From the ghosts of tortured slaves at LaLaurie House in the French Quarter, to the spirits said to lurk in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans has a reputation as one of the most haunted places in the United States. But when the New Orleans Haunting Supply Company opens its doors in the 7th Ward later this year, it’ll be another reminder that the true spirit of the Big Easy has always been more than supernatural.
That’s because the store will open as part of 826 New Orleans, a new location of national student creative writing and tutoring nonprofit 826. Writer and philanthropist Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari founded 826 in San Francisco’s Mission District in 2002. Since then, it has blossomed into 826 National, a network of chapters that teach creative and expository writing to roughly 35,000 low income students in seven major cities. Every location includes a public-facing store that takes its name from local culture or history.
Empowering students to write and have their voices heard is essential to building a more equitable and inclusive future.
New Orleans will be 826’s eighth center, and its first in the South. “We work in cities that have distinctive cultures, turbulent histories, and historic racial and economic divisions. And we believe that empowering students to write and have their voices heard is essential to building a more equitable and inclusive future,” Gerald Richards, CEO of 826 National said in a statement. “New Orleans has always been a city where we wanted to build a deeper impact.”
Fortunately, 826 won’t have to start entirely from scratch in the city, since it’s building on the work of local youth writing nonprofit Big Class. “I had 43 first-graders in my class in the 2010-2011 school year. So I had a literal big class,” says its executive director, Doug Keller, with a laugh.
Keller was so inspired by 826 that he decided to publish a book written by his students. Other educators and community members around New Orleans were so interested in this intersection of education and the arts, that Keller left his job as a classroom teacher and devoted his time to expanding Big Class. It served about 1,500 students in the city during the 2016-2017 school year. Once the transition to being 826 New Orleans is complete, Keller anticipates they will be able to double their impact in the first year.
New Orleans Haunting Supply Company and the rest of the 826 New Orleans center are being built in Sacred Heart at St. Bernard, a new mixed-income housing and community complex. “We’re in a two-mile radius of 14 public schools, which is a major reason we selected that neighborhood,” says Keller.
The need for that expansion is certainly there. About 92 percent of the 31,000 students enrolled in the city’s Recovery School District (which was formed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina) come from low-income homes, and only 56 percent of kids K-12 scored proficient on state standardized tests.
“I think there’s a lot of razor sharp focus within our schools on reading and math—we need to get the test scores up before we do anything else,” says Keller. “I think there is so much more that [students are] interested in.”
Research by the Carnegie Corporation has found that “writing is an often overlooked tool for improving reading skills and content learning.” But what really sets 826 apart is that teaches kids how to write by encouraging them to be weird and imaginative. “One of the key tenets that we’ve seen young people respond to is getting to write about what they want to write about and just getting it down on paper,” says Keller.
Our students are real authors and their stories, their books, are just as important as anyone’s.
Student voice is so central to Keller’s work that he had the kids from Big Class come up with the theme for 826 New Orleans. “We went through a design-thinking process with our students, thinking about what would people in New Orleans want to go to that really speaks to the city,” he says. They considered a Mardi Gras theme, voodoo, and music, but eventually settled on ghosts.
“We’ve talked about the idea of spirit and being spirited, and the spirits of this historical neighborhood and how we honor our history through that theme,” says Keller. It has “that silliness and creativity at the heart of it, but we’re also figuring out ways that it can connect with a lot of different purposes for the store.”
To that end, the New Orleans Haunting Supply Company will sell ghostly-themed accessories and knickknacks—as well as student-penned publications. Maybe the kids will write about the city’s spooky past or native son L’il Wayne—or perhaps they’ll tackle the fight over taking down Confederate symbols. Whatever they choose to explore, “The books that we’re going to be able to publish will be able to exist on the shelf next to any books about New Orleans—that piece is really important to us,” says Keller. “Our students are real authors and their stories, their books, are just as important as anyone’s.”
