Nancy Cook - 2019 Summer Resident
Nancy Cook is a writer, teaching artist, and community builder. She coordinates the “Witness Project,” a series of free community writing workshops in Minneapolis designed to enable creative work by underrepresented voices, and, as an artist affiliate for the Southwest Minnesota Housing Authority, she helps design arts programs for adults in transitional housing. Holder of both an MFA in creative writing and a JD degree, and the sole parent of an adopted child, Nancy formerly worked full time in academia, teaching and supervising students in community justice work while maintaining an active writing practice and teaching creative writing in multiple venues, from college campuses to prisons. She currently teaches at a number of local arts centers and serves as a manuscript reviewer for Coffee House Press and as creative nonfiction editor for Kallistogaia Press. She is widely published and recently completed her first book of short stories, arising from a residency on the grounds of the former Fergus Falls State Hospital in western Minnesota. She has also served as writer-in-residence at Gettysburg National Military Park and is spending the early part of 2019 in Omagh, Northern Ireland, as International Artist-in-Residence.
Writing and Workshops
While at Plyspace, Nancy offered a series of writing workshops that focused on developing a community narrative about Muncie and its environs. Among the possible projects were a “Poetry Map” in which the literary and the geographical combined to provide new definition, description, and reflection on significant points of interest in the area through poetry. Writers contributed to writing “The Biography of a Town” by developing poems and narratives around such themes as houses, daily tasks, adornments and dress, amusement, means of communication, and beliefs, using a taxonomy developed by Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola.
Workshops were conducted with two community groups, The Youth Opportunity Center, and the Ross Community Center. Each were designed for writers of any experience level, from absolute beginners to published authors, and worked through a series of exercises that help writers explore their own stories.
In the months after the residency was complete, Cook wrote on her Muncie experience, consulting with the participants in the writing groups. They came up with the idea of assigning the exercises they used in our workshops to herself, to mine the material she’d gathered. Her new work draws from her experiences in other small towns, including her home town in Ohio. With each individual piece she adapts the voice of a different (and fictional) small town resident. In this way she hopes to sympathetically reflect the character of a “typical” Midwestern town.
The Exercise
Write a poem or prose poem in a single sentence
Possible Topics:
Friendship
A long walk, drive, or bike ride
Past Love
A storm or catastrophe coming in
STRUNG OUT
Feeling bloated from too much fried food at last night’s neighborhood potluck, I started out on a walk around town today, which took me first across one empty parking lot and then another, and then another and another, until the emptiness depressed me, so I turned up a side street, going at a pace that was not too fast because the sidewalk was not just cracked but broken in so many places, big sharp concrete hunks dislodged from the ground, so bad in fact I dared not raise my eyes from a few feet in front of my shoes, when suddenly I came to a halt at a place where the sidewalk ended, ended in the middle of a residential street, as if the spot marked the boundary between warring nations or the contractor had run out of cement or maybe the workers one day had just given up, shrugged their shoulders, and gone home, so I thought to stay on the grass which was flattened almost to dirt, but broken bottles and abandoned fast-food containers of all description impeded my way, so I crossed over to the other side of the street, took a right turn, only to find the sidewalk again ending, near a field where a weathered sign pronounced “community gardens,” of which there were none, and well, by this time, my discouraged Cons longed for stable footing, my eyes craved greenery, my ears felt tenderized by assaults from too many sirens within too short a distance, my gut felt queasier than before, and thus I found myself inclined to get into my car and drive to a nature trail five miles out of town, which I did, stopped en route at the railroad tracks for a passing train, and then, walking the trail, at last on terra firma, in the company of grazing geese and blooming buttonbush, I passed below a trestle to the rattle and pound of the freight above, then minutes later arrived at a similar scene and this time paused to watch the long line of Union Pacific, Kansas City Southern, and CSX Transport cars go by, car after car after car after car after car, car after car loaded with corn syrup, only corn syrup, tank car after tank car, tons and tons and tons of the stuff traveling the tracks, bound for wide open country or, just as likely, headed for a dead end.