Sarah Stewart is a painter originally from Austin currently based at Erector Square Studios in New Haven. Stewart tries to spend at least three hours in the studio a day, completes 3-5 paintings a year, and rarely listens to music when she paints. Her paintings operate on divergent timescales — on one hand, they depict particular scenes from her past, on the other, they constitute a rich cluster of lines recalling the hours during which they were configured. Stewart reminds me that memory is not a fixed object but an active imaginative process. To carry the past is, inevitably, to reshape it.
Love
I remember the day when I visited your open studio someone walked in and exclaimed, “it’s echoes of your memory!”
Stewart
I remembered that too because I thought it was such a great way of putting it. My paintings aren’t direct memories. They’re built up, day by day, moment by moment, year by year. Something had to happen once, right? And then, there are outward rings from that moment. Our memories do echo for a while. I’m not painting the actual place where the memory happened. It’s different but is able to hold the memory. Through the painting process it becomes something else.
Love
Are you traveling backwards and forwards at the same time?
Stewart
Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of like the two are married—the past and the present. And the memory is directing the painting. It has to show me something.
Love
What do you mean by that?
Stewart
These are great memories, but I’m compelled to paint them, make something present, make something visible. I think there is something else going on. The memory is driving something and helping me to find meaning today.
But the painting, in the end, it’s more than the memory. It brings something invisible and makes it visible. Something about who I am and who my voice is. It feels good to be able to find that in the painting.
Love
What do you think it is about paintings that makes the invisible visible?
Stewart
I think there’s something I can only find in the process of painting. I’m with these paintings for a long time. They take months. Some of them take years. So I’m really getting to know their internal structure. These decisions about symmetry, these decisions about color. How do we expand the space to a world inside them?
Love
Would you say that your paintings take a series of mundane gestures and turn them into something grand?
Stewart
That’s how it started. The technique is based on a natural arm movement—something that the arm does easily. There is something interesting going on with the layering of the lines. Every time you make one mark of a line, it opens up space around that line. Each mark, for some reason, opens up space. And I love that shallow space in a painting that I can kind of inhabit.
The repetition of the swooping lines in my work speaks to me about the continual feeling of the passage of time. Or the continual movement of time. Something that is always present, and the work, through my daily process documents that.
Love
Do you associate your paintings with people?
Stewart
This brown painting here. My dear friend who is also a painter, Riley, wears this big brown coat in the winter. The name of that painting is Brown Bear. Whenever I think of that painting I think of Riley and his brown coat.
The little green painting, whenever I look at it, I’m reminded of an ex-boyfriend that I had. While I was painting it I needed to get over that relationship and forgive him maybe, forgive myself. That was processed while painting that.
Love
Do you associate your paintings with the time you spent working on them?
Stewart
They’re a record of that period of my life. That makes it hard to part ways with them.
Love
How do you know when you’re finished?
Stewart
It’s really hard to know. Especially with paint because it takes a while to dry. And my paintings are so light sensitive and delicate on the surfaces. I can have a painting and think, that’s it, it’s done! But I’ll come in a week or a couple days later, when the paint has dried in, and think, what happened? That happens all the time. So I’ll keep painting.
I’ll have a painting that could be done, but I kind of know that it isn’t quite where I want it to be. So I keep going and going and going, almost to the point of questioning—what am I doing, this is crazy, why would anyone paint this way? And then finally the painting won’t let me do anything else. I feel it in my core that some paintings are done.
I hardly knew New Haven until I started fishing it.
In August of my freshman year, I made my first visit to Dee’s Bait and Tackle in Fairhaven. I’ve been fishing all my life, and I had spent many slow afternoons at my sales job back in Kansas on Google Maps, ogling the lakes and streams of southern Connecticut and reading trip reports on the state’s stocked trout streams. I knew about Dee’s, too—I’d found it on one of my boredom-driven virtual sojourns—but I just stopped by to buy a license. I had brought all of my gear with me.
Dee’s occupies a south-facing storefront at the triangular intersection of Blatchley Avenue, Monroe Street, and Clay Street. It doesn’t look like much: the rest of the building appears vacant, and even the storefront windows are so scuffed and dusty that it’s hard to tell that there’s anything inside.
But the drab storefront conceals a lively scene: there’s almost always a line at the register. A bulletin board near the entrance is covered with pictures of grinning customers and their fish; if they weren’t all tacked on top of each other, they’d paper the whole room. At the register, Pete DeGregorio, one of two brothers who operate the shop, asked if I wanted a combined freshwater and saltwater license. I told him I’d prefer to save the five dollars; Pete wouldn’t let that slide. The fall striper run was just about to start up, and he didn’t want formerly-landlocked me to miss it.
Every fall, he told me, striped bass—“stripers,” colloquially—migrate south from the colder waters off Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts to the warmer waters of the Southeast coast. Along the way, they run upriver from Long Island Sound into Connecticut’s shallow tidal estuaries, looking for baitfish like Menhaden that school in the riverbeds. Fishermen follow closely on their heels, hoping for a chance to battle the hard-fighting sport fish, which usually range between 20 and 35 inches in length. You can catch stripers all year in Long Island Sound, but the fall and spring runs make targeting them far easier and more exciting for shore fishermen: at no other time can you catch fish so big in water so small.
The lecture worked: I walked out of the shop with a saltwater license, a brand-new ten-foot rod, and a few bags of rubber swimbaits. Pete had told me that’s all I needed to hook a striper. I had big plans for that fall.
But when I started my freshman year, I got busy and forgot; the saltwater rod gathered dust on my dorm room wall.
***
I finally picked up the rod this October, after another conversation with Pete DeGregorio convinced me to get my act together. In my first three years at Yale, I certainly hadn’t avoided fishing entirely—I’d caught plenty in freshwater lakes and rivers outside of New Haven—and I’d been back to Dee’s for the occasional gear resupply. But still, I told Pete, I was too intimidated by the salty waters closer to my doorstep. Again, he didn’t let that slide. It would be easy, he assured me, if I did what he told me to do and went where he told me to go.
I began my first night of striper fishing at the first spot he recommended: the Sackett Point Road bridge over the Quinnipiac River in North Haven. I arrived at 3:30 AM, but a fisherman in a battered Dodge had beaten me to it. He hadn’t caught anything that morning and was on his way out, but he suggested I throw my swimbait upriver where a streetlight lit the incoming tide—“the fish seem to like the light.” I tried a few times, working the lure quickly through the murky water, feeling a bit silly about the locale I’d chosen: I was perched on a rock between a dingy pool bar and junkyard, and the water smelled nasty. It didn’t seem like the place to find a trophy fish.
