Park Slope Reader

The Reader Interview

The Reader Interview: Coming Out

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How the hidden, queer verse of Walt Whitman found a safe space amidst the illustrations of an adored children’s book author.

Author Brian Selznick

Walt Whitman hid a big secret in Leaves of Grass. Brian Selznick, author of The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Caldecott Award winner, has long been a collector of the book, but he never read a single line. That is, until his revered mentor and longtime friend, Maurice Sendak, let him in on the secret only known in select literary and scholarly circles. Hidden within the pages of this celebrated collection of American poetry was another collection of poems, Live Oak, With Moss.

Now, upon both the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth—and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots—Live Oak, With Moss debuts to the public in a format as never seen before, complemented with a visual journey courtesy of Selznick and contextual analysis by Karen Karbiener. 

We sat down with Selznick in his Park Slope home to discuss the artistic endeavor of presenting Whitman’s Live Oak, With Moss, out, for the first time. 

PARK SLOPE READER: In your forward to the book you acknowledge the major influence that Maurice Sendak had in your career and in inspiring this endeavor—including his stance that poems don’t need illustrations. How did this shape your approach to the book?

Brian Selznick: How do I justify the fact that I made this entire book? No, that was a really big issue for me because Maurice really had always been like a god to me. His work was the work that I had learned the most from. 

There’s so much about our conversations that directly or indirectly led to everything I’ve done since we’ve met. I think one of the things that I had noticed even before this particular conversation was that he was really brilliant about what to illustrate and what not to illustrate.

If you remember Where the Wild Things Are you might remember that the only page that has no pictures is the last page where Max has come home from all of his adventures, he’s left the wild things and he ends up back in his room, and his mother, who had sent him to bed without any supper, has left his supper for him waiting. And you turn the page and it’s all white except for the words, “And it was still hot.” He could’ve drawn Max sitting happily eating the supper and his mom maybe looking through the crack of the door over him, but Maurice chose not to draw a picture on that page. . . . No matter what he does, his mother still loves him and that doesn’t need a picture.

My interpretation of what he meant was that poetry is designed as a communion between the poet and the reader, and that anything an illustrator does will interfere with that communion.

Because he said he didn’t illustrate stories. He tried to illuminate them.  

This collection of poems has never really existed on its own in print. It’s now out and it’s visible and it’s consumable, and it did feel as though you were respecting that.

Brian Selznick: Well, that was definitely the intention and the fact that the poems themselves were hidden and then revealed is itself something that parallels what most queer people experience in terms of coming out. 

[Whitman] never talks about these poems in any of his letters to anybody. There’s no indication in any of his other writing that anybody ever knew about this sequence. One of the things Karen Karbiener talks about is how special it is and how powerful it is that he wrote these poems about this part of himself that people didn’t even have language for.

In one of the poems he actually says the line, “I am what I am.” Karen identifies that as this moment where he comes out to himself for the first time, and that’s a very powerful thing to recognize and to see and to have written. 

You’ve spent most of your career working on very obvious narrative arcs, and this, by contrast, must’ve presented a unique challenge. You’re dealing with something in the abstract. How do you approach that as an artist, and can you talk about the different process you took in producing this?

Brian Selznick: I’m a very narrative-based thinker and so all the books that I’ve done up until this are really built around the story. Even when I’m writing my own books, like The Invention of Hugo Cabret or Wonderstruck or The Marvels, I always start with the plot first, and then the second thing I figure out is characters, and then the third thing I figure out is motivation. So, it’s this weird, very backwards way of working. But, it’s somewhat mechanical in certain ways in that I need to know what’s happening in the plot in order to know who the characters would be that would make that plot happen. 

Then, after working on something for a year or two, I figure out why the characters are doing the thing that makes the plot happen. And I think that’s partially why I’ve always really loved abstract art and always secretly wished that I was an abstract artist, because I’m so tied to plot.

I do see a narrative arc in Whitman’s poems and it was described to me by Maurice as a poem about a love affair that Whitman had with another man that ended, and then Whitman is dealing with the grief of the end of that relationship. (And Karen and most scholars now argue that it’s not necessarily about a single relationship; it’s larger and more esoteric than that.)

But still, when I think about the movement through these poems, I still see or create a narrative, but I think that’s very human thing to do. We make narratives out of everything, and I think that most of us even look at abstract art and often we’ll put a narrative on it. 

He wrote these poems about this part of himself that people didn’t even have language for.

You are a children’s book illustrator, primarily, but Live Oak, With Moss is intended for adults. Was that at all freeing for you? Was it challenging? Did it matter at all?

Brian Selznick: It did matter. When I write my books for children I actually don’t think about children when I’m writing. I’m just trying to make a good story. 

Which is why I think they’re so beloved by adults as well.

Brian Selznick: Oh, good. I’m aware that most of my audience will be kids, and the reason I think my work is for kids is because my main characters are kids. But that’s not really a choice I’m making. It’s just that the stories that come to me are about people who are between the ages of 10 and 12 years old. Because of that, I’m aware that people who are that age like to read about themselves, and the only concession I make to children when I’m thinking about my stories is that I know that I’m not going to use curse words, and I know that there’s not going to be sex scenes. 

Other than that, there’s no concession to kids, which is why I often end up writing about things that either grownups don’t even know about or you find out in grad school—like the history of French cinema or the history of museums and the cabinets of wonder and memory palaces, which is part of what Wonderstruck was built on, or 19th century theater and the AIDS crisis which was at the heart of The Marvels. These are not general topics for readers who are 10 to 12 years old.

I was conscious of that fact that I was making something for grownups and wanted to be honest about what I was making—and honest about the queerness of it and the sensuality of it, but I definitely was aware that I didn’t want to do anything that, if a kid was to see, it would be too upsetting. There’s naked men in this book. There’s this sequence where we see the bodies touching, but there’s nothing identifiable in it that I think would be shocking to anybody.

Live Oak, With Mosshas a lot of literary and creative heritage imbued in it. Could you talk how you felt bringing all of this together?

Brian Selznick: Yeah, well, I mean nothing exists in a vacuum and everything that we create is something that comes out of what we’ve learned about what our experiences are, who we’ve encountered, what artists move us. In so many ways, anything you look at you can trace back through the history of time and probably find some precedent for any story that’s been written somewhere in the Bible or the Mahabharata or in Greek mythology. 

The roots for all of these stories and all of us as artists, I think, is pretty easily traceable throughout all of time. Maurice, for me, has always been the central artist, and after I did a couple of picture book biographies—the Whitman book, one about Marian Anderson, one about Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt, one about a dinosaur artist named Waterhouse Hawkins—and I ended up getting stuck after that. I didn’t know what to do, and that’s around the time I met Maurice and I just sort of clicked myself into Maurice Sendak university. Whatever he mentioned to me, whatever poem he mentioned, whatever novel he mentioned, whatever painting he mentioned, I would then go and look up, and read or dive into, or learn more about if I didn’t know about it.

That’s why I first read Moby Dick—because he loves Herman Melville so much and Emily Dickinson, and Van Gogh as I had mentioned earlier. He offered me a gateway in a lot of ways into all of these early 20th and 19th century artists who themselves were then coming out of so many other artists before them. I love what Karen talks about with Whitman looking at Shakespeare and purposefully taking things from him and trying to parallel and trying to say America can make someone like you, too. Like, I can be what you are in England in the world, but I can be expressly American, and America has the talent and the breadth to do that. This new country can create an American bard. I think that that very much is an inherent part of the creation of the book—it is all of these connections: The Victor Prevost black-and-white photographs of the city, and the idea of the city has portraiture and then some of the photographs are the naked men by Thomas Eakins and Edward Muybridge.

Eakins, who painted a lot of naked young men, also very famously photographed Whitman at the end of his life and knew him. I think maybe I knew that a little bit, but that connection became stronger once I was putting the book together, realizing that I was using photographs by someone who had later photographed Whitman.

The fact that so many of these images are by Edward Muybridge, who people credit with the beginning of cinema. . . .it makes sense that the book itself is a web of all of these artistic connections. If you go to Shakespeare, if you look at all of the writers who he was inspired by, he hardly made up any of his plots! He would read this myth and then this story, and then that play and the write his version of it. But, of course, his version of it was a billion times better than any of the previous ones, and it becomes the one that we know. And it becomes . . . he imbues it with his genius. 

As long as there are artists making art, Maurice’s work will be there as an inspiration and as something beautiful the way that all the people he loved will continue to inspire people.


Spirituality, Social Activism and Spare Time

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A RABBI’S SEARCH FOR BALANCE

In 2015, Timoner relocated her family from Los Angeles, where she served as associate rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple, to take a position as senior rabbi at Congregation Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation that traces its roots to the late 19th century and, since 1910, has gathered on the corner of Garfield Place and Eighth Avenue. In her brief time in Brooklyn, the long-time progressive activist and grassroots organizer has become a central force in not only the spiritual but political life of Park Slope, making headlines for her arrest protesting President Trump’s travel ban in February of 2017 and kindling the resistance movement #GetOrganizedBrooklyn with councilmember Brad Lander, among many other actions both within the congregation and in the wider community. 

As we sat in her cozy, book-filled office tucked behind CBE’s sanctuary, the rabbi engaged with off the cuff eloquence about relocating from the west coast, following the teachings of the Torah, and what to do about millennials. A theme of our conversation was the complexity of the human experience, and how challenging it can be to not only live with but try to embrace contradiction.

Perhaps we can look to Timoner as a model for such duality. She is commanding yet compassionate, emotional and intellectual. She is endlessly active, yet — this struck me most of all — she listens, carefully, thoughtfully. When you speak with Rabbi Timoner, you feel heard. Understood. Though this writer’s spiritual search continues, I left my conversation with the rabbi — as I did last time we spoke about her work — emboldened by another dialectic: spurred on to action and anchored by the great wisdom that exists in our own backyard. 

 

What makes your congregation such a unique and special place, one that would draw you to Park Slope all the way from California?

There’s a question right now in the Jewish world about what the future of the synagogue is going to look like. A lot of a lot of young Jews think about the synagogue as something that their parents or their grandparents were part of, and there’s a question of like, can and will the synagogue reinvent itself? And how? This congregation has been engaged in that for some time and really is open to experimentation. To engaging the larger neighborhood, not just the Jewish community. To being right there and relevant on whatever the pressing questions are at the time. And that’s the kind of congregation that I most wanted to serve. One where we could be talking about what’s most important in our society and in our lives. And one where we are having a really open boundary, like just really open to the rest of the community and looking actively for partnerships across lines of race, across lines of faith. And also one that is willing to be bold, and willing to try new things and willing even to fail in the pursuit of the kind of change that meets people where they are. 

It seems that a huge part of your life is defined by your commitment to social justice. Do you ever feel that there’s tension between that role and your role as a rabbi? Or does anyone from the congregation ever give you the idea that there might be tension there? 

In any congregation this big, we have like 900-something households, there’s diversity there. And there are a lot of people who really prize the role that we’re playing around social justice. It’s one of their primary points of connection. And there are other people who don’t want to see that here. Who feel like a synagogue should be mostly a place that feels calm and peaceful, where we don’t really talk about political questions. Where we don’t talk about things that are upsetting. There are people who feel that way. Or who feel like the direction our country is going in is OK, there are those. It’s a very small minority of people here, but there are some people who feel that way. So, the way that I feel about that is when I am aware of somebody being uncomfortable with the direction we’re taking, I really want them to know that I want to hear from them and I want to sit with them. I want to hear what’s been uncomfortable and want to hear, you know, I want to hear their perspective. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not going to do what I’m doing or that I’m not going to lead the way I’m leading because I do feel like this moment requires that of us. I actually feel, beyond this moment, I feel that Torah and Judaism requires of us that we take a stand on the moral questions of our time. And then we take the political questions. Torah is actually a political text. It’s about society. It’s about how to create a just society. That’s what Torah is. So in my eyes, if I were to be silent or inactive on the injustices of our time, I would be betraying Torah. In order to fulfill Torah and be true to it, I have to speak. I don’t have a choice. 

