Arts writer resumes her beat NYC fellowship spurs critics’ dialogue

New York City for a year. That was the deal last summer when Columbia University awarded a National Arts Journalism Fellowship to the arts writer at the Bangor Daily News. That’s me, and after a decade at the job in Bangor and a bygone vow to return to my city roots at some point in life, I lit out for the Big Apple. The fellowship program included nine other writers with similar beats, not to mention determination, at newspapers and magazines around the country. An editor from St. Louis. A radio producer from Philadelphia. A theater reviewer from Chicago. A political editor and performance artist from San Jose. Critics from Washington, Tulsa, New York, Seattle and cyberspace.

In one fashion or another, we all left our jobs for the year and moved to New York City to immerse ourselves in that overt and celebrated arts mecca. I traded in my downtown apartment in Bangor, with a view of church spires, oak trees and the Penobscot River, for an uptown apartment in Morningside Heights, with a view of Harlem, the George Washington Bridge, Yankee Stadium and a silvery sliver of the Hudson River between skyscrapers.

The fellowship program requirements were loose: Take as many classes as you can handle without risking a nervous breakdown. I went for the blitz and enrolled in Shakespeare, nonfiction writing, literature, art history and American history. And that was just the first semester. Outside of classes, the fellows in the program met formally each week for organized conversations about arts, culture and the tricky and persnickety profession of arts critic. We often had guest speakers from the worlds of publishing, performance, arts administration or funding. We had arguments, standoffs and breakthroughs. What does the critic owe the artist? What does the critic owe the audience? Is it good to be nice? Is it nice to be nasty?

And the rest was New York, New York.

I immersed, indulged, engaged, obsessed. It was theater two, three, four, five nights a week. Then a matinee. It was opera from Glyndebourne. Dance from West Africa. “Richard II” from London. “Oedipus Rex” from Greece. Paintings by William Blake and Vermeer. Readings by actors and writers and poets. And food. Oy, the food.

In the middle of the second semester, my colleagues and I went to Dublin, Ireland, for a cultural exchange with the Irish Arts Council. The whirlwind of arts events continued there, but this time with a lot more green and far too much Guinness.

Ultimately, the year was about conversations with other arts writers and the artists whose work keeps us all in business. Artist and critic alike asked the same questions: What do we do? Why do we do it? Who cares? And what’s in it for us? The discussions weren’t too different from the ones I have had with driven writers and artists here in Maine – just more constant, perhaps more in-depth, and occasionally delightfully vehement. As a final writing project, I wrote an article about covering the arts in frontier cities, places that aren’t New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, but that still aspire to a vibrant arts dialogue. The resources, talent pools, quantity and quality may differ from region to region. But the questions about the place of the arts in a community remain the same, I discovered, whether the discussion is in St. Louis or Dublin or Bangor.

Still, the most profound conversations of this year grew out of an arts education project I developed with disenfranchised single mothers from a life-skills program in my neighborhood. Twice a week, I joined their group in a church on 114th Street and helped with sewing, computers and lunch preparation. Gradually, I began talking about a live production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the American Globe Theater on 46th Street near Broadway. One day, we sat in a circle and I told the story of the star-crossed lovers, their family feuds, their love, their deaths. My language was somewhat different from Shakespeare’s: “So Romeo’s walking down the street with his home boys …” The meter might have been off, but it was Shakespeare’s story through and through, and the mothers sat on the edges of their seats.

We never read the play together, but we watched segments of film versions and listened to Tchaikovsky’s ballet and talked about young love, early tragedy and unreliable parents.

After one meeting, a woman with whom I developed a particular friendship caught my arm as I was walking out of the building. As with others in the group, she understood violence and loss first hand. At 46, she was beginning the mighty shift away from her own perception that she, like Romeo and Juliet, might have been cursed by the stars.

“It’s too bad Romeo and Juliet died,” she said in a whisper. “They didn’t have to.”

The comment slid past my ears and right into my gut. Over the years, I’ve taught dozens of classes, hundreds of students, and have heard the gratitude that can come with the explication of a play or poem. But this was explication of the heart – hers and mine – and it took my breath away.

The next week, we attended a live performance of the show, and afterward, as I shared a box of cookies on the subway ride uptown, the mothers argued about the play. Juliet was too skinny. Tybalt was sexy. The nurse was outrageously funny. But why weren’t the love scenes more passionate? And what was up with Daddy Capulet (as we called him) who hardly flinched when his daughter died?

Turns out, everyone’s a critic.

But I’m the one who has come back to Bangor to take up another kind of conversation about the arts. The fellowship broadened my sense of what I do, why I do it, who cares and what’s in it for any of us.

On the first day back to work in Bangor, I swerved on the road to miss hitting a deer, a chipmunk and a suicidal bird. We all lived. And I chuckled at the huge differences and surprising similarities between my life in Maine and my year in New York.

Am I undergoing culture shock?

No.

Did I see “The Producers”?

Yes.

Veteran arts critic and feature writer Alicia Anstead returned to her post this week at the Bangor Daily News after a 10-month fellowship in the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She can be reached at aanstead@bangordailynews.net.