Tender Ears: Writing from the Workshop of Holly Prado
Josie Martin -- October 5, 2005
It is a Festschrift, an homage in that ancient German tradition to one of Los Angeles' great creative writing teachers. For more than 25 years, Holly Prado has held workshops in her living room birthing the voices of women onto the page, onto manuscripts and galleys, often into print. Yet publication is hardly what her workshop is all about.
Much of the writing in TENDER EARS is about "keen sensitivity to personal problems, joys and losses," brought into the safety of Holly's presence where authors are able to explore their "depths, and sometimes visit the darkness that awaits there to see what it wants from our creative energies." Read Linda Berg's meditative/poem, "Limitations of Metaphor" on the death of a child:
blue freesia, bald eagle
what do birds and flowers
have to do with years of mourning
our daughter gone in the the snow
I'll take my poetry straight-up
and life untinged by death
And poems of quiet joy so site-specific, they are like a visitation,
O la Van Nuys,
la reina de whatever,
comfort all mermaid pinatas stuffed and hanging,
their paper hair hiding in bottle-brush trees.
They wait for your orange sodium street lights
(and a star or two if we're lucky)
to shelter us, not forever,
but long enough to bless
a six-year-old's birthday party.
Just as I have done, Anita Clearfield, the poet of "Van Nuys Prayer," had to leave L.A. and Holly's workshop. Anita now lives in Maine, and like me greatly misses her LA life and the "sacred circle" that Holly created every Tuesday morning. But the consolation of this anthology is considerably more than a reunion with beloved cohorts. Much more importantly it demonstrates/ proves that great writing doesn't have to wait for big "high-bicycle" publishers, or famous forewords, although TENDER EARS is lauded on the back cover by no less than Diane Di Prima, Sharon Doubiago, and Robert Peters. With its content of carefully crafted writings this anthology is evidence that art committed to blood, sweat, and tears, generously mixed with inspiration becomes literature.
Celia Wolloch, a celebrated poet-teacher herself writes, "I can't imagine having written my book, Tsigan, without Holly's quiet presence urging me on." Wolloch's is a long breathless poem that begins with: "Daddy called me tsiganka when I began to wander", followed by lists of hard cold statistics tracing Gypsy persecution all the way back to: "1192: Battle of Terain. Last Roma leave India for the West."
Rae Wilken, perhaps the oldest member of the Tuesday Morning group goes back in time too with her memoir, "Simi Valley-1935". She tells the girl she used to be "You are standing on the covered porch, rain clattering down, gentle California chill brushing little girl arms. Brothers, sisters, mother, father called out by the exuberant din....cats and dogs, beautiful $500 rain. 'Three inches in this country is worth more than any irrigation,' your father says."
Josie Martin
One of the charms of TENDER EARS is how much of the writing is informed by Southern California's paradoxical backdrop as in Sissy Boyd's short play, "WHAT IS THE POINT OF LIDDY?" In just four and a half pages we get a full-sized portrait of a Hollywood gin-soaked marriage that would take most writers an entire movie to tell. And there is a journal with the entry, "I loved rain when I was a hippie living on a hill in Silver Lake, when I was a bewildered young mother in Beachwood Canyon, and when I was not quite yet a matron on the flats of Hancock Park -- wherever I have lived in L.A., the rare rain has been promise and resurrection." Affection for place, for language and for that quirky belief that something hasn't quite really happened until it is finally laid to rest on the page.
But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this collection is how it came into its present incarnation. The members of the Tuesday morning class chipped in a sum, a few folks took charge, a gorgeous photo was found for the cover, some brilliant paintings for the interior, and in less than 6 months TENDER EARS became a reality to be presented to Holly, the surprised guest of honor, at a garden party last May.
This is a rich collection of writing from the depth where the creative, that transient spirit, dwells ever so fleetingly. Words, short and long strings of them, composed by people willing to go to that fickle place, to look past the flotsam, and be illuminated, even if only for an instant, with the kind of self-awareness that makes that harrowing journey the great odyssey of all writers's lives.
Tender Ears, Writing from the Workshop of Holly Prado Edited by Linda Berg, Ph.D. and Toke Hoppenbrouwers, Ph.D. ISBN 0-9742663-1-0 Monte Nido Press