It is hard for people to imagine a world without police because we don’t have other safety alternatives. It is parallel to the military. I don’t think people are aware how much of their tax dollars go to both. Most reasonable, caring people would agree that we need to invest more resources in projects that prevent crime, rather than supporting the violent militarized entities that respond to it.
—Elizabeth Tannen
Family Migration to New York City
My grandmother on my dad’s side just died, at 109. I heard this story about her mother, my great-grandmother, at her shiva: she came to Ellis Island at age twelve, without adults, shepherding her younger siblings, holding a paper with the address of a relative. She lost the paper and panicked that they would get sent back. Luckily, someone from the family’s network was able to help her, so she and her siblings could stay.
People in the family tell this story to explain why we are anxious—which I find hilarious. We’re Jews! Of course we’re anxious!
My grandmother on my mom’s side died this year too. Her ancestors came from Germany in the 1800s and were part of a class-privileged Jewish community. Her family was totally dysfunctional: she was separated from her mother, my great-grandmother who had MS, and was brought up by her grandparents and a Swiss governess. She lived in Manhattan in a rent-controlled apartment where my mom grew up, until she passed.
Brooklyn Childhood
I grew up in Brooklyn, in the neighborhood where my Dad was a child —Midwood. He and Bernie Sanders went to James Madison High School together, along with other famous Jews like Chuck Schummer and Carole King. By the time I was a child, the neighborhood was dominated by an insular sect of Orthodox Jews. I had no connections to the neighborhood. All my friends lived elsewhere: many in Park Slope, or the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
My mother taught at a private school in Greenwich Village, so I went there from nursery school to 8th grade, and then to Stuyvesant, a big math and science public magnet high school where admission is determined by one test. At the time it was about 60% Asian, with a combined 7% Black and Latino students. This last year they made news for enrolling only seven Black students. There is a test prep mill to get into the school: parents in Korean and Chinese American communities and middle/upper class White communities, groom their kids for the entrance exam.
I started writing for the high school newspaper, an opinion column that the editor made up for me called Notes from the Underclass. I was definitely righteous, though I wasn’t political then. I remember writing once about Bosnia, but mostly about trivial things, like the ballroom dancing class. As a senior I took over a standing column: called Diary of a Mad Senior.
Macalester
Macalester had a quirkiness that attracted me, and I wanted to get away. The first couple years I didn’t travel much outside of campus. I found a group of friends. We latched onto each other right away. I got involved with the newspaper and loved that, but I was intimidated at Macalester: the kids were a different kind of smart. I lost the nerve to write anything personal or to express my opinion and stuck to straight news.
Two weeks after I arrived, 9/11 happened, which was surreal. I still don’t understand how that impacted me. I don’t remember that time well, though I do remember the day. I was sleeping in my Stuyvesant High t shirt. I woke up late, went into the lounge, and the first thing I saw on TV was my high school, across the street from the towers. It felt strange to be far away. Everyone else in the room was from the Midwest.
Working at NPR
I edited the Mac weekly paper my senior year. After college, a mentor on the paper got me connected with an internship with MPR’s American RadioWorks — their documentary project. It was mainly transcribing interviews, but I learned a lot.
On a whim I applied for an internship at NPR. A phone call from Chris Turpin, then the Executive Director at All Things Considered, woke me up at one morning. He interviewed me on the phone, and offered the internship to me right away. I was on the verge of breaking up with a boyfriend in St Paul so figured I would return to New York after the internship.
A woman who was an editorial assistant, left just as my internship was ending, and I ended up in her position on All Things Considered, booking guests for the daily show, day-of, on the fly. It was a huge responsibility. You were expected to pitch stories at the morning meeting for that afternoon’s show. For many months I was too terrified to talk, but eventually I learned that even smart people sometimes have terrible ideas!
