By Brian Dunlap
The first Sunday of summer my parents and I found ourselves in Echo Park at 826LA. A block from Echo Park Lake, along Sunset. Four in the afternoon. 82 degrees. The reading series Roar Shack, hosted by novelist David Rocklin, was returning in person for the first time since February 2020. The reading is now in its 10th year.
June’s features were Aruni Wijesinghe, Arthur Kayzakian, bridgette bianca, Suhasini Devi Yeeda and Nikolai Garcia. Four poets and an essayist/fiction writer.
From Rocklin’s first words—being excited and thankful to be back in person, physically present in community, not through Zoom squares—the reading became for everyone, about the need to be in community. To vent our anger and outrage over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Not only did Rocklin remind everyone to use their voice to fight back against this encroaching fascism, he emphasized the writers’ role in using their talents to speak out.
Wijesinghe shared what she was already doing to combat the Supreme Court decision; crocheting uteri in different colors for people to have if they donate $10 or more to a woman’s rights or woman’s health organization of their choice. Only one of the six uteri she brought remained by the end of the reading.
Since I featured in person at Roar Shack in January of 2019, that I’d engaged in the reading series and had forgotten about the reading’s unique structure. Placed in front of each chair, on the tables, was an index card, where everyone wrote down a prompt to write about. Rocklin gathered the cards where, halfway through the reading, he’d choose his favorite that two volunteers would then write on for 5-10 minutes. Upon completion, the two volunteers would read their pieces, and the audience would vote on which was best. The winner would be a feature at next month’s reading. Then the reading commenced with Nickolai Garcia. A poet from South Central who currently sleeps in Compton, he began with the poem “Confessional Poem #1,” from his chapbook Nuclear Shadows of Palm Trees.” It’s about his youth growing up in South Central.
That day I learned
blood has two
colors: the bright radish-red
when leaving the body;
and the rusty
brownish-red after drying
on concrete.
Next, essayist and fiction writer Suhasini Devi Yeeda, read her essay “A Roof of One’s Own,” published in Ms. Magazine. Yeeda is a first generation Indian American from Dallas who currently lives in Los Ángeles. Shortly after she graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with her MFA in 2015, she moved to L.Á. and “soon fell in love with,” the city and its vast diversity as she explains in her Shoutout L.A. interview. In her essay about her history growing up in Dallas and needing a space of her own, Yeeda writes:
By the time I was gifted the back room, there were neither parties
nor full houses. It was just my mom and me and the silence about
our shared history spent in my father’s house before his passing.
There was everything that came after this. Before and after, there
was the roof.
After every reader, a heaviness hung in the air, as the audience took a moment to process each writers heavy truths, necessary truths, unfiltered truths, that society is stripping from us. We needed to sit with it. When both Wijesinghe and bianca read, they each mentioned how unfortunate it was that a poem they were about to read, was still relevant. That they couldn’t retire it as the poem spoke in some way to their experience being women and women of color in America.
bianca read my second favorite poem of hers, “i want the world to see.”
this is what it feels like to be a woman in a land more
concerned with putting restrictions on my pussy than
assault rifles
this is what it feels like to be anything but white in a
country that values confederate monuments more than my
child’s flesh
Yet, it was also impressive to hear Arthur Kayzakian read two poems based on the cartoon, “Avatar: the Last Airbender.” He used the show as a jumping off point to discuss personally, some of the show’s themes. This is a poet who grew up in the Burbank/Glendale area, whose collection The Book of Redacted Paintings won the 2021 Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series award. He writes about how we hold loss after invasion, war and migration; how to reconcile a childhood with fragments of terror, then carry a gallery of stripped experiences inside the body while navigating in a new country through the process of assimilation.
But before the last reader, Wijesinghe, read, Rocklin announced the topic two volunteers would write on: “But you said.” Kayzakian was one volunteer. After they wrote for five minutes, they both (I forget the other person’s name) read powerful narratives made more impressive by the brief time spent penning them. In a close vote, Kayzakian won and will be featuring again in July.
Once Roar Shack ended, everyone lingered, conversed, laughed. We wanted—needed—to stay in community for as long as possible.
Los Angeles Literature 