AL YOUNG
I first met Al Young in 1984 when a graduate student at the University of Michigan. A native of Michigan, and once an undergraduate student at Michigan who'd majored in Spanish long before he went to Cal Berkeley, Al came to the Ann Arbor campus and treated it as a homecoming of sorts, and he seemed so happy to be there, to give a reading, and he offered one-on-one sessions with any student in the English Department who had sent him work in advance for him to critique.
I had sent him one short story, Tropical Somnambulist, which three years later was published in an antholgy, How The Weather Was, and I later included it in my first book of stories, Something Grand.
You would think that being at university, it would be easy to get feedback, and I don't mean complaints and envious carping and snide stabs in the back from fellow students, but applicable ways to practice better shared by those who'd been doing it for a while. It was a revelation to me, as much as I liked being at U of M, at times, that this was not often case. I remember realizing that one of my writing teachers, who shall remain nameless (and may he rest in peace) was so insecure and full of bragaddoccio because he knew he was going to be competing against all his students once they graduated and he had no intention of aiding any of us along in the process. He was there for his own career and he didn't care how many young hopefuls he crushed along the way. I'm happy to say he was only at Michigan for one year, and many of us students had our say in terms of requesting that the department head get rid of him, though he went on and kept crushing souls at other universities, bouncing around and making the scene and dropping more names than the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London during the Blitz.
Al wasn't like that at all. He was just the opposite, and such a breath of fresh air. He wrote with humor, and he had a big smile and lots of energy, and he talked about music, from blues to jazz, with a wide range of knowledge and passion. He wrote not only novels but poems and short pieces which were unique in that they showed his voice, his distinct view of the world while at the same time celebrating his zeal for lesser known blues singers and jazz players, and introducing them to someone like myself who hungered to learn more from one who'd lived in ways I could only imagine.
At the time, the story I presented lacked a title and it was a longish story, eleven pages and we went through it together, Al with his red pen and some pre-written notes taking me through it and pointing out what he liked, what was working, and where I was just tedious or else showing off. He did all this in a way that didn't insult me in the least, but inspired me to get home and revise, revise, revise. Now that's a teacher. I was thrilled to learn decades later that he was named the Poet Laureate of California. Such an honor could not have been bestowed on a more deserving gentleman and poet.
With Al's guidance, practical advice and useful suggestions, I reduced my story by a little more than half and found that at five pages, much to my astonishment, having cut what I'd thought were so many important details and twists and turns in the narrative, I'd given the story more of a voice, a controlling image and metaphor, hence making it more powerful, compelling and publishable.
Learning how to trust another's advice and then use my own insights when applying my editorial scalpel was an invaluable lesson that Al gave me. I don't know if that was his intention. He seemed to be having so much fun just talking about the process, and feeling where to cut, where to expand, sensing when a line of dialogue really popped, and when it went over like a fart in church.
Could writing really be less of the precious act of vanity that I thought it was? It seemed so. I joked with Al and said I'd have to do it for another ten years to find out. He joked back that another twenty years might be a more suitable measure.
Al was frank with me, honest, and down to earth. I talked to him about my frustrations with academia and how I really didn't see it as a place where I fit in. He got me and he told me a story about the author Richard Price, who he'd known briefly at Stanford, and how Price had abandoned a considerable Stegner writing scholarship there, a real honor, and moved back to Manhattan in order to write his novels the way he wanted to, and to live the way he wanted to, and perhaps write for magazines and film.
As Al put it, "Stanford isn't for everybody. Richard knew what he wanted, so he just went ahead and did it."
Mr. Price at that time was already making a name for himself, having published The Wanderers back in 1974, but in coming decades he would pen many fine novels such as Lush Life, and the novel and screenplay Clockers, which in my opinion is one of Spike Lee's best movies. He wrote screenplays for edgy and exceptionally popular films such as Sea Of Love, with Al Pacino, and The Color Of Money, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination.
"So you can do it," was what Al told me, summing up his Price story. "It's up to you."
Ellen Barkin in Sea Of Love
Newman, Cruise, Mastrantonio in a still from The Color Of Money
We talked about work too, needing to make money and to needing to find a balance between one's job and the amount of hours required to write well each day. What Al told me was that during some of his most productive years as a young man trying to write, when he was developing earlier novels such as Snakes, and Who Is Angelina, he was employed by a railroad transit company in the afternoon, not full-time, about five hours per day, five days a week. It was a clerical gig, not too demanding. A total of 25 hours on an hourly wage that provided him with just enough money to meet his rent and bills, but more importantly gave him his mornings each day, seven days a week, to rise early and stay at his desk until noon.
