Ghost of Future Self
IZZY SANTILLANES: Yeah, I was 23 years old in 1984 when I first went into prison. It was about 6 or 7 years after that that I joined the workshop. At that point, I had no hope for ever getting out. I had two life sentences running wild, in other words: one after the other. “Consecutive.”
The problem with that inside of a kid’s mind—because at 23 years old, you’re still transforming yourself into a man—and when a 23 year old mind tries to imagine 20 years ahead, especially in such a dark place, there’s no real image that comes to mind and no real sense of hope.
[Ominous church bell rings out]
It’s just a big, blank page that has one tiny word right on top, and it says “desolation.”
SARA ORTIZ: That was Izzy Santillanes.
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SARA ORTIZ: Welcome to Black Mountain Radio, broadcast from the Mojave desert. I’m Sara Ortiz.
ERICA VITAL-LAZARE: And I’m Erica Vital-Lazare.
ORTIZ: Erica, I’m so, so, so [repeated and stressed for emphasis] glad that you are joining us today as a guest host for Black Mountain Radio.
[Music fades out]
VITAL-LAZARE: Thank you, and I am always thrilled to be in your company and, even more so, in the company of the artists and creators that we have joining us today.
ORTIZ: Yeah, I’m really excited about what listeners will hear. You know, I don’t have a bio here for you but, do you mind giving us a little spiel about how long you’ve been in Las Vegas, maybe how you’re connected to BMI, and how you’re a part of our family?
VITAL-LAZARE: Oh wow, I think I was just born into this BMI family, but, I am not a native to the region. I am originally from the east coast. I’m, very specifically, a southern woman, a Georgia peach, but I’ve been here in this desert for, ugh [emphasizing the dread of time], 25 years now. Enough to grow to love it and the people in it.
ORTIZ: So much love. Other folks that we love are the more than 30 contributors that are featured over the course of these six episodes this spring. They range from graduate students to audio novices. And from emerging voices to established writers and artists.
And what’s exciting is we’re intentionally giving a space to folks who would not traditionally be able to tell stories on the radio, and because we too are, admittedly, very new at this and do not pretend [laugh talks] to be professionals in any way. Well, we are professionals, [laughs] we’re just not seasoned.
Because we are not pretending to be experts in this field, our collaborative approach is a little bit unconventional. It’s with that spirit that the show takes a dedicated, hand-in-hand approach when working with our contributors. Our intention is to include all of these fantastic artists and writers in a platform that augments compelling and meaningful stories through sound.
VITAL-LAZARE: Beautiful, Sara, and I think that the lack of pretense, which is part of your mission, part of Black Mountain and their mission, is to just be real. Whether you’re 19 or 90, you can still be a newbie, newly emerging, always wondering and curious, and, like Socrates, knowing nothing.
ORTIZ: That’s such a beautiful summation of what’s at the core of this episode. The seed for our first segment was planted in an interview featured in the April/May issue of The Believer, Black Mountain Institute’s flagship magazine.
In that interview, Native American author Elissa Washuta chats with fellow writer Sarah Nielsen about seeing her future self while walking around Seattle. And I’m excited for listeners to listen to this, but it’s somewhat wild.
Washuta herself is a member of the Cowlitz people, and her ancestral territory is, what is commonly referred to as, Washington State. In this interview, Elissa describes a scene from her book, White Magic, where she is adamant that the apparition she saw was real, and not a mirage.
VITAL-LAZARE: Love it, yes. So, this segment was both an urgent and gentle reminder of treating ourselves and the time we have tenderly because you will see yourself again.
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I ASKED CRAIGSLIST IF I WAS THERE
SARAH NEILSON: In White Magic, you write about seeing an older version of yourself in the Seattle neighborhood where you lived at the time. Can you tell me about her?
[Deep, mellow music plays in the background]
ELISSA WASHUTA: When I try to think about how White Magic came about, how I started writing this book, that's the point when the book started to become the book. In November 2012, I was living in Seattle, in the Madison Park neighborhood. I was taking the bus home from work. I was hung over. I was in a very, very dark place at that time. [Laughs] For a long time.
I was slumped. I was just in my seat looking out the window at Lake Washington, [a] few stops away from home, and this woman started getting off the bus, and I looked up startled, and she was startled. I could tell because she was me. It wasn't just that she looked a lot like me. I felt very strongly that this was me in the future. She had the same widow's peak that I have, the same dark brown hair, the same shape of black framed glasses that I've had since I was 12. She was wearing this wool cape and a surgical mask. She just stopped and paused before getting off of the bus and then got off.
I thought about going after her or, I don't know, trying to talk to her. What about, I don't know, but I was just really— disturbed isn't the right word. I felt that something had happened. So, after that I made a Craigslist ad, and I think the subject line was, “you were me from the future wearing a medical mask.”
