Writing the Future with Our Own Hands
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Eight months ago, Arleta Little joined the Loft as its executive and artistic director. With her guidance, our staff, board, and connected artists have put in a lot of sweat in thinking about what it means to live and work and build as an arts organization in this moment.
And what is that moment? It’s potent, painful, and purposeful, and ultimately different for each of us, but it demands our full attention. We cannot let it slip by or be forgotten. In a recent essay titled “Life and Death in the North Star State,” Arleta reflected on the space and time where we find ourselves in Minneapolis. It is one of mourning, anger, and fatigue, but also of hope. In the essay, Arleta writes about the people who “have brought our stories and scattered the essence of our days across this continent,” and it is within these stories where the hope lives—”What we do not find, we will make.”
That’s where the Loft finds itself these eight months later, in the powerful and uplifting mess of making, and we invite you to join us. The Loft is spending the next 12 months exploring the theme of Narrative Power. We kick that off with an event on November 12 (7 pm @ Open Book) called Making the Revolution Irresistible. It will riff on the Toni Cade Bambara quote that “the job of the writer is to make the revolution irresistible,” and will feature readings and conversation with Douglas Kearney, Chavonn Shen, Khary Jackson, and Preeti Kaur Rajpal.
It will also be our official event welcoming Arleta to the Loft. We hope to see you there. This is the event where we can start something fresh—connect our stories, celebrate our future, and find out what we will make together.
If you can’t join us, here is a poem that Arleta wrote she will read at the event and which she says speaks to her calling to her new Loft role.
Kujichagulia
by Arleta Little, originally published by the Saint Paul Almanac
For this,
Beloved Community,
we steep in the literature and
music of movements.
For this,
we keep clear
in mind and body and
with each other.
For this,
we are leaders, positional and otherwise,
exercising our power
with and without permission.
For this,
we show up to our work
to create, to change, to resist, to regenerate,
to preserve and to pay forward.
For this,
we were born,
are called, and
have trained.
For this,
we recognize the relevance of our history
and we write our future
with our own hands.