name for work I've been doing for many years. With Creative Dialogues, I bring together my skills and experience facilitating groups using creative writing, theater, participatory research, and restorative justice methodologies. Creative Dialogues help people very different from each other get to know each other better and make progress together with their goals and challenges. 

Facilitation is about more than timekeeping and agenda-building. In any meeting or group gathering a good facilitator will strive to be aware of the whole space and everyone in it. Who’s dominating the conversation? Who’s not participating in any way? Who’s participating in subtle ways? Are we staying on topic? Are we understanding each other? Are we coming to a consensus if we need to? Can we hear each other? Do we need a break? Should a window be opened? A door closed? A facilitator is there for the group, not for themselves and the best facilitators are able to take themselves completely out of the conversation and help the group come to conclusions everyone will accept and in which they’ll see their own contributions. 

These outcomes aren’t always achievable by direct talking around a table. This is especially true when individuals are very different from each other, with divergent points of view, with varying language skills and/or educational backgrounds, some with more power than others, with differences that come with prejudice and bias, etc.. There are many techniques that can help with these challenging dynamics. Art and creativity can enable a group to level the playing field and grow understanding in indirect ways. Through facilitation techniques that ask us to create together and respond to each other creatively, understanding grows naturally, not through debate or winning arguments, and we are more able to see viewpoints different from our own. 

Let me know if a Creative Dialogue might be helpful for your group. Please contact me to arrange a free 20-minute phone consultation.

More information here.

I look forward to hearing from you. 

- Peggy Simmons

Medium Muse Dealer:  
What’s up with it? 
Me:
Oh nothing much. What chu got up? What you smoking on? 
Medium Muse Dealer:
Oh I’m busy, you know me, I keep it turned up . 
The better question, my man, is what you got up? You working? 
Me:
Man, I’m always working. It’s a lifestyle. A movement. 
It’s what I am. I’m Work. You already know this. I wish you’d cut to the chase. 
Medium Muse Dealer:
You funny as shit, yo, I dunno. I heard you had some slapping beats wasting away in that laptop you keep in yo backpack. I think we need to get to mixing them bitches down. 
Me:
Me Slapping Beats? In my backpack? 
Mixing down? I’m not sure what you're talking about. 
Medium Muse Dealer:
You got too many jokes. 
Me:
Man, those bitches don’t love anymore. They just pretending. 
Medium Muse Dealer:
Stop it Dude... you're tripping. Put those Sony’s on and talk to your music part for a hour or two. You owe it to the world, bruh. Come on. If not two hours maybe a half hour, a good 45 minutes or sumthin. Come on kid, stop fronting. 
Me:
Naw, I’m cool. I got way too many channels to surf right now. 
Plus I got some lightweight depressing thoughts to muddle in. Maybe next week. Besides the crib is a mess. 
Medium Muse Dealer:
I know what you mean. Well, fuck it then. Go on and take a picture of that canvas panel piece by the bathroom and post it. Gotta keep checking your phone for those ten likes, yo. Lol.
Me:
Haaaaa. A'ight a'ight only for a couple hours, tho. 

Several hours later after I have swapped out bass lines, added drum fills, guitar variations, panned DJ scratches and cuts, and added reverb and echos to songs that by this point I’m literally sick of listening to. Then I stop to see that the piece of art I thought was all that has gotten three likes. Unmoved I send a text to Thugette, call Moms and try to get some sleep.

I awake and the process repeats with a different variation of actions. I get called and hustled by my Medium Muse Dealer about what creative endeavor they deem more urgent and I bargain my time down on the act and give in. Be it painting a picture, developing a story for a screenplay, or logging the points for edits on video footage. 

The Medium Muse Dealer basically owns me. Peggy, please send help 
​

The Uniquely Yours monthly workshop started in March 2009! 

For ten years, these workshops have inspired all kinds of voices: ages 14 to 82, high schoolers, adults working on their AA, people with MFA’s, science fiction writers, poets, memoirists, children’s book writers, essayists, novelists, songwriters, homeless, renting, passing through, house-owning, from all corners of Oakland and all spots on the gender-queer spectrums, with various racial and cultural identities. 
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​
 
Listening to the other people’s writing always amazes me--the variety that flows from the same prompt in the same town on the same evening. 
- regular Green Windows writer

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​
For ten years, writers have said they’ve done their best writing in this community.

For ten years, we’ve offered a sliding scale workshop anyone can afford.

For ten years, we’ve shown up consistently, out of belief in the writing and in the community, donating time and professional facilitationwhile paying way-under-market rent to The Rock Paper Scissors Collective, a grassroots organization that has been a cornerstone of the Oakland art community.