As a society, we want to move beyond this idea of, “as a Democrat, I could never be friends with a Republican” and vice versa, but it sometimes feels like we’re creating divisions that are insurmountable. But we have to be able to reach across and have a dialogue…

Because we have more in common than we realize. One of the things that we’ve been doing this year, actually for the last two years, is creating a dialogue series here specifically hoping that people will come who don’t agree with each other. This year our focus is Israel. Within the Jewish community, there’s a really big range of feelings about Israel, and within this congregation there are. So we have a 12-part series we’ve been doing this year in which each time we meet, one of the hours is study, where we actually learn some history about Israel and Palestine and Jewish history and get grounded in some knowledge. And then the other hour is dialogues. So we have trained a group of congregants to be facilitators, and we have small groups and people come together and really are encouraged to open up and talk about how they feel and what they think and to disagree with each other. And to grow our capacity to be uncomfortable, to grow our capacity to listen to views we don’t agree with, to take a deep breath, to stay open, to stay curious, to see if there’s something we might learn. None of us has the answers. To develop a humility that, I need you and you need me and we need each other to be able to create a society together. And so I think that what that requires is two parts of the whole. One part is being able to speak and act with clarity on the things we are clear about. You were asking about social justice. So there’s a lot of things that are very clear from Torah about what should happen in a just society. When we see injustice, we must speak about it, we need to protest it, we need to stand for what’s right. Meanwhile, we also have to have the ability to listen to people who don’t agree and to be humble in that conversation and to be open and to be curious and to expect that we might have something we don’t know. And that’s a very challenging combination. Two different modes of being. But I’m trying to make both those modes of being happen here, both myself and my own leadership and for the congregation to have opportunities to do both things at the same time.  

It wasn’t that long ago that you joined the rabbinate, receiving s’micha from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 2009. Since then, how have you grown in your spirituality? In your idea of what it means to be a rabbi?

I feel like my growing edge, the part that I’m always learning about is the relationship between spirituality and social justice, between having an active relationship with God, the source of life. Having an active relationship with the aspects of being alive that are more subtle and internal and with the part of my leadership that has to do with crying out for the role that should be. And those in some ways really obviously dovetail with one another and other ways can sometimes feel far apart from each other. Sometimes the work we do, when we are advocating for policies or doing community organizing or protesting things, can feel really secular. Really, really secular. I think that the integration of those two things, always remembering where the motivation comes from. I don’t just care about this as an American. I care about this as a Jew. I care about this as a rabbi. Where does that come from? It comes from Torah. Where in Torah does it come from? And where does Torah come from? Where does that feeling in us that pulls us to say, wait, I believe in us as, as human beings, I believe that we can do better than this. I must speak about this thing that’s wrong. Where does that pull come from deep within us? My feeling is that that comes from something beyond us. It’s also in us, and so just always connecting those two pieces. I feel like it’s possible to be praying and not thinking about the world or be in the world and not be thinking about God, and I’m always wanting to reconnect those two things to each other and integrate them. That is, for me, it has always been a very present challenge for me, and it continues to be. 

You also aren’t afraid to put yourself on the front lines of social justice. I know you’ve engaged in civil disobedience and written and spoken about that work. I was struck by something in a piece you wrote about the Muslim ban. You said that civil disobedience is what privilege should be used for. Could you take me back to that moment and elaborate on that sentiment? 

There were a group of rabbis, 19 of us, who blocked the road by Trump Tower in Manhattan, the Trump hotel on Central Park West and Columbus Circle. I was aware that night about how safe I felt, sitting in the dark in the middle of the road. I knew that the cars weren’t going to hit me because there were police there blocking them. I knew that the police weren’t going to beat me up. I knew that I wasn’t going to get locked up for days with no one coming to help me. I knew that if there was bail I could pay it. I knew that I wasn’t going to get put in Rikers Island. Given that I was doing something risky, I felt remarkably safe. And that is because of a lot of things. I have white skin. I have lots of contacts, lawyers who could help me. We organized this in a way where we made sure that we had what we needed to be safe. I think one of the interesting dynamics as white people become more and more aware of our privilege and more and more aware of systemic racism is to think about what to do with it. Because it’s not useful to sit around feeling guilty that you’ve gotten a leg up on everyone, all people of color around you, that you’ve gotten advantages that other people haven’t gotten. It doesn’t do anything to feel guilty about that. So, ok, instead, I’ve got this privilege, I’ve benefited from this privilege. I would like to dismantle this system, but in the meantime, what do I do with this privilege and the power that it gives me? If I can put my body on the line in a visible way that gets media attention for people who might be behind bars or might be in detention, or might be at risk of deportation or are being barred from this country because of their religion, et cetera. If I can do that, that is a great way to use my privilege. Whereas if I didn’t have these privileges, taking that risk is something that I still might do, but it would be much riskier. And so I do feel like for those who have privilege, I think one of the questions we ought to ask ourselves is: what is this privilege good for? What can I use it for, given that I have it, and how do I use it with tremendous humility? How do I make sure that I am acting in a way that supports the leadership of people who are targeted and oppressed that never brings attention to myself at their cost or expense, but that is strategic and makes that privilege useful.

Given all that you do and these different roles you play, how do you not only find time for yourself, but also for your family?

I think that people who aren’t involved in synagogues or churches often don’t have any idea how clergy schedules are. 

And I imagine in many cases, people need you, they don’t just want to chat. 

Yeah. So my schedule, like I tend to be completely booked, you know, 10 to 12 hours a day without a break. I’m booked six weeks out, for six weeks solid. And then if you go six weeks ahead, you can find that opening. I right now have kind of found my groove. When I started in this job, it was overwhelming to me. When I started in my last job, it was overwhelming to me, but in time you kind of get to know the rhythm, the game of Tetris that is the calendar [laughs]. And in terms of time with my family, I don’t have enough time with my family. I don’t. I just was away with them this weekend and really, really soaked up that time and enjoyed it. But in general, I don’t have as much time with my family as I would like. We make sure to have Shabbat dinner together every Friday night and make sure to have, you know, little snippets here and there late at night and sometimes on the weekends. But it’s part of what I agreed to when I decided to be a rabbi. I took that on, and I hope, I think that my children and my family are getting what they need. But yeah, it’s definitely a lot to balance. In terms of not going crazy or not getting too exhausted, I do keep my eye on that. Like I definitely work hard to find ways that I’m going to get enough rest, have some time when I’m not here, have some time when I have some days off. Because I would love to be doing this work for a really long time.

To make it sustainable. Well, to come full circle, there are various reports that say millennials are less inclined to believe in organized religion. What you make of that? Do you notice that in your own congregation? 

Well, one thing that’s incredible here at CBE is that we have this thing called Brooklyn Jews, which is for millennials, and it is thriving. There are hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of people in their twenties and thirties who are coming to things and who are connected to each other and making community. I think the issue is, if it looks like the older generation’s thing, like, who wants to be part of that? If it looks like it’s willing to adapt to meet you where you are, then it starts to become intriguing. Brooklyn Jews has Shabbat services, it has Shabbat dinners, it has holiday parties. It has all kinds of different things out and about in Brooklyn and at CBE. Increasingly we are combining things, with Brooklyn Jews and the general congregation doing things together. And it turns out that a lot of the 

people in their twenties and thirties, they really want to be an intergenerational environment, as long as it’s not just that they’re supposed to fit into what the older generation wants. It should be about them also. And we’re ready to do that. And we do that. And it’s really incredible. I would say that the polling data about millennials, I am not seeing that. I think that it’s overstated. 

I’m someone who is still figuring out my own path, but we all need community. There also are statistics that people are lonelier than ever and more addicted to substances than ever.

Yes. Yes, I think that millennials are very much looking for community.

And in real time. 

Yes, with other people, laughing, talking, eating, singing, being together. You know, I think millennials very much are spiritual. They might not think of themselves as religious, but they’re spiritual. They’re curious about, they’re wanting to engage with questions of meaning and questions of life purpose. I think I’ve talked to a lot of people who feel that they kind of are connected to something larger than themselves, and it’s mysterious, and they don’t know what that is, but they want to be able to pursue that and explore it. And so I don’t think really fundamentally millennials are different than everybody else. 

We just have a lot more confusing content to sort through. 

Yeah. And our world is… looking at our world right now could lead one to despair. And I think coming of age in this time is harrowing. So having other people to do that with, having people to do that with who will also be willing to talk and think about what makes you hopeful and what we could do together and where we could come together and are willing to laugh. I think everybody needs that.

 

The Art of Bookselling • The Reader Interview

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Stephanie Valdez and Ezra Goldstein of Community Bookstore

 

“You’re really catching us on quite a day,” said Stephanie Valdez when I met up with her and Community Bookstore co-owner Ezra Goldstein one afternoon early in December. Not only was the usual holiday rush upon them, there were last-minute children’s book fairs to coordinate (“it’s almost like setting up two more stores”), book orders to be completed without delay, and sniffles to be suppressed as best one could. (All sneezes have been omitted from the following conversation.) Yet the staff was in good cheer. When I arrived, Ezra was standing by the front register regaling several employees and a customer with a story. Stephanie laughed as she typed busily at the computer, while store mascot Tiny the Cat lounged with characteristic disinterest inside his basket in a corner of the window.

At the back of the store by several bowls of cat food Stephanie and I chatted before Ezra, busy with orders, joined us partway through the conversation. They spoke of current bestsellers, the books that should be selling better, that episode of “Louie,” the charm of Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a man, his chicken and Tiny the Cat.

To begin, it would be great if you could describe how you found the store when you first took over in 2011.

Stephanie Valdez: How we found it? In what condition?

Exactly, how you would describe the space.

SV: The store was much different then than it is today. Ok, how would I describe it. The owner, who’s a friend of ours, her name is Catherine, she’d moved to Albania, and she was going back and forth between here and Albania on a regular basis, and the store was being run by a couple of college students who were here trying to do their best under the very difficult circumstances. The store was in debt; it was filled with animals. We had two dogs, two cats, a bearded dragon, a bunny, and two turtles. Which made it chaotic. And physically, the store was sort of a labyrinth of shelves and nooks and crannies, and it was in need of some work. We actually bought it in 2011, but we took over in 2010, so we spent some time just fixing it up. And it was really wonderful, in a way, because the work that needed to be done was so clear. Every day you’d come in and you’d just tackle a corner. It was sort of like a fixer-upper project where you’re renovating a house, where every day you can tackle a project and turn it around and make it better. And that process was sort of a gift to us and part of why we decided to buy the store.

What would you say is the most interesting event that you have hosted?

[pullquote]We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity[/pullquote]SV: That’s a really tough question. I’d have to think about that a little bit. Certainly our most packed ever was when we had Karl Ove Knausgaard. It’s when he suddenly got very famous, and we knew it would be packed, but it ended up being like, wall-to-wall standing-room-only for 200ish people. We’ve never hosted anything like that, before or since.

Was it in this space, in the bookstore?

SV: [Nods affirmatively] There was a line outside the door. To get him into the space we had to move people aside in order to go through. There’s actually a picture on The New York Times site of him parting the crowds to walk through this completely packed space. That was also very charming, because he ended up staying and hanging out with us for the whole evening in the garden, drinking cheap beer, which is unlike what most authors do.

What do most authors do?

SV: Especially touring authors, when they come to New York they have dinner with their agent or they go out with their friends that are local. It’s rare that they sit in the Community Bookstore garden and drink cheap beer.

Is there a writer whom you have never hosted that you would love to?

SV: I always wanted to host Marilynne Robinson. And then we actually did host Marilynne Robinson and I was judging a literary prize. And of all days, it’s the day we were hosting Marilynne Robinson that I had to be in another city, judging a prize. And I tried to make it work and there was just no way to be in two places at once, and so, I missed hosting Marilynne Robinson. Which was unfortunate. But I have hope that we will host her again.

 

 

Do you have a favorite Park Slope author?

That seems fraught.

It does!

SV: It seems like if I do, I shouldn’t say. [Pause] Probably Siri Hustvedt.

And why is that?

SV: I just love her books. They’re brainy and complex and feminist and brilliant.

Are you yourself a writer?

SV: I dabble a little bit, but I’ll say no, not currently.

I know you also manage Terrace Books. What are some of the challenges you face as you try to manage these two spaces at once?

SV: Time. Time is the biggest. Terrace Books is sort of my side-hustle. My husband runs that shop. But I do most of the book-buying. And I also do a bit of rare books out of that space, and so, that’s my side project. Bookstores require a lot of time. I mean, it’s a small space, you think, how complicated is it to run a bookstore? Somehow there are always new books and there are always new events. So, however much time we have, it doesn’t ever seem to be quite enough.

How would you describe a typical day at Community Bookstore?

SV: A typical day involves coming in, feeding the cat, turning on all the lights and the computers, and then, Ezra orders books every day, every weekday, so he works on book orders. And then the thing about working in a bookstore is that you never know what the day will bring. You never know who will show up and what questions they’ll ask and what conversations will ensue. There’s a lot of email in my job, between events and ordering books and all sorts of things. And tending the shelves, shelving books. I do less unpacking than I used to, but we get boxes and boxes of books, five days a week. So, this time of year, it can be 40 boxes of books.

Do you read all the new books that come in?

SV: Oh, I wish. We try to read as much as we can, but that just depends.

Do you try to set aside time to do so?

