The WAT?! Tour’s 9th year promises to be its biggest yet. The week-long poetry marathon kicks off Sunday, August 10th and runs through Saturday, August 16th.

It’s poetry for 7 nights straight in 7 venues. It’s a lineup that consists of 19 of Houston’s top poets and a select, nightly feature that promises to bring diversity and excitement that defines what it means to be a performing poet in Houston. Participating poets range in styles from academic, slam, spoken word and experimental.

As always the show is free and open to the public nightly at 8pm sharp every night of the tour.

THE 2025 VENUES

SUNDAY, AUGUST 10TH BOHEMEO’S ART HOUSE 708 TELEPHONE RD., HOU. TX, 77023

MONDAY, AUGUST 11TH INPRINT! 1520 WEST MAIN, HOU. TX, 77006

TUESDAY, AUGUST 12TH WILLOW ST. PUMP STATION 811 N. SAN JACINTO, HOU., TX 77002

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13TH AVANT GARDEN 411 WESTHEIMER HOU., TX 77006

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14TH BOOMTOWN HEIGHTS 242 W. 19TH ST. HOU. TX, 77008

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15TH THE ALLEY KAT BAR & LOUNGE 3718 MAIN ST., HOU. TX, 77002

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16TH BRASIL 2604 DUNLAVY ST. HOU. TX, 77006

THE 2025 LINE- UP

This line up represents the full spectrum of Houston poetry- poets garnering attention from local, national and international publications, along with prize winning slam poets; poets working on MFAs and PHDs amongst performers, hosts and producers of theatre, blogs, live shows and internet radio. They are professors, students, activists, jazz musicians, and graduates from the school of hard knocks from all over the Houston area.

*ALICE ALSUP | SAVANNAH BLUE | BGK | GERALD CEDILLO | PW COVINGTON

WINSTON DERDEN | DIGH | ERANIA EBRON | MARLON LIZAMA | SAL MACIAS

JONATHAN MOODY | BISHOP RAGTIME | OSCAR PEÑA

RAIN | AMIR SAFI | TRADEMARK | MARY WEMPLE

THE 2025 VETERAN FEATURES

These poets have performed with the tour for at least 3 years, and have earned a short feature at a venue during one night of the tour. They are Hip-Hop Artists, Lyricists, Teachers, Arts Organizers and Visionaries. They help build poetry in Houston

ARIA | STEPHEN GROS | LUPE MENDEZ | THEFLUENTONE | CHRIS WISE

*NOTE: In Memoriam – Sadly, Alice Alsup passed away soon after being selected for a slot on the Poetry Tour. The organizers ask the participants and the audience to honor her memory by holding a moment of silence every night of the tour. No one new was selected to replace Alice on the WAT Tour – out of respect and love for the poet.

About one week ago, the local poet, journalist, and University of Houston student Alice Alsup wrote a Facebook post soliciting favorite lines from suicide notes. As a fellow poet, journalist, and lover of words, I thought nothing of it–maybe she was working on a story for Houstonia, where she interned, or maybe she just had some kind of goth predilection.  I contributed some lines from one of my favorites, Mayakovsky’s Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. I think Alice, herself, recommended something from Sylvia Plath, but I could be mistaken. Alice’s Facebook profile no longer exists.  As of Monday, June 9, neither does Alice.

She was a sprightly being, a read-headed butterfly fluttering about on her bicycle from a vintage shop to a picnic in the park, from a friend’s club gig to the next poetry reading…to places beyond and places between.  Her lucent, gossamer complexion betrayed a radiance within–she did not seem of this world, in truth. A faerie. A nymph. A sprite.  Her voice–a little squeaky, a little unsure–and her charm–she seemed at ease with being ill at ease, disarmed any unease as another stranger became Alice’s new friend.

At Summer Fest this year, Alice said hello to me then immediately struck up a conversation with my companion, placed a Texas sticker on her chest so as to leave a negative tan “tattoo” in the shape of the Lone Star State, thus giving her a fun distraction from the heat. Our mutual friend Make was about to perform.  She supported her friends, and her friends, likewise, remain some of her biggest fans.  (Look for Alsup’s article about Make, aka Josiah Gabriel, in the July edition of FPH–we wish she were here to see it.  And look for Alsup’s poetry in the upcoming Word Around Town poetry festival.)

Yesterday, a motley crew of about 50 tattooed, pierced, dreadlocked people gathered in Menil Park to mourn and celebrate Alice. The diversity, in every sense of the word, among her friends bore witness to the breadth of her explorations–young, old, black, white, hispanic, man, woman, trans, rich, poor, crusty, preppy–all came out to wring their hands, lament their loss, curse her act, share tears and laughter.

I did not know Alice well, though I had hoped to get to know her better.  I first met her at a dance party I helped organize on Valentine’s Day.  My collective, Nomadic Beats, threw a renegade street party on the median in Montrose in conjunction with Art League Houston. We dropped some funky beats and handed out 200 red carnations to motorists stuck in traffic.  Alice appeared to have loved it, and her presence added much to the atmosphere.