[Music fades out]
I asked Craigslist whether I was there.
NEILSON: You were wearing a medical mask though, and that feels very prophetic.
WASHUTA: I didn't know what to make of it at the time, but it seemed like the kind of thing I would want to put in a book, I guess. [laugh-talks] And I was really struggling with writing at that time.
I was trying to write a novel. I was trying to write a memoir about food. I was just trying to do something that would be easy to sell. Nothing is easy to sell [laughs] and nothing is easy to write. So, then I just wrote about this woman that I saw. And I saw her again two more times, no mask, but I saw her again, once on the bus and once in the grocery store. I just wondered, especially with that first time, “what does it mean? This person is wearing this medical mask.”
It was late spring or early summer of 2020. Of course, it’s not like I had forgotten about this woman. I had been, you know, revising the book and getting it to its final draft, her final form. I was going to the grocery store and wearing my medical mask, wearing a wool cape with my hair pulled back into a bun just like hers with my same style of glasses I continue to wear. I got out of the car in the grocery store parking lot and saw myself in my car window and thought, well, there I am. I'm the future now. I thought maybe that meant I was going to die, but that didn't happen. Nothing happened. I mean, nothing has happened for months and months [laughs].
NEILSON: Yes, I suppose that’s true. Although, you could also say everything has happened.
WASHUTA: That’s true. Everything has happened. Yeah, but it feels like everything is the same every day.
[A soft, droning bass guitar is heard over the sounds of rain]
NEILSON: I’m interested in the way you wrote about Seattle as a “mirage,” which really resonates with me as someone who lives in Seattle. But I’m wondering about what felt mirage-like to you and how that connects to seeing this woman who was you. Did she feel like a mirage to you or did she feel more like a real thing in this mirage of a city?
WASHUTA: She felt real because I was inside the mirage, and in the world of the mirage, and the world of Seattle, and all that happened there, she was real. Seattle always sort of felt like a mirage to me because it was a place that felt mythical when I was a kid. I was a huge Nirvana fan, which I’ve written about in my first book, and a lot of my family lives in or near Seattle, so I had gone out there a lot during my childhood and teen years.
I just loved it. I just always wanted to be there, and it felt completely unreal. The mountains and the evergreens felt completely impossible to me. It felt like they were defying the natural laws of the East Coast [laughs]. I think, in part, because of those things, but, in part, because I felt for so long like I was just waiting for my life to begin and I wasn’t fully in it yet.
NEILSON: What kind of meaning do you make out of seeing this woman in this period of your life and the context in which that happened?
[soft, atmospheric music, befitting of meditation, fades in]
WASHUTA: You know, during that time I was… I know I was deeply unhappy. I don’t know exactly what was going on around then because there’s a few years that just feel like a drunken blur. I was just drinking a lot. I think I felt like… I couldn’t imagine a future really.
I didn’t have a best-selling first book. I didn’t have a breakout debut. I had a book and then I didn’t know what to do. I felt really directionless. I was just trying to figure out what I needed to do to make my life begin and was just so hopeless, and so in despair. I didn’t know how I could ever get a full-time job.
I didn’t know how I could write another book. I didn’t know whether any publisher was ever going to want another book from me. And I didn’t know whether I should bother trying to be a writer. So, I just drank, and I drank, and I drank, and I think seeing the woman, I don’t know what it meant. I don’t know what it was, this visitation, but I know that it was a piece of the future that was unlike anything else that was in my life at that time.
[Music becomes very pensive and dream-like]
I had had a friend who suggested that maybe this was a sloughed off version of myself that I was never going to become. I thought, maybe, she was the real future me reaching back into the past, into her past.
I would like to know from her whether she has any information about the lives that I didn’t lead. Maybe I don’t want to know that. Maybe that’s bad, but [laughs] I'm very curious.
[Music fades out]
NEILSON: Do you think the word “apparition” is an accurate description of what you saw?
WASHUTA: I think that she was really there. I don’t think it was an immaterial vision in any way, but, having been raised Catholic, I have a lot of associations with the term “apparition” and I think of a saintly person.
I am a much better person than I was then, and I’m not saintly, but I know that I am trying my best to be useful to other people. Maybe what was important or significant about that event was looking into a future where I am really starting to see the physical toll, the health impact of doing so much and trying to be so much for other people.
Looking into my car window and seeing the woman from the future is a time when I was starting to get really sick with my chronic illness and realizing how bad stress is in my life and how much I’m taking on. Maybe this woman from the future was just there to let me know to pay attention to my life as it’s happening.
My body’s decaying. That sounds really dramatic, but [laugh-talks] all of our bodies are decaying. Maybe she was not there in my past to tell me anything about my past. Maybe she was there for me now to think about who I am now and what is remarkable about, you know, June 2020, or whatever it was that I saw.