SV: Reading is not part of our day-job. It’s all extra-curricular. So, just like anywhere else, we have to fit it into our after hours’ time. I have a one-year-old, so, currently my after hours’ time is a little more limited than usual.

Are you reading any books to your one-year-old?

SV: Oh, yes. He’s a very avid reader so far. He’s now at the phase where he tends to want to repeat the same books.

Which can be both fun and a little maddening, I would imagine.

SV: Yeah, I’ve already memorized a shocking number of children’s’ books, which makes me realize I could have been memorizing all kinds of things all along.

Does he have a favorite?

SV: What’s his absolute favorite right now? He really likes The Quiet Noisy Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. She’s famous for Goodnight Moon. This is sort of a lost book of hers that’s been republished. And a book called Hooray for Birds [by Lucy Cousins]. Which is just about birds.

I know you mentioned [Tiny] the cat earlier as well. I’ve read a few different stories about him. Do you have a favorite?

SV: Well, my favorite was when I was hosting a story-time for an author and there was a group of toddlers sitting here on the floor and a man walked into the middle of the event and pulled out a chicken from under his coat, and put the chicken down on the ground. And within an instant, Tiny was chasing the chicken and we were chasing the chicken and Tiny to try and prevent disaster in front of this group of toddlers.

Why did this man bring a chicken to the store?

SV: I guess there was a chicken in the book and they thought it might be fun if he just showed up and brought a chicken. It was a show-and-tell type thing. But we weren’t warned about the chicken, and cats and chickens don’t really mix. And I guess he had a cat at home as well as a chicken, so, as far as he knew, cats and chickens cohabitated just fine. But our cat, Tiny, does kill birds with some regularity, so, this was not your average cat.

These were not characters from a children’s story.

SV: Exactly.

[Ezra joins]

What is your current bestseller here in the store?

SV: Is it Jennifer Egan?

Ezra Goldstein: It would be close between Manhattan Beach [by Jennifer Egan] and Sing, Unburied, Sing [by Jesmyn Ward], I think.

Are there books that you believe ought to be selling better than they are? 

EG: Well, there are a lot of books like that. But there are a couple of books that I’ve read recently that are really outstanding that didn’t make any of the best lists that should have been on the lists. One of which I’m reading now called Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor, terrific book. Another is Solar Bones [by Mike McCormack], really good book. But that’s up to us, because a lot of books that we think are really good don’t get the publicity that they deserve, because they come from small presses or they go under the radar. In general, small presses don’t get the publicity they deserve, so that’s why we exist, to put those books in people’s hands.

How do you try to find the smaller under-the-radar books?

SV: We talk a lot to those small publishers as well as talk to other readers, whether it’s other booksellers, customers who come in. We read reviews. You try to keep your ear to the ground for good things coming out.

EG: The book Reservoir 13, one of our customers told me I had to read it. And she was right.

Do you have customers coming in and asking you for books that are not currently stocked?

SV: Every day. We do a lot of books by special order, because we’re such a small store, and we can often get books within a day or two. So, yes. We often have people special-order books. And then we often take a look at them to see if that’s something we should carry.

EG: I think it’s also that it’s connected to our reputation, that we can get books and we’re really good at getting books. And also our clientele tend to be people who go very deep into backlist books, you know, books that came out 20 years ago or 30 years ago. Those are the kinds of readers that we have.

SV: Our customer base is filled with just great readers and they often recommend us books, so it is a two-way conversation.

Have you ever had a particularly unusual request?

SV: For a book?

Yes, for a book, something that was very difficult to find, that was very old, or very rare. Speaking of Terrace Books as well.

SV: Well, we don’t do rare or used special orders. So mostly, it’s just things that are out of print. I think the most frustrating thing is when there’s something that’s out of print that shouldn’t be. There have been various points in time when certain books are just out of print, and it seems like it shouldn’t be out of print.

EG: With some regularity we’ll track down a book in England that we order for people. It’ll take a month to get, but, you know, we’ll get it.

SV: We don’t really have a zany story. It’s mostly pretty prosaic.

EG: One of the great stories was that Laura Ingalls Wilder book, the original one that came from the South Dakota historical society. It got written up somewhere and became this surprise bestseller.

SV: In The Times, yeah.

EG: This poor tiny historical society in South Dakota was cranking out books. So I was calling South Dakota and we actually got—I think we got just about every copy they had. [Laughs]

What is the book that you’ve been recommending the most recently?

EG: Well, you know, it depends on who the person is. But, the Sing, Unburied, Sing, which won all the prizes, deserved them. It’s a very fine book. But it’s not for everybody because it’s a very grim and hard book. That’s the art of bookselling, is trying to match the recommendation with what people want.

I also saw that Community Bookstore was featured in an episode of “Louie” a few years ago. Have you had customers coming in and asking you about that?

SV: I actually haven’t had any inquiries lately.

EG: Not lately.

SV: Since the scandal.

EG: But a lot right after the show came out. A lot. People would come in and wander around and say, ‘Nah, this isn’t the store. It’s not big enough.’ [Laughs]

SV: It’s unfortunate. We weren’t necessarily fans of his, and a couple of years ago quite a few rumors were flying around about these allegations. So we haven’t really used that footage as publicity or anything and we met him in passing once. I don’t think we have anything especially interesting to say about him or the scandal.

EG: Although I did get to hang out with Parker Posey, so.

Is she cool in real life?

EG: Oh, yeah. She’s really neat. Yeah. She’s really nice. She was in the episode.

SV: And Chloe Sevigny as well.

EG: Yeah, Chloe Sevigny, that’s right. Both very nice.

SV: Both readers.

Did they buy anything?

EG: Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. And the producer, who’s a wonderful woman, bought a whole big stack of books.

SV: We’ll probably continue to just keep our distance and move on.

You read a lot about the resurgence of independent bookstores nowadays, in spite of Amazon. To what would you attribute your continuing success here?

EG: A very loyal customer-base. And just being fortunate to live in a neighborhood where people like to shop small and like to see what they’re buying and like books, love books.

SV: Dedicated readers. We are very lucky because we are one of the few independents that we almost only sell books, we don’t have to entice people in with toys to get them to buy books. We just focus on books. We’re very lucky our audience is made up of very avid readers. We don’t have to convince them that books are a necessity.

 

 

Larger Questions: Our Conversation with Nicole Krauss

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The characters in Forest Dark are neither “empathetic people from the first page,” as they were in The History of Love, nor are they quite those “who, from the first, were difficult people, as people are,” such as populated her Great House. They defy easy categorization while tempting you to draw connections between their own journeys through parts unknown with what you might think you know of Krauss. They include the elderly Jules Epstein, a wealthy and formerly gregarious New York attorney who has begun selling off his considerable possessions. On page one we learn he has disappeared from the rundown Tel Aviv apartment in which he had been living alone. And we have the protagonist of a parallel story that, in true Krauss fashion, is recounted in alternating chapters, a novelist living in Brooklyn with two sons, and a husband from whom she feels increasingly distanced. Ostensibly to research a new book, she, too, leaves for Tel Aviv. Her name is Nicole.

When asked just how autobiographical are those sections that feature a character who is a Brooklyn writer named Nicole? “Oh, I mean of course, it’s usually the first question people ask me,” the “real” Nicole says in response. The similarities between creator and creation are many: They share a name, a home, two sons, one religion, a friend named Matti Friedman (a journalist in real life, as he is in the story), and a failing or failed marriage (Krauss divorced from author Jonathan Safran Foer several years ago), among other details.

“I totally get it,” Krauss says of the desire to ascertain what is true and what is invention. “But my hope is [the book is] also tempting you to sit with the question of, why does it matter so much to us? It matters to me, too,” she’s quick to add. “I’m fascinated by where the supposedly real ends and the imagining begins.”

But a concrete answer she will not offer. Instead, and without referring to the novel specifically, she makes like Forest Dark — a book that traffics more overtly in abstract ideas through its discussions and inner monologues than its predecessors — and cites a larger concept. “When you write, for example, in the

first-person voice of an old man, like in The History of Love with [the character] Leo Gursky . . . if you’ve had the experience of sitting down and trying to write an old man, you would know that you’re going to draw from your own experience, and naturally you can only make him out of some aspect of you. Part of it is your observations of old men, but much of it, like the really deep value of it, is you. So once you understand, like, oh, I also contain an old man . . . you understand what is called ‘the self’ is largely something that is a construction and it’s an ongoing creative act.”

She continues, “I was aware when I was writing this that this would be a question that would be tripped, and I hope it asks a larger question.”

Large questions make for the foundations and furniture of all great fiction. Forest Dark explores what happens when two people reject their previous understandings of reality and begin to embrace the uncertain. For Epstein, this means engaging with Jewish mysticism and poetry; for the Nicole character, it means, among other things, acting with an uncharacteristic lack of planning. (“I didn’t want to see things as they were. I had grown tired of that,” the character says.)

The work of the Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel became important to Krauss as she was thinking through the book. In his Man is Not Alone, Heschel discusses “turning away from wonder, and what is lost when we live in a society that doesn’t value wonder, is almost afraid of wonder,” says Krauss. It was this line of thought that “woke up or fed” the questions she was forming: “why is it that we have made such a religion out of factual, rational knowledge, and in what ways is it good for us, and in what ways does it make us feel a little bit ill, and what do we lose when we can only think of the unknown or uncertainty with anxiety?”

Among the more mystical elements addressed within the narrative is Heschel’s idea of menucha, or, simply put, peace. Alongside this theory stand several others that allude to universal feelings, universal sensations, universal doubts and hopes, but which are described in terms of the characters’ engagement with religious texts and called by their Hebrew names: Tzimtzum, Tikkun Olam and Tikkun ha’nefesh, Gilgul. (With them, too, is the not particularly Jewish concept of the unheimlich, or uncanny, which was, however, first posited by the Jewish Freud.) These concepts so fundamental to the discursive book and its human evocations are rooted in a specific culture, as are the protagonists and the people whom they meet.

Krauss, who was named to Vanity Fair’s 2009 list of young Jewish authors the magazine deemed the “New Yiddishists,” recalls an event she once attended while a student in the mid ‘90s. The Polish film director Krzysztof Kieslowski “was talking about how he no longer was interested in making films anymore because under Communism there was a secret language, and a gesture could be made among his films that all his audience would

know what he was talking about,” says Krauss. “So what I would say about that is, in terms of being Jewish, there’s something really, really wonderful and profound to feel, on the one hand, that maybe you have a deep, deep language with a people.” However, although this connection is “rich,” when it comes to her readers, “I don’t feel like I’m thinking about Jews in the way that Kieslowski was thinking about only those people” among his viewers who could decipher his code. Krauss insists she’s “not here to serve any party line” nor to speak “for anyone except myself.”

“So I guess those feelings are in conflict with each other: one is gratitude to have that richness of cultural belonging and language, and the other one is an absolute instinct, the freedom often not to write about it.”

And yet there’s no denying both the richness and ambivalence associated with her heritage are things she is able to mine for emotional effect. Take, for instance, Forest Dark’s Israel, the country to which the novel’s two American protagonists flee. Krauss says she has always felt at home there. “I feel at home here, too, but it’s surprising to feel at home in a place where you didn’t grow up.” In thinking about why “some aspect of it feels native to me,” she muses: “is it some aspect of the Jewish upbringing that always teaches you about here and there, where there’s always a there to your here? . . . What is it to grow up in a culture that somehow at its core teaches you that you are from someplace else, and no matter how well you’ve assimilated or roots you’ve put down, that other place, that there, whether you’ve touched it or kissed it or not, will always draw you — is that true, you know?”

This notion of a “there to your here” recurs throughout the book, and not only as an echo of Jewish thought. The first time we meet the Nicole character she is recounting a childhood memory of watching television and feeling so certain that a girl in the TV audience is her, that is, that she is both there on that television set, as well as where she is, in her parents’ bedroom. Yearning for a state of being different from how you are is, for Krauss, indelibly human. “Have you ever known a person who hasn’t grown incredibly tired of oneself and one’s life and one’s limitations and just wouldn’t love to be free of all the constraints, both self-imposed constraints, of which there are always far more than the constraints that people place on you,” and those that “the life you live force on you?” It’s no wonder that as Forest Dark explores the theme of transformation, the writer of The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, who also gives the work its epigraph, comes to play a prominent role.

Given the many themes, the many texts, the many ideas at play in Forest Dark, the novel may at first appear to stand apart from Man Walks Into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House as the most cerebral of the Krauss quartet. The narrative line is, perhaps, of less of a concern than ever it was. But though Krauss has sometimes been labeled “difficult,” cerebral is not how she would choose to describe her latest creation. Or, not only.