But on my fifth cast, I hooked a striper. I wasn’t ready—my drag was set far too low—and within a few seconds the fish had run far enough that I couldn’t see where my line met the water. I’d rigged a flashlight above my reel so that I could see the water, but it wasn’t much use once the fight was on and my rod tip started flailing: any cars passing on the road above must have been treated to quite the light show. After a minute or so of push and pull, though, I managed to land it. As stripers go, it wasn’t huge—probably 26 inches—but my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
The next two hours made the first fish seem like beginner’s luck. After a while, I left the bridge and tried a few of Pete’s other spots: the bank behind the Target in North Haven, Q River Grill near Grand Avenue Bridge, and Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven. No dice. Still determined to find the fish, I headed to the last spot on my list: a bit of bank on the Mill River north of the old English Station coal plant.
I could hear stripers in the river even before I made it to the bank of the Mill. The warehouses and auto shops and rail bridges of Fair Haven are quiet at 5:30 in the morning, but the fish come alive in the pre-dawn tidewater. I stopped in the dark and bounced my first cast against the eroded wall of the Amtrak rail bridge. Immediately a striper hammered my cheap rubber swimbait and ran upriver, nearly pulling me in with it. I fought it quickly, wary that the frenzied fish would find a way to weave itself through the industrial debris of the riverbed and break me off. Within a minute, I had it lipped, de-hooked, and back in the river.
My hands didn’t stop shaking with adrenaline for the next two hours. From the same overhanging beam of the old bridge, I hauled in twelve more stripers from the same twenty foot wide stretch of river. By 6:00 a.m. my right thumb was scored and bloody, but I hardly noticed.
About the time the fish stopped biting and the sun came up over I-95, a New London bound train broke the spell, and I finally got a look at the spot I’d found on Google Maps the night before. In the light, I saw that I had been fishing from the remnants of a rotted-out beam at the base of an old wooden rail bridge. The tide lapped at my shins. Foul-smelling steam from a nearby sewer pipe cut through the cold morning air. On the bank, rats picked their way through oyster shells and shreds of muddy plastic.
The sun and train had woken up neighbors that I didn’t know I had. Across the river, a half dozen people were stirring in sun-faded tents set up above the abutment of the old bridge. A woman tidying up the camp dumped the night’s refuse into the river, and the smell of urine drifted upstream.
***
Regardless of NO TRESPASSING signs, steep banks, and stinking tidal mud, fishermen take advantage of every available stretch of riverbank in the New Haven area. Even when I find myself alone on a secluded bank, I always find signs of use: there’s always a rusty hook, a bit of line, or a few crushed beer cans to keep me company. When I run into other fishermen, they’re always happy to share real estate, as long as our lines don’t cross. Often I’ve stood feet away from strangers at three or four in the morning, exchanging tips and tricks and cigarettes and leads on the best spots.
Earlier this fall, while looking for water around 2:30 a.m., I met a strung-out man in tattered clothes on Quinnipiac Ave in Fair Haven who saw my rod and offered to show me some spots along the river if I promised to give him some cash. “Those guys are always fishing behind the bar and grill,” he told me. “They do alright.” He walked me there, talking my ear off about the fishing he’d done as a kid. A week later on the same stretch of road, I ran into another man who stopped me to offer advice on cold-weather fishing. “There’s oysters down there,” he said of a bank downstream in the Quinnipiac, “so they feed year-round.” Urban fishing has its upsides: there are a whole lot more people around to wish you luck.
Many of the people I meet on the rivers of New Haven are hobbyists—they might keep the occasional fish, but they’re really in it for the thrill. They stop by the water for an hour or two, often on their way to or from work, and see if they can land a decent fish. I run into this category of fishermen at spots like Sackett Point Road, which is quickly accessible from I-91—at sunrise in mid-autumn, their cars fill the gravel lot by the bridge. Middle-aged suburban dads with neoprene waders and fishing vests cast beside chain-smoking old guys with surf rods rattling around in the beds of their battered work trucks. These hobbyists, myself included, are excitable and easily impressed, and they’re as quick as new grandparents to show you photos from their camera roll.
Others are true sportfishermen: hooked on stripers, they’ll fish all night, armed with an arsenal of baits and leaders and rods. Back at Dee’s, the truly committed are household names, and serve as invaluable information-sources on the status of the run. When one such sportfisherman, a Fairhaven local named Jose, stops catching inland fish sometime in late November or early December, Dee’s declares the run over.
Useful as these experts may be, Pete DeGregorio cares more for the newbies. “I want you to catch fish,” he told me one evening while he sorted sandworms. “And I go out of my way to tell you how.” Pete spends every day passing along advice. “There’s nothing like, you know, when somebody comes back and says ‘look what I caught!’ and you showed them how to catch it. And that’s probably the most exciting thing about it.”
There’s no substitute, he believes, for the knowledge-sharing community that a local tackle shop provides; Walmart or Bass Pro Shops can’t fill the void. Without the tackle shops and the expertise that they provide, he says, beginners have a harder time catching fish, and the sport suffers. “They get a bad taste in their mouth, and they just don’t go out again.” I, for one, have avoided that bitter feeling of getting “skunked” largely thanks to Pete and his brother. On slow mornings, I call them up, and receive a much-needed course correction: “Try the Ferry Street bridge.”
***
But Pete sees a few ongoing threats to the health of the community. Especially for beginner fishermen, access is a problem. Some of the best fall striper fishing in New Haven can be found in dilapidated stretches of post-industrial water, hidden behind chain-link fences or obstructed by highway interchanges. “It makes it tougher,” Pete told me, “because I’m skeptical of who I send where.” Although New Haven is built around its waterways and oriented towards its harbor, industrial development and urban renewal have alienated the city from its water. Now, many of the New Haveners who use local waterways access them with difficulty or even illegally. Fishermen at the popular Long Wharf Pier, for example, have to pass a sign that reads “NO FISHING AT ANY TIME” on their way to the water.
From Pete’s perspective, strict regulation of the recreational fishery in Connecticut also poses a threat, particularly to low-income and immigrant communities in New Haven. To protect the overall health of fisheries in Long Island Sound, the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection imposes a complex set of regulations, updated annually, that limits the recreational harvest of fish. Fishermen can only keep one striper a day, for instance, and it must measure between 28 and 31 inches.
For many fishermen, annual adjustments to these take restrictions can be life-changing. Especially along waterways within the city of New Haven, many are just trying to put food on the table. But it’s these fishermen who take greatest advantage of the city’s waterways.