NEILSON: Maybe there’s some magic in that too.
[ominous, atmospheric music, as from a mystery drama, fades in]
WASHUTA: I think so. It feels like everything’s no longer magical. I hardly believe in magic now that I’ve written a 400 page book about learning to believe in magic. I’ll have to put an addendum on the end that magic’s not real, but it was one of the more magical moments, magical in that actual magic sense of something totally unexplainable.
Everything has felt very explainable for a long time now, for a whole year. You know, except for human motivations and the existence of evil, that’s the only thing that’s felt really, truly incomprehensible over the last year. Nothing has felt magical. Nothing has felt unexplainable in that sense that it causes wonder in me.
[Music continues to play until fade-out]
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VITAL-LAZARE: This piece was, for me, a revelation as to how we are extensions of one another. Whether or not that was an actual doppelganger that Elissa encountered, or whether or not it was a stranger she was just able to see with love and clearly, I don’t know if that really matters. I believe her and I feel it when she says she saw herself.
We’re always seeing ourselves in others if we’re doing it right.
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ORTIZ: So I picked up the book Learning from Las Vegas at—what’s the name of that bookstore that closed?
VITAL-LAZARE: Amber Unicorn
ORTIZ: Yeah! Amber Unicorn. So, I got a copy of this book from Amber Unicorn—I’m really sad that this is one of our losses from the pandemic here in Las Vegas. We lost a lovely used bookstore. That’s where I first picked up the book and where I would first start leafing through it.
I wasn’t approaching it as, “oh, I’m an architect buff and I want to know more about what these educators and architects had to say about Las Vegas.” But it really is a really interesting book.
The next segment focuses on one of the co-authors of a required read for architecture students and it’s likely, if you find a copy like the faded light-blue one that I have, it will have some annotations inside.
VITAL-LAZARE: Architect and educator Denise Scott Brown is one of the authors. Denise Scott Brown and her look at Las Vegas is about making the connection between the lived in spaces of this town, and the people within it who are often forgotten. We do live here.
So her segment is not only a very human segment that transcends architecture. It is also entwined with two stories of this woman. Denise was the co-author of an absolutely foundational book on Las Vegas’s meaning to the world. Learning from Las Vegas was published about 50 years ago. But that second story, the story of this phenomenal woman, is also emblematic, iconic unfortunately, as it is a story of misogyny and mistreatment, because, though she and her husband Robert Venturi co-created their work, she was excluded from much of the recognition.
ORTIZ: Yeah, It really is a shame that she was excluded, especially while he was still alive. But even in my used copy, which is from 1989—it’s a tenth printing paperback that was published by MIT—in the front matter, the first name and only name listed by the “Learning from Las Vegas” title is Robert Venturi’s, or rather, it reads: Venturi (comma) Robert (period).
If you stopped there, you’d honestly think he was the only author.
But further down the page—after two returns and a new indented paragraph—there is additional bibliography information. The order goes: (1) architecture, (2) Nevada, (3) Las Vegas, (4) symbolism in architecture, and you get to (5) and you finally get to Denise Scott Brown.
VITAL-LAZARE: Wow. Fifth placement? And despite the fifth placement, they remained married for over 50 years. And we all know what happened to Fifth Harmony, right? They broke up [Ortiz laughs]. Fortunately, this is not only a tale of another talented woman pushed to the margins. “Acclaimed architect” Denise Scott Brown is working on a new book and, what’s more, she’s reclaiming her time.
In 2016, she was awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. It took half a century for us all to honor the true placement of this woman’s name, but now her work, and that name, are now rightfully and regally centered.
ORTIZ: In this segment, co-produced with Claire Mullen, the writer Elizabeth Greenspan sits down in the home of Denise Scott Brown. Elizabeth gathered over ten hours of tape when meeting with Denise—once in 2018, and a second time in 2020. So, these next 14 minutes feel a bit like a disservice if I’m being honest, but don’t worry, our editorial team at The Believer is on it, and they are working on a longer feature as we speak.
VITAL-LAZARE: For now, what we hear next is a vibrant Denise, a key figure in the architectural world, and she’s one who’s finally getting a beyond-earned spotlight.
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I PUT HIM THERE
[Calming, 8-bit piano fades in; reminiscent of Gameboy sounds]
UNKNOWN SPEAKER: Liz, we’re going to serve some lunch, and some soup and a quiche.
DENISE SCOTT BROWN: The three of you should be…
[Conversation continues in the background]
ELIZABETH GREENSPAN (NARRATION): I went to see Denise Scott Brown in early 2020 at her home in Philadelphia. It was my second visit in two years, so we picked up where we had left off the last time.
GREENSPAN: Okay, great. Yeah. Where should we sit? What’s comfortable?
