Poet keeps the flame alive

Jewelle Gomez learned the beauty, grace and power of good storytelling early on in her life.

She remembered spending Christmas dinners listening to stories of her mother and grandmother's great adventures.

"The thing most common among all my family members were they were all great storytellers," she said smiling, remembering. "I would hear some of those great adventures from them, how they would run with gangsters. My grandmother used to dance on the stage."

"They were progressive women. (And) they would tell great stories," she recalled.

And now she has been hired to pass on the trade.

On Aug. 24, the 47-year-old writer was hired to be the Executive Director of the Poetry Center and the American Poetry Archives at SF State. Her primary duty will be to find private money from foundations and private citizens for the center's nationally-acclaimed archives -- a difficult task in the wake of cuts to the National Endowment to the Arts and a general decline in public funding for the arts as well as other social services across the country.

She replaced Rosemary Catacalos, who served as director since 1991.

Born in a Boston ghetto during the late '40s, the daughter of Delores Minor, of African-American and Native-American heritage and Duke Gomez, of African-American and Portuguese ancestry, Gomez grew up poor, in Boston's South End. She was raised by a loving and encouraging great-grandmother who taught her a love for reading.

But it was in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement that she was given the encouragement and opportunity to advance this love and learn how to use the written word to project her voice and her ideas.

"I was initially discouraged from going to college. Until affirmative action I was really thinking about becoming a hairdresser or going into the Marines. If it were not for those movements, I wouldn't be here today," Gomez said from her office on the fifth floor of the humanities building.

"I think going to college and being socially and politically conscious was one of the best things to happen to me," she said, "because it gave me the ability and the necessity to change things, to have that as part of my life goal. To be constantly trying to improve the situation, whatever it is. To never be satisfied with the status quo. That comes from a life of activism."

Gomez attended Northwestern University in Boston, going on to work in public television in the city from 1968 to 1972 with one of the first television programs in the country focusing on black affairs, "Say Brother."

After she graduated, she moved to New York City continuing in public broadcasting, teaching high school and college theater, and attending Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She lived there for 22 years until she moved to San Francisco two years ago.

In her writing, Gomez focuses on themes of building community and family, of empowerment and inclusion. Her three collections of poetry, a collection of essays, and a stage adaptation of her novel, "The Gilda Stories," which is now touring the U.S., is a testament to her own success in fostering her support group, her own sense of community.

And it was from a story that she found this sense.

When she was a teen-ager her grandmother told her a story of a woman she met at huge party. Her grandmother recalled how they danced all night and the woman took her home and asked her to go out. Her grandmother told Gomez that the woman was a wonderful woman, but she said, "No thank you."

"My grandmother told me this story with no moral objection the woman would ask her out," Gomez explained. She said it was her first reference to lesbianism from her family.

"I thought, 'I am like that woman. I am a lesbian,'" she remembered. And because the reference came from her core -- her family -- Gomez said she felt it was "okay," and suddenly she had a word to go with her feelings.

According to Gomez, her involvement with the lesbian and gay movement crystallized her beliefs about creating community and family.

"I saw so many lesbian and gay people who were isolated from their families, who were making community, but didn't understand why it was so necessary. Everybody needs community," she said.

"We tend to create our support community. It's a natural instinct. And it's one we should go about doing more consciously."

While writing gives her an outlet for her activism and a way to express herself to others, she said teaching, gives her an opportunity for personal involvement with her students and the opportunity to learn a wealth of knowledge and insight from them.

Her only class this semester, Directed Writing, involves one-on-one meetings with eight students to talk specifically about their writing and career objectives.

"What's magical about teaching, what a teacher hopes for, (is) that by sitting down with her student, you change their life, and in turn they change yours," she said.

Her students enjoy the connection with her, as well.

"When I first met her, she was genuine, warm, nice and funny. She's so positive," said graduate student Kristine Downing, who feels Gomez's best attribute is her ability and desire to get to know the student. "Jewelle got involved in my work, stylistically, images; but also my history and my background."

The first time Gomez stood in front of SF State students, faculty and staff -- during the interview process -- she had a moment of panic.

"At one point I had to teach a class with writing students, which I was prepared for. But what I didn't realize was there would be all these professors in there at the same time," she said.

"I thought, 'How am I going to teach a class with all these professors who have been doing this for years in the classroom.' But once I started talking to the students I realized, 'Oh, of course I can do this.' This is the reason you come to an institution, that one-on-one with the dynamic energy that students have. And once that happened I realized, 'Oh yes, I really want to be here. I really want to be here.'"

On Thursday, the Poetry Center will be hosting a ceremony to welcome Jewelle Gomez as their new executive director in the humanities building, room 133 at 4:30 p.m.

[ Golden Gater Online September 10, 1996 ]

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