One of the cornerstones of Small Press Traffic’s fiftieth anniversary season, Where Would I Be Without You? was an expansive project imagined and hosted by Black feminist performance artist and writer Gabrielle Civil and featuring an array of Bay Area luminaries, including Judy Grahn, Truong Tran, erica lewis, and soledad con carne. Exploring such themes as friendship, lineage, and literary ambition, and spanning a variety of media and disciplines, the intimate five-part in-person and online series drew from Civil’s research in SPT’s archive even as it generated material for that collection — in Civil’s words, it “became the archive that we were accessing.”‍

‍Three months after Where Would I Be Without You? culminated in the June 2024 premiere of Civil’s solo performance, My San Francisco, she connected with writer Theadora Walsh who, as SPT’s head of communications, had a front-row seat to the yearlong project. TBR is pleased to present their conversation, a postscript of sorts created in the spirit of this generous and generative community undertaking.  -clr

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Theadora Walsh: It’s funny to reflect on Where Would I Be Without You? from this point, because it’s so recent but, for me at least, the sharp details of the experience have leveled into something much more abstract. I now just have a recollection of how I felt and what it made me think about, which is nice and strange.
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Gabrielle Civil: Yeah, I’m always moving between the feeling of something and the details. But feeling is also an archive, the residue that’s left in one’s body after having an experience. Or the collection of those residues. That kind of archive in performance is really important. It’s something that you work with, you draw from, you build all the time.
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TW: I remember you told me that you feel like you, yourself, are an archive. Or, you feel like you’re constantly making performance as an archive. 
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GC: This project really made me understand how archival my own practice is. As a performance writer, I’m always navigating two contradictory impulses. One is to try to be as absolutely present as possible and to create something ephemeral, something for only those in the room, something that we create together. But there’s also this deep desire to document everything, to mark it down, and to remember it in very material ways. I’m so haunted by the many Black women performers whose materials were lost. No one knows what their performances even were, and I just always feel like, “Oh no no no no. It can’t go down like that for me.”  
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TW: Sometimes I feel like the idea that anything can be permanently documented is an illusion, and performance is exciting because it has no choice but to honest about that. 
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GC: Well, even more than an illusion, it might be an aspiration. Throughout Where Would I Be Without You? I was interested in offering different kinds of encounters and interactions, different ways for people to experience performance. Even if we don’t catch every single word, or if later we don’t remember every single word, how can we maximize the possibility of holding onto feelings? I’m curious, what do you remember from My San Francisco?  

TW: I’ve been thinking about that. I feel like the audience was a little bit scared at first. It was almost like you had to become bigger and more animated because people didn’t immediately want to interact, but a reciprocity of trust was necessary for the piece to move forward. I remember seeing and feeling that you’d gained the trust of the room over the course of the performance. By the last portion, when we were all sitting on the floor gathered around you, it reminded me of a school assembly; everybody was buoyantly and excitedly participating. I enjoyed the arc of that: from the nervous, fearful withholding that we started with, you were able to, we could say, encourage — or manipulate — the audience to start participating in the way that was needed. And that made the final moment incredible, when there was a shift —
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GC: Yeah. 
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TW: In the beginning, you were addressing us, asking that we actively listen and, like, prove that we were participating. And then once you had gotten us in, gathered us close to you, you switched. The audience didn’t matter at all. You enacted almost a reverse strip tease, where you used a scroll that we’d collectively written on to do a frottage treatment against your body in a way that felt incredibly private to me. To the point that at times I was slightly embarrassed, like do I deserve to see this? So that’s what I remember. And I am describing feelings, mostly, which emphasizes our point.
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GC: It’s such a gift to hear your experience. That arc that you described for me is the arc of the entire series. We took things from the archive and activated them and then activated ourselves and put that back into the archive. At the listening party, we took Where Would I Be Without You, this 1976 record that Judy Grahn and Pat Parker created, and we cracked it open. The two online Watch Party Workshops used movies of two very different levels of quality to inspire our own writing and thinking about friendship, about community and place. At the Friendly Reading & Social, people were drawing on their own personal archives and networks. The poets I invited to read got to invite someone else and actively be in a poetic conversation with them in front of a live audience. They became the archive that we were accessing.