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise’s house is spacious and light-filled and packed with stuff.
[shuffling sounds in the background]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): In the living room, stacks of books fill side tables; a few vintage Coca-Cola cans, what Denise considers “decorative Cokes,” adorn a large, round coffee table. We sit on the sofa, where throw pillows feature cartoon superheroes, like Batman and Wonderwoman.
[Melodic, video game-like piano fades in]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise is turning 90 this year and finishing what she imagines will be her final book, which she has titled, Wayward Eye. It’s a collection of never-before-published photographs of the buildings, streets, billboards, and signs that caught Denise’s eye as she began forming her ideas about cities and architecture in the 1950s and ‘60s.
GREENSPAN: These were you and Bob together when you were taking these?
SCOTT BROWN: Yes, I went about 4 times to Las Vegas before I invited Bob to come.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Most of the photos showcase regular middle and working-class neighborhoods and commercial strips, many of which have declined and even disappeared from the American landscape over the last 50 years. We see modest front stoops with flowerpots and bright neon diner signs.
Besides being the first time her photographs will be published, this book is also an opportunity for Denise to tell her own story.
[Calming, video game-like music fades in]
Throughout her life her work has always been tied to her late husband, Robert Venturi, and their firm, Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates.
Both Denise and Bob are among the most influential architects of the twentieth century, but Bob is the one who has always been recognized. When he won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, in 1991, the selection committee said, “he has expanded and redefined the limits of the art of architecture in this century, as perhaps no other has, through his theories and built works.”
But Denise developed many of these theories and buildings with him, and, in 2013, she asked to be included in the award. This protest brought new attention to her work and spurred an international petition to retroactively add her name. But what it did not do was fundamentally alter the story told about them, which casts her as the muse and him as the artist. A story Bob was attached to.
[music fades out]
GREENSPAN: That’s interesting that Bob was reading Tom Wolfe but hadn’t been to Vegas until you took him.
SCOTT BROWN: When Bob signed the petition, he said, “my partner, my inspiration." But what he didn’t say is my co-designer. Which he didn’t want to face. Because you can be afraid, then, that something will happen and you’ll lose it. If I died, would he lose it? So, he didn’t want to talk about that.
GREENSPAN: Did you talk about it, privately?
SCOTT BROWN: Yes. But you know, in the end, he’s an old man and people in the office were saying, “we can see where the bright design ideas are coming from now.” I didn’t want to rub all that in.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): It’s perhaps more often that husband-and-wife teams run into this narrative conflict. Which one, we ask, is the “real” artist? The truly brilliant one? As if it must be only one. Even when it’s impossible to know, we’re compelled to parse the contributions, to determine who did what.
This compulsion to split and separate often left Denise’s contributions unacknowledged and unseen. If she was seen at all, it was typically as ‘the wife,” supporting her husband, along for the ride.
SCOTT BROWN: When I complained about the Pritzker and all of that, people say, “what is she talking about?
Well, I've been working with Bob since 1960. And, in fact, that’s when our great ideas came together, and we got practice of putting them together, which we could then use for Learning from Levittown. The truth is that Bob and I—it’s not that he does this and I do that. We do this. But his experience and my experience about this part here makes a very rich combination. Not just one person’s head, two heads. So, it makes us a very efficient design team. This is the same material, and I go this way, and he goes that way. Beyond. It’s like lacing up a very great shoe.
[Calming, video game-like music fades in]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise says her obsession with lights, colors, and urban environments began when she was a young girl growing up in South Africa. She remembers being awed by the first neon signs she saw in a theme park.
[SCOTT BROWN’s voice fades in]
SCOTT BROWN: There was a certain park in Johannesburg and we’d go play there and all that. I think the first neon I saw was at the Jubilee celebration of Johannesburg. I was taken out at night for the first time. I was four years old. There were all these lights and I thought that was a celebration. I’m now convinced that was just neon.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Denise, whose parents had immigrated to South Africa from Latvia and Lithuania, stayed in Johannesburg until her early 20’s, when she moved to London to study architecture. It was there that she became interested in commercial spaces and signs, and another idea that she would return to again and again: the imagery of “Main Street.” It was also in London that she began to take photographs.
SCOTT BROWN: And suddenly we saw on high street, as it’s called, steel and glass stores, with also nice modern signs and things. So, I got into looking at commercial architecture that way, through their modernism.
In the beginning, the signs I was talking about were ones about finding your way, marker signs, and things like that.
[Calming, video game-esque music fades in]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Her interest in signs continued through her move to Philadelphia, where she received Master’s Degrees in city planning and architecture. It was in Philly that Denise met Bob, and they began to collaborate.