Subsistence fishermen are some of Pete’s most reliable customers: they fish in any weather, and their habits are less tied to the migration patterns of sportfish like stripers. It’s these low-income subsistence fishermen, Pete says, who are hurt most by the complex and changing list of regulations imposed on the recreational fishery. Although he sells more licenses than anyone in the state, for example, DEEP never sends him enough regulation booklets. “They expect everyone to go online,” he said, “but a lot of people can’t go online.”
He told me that regulations on the recreational fishery fail to take underserved communities—and the value of subsistence fishing—seriously. He cited limits on porgy implemented by DEEP as a particularly glaring example. Porgy, he explained, are mostly targeted by Black and, increasingly, Latino fishermen in New Haven. They aren’t an exciting fish to fight, but they’re easy to catch and good to eat, so they’re a staple food source for some families. For years, there were no minimum size or daily creel limits on porgy harvest. Pete fought tooth and nail against porgy limits, in part because he thought that the state was taking the wrong people into account: “Is it a class thing? I don’t know. But I’ll tell you one thing: it’s awful funny that they attack the porgies.”
If anyone needs to cut back, he said, it’s the commercial fishermen. Commercial outfits must also follow stringent regulations, but their methods—particularly draggers and gillnets—catch and often kill fish indiscriminately. Pete thinks the commercial fishery is given more regulatory leeway because it’s viewed as a food source. But the recreational fishery, he reminded me, feeds many of his neighbors. He knows that not all of the subsistence fishermen follow catch limits, but he struggles to blame people for it. “You’ll see people taking small fish. But they’re feeding their families. It’s not right, but you know you see the commercial guys . . . what the commercial guys destroy is unbelievable.” As long as the water is there, people who are hungry enough to hop fences and breathe a bit of sewer gas will fish it.
***
On a recent November morning, I drove over to a little unused scrap of tarmac on the West River, just north of the Kimberley Avenue bridge, to try my luck. I’d been fishing since midnight with relatively little to show for it—I’d hooked three undersized stripers—so I figured I’d use my last bit of energy on a new stretch of river.
I parked in a spot that seemed public enough, next to an old boarded-up structure with a sign that read “COAST GUARD AU—”—the rest had chipped away. While I was setting up my rod, two old men puttered up in a battered Suzuki Grand Vitara, handicap tag fluttering beneath the rear-view mirror. They produced a few surf rods from the trunk, rigged them up, and started making their way down the trash-covered, unmaintained trail through the underbrush by the high-tide line. The older man, maybe seventy, picked his way under the bridge with a wooden cane, clutching two surf rods in his free hand and struggling on the slick rocks exposed by an outgoing tide. The younger man, maybe sixty, carried buckets.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
They responded in good but rarely-practiced English: “Stripers, blues, porgies, you know, anything. Something for dinner.”
They set up by the water, threw out a few lines, and waited. I tried my luck for a while, didn’t get a bite, and left them to it. I’d caught my fish for the day. They would probably be there a while.
Eleanor looked up at me with glossy, deep-set blue eyes. The corners of her pale lips were downturned, wrinkling the soft skin between her eyebrows. The rest of her body lay still on the thin mattress — the blankets remained neatly laid over her small legs, undisturbed since the nurse tucked her in hours earlier.
I sat down on a chair next to her bed and introduced myself. For a while she didn’t look at me, so I settled into my seat and opened my computer. The room was quiet, and the sound of my keyboard filled the space. It wasn’t until I stopped typing that Eleanor finally gazed over to me.
I closed my computer and met her eyes. The frown on her lips seemed to deepen, and I couldn’t help but feel that I had done something wrong. I smiled at her, and she weakly threw her arm toward me as if reaching out.
Eleanor’s inability to verbally communicate made it difficult to determine the meaning of her tossed arm. I held her gaze for a moment longer, gently reassuring her that I was there to keep her company and not to disturb her, and I returned to my computer.
The sound of my typing provoked Eleanor to reach out again, this time letting out a sigh. Eleanor was not my first patient to lack the ability to speak, but she was the first who struck me as frustrated with her disability. Her eyes held mine, this time unmoving and with a vehemence that willed me to feel her sadness.
Eleanor noticed that I saw her heartache and threw her arm out again. I felt I understood the words she hoped to express: see me, hear me, be with me. I slowly reached my hand toward her, giving her the opportunity to signal that I had misinterpreted her expressions, but she leaned in, and her sighs ended when I held her hand in mine. Though I couldn’t be sure this is what Eleanor meant, I was compelled to believe it was the right action.
From the hallway, the four hours I spent with Eleanor sounded like a one-sided conversation. Sometimes it felt like that from within the room as well, but quality care doesn’t end if I’m uncertain if the care is being received. I’ll never find out if Eleanor was comforted by my presence, but even a small chance that she felt seen was worth the time and effort.
When I saw Eleanor the following week, she had lost the ability to move as well. She lay still with only her chest slowly rising and falling with her soft breaths, gazing absently at the wall in front of her. I chose to sit quietly this time. I didn’t want to risk hurting her or pushing boundaries she wasn’t able to set.
•••
As premedical students enter their careers in healthcare, their youth – and temporal distance from death – tends to create a belief that death is tragic which makes it confusing when a patient passes away quietly with no drama or pain. The evident intensity of trauma and the quiet rage of silent battles are distinct kinds of suffering that cannot be compared because they represent two different phases of life: a life cut too short and a life long-lived, respectively. Eleanor, over 100 years old, had outlived her family and passed away without her loved ones to support her. Her efforts to communicate were subject to the interpretation of her caregivers at the hospital, isolating Eleanor from the world around her.
I believe it is vital for family members, volunteers, and physicians to advocate for patients who struggle to advocate for themselves. The act of listening might seem insignificant in comparison to more concrete actions such as running diagnostic tests, administering life-saving medicine, and performing CPR. These exams can identify injuries or underlying biological causes for illness, but listening to a patient’s story can offer insight into lifestyle and habits that are developing or worsening symptoms and suffering. It is essential for patients to be involved in their own health outcomes by leading healthier lives, but caregivers cannot know if a patient is aggravating their illness through their lifestyle if physicians don’t stop to ask them. .
Eleanor was silenced by illness, and it may have caused her more pain that she would’ve faced if she could communicate; other patients are silenced by treatment, injustice, and ignorance. Whatever internal or external battles a patient may encounter, listening to their words — spoken or not — ensures that both a patient’s outward and inward struggles are addressed to the best of our abilities as providers.