Back at Menil Park, Kira, whose shoulder bears a tattoo line drawing of Vonnegut’s face with the caption “So it goes,” Mary, and I read this passage from Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, the Bokononist death rite, and talked about savoring every moment of our time in this form:

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!”
“See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.”
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God.
Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait…
To find out for certain what my wampeter was…
And who was in my karass…
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

Some folks at the park felt angry about Alsup’s “selfish” act; others wiped tears from their eyes and shrugged their shoulders and said she had every right, that the life was hers to live or refuse; some spoke of mental illness; some said our lives are not ours alone, that we belong to others in addition to ourselves.  I was reminded of my high school guidance counselor’s adage that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

I hear tell of at least three suicides in the Houston arts scene just this week, all under very different circumstances. I’m not really sure what else to say about that. Love your friends, I guess, and look for those signs.

According to one friend at the memorial, Alice had been posting photographs on Facebook that dropped subtle hints about the way she would eventually choose to go.  According to another friend, on a recent visit to the prison museum in Hunstsville (which she wrote about for Houstonia) she seemed particularly captivated by condemned prisoners’ last words.  And then there was the Facebook exchange I mentioned.  Taken together, these observations begin to paint a picture, but taken independently, how could any one of us have known?

So what is there to say?  It’s just sad, really really sad.  A tragic loss.  Our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Alice Alsup.  If only she knew the number of people she inspired.

Let’s let Alice have the last word.  Ronald Jones’s videos do an excellent job of capturing her spirit. I can’t believe she’s gone.

Read love it’s last rites.
Say to yourself
“This is my heart letting go.”

I should always be prepared to be in transience, you know, ready to move on at any time. Even now, I love where I ‘m living now, but I have every cardboard box that I’ll ever need stuffed in the hallway closet just in case I need to move again. And I have left two boxes unpacked.

All photos courtesy of an anonymous friend of Alice’s.

Feel free to use the comment space to leave stories of Alice and thoughts for her loved ones.

Navin R. Johnson, Steve Martin’s character in the classic comedy The Jerk, is a white man raised by an adoptive black family in the rural US south, and the film opens with Johnson learning on his 18th birthday that he is not the biological child of the people who raised him.

“You mean I’m going to stay this color forever?!” Martin delivers one of the film’s most-quoted lines.

Pauline Black, lead singer of the seminal British ska band The Selecter, grew up with no such illusions. Her recent memoir, Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir opens with her adoptive (white) mother punishing her for throwing up, at the age of four, when told that she’d been adopted. Black was about to start school, and her mother thought she should know how to answer when her schoolmates asked her why her skin color did not match her parents’.

Pauline Vickers, biological child of a 16-year-old, Anglo-Jewish girl and a married Nigerian man, was raised in a loving home by Ivy and Arthur Vickers in a small town outside of London during the mid-1950s-60s. The Vickers were loving and kind, if somewhat clueless, and the opening chapter goes on to describe the fascination “three curious old aunts, all named after various fragrant flowers,” had for her wooly hair. She grows up in a family that wants to ignore that her black half even exists, and friends and relatives routinely make racist comments, oblivious to the presence of the small black child in the room.

She knows no other black people. Indeed, no other black families even live in her town, and her first introduction to the African diaspora is through the record collection of her friends’ beatnik parents–which featured American jazz music. Isolated from the British African diaspora, Vickers learns about black power through American sources–Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Jimi Hendrix. Her mother (and the whole town) is scandalized when she steps out rocking an afro (bless her white mother’s soul–she never really knew what to do with Pauline’s hair, anyway).

It doesn’t take Vickers long to realize that her way out of this cultural backwaters where nobody dares to date her is through school, so she hits the books hard and leaves for university in Coventry. This is where she finally makes some black friends. She learns guitar and becomes a singer/songwriter, playing hippy crap until she’s recruited to join a ska band that already had one instrumental hit (their only song)–a b-side on a Specials single released by the newly formed 2-Tone label. Her life would never be the same.

2-Tone Records was created with the explicit aim of challenging racist bullshit, but no single group encapsulated that message as well as The Selecter. Of all the 2-Tone bands, not only was The Selecter the most racially integrated, it was also the only to feature a female singer–and an “androgynous” one at that.

The band and their label-mates–the Specials, Madness, Bad Manners, the Beat–all skyrocketed to fame almost instantaneously. Vickers, who was calling in sick to her job as a radiologist, was somewhat unprepared for this, and this is when she decided to rename herself–because she feared the consequences of her employers learning about her double-life.

She chose “Black,” Pauline Black, to force people (such as her family) to acknowledge that part of her.

The middle part of the book reads like many rock bios. The challenges of touring, the tensions in the band, the racial tensions stoked by the bands’ message. This portion might appeal to die-hard, 2-Tone fans, but for this reader, the best part was reading the book alongside YouTube, so I could look up all the obscure bands The Selecter performed with, and even watch stuff like their famous Top of the Pops TV appearances while reading the backstory.

For a variety of reasons, The Selecter fell apart almost as quickly as they rose to the top, but Black refuses to go back to her radiology job. She takes on acting roles, and even has a brief stint as a BBC television personality, which brings her to the US to cover Jesse Jackson’s historic presidential bid in 1984.