The schedule was frenetic. We would get an assignment at 11am. All of the day’s interviews had to recorded by 3pm. We had to book the interviews and provide the host with background information. At first I hated it, but eventually I got addicted to the adrenaline. I did a lot of wrangling politicians, which was fun. It involved a lot of flirting, which sometimes led to dating Republican secretaries—this was the Bush years. And I got to go to Denver for Obama’s nomination at the DNC. That was glamorous and fun.
People at NPR are so hyper-cautious about showing political favoritism, especially any left-leaning tendency, so when the news came in that Obama had won, people were just quiet in the newsroom. When I got off work, I met up with friends and walked to the White House with people celebrating having a Black person in the Oval Office. It was an exciting time to be in DC.
I left NPR right after the inauguration. It had been three years. I had to go to therapy for six months to get up the nerve to tell my boss I was leaving, because leaving NPR felt like such a reckless thing to do. To move up there you had to be interested in the technical or production side of radio, and I wasn’t at all.
MFA in Albuquerque
I was doing some personal writing about my romantic exploits and decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing. I moved back to New York, got a job in a restaurant and took some writing classes to build up a portfolio. My idea was to go to grad school in New York.
I always had this idea I didn’t have a choice about returning to New York. I would be inadequate if I failed to grow old in the city.
I applied to the New School and Columbia. Columbia accepted me but without funding. I called my grandmother and told her it would be hard to say no to going there. “Why?” She asked. “I have three degrees from Columbia and I’m starving.” I got a full ride at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque and decided to go there.
My main association with the Southwest before living there was a trip my family took before I was born. I always felt jealous, watching slideshows from that trip, but I also loved it because it made me feel like the family was whole and happy and healed then–which of course it wasn’t.
The desert had an edgy quality to it — a totally different landscape. I knew I wouldn’t want to live there for life, but it was beautiful.
I got to teach composition and creative writing as part of that program and discovered that I loved it. The department was dysfunctional, as I guess most academic departments are. But I met some great people, and felt very lucky to have the space to focus on writing.
My father had a first wife who died when my brothers were very young. She grew up in the same house where I grew up. My dad married my mom, and had me a few years later. When I was in grad school, my dad told me he thought a kid would help bring the family together. I began writing a memoir about growing up in the house of my brothers’ mother.
Getting Back to Minnesota
When I finished the program, I came back to New York and lived with my maternal grandmother. I got odd jobs tutoring and writing content for an on-line university and applied for all the arts residencies I could find. I finally got one in New York Mills, Minnesota. It was five weeks. They take one person at a time and give you a little bungalow a few blocks from their cultural center. I gave a reading and taught a class and hung out with the local arts community. I loved it. I had never experienced a small town.
The man who ran the arts center in New York Mills had a nephew who lived in St Paul. He visited one weekend and we got together quickly and seriously.
Minnesota Prison Writer’s Workshop
A few months after the residency I moved to Minneapolis and we got a place together on 34th and Harriet. I had heard Wally Lamb read something inspired by his prison teaching experience at a conference that summer, and got interested in that work. I connected with Jen Hicks, who founded the Minnesota Prison Writers Workshop. (MPWW)
It’s been a real privilege to teach incarcerated writers. I taught my first class with MPWW at Lino Lakes prison. The students were as engaged and serious as they could possibly be. Writing is a primary means of communication when you’re incarcerated. They often have natural writing voices and so few opportunities to be treated as a human beings so classes mean so much to them.
Becoming a Poet
I was still working on that book about my father’s first wife when I got another residency in New Mexico, up in Taos. I had sent my manuscript to a woman I thought was going to be my agent but was still waiting for her to get back to me. I decided to try and work on a novel but then I had this flicker of interest in writing poetry. A verse came into my head while I was driving and I just followed it.
The agent rejected the book. It was very lucky that I had this sudden interest in writing poems.
