A New Anthology Amplifies the Voices of Nashville Immigrants and Refugees – Nashville Scene

A look at Words Are Windows — a product of The Porch’s writing workshop — ahead of this week’s launch party

Anna SilversteinPHOTO: DANIEL MEIGS

In fall 2016 The Porch, Nashville’s nonprofit organization for writers, launched a new workshop specifically for immigrants and refugees in Nashville. Free of cost, the workshop — which launched just before the presidential election — required no ID or documentation to enroll, and the organization stressed that fluency in English was not necessary. 

It was the brainchild of writer and educator Anna Silverstein, who has now taught seven iterations of the course, with students from every continent except Antarctica and Australia. This month, students will see the fruits of their labor in print with a new anthology. Words Are Windows: An Anthology of Immigrant and Refugee Voices will showcase the stories, poems and essays of 26 contributors from 22 countries. 

“As the granddaughter of immigrants,” says Silverstein, “I saw the barriers that prevented my grandparents from sharing their stories the way that they would have liked to. So I have a very personal motivation in teaching this workshop and editing this anthology.” 

The Porch will host a launch party at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20, at The Porch headquarters, and organizers say all are welcome. The anthology is full of compelling short-fiction stories, poetry that distills both painful and joyful moments, and memoiristic essays. 

Nadreen Bagoun — who was born in Khartoum, Sudan — opens the anthology with her short story “Home.” In it a Sudanese immigrant named Kamal has recently bought a 1993 Toyota Corolla that barely runs — but to Kamal, the car represents status and success. Bagoun skillfully weaves the events of her protagonist’s weekly visit to Goodwill with his memories of home and hopes for a future visit there, with heart-wrenching results. 

Another writer, Drenusha Kolshi, escaped the civil war in Kosovo with her mother when she was 6. Kolshi published four pieces in the anthology that explore the theme of fear. In her poem, “Inheritance,” she writes: 

I imagine being birthed with hesitance.

My mother asking the midwife 

Are you sure she’s ready? Will her softness turn to stone?

Silverstein says there was no expectation that students write about their experiences as immigrants or refugees, though some did. 

Karla Vasquez has participated in all seven iterations of the workshop. She moved to Nashville from Mexico City when she was 12 years old, and in 2012, she was granted temporary residency through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Her essay in the anthology, “The Bittersweet Reality of Being Undocumented,” details the conflicted emotions she felt when DACA passed.

“I remember realizing that being undocumented had become a part of my identity,” Vasquez writes, “just like being a woman, a college student, a Nashvillian, or a pet lover. Being undocumented had introduced me to friends, given me purpose, and helped me find a passion for advocating for social rights.”

In a typical class, students study a piece of writing from authors like poets Chen Chen and Li-Young Lee and fiction writers Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi and Naomi Shihab Nye. Usually, Silverstein assigns an in-class writing assignment. Students have the option of developing one of these works — or something else entirely — through peer critique and feedback from Silverstein. 

“The workshop and Anna were able to create this sense of community and security and feeling comfortable sharing with each other,” says Vasquez. “And I think people being open to sharing those stories made me feel comfortable sharing my own.” 

Words Are Windows is published by IngramSpark and funded through a donation by Ingram Content Group. You can buy the anthology at the Oct. 20 event and at The Porch’s website. The next class begins on Oct. 21, and Silverstein is handing the reins to instructor Nina Adel. 

We’ve published an excerpt of Silverstein’s editor’s note, which introduces the anthology, below. 

When I was young, and my grandparents were still alive, they didn’t tell me many stories of their childhoods in Poland or of their lives when they first came to America. However, there is one story of my grandfather’s that stands out to me: when he came to the U.S. at age fifteen, he was placed in a kindergarten class in a New York City public school because he knew no English. On the first day, the five-year-old at the desk in front of him turned around and stabbed my grandfather in the back of the hand with a pencil.

“What did you do?” I wanted to know.

“What could I do? I was three times his size. I wasn’t about to beat up a little kid.”

I pictured that scene, even though I could hardly believe it. A fifteen-year-old crammed into a tiny desk, the little kid looking back with narrowed eyes, cold, appraising, what are you going to do about it?, as the two of them looked at the pencil. The pencil. Had it broken the skin? Was it just there, sticking out of the back of his hand while the teacher did nothing? I’d never had a first day of school like that, still I could see it. This is the power of words: to create windows into other scenes, stories, lives. To offer a glimpse of something outside our own experience.

What did coming to this country mean to my grandparents? It was life, starkly. Almost every Jew who remained in their village in Poland was murdered in a mass execution in 1942. For many immigrants and refugees today, this country, despite its many problems, means life. We live in a time when some people want to close our borders, say that only those who arrived before a certain date, or those who come with money, or an education, or from certain countries, are welcome.

On the cover: “Portal,” Virginia Wagner It is incumbent upon all of us who now inhabit this land to speak, to make our words known and our voices heard, to represent our own individual experience and perspective, to face the history of this country and work to make it a more welcoming, inclusive, and just place for all.

For the last four years, I’ve led a creative writing workshop for immigrants and refugees in middle Tennessee. One evening a week we would gather together and discuss writing, read published work, share and offer feedback on writing in progress.

One night during class, for no particular reason that I could identify, the feeling came upon me so strongly: how strange, how improbable, that here we were, people who had been born in so many different parts of this planet, more than two dozen countries, five different continents, and here we were, in a room with strangely shaped tables in Nashville, Tennessee, writing together. It seemed so unlikely, thinking of all the events that had taken place in each person’s life, the good, the bad, the choices and exigencies, that had led up to all of us finding ourselves together in the same place and time. And yet, there we were, and how magical, that this unassuming classroom would be the place where our lives would intersect and we would write, read, and create together.

Words are windows into lives we haven’t lived, places we’ve never been, experiences we’ve never had. Often in our workshop, one writer would say to another, “I’ve never been anywhere like that but I can picture it exactly from how you described it.” Words can be windows to another country, culture, experience, to the unexpected similarities and differences.

Words—even someone else’s words—can be windows into our own pasts. During one of our class sessions last winter, one student was brought to tears by another writer’s description of a traditional breakfast food from their shared home country, a food he hadn’t eaten in years.

Words can be windows looking out onto familiar settings, but with a new perspective: seeing that same scene from the eyes of someone who’s seeing it for the very first time, or from a very different vantage point.

We live in times where we are inundated with news of refugees fleeing wars and climate disasters, drowning in shipwrecks off the coasts of countries that are closing their borders, where children and parents are separated and confined in appalling conditions at our own borders. Words are windows that save us from growing inured to these horrors, from growing hopeless, worn out, resigned. Words can activate the senses, make the reader feel as though she is not only looking through a window, but in fact has stepped through it herself.

Words Are Windows: An Anthology of Immigrant and Refugee Voices 

Launch party 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 20, at The Porch, 2911 Dogwood Place