Comments Off on Cemetery of Forgotten Books #2: Ganymede, or The Golden Age of Greek Mythology Retellings
Mine is, naturally, a bed of godly proportions. This is despite the fact that I have not grown a millimeter since I was a fleshy thing of sixteen. My left foot, caught in a silk whirlpool. Oil stains, some still wet. I try to think of nothing—there is no better aid for retention than the very attempt to forget. The centuries have taught me that bad memories are like thunder clouds. Nothing more to do than close your eyes and wait for the wind to sweep them away.
•• •
Summer 2018. I sat at my computer, ready to turn an extremely minor character in the Greek mythological canon into a star. No time to waste. I had discovered him before the others, sandwiched between verses of epic poetry and hiding deep within the hyperlink webs of Theoi.com. A young Trojan prince of uncanny beauty, kidnapped by a sharp-taloned Zeus, made immortal against his will to be his personal cupbearer for eternity. There was a lot, aesthetically, to latch onto: the violent, ascension-like episode, the drama of bestowed-upon immortality, the idea of an attractive young man. Though Ganymede’s ordeal struck me as nothing short of horrific, a crasser part of me jumped at the opportunity: a gritty retelling, I thought, practically wrote itself. But to pen the definitive retelling of Ganymede’s story, I would have to write something quite spectacular. Competition had never been more fierce.
“The Golden Age of Greek Mythology Retellings” can refer to two different, overlapping things. On the personal level, it is the era of my creative life that Ganymede was the flagship project for: this was the time when, between the seventh and tenth grades, I half-wrote at least a half dozen distinct Greek mythology-inspired stories. On the macro level, it describes a real-life trend that took hold in the late 2010s and early 2020s, as the aging BookTube and up-and-coming BookTok swelled up with modern retellings of the ancient stories geared towards young adults, to the delight of chronically online teenage girls like myself. The Song of Achilles, The Silence of The Girls, Circe, The Penelopiad… and these are just some of the ones I read, to varying degrees of enjoyment.
Granted, I was undoubtedly the target audience for this renaissance. When I was around seven years old, I received the Usborne Book of Greek Myths as a Christmas present. To me, it might as well have been the Gospel. I read it so many times I memorized it, illustrations and all—the image of Jason’s Argo with its great big sail rendered in watercolor yellow amidst a sea of teal-green tongues is permanently etched into my brain. I sat my Barbies and plushies down, stood in front of my little blackboard and told them about Pandora’s box and Heracles’s tasks.
With a seemingly infinite amount of potential stories to tell, why insist on continuing to draw from the same well? Renaissance poets imbued the popular characters with Catholic values. Playwrights in Nazi-occupied France swaddled calls for resistance in colorful, familiar narratives. The authors of the modern Golden Age focused on Greek myths to criticize the oppressive power structures they see inscribed at the core of the Western literary canon. To them, adaptation was reparative: it was a scramble to find the next scorned woman and rescue her from the unforgiving maw of history. In the few stories where he made an appearance, Ganymede was an eternal victim, a silent, shiny prop. He seemed, at first glance, a perfect subject for an adaptation in this vein.
But I was not trying to compose an adaptation in this vein. Despite the wider movement I was witnessing, I did not feel any sort of urge to correct. I was much more compelled by the fact that, occasionally, rich, beautiful displays of humanity were able to find their way into the classical texts. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Ganymede is, for the first time, given a voice of his own. Nearing the end of the Trojan War, he becomes extremely distressed by his impotence in the face of the destruction of his homeland—which, from the near-omniscient standpoint he has on Mount Olympus, he can tell is evident. He implores that Zeus spare him from seeing Troy fall. But the god, in what could be construed as mercy or mockery, only summons a dense fog to literally obscure the carnage from Ganymede’s sight.
I cannot fully articulate what about this scene moved me so much. I was struck by the fact that it seemed to illustrate an eternal human condition—one that even a teenage girl in the twenty-first century could very intimately recognize. I read the Aeneid hot on the heels of my own crisis of adolescence: the arbitrariness of the world had become impossible to ignore and, in the face of it, I felt completely powerless. I found a strange comfort in Ganymede’s frustration over his inability to control forces incomprehensibly greater than him, the genuine and completely irrational pain involved in accepting the apocalypse.
As my goal was to capture a feeling, I played with loose and otherwise unconventional adaptations. An extremely self-aware Ganymede befriended an equally-implausible Psyche and received secret visits from Bellerophon’s winged horse up on Olympus. A sci-fi setting saw Ganymede subjected to a different sort of forceful ascension: crippling inherited debts forced him to take a lonely, soul-crushing job as station master at the sparsely transited space station located on the constellation Aquarius. In a more politicized retelling, a Latin American Ganymede struggled against the eagle-figured embodiment of American imperialism.
But, creative as they may have been, none of these experiments satisfied me. I had been drawn in by the poetic force of Ganymede’s situation, the romanticism of a few striking images—as a result, I had declared myself above canon-compliant clarification. But, as I discovered through more research, there was more to Ganymede’s story than that. Apparently, describing Ganymede as Zeus’s cup-bearer was euphemistic—there is a shared understanding among ancient sources that their relationship was meant to read as sexual. It is extremely likely that the purpose of the Ganymede story as a piece of mythology was to give a sort of divine legitimacy to the ancient Greek institution of pederasty—the practice through which an older man would offer mentorship and social influence to a young boy in exchange for sexual favors. With this context, I had trouble reanimating the innocent curiosity that had drawn me to the Ganymede story. A stinging sensation in my chest demanded that I do something about it, no matter how stupidly symbolic. I finally came to feel, even more than I understood, the urge to correct.
But this unexpected burst of passion came at a cost—given my age and naivete, the responsibility of definitively doing Ganymede justice wound up crushing my creative spark. No matter how much I drafted and redrafted, I remained just insecure enough about what I was doing to never show it to anyone. I now regret that. I wish I had realized that a piece of fiction need not be genre-defining to be worthwhile. Regardless of whether it ended up christening me as a modern Virgil rising above the sea of horny mythologically-inspired webcomics or not, it would have been nice to give Ganymede—and myself—the closure of a place to land.
If my dorm room is my holy sanctuary, then my matcha cart is my fountain of life. Over this semester, empty matcha tins on the cart have multiplied.
In a way, matcha feels like a long-lost love that I’ve unknowingly ignored. My earliest memories came from my dad, who frequently ordered matcha lattes at coffee shops for my sister and me. My dad was an avid believer in the daily cup of joe. My mom never drank caffeine under any circumstance; she treated it like a forbidden fruit. And she insisted that coffee would stunt our growth, so this grassy concoction was the happy medium between them.