“I don’t know if it’s more cerebral. I mean, it feels emotional to me, but those things go hand in hand, cerebral and emotional.” Nor would she want to spoil the sense of the unknown that greets every reader at the onset of a new story by offering a neat summary of her Forest Dark. “In an ideal world, I would see that people are OK with the fact that it can’t be described . . . I would love it if it were OK to just say, here’s how the book made me think or feel, but I can’t really give you a synopsis of what it is, or what it’s about. You have to read it.”

 

The Reader Interview: Activating a Democratic Space

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The Reader Interview with Jack Walsh of the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival

Whether you’re enjoying the afro-blues sound of Amadou & Mariam, waxing nostalgic with Talib Kweli, or taking in a film with live scores performed by the Brooklyn Interdenominational Choir, the Wordless Music Orchestra, or Brooklyn United Marching Band, you’re sure to make some new meaningful memories, big and small, at the Festival this summer.

On a rainy afternoon in late-May, the people who make the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival possible continued their preparations for the Festival’s 39th season. Jack Walsh, who is Vice President of Performing Arts at BRIC and the Executive Producer of Celebrate Brooklyn!, welcomed me to the Prospect Park Bandshell as the staff closed out for the day. Walsh has been with the Festival for 35 of its 39 years. We sat down at Dizzy’s Diner to discuss a changing Brooklyn, the Festival as a platform for artists’ voices and activism, and Walsh’s favorite BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival memory.

 

 

Can you walk us through the process of selecting the lineup for the summer? How is this summer different from other years?

Sure. We have a programming team. I serve as the Executive Producer and oversee the whole festival, but I really work in partnership with Rachel Chanoff, the Artistic Director. Under her there are one or two programmers. We feed all the ideas in through Rachel, and she leads the programming team that’s doing the booking and reaching out to agents. Because of Rachel and our partnership over many years, we hope the Festival has an artistic, or programmatic, voice. Even if people can’t quite put their fingers on it, they understand that the selection process is very thoughtful and intentional. That’s broadly how it works.

This year is different in that, while we’re not wearing our activism on our sleeves, a good many of us are pretty active, and upset about what’s happening in the country and the world. There is a bit of intentional social justice activism in the lineup. That’s a little different this year, and as we move into next year for our 40th anniversary season, we’ll see a bit more of that intentionality through some commissioned projects. Every year we do a post-season assessment and talk about what worked, what didn’t and why, looking at data, but it really boils down to artistic choices.

Brooklyn as a borough is becoming more gentrified, the city has some of the most segregated schools in the country, and the country is divided politically. What can the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival teach us about bringing people of different backgrounds and ideologies together?

That goes to the heart of the Festival and its origins. We don’t put it out there as front and center as we used to, but there is a mission statement for the Festival, and part of it is to bring people together in a safe, harmonious setting to experience each other’s cultures. Brooklyn is still one of the most diverse places in the United States, but, as you say, it’s getting more and more gentrified. While we have recognized that—we live here and see the changes—we have made a more concerted effort to not just program a Festival where you see diversity on stage, but to program the Festival so you see diversity in the audience. That’s really important. So we put more of an effort on marketing and outreach to communities of color, and think about how it is we can make sure all feel invited and welcome. That’s something we’re very deliberate about, and we’re more or less successful. We’re trying all kinds of things to make sure that happens.

Part of BRIC’s mission is to incubate and present new work by artists. Do you also think of the Festival as a way to incubate new work?

It is. Because of the scale, it’s different. At BRIC, we have a fantastic, smaller-scale program called BRIClab. We give artists workspace for over two weeks to develop projects and present them in workshops. That’s a way in which a lot of work is developed. Because of the scale of the Festival, the way we can incubate work is different.

Here’s one example from this summer’s lineup, which addresses the activism piece and also how we work with artists to help them with what it is they want to work on, or give them an opportunity to do something different. The film Selma, which has been out for over two years, is an incredible, well-done story. The music was composed by Jason Moran, a New Yorker and jazz composer, who’s now the Kennedy Center Artistic Director for Jazz. He’s an incredibly accomplished jazz musician whom we’ve worked with and presented before. This year we approached him and said we’d like to show Selma and have you perform the score live. He was intrigued by that, but then let us know it included a 35-piece orchestra. He doesn’t get to do that often, so we said “why not?” and put a lot of resources into it. It’ll be the only time that score will be performed live with Jason Moran’s trio and a full symphony orchestra. That’s a way in which you can say we incubate work, or at least give artists an opportunity to do something different. There are other examples, but that one really stands out for this summer.

Hopefully that performance will be a way we can get people to wake up and think about what’s happening with voting rights in this country.

Is there anything you want the audience to be especially awake to?

We’re here in Brooklyn. It’s different here than it is elsewhere. We want to be a platform so that musicians and artists can speak their voice. Many times, they’re the best activists. Beyond that, as citizens, we can all be thinking about voting rights, even though the restrictive voting rights measures taking place in other parts of the country aren’t necessarily happening here in New York. But voting rights have been challenged on the federal level, which allows different states to do less to protect those rights, or to be more restrictive in states like North Carolina, which are now actively trying to make it harder to vote, in ways they couldn’t until recently. Here in Brooklyn we can make a difference. We can try to get these rights reinstated on a federal level. It affects the entire country. Showing a film like Selma and celebrating its message is something we can do as a Festival.

We focus on performance, and the experience of performance. A lot of organizations would love to be at the Festival to solicit, fundraise, or get signatures. We don’t do a lot of that, but we’ve consistently allowed voting rights organizations, like HeadCount. We feel voting is a baseline thing in a participatory democracy. Anything we can do to move the dial is a good use of our platform. We’ve embraced that for many years. This year, we’re trying to lean into it more.

People in the neighborhood have a very personal connection to Prospect Park. What role has the park played in the 39 years of BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival’s history, as a setting or even as a character?

I’ve never thought of it as a character. I was born and raised in Park Slope, and literally spent my life in Prospect Park. People use the Park in ways that are very personal to them, and it certainly is a setting for many stories and memories. That’s something everyone can relate to. The Park has been designed to be and has always been a very democratic space. To activate it the way we do with music, dance, and film is an incredibly special way to use the Park. Most parks are designed to have a place for gathering and music. For me, having worked on the Festival for decades, Prospect Park is most especially a setting for music. But it is a setting for other things, like picnics and gatherings with family and friends, important moments big and small.

What was the most memorable concert in your time with BRIC’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival?

I’ve been working on the Festival since 1982, every summer. I’ve worked on every single show, except for four. That’s over a thousand performances. With that as the background, I have to say David Byrne in 2010 was one of the best shows we’ve ever done. For me personally, it was absolutely thrilling. He was on a tour where he was doing a lot of old Talking Heads music. That one is very much at the top of the list.

In terms of others that rise to being super memorable…it gets harder after that. David Byrne is at the top for me, and after that, there are so many other great ones, and it’s hard to choose. Norah Jones was fantastic, in the pouring rain, and St. Vincent, and Sylvan Esso, who’s coming back this summer. Going way back to my first year, 1982, when I was very young, Betty Carter left quite an impression on me. She was a jazz singer who lived here in Fort Greene. Her performance is up there on the “unforgettable” list, partly because it was my first year working the Festival. But she was also a legendary and influential performer with an impactful career. In the early years of the Festival, we presented a lot of jazz singers from Fort Greene, like Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, and others, and I was there for that. Those are some of the more recent and earlier shows that are especially memorable.

In addition to the screening of Selma, what are you most looking forward to this summer?

The closing night show with Youssou N’Dour from Senegal will be extraordinary. Youssou is a global ambassador of culture. His music at its core crosses boundaries and borders. This show is emblematic of what we try to do at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, to bring people together “under the big tent,” if you will. He comes to New York every year or so, but this will be one of his first free shows in New York. We intentionally programmed it to close the season. We’ve been trying to get him forever and finally got him.

Is there anything you’d add for our readers?

You enter the park at 9th Street and Prospect Park West, so in many ways it’s Park Slope’s Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. It is for the whole borough, but there is a real special connection to this neighborhood. Many people here support the Festival and become members. Our Friends of Celebrate Brooklyn! program has a thousand people in it who all support the Festival, and many of them live in Park Slope. It’s gratifying to see that because it means we’re really connecting with people. They feel that connection and want to repay the favor by supporting the Festival. There are a lot of people who come again and again, which is really special.

I’d say to everyone reading the Park Slope Reader, the Festival is there for you, come out, take advantage of it, make it your own, support it if you can. Otherwise, come and bring your friends, and spread the word.

Do you have any advice for artists who want to engage with those issues of displacement and gentrification?

Artists have voice, and a platform. What they choose to speak about is their choice. But I think that artists can move the needle on issues in ways that other people can’t. If that’s at the core of your artistic practice: good for you, keep it up, get stronger, do it louder. If it’s not in your practice, and you’re concerned about issues that affect your neighborhood or society, I would say, sharpen your pencil, get a bit of a tough skin, and start to put yourself out there more. Because, again, artists can say it in ways that can encapsulate the message for other people, and that has a unique multiplying effect. I just encourage it. If you’re already doing it, do it bigger, better, louder.

It’s interesting. We’ve talked about gentrification. The Festival was founded at a time when Brooklyn and Park Slope weren’t such fine places to be. It was meant to bring people together to celebrate Brooklyn, and it was part of an effort to “revitalize” Brooklyn. “Revitalization” was a popular word then. Now, the tipping point has come and gone. Gentrification has almost come and gone. Now it’s more like displacement. That’s happened in Park Slope. This place we’re sitting in has been here for a long time, but it wasn’t always Dizzy’s. I struggle with that; being born and raised here, I’ve seen waves of change.

Really, change is inevitable. Change is good. But being an active participant in the change is key.

DISPATCHES FROM ALBANY: THE READER INTERVIEW

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The Reader Interview with Assemblymember Robert Carroll

Spring of 2017 has been a tumultuous time for the New York State Legislature. Having missed the deadline to pass a new budget, the Assembly and the Senate voted for an emergency extender budget. This placeholder, in effect until May 31, prevented a shutdown of the state government but left many questions unanswered.

In the midst of this uncertainty, and between votes on the Assembly floor and meetings with colleagues, Assemblymember Robert Carroll was kind enough to speak to me in early April. Assemblymember Carroll, elected in 2016, may be new to the Assembly but not to politics. He has been involved with the Park Slope Civic Council, Community Board 7, and was the youngest President of Central Brooklyn Independent Democrats. He now represents Assembly District 44.

Our conversation touched on the concerns of his District, the Young Voter Act—a bill Carroll crafted in collaboration with three Bard High School students and that would, if passed, lower the New York State voting age to 17—and Raise the Age. Raise the Age is an unnecessarily controversial effort to ensure that individuals under the age of 18 will not be prosecuted as adults for non-violent offenses. As of this writing, the Assembly has voted to raise the age, but the Senate has not.

Assemblymember Carroll’s take on how young voters, and young people, should be treated reveals his faith in the ability of the community to determine what’s best for the whole. As the story of Kalief Browder—a young man whose life and death speaks to the necessity of Raise the Age—becomes more widely known, one can hope that the resolution of this issue will no longer be considered a roadblock to the passage of a budget, but, as Carroll calls it, “a necessary good.” Albany could certainly use a bit more of Carroll’s optimistic practicality.

 

Robert Carroll speaking on the assembly floor.

 

What do you hope to accomplish for your district in your first term?

Originally I was hoping that we were going to be able to pass a progressive and transparent budget, one that prioritizes New York City public schools, our infrastructure, and also making sure that necessary services to our senior centers were fully funded, as well as bigger picture items, like raising the age of criminal culpability to 18 from 16, making sure we bring electoral reforms to the state of New York, and that we open up our election process.

[pullquote]Time will tell which bills will pass, and which ones won’t, in the New York State Legislature this year, but one can only hope that future legislation will build “towards a more just and fair society.[/pullquote]Obviously we’re still having these big picture conversations; raising the age is still a necessary good, and hopefully we will get it by the time this is published. It’s a reform that will make our society more just. It’s something that is right, makes sense, and is practical. It has hit a lot of roadblocks, and that’s one of the reasons why we don’t have a state budget. Whenever you’re trying to reform a system, or whenever you’re trying to change something, there are always people who are inherently afraid of that change and will not want to go and do it.

I am looking forward to still working on those issues, and making sure we find ways to bring about real electoral reforms. That’s something I’ve done as an attorney and worked for as an activist and I think is necessary.

 

New York state is one of two states where a person 16 years of age or older can be automatically prosecuted as an adult. At the same time that Raise the Age is front and center in Albany, you’ve introduced the Young Voter Act to lower the state’s voting age from 18 to 17. Does our state need to change the way it looks at young people in general?