I don’t want to give away the whole book, so I’ll leave out what happens when Black goes searching for her birth parents, but this book will make a great present not just for fans of ska and 2-Tone Records, but anybody interested in what it was like to grow up mixed-race before it became the norm, in a woman’s struggle in the male-dominated music world, an outsider’s view of race relations in the US and just plain, old good prose. (When approached by a publisher to write her autobiography, Black insisted that she would write it herself–without the aid of a ghostwriter as most music biographies are handled–and she proves her chops).

I’m friends with a mixed-race couple here in Houston–he is Gujrati and she is non-Mormon from Utah. They have two beautiful children who just recently started school. The father, who is of Indian heritage, like me, jokes about how we used to stick out like a sore thumb among the white kids in our respective schools while growing up. The funny thing is, he met another father, a white man, while waiting for his kids outside of school recently.

“I have no trouble finding my kid,” that father said. “He’s the pale one with the blonde hair.”

How times have changed.

Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir by Pauline Black, published by Serpent’s Tail, is available for $13.68.

This article ran in the December 2025 edition of FPH.

Navin R. Johnson, Steve Martin’s character in the classic comedy The Jerk is a white man raised by an adoptive black family in the rural US south, and the film opens with Johnson learning on his 18^th birthday that he is not the biological child of the people who raised him.

“You mean I’m going to stay this color forever?!” Martin delivers one of the film’s most-quoted lines.

Pauline Black, lead singer of the seminal British ska band The Selecter, grew up with no such illusions.  Her recent memoir, Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir opens with her adoptive (white) mother punishing her for throwing up, at the age of four, when told that she’d been adopted.  Black was about to start school, and her mother thought she should know how to answer when her schoolmates asked her why her skin color did not match her parents’.

Pauline Vickers, biological child of a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Jewish girl and a married Nigerian man, was raised in a loving home by Ivy and Arthur Vickers in a small town outside of London during the mid-1950s-60s.  The Vickers were loving and kind (if somewhat clueless) and the opening chapter goes on to describe the fascination “three curious old aunts, all named after various fragrant flowers,” had for her wooly hair.  She grows up in a family that wants to ignore that her black half even exists, and friends and relatives routinely make racist comments, oblivious to the presence of the small black child in the room.

She knows no other black people.  Indeed, no other black families even live in her town, and her first introduction to the African diaspora is through the record collection of her friends’ beatnik parents–which featured American jazz music.  Isolated from the British African diaspora, Vickers learns about black power through American sources–Aretha Franklin and James Brown and Jimi Hendrix.  Her mother (and the whole town) is scandalized when she steps out rocking an afro. (Bless her white mother’s soul–she never really knew what to do with Pauline’s hair, anyway).

It doesn’t take Vickers long to realize that her way out of this cultural backwaters where nobody dares to date her is through school, so she hits the books hard and leaves for university in Coventry.  This is where she finally makes some black friends.  She learns guitar and becomes a singer/songwriter, playing hippy crap until she’s recruited to join a ska band that already had one instrumental hit (their only song) — a b-side on a Specials single released by the newly formed 2-Tone label.  Her life would never be the same.

2-Tone Records was created with the explicit aim of challenging racist bullshit, but no single group encapsulated that message as well as The Selecter.  Of all the 2-Tone bands, not only was The Selecter the most racially integrated, it was also the only to feature a female singer–and an “androgynous” one at that.

The band and their label-mates–the Specials, Madness, Bad Manners, the Beat–all skyrocketed to fame almost instanteously.  Vickers, who was calling in sick to her job as a radiologist, was somewhat unprepared for this, and this is when she decided to rename herself–because she feared the consequences of her employers learning about her double-life.

She chose “Black,” Pauline Black, to force people (such as her family) to acknowledge that part of her.

The middle part of the book reads like many rock bios.  The challenges of touring, the tensions in the band, the racial tensions stoked by the bands’ message.  This portion might appeal to die-hard 2-Tone fans, but for this reader, the best part was reading the book alongside YouTube so I could look up all the obscure bands The Selecter performed with, and even watch stuff like their famous Top of the Pops TV appearances and while reading the backstory.

For a variety of reasons, The Selecter fell apart almost as quickly as they rose to the top, but Black refuses to go back to her radiology job.  She takes on acting roles, and even has a brief stint as a BBC television personality, which brings her to the US to cover Jesse Jackson’s historic presidential bid in 1984.

I don’t want to give away the whole book, so I’ll leave out what happens when Black goes searching for her birth parents, but this book will make a great present not just for fans of ska and 2-Tone Records, but anybody interested in what it was like to grow up mixed-race before it became the norm, in a woman’s struggle in the male-dominated music world, an outsider’s view of race relations in the US, and just plain old good prose.  (When approached by a publisher to write her autobiography, Black insisted that she would write it herself–without the aid of a ghostwriter as most music biographies are handled–and she proves her chops.)

I’m friends with a mixed-race couple here in Houston–he is Gujrati and she is non-Mormon from Utah.  They have two beautiful children who just recently started school.  The father, who is of Indian heritage, like me, jokes about how we used to stick out like a sore thumb among the white kids in our respective schools while growing up.  The funny thing is, he met another father, a white man, while waiting for his kids outside of school recently.

“I have no trouble finding my kid,” that father said.  “He’s the pale one with the blonde hair.”

How times have changed.

Black By Design: A 2-Tone Memoir by Pauline Black, published by Serpent’s Tail, is available for $13.68.