Right before I left Taos I broke up with the person I’d moved to Minnesota for, and fell in love with Julia Roberts’ ranch-hand. He knew it was just a fling but I thought we were in love! I came back to Minneapolis and spent the summer on my friends porch writing bad poems about heartbreak.
I’d gotten a scholarship to a writer’s conference in Wesleyan where I met the poet Michael Dumanis. He’s an extremely generous person, now the editor of Bennington Review. He offered to meet with anyone for an hour so I brought him a few poems. He read them, but the more significant thing he did was write down a list of poets I should read. I went back to Minneapolis and plowed through that list. That was a great gift.
555 Reading Series
I was hanging out at Five Watt a lot. The coffee shop in Kingfield had just opened. I became friendly with one of the owners and we started talking about setting up a reading series. I thought their little stage would be perfect. The poet Mary Austin Speaker, had run readings in New York and encouraged me to do it. At the time I did not see myself as an organizer of anything.
The first reading was five White writers, which is shocking to me now, but that was who I knew, and it didn’t occur to me that there was anything wrong with that. Within a few months I began being intentional about bringing in writers of Color — a majority if possible. And so I started meeting all these amazing writers of Color.
I got hired to teach writing at Anoka Ramsey, got accepted into the Loft Mentor Series program in poetry, and got a State Arts Board grant to work on poems. For the first time, at the Loft, I was part of a group that was not majority White, which was startling to realize. There were incredible people in that cohort. Some are still close friends.
Around that time I decided to set aside the memoir. The memoirist Dani Shapiro helped me make that decision. She hadn’t even read it but just talking about it she said she could tell it wasn’t ready. Now I feel disconnected from it. I don’t think it needs to be in the world. I don’t regret working on it because I think it was cathartic for my family and friends of Jackie’s. One of her friends said to me recently that maybe I didn’t need to publish it, I just needed to write it. It was a relief to hear that from her.
Anti-racism Circles
In the fall of 2016, when I was teaching at North Hennepin, a friend of mine — poet Kara Olsen — encouraged me to sign up for this anti-racism training called SEED, created by Peggy Macintosh. You sit in a circle and read and talk about various equity issues. Most of the other people in it were older White nursing faculty, and I while I wasn’t facilitating those conversations, I felt like I had a knack for it and would be something I should try out.
I signed up for the ASDIC anti-racism circle, thinking of it as a practical path because they do a facilitator training once you’ve participated in a circle. The ten-week program was an exercise in humility: I realized how much I was learning and still needed to learn. There was a pivotal point, where the weight of historical white supremacy washed over me and I just knew that I couldn’t be in right relationship with myself if I didn’t shift my focus toward racial justice work. It no longer seemed OK to center my own writing. I still find teaching writing is important, and it is my main source of income. I’ve given myself permission to give my own writing some space, mostly so that I can continue that work.
My focus, for now at least, is on grassroots organizing, which I have found much more satisfying and worthwhile then the little bit of professional organizing I have done.
I facilitate some anti-racism groups with ASDIC. We just did a training with 300 employees who had not agreed to be there. I’m beginning to think it is not worthwhile to do that with people who are not there voluntarily. There is no way to reach them that is not preachy. When people choose to come, they may still resist, but by being there, they are expressing an openness.
I would like to work more with White people who are beginning to wake up to the realities of white supremacy. Unlike Debby Irving, who wrote the book Waking Up White, my experience is that awakening as an on-going process, a series of awakenings.
I feel conflicted about profiting from that work. I’m not sure how much I want to professionalize it, but I need to get paid for something, Currently I do get paid for some of it.
Jewish Community Action
Okogyeamon, an African-American elder who co-created the ASDIC circle, responded strongly when I told him was not raised with a tradition of Jewish activism. “There is a long history of Jewish resistance. Go learn it.”
I began going to Shir Tikvah and joined Jewish Community Action. I went through their training, TZEDEK, which was a real gift.