He was one of those self-made uncompromising and successful writers who I'll always remember because he spoke to me candidly, without condescension or a false sense of interest, about the reality of trying to eke out a living and write novels and poems at the same time. His message to me, "It can be done" not only resonated, but it's stayed with me and I remain a grateful admirer.
I think anyone who knew the man misses him, but there remains the spirit, the energy, the constant searching all of which pulses throughout his stories, his novels and his poems.
Here are some tidbits about Al, along with links to the pages, that I found online and would like to share.
https://communityofwriters.org/al-young-1939-2021/
Al, who served as California’s Poet Laureate for three years, wrote over 25 books of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he also taught widely, as a Stegner fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford, as well as at universities and conferences across the country and the world. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, among them the Guggenheim, the Richard Wright Award for Excellence in Literature, a Fulbright, NEA Fellowships, PEN-USA awards, and Radio Pacifica’s KPFA Peace Prize.
Albert
James Young was born in Mississippi in 1939 to Albert James, an auto worker and
a musician, and his wife. The family lived in rural Mississippi until 1946,
when they moved to Detroit, but even after that Young often spent summers in
the South. That area consequently exerted a strong influence on his
development. After attending the University of Michigan from 1957 to 1961 he
moved to the San Francisco area. Later he attended Stanford University and the
University of California at Berkeley, and he received a bachelor’s degree in
Spanish from Berkeley in 1969. He married in 1963 and had one son.
Among the many jobs Al Young
assumed during his early life was that of professional musician; in fact, he
considers himself as much a musician as a writer, and his participation in and
enjoyment of that other means of artistic expression informs and is often the
subject of his written work. As he explains in his three volumes of “musical
memories” (Bodies and Soul, Kinds of Blue, and Things Ain’t What They Used to Be),
music became a means of understanding life even before he began to play music.
Young’s first book, Dancing,
is a volume of poems that seem to demand oral expression. The work’s title is a
further clue to Young’s view that music helps people to understand and express
themselves. Those who hear the music can no longer remain the same, so they
dance, helping to complete the statement made by the music as they “analyze” it
with their physical responses.
Young’s first novel, Snakes, is an “education”
novel about MC, a young black adolescent from Detroit who resembles Young
himself and who, with his band, writes and performs a song, “Snakes,” that is a
local hit. The band dissolves and the euphoria dissipates, but the young hero
wants to continue his musical career and sets out on a bus for New York,
leaving behind the grandmother who had raised him lovingly after the deaths of
his parents. This novel includes that important theme in Young’s oeuvre, close
family ties and both the warmth and the restrictions that develop from them, as
well as the technique of using a first-person narrator who speaks with the
vocabulary and rhythms, the music, of the streets.
Young’s interest in the lives
of adolescents did not end with Snakes.
From 1961 to 1965 he was an instructor and linguistic consultant with the
Neighborhood Youth Corps Writing Workshops in San Francisco, and from 1968 to
1969 he was a writing instructor at the Teenage Workshop of the San Francisco
Museum of Art. He also served as a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford
University, 1969 to 1976.
Other honors Young has received
for his writing include a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at
Stanford (1966-1967), National Arts Council Awards for Poetry and Editing (1968
and 1969), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1974), and a National Endowment for the
Arts Fellowship (1979). Young used his Guggenheim Fellowship year to finish his
second novel, Who Is
Angelina? which, as the title indicates, retains the same
subject as Snakes,
a young person’s search for identity. Angelina Green is also from Detroit, but
better off than MC. Her discoveries about herself and her family reveal Young’s
increasing interest in spirituality, a concern that reaches full flowering
in Seduction by Light.
In 1972 Al Young wrote a
screenplay adaptation of Dick Gregory’s 1964 autobiography, Nigger , but no film
ever resulted from this project.
Young, a long-time Berkeley resident whose deep, melodic voice
was as smooth as the blues music he adored, saw his work become a permanent
feature in the city’s landscape. His poem, Who I Am In Twilight, is embedded in
the Addison
Street Poetry Walk, right in front of Freight & Salvage. Berkeley also
proclaimed Feb. 5, 2013, as Al Young Day.
In 2007, during his term as poet laureate, Young traveled around
California, reading his work in 40 rural communities in the Central Valley and
mountain areas in 11 days, often accompanied by a musician. For Young, poetry
and music, particularly jazz and blues, were intertwined. He frequently wrote
while listening to music (he knew so much about music he was almost a music
ethnologist, one friend said) and incorporated jazz rhythms into his poems. “He
wedded poetry and music together,” said Sharon Coleman, a poet and instructor
at Berkeley City College “He brought music to poetry in a very integral way.”