Finally, in My San Francisco, I’m playing with the Small Press Traffic archive, represented in pictures all around the walls of the room, and my own memories of the city. For this piece, I also got obsessed with old technology, taking pictures of the audience with a Polaroid camera and playing Thelonious Monk’s At the Blackhawk on a real record player. I wanted to bring the essence and energy pouring throughout the whole series into these materials — Polaroids of the audience, pictures of the SPT archive, the scroll of paper with audience writing — and then bring them all together on stage and wallow my body in them.

It’s amazing to hear you describe that final performance as looking and feeling private, because for me, it was so much about this gift to the public, allowing for a display of my body or my movement to be for public consumption. Which for me is kind of like, what an archive is. You know, there’s so much intimacy that I found in the Small Press Traffic archive. Even when you look at different journals — Renee Gladman’s Clamour, giovanni singleton’s nocturnes — or Stephanie Young’s Bay Area Poetics anthology, the one that I did bibliomancy with during the show — when you look at the tables of contents, you see relationships. Amazing! Even if you didn’t know about those relationships beforehand, if you spend time in the archive, you see certain names repeat and coupled together. You notice different people are reading together or you find flyers or there are notes from proceedings and conversations. You see all this very intense, human behavior that is just waiting to be re-engaged through our presence in this contemporary moment.

This also speaks to a major thread of the series overall: friendship. The way people become poets, the way people become artists, the only real way to do that, you have to have friends. You have to have some group of people or at least one person who really believes in that for you. Otherwise it’s very, very difficult to make it.  
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TW:  I took a writing workshop in Brooklyn a really long time ago that Tonya Foster visited. She talked about how every poem is calling out to someone and it’s important that you know who your poem is calling for. That feels really true to me and relates to what you’re saying. I’m curious how you think about address and how that relates to this regard for friendship in your work.
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GC: Address is super important, and I think it operates on a couple levels for me. My own use of direct address in performance can sometimes make audience members uncomfortable. Or it can break the ice and create humor or a space of connection. Either way, it is me insisting through direct address that I see you and that we are in this together — almost like an interpolation or a way of saying, “I don’t want you to be passive. I’m calling for you because I want us to be together. I’m calling for you because I’m lonely, I’m calling for you because I’m delighted that you’re here. I’m calling for you because I’m already halfway in love with you and I want us to have a romance for the length of this performance. I’m calling for you because I’m angry at the world and I want us all to come to solidarity and do something. I’m calling for you because I’m restless or I’m bored or I’m curious about this place, San Francisco, and you all are here and I want to know more.”

Especially in performance, address is a way of waking up the space, waking up myself, of reminding people that they’re there, even though I usually am not asking for anything too intense — I mean, I have been in performances where the artist has really gotten into the faces of people. Usually that’s not my mode. But it is a sense of trying to push back against captivity. So that’s one kind of address. There’s also a sense of a future audience or a future call. I was just reading that Tommy Orange is the latest writer invited to contribute to the Future Library.
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TW: What’s that?
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GC: You have to write a work that no one will read until 2114. So it’s pitched, specifically, for that audience almost a hundred years away. And that’s very difficult, especially in the situation that we’re in ecologically on the planet. Will we be here in a hundred years? What’s actually going to happen? What languages are people going to speak? What is it going to mean to read?
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TW: Will people have attention spans?
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GC: There you go. It’s a tremendous leap of faith, an address to a future world. And it’s also related to the archive. I mean, the person who came up with this planted a grove of trees, and the idea is that those trees will create the paper on which this book and the other books in the series will be printed. So that’s already a lot of assumptions. Are we going to have paper books? Are those trees going to grow? Etc. But this is what this person knows and so this person says: this is what I’m going to try to do for the future and I’m going to invite you to dream into the future with me.