Unfortunately, I grew akin to my dad, and matcha soon faded into the background. For most school days during my senior year of high school — when I was old enough to defy my mom’s anti-caffeine wishes without many consequences — I’d fill my 30oz YETI tumbler with diluted black coffee. Lukewarm, unsweetened, no milk, made by a Keurig. It was tragic. But I drank it out of necessity: it was hard to keep my heavy eyes open. My days went school, then crew, then gymnastics, then homework. My days felt boundless and my nights were bounded by a maximum of six hours of sleep.
But after my college acceptances came flooding, I suddenly found myself craving something greater than Keurig coffee, which by this point was laced with high school anxieties, fears, and dreams. I had outgrown it, I thought.
Moving on seemed easy. Matcha entered my life along with a sense of success and a newfound sense of self. Brewing that first cup in a quiet kitchen, right after committing to college, felt like an unexpectedly large ritual. I took a sip, steadying myself, and thought about how grown up I felt. The irony was stark: my inability to drink coffee as a child made me revere it as a grown-up drink, but now I associate it with adolescent oblivion. I was disillusioned by prohibition, craving something I never wanted in the first place.
Still, I had a bit of a relapse: my first year at Yale became an ode to the espresso bean. Atticus and Willoughbys made frequent appearances on my credit card statements. It wasn’t just the ritual that gripped me; it was the bite of the caffeine, that sharp jolt of purpose. Albeit this purpose wasn’t a real call to action, but a call to work, mindlessly churning out deliverables for my professors and my delusioned self.
Old habits die hard, but they can still die.
Then, the summer before sophomore fall, my family visited Osaka and Kyoto. Away from a life gorged with school assignments, and my need for coffee diminished. And, after Japan, I reconsidered matcha — perhaps because of my nostalgia for my serotinal train ride to Uji or for quality time with my family. It could also be as simple as the fact that matcha—with its L-theanine and antioxidants, which are incomparable to coffee and its jitters— makes me feel good. Good, like getting-into-Yale good. Or traveling-with-family good.
I wanted matcha-feelings to never stop, so I put a matcha cart in my sophomore-year dorm to keep a constant stream of goodness; since then, I’ve made matcha everyday.
Each time I whisk the matcha, purpose settles over me like an inevitable grace. This purpose feels different, almost raw. I’m whisking matcha because I want to. I’m flowing with a liquid consciousness, where I’m aware of every action and desire that billows throughout my body, dorm room, world. With each flick of the wrist, I feel as though I’m standing in the middle of the Jordan, not to be washed away, but to be reborn. Outside my window, York Street hums with the usual chaos, but here, with my cup in hand, I’m momentarily removed. I’m wandering through my own desert, where time slows and the world moves on without me, just a little longer. I’m sure getting into Yale or traveling to Uji didn’t directly give me this life-altering purpose, but it did clear the fog. Eyes-wide-open, I’m seeing, not for the first time, but in a sharper light, piercing through naivety like bullets.
It could have fallen from any tree. A lack of naming, or perhaps of remembering. But I do remember this pine cone as animals must—not by language or the things we do by ritual or conceit, but by the sting of experience. Last fall, how sweetly it dropped upon your shoulder. Happy, I could still remember your name without learned associations the way my cat remembered our electric fence before she caressed it and discovered the name for pain. I have always found something sensitive about the scientists’ branching taxonomy, something romantic about christening the distinct spirals of the pines’ wooden flowers. Older, I am waiting for the day your name falls like this pine cone: strangely familiar, unburdened by memory’s tender, heavy branch, that I may pass it, guiltless and unaware, in the mulch.
Comments Off on PROFILE: Camari Mick’s Recipe for Community
Watching Camari Mick bake is watching a woman in her element. She presses her finger assertively on the blade of an icing spatula, spreading whipped crème frâiche atop a thin layer of rum cake. Her fingers tuck the edges of the cake into itself. She pulls, carefully, deliberately, gaining momentum inch by inch—we suddenly have a log cake. There is no bead of sweat glistening on her brow, no face furrowed in consternation. Instead, she answers my questions readily, sneaking in a little joke or a hearty laugh. She brings me into her world with a lick of crème frâiche, and I take mental images of her technique for my next baking project. So when Mick tells me she hopes to be a mentor for black and brown chefs, I believe her.
We are in the kitchen of the Grace Hopper Head of College House, where in an hour, Mick will be speaking to food aficionado undergraduates about her career, which has grown exponentially in recent years. As the executive pastry chef of New York’s one-Michelin-starred The Musket Room and French-Italian bakery Raf’s, she has earned a spot in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list, Food & Wine Magazine’s Best New Chef award, and a semifinalist ranking for the James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Pastry Chef—all in 2024. She is perhaps most well-known for desserts inspired by her Jamaican and Southern heritage. Her jerk ice cream, when paired with a goat tres leches, transforms the classic Jamaican method of seasoning and smoking meat into a complex dessert. She reimagines Southern sweet potato pie with roasted sweet potato mousse, smoked molasses ice cream, and aquafaba meringue. Even the creation in front of us, her version of a Yule log, is an iconic French confection turned into a Jamaican rum cake. Under her hand, seemingly disparate culinary narratives intertwine to say something entirely new.
Her habit of merging French pastry with her Jamaican culinary heritage is no radical departure from the globalised way that the French pastry tradition developed. “All France really did was go to these different countries [through] colonization and brought back all this information,” she says. Pointing out that similar culinary techniques exist across cultures, Mick reasons that the French pâtisserie tradition is a mélange of global influences rather than a unicultural movement. “The French were just the ones to write it down,” she says. In that light, her desserts, innovative as they are, reflect an existing continuity between global culinary cultures.
It is a tenuous line to walk. French cuisine conjures images of pristine white tablecloths, impeccably-dressed waiters and intricate dishes, while Jamaican cuisine is often relegated to the realm of street food. Nonetheless, Mick resents the idea of “elevating” the cuisine. “It doesn’t need elevation. It’s beautiful in its own right,” she says. But how else does she describe her desserts destined for a fine dining table? “We’re just putting our own lens on it.”
Mick has developed a culinary repertoire as varied as Italian dolci to Japanese pastry. But there’s a more personal connection when it comes to her own culinary heritage. As a child of an immigrant parent, taking nostalgic flavours and twisting them into something new reflects, for her, a vision of the “new American family”— one that is all about integration and interrelation. In her kitchen, that also means uplifting black and brown voices.