They were both intensely interested in pop culture, vernacular design, and the ways these intersect with ordinary life.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): One of the most recognized results of this partnership is the groundbreaking book, Learning from Las Vegas. When it was first published in 1972, it was so radically ahead of it’s time that many people in the architecture world considered it blasphemous. It challenged the reigning Modernist philosophy and style, which was obsessed with clean lines, oversized buildings, and stripping design of any ornamentation. Denise and Bob argued that modernism was so focused on simplicity that its buildings were “mute and vacuous.”
SCOTT BROWN: You see, the Modernists had to say, “yes, traditional architecture is lovely and wonderful, but we’ve had a terrible war. We have terrible problems. We have a great many new problems and opportunities.” You really have to think of another way of building now. And you really have to face the issue that it’s changed, and how do you respond to it?
Modernism has had to do that same facing of issues and upgrading about four times over the 20th century. We were one of the times.
[Calming, video game-esque music fades in]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Learning from Las Vegas showed that one of architecture’s essential functions is, in fact, communication. Denise originated the book’s ideas during multiple trips in the mid-60’s to document Las Vegas’s signs, buildings, and billboards. Most architects and city planners saw Vegas as a sprawling “non-city,” unruly and unsophisticated. But Denise loved the color and saw beauty and patterns amidst the chaos. In 1966, she invited Bob to join her on a visit to see the Strip, a trip which kindled romance and led to their famous 1968 Yale research studio on Las Vegas.
SCOTT BROWN: Bob was the most excited person in the world when we were looking at Las Vegas. “Denise has helped me so much,” and all of that. And then, as he got older, some senility starts. Who knows when or where? But there came a point where he wanted to feel he’d done it all, and he hadn’t, and he knew he hadn’t.
[Conversation continues under narration]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): After we have lunch, we sit in front of her computer, set up on the dining room table, and she shows me the images she’s selected for her forthcoming book.
SCOTT BROWN: I began to realize that photography was a very good medium. This whole book is set up in such a way that you put your nose right into it because anything to do with planning that’s published by an architect journal is the size of a postage stamp, and you can’t see anything at all.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): Looking at her photographs, it’s clear that her art stemmed from her ability to see what was, for so many others, unseen. In the ‘60s, Vegas was the most extreme and intense example of a new kind of city, one being designed to catch the attention of drivers. Denise saw how big signs atop little buildings were, in fact, a sophisticated architectural choice for the Strip’s unique needs, giving the city definition, and making it legible to everyone zipping by in their little cars. Today, we think of this phenomena as part of the “attention economy.” Fifty years ago, Denise was among the first to conceive of it.
SCOTT BROWN: But again, it’s a scale things, like, these people in relation to these people.
GREENSPAN: Right, and then like the sword here. [laughs]
SCOTT BROWN: I love this kind of roundness of this human being and the roundness—
GREENSPAN: Right
SCOTT BROWN: They look like you could lick them.
GREENSPAN: They do.
As we continue flipping through her archive, Denise says their collaboration allowed Bob to see even his most familiar corners of the world differently.
SCOTT BROWN: That’s South Street, which is where Bob’s dad had his fruit and produce. So, Bob saw this every Saturday morning.
GREENSPAN: Right, but he was seeing it, so he was noticing it every day. But it sounds like, at this particular moment, you looked at it differently, would you say?
SCOTT BROWN: Well, he said, “things I’ve passed by every day, and I didn’t see their significance until you came along.”
GREENSPAN: I mean, how would you characterize what you helped him see?
SCOTT BROWN: Eyes that will not see, helped see the things that eyes that will not see. He was very, very ready in terms of his philosophy to see, but hadn’t thought of applying it to the rest of Philadelphia.
[Calming, video game-like music fades in]
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): In Wayward Eye, Denise is only including images that she herself took. There will be no ambiguity over who the artist of this work is. Ironically, this means that one of the images for which Denise is most famous will not appear.
It’s a photograph Bob took of her on their first trip to Vegas together. She stands with hands on hips, and a big Cheshire cat smile, with two buildings and one big sign in the background. In her book, Denise will include a nearly identical photo that she took of Bob standing in front of that same background.
GREENSPAN: And you, you...
SCOTT BROWN: I put him there.
GREENSPAN: Put him there, yeah.
SCOTT BROWN: And I put myself in the other one and I said, “please, take it.” So, whose picture is that? His finger, my composition.
GREENSPAN (NARRATION): With her gallery shows, and a recent lifetime achievement award from London’s Sloan Museum, Denise is receiving the kind of recognition today that she never did while she and Bob ran their design firm together. The story she tells through her photographs builds upon this attention, but it also establishes Denise as a creator and centers her vision.
GREENSPAN: Did you think of yourself as a photographer? Was that part of your—
SCOTT BROWN: No, no, no.
GREENSPAN: No? But even though you were thinking of photographer—
SCOTT BROWN: And I was also thinking of myself as an artist.