Another person who did that so brilliantly was Alexis Pauline Gumbs. She has a story called “Evidence” where she imagines a future descendant writing her a letter. What does it mean for us to utilize these various modes of address? Why are we keeping archives? Who are they for?
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TW: When you mentioned the type of performance that can really aggressively use direct address, it reminded me, I think we have a friend in common. Sawako Nakayasu?
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GC: Oh yes! That’s my performance sister. 
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TW: I studied with Sawako! I did a performance in grad school, and afterwards I felt horrified and stripped bare in this way I’d never felt before. Sawako talked to me afterward about how every moment in a performance is loaded with this suspended intimacy — when you’re doing something live you’re trusting an audience that you’ve never practiced with before, and there’s a way that time gets so heavy. Time can actually beat you; you have to stay with it or your performance will fail. If I remember correctly, Sawako was saying that there’s an awareness of that in the performer, and that that might be why I felt so bad after. 
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GC: Oh yeah. 
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TW: How do you feel while you’re performing? What is it like physically and emotionally for you?
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GC: Well, it really depends on the performance. It depends on my level of preparation and how new is the work. My San Francisco was brand new and I felt like, “Ooo, this might not be good.” There were so many things I was interested in trying and I had so much juicy, rich source material that I was trying to weave together from my own personal remembrances of San Francisco and the SPT archive, and the friends who were in San Francisco who helped me become a poet. I was aware, too, that some friends, like Michael Abdou, Renee Sedliar, and my OG poet pal Eric Leigh, were in the room, so that also informed how I was feeling. I wanted to do them proud, but I needed to make sure I didn’t get too distracted. I needed to make sure I was still grounded in the different emotional reaches or even just the logistical things I needed to do.

You know, some people who make performances love to get in front of the crowd. I definitely enjoy people and opening up and offering. But I’m not necessarily a born entertainer. I’m interested in what happens in my own psyche and space. How am I able to manifest something about myself that feels like it can only be manifested through this process of performance? It’s a way of being in the world and being with people or opening up a space where I’m allowed to ask for all kinds of things. In everyday life, I either don’t feel able to ask for those things or I try to ask and I can’t get them. There’s something that happens in the space of performance that’s so different: I feel empowered, I feel ambitious, I feel strong. But I also feel aware of my own weaknesses, like, wow, I wish I could sing but I’m not a singer. I’m going to do this dance, but I’m not a trained dancer. You know? I’m super aware! But I just do it anyway.
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So, it’s a big range of feeling. Often when I’m performing or even when I’m curating or hosting a show, I feel euphoric, I feel so blessed that there are people who have come to be a part of this thing that we’re doing together. But then, to what Sawako was saying to you, there can really be an aftermath, a crash. And I don’t know beforehand how I am going to feel after. I’ve made a lot of performances and sometimes, even if the performance seemed to go very well, I can feel terrible. And then sometimes, when the performance is an amazing flop, I’m just like, well, OK, let’s all have tacos or get a drink or something. In the best-case scenario, you’re performing more than one night or you get to come back the next day and strike everything. So that changes the whole rhythm of how you metabolize what just happened. I often work with small organizations, non-profits, artist-run galleries, community spaces, so I end up coming in the day before or the same day, setting everything up, trying to make something happen, and then needing to swiftly take it away, which is wild. Most of my performances I’ve done once or twice and that’s it.

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TW: It’s incredible that it can make you feel powerful.
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GC: When you were doing your performances, you didn’t have that feeling?
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TW: Uh-uh. They were received well; or people were like, you should do more. But I didn’t want to, which was a new kind of relationship to art-making for me. Because I love writing. I mean, it can be a withholding bastard: you have to wait for hours just to have one good thought. But I love the way it feels to write. That makes me feel powerful, I guess. 
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GC: Writing is hard. It's sometimes hard just to sit down and do it. And I’m a person that does it all the time. [laughter]
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TW: I actually find it comforting, how hard it is. I remember when I was like nineteen or so, I had the thought that I could work on writing for my entire life and never be finished. Something about the longevity of that practice is really comforting: here’s a way I can spend time and share time that will never go away. 
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GC: Right, you can’t use it up. I feel a little bit like that with performance. There’s a vulnerability because often I’m trying to do something that I don’t know how to do, which is actually the best. The writing that’s been the most exciting to me has been writing where I was not sure how to do it, what the form would be, or how to create the container of language for what I was trying to express. Or how to shift from one mode to another — that’s still something I think about. There’s a lot of code-switching in my work; there’s teacher Gabrielle who’s leading everyone in the school assembly and then there’s this whole other entity, being, energy, that wants to be expressed. Those entities want to come together and so, what does that look like?