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Mick was born in eastern Pennsylvania to a Jamaican father and a Southern mother — both excellent cooks within their respective culinary cultures. Mick’s childhood dining table was decked out in sumptuous dishes touched by the traditions of the Caribbean and the American South. But Mick’s parents were not great bakers. Craving something sweet at the end of meals, Mick picked up the whisk and started baking with her mother. Soon enough, Food Network became regular programming in the household, and she would experiment with online dessert recipes. It became her calling—so much so that in elementary school, Mick started applying to pastry schools for fun. “I was a little devious,” she says with a grin, explaining how she would apply to study French pastry during computer hour. “[The schools] would call my mom and say, ‘We would like to talk to Camari and see how we can get her here.’” It fell onto her mother to explain that Mick was only eight years old.
Though Mick nurtured her love for baking throughout high school, where she started selling her own pastries, it wasn’t always apparent that she would become a pastry chef. As a teenager, she wanted to be a forensic pathologist. “My dad was like, ‘Are you sure about that?’” she recounts. Today, Mick credits her parents for pushing her onto her trajectory as a pastry chef. Knowing that any other path wouldn’t fulfill her, they supported her passion for pastry, she says. Mick doesn’t take this support for granted. Being in no way pressured to go into medicine or law, as many children of immigrants are, Mick pursued a Bachelor of Science in pastry arts at the Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. From there, she worked at a number of fine dining restaurants by some of the most famous chefs in the country—including db Bistro Moderne by Daniel Boulud, the now-defunct TAK Room by Thomas Keller, and the three-Michelin-starred New York stalwart, Le Bernardin, by Eric Ripert.
Still, working at these establishments was not as glamorous as one would expect. When I ask her about her experience in those kitchens, Mick pauses her spatula, leaving the Yule log half-covered in ganache. She gathers her words carefully. “I’ve trauma-bonded with some people [who’ve worked there],” she says. “It’s just one of those spaces where you will never feel seen.” She was often the only black person in the kitchen, and nobody would take her side if someone said something blatantly racist. Physically taxing days—”ten-hour days, six days a week”—were made more unbearable by a “cutthroat” environment laced with sabotage. Other chefs would replace Mick’s sugar with salt to get her into trouble, she recounts. Besides, the restaurants were so traditional that there was no room for ingredients such as jerk on the menu. “That’s fine, there’s a certain market and demographic for that,” she says, referring to the conservative palates that these restaurants cater to. “I just don’t fit into it.”
To an extent, the lack of black and brown representation in the restaurant industry is a generational issue. “When you look at the generation before us, it’s all old white male chefs,” she says. “All the chefs that I’ve been miserable under have been white, straight men.” But the restaurant industry might just be a microcosm of larger social dynamics that Mick is no stranger to. Back in her “hyper-white” corner of Pennsylvania, the classroom was also a place where Mick was the only black person. Her family became an important community for her. As a chef, being in predominantly white spaces meant that she never explored her own culinary culture until much later. Tied implicitly to her culinary heritage were fundamental questions about her personal identity, which required hours of introspection, reflection and therapy. “How do I uplift the black community?” she asks. “Who do I want to be? What legacy do I want to leave behind? Who am I?”
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On the counter next to Mick’s workstation is a bottle of Ten to One dark rum, a rum brand owned by her friend, Trinidadian-native Mark-Kwesi Farrell. Three-quarters cups of that rum has gone into the Yule log, now fully coated in whipped crème fraiche and sprinkled with chocolate crumble, a concoction of baked flour, butter, and cacao powder.
Whenever Mick needs to use rum, she reaches for the Ten to One first. In 2023, she started including it in desserts for events such as the International African American Museum’s opening, as well as a six-course menu celebrating Caribbean Heritage Month. Her collaboration with Farrell is an example of the mutual support that Mick tries to create within the industry. Indeed, she has found a community—or what she calls a “gaggle”—of black and brown chefs trying to bring their cultural cuisines into the dining scene. Collaboration dinners, where chefs join hands to deliver a one-off dining experience, are just one way in which community bonds are forged. Otherwise, it could be the rendering of assistance for a special dinner or event, or even a repost on Instagram. “It’s creating spaces in which we can highlight one another,” she says.
For Mick, this community did not materialize until she had a clearer idea about what her culinary style was going to look like. Her style might not have developed as quickly as it did were it not for the onslaught of the pandemic, which left her with lots of time on her hands to explore and bake. In 2020, Mick started running pop-up experiences, including Maison Yaki’s Black Entrepreneur Series, which featured black culinary voices in the food and drink industry. On the side, Mick also started selling donuts on Instagram. She hand-delivered pastries to her clients, one of whom happened to be Nicole Vitagliano, co-owner of The Musket Room with her sister, Jennifer. They called Mick in for an interview; she was hired on the spot. That year marked the first time that Mick had had the platforms to create her own menus, allowing her to experiment with her traditional pastry training and her Jamaican roots.
As Mick discovered the joy of incorporating her culinary heritage into her creations, she — alongside other black and brown chefs during the pandemic — also started questioning the dearth of fine dining restaurants that highlight black and brown cuisines in the United States. Thus, “How do I grow our industry?” is a question that Mick asks herself often.
Her answer is mentorship. A lot of chefs at Mick’s level have figures who guide them outside of the restaurant. Mick has had none — “especially one who looks like me,” she says — which spurred her decision to take on a mentorship role and “uplift black and brown voices in the culinary space”.
That’s already happening at the Musket Room kitchen. Mick tells me about her first hire, Quilla Gamarra, a Peruvian cook who’s been working with her for four years now, and who recently had their own spotlight dinner with the James Beard Foundation. The fulfilling part, Mick explains, was not just seeing them grow; it was also seeing them explain their love and connection to the dessert instead of simply reciting the ingredients and techniques they used. “That’s what I always want to embed in people. There’s so much we can do with food. We can let it talk for us.”
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Holding a fork in one hand and a meringue mushroom head in the other, Mick carefully makes a small incision at the head’s base. She picks up a meringue mushroom stem, dips its pointed tip in crème fraiche, and affixes it to the head. There we have it — little champignons dotting the Yule log. Complete, the cake revels in its playful artifice.
The cake is a fine exemplar of her style, which she describes as “whimsical” and “perfectly unnatural.” But to Mick, substance is as important as style. Her eyes light up when she tells me about her newest dessert on the Musket menu: a cranberry bean mousse with huckleberry jam and bay leaf hazelnut shortbread. According to her, it is a riff on bean pie — a dish associated with the Black Power movement, when the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party would carry out free breakfast programs and after-school programs for Black communities. Eventually, Mick hopes to open a restaurant in Jamaica and establish programs that give back to the local community.
