ABOUT EAST SIDE VOICES PROJECT
Creating a Voice for Inter-Cultural Dialogue in Multicultural East San Jose
Summary
“East Side Voices” is a Center for Literary Arts educational outreach project, which documents the voices of people from the historic east side of San Jose, California through the creation and performance of monologue poetry and prose based on the lives of those who live and/or who work in the East Side. By giving these underrepresented characters a voice in contemporary literature, the project helps to facilitate inter-cultural dialogue and greater cultural understanding between ethnic groups. The project also aims to encourage a culturally diverse East Side Union High School District high school student population to explore and write about the world they intimately know. Carefully selected and trained graduate student writers from San Jose State University serve as mentors in a workshop under the supervision of ESUHSD and SJSU English Department faculty.
Activities and Impact
For the pilot project, we have commissioned MFA student Samantha Lê to serve as writer-in-residence for Mt. Pleasant High School. In the project’s first phase, Lê and two SJSU interns have conducted a weekly writing workshop with a small group of student writers to create original poetry and prose monologues based on the lives of East Side residents—individuals who may be friends, neighbors, or co-workers of these students and their families. Interviews are recorded (with the subject’s permission) to create raw material on which Le and her student writers will base their works. The workshop includes instructions and exercises on how to conduct interviews, how to write poems and short stories. Lê and the interns provide models from their own creative work and the work of other contemporary multicultural poets and writers to guide the students in the creation of their own writing.
The goal of these monologues is to expose the full dimension of the lives of East Side residents to the wider audience, lives that are diverse and representative of a multiplicity of cultural backgrounds and attitudes—an American reality much different than one that is depicted in mainstream works of American poetry and fiction.
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