The Louisiana Weekly
By Michael Patrick Welch Contributing Writer
Some writers toil their entire lives without ever seeing their work appreciated, or even published. A few rare, fortunate writers have their writing published before they even know they are writers. This past May saw the publication of the book History Between These Folds, written by the 11th-graders of George Washington Carver High School.
Last winter, Big Class, the organization behind the popular “Pizza Poetry” project, put out a call for high school teachers willing to help students write and publish a book that would document their school, their city and their young lives — not unlike the famous Neighborhood Story Project series of books written by kids, New Orleans Black Indians and other important community figures.
Though he is not an English teacher but a history teacher, Eric Parrie nonetheless accepted Big Class’ literary challenge on behalf of his students.
“I was working to help them see the similarities between the history we’d been learning and the writing we’re doing for the book,” says Parrie. “I tried to help them understand that their moment of U.S. history is right now. I saw this project as a way to connect the normal work we were doing in history with events from their own pasts, to show them the importance of what we remember, and how we remember it.”
Parrie also thought this particular challenge would be a great way to teach his students the history of the land on which they live, so that they could in turn teach that history to others through their writing.
“At the beginning of the year I talked to them a lot about the history of our school, Carver,” says Parrie. “We’re across the street from a landfill, which to me is very symbolic; Carver’s creative contribution to this area was teaching farmers how to use depleted soil. We too are on a site of exhausted soil, and the students are giving it life with this book. I see this project fitting into that legacy of Carver.”
After a winter spent brainstorming, producing feedback and conferencing one-on-one with the students, Parrie brought in author Kiese Laymon, who workshopped with the kids and helped give the book shape, in the form of seven categories: Parade and Funeral (Stories of New Orleans), David and Goliath (Stories of Overcoming Obstacles), Sanity and Insanity (Stories of Tragedy), My Blood and My Enemies (Stories of Family), Gone and Here (Stories of Rebirth), Yesterday’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow’s Yesterday (Stories of History), Yin and Yang (Stories of Identity).
Parrie says Laymon provided much more than just structure. “There’s electricity crackling across the classroom when he’s there,” says Parrie. “He loves teenagers and working with them.” In that way, Laymon’s presence was important in motivating a class that had signed up for a history course, not a writing course. “His presence indicated to them that they were working on something big and meaningful,” Parrie says. “Initially, I found some of the students hesitant to write, they had some trepidations at first. But over time, the project really transformed the students’ idea of what was possible in their classroom. Expressing what was important to them, for some kids, it really helped them forge a new identity as a writer.”
Paris Johnson, a Carver junior whose letter to New Orleans opens the book, agrees. “Growing up I always made poetry and I wrote many pieces,” says Johnson. “I even went to some open-mic nights with Mr. Parrie before I wrote and we did this book. But this book project really helped ignite was what already in me.” And what was in Paris Johnson was profound, as evidenced by her rumination on City Park:
Many of those trees the families sit under were trees where slaves/ were hung for “being bad,” but boy oh boy you gotta love New Orleans/ with all the parades, food, and memories left behind./ I love and hate New Orleans at the same time. Many different/ things turn me off about New Orleans, but the major one is police/ brutality. New Orleans is paying $13.3 million to deal with different/ cases of police brutality, which is sad because we trust these men in/ blue uniforms to protect us. But hey! Gotta love New Orleans.
“I was originally writing a letter to New Orleans to put out how I feel about everything that is going on… then it hit me that I wanted to tell the story of my sister,” says Johnson, who wrote of her deceased sister, “Since you’re gone I want to let you know that I know it was painful, living with people who accepted nothing about you or anything you. Did you ever try to talk to them?”
Johnson also learned some technical trade tips, while serving on the book’s editorial board. “The board was there to make sure that the stories were up to date and ready to be put in a book,” says Johnson. “That’s after I read and categorized all of the stories.”
Johnson says this one experience publishing a book has encompassed many experiences. “I feel like this project could get me very far just by me having the experience of writing a book and seeing how it’s all put together,” says Johnson. “I now feel like I can do any job dealing with writing. If I want to write another book I could — I mean, I know it will take a lot longer because I’d be doing it by myself. But still I know I could do it.”