By Rob McCarthy

Harbeer Sandhu is a smart guy, but he knows that you don’t have to be a smart guy to appreciate art. In fact, if you even enjoy art, you are miles ahead of the average neanderthals amongst us.

Herb, as he is affectionately known amongst his colleagues and friends, is more than passionate about art, he is the writer of the blog Texphrastic, which aims to “give long-form criticism and independent ekphrastic reponses” to art installations, artists, and particular pieces.

Although he has his MFA in creative writing, he has little to no formal education in visual arts, art history, or art criticism. We had the pleasure of speaking with him, and getting to know more about him, art, and Texphrastic.

Why is this blog so special?

I write it.

Aren’t there a million other blogs that do the same thing too?

No. Zero, actually.  (There are other good art blogs, all with their own strengths and interests, but mine, I would say, is specific to my voice and my interests, so it is singular in at least those respects.)

What specifically do you hope to do that no one else does?

I am neither an academic art historian nor a journalist reporting on art events, covering who was seen on the scene for the society pages, or regurgitating press releases and artist statements.  I contextualize contemporary art by relating what I see to literature, film, current events, sociological concerns, and other art. I do this with a close attention to language.

Another thing I try to do is to make contemporary art accessible to the layperson.  There are definitely others doing that, too, so I don’t claim any exclusivity on that tip — but expressing complex ideas in simple language is of paramount concern to me as a writer.

Without having a who’s who on the arts, do you feel that people can still appreciate the techniques, the history, the theory, and the approach to art?

Absolutely yes, but it requires work on the audience’s part.  Ask a foreign visitor to watch a game of American football and see how much they get from it.  Art (in all media) is, above all, a conversation, that is sung, so, just like you can enjoy music in languages you don’t understand, there are many other levels at which it may be appreciated if you speak the language.  (And this is a sloppy metaphor, because things are expressed graphically and not verbally for a reason, but visual art is nonetheless a “conversation” that employs “languages.”)

How do you approach a new style or artist without having been versed in the work that may have influenced that art? Does that hinder your ability to relate to it or to write about it?

I look at it, I think about it, and then I ask myself if it’s worth thinking about more.  If I decide it is (based entirely on my own subjective viewpoint) then I spend some time with it.  Not knowing too much about it does not necessarily hinder my ability to relate to works, because can I learn more if I feel so inclined, or I can go with an impressionistic, ekphrastic approach.  It all starts, however, with looking closely at the work and spending some time with it, then asking questions.

Apart from Houston, you have spent significant time living in both New York and San Francisco. How did those environments shape your outlook on both art and literature?

I’ve heard it put this way (though I would say it’s dated, because SF is over):  In SF, people have talent but no ambition; in LA, people have ambition but no talent; and in New York, people have both ambition and talent.  Where Houston fits in to that, I’ll let you decide.

That said, in Houston, the conversation among art professionals is that we need more arts funding to make real our claim to be a cultural capital/destination.  That’s all they ever want to talk about — funding (most of which goes to non-profit administrators, anyway).  While I agree that funding is crucial, and the arts do have social benefits so they are worthy of public funding, I think another crucial ingredient that never gets mentioned is a good audience.

In New York I saw a very educated, discriminating, diverse and engaged audience.  (Diverse among professions, in particular — in Houston the art audience seems to be composed almost exclusively of other artists.)  I learned a lot from those people, and being around smart people talking about cool things made me want to educate myself, more, too.

In both SF and Houston, I feel like audience expect much less, and consequently, artists feel justified in tempering their own ambitions, and that really holds the culture back.

Explain the portmanteau of “Texphrastic” to our readers.

Ekphrasis (or ekphrastic writing) is an Aristotelian term describing writing which is done in concert with visual art.  This is what I aim to do in my art criticism — to write stand-alone works of literary quality which use visual art as a point of departure for my own impressionistic creative writing.  My blog is focused on Texas art, so I combined the words “Texas” and “ekphrastic” to make TEXPHRASTIC.  (I probably should have chosen an easier to spell URL, but now I’m stuck with it.)

What makes your website different from typical art journalism? Why avoid the norm?

As I said above, typical art journalism usually does one of three things:  1) paraphrases the curatorial statement or the artist’s statement; 2) describes the work in very literal terms with some discussion of materials and process and its place in art history; or 3) presents a bunch of photos of the opening with captions describing who’s who.

In the first case, that style of art writing does not challenge or question or otherwise engage the press release/curatorial statement/artist’s statement.  In other words, it adds nothing to the discussion or audiences’ understanding of the work.  In the second case, that’s kind of what art historians do, and it’s somewhat meaningless to the layperson.  And the third case, that’s just vapid, meaningless bullshit that nobody should care about, and if they do care about that, then I hope they stub a toe like right now, maybe even bust a shin on their coffee table.

In any case, there are enough people already doing all those things, and I bring a unique talent to the table (that of my freewheeling associations — bringing literature, film, music, etc — into the discussion), so I would be doing myself and my potential readers a disservice to forego doing something unique in favor of doing that which others are already doing.  If readers want “typical art journalism,” they have places they can go for that.

What has inspired you down this Texphrastic path?