Mick is certainly no stranger to how intertwined food is with culture and existence. While her desserts embody narratives of history, struggle, empowerment, and kinship, her endeavors outside of the kitchen strive to bring that community beyond the plate and into the dining scene. That is the kind of chef that Mick strives to be.
Comments Off on NONFICTION: A Game Ends in Twilight
At some point, on a cool summer evening, Mike listened to a baseball game crackle out of his back porch window for the last time in his life. I wasn’t there, so I don’t know what happened in the game. But I hope it was perfect.
The last time I did sit on the patio with him, joining his nightly tradition, we were listening to one of those agonizing games in which play after play seems to mock you with its absurdity. Sinking into our faux-wicker patio chairs, we groaned and pulled our hair as the San Francisco Giants left another runner stranded at third, grounded into another flimsy double-play, dropped an easy fly ball to blow their once comfortable lead. We didn’t hear the Giants score even a run. As the night set in we had to turn off the game.
I hope my grandfather’s last game wasn’t like that one. I hope it was exhilarating. In my imagination, Mike doesn’t notice the porch lights turn on as daylight slinks to shadow; he is glued to his seat. Maybe Patrick Bailey nails a tag at home or Yaz drives in the tying run on a fluke triple. Like always, the television volume is on mute, and the radio broadcast booms around him instead. Why? Because his son’s voice is the one that narrates the twists and turns, the wild pitches and three-run-homers, of every Giants game. Mike takes his greatest pride in his son’s work, his art: when my father told Mike he wanted to pursue sports broadcasting, he offered no passive aggressive ultimatums. When my dad struggled, he held no judgment. He trusted his son’s work ethic, and now he gets to watch as his passion blooms into a life.
Over the radio my dad’s voice bursts with electricity and Mike beams.
I’ve been thinking of my grandfather’s life in two categories recently: summer baseball evenings, and everything else. This is an extremity, of course. But when he wasn’t immersed in a scene so all-encompassing, teeming with emotion and absolute sensory presence, the events of Mike’s life were mostly in-betweens. Every Sunday night, he drove three hours to his job’s headquarters, where he’d stay in a small apartment away from home for the workweek. Eyes straight ahead, these commutes were a means to an end. If he spent the week working diligently, he’d get to return home come Friday afternoon. Back to his family, his wife, the cool dusk and the drone of lazy cicada songs.
I often worried that his in-between moments were as monotonous as they seemed. Repeat the same gardening tasks every week, reheat the leftovers after work, get out of bed before dawn again and again. He was alone most of the time. He never complained. But was Mike’s faithful tolerance contingent on the eventual gratification of a summer ballgame or home-cooked family meal? Was there nothing in those in-between moments that held marvel in and of itself? I now wonder if, on his weekly slog back to work, the Virginia interstate ever whisked him into melancholy. If he ever pulled over just to stargaze or take a nice deep breath, to soak in that particular side of the road. I wonder if he had a favorite stretch of highway.
On that June day where we heard the Giants’ pitiful fall to some middling National League team, my grandfather and I abandoned our patio seats to watch the bats that streak across the twilight sky in his backyard every summer. We used to play this game often; standing side by side, we’d search the dusk, racing to be the first to point one out. The exasperation of the abysmal baseball game faded completely, unimportant in the face of purple sky and the leathery beat of secret wings. Our excited whispers hung suspended in the air like thick smoke, swirling, enveloping, dissipating slowly. Our breath, silently aflame.
Our batwatching only ensued from a painfully mediocre ballgame, and maybe those tense baseball evenings were so sweet solely because of the dragging weeks of work that had to precede them. Although it was rare, Mike’s steady patience always led to something magical in the end. It was a matter of making it there.
But the morning Mike died was an in-between: the start to an average day in an average week that was supposed to float him somewhere momentarily perfect, not plant him on the apartment floor — the temporary place he stayed only to work, miles from his cherished home — forever. The image breaks me. To ease it I dream that he fled his flesh and flew over the interstate one more time. Whisked his soul back to the site of sublime baseball evenings, as his own twilight pressed its way in, all around, too steady to stop.
Brother Elder Amado Jimenez-Diaz enters the front of the room of the church. Blue and white tiles and lavender walls blush slightly under the light, turning the cool room rosy. Music pulses from a speaker set up next to him. Brown and tan fold-out chairs surround several tables around the room. As participants file in from the cold, they take off their thick jackets and settle into the chairs.
“Heavenly Father, I thank you for this evening of having us in your house of worship,” Jimenez-Diaz says. “Thank you for our volunteers in Imani, thank you for the food so that we can be nourished… in the name of our Lord Jesus, amen.”
Jimenez-Diaz is a facilitator for the Imani Breakthrough Project, a church-based treatment program for substance abuse recovery which focuses on community support as a mode of healing. It is just past 6 p.m., the start time of each week’s session, which lasts until 8 p.m. This group of participants is on week 6 of 22. Jimenez-Diaz tells me that sometimes over 25 individuals come to the nightly sessions––even though the sessions are capped at 25 people, with only those registered receiving a $10 stipend for attendance at each session. All ten churches across Connecticut that host programming from Imani have the same cap on participant numbers; the project’s creators designed it so that groups could remain tightly knit. Jimenez-Diaz still ensures, however, that all who attend are allowed to participate, eat a plate of hot food and warm up.
Jimenez-Diaz’s co-facilitator, Xavier, joins him at the front of the room. “I love you guys,” Xavier says. “I’ll be here for anything you need.” He steps away to watch Jimenez-Diaz deliver today’s workshop. Later, he tells me, “I like seeing people smile.”
Jimenez-Diaz moves a large, poster-sized legal pad to the center of the room and flips to a new page. Today’s topic is social awareness, which he writes and underlines with black marker at the top of the page. His voice is calm and warm as he asks the participants what the elements of social awareness are; the audience calls out answers. As he speaks, he interweaves discussions of each point with advice and faith. As he writes congregation, he says, “Being selfless speaks volumes. One thing that God does is be selfless.” As he writes #1) sacrifice, #2) commit, he notes, “It will be negative 20 degrees Celsius soon. If our friends don’t notice, it will be 1 o’ clock, and they will be freezing. The drugs will warm you for some time before, but make sure you get to a warming center by nine.”
