Word on the Streets
Emerging from homelessness and hard-luck lives, struggling Albany writers seek homes for their work.

By Travis Durfee

Photo: Joe Putrock

“ ‘Beat down’?” questions Mimi. “Are you sure that’s not supposed to be ‘beat up’?” she asks, looking up through round, tortoise shell glasses.

“Nah, it’s ‘beat down,’ ” grunts Patrick, leaning back on the couch with his arms crossed.

“It’s that language thing again,” Tracy laughs to herself before addressing the group. “Like you say ‘high five,’ to us it’s ‘down low.’ It means the same thing, just a different way of saying it.”

“Al-l-l-right,” Mimi says, standing corrected, “let’s go on.”

It’s a Thursday afternoon in early October, a little past 4. Gathered in the circle of sofas, love seats and kitchen chairs in the reading room of the Women’s Building at 79 Central Ave. in Albany, Mimi Black, Patrick Whelan, Tracey Dorsey and Raymond Dixon are critiquing Patrick’s yet-untitled short story.

For the past three months, this group, or variations thereof, has met weekly to read and discuss writing. While the forms vary from short story to poetry to performance pieces, the content is narrower: The writing depicts the ghettos, gutters and prisons that have shaped the lives of the individuals in this room. Black, a retired magazine editor now volunteering with Homeless and Traveler’s Aid Society, leads the weekly workshop fashioned after a writers’ group for the homeless in New York City. HATAS created this group two years ago for writers with life experiences from the streets of Albany.

But this week, the group is working on an import: Whelan’s tale recounts the murder of the loudmouthed Bobby, who meets his demise in the Massachusetts Correctional Facility in South Walpole, Mass.

“Now, this may be nitpicking, but how did Bobby get his hands through the bars if they were cuffed behind his back?” Dorsey asks. The group is fine-tuning the climatic scene in Whelan’s story when Bobby, already in solitary confinement, is led to the recreation cage where two thugs await with orders to kill him.

“Nah, it’s like this,” says Whelan, a hulking 44-year-old. He hops to his feet, assuming his character’s position as a handcuffed prisoner. “Once they lock you in the cage, you turn around and there’s a slot in the bars for you to stick your hands through. Then they unlock the cuffs.

“Before they can unlock Bobby, the two guys grab him, throw him down and stomp his head,” Whelan continues in his thick New York City accent. Heading back to his seat, Whelan nods his head once and turns his palms up in the air—universal sign language for “Get it?”

“Oh, now I understand,” says Dorsey.

Black reads on as Whelan reassumes his seat on the couch. A tattoo is exposed from beneath the sleeve of his fading Baltimore Ravens T-shirt: “Irish Pride” reads the script on his left arm. Above the cursive sits a three-leaf clover. Fitting. Whelan hasn’t led a four-leaf-clover kind of life.

Photo: Joe Putrock

A self-professed juvenile delinquent who has struggled with substance abuse throughout his life, Whelan writes all of his stories from his real-life experiences. This one is no different. Whelan’s first trip to the state of Massachusetts led to a bungled bank robbery and prison term in Walpole. The names have been changed to protect the innocent (or the not-so -innocent, in this case), but there was a “Bobby” whose head was stomped for talking shit to the wrong people. The story about Bobby is but one in Whelan’s catalogue of hard-knock prison stories and tales of homelessness on the streets of Albany after his release.

As Whelan began straightening his life out in recent years—living in the rehab center at the Salvation Army on Clinton Avenue where he also works, coordinating donations—the writing he dabbled in as a child has become more of a focus. At work, a stack of green copy paper sits on his desk next to the phone. When an idea arrives and time allows, he scrawls out longhand the episodes of his life. He brings the drafts to Black, who types them up and distributes them to the group on Thursdays for critique. Whelan wants a book contract, and says he’s got the stories and the dedication to earn one. He just needs a start. Something published.

The turnaround in Whelan’s life is typical of those who have taken part in The 2-year-old writers’ group. Recruited from local shelters and referred from social-service organizations throughout the city, many people who’ve fallen on hard times come to the group seeking a creative outlet, a place to share their stories and hone their abilities.