I just spent a lot of time with the work of Leslie Scalapino because I was asked to do the Scalapino lecture at Naropa and there’s a lot of her stuff, if I’m not mistaken, in the Small Press Traffic archives.
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TW: We’ve got some things!
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GC: She can turn on a dime. She has so many different energetic charges in her work; sometimes it has to do with her use of dashes, or this repetition of phrases that all of a sudden turn into something else or mean something else through the repetition. I love that. I think about Ntozake Shange too, how she’s able to ride language and bring different registers of speech through jazz inflection. And also just her ear, the way that she’s moving her words and her phrases across the space. Both of them are extraordinary, but Shange is super important for me because her poems are poetry and performance.
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TW: I think they’re totally inextricable. I remember when I read Zong! [by M. NoubeSe Philip], I thought of it as more abstract, like a concrete poem, a very aesthetic gesture. But then I saw video footage of Philip performing Zong! and understood something new. I completely had not gotten what she was doing until I had the key of the performance.

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GC: M. NoubeSe Philip is an incredible performer and Zong! is a true archival project. Now it’s like, “Archive this! Archive that! Everything is archive!” But she went back into the legal documents. She looked at a collection of historical material, and then she channeled spirit, the spirits in and of the archive.

‍TW: Throughout Where Would I Be Without You? you pick up on your own experiences of friendship in San Francisco that overlap with moments of history contained in the archives. The more I research the New Narrative writers, the more I understand that they’re just directly writing to and about each other. I recently saw My Walk with Bob by Bruce Boone in the SPT archive — that book came out of the writing workshops that Robert Glück was leading in the Small Press Traffic bookstore’s back room in the late seventies — and I realized that, much like reading something and not seeing it embodied and performed, I wasn’t understanding the context of friendship that inspired and incubated the work. Your curation and this project helped draw that out for me and make it feel alive.
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GC: Thank you so much. The friendship piece is so inspired by Judy and Pat.
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TW: Yeah, that was unbelievable. ‍‍

‍GC: The listening party was so excellent. We had food and wine! People sat on the floor. People wrote on a scroll. It was introducing some of my experimentation with how to be together. But for me, the icing on the cake was Judy and how she talked about her friendship with Pat. She talked about how there were things that she didn’t understand or mistakes that she made, but that Pat loved her and that even if she got angry with her, she didn’t let her go.  

The power of that — particularly in the present moment, how intense things are — to hear somebody just say, “I’m so thankful to my friend that she didn’t let me go.” She talked about how it can take time to catch up to where your friends are, to understand the world, and that you just pray that you live long enough to actually gain the wisdom. The things that she said that night were so amazing! She said, “There is no word for the love between revolutionary poets.”
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TW: God, she was great. I loved what she said about the seriousness of friendship and the responsibility it entails; she spoke to a moment when she messed up and Pat was upset with her, and they sat in the feeling for a little bit, but there was no question that the love between the revolutionary poets was going to go away. It’s not possible to never mess up and it’s not possible to catch up to where someone else is instantaneously to, like, help you save face. But it is possible to apologize, to sit in the responsibility of hurting someone or misunderstanding someone and rise to what it would mean to repair that. That’s an option we have. And we don’t talk about it enough. 
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GC: Well, because it’s really hard, all the way around. Judy was doing such powerful feminist work, so she’s on the side of the angels, she’s used to being right. And then she’s realizing, wait a minute, here I am and I’m wrong.
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TW: People should listen to that conversation. 
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GC: And they should listen to that record, as well.

But before I forget — I’m so glad you linked it back to the architecture of Small Press Traffic. So many radical groups met in that original space, from third world women writers to gay liberation. And they didn’t necessarily overlap. I mean, I would imagine that there were some third world liberation folks who were queer or gay or lesbian, but I don’t know socially how much those groups mixed. That would require deeper engagement with the archives. But just the fact that the space could hold these different affinity groups, these different kinds of communities, that is a powerful model — it’s inspiring to recognize the multiplicity within a particular space or the multiplicity of scenes within a local scene. And that that’s a kind of architecture.