Black Visions Collective Super Bowl Action
In February 2018, I participated in the Black Visions Collective Super Bowl action. We blockaded a light rail on Super Bowl Sunday. There were seventeen of us who risked arrest, probably 100 involved overall. It was one of the coldest days of the year. We locked ourselves across the tracks. There were BLM folks from around the country who had come in to participate, and Black folks read a list of demands.
Women from the Blackout Collective in Brooklyn came in and led the direct action training. That in itself was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. We rehearsed a jillion times and then it all went to shit when we got there. It was freezing and we were all in different cars. There were police already there when we arrived. We were wearing diapers and giant T-shirts over our coats. Everyone looked like an identical marshmallow.
It was my first taste of feeling a part of something historic. There was such visionary Black leadership. It was an amazing experience to be told what to do by them, to be an ally in that way. We had such a clear purpose and commitment to the cause. There was so much support: there were people tying our shoes, blowing our noses, putting foot warmers on our feet. We were expecting to spend the night in jail, but they just booked us and let us go. None of us had our phones, so we had no way to tell folks we were out. Somehow–I still don’t know how–Lena Gardner pulled up at the jail in a van— like the batmobile! We all piled in and drove to CTUL for food and celebration. It was a transformative experience.
I remember looking at Kandace Montgomery, Director of BLVC, who was leading the action, and thinking: “Thank God I’m not doing that.”
Six months later I was doing it, in a much less effective way.
Poor People’s Campaign
The Poor People’s Campaign was in the Spring. Abbie Shain and I ended up organizing a lot of it, through Jewish Community Action.
I got a call asking if I wanted to go to Nashville to attend a Poor People’s Campaign training with Reverend Barber. The idea was that this would train people to lead direct action trainings in our communities.
There was a template that the national campaign wanted each state to follow—each state was supposed to have three leaders: someone impacted, someone spiritual, and an advocate. A lot of the states were struggling to navigate what was happening on the ground with what they were being told in national trainings. In Minnesota there were not enough people of color and poor people in the Poor People’s Campaign. Nevertheless, for me, it was an amazing opportunity to learn. I met incredible organizers from all over the country.
We organized an action every week for six weeks. The goal was to have people arrested, but week after week, they made us work. Old White people would be standing in the street in the rain for hours.
The last event of the Poor People’s Campaign was the occupation of Mayor Frey’s office with the Catholic Worker and the Center for Prophetic Imagination. Our demand was No More Cops. Folks brought bags of dried dirt to create a grave, and read a litany of people killed by police. The rally was initially on the steps of City Hall, while folks took over the Mayor’s office. The rally moved inside to support what was going on in the office. The Mayor was tiptoeing around them. Kandace and Hani from BLVC helped keep the energy up. Ricardo Levins Morales, Pamela Cook, and Abijah Archer from BLVC, who had written an Op Ed explaining the No Cop demand, spoke among others.
We left too early, thinking the Catholic Workers were about to get arrested. They stayed much longer. A security officer wound up making a citizen’s arrest, just to get them out of there.
Catholic Worker House
I didn’t know about the Catholic Worker until I met my partner, Rob, who was raised Catholic. He encountered it when he was going to college in St. Louis. We ate at the Rye House at their Thursday night dinners a few times. I met Joe Kruse from the Catholic Worker, who was also at the time organizing NOC’s (Neighborhoods Organizing for Change) white ally group.
Rob found out about this Catholic Worker community in Duluth. They had room, so he moved in. Right after he did that, there was a room at the Minneapolis Rye House. I moved in. There are two of us who live there as community members now.
There are three houses in the Minneapolis Catholic Worker community, but Rye House is the central hospitality house. We have three bedrooms set aside for guests. We prioritize queer and trans young adults. People stay as guests for up to a year. We connect with many of our guests through Avenues for Homeless Youth. Some donors and volunteers are connected with Spirit of St. Stephens, but the majority of those involved in the community are not Catholic.