Yes. On the one hand, our outlook is paternalistic towards young people. On the other, when people make mistakes early on, we can brand them for life, putting them in a system that will basically make it impossible to right their life. This impacts communities in a whole host of ways, for generations. The Assembly bill for Raise the Age is not saying that there aren’t repercussions for violent, heinous crimes; it’s not stopping somebody who has killed or raped someone from facing real serious repercussions. The Assembly bill addresses cases where, for example, a young person commits a burglary that is non-violent, but because that crime is categorized with other violent crimes, they’re treated like an adult and could possibly do years and years in prison and have a felony record to their name. No one is condoning that action, but if we put a 16 or 17 year old in prison for years, it only hurts the rest of us.

It’s going to be harder for that person to reintegrate into society as a functioning individual, and become employed. That creates other burdens for society. That person could commit other crimes, could go on some form of public assistance, they could lose their relationships with family and friends and become disconnected. It reverberates throughout and hurts communities. That’s why Raise the Age is so important.

 

Speaking to PTA leaders.

 

And it couples directly with lowering the voting age. Some people think, ‘shouldn’t they be the same? If someone is not mature enough be tried as an adult, then surely they’re not mature enough to vote.’ That’s a false choice there, because Government tries to reinforce good habits all the time.

By lowering the voting age to 17, all students can at least vote once before they go to college, or go out in the world to work. So we foster that habit. Then it’s on them, to continue to participate. But we jumpstart that person’s engagement in civic and political life. There’s a lot of good research out there that if you start voting before you’re 25, you’re very likely to become a lifetime voter. If you start voting after you’re 25, you’re not likely to. That was in The Economist back in February. In 1972, over 50% of people 18 to 25 voted in that year’s presidential election. In 2012, it was around 38%. We’re seeing this steady decline in youth participation in elections, but we want to reverse that and help people become regular voters.

And you’re not a regular voter if you only vote every 4 years for president, and if you’re not voting in local elections: midterms, State Assembly, State Senate, City Council, and mayoral and gubernatorial elections, and also primaries in New York. Most elections in New York City and in the suburbs are decided in the primaries. Most years in New York you can vote almost every year, once in September, and once in November. We’re going to have a big election in New York City in September for all those citywide offices, and a general one in November. We’ll also be voting on a constitutional convention.

We need people to participate in all of these elections. I’m a big believer that the whole collective, the group, is rather smart, and in tune with what’s going on. I’m not cynical. There are some people who believe that voters aren’t intelligent, that they’re easily manipulated by power brokers, or will only vote in accordance with certain aspects of their identity. If they’re young, then they’re easily swayed by their parents. I don’t believe any of this. Voters do tend to go towards issues that are better suited for the whole. All elected officials should be trying to get as many people out there to vote as humanly possible. It’s simple – we’ll get better outcomes when more people vote.

 

What has most surprised you about being in the Assembly so far?

There are days when you feel progress is being made, and that you’re moving forward. And then there are days when you feel there are entrenched forces all around and nothing will change. That kind of dichotomy, where it can switch on and off, can be frustrating. You can feel very heartened one day, and completely frustrated the next day. The other surprising thing—which is somewhat amorphous and hard to pin down—from day to day those things can be almost the same. You can have a person surprise you from one day to the next. You might say to yourself, ‘I never thought this person or this organization would champion this issue,’ and then you think, ‘Why is that person now doing this?’ You forget it’s three-dimensional, with different parts moving.

There are some really good things that the New York State Assembly and the Legislature has done lately, from minimum wage, to stopping hydrofracking. But with something like Raise the Age, you wonder, ‘why can’t we figure this out?’ The Assembly is very good on it, but the Senate is being pretty difficult on it right now. Why can’t we come up with something that’s reasonable? It’s not an unreasonable point to make, or issue to bring to the forefront.

So overall, it’s not as great as it is on its best day, nor is it as bad as it is on its worst day.

 

The 44th District is pretty diverse. How do you balance your different constituents’ needs?

My district is wonderful. We’ve got Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Kensington, Victorian Flatbush, Ditmas Park, parts of Borough Park, and a little bit of Midwood. There are people who are very new to Brooklyn, who have just moved into all parts of my district from far and wide. There are some people moving to Park Slope, Victorian Flatbush, and Windsor Terrace who are maybe professionals with means and money. Some people are moving to Kensington and Coney Island Avenue from Pakistan and Bangladesh. There’s a large Orthodox Jewish population in Borough Park, and in the district there are also people of Irish, Italian, and Puerto Rican descent who have have been here for years and years. I grew up in the district, in Windsor Terrace and Kensington. Brooklyn is the only home I’ve ever known.

There are multigenerational homeowners here, and immigrants, and people who are brandnew who might be called gentrifiers. That’s the way neighborhoods are created in New York. If you’re a New Yorker, you understand the city is always in flux. And when you get down to the core issues, people are worried about the local subway station, the local public schools, making sure the neighborhood is safe and affordable and that city services are working.

A great thing about this district is that a lot of people are concerned about building towards a more just and fair society. It’s not just purely a matter of, ‘what the government is doing for me.’ They understand that we’re all in this together and that we need to bring everyone along with us.

 

Reading to children at Windsor Terrace library.

 

The previous Reader Interview: http://www.psreader.com/issue/issue-59/the-reader-interview/enriched-landscapes-the-reader-interview-with-susannah-c-drake-on-cleaning-up-the-gowanus-canal/

Enriched Landscapes: The Reader Interview with Susannah C. Drake on Cleaning Up the Gowanus Canal

By Filed Under: The Reader Interview

The Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™ opened in the fall of 2016. Facing the Canal at the end of 2nd street, the park was designed by DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture to clean up the Canal’s notoriously polluted waters. I spoke with Susannah C. Drake, DLANDstudio’s founding principal, who—as a registered architect, landscape architect, and an adjunct professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design—offers a unique perspective on the topic of green infrastructure and the design challenges that are unique to New York City.

 

 

How does the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™ work?

When we came up with the idea, I didn’t want to go into a neighborhood and say, I’m putting a wetland in your backyard. That wasn’t going to fly, nor do you want to have a true swamp in your backyard. But we do want a landscape that can absorb more surface water runoff, to prevent it from going into your cellar, creating puddles on the street, taking all of the detritus from the street and putting it into our water bodies, and killing wildlife. We wanted to create a landscape to absorb that water. So the term “Sponge Park™” refers to an absorbent landscape. We designed it as a park space, a garden with very absorbent soils that will take all of that water and help make it available to the plants, which will evapotranspirate the moisture and keep it out of the waterway and your cellar.

The Gowanus Canal is a Superfund site.

It seems like this design could be replicated in a lot of different street-ends throughout the city.

Right. When we did the original master plan, working with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, we designed a system for all of the areas around the Gowanus. We got a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to do this initial planning work, and we tried to find every available absorbent surface. We discovered there was this setback that city planning was putting into law where you would have a 40-foot setback from the waterfront plus a 10-foot supplemental walkway. Initially, we thought, this is great. We have all of that landscape available to make Sponge Park™’s. But one thing that differentiates the Gowanus Canal and other industrial canals from a waterfront like Battery Park City is that they’re industrial landscapes which tend to have buildings abutting the waterfront, so you can’t have that continuous walkway or open space. We saw that as a potential opportunity to thread the green infrastructure, or thread the enriched landscape, back into the community. One of the first places we saw an opportunity to do this was at the street-ends, where the land was available and there were no buildings. And so we created this prototypical Sponge Park™ street-end that could be replicated. We’ve done some GIS (Geographic Information System) analysis of other street-ends around the city and found there were a couple of hundred places where this same design could be implemented. The Department of Transportation is really excited about that and they were looking at how much it’d cost to implement it on a broader scale. We’ve been calculating how much water it will actually manage and it manages millions of gallons of water per year. So it could have a very meaningful impact.

DLANDstudio’s fundraising process struck me as unique. Is it unusual for an architecture studio to be working with government agencies and non-profits?

[pullquote]One thing that was so magical about working in Gowanus, that I really appreciated over the last 10 years, was that there were so many different voices and people who really cared about their neighborhood. [/pullquote]We created a completely different paradigm of practice, where we basically look for things that are broken in the city. Sometimes those discoveries happen because of discussions with non-profits who tell us, Hey, there’s an issue in our community and we want to figure out some solutions. Sometimes it’s just from running or biking around the city and seeing something that seems like a design opportunity. But we look for those opportunities and relationships. Then we find sources of funding to first develop some of the planning work and then ultimately fund some of the design development and construction drawings, and then we’ve raised money for for the construction. It’s completely different than a normal procurement process. It’s been fruitful and it was particularly fruitful for my firm because I had been practicing for about 15 years before I started my practice, but my practice was seen as that of a young woman-owned business. The work I do is in the infrastructure space, which tends to be controlled by massive engineering firms, and architecture firms started to find landscape architecture and infrastructure interesting as well. So the competition is quite fierce from huge firms that have been around for a long time and have a lot of built work. But I felt I had a different, important voice to communicate, and that I had the experience to do the work. It wasn’t like I was naive to what it takes to do public work. So I came up with this method of applying for grants from environmental organizations and getting significant amounts of money to build these prototypical green infrastructure systems. So we did the Sponge Park™ and we also did one that we call HOLDS in Flushing Meadows Park. These are ideas, they’re experiments, prototypes that will need to be adjusted as we move forward and think about broader implementation. The point is to use the grant money to enable innovation that can’t happen through a normal procurement process. But it’s completely different. It’s a wacky paradigm. Nobody does this. Nobody did this. Now it’s so funny because the big architecture firms who would get the jobs anyway are all starting little non-profit arms, which is frustrating.

Is this procurement process trickier, or more bureaucratic, than the conventional method?

Every public project is filled with bureaucracy. I have to say the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was very patient with me although we drove each other crazy for a while. But they were patient. What was really exciting was that there was an overall vision for creating green infrastructure supported by the Bloomberg administration and the DEP during that administration, that has carried forward into the de Blasio administration. There’s a recognition of the need for these kinds of new strategies that enabled a willingness to experiment. So that was good, but it was tricky because these government entities aren’t set up to receive big grants of money from a random private firm and then give it back to that firm. That’s a tricky thing. It’s hard to figure out how to make that work through a public process. But meanwhile I did all the work to get the grants. I wrote the grant proposals and did all of that on my own dime. So in a way I’m providing great benefit to the city by doing this. It’s not like we’ve made any money doing the project. It’s been all about the research and development of an idea.

Do you think that procurement process encourages more input from stakeholders, the individuals who are actually affected by these designs?

Yes. I did some work up in the Bronx with the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, and it was pretty great in terms of engaging kids and the community in the development of one of these innovative structures. I think the kids really learned a lot. City agencies can do a lot of really good work. We shouldn’t necessarily try to subvert everything they do because there is a very beneficial public process that can make great parks and playgrounds and make things happen. But to the degree that you can use these kinds of systems to augment initiatives that are happening, like the vision of the city, I think it’s really great. Or if a community group has a vision, as a designer if I can help them realize that vision, it’s really rewarding for me, and for a lot of other designers who care about the communities in which they live. It’s a pretty great method for giving grassroots communities power to implement something, but we do have to remember we also have city council operating on behalf of the public to make things happen. But if you can combine the work of that community group with the work of city council, then you can get something really exciting going because you have more power. So using it as leverage is really the most valuable situation.

I love the idea of THE BQ GREEN project, which hopes to unite the neighborhoods that were divided by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE). Was there a similar process for that idea?

[pullquote] I’d like to see more women leading firms. There are some very talented women out there leading architecture firms and landscape architecture firms. [/pullquote]I have to give a lot of credit to the New York State Council on the Arts. When I started my firm I applied for a grant from NYSCA to look at capping the BQE over in Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, which is pretty close to my office. I developed this vision for making a new park space there, which attracted the attention of city councilwoman Diana Reyna. She invited me to participate in an RFQ (Request for Qualifications) for looking at her neighbourhood and potentially doing something over there. Her neighborhood, Southside Williamsburg, is where BQ GREEN ended up getting developed. We won a competitive bid against some really talented architects and developed that idea. It was really the result of a very involved community process, with a lot of meetings with different stakeholders and groups that didn’t necessarily always want to show up at the same meetings, so we had to have separate meetings for different constituents. We also just went out to the playground and talked to people because we weren’t getting enough voices. So we started talking to people on the street, at church, and at school drop off and pick up. We got a lot of input and found that the community really wanted active recreation space. They had playgrounds for little kids, but they didn’t have space that would keep middle school age kids active and occupied. That was important because the neighborhood has a lot of gang violence. Diana Reyna told a very poignant story about being in the playground as a little kid and hiding behind a water fountain just to avoid being caught in the crossfire between two competing gangs who were having a shootout. So that stuck in the back of our mind. We thought, let’s get the kids out on a sports field instead, really unite the neighborhood, and eliminate, or start to blur the territorial boundaries between two competing neighborhoods, or two different constituencies. I feel like that project has a lot of great potential benefits. Along with Diana Reyna, El Puente, Los Sures, St. Nick’s Alliance, and the Open Space Alliance, we’ve all been trying to make it happen, without necessarily selling out the neighborhood to real estate development interests. So we’re trying to get the city to do it just because it’s the right thing to do. And that’s a really hard lift. But the Borough President has put I think two million dollars into the potential development of it and Diana Reyna has been working tirelessly to try to make it happen, and so has the Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn. So they’re really pushing to try to make it happen now as well. It’s funny because it’s getting out there and it’s becoming something that feels real. That’s an exciting thing to have something that started as this planning study and vision really driven by the community start to become something that people feel is inevitable.