I was going to be an architect, and they all seem to come together. If you like modern art, you want to get these photographs. You like modern architecture; you want to learn from these photographs.
[Calming, videogame-esque music plays until fadout]
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ORTIZ: Literature is a lifeline for some prisoners, and it was certainly that for Izzy Santillanes, a convicted felon and student of Shaun Griffin’s. Erica, I know that you and Shaun Griffin go back. Y’all know each other. Will you tell us a little bit more about him and Razor Wire?
VITAL-LAZARE: Most certainly. Shaun is not only a heartthrob [chuckles], but a person who lives through the heart. He was one of the first Nevada poets I read when I became a citizen of these here parts. I believe we met originally at a Nevada Art’s Counsel event. I was drawn to him immediately, not only for his flair and his mustache, but, again, for that spirit, life and light, and acceptance just shines from his eyes.
He paints the desert and its people through his poetry with such an empathetic and farseeing brush. He’s a bit of a nomad—his wife can attest to that—and he has traveled the globe, I believe, in order to get as close as he can to all the inhabitants that walk and share this earth with him.
My friend Shaun Griffin runs a very impressive education program. He does that for the incarcerated people here in Northern Nevada. Razor Wire Poetry Workshop is the name of that effort. He’s such a humble human being and you can see that humility and you can also see that swagger [Ortiz laughs]. I like to say he reminds me of Sam Elliot, that kind of smoky rasp to his voice, and he has a very Johnny Cash sort of [both laugh] style of dress. He’s always in black, in jeans. Very Marlboro in a good way.
So, what you see first when you see Shaun is that original figure of the West, but then, when you get to know him, when you get to read his work, when you get to see and witness the work he does on the part of incarcerated people, you see that he is everyone’s fellow traveler.
ORTIZ: I actually have had the pleasure of getting to connect with him on a phone call because I wanted to learn more about the program and I knew that I wanted to include him in a segment of Black Mountain Radio. He’s been running this program for over 30 years. He is committed to these men. It’s a really beautiful way to dedicate your life’s work and the work that you want to do.
VITAL-LAZARE: Well, yes, over 30 years, Sara, he’s been delivering this workshop as gift and mission, ministry in so many ways, and I’m sure that he would say that he is also ministered by the work that he does. This workshop started for him in 1989, and for many of the men on the yard, it is their primary artistic outlet.
Since its inception, more than 150 men have participated and only a handful have returned to prison. Outside the circle of this workshop, the men’s lives, in prison, revolve around rote things—walking, sleeping, eating, and, yes, as we all imagine, simply surviving—but having an identity beyond the yard, especially the identity of an artist, is lifesaving to some of Shaun’s students.
As a mentor and fellow poet to the men in this workshop, Shaun not only reintegrates their voices to society, but, in many ways, he is the conduit through which they are able to re-introduce their voices, the strength of their own voices to themselves.
ORTIZ: Mmm, I love that. That’s such a beautiful way to describe this program and what it does for the incarcerated population that gets to participate in it.
So, what does it mean to be unseen for an incarcerated population that is attempting to tap into creativity, tenderness, vulnerability, and poetry?
VITAL-LAZARE: That’s a really good question, Sara, and I’m sure it’s a question these men have themselves when they enter into workshop the first time. Through those words on the page, these men come to a place where they are able to grieve… but also celebrate. The words on the page are doubled by what is lost and what is found.
It’s hard for that kind of beautiful vulnerability to exist anywhere let alone in the spaces that they’ve just emerged from. Those deliberately hard and unforgiving spaces of the incarceral system don’t often afford many of the men, or many of the men and women who work within the system, to see the soft spaces in all of us.
ORTIZ: That’s such a beautiful introduction and it’s so fitting for this segment. Up next, are Izzy Santillanes and Shaun Griffin in a conversation we’re calling “The Griffin Imperative.”
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THE GRIFFIN IMPERATIVE
[POEM SONG DI BOS - LA NUOVA PRIMAVERA]
SHAUN GRIFFIN:
Learning to Polish Razor Wire—Elegy for Bobby Gonzales (by Shaun Griffin)
You lie face up in the obituary
like an owl with no moon to wing by,
the dirge of Alzheimer’s finally slowed.
For twenty years you wrote poems
in the workshop—small, cryptic
epigrams to the past—the scar
laced throughout—and we listened,
not knowing how to intercede
save their passage to the page.
[Lullaby-like music plays]
IZZY SANTINALLES: At first, I had delusions of grandeur with poetry simply because I thought, “well, you know, I can understand music some,” so I thought, “anybody can write this stuff.” But that’s what I went in with, and what I came out with was so much more than just knowing how to write a poem because what poetry does to the inside of a man who listens to himself while he’s writing poetry is a complete transformation of his thinking, his being. I am a strong believer of the phrase: “poetry saves lives.”