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I’m going to answer this with a quote from Dorothy Parker’s Paris Review interview:

Interviewer:  What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

Parker:  Need of money, dear.

The first piece I wrote that might be called “art criticism” was a piece I wrote for CITE magazine about Dean Ruck and Dan Havel’s piece in the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston’s “No Zoning” show.  After that, I wrote a few more articles for various publications about local art that struck a chord with me, and when I found out there was a grant available for people writing about visual art, I figured I should apply because I do something unique which would have a good chance of winning the grant.

Inspiration has nothing to do with it; it comes from having a need to eat and pay my bills.  It’s a job, though oftentimes I can’t tell the difference between work and play.

What do you see yourself doing with it in the future? What were the goals for the blog out of the gate, and have those changed at all?

I see myself continuing to do it indefinitely, although I think the blog format is not really well-suited for what I do.  I put too much research into my blog posts (I read three whole books for one post, and I’m working on another one that’s incorporating at least five books) which makes it hard to hard to update even on a weekly basis, and they’re too long for online reading, I think, too.  I want to move in to writing exhibition catalog pieces and long-form magazine articles.

Why shouldn’t art be propaganda?

I think it is.  All of it — including all the billboards we’re forced to look at.  Look at those before-and-after liposuction billboards.  Look at TV commercials:  Super Bowl commercials are some of the best art and some of the best propaganda, but they’re not inducing people to do or contemplate anything worthwhile.

I think you’re asking me about “political art,” though, and about that I’ll say this:  I think art that is emotionally manipulative, simplistic in terms of “good vs evil” (or other dualistic constructs), or privileges political content over nuance, subtlety, complexity, and craft is boring, at best, and dangerous, at its worst.  I also think that “commercial art” (like billboards and television ads) is destroying our bodies, our psyches, and our ability to live on this planet.  I would like to see more ambitious and successful art (in all media) that effectively pushes people to question many of the things we accept as a given under capitalism (competition > cooperation, for example), and maybe even helps organize communities, as in the “social practices” form of art.

Why should anyone care about art in this day and age? Are not our instagram feeds and graphic tee’s enough to convey to people that we are still “artsy?”  Is art dead?

I’m going to answer that with an exchange from A.R. Ammons’s Paris Review interview:

Interviewer:  Do you think poetry has any future?

Ammons:  It has as much future as past — very little.

Iterviewer:  Could you elaborate on that?

Ammons:  Poetry is everlasting. It is not going away. But it has never occupied a sizable portion of the world’s business and probably never will.

That said, there are ideas and emotions and aspects of human life that cannot be captured or expressed on instagram or t-shirts.  (That’s why bumper stickers were invented.)

To open by listing author Anis Shivani’s many accomplishments — the prestigious journals where his work has appeared, the awards, the accolades — would be to take up half my column-space.  Suffice it to say that Shivani, who writes short fiction, poetry, criticism, and has his first novel coming out this fall, has been humbly sharpening his craft here, in his adopted home, since the mid-90s.

What brought you to Houston?  From where did you come?

By the mid-1990s I felt like I needed to get away from the New England/New York bubble if I was ever going to become a “real” writer. The decision to move to Houston, or any culturally less-sophisticated place (which Houston was then, but is less so now), extracted a heavy toll in terms of alienation, but it was a price worth paying.

I wrote a tremendous amount of crap in the late 1990s, making every literary mistake possible, but it’s an unavoidable process. I must have written a million terrible words of fiction before anything good came out. I had to overcome a tendency toward didacticism, because I’d done a fair amount of journalism, and I also had to get past the scholarly attitude and instead think like a writer. That started happening when I cut myself off from academic ties, and tried to make sense of writing from many different time periods and genres, as someone in the 1920s or 1930s might have done in some bohemian enclave in New York or Paris without the institutional support and grant money which is the staple of the artistic life today. I acted as though the structural mechanisms of writing didn’t exist, so I could discover my own style without any pressure to conform. My writing would have been utterly different had I not followed this idiosyncratic path. In the early years I socialized very little, lived in a miserable ghetto, and spent all day every day at the library; I couldn’t exert a fraction of that sort of inhuman discipline if I wanted to now.

 The conservatism of the South was a shock; I’d never encountered such belief in faith, family, and homeland before, but I did appreciate that the people seemed more “real” than the theory-besotted pseudo-intellectuals in our bohemian capitals. I still appreciate that.

What do you think of the local literary scene?  How do you fit in (or not)?  In other words, what is your place in the local literary “scene?”?

The local literary scene is becoming more diverse by the day. Different aesthetics can now flourish on their own without being pushed by competing tendencies. The growing interaction of the broader arts community with the literary community is an exceptional development. The geographical concentration of artistic and literary activity in a single district is also great, because such density is helpful for organic evolution. Lately I’ve become worried though about the accelerated gentrification of the arts district, which can damage the critical mass that’s already developed. The neighborhood has barely had time to take off before the vultures have swept in.

