There’s a new collection of writings that amplifies the voices of Rockford artists — their joy and pain. WNIJ’s Yvonne Boose explores how their stories offer a diverse portrait of the city.
The call for contributors went out last fall. Rachel León is the editor of the anthology — a collection of poems, essays or other writings by different authors on a specific thing. In this case, that’s Rockford. It took León more than a year to pull things together. She said the pieces have a variety of viewpoints about living in the city.
“Some of the stories are very personal," she said, "and then others are kind of more general, but I think there's a lot of texture between the different stories.”
There’s a story about being a Black writer in the city, a poem that captures what it’s like to sit in a city council meeting and another about domestic violence.
“I wander in a memory back to that house on Dresden only to assure her there are no weapons here you can touch more lethal than those inside your head and to ask her what the hell to do with that unwieldy heart of hers splintered like the wood of empty factories.” — an excerpted passage from “Poetry of an American Dream Under Fire” by Blake Atterbury, pen name Voltavelle.
The poetic form Volta means a change in thought, emotion or argument that signals a shift in a poem’s direction. This is her first published work.
Atterbury said sharing her work gave her anxiety. Her family has been in the city for four generations.
“One of my first memories is my parents literally, like, fighting with each other on the front lawn of her house," she said. “My grandmother and my grandfather also had issues with domestic violence and some of it was so bad that my grandmother was, like, very physically injured.”
A lighter piece takes readers back to a childhood moment between poet Wren Medina and his late grandmother. Medina said they often watched the movie “A League of Their Own," a tale based on the Rockford Peaches women’s baseball team of the 1940s. Medina said when he moved from Tennessee to Rockford, he had positive thoughts about the city because of what he’d seen.
“You know," he said, "the hopes and dreams, again, of people born with uteruses, stepping outside of those norms that have been in place for them. When I moved to Rockford, I thought that, you know, that would still be what happens. But it came with some disappointment.”
Medina said he wrote the first line of his poem “Field of Dreams” before he heard about the anthology. Right before the submission deadline, he attended a city council meeting and the poem he needed to write took another path.
“I was wearing Peach-colored glasses —
a childlike misunderstanding.
When I roll my wheelchair to the mic at Rockford’s city council
to ask this city to care about their
Tired,
Hungry,
Poor
the same way they care about Landlords” — excerpt from "Field of Dreams" by Wren Medina.
Medina’s peach-colored glasses mention is a variation of the phrase "rose-colored glasses." In his poem, he acknowledges teachers, landlords, students and other people who are a part of the city’s fabric.
“But I thought it important," he said, "to include, too, the perspectives of the aldermen who you know will languish on for hours about gravel driveways and whether that's prettier than concrete, while not acknowledging the financial burden that, again, the city places on its citizens.”
Atterbury, the poet who wrote about domestic violence, said this anthology is a beautiful mosaic.
“We get to say, ‘hey, what you think about Rockford is not right. Like, we want to tell you how our experience actually is,’" she said, "and I think that's super beautiful. Like, I'm just grateful to be one voice out of many.”
The Rockford Anthology is one of many in a series published by Belt Publishing, which focuses on sharing the voices of those living in the “Rust Belt.” This includes areas in the northeast and Midwest that experienced industrial decline in the 20th century. Rockford was once booming in machine tool manufacturing and furniture production, but this is no longer the case.
Normally royalties for anthologies go to the editor. León said it’s an enormous amount of work to make something like this, but she didn’t feel right accepting the money. She wanted to put it back into the community.
León and the contributors voted, and the Rockford Area Arts Council will get all of the proceeds from the book sales. The RAAC supports artists across the city by offering grants and other resources.
The runner-up was the Family Peace Center, an organization that provides services for those dealing with domestic violence and other abuse. It won't get book proceeds, but the contributors decided to create t-shirts and the proceeds from the sales will go to the Family Peace Center.
Eighty-two writers contributed to the collection. They include New York Times best-selling author Kimberla Lawson Roby, comedian Ashley Ray-Harris and former Rockford poet laureate Jenna Goldsmith.
