Silver Eye Center for Photography

Point of View Writing Workshops

The Point of View Writing Workshops are a collaboration between Silver Eye and Sherrie Flick, artistic director of the Gist Street Readings series (www.giststreet.org). These three-session writing workshops introduce a new way of looking at and responding to photography. Through a series of generative writing exercises, participants construct short stories related to the gallery’s current photography exhibition. In this way, Silver Eye hopes to foster a dialogue between Pittsburgh’s writing community and its gallery space with this two-year audience participation project. This project was funded through the Arts Experience Initiative of The Heinz Endowments. Click here to learn about upcoming program dates.

The following is a selection from the previous exhibitions that have been used as source material for an extension of the Point of View workshops. Silver Eye has commissioned five Pittsburgh writers to respond creatively to upcoming exhibitions. Sherrie Flick is curating these poets and prose writers, whose work will be posted on this web site and who will participate in one of two upcoming public readings. The first example is one of these writers, the other two examples are monologues from the Point of View writing workshop. The exhibition is used as a jumping off point. Sometimes the work is directly related to the image in the photograph, to its details. Other times, it’s the mood or the tone that helps writers connect to the image.

Process report from the author:

"Even though quiet and stillness inform this photo, I kept fighting the urge to flee: from the story that brought the stillness, from the seemingly content faces, from imagining those mouths might speak again. Letting the poem slip outside the photograph was OK."
– Yona Harvey	Full Poem

"Ultimately, I settled on a photograph without a human subject: “Oshkosh, Wisconsin” a photograph of a 20-foot fiberglass roadside sculpture of a Holstein bull ratchet-strapped to a flatbed trailer. And it got me thinking, How long’s it been there? Where’s it going? Who commissions such sculptures and why?"
– Jeffrey Carpenter	Full Monologue

“Having not done much writing in my life I was terrified, but eager, to soak up and learn from the writing workshop. Initially I gravitated towards this photograph because it reminded me of someone that I used to know. I wrote about our true life experiences together, but then through the homework and workshop exercises I began to see a different person all together.”
– Tami Dixon	Full Monologue

FRIGHT

Square-eyed you follow scars—

what a man can do to a man: turn him

with photographic fog

to hunch & grunt, stitch & howl, to

a shadow stalking a boy, you

upright now & a man, along-

side a woman. If you bawl that woman

will rush to you, shushing, calming, a mouth

all haunt & haunting. You drift in night.

If you concoct this story, this instant

as a man, would you cry out? & why?

Yona Harvey teaches creative writing in the community and at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a married mother of two children.

EULOGY

Pride is a 20-foot uncastrated male bovine standing in your front yard.

[Pause]

My family how tall you were figur’d in somehow. Every Sunday we’d come home from service and before we could eat, with supper smellin’ on the table, Pa would make us each make our mark on the kitchen doorframe. For what seemed like year’s I could never move that line. Big brother Roy, who seemed to grow by the hour, used to love to make up names for me: “short cut,” “doosle-dwarf,” “mini-mart,” “toe-jam,” and the ever unfantastical: “shorty.” The last he used so often it kind of caught on. At first with my cousins, then with the neighbor kids, and finally even my own mother. Like a brand. Didn’t even matter that by the time I’s 13 I’d grown within an inch of him, it might as well a’ been a mile. Tall was a destination, and it seemed I would never arrive. That’s why I hated haircuts. I’d hide in the root cellar fall asleep and dream my legs were corn stalks. And on my corn stalk legs I could hopscotch on metal roofs and treetops. Way up high as you look below it all looks small and no one can tell the difference.

At least in your dreams. Cause there’s dreams, and then there’s reality of life. And what I’ve realized over the years is the two don’t always see eye to eye. And bein’ happy, or bein’ sad, depends on how well they get along. And that’s why I stand before you today, my friends, my family…to commemorate a dream that fought to rise up and look reality dead in the eye—a dream that came to fruition.

I remember it like it was yesterday. I dream’t I was out in the feed lot on a wintry morning, looked up toward the house and saw my darlin’ wife Rachel walkin’ right at me with this wild-eyed look on her face like she was gonna to tell me something, like a secret or something, and when she got close enough she looked me right in the eye and said, Ray, if ya wanna grow TALL, gotta go for it ALL. And just then I looked behind me and saw a bull, on top of the barn, chompin’ on a blade of grass…a bovine, yes…a male cow…big as an eighteen-wheeler. And I started to cry… tears of joy and understanding. And when I woke, eyes still wet, I knew what I had to do.

[Pause]

Pride is a 20-foot uncastrated male bovine standing in your front yard. Steinway, what can I say to you, old friend? Day you came used a ladder to grip the tip of your nose, climb on your back, and see the world. People looked up, and we looked down, together, not snobbish, but knowing, like a big brother should. From there I finally saw the world from a new perspective. I finally knew what it was to stand tall. And on that spot you stood for years, tall and true and proud, watching over us, bringing goodness and bounty to our home and farm, until today. And now, old friend, we must part ways. The day has come for us all to live a new dream. To travel onward, down the road… Us to retirement and the sandy shores of St. Petersburg Florida, and you to stand true, to stand tall, to stand proud, in the “kiddie corral” at Ben and Jack’s Steakhouse out on Rt. 44. Wish we could take you with us ol’ buddy, but the chairman of the sub-committee at the Rainbow Springs condo says it’s out of the question. So today we say goodbye to a dream, and a friend. Today we salute you, our Steinway, the tallest bovine in Winnebago County. Here’s to you old friend! HERE HERE!

Jeffrey Carpenter is an actor, director, founder, and artistic director of Bricolage Theater Company, which he runs with his wife Tami.

Son

You want to call the police?

What would you say? Would you tell them how you disappeared when your wife needed you the most? Would you say that the sickness came and you left? Or would you tell them that your son is a freak who killed your wife?

Why don’t you tell the police how I carried her from her bed every morning, bathed her withered body, washed and brushed her thin gray hair, changed her feeding tube and her diaper, and read to her as she gasped for every little bit of air that she could get in before it was time for bed and then time to get back up and do it all again.

Why don’t you tell them how I did this for 10 months every day until the end? Tell them how I lost my job, my apartment in the city, my friends, my whole f___ing life in order to watch the woman who raised me die. Do you have any idea what it’s like to wipe the ass of the person who disowned you?

The funny thing is that last year when you called me I thought that you were calling to apologize. I thought that you were going to say, “We’re sorry son, we don’t care how you want to live your life, we love you and want you back in our lives.” What a laugh. You wanted me back all right but it wasn’t because you cared.

Where the f___ did you go? No, I don’t care where you went. All I care is that you take your ass back there soon. How dare you come in here after all this time, after all your lies and try to lay any guilt on me. F___ you. I don’t feel guilty at all. I feel relieved. I feel a huge sense of f___ing relief. I am so f___ing happy that this is all over.

She loved you, you know that? She knew you weren’t strong enough to be of any use to her, that’s why she asked you to call me. It took me 10 months to be able to give her what she wanted. One day I was sitting on your back porch smoking a cigarette and looking out at the city on the other side of the river. Looking out at all the things that were going on over there. So many cars moving, lights turning on, people going shopping or to the movies or to school. And I thought…the world doesn’t care. I could die here with her and it wouldn’t change one thing that is happening over there. So I went back into the house and I told her that it was time. And you know what she said? She told me that she loved me.

Tell the police whatever you want. There’s nothing you can tell them about me that I don’t already know. I don’t need you to like me. I just need you to leave.

Tami Dixon is a creator and Producing Artistic Director for Bricolage Theatre Company based in Pittsburgh.