All kinds of fiction and poetry are being written here; you can always start a group or movement to suit your tendency. I love what Fran Sanders does with Houston Public Poetry, and I’m happy to be part of it. It’s great exposure for KUHF’s Front Row to interview poets reading in that series! The Mongoose vs. Cobra series run by Shafer Hall brings in diverse voices from around the country; Houstonians should go out of their way to support it. I’m thrilled to be reading at Kaboom Books soon, as part of Steven Wolfe’s LitFuse series. There’s some interesting literary event or other always going on. Brazos Bookstore brings exciting writers almost every day. Poet Kevin Prufer has started a series bringing in readers from far away. The Inprint reading series has its all-time most impressive lineup this year, including Mohsin Hamid in March, so all credit to Rich Levy. It’s exciting that a major poet like Fady Joudah, who just won the Griffin Prize, lives in our midst. Being part of this scene is very rewarding.

My one big reservation is the dominance of the UH creative writing program, but I hope we’ve created enough of a base that their hegemony is less threatening. It’s never healthy when a city has a well-known MFA program that monopolizes every outlet and establishes an exclusivist sense of hierarchy, based on the necessity of supporting members of the in-group alone. This still happens–for example, the UH clique’s tendency not to attend readings by anyone else outside their own group–but there’s so much else going on that we can safely ignore them.

I would love to see even more interaction between the arts and literary communities. It would be nice to have more discussions, not just readings of one’s own work, but this goes against the MFA aesthetic of reciting one’s musings as though they were revelations from on high, not susceptible to critical analysis. It’s time to take it to the next level in Houston by becoming more collaborative and sophisticated. The emergence of more informal salons, rather than the usual established venues, would be welcome. This will all happen over time. Much of what one experiences as “readings” hardly ascends to the level of art, it is simply confessional/memoiristic outpouring little touched by the subtleties of technique, but in a dynamic environment there are ways to get past that.

Sometimes you use non-English words which may not be familiar to all your readers (murshid, pehelwan, parathas, tamasha, lathis, etc).   Why do you do this?  What is gained by this, and is it worth it to risk alienating some readers to this end?  (I also do this, but I will refrain from sharing my reasons unless you want to know.)

Some literary agents have wondered about that in the past, and I haven’t liked it. I always provide enough context within the narrative to make sense of the unfamiliar vocabulary. It’s the lazy reader not willing to invest in the concreteness of the world I’m creating who gets so easily alienated. It’s a dead giveaway of someone who comes to my work with a preconceived bias. The other common ones are, “Your female characters are too strong” (a prominent agent on the west coast told me that about Anatolia), or that “Your work is too real” (a top editor felt that way about Karachi Raj).

Certain ethnic communities have long been used to sprinkling “foreign” words in their fiction, but when they do it, it’s considered a mark of authenticity and they’re admired for it. If you yield a little, the richness of the sound will provoke you. Language wants to be made over in the image of the writer. Wait another few years, and you’ll see how the rising countries of the world have their way with English. The novel I’m writing now, Abruzzi, 1936, is set at the peak of fascism, and here again the context should always make clear what the unfamiliar vocabulary is getting at. It’s a neat way to enrich the reading experience.

What is up with the cover on The Fifth Lash?  I realize you may not have had any say in its selection, but it might set up some readers to expect gay s&m erotica.  What is the relationship between pain and eroticism?

The gay part isn’t in that book–that was going to be my Bangladesh novel–but the s&m erotica is there, sort of, in a story like “Jealousy” or “Alienation, Jihad, Burqa, Apostasy.” I had everything to do with the selection of that cover, which has been true for my other books too. The cover of My Tranquil War is a painting by George Grosz, which I always wanted even before the book was finished. The Fifth Lash’s cover is by the well-known Pakistani photographer Tapu Javeri; it’s called Ghulam, which means slave. Slave to what kind of desire, is the question that keeps recurring throughout The Fifth Lash, which often traffics in thwarted, repressed, perverse sexuality. It is a reflection of coming to terms with sexuality, which is true of any writer at the early stages. The cover reflects how things seem upside-down when it comes to the East interpreting the West, and vice versa, truer after 9/11 than ever before. It evokes pain and exorcism, which are necessary to get past one’s dinosaur identities and evolve into something more human and global and catholic. It suggests an overwhelming narcissism, which is often true of the characters in The Fifth Lash. In other fiction my characters have been more self-aware, exercising more agency, but that’s not true of The Fifth Lash, where fate plays a greater role. There’s a section in Karachi Raj actually involving gay s&m erotica, including stuff happening at Data Darbar! The Fifth Lash cover may well be pointing to my future. But there is enough disturbing sex–or non-sex–in The Fifth Lash as it is to keep anyone stimulated.

Some of your characters are Muslim Zionists.  (“His older brother used to mock him for daring to plunge his tiny body into the melee, like tiny Israel in the the middle of the vast Arab lands, inviting certain destruction.  Of course, Israel had thrived, while the Arabs languished…” and “In my opinion, there’s only one democracy in that part of the world, and the only one in the foreseeable future:  Israel.  The rest can only be shams.”)  You have been commended, in print, for your ability to depict a broad Muslim diaspora–are you choosing to depict Zionist Muslim characters as another way to show the breadth of Muslims’ political opinions, or is there something else at work here?

I’ve thought about this after the book came out. The first quote is from “What It’s Like to Be a Stranger In Your Own Home,” about an Egyptian engineer named Mo(hammed) in New Jersey, caught in a web of suspicion right after 9/11. A lot of the paranoia is of his own making, as is typical when such hysterias take hold of any society. Mo wants desperately to belong, to the extent that when he’s fired from his job, he imagines a letter to his father in Egypt about how well he’s been treated by his former employer, how he’s never lacked for dignity and respect. It’s illusion, insupportable rhetoric meant to convince himself of his musings about Israel versus the Arabs.

