“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” -Graham Greene

Start where you are. It sounds so simple, so obvious. But we forget. It is too easy to become caught up in trying to find the perfect point from which to begin anything new, the moment when all is laid before us in a clear path instead of recognizing that moment can be any moment, that we can simply start from where we stand today. In this way, we manage the fear and intensity of change and newness.

Tongo Eisen-Martin is a poet, movement worker and educator who spoke to us during the month of April 2020 from San Francisco. He reported that the city had adjusted to the quarantine relatively seamlessly, noting that there is a large population of people there who are able to work from the safety of their homes. He went on to say that the homeless population there have seen a terrible spread of COVID-19 after being gathered together in a makeshift shelter where the virus broke out. For his part, Eisen-Martin is working on poems, prose-essay hybrid work and curricula related to the recent murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. He has written similar curricula in the past to give a social context to the statistics of murders such as these. To hear a conversation about this as well as live readings of some of Eisen-Martin’s poetry, listen to the complete interview.

Andrew Woolbright spoke from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Woolbright runs a collaborative gallery with friends on the Lower East Side that opened its doors a little over two years ago. Because the gallery is independently run among the artist collaborative, they are able to take risks. There is a focus on group shows and an emphasis on being radically non-hierarchical, showcasing the work of both emerging and established artists. The gallery began in part as a reaction to the desire to do something rather than just complain about the ways in which the art world is lacking. To hear more about this rather Utopian endeavor, the fire that destroyed his studio and a treasured heirloom and more, listen to the complete interview.