Most valuable of all, however, may be the feeling the project has given the students, including young Paris Johnson. “Being so young and having a book with my name in it,” she says, “is really awesome.”
This article originally published in the June 5, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
Foreword to History Between These Folds: Personal Narratives by the 11th Grade at George Washington Carver High School
During the spring 2017 semester, the junior class at George Washington Carver High School in New Orleans’s Ninth Ward worked with Oxford American contributing editor Kiese Laymon to write History Between These Folds, a collection of essays published in partnership with Big Class, a nonprofit organization focused on youth writing.
“Writing it was hard,” wrote the editors in the book’s introduction. “We had to open ourselves up and be vulnerable. We had to find just the right words to help people feel and understand the things we go through every day. We had to tie in our personal histories. And we couldn’t help but consider what people would think of us when they read our stories . . . Through this journey we learned we all have different voices, but we came together for one goal: to let people hear our stories and to tell the world about us. Yes, we are in New Orleans, but we are more than the stereotypes that come to mind when you think of The Big Easy. We are rare and powerful. Through this book we will make you laugh, we will make you cry, and we will challenge the ideas you may have had about us.”
Laymon wrote the foreword to the collection, reprinted below.
NOLADefender.com Posted Tuesday, May 23rd, 2017 by Alexis Manrodt
On Tuesday (5.23), students of George Washington Carver High School came together at Cafe Istanbul in the Marigny to celebrate not the completion of final exams or impending summer vacation plans, but a nationwide literary endeavor that far beat any yearbook inscription. The junior class of the Ninth Ward school toasted the publication of their collective book, History Between These Folds.
By Ann Maloney, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on May 20, 2017 at 8:22 AM, updated May 20, 2017 at 4:08 PM
Imagine you’re 10 years old and you open a book to see your name and your own writing in print. That’s an experience that many of the 3,500 children who have passed through Big Class, a literacy and writing program, have had.
Now, Big Class wants to double the size of its program, create a new brick-and-mortar New Orleans’ Writers Center in the 7th Ward and morph into a chapter of 826 National, a network of organizations founded by author Dave Eggers and educator Ninive Calegari.
Author Dave Eggers chats with students Nia Gates, Akilah Toney and Amaya Smith at a benefit for New Orleans’s Youth Writing Center Thursday (May 18) at the Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine. (Dinah Rogers Photo)
Those stanzas and couplets have made a long journey from the creative mind of a young poet before being read by professional poets, educators and interns, attached to something delicious and delivered to your door.
It’s for a good cause: Pizza Poetry Day and the programs of Big Class, an innovative writing program dedicated to making the voices of New Orleans students ages 6-18 heard.
Those voices come through loud and clear in the innovative, funny, smart and imaginative poems that will add a little spice to your pizza on Friday. After Pizza Poetry Day, the poems will be collected and published in an anthology.
BY JASON BROWNE and KAREN TAYLOR The Advocate December 28, 2016
If Pizza Poetry is the voice of the children, those kids are about to get louder. Big Class, the New Orleans nonprofit that encourages kids to write, in part by attaching their poems to pizza boxes at restaurants across the city for one day each spring, is helping to develop a New Orleans Youth Poetry Festival and working with 826 National on initiatives to get more kids writing to get those works out to a much larger crowd.
Check out the great radio and written piece by Nola Vie! Big Class’s Executive Director Doug Keller discusses the history of our organization and what’s coming up in the future. Read and hear the full piece here.
On Thursday, July 28th, we finished our Photo and Phiction summer workshop series with a exhibition of student work in the Teen Room of the Norman Mayer Library. Young writers brought family and friends to see their beautiful photos and writing proudly displayed on the library walls and celebrate their creativity.
“This program is teaching our kids how to use how to use words in a way that can affect change. Now they are becoming the powerful ones because reading gives you access, but writing gives you power.”
–Kyley Pulphus, Big Class board member and teacher
WDSU wrote a lovely short piece about our work and dropped by our final Photo and Phiction workshop of the summer, led by Big Class youth intern Keith Riley (pictured above).