The same applies to the second excerpt, from the story called “Growing Up Blind, in a Hotly Contested State,” where Safdar, a South Asian professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Mt. Holyoke College, is in utter denial about his marital situation, while his wife lives away from him in a Boston apartment and is having an affair. Safdar is proud of his lineage from the Prophet, but is eager not to be seen as being too closely allied to Islam, despite his scholarly interest in Islamic constitutionalism. He mocks the Syrians, Algerians, Egyptians, and other Arabs who hold democracy panels at his elite university. Safdar’s reactions can be interpreted very differently in the changing periods of turmoil that overcame the Arab world in the early 1990s, the early 2025s, and in the aftermath of the recent “revolutions.”

 Obeisance to Israel may be a form of identity marker, a shortcut to belonging where perhaps one may never belong.

Your first novel is coming out soon.  What do you want to tell Free Press readers about that?

Karachi Raj will wash you of any impurities you might have accumulated during the watching of Slumdog Millionaire. For a long time I’d called it The Slums of Karachi, but that didn’t capture the totality of the book, which extends far beyond the slums, though that is a major setting. I came up with the current title during a brainstorming session at Cafe Brasil, as is true of the titles of my other books.

Karachi Raj is based on the actual slum called Orangi Pilot Project, founded by a major South Asian NGO leader, Akhtar Hameed Khan, who started his efforts in what used to be East Pakistan, and then brought it to West Pakistan after the 1971 war between the two parts of the country. Khan believed that slum dwellers could improve their lot by not relying on others, but by taking the initiative to make their environment conducive to health and prosperity. Self-improvement ties in with micro-lending, which has become very popular. Karachi Raj describes the efforts of a brother and sister to transcend their situation, and while things look good for the young woman, because she takes advantage of a university scholarship, they don’t look as good for her brother, who starts off in a menial job and ends up in an even more subservient situation. The third leading character is an anthropologist from Boston University, Claire, who’s doing fieldwork for a year, staying in the slum and interacting with an assortment of characters, Pakistani and foreign.

I wanted to present a panoramic view of Karachi, such as has not been offered before in English fiction, and to connect the meanings of spaces, public and private, with the enormous economic and social transformation countries like Pakistan are experiencing as they race to make the most of globalization. How things are different from the received image of Pakistan in the wake of changes in class and gender relations, and how they’re still the same, is what I tried to address. It’s not straightforwardly realistic–I’m probably constitutionally incapable of writing in that vein–because it has a fair amount of absurdity built into it. Karachi emerges as perhaps the dominant character, and the phantasmagoric descriptions of the city, as it goes about its ruthless business as any major commercial city does, are, I hope, fresh and illuminating. And the book is funny. I really did not want to write a serious, earnest, politically correct book about poverty and misery in South Asia, so that’s not the style of the book at all. It’s not explicitly political, there are no terrorists, no family secrets, and the women come out very well against the men, so there you have it, I’ve written precisely the wrong kind of novel for the New York mafia.

Very few writers work in multiple forms, but you have published award-winning fiction and poetry (and criticism).  Why do you work in these two forms, or why do you choose one form over the other?  In other words, when you choose to write on a subject, what determines whether you’ll approach it in prose or poetry?  And how are the processes different?

Poetry is simply an intensification of what I already bring to any form of writing. Even my critical pieces tend to be organic, dense, and allusive, not journalistic. My fiction is becoming more lyrical and poetical, so there’s that convergence. When something is really difficult to express I turn to poetry, whereas ideas that are more clear are conducive to fiction, and ideas that are clearest of all probably find expression in critical prose. I go to poetry when I’m least sure of what’s going on in my head, and I want to be surprised by what emerges. In fiction there has to be a sense of beginning, middle, and end, or I would get lost and never finish.

The novel requires mastery of all other forms–poetry, drama, essay–so there is that convergence too, but obviously the novel is conceived on a much bigger scale. Poetry is often my gateway to prose, it gives me a tentative grasp before I take things further. I recently became very emotionally invested in a book of 100 sonnets, Soraya, by far the most pleasurable thing I’ve ever written; the genre was dictated by the idea, which involved a tense struggle with my inscrutable muse. I could have written lyrical essays on the subject, but the baroque density of the conflict, which simultaneously charms and alienates, is perfect for poetry.

My next book of poetry is called Empire, where I take four instances–the British Raj, the Han dynasty, Spain in Mexico, and America in Vietnam–to explore correspondences in the administration of empire, letting both rulers and ruled speak in ways that justify their behavior to themselves. This will be more narrative, expansive, descriptive poetry than I’ve ever written before, but because I want to get at the ineffable nature of empire, poetry seems best. If I wanted to write a treatise on a specific aspect of empire, and I’d done all my research and knew precisely what I wanted to say, then a social science tract might be best, not poetry.