GRIFFIN: Izzy, I'm really glad that you ended with that statement, poetry saves lives.
This process of learning to write poetry, really began to be a process of keeping people alive, especially inside. What happens so often inside is you just begin to give up and you think there isn’t anybody there that cares. What happens so often in prison is that you lose that identity. You don’t remember anymore that you’re a person. You start living in another identity. My role was to intercede at that moment and keep people’s humanity in the room.
[Upbeat, side-scroller-like music plays]
SANTINALLES: My name is Ismael Santinalles, that’s the name given to me at birth, but everyone calls me Izzy because it’s more compact and it lends itself to poetry. Being poets, you have to condense everything, so here we are. There’s shh, and that’s short for Shaun, or poetic for Shaun, and I’m Izzy.
GRIFFIN: My name is Shaun Griffin, and I’m happy to be talking about Razor Wire, which is a workshop out at the prison where I’ve been volunteering for many moons. We’ve had a lot of different people in the workshop over those years. I’ve become very close to several of them.
SANTINALLES: I was 23 years old in 1984, when I first went into prison. It was about six or seven years after that that I joined the workshop. At that point, I had no hope for ever getting out. I had two life sentences running wild. In other words: one after the other, “consecutive,” as they say.
The problem with that inside of a kid’s mind—because at 23 years old, you’re still transforming yourself into a man—at that stage in life, we have no idea what 20 years looks like. And when a 23-year-old mind tries to imagine 20 years ahead, especially in such a dark place, there’s no real image that comes to mind and no real sense of hope. It’s just a big, blank page that has one tiny word right on top, and it says “desolation.”
[Ominous church bell rings out]
And you go there because that’s the only word you know. And you go there.
When I went from maximum security prison to the medium security prison. I met a man—his name’s Gary—and became friends with this man. One day he says, “Why don’t we go take some laps?” So, we went and took laps.
[Ominous music, reminiscent of a gothic choir, plays in the background]
We stopped at the snack bar—it was a Saturday—and we bought a Coke and we went walking. And at one point, he stops me and he says, “you see that guy over there?” It was the endemic lifer with a stained coffee mug, stained fingertips from his Bugler cigarettes, and he says, “watch.”
And there was almost a lifelessness in his eyes, but as he’s walking by, and he walks past us as well, and, I don’t know what it is, out of instinct, I moved out of his way.
I mean, he’s not a threatening man. He was about my height, out of shape, nobody that you would have to worry about in a physical confrontation, but, for some reason, instinctually, I just got out of his way.
Gary, then, turns to me and he goes, “what do you think is wrong with him?” And we talked about that a little bit as we walked. His summation was simply that this man had no soul, that his soul had died.
He allowed me to mull that over while we took a few steps more, and then he stops me and he says, “if you don’t change, you’re going to end up like that.”
At that point, that was the biggest catharsis for me to get myself changed, to change.
[Melodic, laid-back guitar fades in]
One of Shaun’s very first rules, I ended up calling the “Griffin imperative,” was “write only what, you know.” And I thought to myself, “well hell, I can do that. Anybody could do that.” So, I started trying to write what I knew. Man, it turns out that what I knew was, in my opinion, not worth writing about. That’s where I start to dig into the dictionary, trying to find specific words that meant what I felt.
That’s part of the starting process of healing myself from myself. I was my own disease.
GRIFFIN: Yeah, write what you know.
What I was trying to say to everybody in the room, and especially to people like Izzy who were looking at a long sentence, was to tell me your life. Tell me your experiences. Tell me how you became who you are. Tell me what you’re trying to do now. Again, going back to finding a way to affirm who they were as people.
You know, we would get to the tough and difficult parts of learning the art form. It’s an art form that can never be mastered. It’s like learning to play the violin. You can only improve at it, but you can never master it.
The irony, though, is that this class, this workshop, serves a life-saving purpose inside. Once people leave prison, it’s very difficult to stay connected. Real life comes bearing down in. You have to work and you have to stay alive, and that's the single thing that kept me returning—keeps me returning—was the men in the room.
So, in the midst of the dynamics of insanity of prison, me, Shaun, has to find a way to be authentic, to be real to keep those individuals in that room alive. That’s the lifesaving thread. These individuals matter and what happened, whatever happened, that got them into prison is not how they define themselves today.
SANTINALLES: You want to make a prisoner cry? Treat him like a human being.
The one thing that really transforms other human beings: humanity. Treat someone else like a human being. That’s the humanity in all of us. You stop doing that and you start losing your humanity.
Shaun was able to do that with poetry, with the poetry workshop.
I mean, we were... We were all in for different things. I was in for murder.
But, it didn’t matter. When we coalesced as a workshop, we coalesced as a group of men willing to expose our hearts, and it was through that sense of giving yourself over to the process that we began to change.
