Panel of Writers

On Friday, I attended the panel of writers, an event of the humanities symposium. I attened a similar event last semester for Effective Writing, but found that the event this semester related better to writing Baltimore. The panel consisted of four writers, Gregory Kane from the Baltimore Sun, Elizabeth Evitts the editor-in-chief of the Urbanite, Jane Conly an author of children’s books and Chezia Cager a professor at Maryland Institute College of Art. Each of the speakers helped the audience understand the difficulties and challenges that writers face and the problems that the city of Baltimore is facing today and how to help solve those problems.
The first speaker was Gregory Kane. He began by telling the audience that he would probably be the speaker to take ten minutes rather than the fifteen minutes that he was allotted. He said that when he was asked to speak to a group of middle school students, he was given ninety minutes to speak and he spent eighty of those minutes talking about rap and only ten speaking about what he was asked to. For him, the biggest challenge about writing for the Baltimore Sun is getting public officials to speak and when they do speak, getting them to tell the truth. For instance, a Baltimore police officer was killed a while ago and Gregory said that he has yet to get any answers about his death. He said he was told to wait a few months and he would have answers but he waited seven months and the public officials told him that they were still conducting an investigation. Gregory was later told that the officials take a long time to investigate so they do not have to answer to the public. Most of his talk was about telling the truth and exposing what the public officials hide from the public. He also talked about moving people away from the tourist attractions. He said that the only places that get renovated are the places that attract tourists, for instance the inner harbor. Which is true, because we are so concerned with attracting tourists and generating revenue we forget that it is more important to take care of the needs of the residents of the city.
It was easiest to relate Elizabeth Evitts’ talk to writing about and living in Baltimore. She is the current editor-in-chief of the Urbanite, a magazine that talks about the issues facing not only Baltimore but also other cities in the U.S. Every month they pick a theme and all of the articles and quotes relate in some way to that theme. When the Urbanite was first published, it was a small black and white magazine with a circulation of about 1500. Today the magazine is much larger and the circulation has increased significantly. Elizabeth talked about Jane Jacobs, whose work, The Life and Death of Great American Cites, inspired the theme for the Loyola College humanities symposium. She said that Jacobs was not only a great writer but she was an exceptional observer and researcher. Jacobs wrote a piece in which she talked about a community that hated a green lawn in the area because it represented progress. The homes of the members of this community were being torn down to build new resident towers and no one had asked the homeowners how they felt. Elizabeth said that a writer cannot sit in front of a computer and write about a city and expect the work to be appreciated. A writer must know about the topic and the only way to understand the issues of the city is to talk to the people who live in it and are affected by it. That fits in so well with the Year of the City, because that theme forces us out into the city to immerse ourselves in the rich culture and history of the residents. Elizabeth also talked about what homes today have come to represent to buyers. She said that many people buy homes as an investment and their main concern is how much the property will appreciate in the next few years. With all of those concerns, she said we spend little time getting to know our neighbors. She also said that many parts of Baltimore need to be rejuvenated, and stores need to be built so that the communities can function on their own.
Chezia Cager was the most entertaining panelist at the event. She read and sang to us a poem that she wrote called “Country Girl, City Girl.” It was a beautiful poem that discussed the issues of living in a city. She asked herself if she really wanted pollution and crime and the noise that comes with living in a city. She said that when she thought of home she thought of a place overflowing with love. So to her home was in the country or in the city, as long as there was love surrounding her. Later in the event she talked about stoops and what they represent to people that live in the city. She said that in many parts of Baltimore, there are no community centers where people can gather. So the first thing that people faced with this problem do when they come home is drop their bags and sit out on the stoop. She said that the people sitting out on the stoops are the eyes of the city because people know that you cannot steal or start a fight while everyone is watching.
Jane Conly in her talk gave the most vivid descriptions of Baltimore, which came from the children’s books she wrote. The first description was about row houses where everyone knew the people who lived across from them, next to them and a few houses down from them. She said that unlike places outside the city, people living in Baltimore did not have to worry about kidnapping because people knew that they did not have the money for ransom. It was so easy to see how different her perspective was from Elizabeth Evitts. In this description everyone in the neighborhood was acquainted while Elizabeth said that we do not get to know our neighbors because we are to concerned with property value. The second description was about Earl and his siblings. He lived with his aunt who had a drinking problem and one day never came home. That same day, his little sister went missing and his cousin Wayne would not help him look for her. Jane began writing about Baltimore when she went to a free clinic for help and later began volunteering there. She got to know the people that came into the clinic and understood the problems they faced. She talked about what used to happen in the neighborhood of Waverly. She said that real estate agents would move African American people into town homes in the neighborhood and would then go to the white people and tell them that African Americans were moving into the neighborhood and the value of their property was gong down because of it. So the white people would sell their homes for lower than what they were worth and would leave the neighborhood. The realtors would then sell those homes to more African American people. As she told us this, I immediately thought of Julia Alvarez’s “Queens” in which the Jewish woman is so concerned with the value of her home decreasing because and African American family moved next door. Her descriptions of Baltimore showed us a side of the city that we never knew before.
Each of the writers, with their ten-minute discussions, forced us to look at the city from a different perspective. Gregory showed us that the public officials wanted so much to generate revenue that they forget about the residents of the city. As Elizabeth said, he is one of the few reporters that is willing to get the truth and does not stop until he finds it. Elizabeth told us that in order to write about the city we have to know what it means to live in the city and the only way to do that is to get to know the people. She also told us that today we have become too concerned with property value and are less concerned with getting involved in the community. Chezia Cager showed us that the stoop, which is commonly associated with children making trouble, is merely a way for the community to get together. Like Gregory she said that we need to stop worrying about the tourist attractions and need to worry more about making places for people of different communities to get together. And lastly Jane Conly allowed us to see what it means to live in the city neighborhoods and revealed a past of the city that we did not know before. This event reinforced what the theme of the Year of the City is about. We have to understand the people and the issues that they face as they live in this large and complex city.