Plants in the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park.

Your studio really emphasizes interdisciplinary design. Why do you think interdisciplinary design is something to advocate for?

I studied architecture and landscape architecture at Harvard and I got registered in both, and I’ve always wanted to have an interdisciplinary practice. I hire people that have really varied expertise because I feel that it makes a rich environment for the development of design work. You know you can have just smart people coming together and bringing their expertise if you have people who have experience in, say biology or engineering, or we had one woman who was an astronomer, another woman with a background in religion. I had a sculptor bringing their expertise to the design. These people make it so much richer, more interesting. And so I’ve always really focused on maintaining that interdisciplinary atmosphere in the office and trying to do projects that really bridge the disciplines. And that’s a challenge. It’s not something that is really fully understood. There’s always a desire to have these these teams that represent a lot of different disciplines, but having an all-in-one office is very fluid and valuable.

Are sustainable architecture and design becoming more common, either in New York City or generally?

Definitely. It’s much more prevalent. A lot of the ideas that I’m able to make happen are things that people were talking about in the early ‘70s, when I was a little girl. It comes out of the environmental movement. But I think part of the reason those environmental initiatives didn’t take hold in a meaningful way in cities up until now is that there wasn’t an integration of the natural system and the urban system in a way that really could work. So I think there’s a greater understanding of the need for the integration of a greater level of formality—and by that I mean formmaking—with the the function of an ecological system, a greater hybridity between the engineering and the ecological and the architectural to make something really beautiful. When I say “beautiful,” I know that wetlands are beautiful in a particular context. But I think it’s important to understand the civic nature of cities and to have an expression that is a bit stronger or more formal.

What can a reader or average person do to encourage that sustainability, and that integration?

A great book just came out called Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning, published by the Lincoln Land Institute. It has all the top landscape architects represented talking about their approaches to nature and cities. So I would say that’s a perfect primer. The chapter I wrote is excerpted in the magazine Land Lines. It’s a good read. Not to put in a shameless plug for the book, but it’d be a really good primer.

How would you describe the status of women in your industry?

Do you think things are changing right now? I’d like to see more women leading firms. There are some very talented women out there leading architecture firms and landscape architecture firms, in particular. Andrea Cochran is an amazing role model as well as Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, though at GGN, they don’t like to describe themselves as being a woman-owned business. They just say, we are designers who happen to be women. It’s kind of a macho profession. I think the only way we’re going to advance is if more of us decide to take the initiative and start our practices and really take on these leadership positions. Part of that is how you create your own identity. You have to choose to be a leader. If you choose to be a leader you have to really follow up on that, and it’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of nuance. I have a number of friends who are partners in large firms. They have an interesting perspective because they’ve said they never really felt any issue about being a woman, until they made partner. Then they felt like they were treated differently, like they were only able to get to a certain level within the upper partnership ranks. I try not to dwell on it too much, but I am aware of the issues. I’m always aware when I get interrupted more than my male colleagues. I’m aware when I hire somebody who has less experience than I do who is male, and people think they’re the boss. It’s frustrating, but I just deal with it.

Has teaching influenced your work, or do you think of them as separate spheres?

[pullquote]I’m a little bit concerned that as the development pressures push into Gowanus, the amount of open space won’t necessarily be maintained and there might be a loss of that (INDIVIDUAL) expression. [/pullquote]It definitely influences the work. I love teaching and influencing the next generation, and I like bringing people from my academic world into the practice. I’ve had a number of my students come and work with me. It’s been great to watch them grow and develop the ideas that started to germinate within the academy, and then came to fruition through our practice. A number of those people have actually gone on to become teachers themselves, which is is both great and challenging because you don’t want to lose good people. At the same time I want to see people grow. So I’ve really enjoyed it, and I feel I get a lot of ideas from teaching and also, frankly, from traveling to different cities, because I’ve been an adjunct in a lot of different places. I’ve seen a lot of different things which has been helpful.

Are there things you’ve seen in other cities that you’d bring to New York if you could?

I don’t know. New York is so big that it’s really hard to think about implementing some things that work in smaller cities here. I find it remarkable when planners look to a city of 200,000 people and start to apply a system, that would work there, to New York City. To a certain degree, some of those systems work, but sometimes they just can’t because of the scale and population density. It’s a tough environment for plants, and for bicyclists. There’s a need for design here that really understands the scale of operations and that the systems in the city need to keep moving in order to make this place vital. It’s tricky because there are a lot of beautiful things that I see in smaller cities that just wouldn’t work here.

You said in an interview that landscape architecture is always shifting whereas with architecture, you finish a building and it’s finalized, and that you like moving between those different modes.

It’s satisfying to build something and then have it be complete when you’ve finished building it. Whereas with landscape architecture, you’re seeding change. It’s like if you’re having a baby and you need to raise it to be an adult. That’s what being a landscape architect is like. There are a lot of things that can go wrong with that baby along the way unless it’s taken care of and nurtured, and educated or tended to. So it’s nice to work in both and be able to to have the satisfaction of creating something where you can achieve a certain level of perfection immediately and recognize that, and then other cases where you’re actually making something for the next generation.

 

The Gowanus Sponge Park was designed as a public park space.

Urban design seems similar to landscape architecture in that it has to shift and respond to change.

The profession of urban design actually grew out of the profession of landscape architecture. Landscape architecture happened first. There was a profession of architecture. Then in the United States, in the late 19th century, the profession of landscape architecture was born with the creation of all of our great parks. There were clearly beautiful landscapes created in Europe and Asia and all over the world, but landscape architecture involves landscapes that were specifically designed for public use. That’s an American idea and an American profession that was established by, among others, Olmsted and Beatrix Farrand, who was the only female founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Landscape architecture as a degree program started at Harvard around the turn of the century. And then urban design as a degree program started of a couple of decades later, maybe even three decades later, at Harvard. So it’s a newer profession, but urban design co-opted a lot of the work that landscape architects do. So they’re related. And there is a program in urban design at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard that is an MAUD program, and you can come into your MAUD program or MLAUD program with either a degree in architecture or a degree in landscape architecture and you get that urban design degree that has a bit of a qualifier of whether it’s landscape or architecture. But all the students are working together.

Is there anything you’d add for people in Park Slope or Gowanus?

One thing that was so magical about working in Gowanus, that I really appreciated over the last 10 years, was that there were so many different voices and people who really cared about their neighborhood. They saw a great opportunity to make open space with a character that reflected the neighborhood and to actually affect the design. So our master planning work was really intended to be very flexible, so that it could provide a framework for individual expression for its ultimate implementation. I’m a little bit concerned that as the development pressures push into Gowanus, the amount of open space won’t necessarily be maintained and there might be a loss of that expression. Part of the expression had to do with craft and people who were making things, and the fact that it was this industrial neighborhood. Maybe that’s a bit of a romantic vision, but it’s an exciting vision. And it’s something that makes you feel like you’re part of that place. And I know cities have to transform and are very organic. I mean my ancestors actually had a farm in Gowanus. There’s a creek that was named after my family that now all goes into a CSO. So there has to be an ability to embrace change. But I just hope with that change, the Gowanus area will be able to maintain its wonderful diversity.

 

In Drake’s mind, the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™ and many of the studio’s designs are an “opportunity to thread the green infrastructure, or thread the enriched landscape, back into the community.” One can hope that this kind of thinking takes hold on a broader scale.

The Reader Interview with Sally Kohn on Election 2016 and Beyond

By Filed Under: The Reader Interview Tagged With: , , ,

“Equality is Not a Zero-Sum Game”

On a muggy day in in late Summer, I sat down with Sally Kohn, columnist and CNN commentator. I picked her brain about the presidential election, Dog Whistle politics—rhetoric that uses coded language to convey a message to specific segments of the population—and Kohn’s idea of emotional correctness, as presented in her 2013 Ted Talk. For Kohn, emotional correctness refers to “a daily spiritual practice” that consists of trying “to find compassion for the people I not only disagree with, but who are fundamentally lacking in compassion for me and my side.”  By Mirielle Clifford

Kohn is currently working on a book that’s informed by that notion of emotional correctness. Throughout our conversation, Kohn showed how the choice to examine the systems at play, instead of simply blaming individuals for actions we may not agree with, can lead to a much more productive understanding of our current political landscape.

How do you think this election will be remembered? 

Either as the beginning of the end, or the beginning of the beginning. It’s very hard to say, in this universe of political thinkers and talkers. Everybody always says, ‘this is the most important election of our lifetimes.’ We’ve all heard this before. This actually does feel like an important one, in an existential way, in terms of the future of both parties’ ideologies which are being wrangled with in really interesting ways, and in terms of the future of American values and identity. Belonging and inclusion or exclusion are being wrestled with in fundamental ways. Fundamental precepts of democracy, voice, respect, and civility are facing unprecedented turmoil in this election.

Which way does it go from here? I think it’ll keep getting worse in some of these regards, but it could be the moment where, historically we’ll look back and say, this is when it started to turn. The profound ugliness, elitism, and exclusion of the racial bias-fueling politics of the right for the last forty years probably won’t end after November. But this could be the moment we look back and say the wool was pulled off the disguised wolf and America saw it for what it was. I hope that’s the case, but I’m not sure.

You wrote for CNN that “so many Americans see the advancements of others as a strike against themselves.” Why do you think that is?

How much time do we have? This could be the entirety of the interview, trying to understand this. I’m careful not to say that people who support Donald Trump, or who are against affirmative action, or who think we need a wall between the United States and Mexico are racist. First, I think “racist” is a loaded word that shuts down the conversation. Second, it locates the whole conversation in the personal, while what we’re going through as a country is bigger than that.

This is about forty plus years of politics—largely fed by the right, but not exclusively—responding to the progressive successes of the New Deal in helping to build the white middle class. These politicians thought, ‘we can’t attack those policies on their face because they’re so effective, but we don’t like them. What are we going to do?’ When the Civil Rights movement came along, and Lyndon B. Johnson tried to expand these New Deal policies, which specifically excluded African Americans, the Right saw an opportunity to exploit and fan white racial resentment, to turn it against public policy the Right didn’t like.

So you had Nixon, Reagan, and this practice called the “Southern strategy,” but which was really a national strategy, of Dog Whistle racial politics. ‘We’re not going to say Black people are inferior, or endorse segregation; we’re going to move away from that. But we’ll talk about law and order, welfare cheats, and cadillac-driving Welfare Queens.’ If you’re Bill Clinton, you’ll talk about Super Predators.  They tried to feed into the notion, or create the notion, that by making our country more equal, by creating opportunity for people of color and Black people in particular, that you’re taking something away from white people. Your schools will get bad, your neighborhood will get dangerous, your property values will decrease, you won’t be able to get that job.

It fascinates me when I hear white liberals say off-handedly when they don’t get a job—‘Oh, they probably gave it to a person of color.’ No, they probably gave it to a white person. We know the statistics. If there are five job openings, and one goes to a person of color, the inclination as a white person is to say, ‘Oh, the person of color took my job,’ as opposed to the four other white people. The assumption is that you, as a white person, and the other white people, were entitled to the job, but the person of color only got the job because of affirmative action. White people reading this, even the good Clinton-supporting or Sanders-supporting liberals, can hear a kernel of truth—they’ve thought these things, too. Certainly it’s something to be held accountable for as an individual, but it’s not just about individual bias. It’s also about these social, political, and economic systems that have encouraged white people to think of equality as a zero-sum game.

There’s a great, unattributed quote: ‘When you’ve only ever known privilege, equality feels like oppression.’ That’s true.

This is also how you end up with an economic system where working class and middle class white folks vote for elite economics, which is mind-boggling unless you understand this notion of racial hierarchy and racial supremacy, which is very much in place today.