Young’s 2008 book, Something
About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry, included a CD of
Young reciting his poems against a blues backdrop. It was one of a number of
Young’s books that expressed his love of the blues and the inspiration he drew
from the music.
Young won some of the literary world’s highest accolades,
including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
Guggenheim Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship,
and a KPFA Peace Prize. The Berkeley Poetry Festival presented him with a
lifetime achievement award. The New York Times also named two of his books
notable books of the year.
Despite that recognition, Young was not as famous as he deserved to be, said longtime friend, collaborator and fellow writer Ishmael Reed, pictured below.
Said Reed, “He’s probably one of the most underrated writers in the country.”
Reed published The
Yardbird Reader, a literary magazine that highlighted contemporary
Black writers, with Young in the 1970s. “He lived on the West Coast. The people
who receive a lot of publicity live in the New York-Washington, D.C. shuttle
area. It’s difficult for a writer like Al to achieve prominence with critics
who see Northern California as a stepchild of Manhattan.”
From 1957 to 1961, Young attended the University of Michigan,
where he co-edited Generation,
the campus literary magazine. He dropped out and moved to the West Coast,
finally settling in Berkeley. “I came out here with $15 – or something like
that – and a guitar,” Young told NPR. “I came out under the sway, all of the
hullabaloo. The Beat Generation was sounding its horns and all this. And there
was just a lot of romance about it.”
Before returning to school, Young worked a variety of jobs,
including as a photographer, warehouseman, clerk-typist, interviewer for the
California Department of Employment, and yard clerk for the Southern Pacific
Railroad. He also carved out a career as a singer and guitarist, singing folk
songs and blues, but later gave up performing professionally.
Young graduated from UC Berkeley in 1969 and started a lifelong
career as an instructor of writing, poetry and American literature. He taught
all around the country, including appointments at Stanford University, UC
Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis and many other colleges. He was a longtime
poetry instructor at the Community of
Writers, a summer workshop started 51 years ago in Squaw Valley in Lake
Tahoe.
A number of Young’s students praised how he showed them to be
their most authentic selves. My “poetry got more intimate” through Young’s
instruction, said Vernon Keeve, who took two classes from Young at an MFA
program at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. “Instead of wanting
to hide on the page, Al taught me how to be more authentic. He said to face
things that hurt you, don’t run away from trauma on the page.”
Young’s classrooms had the “warmest” feeling, said Keeve.
“People cried in the class. Sometimes we cried together.”
Chloe Veylit, who also attended the MFA program at CCA, said
Young taught her to slow down and focus on the present. He also encouraged his
students to be creative and was thrilled when she wrote a piece from the
consciousness of an octopus. “He had this openness, this willingness to pursue
things with you,” she said.
Young published his first book, Dancing: Poems (Corinth Books) in 1969. It
won the Joseph Henry Jackson Award. He went on to write or contribute to more
than 20 other books and anthologies including The Song Turning Back into Itself (Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1971), The
Blues Don’t Change: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State
University Press, 1982), Heaven:
Collected Poems 1956–1990 (Creative Arts Book Company
1992), The Sound of Dreams
Remembered: Poems 1990–2000 (Creative Arts Book Company, 2001)
and more.
Five of Young’s poems were also included in the new Library of
America anthology, African
American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song. Heyday Books just
published Why to These
Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers, an anthology of
some of the best work produced by poets, including Young, at the summer poetry
workshops of the Community of Writers.
He wrote film scripts for movies starring Sidney Poitier, Bill
Cosby and Richard Pryor in the 1970s, said Reed.
Young also wrote the liner notes for George Benson’s 1977
Breezin’ album that won multiple Grammy awards and went quadruple platinum. As
a token of its appreciation, the label sent him a fly canary-yellow silk
bathrobe with “Breezin” emblazoned on it, according to Young’s son Michael.
Young’s 1981 memoir, Bodies
and Soul: Musical Memoirs, won the American Book Award.
In 1963, he married Arline Belch, a technical writer. They had a
son, Michael, born in 1971. They later separated but remained good
friends until her death in 2016.
Young had a magnetic presence, which Andrew Tonkovich, a lecturer
at the UC Irvine department of English, expressed in a remembrance.
“I wanted to be in earshot of Al, as did many. He completely
owned the rhythms of humor and idiom and was, of course, a blues man,
self-described. Community of Writers participants will recall the elegant wit
and jolly subversion of the duet played and sung by Al and the late Jim
Houston, his life-long pal and fellow Stegner fellow, with Houston on ukulele
and, hilariously, Al on credit
card. You cannot make this stuff up. But they did, together,
in their gently class-conscious ditty “White Man’s Blues.”
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