One of Brush Fire’s amazing board members attended Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp earlier this month. She was super excited about it; Her enthusiasm for the event’s focus – story telling – encouraged me to share the story behind the creation of Brush Fire.
My first favorite book, The Fire Cat
In the mid-1990s, I was on the fast track for a glamorous career in the publishing world. My first love was books and, I was busily building a resume working for a variety of book and magazine publishers that no publishing company in New York City could possibly resist.
I was well on my way to fulfilling my life-long dream, when I was asked to participate as a mentor for Each One Reach One (http://www.eoearo.org/) an organization that provides one-on-one playwriting with youth in the juvenile justice system. The pay was pretty good and the project sounded interesting, so I figured I would give it a go.
My first trip to the maximum-security facility for San Francisco’s most violent juvenile offenders was terrifying. As soon as we walked through the metal detectors at the front door I began to hold my breath. We were escorted down a long hall toward the unit, stopping every hundred feet or so for some unseen guard to unlock yet another door, a system designed to discourage escape. Who would be waiting on the other side of that final door?
I imagined that who ever her was, he’d be disinterested at best, violent at worst. I’d been a self-defense instructor for a few years and I imagined my response to all manner of harassment by my mentee. I was trying to convince myself that I could handle what ever might happen.
In fact, nothing that I imagined prepared me for my two weeks as Andre’s playwriting mentor. He was genuinely surprised and delighted that we cared enough to show up. As I helped him form his play out of nightly writing exercises, I watc
hed Andre become enthralled by his new-found ability to speak the truth he held in his heart through the characters he created. It was gratifying to arrive every evening to witness Andre write the dialogue he’d imagined the night before while in his cell. I watched him transform into a confident writer, able to give shape to his characters and reflect his experience as a young Black man in San Francisco.
Even more compelling, though, was how those two weeks changed me. Prior to this experience, I thought I was able to understand and accept a wide variety of people. Sitting next to Andre for two weeks, I realized that I came to the mentoring experience with a host of preconceived ideas about incarcerated youth – especially youth of color – as scary, violent, and out of control. I was just not aware of how I had absorbed the cultural norm that sees African-American youth as public enemy number one. Perhaps Andre really was dangerous – I found out that he was transferred to the California Youth Authority , (http://www.topjuveniledefender.com/california_youth_authority.html) a sentence reserved for youth who commit the most heinous crimes – but engaging with him over creative pursuits reminded me of his humanity. After all, how many people are really born bad? I became aware of how circumstances may have shaped the choices Andre made and how struggling with the challenges inherent in creative expression could help him to make different choices in the future.
Sharing Andre’s creative process was an electric experience – witnessing how creative expression had given both of us a new way of thinking about ourselves woke up a passion in me that I didn’t know I had. By the end of the final performance of Andre’s play, I knew that I wanted to be that witness again, facilitating connections between youth and their creativity. So Brush Fire Painting Workshops was born.