Can’t actually figure out what to do about it. If you point it out, half the country will say, ‘Sally, you’re the racist for bringing it up.’ It’s like blaming the person who pulls the fire alarm for starting the fire. But you can’t solve a problem if you don’t talk about it.

In your Ted Talk, you talk about emotional correctness. I think we could all use more of that every day, but do you have advice for someone who may have a hard time cultivating that emotional correctness because there’s so much at stake? I’m imagining a member of the Black Lives Matter movement who feels that ending police brutality is a matter of life or death for them, and then you have people vilifying them for questioning the police’s tactics.

I’m working on a book that’s informed by the idea of emotional correctness, the Ted Talk, and how we can be less uncivil and mean to each other in small ways and in massive ways, in terms of actual hate and violence. Part of my work with the book is me interrogating these questions, like, how much of this is naivete? There are times when incivility could be seen as being in furtherance of justice, but I maintain that there aren’t. That’s where I am the moment, and have been for a while.

If we look at the history of social justice movements, long before Black Lives Matter, there have been these tensions, the tensions between Martin Luther King’s idea that ‘Hate cannot solve hate; only love can do that,’ and Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and a very understandable desire to fight fire with fire, literally and metaphorically.

I personally, spiritually, and ethically fall on the side of peace, love, kindness, and civility as the antidote to hate, violence, and cruelty.

For me, the answer is try to lead by example with my own life and share those ideas, but that’s a far cry from proscribing that everyone should act that way in every single situation. It’s a personal choice. Now, there are some interesting and real tensions in social justice movements that I support, like Black Lives Matter or immigrant rights. There are dimensions of these movements that are more on one end of that spectrum than the other. That’s both an individual decision to make and a movement-wide struggle which is sort of healthy. For me, I try to find compassion for the people I not only disagree with, but who are fundamentally lacking in compassion for me and my side. So far I’ve found that effective.

I’ve been talking to people who have left movements of hate, like former white supremacists. One common thread in their transition out is that someone they would never have expected it from showed them compassion, like an African-American woman showing compassion to a white supremacist. I take that as a good sign.

Emotional correctness is a daily challenge. To me, it’s a daily spiritual practice. I could pick up my Twitter feed and find fifteen tweets that it would be so fun and gratifying to tweet rude, nasty responses to. It would probably feel great—I don’t know, I haven’t done it—but only for a few minutes.

I have a seven-year-old, and one thing you try to teach your kids is not just delayed gratification, but that you can make choices that aren’t just satisfying in the short-term but that are good for you, your family, and everyone around you in the long-term. I feel that way not just about social media but about being a public voice in general. Yes, you can say the thing that would be gratifying and cathartic in the short-term, that would get you the most clicks and the most airtime, but are you actually doing good for society and your own soul in the long-term? I don’t think so.

How do you explain thorny or even painful political topics to your daughter?

She’s only seven. By the time this comes out she’ll be eight. She’s very excited. She’ll also have pierced ears, so look out, Park Slope, when you see that bling walking down the street.

I realized this the other day when I did a CNN interview on Skype in my in-law’s basement, which one can do. Everybody wanted to watch it, because my in-laws wanted to see their basement on TV. We all watched it, including my daughter and her little aunt and uncle who are around her age. We were talking about some god awful thing Trump had said. I felt ashamed watching it, though not for anything I’d said. I pride myself on helping my child to be informed, engaged with the world, and thoughtful, in age-appropriate ways. This was one of the moments where I thought, I’m not sure if I want her to know this, that people are saying these things, and someone running for President is saying these things.

It’s a hard time to talk to kids about politics. The same thing goes with what’s happening around race and racial bias in this country. People, including well-meaning liberals, think the way to talk to their kids about race is to teach them to be color-blind. That’s not practical, first of all; it’s not the world we live in. Secondly, the elevation of color-blindness as a solution to racial injustice in this country is a right-wing adaptation intended to serve their agenda. As in, race can’t be a factor in affirmative action or public policy.

The same way we talk to our daughter about gender is the same way we talk about race. She picks up gender cues all the time—pink is for girls, blue is for boys; boys are good at this, girls are good at that. When we see these things in movies or in books, we say, ‘you know, the thing I don’t like about this is…’ and we help her deconstruct her environment, and think thoughtfully about the world as it is and the world as it should be, as opposed to letting her live within her metaphorically and literally lily-white bubble.

There’s an interesting conversation around police. As a white parent with a white kid in a somewhat diverse but still fairly privileged community, especially for New York City, my instinct is to teach my kid, if you’re ever in trouble, you can go to the police. But I don’t want to instill the notion in my child that ‘the police are always a good thing, so if someone is critiquing the police, then they’re necessarily wrong.’

We have to help our children understand from the very beginning that their perspective isn’t the only one in the world, which is incidentally really hard to do with little narcissists, which all seven-year-olds are. Like all of us, when I was a kid and didn’t finish the food on my plate, I was told, ‘there are starving kids in Ethiopia.’ It was very distant, but there are starving kids in New York, too, and we try to help her see that. There are things we’re fortunate to be able to expose her to, through travel, through having a diverse group of friends, through going to a racially and economically diverse school, but also in the way we talk to her, to help help her situate herself and deconstruct the world around her. That’s what makes a good citizen.

But she’s only seven. How do you explain Donald Trump to a seven-year-old?  How do you tell her, ‘you can’t talk this way. Even though Donald Trump said it, you can’t say it.’ My kid thinks that being President must be the greatest thing in the world, and you would have to be a pretty special person—a great role model—to run for President. The Right has made the same critique about rappers. Fine, some valid points, but what about your presidential candidate?

Some people say that you shouldn’t vote for ‘the lesser of two evils,’ but should vote your conscience, even if that means abstaining. What would you say about that in this election?

I’m going to say this as clearly and as non-judgmentally as I can—if you do not do everything you can to get Hillary Clinton elected this November, I think you have some soul-searching to do. This includes not just voting yourself, but spending your time, money, and talent to elect Clinton and defeat Donald Trump.

I’m a lifelong left-wing progressive. I agree our two-party system is broken, that the Democratic Party is too beholden to corporate interests, too hawkish, that a lot of these dynamics around Dog Whistle politics harken back to Bill Clinton. I’m not naive about the past and present structural issues in the Democratic Party, and the challenges and blindspots of Hillary Clinton in particular.

That said, elections are about choices. If we had a multi-party system, which I really wish we did, it would go a long way to address issues like the current hyper-partisanship. But when you have two parties, you have a choice. You pick one or pick the other. Any action you take is picking one or the other. I’ve admired Jill Stein for a long time. I find what she’s doing now unconscionable. Donald Trump isn’t Jeb Bush. If this was Jeb Bush, and we said, ‘Ok, it’s time to teach the Democratic Party a lesson. We’re going to use this as a teachable moment to transform the party for the future, and so it’ll stop taking these issues and these voters for granted.’ I’m down. But this isn’t that time.

And thinking like that assumes that the only way to have power or influence in this two-party system is by withholding votes. Look at the influence that Bernie Sanders had on the party platform; it’s the most progressive platform in history for either party. You can say, ‘look, you’ve  had influence by being at the table, and you can continue to do so.’ If Clinton wins, constituencies that weren’t involved in helping her get elected will have less input. When we talk about a broken political system, that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about, ‘who helps?’ We’re never going to have as much influence as big money, but if you didn’t help, if you weren’t there, you have no influence. Clinton has already moved to the left in this election, but the larger point is, you can engage in that struggle, but you can’t win it. I’ve talked to people on the left who insist they’re not going to vote for Hillary. Some of those people have the luxury to do that because Trump’s policies won’t affect them. They’re not immigrants who will be deported or whose families will be broken up, they’re not Muslims who will be treated with suspicion and whose loved ones won’t be able to come into the country.

Also, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. You can support Hillary Clinton. I don’t think she’s the lesser of two evils. When you look at what she stands for and what Sanders and Jill Stein stand for, there’s 80% or 90% overlap. There are real, serious issues around which we should still be struggling, but to cast those disagreements as overly broad is disingenuous and in the case of this election, very dangerous.

I get emotional about it. I was a Hillary Clinton critic, I remain a critic, I was a Sanders supporter. But you don’t go and elect a protofascist hatemonger and call yourself a Leftie. Clinton wants to raise taxes on the rich; Trump wants to give away $7 billion in tax giveaways to millionaires and billionaires. Clinton believes in public education, while I think Donald Trump wants to get rid of the Department of Education. These are fundamental things. The edges of the conversation are essential, but I think the core of agreement between Sanders, Stein, and Clinton is profound, vast, and not to be overlooked.

What was it like to be at the Democratic National Convention?

It was very helpful, inspiring, and positive. I learned things about Hillary Clinton I didn’t know. Her record fighting school segregation early on, the work she’s done for foster kids in New York City, her deep commitment to children with disabilities, and to 9/11 victims’ families, survivors, and first-responders. I used to question whether Clinton was a progressive. The Convention challenged me, in that I don’t think she’s a progressive on certain issues, but on other issues, she is. It’s dangerous if we become too dogmatic. And she’s the first presidential candidate to talk about getting rid of the Hyde Amendment and expanding access to abortion. In my book, that’s progressive. So the Convention made my image of Hillary Clinton more complex.

It was also incredibly inspiring to me, in the juxtaposition with the Republican National Convention, which was not only frightening because of Trump’s rhetoric, but also decisively white. That reflects choices made by the Republican Party post-1964, to be the party of white people, and they’re succeeding. Going to the DNC helped me appreciate that the Democratic Party is a diverse, pluralistic party that’s largely led by women of color, in terms of the Convention and now the DNC itself with Donna Brazile. Appreciating the social and political significance of that made me proud to be a democrat.

Did the anti-Clinton mood wane?

Yes. People needed to get it out of their system. Bernie did a good job going group to group, talking to folks. A larger percentage of Sanders supporters now support Hillary than her supporters supported Obama in 2008. It continues to strike me that some of these Bernie-or-bust people were very pro-Obama, and Hillary is running to the left of Obama, or at least his governance for the last seven years.

Has your work as a community organizer influenced your current work in media?

Yes. Organizing is about communicating ideas to people, helping make ideas accessible and understood. That carries over.

What do you think is the most pressing issue for Park Slope residents to be involved in? 

There’s something about the complacency of liberalism, that everyone in Park Slope should be thinking about. There’s the notion that ‘we live in a progressive bubble, so we’re good.’ Demographically, it’s a diverse community, but there’s a fair amount of hierarchy and segregation in Park Slope. Are people thinking about the overwhelming whiteness of PS 321 and the implications of that? Are they thinking about their nannies and housekeepers, how much they’re being paid, and whether they’re getting paid sick days? As liberal Park Slope people, we say, ‘Of course we support raising wages and paid sick days,’ but are we doing that for the people who work for us who, in this neighborhood, are largely women of color? Systems of inequality and patterns of bias are about systems and structures, but they’re also about us. I’m not saying, put on a hair shirt. Don’t walk around feeling guilty and suffering. But everyone can ask what they can do in their own lives, not to mention their own companies and investments. We can ask ourselves, am I investing in companies with diverse leadership in terms of people of color and women? In every facet of our personal and professional life, can we all look at how we can do 20% better? What kind of difference would that make? Especially for people with privilege and power, which people in Park Slope tend to have.

What is your favorite part of living in Park Slope?

I love running into friends, knowing people on our block, having neighbors we hang out with. I do love off-leash hour. I wish it were an hour later on weekends. I love small businesses. I love the walkability. A lot of what I love is about city life in general, but there is a really lovely sense of community and belonging that’s delightful.

As the weather cools but the presidential election heats up this fall, we can hope that the values of community, belonging, inclusion, and civility are given their due.

There’s No “They”

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THE READER Interview with Kim Maier on our Cultural Patrimony

The Old Stone House has been many things a baseball clubhouse, a warm place for nineteenth century gentleman to gather after iceskating, a casualty of urban blight, a rallying cry that brings neighbors together, and now, a vibrant public space. In May, I spoke with the Executive Director, Kim Maier, about the Old Stone House’s summer programming, its history, and its commitment to accessibility in a changing Brooklyn.

Maier in front of the Old Stone House, which proudly displays a Maryland flag. Credit: Mirielle Clifford
Maier in front of the Old Stone House, which proudly displays a Maryland flag. Credit: Mirielle Clifford

What’s happening at the Old Stone House this summer? 

As Park Slope’s town square, we’re always trying to create great programming. In July we open with our annual summer programming with Piper Theatre. Our Equity Showcase production is Psycho Beach Party by Charles Busch, which is a fantastic take on the early 60’s beach blanket bingo movies, looking at different views on gender, personality, and psychosis. These Equity Showcase Productions have been a wonderful way for us to support young emerging Equity actors, and non-Equity actors as well, and to bring a high quality of performance to an actor’s space that’s not usually accessible.

