Holbrook brought street cred to Twin Cities writers’ market

Writer-editor-administrator Carolyn Holbrook, well known as SASE: The Write Place founding artistic director, is a singular presence in Twin Cities lit. And has been since the early ’90s, when she strengthened a fledgling free-lance track record, contributing essays to the Minneapolis Star Tribune and alternative magazines like Artpaper and Colors as well as establishing SASE. In a locale glutted with aspirants to consequence, firebrand Holbrook carved a career out of grit, wit and, via her literary service organization, the determination to expose and empower authors who otherwise languish, at best marginalized, at worst wholly obscured. And kept writing to boot.

She started SASE because, after being at The Loft for five years as program director, “It became clear that we had a different aesthetic and a different way of looking at community. The need for SASE was, really, the need to have more than one place writers could go. Back in ’93, when I started SASE, The Loft was pretty much the only place.” She and writers she talked to agreed there should be a place that was accessible to “whoever wanted it, not just highly educated people with deep pockets. You don’t have to be a member to participate. We have one or two programs that cost anything [and that’s] on a sliding scale. Including a mentoring program for emerging writers.” The organization also is, to her knowledge, the only such Twin Cities outfit this side of the Minnesota Spoken Word Association that funds grants for spoken-word artists.

Anthony Porter, who edited Holbrook when she contributed to Colors and later served on the SASE board of directors, agrees that Holbrook’s imitative filled a clear need. “She created literary diversity,” he recalls. “There wasn’t any [on this scene] before then. The Loft was white women. Hobbyists. And that’s all. Carolyn has a vision of diverse literary culture, in the Twin Cities, at least. And pulled together [her organization], very easily, which I think is kind of telling. She had good relationships, and always has, with all the ethnic communities.”

Holbrook now has served SASE’s mission to the point where she is exhausted. Holbrook flatly states, “I’m tired. I need to give more time to my own writing.” After 12 years, preceded by her Loft tenure and four years as founder-director of the Whittier Writing Workshop, she is ready to recharge and redirect her energies. Satisfied that the matured enterprise is being handed off to capable minds of integrity, Holbrook looks forward to woodshedding. She’s going to put on the front burner a book about her incarcerated son. “Really, what happened is that, over the last 10, 12 years, my sister and two brothers died on me, one after the other. And, it’s like, whoa. Wait a minute. I think I need to pay attention to the things I wanna do.”

Operation of SASE: The Write Place will be turned over to Intermedia Arts. The transition is projected to begin by spring and continue into 2007 with Holbrook staying on until then in a consulting capacity.

Holbrook, throughout SASE’s upstart evolution from a grassroots undertaking to a mainstream-acknowledged entity, has written about, among other subjects, urban teens transcending low academic expectations, what it is for an adolescent girl to cope with having been raped and what it’s like to be an artist and a single parent at the same time. Along the way she picked up an Interdisciplinary Studies Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Creative Arts Leadership at Union Institute and University (Cincinnati). Also, her credits as an editor include the “Vistas” column at The Nightly (weekend companion to The Minnesota Daily), co-editing “Poetry Quarterly” for The Whittier Globe and co-editing the annual Loft-McKnight Awards anthologies at The Loft from 1990 to 1992.

Arguably, she is at heart, before anything else, a writer. “I’ve always written. I’ve always loved words, ever since I was a kid.” As to what prompted her to do it professionally, she says with her accustomed pragmatism, “What made me write for publication is that I found out [I] could.” Her style is stark, bare to the emotional bone. Exactly the sort of hand that can do justice to the subject of the book she’s working on. As is her perspective.

Her book is about the impact of incarceration on the convicted individual and on the family. “There’s a lot out there by so-called experts, sociologists, psychologists who are looking at [it] from that intellectual or academic distance. [But] it needs to be written by people who are living it. There’s very little written by the people themselves.” The manuscript actually is co-authored by Holbrook and her son. It encompasses “the day-to-day impact this kind of thing has on families who are living it. And the reason for things that might’ve happened to him. And why he might’ve gone into living the way he chose to live [which landed him in jail].” It’s not about justifying or explaining anything away. It is, however, a firsthand illumination of all too common, yet largely unexamined, circumstance “from the horse’s mouth, rather than somebody’s damned text book.”

All told, not a half-bad legacy for someone who takes a get-behind-herself-and-push approach to things. If she never gets anything else done, Carolyn Holbrook already has accomplished a hell of a lot.