I’m a Libra, so I always want everybody to hang out together. But it’s OK if there are natural affinities or social or aesthetic projects that different people find themselves drawn to in different moments. I hope there can be mobility in that too, because in mobility, you can find aesthetic and political strength and also pleasure, you know, the joy that can come from encounters with others. But a very capacious notion of the Bay Area literary scene and poetry community — that is something I definitely saw in the archives.
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TW: Yeah, so many different writing movements co-existed. I’m not sure how it used to be, but looking at the Bay Area now, we exist in factions. There’s little overlap. Sometimes I’ll see the same twenty people every weekend and then I shift ever so slightly to another scene and it’s completely different: none of them know each other, they don’t go to the same places.

The Bay Area is so particular; I grew up here so I’m endlessly fascinated by studying it. People carve out of what has always been an expensive place these decentralized niches that rely on the kind of radical friendship we’re talking about. But because of that, they’re also quite insular. That’s why when there are physical spaces, like the Small Press Traffic bookstore or The Lab, it’s important; it might be the only time these factions see each other and recognize their context or that there’s potential for them to be in community with each other. 
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‍GC: That’s powerful, what you’re saying. Especially this notion of factions and also how a space like The Lab, on some level, is doing what the old Small Press Traffic bookstore was doing. I was very lucky, as I was coming to spend time at the archive, that my visits coincided with some wonderful things that were happening in the Bay. I got to go to a Cauleen Smith screening at the Pacific Film Archive and then go to hear JJJJJerome Ellis at The Lab — they're the kind of artists who can bring together a lot of different kinds of poets and artists just through their practices, people who might not normally be in a room together.

And I should put this on the record: It was a real honor to be invited to do this work in SPT’s fiftieth anniversary year. There was so much thinking about the history of the organization and its relationship to the Bay Area, when I’m a person who has never lived there. I remember from the beginning, I said to [then Director] Syd Staiti, “Are you going to be unpopular for this, for bringing me in for this moment?” But of course, I had been to the Bay Area on multiple occasions and knew many people who had lived there and had pivotal coming of age, artistic, and personal moments there myself. So it became: what do I remember about these things and what do I notice now looking in these materials?  What do I notice about the different audiences? When people come to a literary event here, what is the culture around eating or drinking or chatting?

 
TW: We just had to buy them cookies.
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GC: I was just about to say! The Friendly Reading & Social — I felt like that broke through. You got the good wine, the excellent bubbly water, and then the cookies. Maybe we need to shout out the cookies.

 
TW: Dianda’s, a family business on Mission. It’s been there forever. 
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GC: People liked the fortune cookies too at My San Francisco. But it’s a different kind of cookie experience: there can be anxiety, like, what is this cookie going to tell me?
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TW: I really appreciate that you are talking about seeing JJJJJerome Ellis and Cauleen Smith as you were creating your pieces which became part of our fiftieth-year anniversary. San Francisco has a reputation for being dead or only relevant in the past tense. We are known as this failing, doom-loop city, like all we have is this rich archive and dwindling legacy of artists and writers — that narrative is so fictional. San Francisco is where some of my favorite contemporary writers are making their work. It’s a place flush with strange, experimental and brilliant performances — your own works included. That was a real gift to the city.

The SPT archive also helps me see that there never was this easier time for poets when San Francisco was a glorious, simple place to live. 

 
GC: Right. [laughs] Right. 
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TW: Your curation and acknowledgment of the city as it is now is nice to receive as someone who has always loved San Francisco and has always seen what a difficult place it is to live. It’s very difficult to survive here without a familial safety net. But then, there are these really activated networks of friendship that are serious — like, serious. Your work tied the validity of that in the past to the validity of it in the present, in a way that felt redemptive. 

GC: The whole “doom loop” story of San Francisco is so politicized. I don’t want to minimize the economic hardship, but there’s also something about trying to go to the Bay to have another kind of creative experience, trying to birth something, or be something different like an underground artist.