The Piper Theatre workshop shows are also very exciting. We’re doing two musicals this summer: Blood Brothers and Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, along with Alice in Wonderland, Beastmaster, and King Lear, which will be directed by Rob Parker from Scotland’s Gordonstoun School. The younger kids are doing The Iliad and The Odyssey.

You have an exhibit on view in the gallery until June 20, called “Partners/Parents/Pets.”

Our goal is to create a lot of avenues for entry and to attract a really wide audience. We have our history exhibit which focuses on life in 18th century Brooklyn. But we also have three contemporary shows a year looking at everyday life in Brooklyn, like our current, contemporary portraiture show.

The show considers who gets to have their portraits painted and explores the link between economic privilege and art. Does the House explore this theme often?

One thing we focus on here is access. We’ve looked at park space and play space, how parks are developed and how land is taken, how parks are maintained—based sometimes on the economic levels of communities—and how vocal community participation can lead to good public programming. Though that’s something any community could take on, it tends to happen in more affluent communities where people feel they have a voice. So we try to encourage people everywhere to have a voice, and set a model that can be replicated in any community.

In a 2014 interview with the Park Slope Stoop, you said “The Battle of Brooklyn today is a battle for a sense of place.” Do you think that battle has changed since then?

It’s the same. The history of New York is one of constant development and continuous change. But for me, having lived in Park Slope since 1983, it used to be a community of writers and artists and was much more affordable. It’s still a wonderful family community, but not as accessible to the creative class. I think a lot about Brooklyn and its sense of itself as a creative community, and how we can continue to support that.

How do you view the Old Stone House’s position in that “battle”?

The park’s improvement has created a lively, welcoming public space that allows for a very heavy level of interaction, from handball and soccer to concerts. In one space, you’re able to access a lot of different kinds of activities that aren’t necessarily available elsewhere … not to mention the fabulous history.

Creating a beautiful space is for the benefit of the many. The few benefit more richly, in a way. But working to benefit the larger community through accessible programming is one way of balancing out the inevitable facts that if you create a beautiful park, the housing around it will flourish, more people will want to live here, and that creates an economic impact that might shut other people out. It’s hard. We’re very aware of it, and that’s partly why we do a lot of free or low-cost public programming.

The Old Stone House couldn’t fix that economic issue.

Right. We support affordable housing and we’re focused on issues of income inequality. But we can’t change the fact that the city is Supply and Demand.

And always has been.

Since 1683.

Have you always been interested in Revolutionary history?

I grew up in Massachusetts and probably visited every historic home on the Eastern Seaboard, but I wasn’t really interested in pursuing history. These historic homes were off-putting. I never had a sense of the families that lived there. The issue of class was never directly addressed. You never got a true look at how the economy of these homes was managed. I remember thinking at Monticello that that beautiful site was run on the backs of enslaved people. That was certainly never talked about when I was a kid.

Coming in here, it feels warm, welcoming, and lively. But how would you address a reader who’s thinking, “hmmm, an historical house … maybe not.”

You should always feel free to walk in the door, because these public institutions are yours. They’re supported by all of us through our tax dollars, by individual donations, and by our programming. They belong to all of us. They’re our cultural patrimony. Today more than ever, this idea of engaged citizenship is really important. The Revolution was the start of that. The Battle of Brooklyn was fought by people who came from all over to fight for an ideal they had no idea was going to evolve and triumph, but they came anyway.

The House was the clubhouse for the original Brooklyn Dodgers, right?

Yes. The Brooklyn Baseball Club had a few different names—the Bridegrooms, the Superbas—but they were all part of this corporation that became the Dodgers. Hopefully, in our next phase of exhibit development, we’ll be able to do an outdoor exhibit on our baseball history.

By 1883 there was a ballfield here, a big grandstand, and an elevated train. By the late 1800s, the ballfield had fallen into disrepair, and they built a new one, which they used for ice skating. They would flood the field in the winter and skate by gaslight. The House, still in its original location, was both the clubhouse for the baseball team and also the gentleman’s club for winter skating. But it had gotten quite decrepit. By the time they had finished using the field, they were climbing in and out of the windows to get in.

Gradually the tenements along 5th Avenue were built up, and the House became a fill site. It was still used for recreation, though. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show came through. It was a very active open space, with a really active working-class community.

Has anything in the House’s history surprised you?

I’m surprised it fell into such disrepair. When it was originally built in the 1930s, it was a Robert Moses-Jane Jacobs kind of smackdown because Moses wanted to build this playground as part of an enormous expansion plan. Residents who knew the site’s history wanted a formal memorial to the Maryland soldiers who had taken a stand here. Moses was not interested in this kind of preservation at all. But they persevered and made him compromise by digging up the foundation stones and constructing this building that mimicked the original. But like so many other parts of the city, the House went by the wayside and was really destroyed. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when a small group of neighbors came together and lobbied the Borough President for funding, that it was repaired. If not for them, this whole history would have disappeared. When I moved to this part of the neighborhood in 1991, I had no idea of this site’s history. I was a typical user in a lot of ways. I was surprised by the disrepair, too, given that the Battle of Brooklyn was the first official battle fought by the United States Army in August of 1776.

Do you have any advice for the “typical users” of Brooklyn on why it’s important to preserve Brooklyn’s historical sites? How can they help?

We’re responsible for the well-being of our communities. There’s no they—we are the voters and the engaged citizens. If you care about the cleanliness of your block, the stability of your home, or the giant development coming in, you need to pay attention to what’s going on around you.

It doesn’t require going to every community board meeting. But it behooves you to read the local paper, to meet your neighbors, and to understand who lives on your block. In the end this is your home. The reasons you moved here will only continue to exist if you take responsibility for it.

As I left the Old Stone House, I was grateful to have been reminded of what engaged citizens can achieve.

The Classroom Door is Always Open

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I recently had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Anna Allanbrook, veteran principal of Brooklyn New School (P.S. 146). BNS has been called “a joyful, time-tested school” by Inside Schools, and as Allanbrook led me on a tour of the school and its garden, I had to agree.

In each classroom, students were excitedly learning from hands-on activities—like the third grade science class using flashlights to recreate the changing angle of shadows made by the sun over the course of the day. Students and teachers in this class and others were full of wonder and curiosity. As Allanbrook says, “the classroom door does not close,” and teachers collaborate to ensure all students receive the same creative, “rich” curriculum. Allanbrook studied painting as an undergraduate at Pratt, and she and many others in the school tend to look at education “through an artist’s lens.”

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The Brooklyn New School (PS146)

While speaking with Allanbrook—who has been the principal of BNS since 2000, and before that, its co-teacher director since 1997—I was struck by how the school’s community has worked to honor the founding story of BNS. Parents and teachers who started the school in 1987 envisioned it as a place where a culturally and economically diverse student body would engage in active learning.

This commitment to inquiry and project-based learning, as opposed to standardized test scores, has landed BNS in the news this year: 95% of families opted out of the state test in April. According to BNS’s Parent Coordinator Amy Sumner, this movement was started by parents: “Once we started the conversation it really blossomed.”

Ms. Allanbrook was kind enough to sit down with the Reader and share her thoughts on standardized testing, the importance of student voice, and more.

PS Reader: BNS is a popular choice among parents. What makes the school special?

Anna Allanbrook: First, I would talk about who attends this school. That’s been a little bit problematic recently. Because it’s such a popular school, sometimes more people from a certain group will apply than others. When the school started they had a lottery where one third of the children admitted were African-American, one third were Latino, and one third were white, Asian-American, or “other.” The Supreme Court later questioned the idea of having any kind of a quota system for admissions (though not at this particular school). The Department of Education took that to heart, changing the way children were admitted.

Today, we have a big catchment area of four districts, and different percentages of kids come from each district. That’s partly why we’re still so diverse. However, we’re not as diverse as we were in the late ‘80s, and there’s always the concern we’ll get less diverse each year if we don’t have some kind of quota system.

Getting back to why parents love this school—first and foremost for me, and I was a parent here years ago—was that diversity; having children go to school with children who may have a different life experience. That’s huge, especially in our global world, and it’s a big problem in New York City public schools that kids don’t get that option so much. I think they still get it here. I’d like the diversity to be greater, but there’s still quite a range of communities that come together in this school.

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BNS students picking out a new book.

Secondly, there’s the curriculum. We focus on inquiry, where kids learn by doing, by going on trips, by making things, and we emphasize social studies and science, as opposed to literacy. Not that we don’t do literacy, but learning about the world is the core of the curriculum. Sadly, that may not happen as much in some other schools.

The third reason that parents value BNS is the social-emotional aspect. We pay a lot of attention to individual children. We’re interested in knowing how they feel. Rather than just making sure children are compliant, we want children to be engaged and expressing their ideas and feelings. That can sometimes be messy, but for a parent, you know your child is safe if someone is listening to them.

What do you mean by “messy”?

If you’re listening to children, they might not do or say what you want, or they might be too noisy as they walk down the hall. With this approach comes student voice, which I think is really important. You can’t control student voice.

New York City has been in the news for having some of the most segregated schools in the country. If you could, what would you do to start to fix that?

It’s a really big problem, and it’s complicated. The concept of school choice is a good one, but by being a school of choice, we do take kids away from their neighborhood schools. I live in Lefferts Garden, which isn’t in this district. That neighborhood is becoming pretty integrated because of gentrification. But you still have the situation where the more affluent folks tend to leave the neighborhood and find a different school. This is not new; it’s been happening historically in our school system for generations. Yet we have a great opportunity right now because some neiaghborhoods are becoming more integrated. If everybody went to the local school, you could have some very exciting education.

On the other hand, I understand a parent who doesn’t want to send their child to a school that may not feel safe or that teaches very narrowly to the test. Until we make sure each school looks and feels like a school we ourselves would want to send our children to, that’s going to be an issue even as neighborhoods become more integrated.

I wonder sometimes if we could just change the district lines, which are historically racist and were implemented way back. It’s almost like you have to start from scratch, and rethink those lines so we get a more natural diversity.

Does BNS’s child-centered approach help to make a diverse group of kids feel comfortable?

It’s interesting to look at the changes in our diversity over time. When we first opened, it was harder to bring kids from different communities together. Back then, there were kids who had no experience with kids of a different color outside of school. Now students have more prior knowledge. You really can’t tell who’s from where because the kids are mixing it up and playing together. Maybe that’s because of what’s ha ppened in Brooklyn over the last ten years. But I see kids from different communities having good friendships and crossing boundaries they didn’t use to cross.

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Reading time.

So does the child-centered approach help? Absolutely. But diversity is still something you have to work on. You have to talk to students, hear their perspective.

Ninety-five percent of BNS families opted out of the state test. What made this possible at BNS?

We allowed the conversation, and I think that at many schools, just having that conversation was frowned upon. There were forums in the school run by our Parent Action Committee, and overall, a lot of information was given out.

The “opt out” atmosphere must affect teachers because they’re not being evaluated based on those test scores. How do you view your role in terms of teacher support?

That’s my job, to support teachers. Even if a teacher is struggling—and all teachers struggle at some point—my job is not to give them a poor rating, but to support them. That might include professional development, or doing some co-teaching with them myself. Just as my job is to help kids learn, it’s also to work with the teachers and help them learn. When I have new teachers, I pair them with more experienced teachers, give them mentoring support, and meet with them frequently. I don’t assume they’ll start out as great teachers, but they will become great teachers with that support. I do think it’s absurd to evaluate teachers based on test scores.

What is BNS’s attitude towards social responsibility and environmental stewardship?

Social responsibility has been a part of what we’ve done since the school started. One teacher has always pushed us to think about what we do that is bigger than ourselves, to help the community. We’ve done all sorts of different projects. Some of them happened spontaneously, as with Hurricane Sandy, and some were planned. We’ve always had an awareness of the need to be a citizen of the world.

Starting in the late ‘90s, we became more aware of environmental issues, which parents and teachers really pushed us to think about. In our meetings people would say we have to teach more about issues like sustainability and climate change. We then looked at our space outside, which led to the amazing garden we have today. It’s really become a part of our curriculum for all grades, and it’s a deep part of what we do.

Do you have any final advice for parents?

My one word of advice is to really listen to your children because we’re so lucky to be parents. There are so many distractions in today’s smartphone age, and I think it’s harder to pay attention to your child. But if you really watch and pay attention, you can relax and give your child what they need.

The interview came to a close, and as I walked out onto Henry Street, I reflected on how lucky all of us in New York are that a school like B.N.S. exists. We can only hope that its commitment to exploration, creativity, and diversity will extend beyond its double doors to all schools in the city.

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The school garden, Allanbrook says, “is a deep part of what we do.”