From a social-services perspective, the idea of a writers’ group presents a unique way to connect with individuals who’ve rejected rehabilitation in the past. “It’s a very interesting way to work with people who’ve been very difficult to engage,” says Ira Mandelker, HATAS’ executive director.

“Some of the people that come to us have been social-worked by the best and the worst in their lives,” Mandelker says. “They come to us with a preconceived notion about the process, and some of them have just written off the value of social-service treatment altogether.

“We looked at writing and a writers’ group as a way around that problem. As a way to engage people that we couldn’t get to with routine, traditional social services,” Mandelker says. “As a way to provide services without beating people over the head with it.”

But now that they’ve been engaged, this incarnation of the group is looking to take the next step—publication. And Black is adamant that it happens.

“I would not run a writers’ group just to have people jerk themselves off,” Black says. “The point is to complete the cycle, to take the idea through the execution, the honing, and get into to print in their community.”

Black hopes to land some of the groups’ best writing in BIGNews, the monthly literary and arts newspaper sold by the homeless on the streets of Albany and New York City. But Black says the pages of the street newspaper currently are filled with “smart-ass skateboarder, New York-hipster bullshit,” and thinks some local content would help move some papers on the streets of Albany. Last week Black wrote a letter to the publisher of BIGNews, pitching the work of her students in the writers’ group, but has yet to receive a response.

Mandelker says he, too, would be interested in having some of the group’s writing published in BIGNews or Upward, another street newspaper in New York City that is more of a how-to and consumer-reports guide for homelessness written by those living on the streets. Some former members of the writers group have had their poetry published in Upward, Mandelker says. He tossed around the idea of starting an Albany-specific Upward, but says it may be difficult considering the ebb and flow of participation in the group.

“I wouldn’t want to start something and then two months later, because of something in the lives of the people in the writers’ group,” have to stop, Mandelker says. “We keep on plugging away on the writers’ group, but it hasn’t yet reached the critical mass I think we need to begin publishing work locally ourselves.”

Black, who says she’s worked at “every goddamn magazine in New York City 100 years ago in the 1970s,” is more ambitious. If she doesn’t hear back from the publisher at BIGNews shortly, Black is ready to self-publish an upstart, Albany-specific literary newspaper.

“I want to give people from this area a venue. When people have had these kind of real-life experiences . . .” she trails off.

Three weeks after the critique of Patrick Whelan’s short story, the writers’ group has been whittled down to three: Black, Dorsey and Whelan. Dixon has been sick and hasn’t shown up for the past two weeks. Two other writers from Catskill who visited the group for the first time last week haven’t returned. Black is unfazed.

Black springs her proposal on the group: a small literary newspaper, 10 pages or so, filled with the group’s short fiction and poetry, maybe some photographs. Black could lay it out on her PC, and pay for a local print shop to run off a couple hundred copies.

“What do you think?” Black asks. The group sits silent for a moment.

“We need more people,” Whelan says.

“No, we could do it,” Black says. She doesn’t think it would be too much work, either. A thick folio of poetry rests on Dorsey’s lap, Black has a handful of Dixon’s short stories, and Whelan is a memoir waiting to be written. All they’d have to do, says Black, is compile the best pieces, come up with a title, author an introduction, write some bios, maybe include some headshots and 10 pages are filled. The group is eager, but ambivalent.

“I don’t want to write for a newspaper,” Whelan says.

“It’s a literary publication, Patrick,” Mimi answers.

“Look, my plan is to write a book and make half a million dollars,” Whelan says. “If you can help me out I’ll give you 50 percent.”

“What is this, a vanity thing with you?” Mimi asks.

“No, he just wants some kind of recognition for the work he’s put so much time into,” Dorsey says.

“I just don’t want to have my picture taken,” Whelan says. “I can write more stories. I just think filling 10 pages is going to be a lot of work. You can get my picture down at the post office if you want.”