That makes me think of Poetic Justice, the first film we featured in a Watch Party Workshop. I mean it starts in LA, but Tupac & Janet Jackson’s characters are taking a mail truck to the Bay. Even though as a text itself, it’s very, very problematic, it impressed itself upon me at an early age, in my Black girl imagination, wanting to be a poet — so it’s part of my Bay Area imaginary. I’m thinking very seriously of doing a whole neo-benshi with Poetic Justice. My friend Tisa Bryant (who was part of the Poetic Justice event) has done this with Under the Cherry Moon by Prince, where you take clips from it and do live voice narration. I did a little taste of that in My San Francisco, but I want to spend some real time reckoning with the movie in the studio.
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TW: You definitely should do that with Poetic Justice. I was completely riveted during the Watch Party even though if I had watched the movie by myself, I don’t think I would have given it much thought. It’s a journey movie, it’s a road trip movie. And it demonstrates what you’re saying, that when you don’t actually know how to write something, or you don’t know how to make the performance you need to make, that necessitates a project. Janet’s character didn’t know how to be in a relationship. She doesn’t know if she’s going to be a poet, she doesn’t even know if she’s going to stay in Oakland or just be there for a day. It maps onto what we’re talking about in a surprisingly good way.
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I also just love the format of your Watch Parties. I had never been to events like that, where I’m watching a movie in the context of friends and everyone is being encouraged to write in a visual medium — almost in collaboration with the movie. In a darkened theater, your experience of a film is theoretically private. Pushing back against that, I just read Disordered Attention by Claire Bishop where she talks about how this idea that you’re supposed to be quiet and not distracted in a movie theater was created by the Austrian modernists and it just, like, didn’t exist before that. Theaters used to be rowdy social places; you would be talking and gossiping and checking out who was there, and then maybe every five minutes or so, glance at the stage where the ballerinas were.
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GC: That’s awesome. I think there are parts of the world where it’s still like that. 
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TW:  The Watch Party felt like it was respecting the art — especially with the second film, Tongues Untied, which was a beautiful, beautiful film — but not asking us to ignore our context. Or not asking us to have it be private.
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GC: It was also an experiment of mobilizing some of the practices from the Covid era to network out differently. There were people on the Zoom that didn’t live anywhere near the Bay Area. Someone in Berlin went to the Poetic Justice one. Somebody else was listening while they were driving.
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TW: Amazing. 
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GC: It was this whole other space-time continuum that I adored. And to your point about being able to write in public, the way that the chat popped off with Tongues Untied was super exciting. In the chat, people were like, “I haven’t talked to you in so long! It’s so great to see you!” It really made me think about new opportunities for community building.  
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TW: What you’re describing, the potential for new friendships or new ways of engaging, makes me think of maybe the last thing I want to ask you. Working with you, I copied or formatted your bio many times and I’ve been intrigued by its last sentence, which says that the aim of your work is to open up space. I thought a lot about what that meant during these eight or nine months we’ve been collaborating. It partially has to do with the generosity of letting people in to all these timelines, all these different lives and perspectives and stories; that makes space feel bigger to me. But I wanted to ask you, now that I get the opportunity, what does opening up space mean for you? What are you thinking of when you say that?
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GC: Thank you for asking that. It’s one of my cornerstone ideas, what I remind myself about why I am writing or making performances or trying to have events. I really want to crack open into something different. I want to get out of these boxes that late-stage capitalism has put us in. Maybe that’s trying to create more breath, more imagination, more ease, more opportunity, more possibility for myself and for other people, and more room to maneuver, which is also to be more nuanced, more patient, and more kind. Opening up space can mean different things day by day. Sometimes it’s about wonder: presence and gratitude for what’s around us. Sometimes it’s just like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to be your stereotype.” I don’t want to be flattened. I want to have more faith to be something different. It’s also pushing back against different kinds of structural and systemic oppression and for there to be a container for gathering. The aim of my work is to open up space for us to be together. Whatever that looks like; the more space we have, the more room there can be for us in our togetherness.  
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TW: I love that, and your programming was the first step of opening our Small Press Traffic archive to the public.
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GC: It was awesome. When you call something an archive, as opposed to a library, there’s a proposition being made around a history and a lineage and a community. And it’s a community we get to be a part of, just by witnessing and engaging and feeling with these materials.
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