By Dr. Brenda Greene
“It was a great gathering of developed writers of color and developing writers of color. The camaraderie was amazing, the spirit, energy.”
Those words were penned by author and faculty workshop leader Jeffery Renard Allen. Allen was referencing The Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color, sponsored by the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College and held at SUNY Polytech in Utica, New York from July 18 to July 22, 2023.
The Wild Seeds Writers Retreat (formally The North Country Institute & Retreat for Writers of Color), provides a writing community whereby established as well as newly discovered writers of color can focus on the craft of writing and create cross-cultural conversations around the literature created by writers of color. Writing fellows have an opportunity to study with a writing professional in the genres of fiction, memoir, and poetry.
The Retreat began in 2004 as a collaboration with the Center for Black Literature, the English Department at SUNY, Plattsburgh, and the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writers. We decided to call it the North Country Retreat for Writers of Color to highlight the presence of people of color in the North Country.
There are very few retreats for writers of color throughout the country. I was motivated to co-found the North Country Retreat for Writers of Color after my participation as a writer-in-residence at the Paden Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color in Essex, New York. The Paden Institute and Retreat, situated on the shore of Lake Champlain in the North Country, was founded in 1997 by Alice Green and Charles Touhey. Writers selected for Paden live in a small cottage and stay from one to four weeks while they work on their writing. My colleague, Dr. Jose Torres-Padilla, a professor of English at SUNY, Plattsburgh, had also been a writer-in-residence at Paden.
He, Alice Green, and I viewed our meeting in Essex as synchronicity, and we, representing three institutions, collaborated to form the North Country Institute and Retreat for Writers of Color which would be hosted at the Valcour Conference Center for SUNY, Plattsburgh, in the summer and at Medgar Evers College in the winter. The first Retreat featured the internationally acclaimed poet Sonia Sanchez, author Tony Medina, and writer Indira Ganesan. Since 2004 Retreat Faculty Fellows have included Kia Corthron, Martin Espada, Patrice Gaines, Indira Ganesan, Aracelis Girmay, Marita Golden, Tonya Cherie Hegamin, DaMaris B. Hill, Donna Hill, Major Jackson, Sandra Jackson-Opoku. Patricia Spears Jones. Victor LaValle, E. Ethelbert Miller, Bernice McFadden, Shaun Neblett, Greg Pardlo, Willie Perdomo, Ernesto Quiñonez, Sonia Sanchez, and Ravi Shankar.
In 2020, we were unable to host the Retreat in the North Country as a result of COVID, space restrictions at Valcour, and the challenges of traveling to Valcour, so we renamed the Retreat in honor of the renowned award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Although we were no longer hosting the Retreat in the North Country, we could still realize our mission of providing a space for writers of color to work on their craft. The renaming of the Retreat as the Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color also enabled us to memorialize the legacy and symbolism of Octavia Butler’s writing.
Wild Seed is a science fiction novel that is sequentially the first book in a sequence of “Patternist” books written by Butler. The book takes place over different centuries and continents and integrates the themes of race, culture, identity, and politics. We theorized that writing fellows who participate in the Wild Seeds Retreat are spreading their seeds, the sources of their creative content, as they develop poems, fiction, and memoirs in a racialized society.
July 2023 was the first time that the Retreat was held on a college campus in upstate New York. SUNY Polytech’s beautiful campus on 800 acres afforded Retreat participants with an environment in which they could write, enjoy nature, and participate in a safe and nurturing community that supported their work. Eighteen writing fellows participated in either fiction, poetry, or memoir workshops, had individualized sessions with faculty workshop leaders, and were able to work on their writing without distractions and in solitude.
Jeffrey Renard Allen, author of the short story collection, Fat Time and Other Stories (Graywolf Press, 2023) and the award-winning author of six books of fiction and poetry, including the celebrated novel Song of the Shank, led the fiction workshop. Joanna Sit, associate professor of Creative Writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY led the poetry workshop. She is the author of My Last Century (2012), In Thailand with the Apostles (2014), and most recently, Track Works. Her poem "Timescape: The Age of Oz" was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2016. N. Jamiyla Chisholm, an author, journalist and educator, and author of The Community: A Memoir led the memoir workshop. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, and her writing has been published by BET, Colorlines, Essence, TIME’S UP and other companies and publications.
The responses of writing fellows reflected the value and importance that the Retreat provided for them. Tanya Everett, commenting on her first day at the workshop, called it “magical.” Yasmine Lancaster underscored how the workshop emphasized the importance of community and allowed writers to connect from various parts of the country. Jametta Davis talked about how the workshop allowed writers the space to write with few distractions and to connect with and support other Black female writers. Kesed Ragin, a graduate of Medgar Evers College who majored in English, spoke of how the workshop energized him and gave him the tools to write experimental poetry, and Shamiqua Wilson, a current English major at Medgar Evers College, stated that she had been inspired by all the poets in the workshop and was pleased that she had taken the risk to participate.
These testimonies represent only a sampling of the experiences of writing fellows and reveal the value and need for spaces where writers of color can have extended and uninterrupted time to develop, improve, and refine their craft. In her acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature, Toni Morrison informed us: “We die, that may be the meaning of life, but we do language, that may be the measure of our lives.” The Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color provides writers with the space to “do language.”
For more information about the Wild Seeds Retreat for Writers of Color, visit www.centerforblackliterature.org.
Dr. Brenda M. Greene is a Professor of English and Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.
