The Only Light We See: Craig Werner and Friends Making a Way Out of No Way

Group Picture: Last Day, Last Session of Calls and Responses

When I introduced Craig Werner at a Springsteen conference in 2005, my friend Charles Hughes tells me I said, “I could go on about all the accolades this man deserves, but I want to sum up the most important part: Craig Werner builds community.” I knew it because about half of my favorite music writers were either his former students or his associates. I didn’t know it near as well as I do now.

I wrote the draft of this blog after returning from an April conference at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where a dozen or so of the people I feel closest to in the world (alongside a couple hundred more) were celebrating Craig’s career (alongside Nellie McKay, Tim Tyson, Danielle McGuire, Ed Pavlic and many others) building the school’s Department of Afro-American Studies. Because Craig didn’t want it to be about him, the conference was named “Calls and Responses: A Symposium on Teaching, Writing and Community.” It was a revelation. I didn’t know something like this could happen around academia.

I’ve been in—and of—and angry with academia for most of my life now, and it’s easy to see the limits—the more you know, the harder to see possibilities. I first realized this when I was just about 22 years old in my first year of graduate school. I stayed at the college where I was an undergraduate mainly because I had very little direction (sorta still wanted to be a musician despite nothing anyone would call talent), and my new wife needed to be there for her graduate degree. I had a wonderful undergraduate experience—the only really positive institutional, extended educational experience of my life. But when I went into graduate school, I saw the politics behind the curtain, and it robbed me of any illusions.

No need to break all that down. I liked my school, and loved a good number of my professors. Let’s just say I saw the caste system, and I saw the pettiness, and I saw that people loved rules more than ideas in school at about the same moment I began to understand all the dead ends in the larger political system. The way people are feeling right now, I relate to it from those days because of Iran Contra, Plantation Week at Oklahoma State University, and the fact that my thesis defense came down to a debate over my unconventional use of commas (in works of fiction). The institution I was in seemed obsessed with the trivial while overlooking the big picture.

Writing about music took me out of the confines of academia, and I must admit I’ve never been able to write to academics in any way I find as satisfying as writing to people far outside of schools. I have been most consistently inspired by people who never had “higher” education or were actually thrown out of their schools. So, on the third day of “Calls and Responses,” when travel problems kept several presenters from one session and Craig tapped me to maybe fill in, I knew I had something to say and began taking double the notes I normally take—and I take a lot of notes—just in case. Thankfully, there was no need for me to share it then.

I feel a need to share it now.

I think I can put this quite simply. Most of the people who have inspired me to think I could make a difference work in some antagonism with academic systems. We can start with musicians, who have often sent me driving miles past the turn off to my campus jobs before I turned back around. The writers and editors who taught me how to write included J-School grads and English teachers but were more often and impressively homemakers, homeless organizers, bricklayers, steelworkers, printmakers, and commercial music writers who dropped out to go into the work. These same people—and my students—taught me most of what I do right in the classroom. I teach veterans of many wars and refugees of crises around the world, and they each add something different and essential. When I went to this conference, I was "teaching" a nurse who was my age. She worked all night and attended my class at 11:00 a.m.

Bianca Martin, Riah Werner and Tim Tyson

I suppose I could do that if I had to, but I’m not sure. And she not only showed up every day, she was crucial to how my class worked. She could have run the thing. Maybe she did.

So I was watching this panel that had been somewhat reshaped to fill holes. Riah Werner, a teacher on the Ivory Coast, talked about how she improvises with next to nothing and how she learned to do that and how she learned to work around the system by growing up in and around this Afro-Am Studies Department. Bianca Martin, producer of NPR’s 1-A, talked about how Craig in particular actually listened to her unlike what she’d encountered before and pointed her toward the resources she needed. Sagashus Livingston, who founded the Infamous Mothers’ Project, “an education and media company that focuses on women who mother from the edge,” testified that the department helped her stay in college and then gave her the strength to go out on her own and start this business. Kevin Mullen, who moderated the panel, introduced us to the Odyssey Project that extends college education to those who normally would have no access. I have seen such work around the margins in my life, but it was almost never something supported by the places I work for a living.

I have this quote from Ms. Livingston, “even my professors were afraid,” as a step in the calculus that led her out of college and into her business. For me, that’s it. In the world we live in today, even your professors better be afraid. The fact that students and teachers communicated that honestly and openly in this department defies about 90% of my expectations in the ancient, gatekeeping systems of academia.

During the phenomenal veterans’ panel, the department’s Anthony Black told a story I told every class I had when I got back to my classroom because I remembered all too clearly when I first started teaching and the mantra from on high was “weed em out.” He told how, at the height of the Vietnam War, teaching assistants literally held the fate of their composition students in their hands. The school relied on Comp I as a gatekeeper, and if students didn’t pass, they would face the draft. “The TA’s stood up,” he recounted, touching on various kinds of rebellions led by English teachers in this time of crisis.

The “modern university” dates back to around 1079, and as with all such institutions, it is built to resist any challenge to its hierarchy. However, at a time when changing technologies challenge the very nature of work and never-ending war seems to be just another component of keeping the system in place, the university is facing a call to change unlike anything that’s happened in our lifetimes. (I believe in well over a thousand years.) Before this weekend conference, I assumed all such structures would ultimately crumble and fall. The Department of Afro-American Studies in Madison showed just what a revolutionary role such institutions can play.

Dave Marsh and Chris Buhalis help me make sense of it all

In general, I remain skeptical of existing institutions, but, in April, I saw what I saw and experienced what I experienced. Some of the finest writers, artists, teachers and musicians on the planet took me down a dark country road in Alabama, into the thickets of Vietnam and under the Iraqi desert sky and even the eastern Oklahoma hills of my former Cherokee home, and they played me, among other things, Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me.” As improbable as it was, I not only went there, but I didn’t feel alone. Beyond that, I left with a conviction that we will continue to carry the dialogue outward and bring what we learn back home, wherever that may be. 

Because the words are true, you know, however we find a way to live up their call—

Craig Werner, David Cantwell and CJ Janovy

“When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we’ll see
No, I won’t be afraid
No, I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand
Stand by me”

--That there, the secret of the universe.

Special thanks to everyone mentioned above, my friends C.J. Janovy and David Cantwell, who got me up there, and every other person I heard or with whom I talked and laughed and dabbed my eyes.

"Whenever you're in trouble..."