‘Speaking of’ brings writers and audiences together

“Speaking Of” looks to spread a love of words to everyone, including its mail carrier. “Speaking Of…” Poetry/Spoken Word/Nonfiction

Third Saturday of every month at 8 p.m.

Amani International Coffee House on the North Side

507 Foreland Ave.

$5 cover, BYOB

speakingofpittsburgh.com

“Speaking Of” looks to spread a love of words to everyone, including its mail carrier.

So the group holds monthly poetry, fiction and spoken word mash-ups featuring three prominent writers, one from each style. Its latest event, held as usual in the Amani International Coffee House on the North Side, occurred this past Saturday.

“Writing is a weird thing to do,” said Marc Nieson, fiction author, winner of the 2008 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest and Pushcart Prize nominee. “You sit in a room for hours on end, and it’s work you do alone, for the most part. Yet I don’t think there’s anything else I do where I have such a sense of feeling connected to something that much larger,” he went on after reading an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, “Houdini’s Heirs.”

Alaina Dopico, co-founder of the literary series alongside Phinehas Hodges, said that she wanted the event to form a connection between the audience and the writer.

“We want people to have a night where they can share in something true and real,” Dopico said. “I mean, you can go to the movies and share in something for sure, but to have someone in front of your face sharing about who they are is really something magical,” she said. “There [is] so much less face-to-face nowadays, and we want that here. We want to connect in a physical and tactile way.”

The Amani International Coffee House is a spacious and warmly lit room with words and swirls painted on the walls and paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The audience sits in folding chairs facing the three presenting authors who stand up in front of the crowd to perform their works.

This month’s “Speaking Of” was opened by Andrew Mulvania, author of “Also in Arcadia,” from which he read a selection of poetry describing his youth on a Missouri farm.

“A raucous trail of geese fly over, silver and bending as a single thing, the whole flock moving with one mind,” Mulvania read from one of his poems, “Putting in the Garden.”

The Washington & Jefferson College creative writing professor described his recent work as “nonironic, formalist poems,” which he described as “sort of unfashionable, but not so unfashionable that they couldn’t find a publisher,” immediately breaking the audience into laughter. His other selections for the evening included a poem about his young son and his experience working at a pizza shop under a gruff and colorful boss.

Second to read was Nieson. He was not satisfied merely to read his fanciful “sideshow romance,” as he described the work, which is largely set at Coney Island, near his hometown of Brooklyn. For Nieson, his reading was a performance as he brought to life one of the characters from his book, a sideshow teller, yelling “Hurry, hurry! Step right up!”

When the third performer, Chassity Cheatham, aka Yah Lioness, took the stage, she hooked the audience so that when she asked if her time was up, viewers asked her to continue her spoken word.

Yah Lioness, a host of the Shadow Lounge’s Open Mic Night and popular Pittsburgh-based spoken word performer, exhibited her prowess in the art of wordplay in the form of spoken word, yet another branch of writing offered by “Speaking Of.”

Spoken word is poetry that is quite reminiscent of a freestyle rap, but Yah Lioness stressed that, though her poems are lengthy and chock-full of substance, she has committed each to memory, bestowing them upon the audience with an internal rhythm and beat that is all her own. She said she “came to spit with the best of ’em.”

“My technique gets hectic, from the first verse to the next / Hit / I converse with the text, get perverse with the sections / If it hurts then I birth it and bless it / Then I call it a lesson,” went just a bit of Yah Lioness’ a cappella  piece titled “Five.”

After the show, Yah Lioness described her passion for language. “I love words — words are like flowers I’m passing by every day, I’m so serious … I love ’em. And poetry is something that my mother gave me to do with my words.”

Often writers in the series have their own unique connection to Pittsburgh. For Yah Lioness, a Pittsburgh native has “been lots of places,” but admits that her love of the black-and-gold city runs deep. “I carry with me the legacy of Pittsburgh — it’s a place that hasn’t been nastily exploited by the machine the way places like New York have. But it’s probably coming soon with the success of people like Wiz Khalifa and people trying to pick up the cover off of Pittsburgh like, ‘What else is cooking in here?’”

“Speaking Of” invites everyone — including students — to submit their work to be considered as one of the readers for the event that occurs on the third Saturday of every month.

Find lists of upcoming performers at speakingofpittsburgh.com or check out the Facebook page.