For another ten years, with the increased cost of living in the Bay Area, we must find ways for this workshop to pay market value for facilitation and rent.

For another ten years, we need your help.

We need only $6,000 per year to make this work sustainable.

Can you donate $10/month​?
https://tinyurl.com/donate2GW

Thank you! 

I look forward to writing with you soon.

​- Peggy

Listen to why I think these workshops are special:

I keep coming back to Green Windows because I really got motivated when Peggy first invited me to the class to get over past things and express myself more. 

While I was taking the class, I went to a women's group and we had incense and candles and meditated and were asked to take whatever was on our mind and bothering us, from childhood to early age to teen to young adult to adult, and write it on a piece of paper, then read it to ourselves, then ball it up. It made me get rid of what was bothering me. I had been feeling like I had been tortured since a little girl. But as I wrote, I released things through the tears in my eyes, from my stomach, my belly, to my lungs to my throat, releasing it, throwing it up, freeing myself. So my writing is more like a journal: Instead of using my voice, I'm using my writing, screaming so the world can hear me. Instead of marching in the streets with the 99 women's march, I'm the 100th woman, marching with words.  

Young women, girls and teens are speaking up with their voices. You know, some people can't speak. Some people can't hear or talk. But they can read with their eyes. Reading, and other people reading your poetry or stories, is inspiring in either a happy way or sad way. They can learn to relieve what is bothering them, too. 

Now I'll hand a person a pencil, ink pen, or crayon and say, "I would like to hear your story. Would you like to write it down?" People think homeless people want money or food. Some people just want people to hear their story, to sit and listen, or release something, or just be quiet together. So asking them to tell their story, what's bothering them, they are like. “Oh, I just wanted you to hear this." Sometimes it doesn't make sense, but I don't care. They just want someone to listen. Most people don’t have time. 

For 2019 I would like for the city of Oakland or Green Windows to have an open mic where women, men too, but women, can say what's on their mind or what they went through, or what they want to release. Then we can give each other hugs after and let each other know we are loved no matter what gender, race, color or nationality. 
​
When I think about the violence done to people of color and queer people, I want say, “No matter your gender, we are praying for you, be strong, keep your heads up, know that you are loved. I hope they catch the racist haters out there who try to torture you. We are going to kill them with love because love is what makes the world go around.” 

Below is a piece of writing that I wrote in a Green Windows workshop. It was published in the 10-year anthology, ​Writing from Green Windows. 

Who’s Your Daddy?
     By Sister Roxanne Rocksteady Jones

Trick or Treats 
Mamas’ babies
daddies’ maybies
Who’s your daddy?

Ok! Soul Sisters
Girls, here we go
Dancin’ to the beat of Aretha Franklin 
and Lady of Soul, Diana Ross 
and Lady Sings the Blues

Here near downtown Oakland 
the block of 22nd, Telegraph and West Grand Ave
which is now called Uptown

Here on the sparklin’ psychedelic rainbow dance floor
in this ol’ ol’ ol’ red brick building
used to be the Pancake House 
which is now called Disco City
Shakin’ our money maker 
as the mens would say
Shakin’ what your Mama gave you 

Shakin’ our bootays
Droppin’ it like it’s hot
Girls just wanna have fun 
Actin’ like our Mamas’ drinkin’ brandy 
Courvoisier 
Vodka with pineapple juice 
and Gin
Strawberry margaritas 

Laughin’ havin’ fun
Cryin’ talkin’ about the good good ol’ days
about the no good men who almost stole our hearts
Rememberin’ the good good good ol’ ol’ ol’ days
When our Mamas was also on the dance floor 
Partyin’ and shakin’ their old money makers 
Their groove things
Their asses, as the ol’ men would say
Drinkin’ brandy with milk 
7 Up with Courvoisier 
Vodka with orange juice
Gin with apple juice
Dancin’ to the Temptations
the Whispers 
Gladys Knight and the Pimps
Dancin’ til’ the funkadelics the freaks 
Come out at night

Dance song 
Shakin’ it
Droppin’ it like it’s hot
and our Moms cryin’ about our no good daddies 
on the dance floor 
as the Godfather of Soul, James Brown 
Sings the number one song 
Hot Pants
I like the girl with the hot pants on 
She can do the boogie woogie all night long

Oh my God, he’s singin’ about my Mama
who’s your daddy?
James Brown, Father of Soul 
Goin’ back to the good good good ol’ days

Trick or Treat 
Who’s your daddy? 
Mamas’ babies 
daddies’ maybies