Project Title: The Tess Project
Recipient Organization: Community Works
Lead Artist: Gloria Frym
Genre and Date Awarded: Literary Arts, July 1998
Completed: 2002

Collaborating with Community Works and with at-risk students at San Francisco’s International Studies Academy, writer Gloria Frym created a work of fiction, reimagining Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles in a contemporary setting. Frym lead an in-school class and after-school salon in which students read and discussed Thomas Hardy’s novel. Simultaneously Frym developed Rose of the Mission, a 350-page novel based on the 1891 novel and shaped by her sustained dialogue with the students.

Frym noted at the project’s outset, “Though Hardy’s literary syntax and social setting will initially appear antique to contemporary teenagers, Tess’s struggles for personal integrity and justice, as well as her tragic outcome, will resonate as familiar.” Over the course of the year, Frym invited the students to critique sections of her work-in-progress. They served as Frym’s collaborators and editors.

Overall, 17 eleventh grade students participated in reading and discussing the book and 6-8 of them participated in an additional, intensive after school salon. “The students provided enormous input for the novel, including personal stories, correction of dialect, current slang, character development, possible endings, and many other aesthetic and sociological contributions.” They invited Frym and Ruth Morgan, from Community Works, to their prom in May 2000. Frym wrote, “It was a crowning moment to the project and has found its way into my novel.”

Community Works supported Frym’s efforts by facilitating the relationship with the high school, selecting students for the salon, providing materials, documenting key sessions on video, and organizing public presentations of the work-in-progress. At the project’s culmination, Community Works printed the novel in a limited edition for use at International Studies Academy.

Initially this project was to be based at Galileo High School, a San Francisco public high school where Community Works had worked on several successful after-school literary projects. Changes at Galileo, however, led Community Works to re-locate the salon to the International Studies Academy, where they worked primarily with students of English teacher and writer Judy Bebelaar. A small alternative school within the San Francisco Unified School District, International Studies Academy primarily serves students whose families are recent immigrants to the United States.

In the 1980s Gloria Frym taught poetry writing to inmates and former inmates of the San Francisco County Jail through an artist residency project run by Community Works. During that time she began experimenting with her narrative form, expanding upon the poem in prose she had worked with for years, and moving into prose fiction. Three pieces she had written about work in the jails were published with the collection of short stories, How I Learned (Coffee House Press, 1990). She writes, “In How I Learned and in my subsequent fiction, I’ve tried to let my characters tell their stories. They are often individuals unwittingly trapped in forms of social confinement. They are repositories of the untold….” Frym’s work with at-risk teenagers in this new, Creative Work Fund supported collaboration, continued this line of investigation and extension of her form, resulting in her first novel.

The project was delayed by the move to a different school. Once started, the workshops proceeded smoothly but construction of the novel took much longer than anticipated. Frym had begun writing the piece from multiple points of view and found she had to abandon that approach. Because of this restructuring, Frym was still writing after the school year had ended. She found this to be difficult as “…the students were my inspirations and informants.” For a future project of this sort Frym suggested that she might undertake a theater piece or performance rather than a novel: “The challenge was always how to collaborate in a medium that requires a fair amount of solitude.”Community Works is a non profit arts organization dedicated to forging links between diverse cultures and neighborhoods, improving educational attainment, fostering strong communities, and extending the benefits of the arts to under-served individuals. Since 1989, it has offered an array of multi-cultural arts programming for at-risk youth, offenders, and ex-offenders in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sites where it has conducted programming include: the San Francisco County Sheriff’s Department’s Post-Release Education Program, Milestones, Galileo High School, Richmond High School, and Verde Elementary schools. Community Works’ director Ruth Morgan writes, “The heart of our programming is an artist-as-mentor approach and classrooms and workshop settings.”

Gloria Frym

Teaching

• Faculty, MFA Writing Program and English Department, California College of the Arts, Oakland and San Francisco, California (2002-present)
• Core Faculty, Poetics Program, New College of California, San Francisco, California (1987-2002)
• Visiting Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico (spring 2002)
• Visiting Faculty, Writing & Poetics Program, The Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado (1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1999)
• Writer-in-Residence, The Chautauqua Writers’ Center, The Chautauqua Institute, New York (1996, 2000)
• Visiting Lecturer, Graduate Program, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, California (1992)
• Lecturer, Department of Creative Writing, San Francisco State University (1984-87)
• Artist/Instructor, Creative Writing, California Arts Council/San Francisco County Jails (1982-1988)
• Visiting Poet/Lecturer, American Cultural Centers, Department of State, Kyoto and Nagoya, Japan (1983)

Books

• Homeless at Home, poems, Creative Arts Book Company (2001)
• Distance No Object, stories, City Lights, (1999)
• How I Learned, fiction, Coffee House Press (1992)
• By Ear, poetry, Sun & Moon Press (1990)
• Three Counts, fiction, San Francisco Art Commission (1988)
• Back to Forth, poetry, The Figures (1982)
• Second Stories, non-fiction, Chronicle Books (1979)
• Impossible Affection, poetry, Christopher’s Books (1979)

Selected Anthologies

• American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century, 4 Walls 8 Windows Press (1996)
• Love’s Shadows, The Crossing Press (1993)
• The Stiffest of the Corpse, City Lights, San Francisco, California (1989)
• Cradle and All, Faber & Faber (1989)
• Deep Down, Faber & Faber (1988)
• Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, 4 Walls 8 Windows Press (1988)

Awards and Stipends

• American Book Award (2002)
• Fund for Poetry Award (1998, 2004)
• San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Grant (1988)
• San Francisco State University Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award (1987)
• California Arts Council Multi Cultural Residency Grants (1982-1986)
• Poetry Center Book Award, San Francisco State University (1982)

Partial List of Public Readings

• University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington
• Cody’s Bookstore, Berkeley, California
• Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, California
• Sahara Bar, New York
• 112 Workshop, New York
• Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, California
• Mill Valley Book Depot, Mill Valley, California
• University of California, Riverside, California
• University of California, San Diego, California
• Beyond Baroque, Venice, California
• Small Press Traffic, San Francisco, California
• The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University
• YWCA, Nagoya, Japan
• Honyarado Coffee House, Kyoto, Japan
• Grace Cathedral, San Francisco, California
• Morrison Library, University of California, Berkeley, California
• Diesel Books, Emeryville, California
• Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California
• St. Marks Poetry Project, New York, New York
• Robbins Books, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• The Naropa Institute, Boulder, Colorado
• The National Poetry Festival, San Francisco, California
• St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California