Criticism functions as the great equilibrium-setter for me. I always dream of a time when I won’t have to write any criticism, but it serves some essential need in letting me advance from style to style, so that I don’t get stuck in a rut. Criticism lets me keep my own work at a distance so I don’t start thinking of it as untouchable gospel. All writing is provisional and unsanctified, incomplete and apologetic, and criticism anchors me in that skepticism.

Shivani will be reading at Kaboom! Books’s LitFuse reading series on November 14.  In the meantime, his short story collections The Fifth Lash and Anatolia, his poetry collection My Tranquil War, and his book of criticism Against the Workshop, are available at Kaboom!, Brazos Bookstore, and other local independent bookstores and libraries. His debut novel, Karachi Raj, will be published this fall.  

–Harbeer Sandhu

In the early hours of July 18, Al-Gene Pennison III, aka The Plastic Clown, died, having fallen from a friend’s balcony.   A year ago, Al spoke about his funeral in a poem:

THE FUNERAL POEM (excerpt)
…at my funeral
(after everyone watches me burn)
I want an open bar
& dancing in the streets
my ashes in a golden vase
& I want everyone to get so drunk
that the urn gets lost
& a one-eyed, one-armed
toothless whore
steals the vase for its gold
but spills a spoonful
of my ashes
into her drink
and becomes healed
she grows back an eye
she grows back an arm
& all of her teeth
& her way up high
and firm little titties
fill back out
and she’s the best
and most prosperous whore
in the whole town

His friends had these words for him:

Clyde Richardson: His poetry, just like the soiree of illusions was a mirror for us all to witness the horrid banality of faking it through this jaded world.

Khloe Morris: Guess that he was honest, vulgar, and a true poet. ” your smile is my safety word” was my favorite line he had.

By Mills-McCoin

In April of this year, Nathan Nix self-published a novel he wrote titled The Drifters. Nix is a soft-spoken, polite gentleman who has lived in Houston his entire life (with the 5-month exception of living in Africa as a child).  Having written two books (that he was not satisfied with and therefore did not publish) prior to The Drifters, Nathan Nix decided not to hold back and went on to champion his goal. FPH caught up with Nathan Nix at Big Star Bar and tricked him into telling us all of his secrets.

Let’s start this interview in the middle, shall we? Good. Is this the book you set out to write?
No, not really actually.  What inspired the book in the first place is I’m a proud product of the Houston Community College system. Or, I guess, Montgomery College is where I went but whatever. It was such a bizarre experience that ended up being a good experience.  However, at the time, it was almost like this purgatory that you’re caught in and there are all of these bizarre people that you meet at a community college that you don’t meet at a university.  So, I set out to write about these people and about this experience. It was going to be like this comic novel.  But as I went along and began developing these characters, the character of Nicole (the main character), I realized that she would be from The Woodlands and she would be this type of person who grew up wealthy, a little spoiled, and ended up having to go to community college because of an Enron-type thing with her dad. I really got more into the idea of her meeting these not necessarily poor, but community college people.  So the book is less funny than it started out being.

How did you manage to write a novel wherein the main character is the opposite sex?  What drove you to make that decision?
A lot of research.  In a way, it was easy because my background is in journalism and so I’ve been taught how to observe and how to distill that into a story. Combining that with researching how girls talk when they’re talking to each other–that’s the hardest part. I know how they talk when they talk to me.  Sooooo eavesdropping.  A lot of eavesdropping.  But at the end of the day, guy or girl, a lot of it is similar until you get to the specifics; like how a girl would describe something.  And I intentionally set out to write from a girl’s perspective in this book because I had written two other books that went nowhere from a guy’s perspective.  And I figured, if I’m going to go through this whole experience again and get kind of a tepid reaction then I’m at least going to want to stretch myself as a writer.  So what’s the easiest way to do that–write from a female’s perspective.

Tell me about the decision to publish this novel yourself.
The thing that turned me onto the idea of self-publishing, and basically made it OK for me, was looking at the situation from my musical background and being involved in the music scene and seeing all of that. Well, it was the same thing my friends had been doing for years. They record an album in their friend’s garage and then they sell it at shows for five bucks. They send it out to magazines or to labels and most of the time they’re going to get rejected. But it’s practice almost in a way.  You know, you’re putting yourself out there and growing with each album you put out, or, in this case, each book you put out. The main thing is you’re building an audience. So even if it’s not put out by a big publisher, the publisher is still going to want you to have an audience eventually.  So, just put it out there yourself and build your audience.  And I was thinking, “You know, if Sufjan Stevens and Ian McKay can do it, then I feel OK just going ahead and doing it myself.”  At the end of the day, all that you really want is for people to read it and enjoy what you’ve written.

How has putting out this novel changed you as a writer?
I finally feel OK trying for a career as a writer, as opposed to it just being some hobby that I might be OK at but I’m not really sure.  And now going through this whole process–and not just the process of writing the novel–but the process of producing it as well, you know, hiring Ashley Ward to do the cover, doing all of the interior part of it, and hiring an editor to edit it–I feel like I actually know what I’m doing.

What role do mosquitoes play in this story?
They’re bloodsuckers, man.  And I’m sure there’s a parallel there with the suburbs.

Well, yeah. The suburbs are bloodsuckers, too.
They’ll suck the soul out of you.

The Drifters by Nathan Nix can be purchased online (www.nathannix.com) or at Cactus Music.