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It makes a certain kind of sense that Gregg Wilhelm’s spanking new office sits in what used to be an old bank. Wilhelm’s nonprofit organization CityLit Project became colleagues with the University of Baltimore’s School of Communications Design last year and his new home is UB’s Liberal Arts and Policy Building. Before the bank, the elegant building at 10 West Preston Street was home to a now obscure private fraternity. The Knights of Pythias was named after a Grecian myth of friendship wherein one friend posted his life as collateral for another in hot water with the law. CityLit and Wilhelm had the good luck to drop right into this historic structure, encased in the metaphors of commerce and seemingly quixotic generosity. That’s Baltimore, all right: always dreaming and scheming even when we’re scrambling to pay the bills.
Wilhelm founded CityLit in 2004 to “nurture the culture of literature” in Baltimore and build and connect a community of readers and writers. The mission gives shape and focus to a mixture of activities. The biggest by far is the annual CityLit Festival, held each year at the Central Brach of the Enoch Pratt Library. (Festival number eight is scheduled for Saturday, April 16, 2011. The featured writers for this event are Andrei Codrescu and Jaimy Gordon.) The rest of CityLit’s work supports writers as it brings their work and the process of writing itself into a larger community.
And not just any community, but that of the city of Baltimore — a very idiosyncratic place. Wilhelm recognizes Baltimore as a place where the artistic imagination can work under the most trying of circumstances. “You can be an artist in Baltimore, and still have a great artistic career, and still live.” While he sees this vision of the city, WIlhelm doesn’t quite picture Baltimore as a candidate for what the Brookings Institution calls a “skilled anchor.” A 2010 Dan Rodricks column uses the findings from the most recent census to argue that Baltimore’s shrinking population might not be wholly a bad thing. Smaller sure, but increasingly nimble, more distinctive, and welcoming to creative workers.
But WIlhelm is doing his part through CityLit to shape Baltimore into a place where the literary arts are recognized and celebrated, if not actually drafted to save the entire city. Reflecting on CityLit’s history Wilhelm observes, “Five or six years ago it [the literary community] was very segmented. ‘Where are the writers in Baltimore?’ ‘Where is the community?’ ‘Where are the readings?’ Part of what CityLit has done, along with others, is develop that kind of community and that kind of scene. It’s easier now. You can come to CityLit’s website and learn about what’s going on. “
And one of the things that’s going on is CityLit Press. Wilhelm has started publishing some of the very writers that have collated around the CityLit community. The first book was City Sages: Baltimore, a collection of writers past and present whom Jen Michalski, the editor, identified as quintessentially Baltimore, in one way or another.
The second book to come from CityLit Press is Vincent Cellucci’s An Easy Place / To Die. Released February first, it is described on the CityLit Press website as “New Orleans-based poet explores existence and extinction in aftermath of city’s own deluge story.” Cellucci has a video on his personal website with one of the book’s poems. An excerpt:
Poor boy got killed purchasing a Po Boy
Of course it was over drugs
For a hundred dollars
When Wilhelm is asked if it gave him pause to publish something so dark, especially given Baltimore’s nature as a minority-majority city, with issues of drugs and violence, just like Cellucci’s picture of New Orleans, he answers simply, “No. That’s about how, on a number of levels, the United States totally ignored New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.” But it seems reasonable to wonder what connections the reader of An Easy Place / To Die will make, given the parallels between New Orleans and Baltimore, now linked by the imprint of a publisher named CityLit Press.
Given that the CityLit Project and Press address the “where” of Baltimore writers, (The introduction to City Sages: Baltimore opens with “Where are the writers in Baltimore?”) the next question it might raise is the “who” of Baltimore writers and the “what” of Baltimore’s stories? What makes a writer a Baltimore writer? What makes a story a Baltimore story? Wilhelm’s asks wryly, “There’s thousands of stories to tell in the naked city, as they say, right?” Later WIlhelm reflects on the range of Baltimore stories and what they mean. “John Waters’ Baltimore and David Simon’s Baltimore are not the real Baltimore. And I think both of those gentlemen would agree to that. And I love both their works, but there’s so much more in between, in all the arts.”
So what is the literary Baltimore that lies “in between?” What stories sit in our city’s unknown, abandoned, or converted places? The CityLit Project is working hard to find out. CityKids is a program where volunteers come into the Govans Elementary School to share fiction and then help the children to write their own stories. Write Here, Write Now is a series of workshops designed to help writers with the practicalities of the craft, like how to submit a manuscript for publication. “Spring Into Writing” is a three-day retreat presented with the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing on March 31-April 3. The CityLit Project is starting its eighth year and continues to offer its own literary generosity to the Baltimore reading and writing community.
Upcoming: Eighth Edition of CityLit Festival Slated for April 16
CityLit Project
120 S. Curley Street
Baltimore, MD 21224
410.274.5691
info@citylitproject.org
http://www.citylitproject.org/
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