It really affected me. People have no idea what goes on in a man’s mind, a prisoner’s mind, when he walks away from that workshop and he goes to his cell and sits there with a lamp at night reading Hayden Carruth’s Emergency Haying. When you read Frost, page 1 to page 200, without stopping because this guy has a really wonderful way of bringing to light humanity. All these poets, everyone we read, was wonderfully gifted at that one thing: teaching us about humanity.
[Lullaby-like music plays]
Old
I heard a voice in the grocery store,
but I don’t look up anymore to see who’s talking.
He sounded old and said to someone else,
“You won’t take anything when you die.”
Inconclusive crap, I thought. But a question
made me look up to get a read on this man’s face,
to see if I could trust his eyes had seen things
others might have missed – and no, I can’t
describe that look. Perhaps it’s instinct...
He caught my glance and in that time, failed
whatever mental protocol measures integrity.
I nodded and tucked away my glance.
By the time I drove my old truck home,
sat the groceries down, and kissed my wife
in front of the stove, I asked myself
the question over and over...
“What have I brought with me thus far?”
That is, to this moment of my life,
and not me, this body getting older,
but me, the ethereal who won’t be taking anything.
I had to actually ask myself those questions. And it is that self-evaluation, that self-analysis, that quiet self-analysis, that occurs when you’re looking for the right word.And that was that slow, poetic transformation that occurred within my soul that was able to get me out of that darkness so that I wouldn’t turn into my soulless friend walking around the yard 20 years later with a stained coffee mug.
And so that’s the transformation that occurs when you’re looking for the right word as a writer, as a poet, anyway.
[Lullaby-like music plays]
GRIFFIN: I wanted to bring in the poems that seemed to me most germane to their lives and began to tell the story of their lives. And once they read those poems, they could find a way in to articulating their experience.
I wanted them to find their own voices. I want everyone to write from their truth, and they each have a truth. And it’s an incredible truth.
[Music plays to fade out]
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ORTIZ: Poetry does indeed save lives, and Shaun Griffin plays a pivotal role in the Razor Wire Poetry Workshop. After serving 29 years in prison, Izzy has been out for seven years, and is now in Antioch’s MFA program.
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ORTIZ: We truly hope you enjoyed this episode of Black Mountain Radio.
VITAL-LAZARE: Black Mountain Radio is an audio project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Sara Ortiz is its mastermind, host and curator.
ORTIZ: That is so very nice of you. And not necessary. Nicole, you can edit that out. [Laughs]
VITAL-LAZARE: No, you’ve got to keep it.
ORTIZ: And today’s lovely guest host is Erica Vital-Lazare.
ORTIZ: Our senior producer is Nicole Kelly. Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad are our associate producers. Scott Dickenshetts is our editor. Anthony Farris is our production assistant. Fil Corbitt is our sound mixer. Art by Jesse Zhang. Our theme song is by Jeremy Klewicki; and graphic design by Lille Allen.
VITAL-LAZARE: Special thanks to Elizabeth Greenspan, my friend Shaun Griffin, Claire Mullen, Sarah Nielson, Izzy Santillanes, Denise Scottt Brown, and Elissa Washuta.
ORTIZ: Thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, Kristen Radtke, Summer Thomad, Michael Ursell, and Haya Wang.
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is supported by the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities with playful, people-first approaches to arts and culture.
ORTIZ: A heartfelt thanks to Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting Black Mountain Radio. And our deep gratitude goes to the Hank Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, the home of KUNV. And a big special shoutout to our engineer Kevin Krall.
VITAL-LAZARE: Kevin is never going to have me back in here with you.
ORTIZ: No, he will. In two weeks. [laughs]
Black Mountain Radio is broadcast from Southern Paiute land.
VITAL-LAZARE: So we can come back on air soon, please consider supporting this project and all we do as a Friend of the Black Mountain Institute. We welcome volunteers and advice, and urge anyone who is able to go to blackmountaininstitute.org, and make a donation of $10 a month. In addition to a heavy fallout of cosmic gratitude, you’ll get a subscription to The Believer, a thank you in its pages, and other tokens of our appreciation.
Learn more at blackmountainradio.org
ORTIZ: Thank you so much for listening.
VITAL-LAZARE: Thank you. This was a beautiful time, Sara.
ORTIZ: Well, thank you, Erica. I could not have had more fun with anyone else. [long pause] Except Niela. I’m kidding. [laughs]
VITAL-LAZARE: Oh! Mon coeur, mon coeur.
ORTIZ: Mon coeur. Tu corazon.
VITAL-LAZARE: [laughs]
ORTIZ: I joke – clearly. [laughs]
VITAL-LAZARE: Okay. [laughs]
ORTIZ: All right.
[Music plays to fade out]
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