Especially because I came late to justice work, living in community is important to me. I grew up without a strong sense of community. It has always made sense to me to share resources. I like hosting people, making them feel comfortable. I like the opportunity to create intimate relationships across difference.
EAR: Equity, Accountability, Reparations. White-Bodied Writers for Racial Justice
In 2018 I co-created a White writers group. EAR grew out of conversations with people–including the incredible poets Sun Yung Shin and Lara Mimosa Montes–-around making public readings more inclusive.
We began by asking White writers to refuse to participate in or read on panels that did not include People of Color. Sun Yung followed up, reminding me that Writers of Color were taking risks everyday and I needed to be accountable. She connected me with the children’s writer John Coy. EAR no has a reparations fund that White writers can contribute to, and a rotating cohort of BIPOC writers who draw monies from it.
It has been difficult figuring out how much to be public about this. We have had some criticism from folks in the community that is helping us learn.
I am always reflecting on how complicated it is to be an ally. Rob and I have been reading a memoir Love and Struggle, by David Gilbert, who was in the Weather Underground and is still incarcerated. He writes about grappling with ally-ship in the 1970s. It feels really resonant today. People say “Follow the leadership of people of color,” but, which ones? It’s not that simple. You are making political choices.
As my comrade, Leykn Schmatz, recently said: you have a choice between doing the work imperfectly, or not doing it. I am committed to navigating the messy imperfection. Some of the feedback we’ve gotten for EAR leads me to want to call other White writers in with the assumption of good intent, so we are not jockeying for “who is the better ally,” which is a good way to push each other out of the work.
Toward Police Abolition
Some of the folks with Reclaim the Block, who had been involved in the action at Frey’s office, and others, reconvened last summer to see how we could push that work forward. The Mayor’s proposed budget included more money for cops. We decided to push for no new funds and a 5% divestment in the cop budget.
We scrambled in the fall to make the budget hearing. We were meeting weekly. We were fully grassroots community members, with no funding. We didn’t get the 5% but the City Council did divert the 1.1 million dollars that the Mayor requested. The city is supposed to have a working group now looking into 911 calls that can be rerouted for many of the things that currently involve police coming to your door. It’s unclear if that is moving forward. I hope it is.
Knowing how much is possible is difficult. When they eliminated the 1.1 million I was elated and sad. It was a great victory and at the same time a drop in the bucket, not one that people will feel.
It is hard for people to imagine a world without police because we don’t have other safety alternatives. There have been community safety practices in poor communities for a long time, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done to create infrastructure. It is parallel to the military, in terms of how the police feel entitled to obscenely disproportionate funding. I don’t think people are aware how much of their tax dollars go to both. Most reasonable, caring people would agree, if they knew, that we need to invest more in resources that prevent crime, rather than violent militarized entities that respond to it.
The disparities in our neighborhoods are outrageous. I had a moment when my parents were visiting and they stayed in an airbnb in Linden Hills. I saw a sign there gloating about how they have been crime free for X years. When has there ever been a police officer in Linden Hills? You know their kids are doing drugs in the basement. Of course there is crime, just no enforcement! I live off of Franklin and Chicago. There are more cops on my block on a Tuesday morning at 10am than there have probably been in the last ten years in Linden Hills, actively harming communities that are already struggling.
We have the momentum now, and the research of MPD 150 is a huge resource. You do not need to be an abolitionist to support shifting financial priorities. We won’t eliminate police overnight, but we can begin the process of building a city that expresses concern for its residents by allocating resources for their welfare.
I wore my Abolish the Police sweatshirt home over Christmas. My Dad said, “You don’t really mean that, do you?” I do, but I know that people are more open when you talk about “over-policing” and “the need for housing and jobs.” I’m wrestling right now with how to activate people. We are so complacent.
Neoliberal capitalist society has created so many obstacles to community and connection. If you don’t feel connected, it is hard to work for change.
Minneapolis Interview Project Explained