Quickly, the session melts into a conversation. Participants add on to what Jimenez-Diaz says; others voice agreement. Some share anecdotes from prior experiences that leave the room in attentive thought. Lulls occur as the room considers particular memories and stories. As Jimenez-Diaz continues building the theme of social awareness, he fuses biblical allusions with his discussion of how substance use affects one’s mind: “The Devil puts thoughts in your head: you can’t go in that church… you smell… you’re homeless. The gospel that we teach says differently. We pray for you; we receive you. That’s the God that we serve.” He addresses one member in the audience, discussing how they received him; conversation flows, back and forth, and envelops the room.
‘Developing skills of how to live’
The Imani Breakthrough Project is a treatment program for individuals using opioids, alcohol, and other drugs held in churches across Connecticut, with some of its first partnered churches located in New Haven. Weekly workshops are run in church spaces across denominations for local residents who are in recovery, open to all who register within the first five weeks. These 2-hour workshops, led by pastors and Imani-trained facilitators who are themselves community members already active in the churches, encompass teachings that are followed by discussions in which participants can share their own experiences.
Some facilitators, like Jimenez-Diaz, integrate faith directly into their teachings, allowing biblical scripture to heat their words about self-definition and healing, but not all––each church adapts the particular style of their teachings to their participants. Such wraparound services aim to buoy the independence of those in recovery, addressing the complex social and economic struggles they may face; the design was born directly out of continuous conversation with Connecticut community members throughout the years.
Imani was created by Chyrell Bellamy, director of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and professor in Yale’s department of psychiatry, and Ayana Jordan, an addiction psychiatrist and assistant professor adjunct in Yale’s department of psychiatry, in 2017 to address disproportionate death rates of people of color––particularly Black and Latine communities––in the opioid epidemic. In the five-town region composed of New Haven, Hamden, North Haven, Woodbridge, and Bethany, the overdose death rate for Black residents was 71.0 per million residents; for Latinos, 63.2; and for white people, 51.2, in 2023, according to a report from DataHaven. Bellamy and Jordan sought to understand how to best address the root causes driving these disproportionate death rates for people of color living in Connecticut; to do so, they had conversations with the community to hear exactly what would serve them best.
Through a six-month period, Bellamy and Jordan, alongside their mentor, Larry Davidson, a clinical psychologist at Yale, began to connect with New Haven community leaders who worked closely with individuals in recovery. One of these leaders was the Reverend Robyn Anderson, who continues to serve as the liaison between Yale researchers and Connecticut-based religious leaders today. Anderson hosted a series of roundtable conversations in Midtown open to any Connecticut residents with interest in the topic of how to create effective treatment for substance use. Through those conversations, which many people of different experiences attended due to the open invitation, they learned that people of color in these local communities who were using substances often lacked the financial ability to access traditional psychiatric care. Furthermore, Black and Latine individuals felt mistrust towards their psychiatry providers if they did seek out professional help, due to a history of the medical establishment not properly addressing the needs of Black and Latine patients, as well as the lack of sufficient representation in the demographic of Connecticut-based psychiatrists. Another cause Imani directly aims to address is the social stigma amongst Black and Latine communities associated with speaking about one’s substance usage and openly seeking treatment.
“Speaking to the level of secrecy that happens in Black and Latine communities, there are so many vulnerabilities that people are experiencing, related to those social determinants of health,” Bellamy said. Sylvia Cooper, a facilitator at the Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in New Haven, also noted that many men of color grow up being socialized via substance usage, which leads to difficulties exiting social circles oriented around ignoring health challenges produced by usage. This, she speculated, contributes to the high proportion of male participants in her groups. She also told me anecdotes about how many who struggle with substance use can find themselves unemployed, unhoused, or incarcerated, which disturbs their independence and can fuel a cycle of usage, which in many ways are also affected by racial bias in hiring, housing, and criminal justice.
Through these conversations, Bellamy, Jordan, Anderson, and other psychiatrists and community leaders involved in the creation of Imani concluded that treatment for substance use must not only be accessible beyond a doctor’s office, but also address psychological and spiritual issues as well as physical ones. This group of initial founders developed Imani’s structure with hopes of addressing these social determinants: for example, they chose to host programming in community churches because they were already centers of refuge for many Black and Latine individuals, particularly those seeking a sense of spiritual healing.
“A lot of people, especially people of color, feel safe in the church,” Anderson said. “They feel that the people facilitating the Imani group are also persons in the community… It’s really about healing, transformation.”
SOAR is the first program that Imani’s founders developed. Designed to last 22 weeks long, SOAR features weekly sessions that include teachings on wellness and workshop-style discussions, where people share their own experiences. The latter half of the program also features individualized coaching to help participants create and reach personalized goals. In recent years, Imani has also received federal funding to create a second program, ImaniYOU, which runs for 24 weeks. ImaniYOU adds onto the key elements of SOAR with telehealth meetings with psychiatrists of color, urine testing, and additional medical services. As many participants have faced financial and logistical barriers to meeting their basic survival needs, such as receiving steady income to purchase food, Imani provides a variety of services at their sessions: many churches also double as warming centers, clothing closets, or needle exchange sites, and serve hot food to attendees.
“We understand that when people are using substances, that bridges might be burnt, and relationships are splintered,” Bellamy said. “How can we help people feel like they can gain skills and focus on their dreams? Some of these are recovery-oriented goals – reuniting with family members and children. How can we help them move towards those things?” Through Imani’s coaching, participants often set goals such as rekindling familial relationships or finding suitable employment.
Imani’s facilitators are already involved with the churches and known by many attendees; many of them have directly experienced or observed substance use’s effects in the community. Jimenez-Diaz told me that he was once a part of a gang, and that when he returned as a church leader, he was a “completely different man.” Part of ImaniYOU’s success comes from the fact that psychiatrists of color are chosen.
“This is the first time that these people have actual doctors they are able to access and have conversations with…and that look like them,” Anderson said.
Facilitators are trained in understanding the harm reduction model in order to address the psychological needs of community members in recovery. Focusing on encouraging safe and limited substance use instead of imposing full abstinence, the model aims to support individuals in a way that feels appropriate and doable at their current stage in their recovery journey –– it is a healthcare approach and philosophy that focuses on “meeting people where they are,” Bellamy emphasized. “By saving lives, we give people another day to hold onto hope, and perhaps that’s another day we get to reach them in some way.”
This idea of giving individuals the ability to generate and share a sense of hope –– and continuously bolstering their sense of independence and agency –– underlies Imani’s philosophy of care. Historically disproportionate death rates reflect the lack of attention previously paid to this approach: the harm reduction model is unique in its capacity to walk beside people instead of in front of them. Rather than enforcing a diagnostic hierarchy, Imani’s horizontal support structure helps humanize.
“[We are] focused on bridging people back to their communities,” Bellamy said. “Harm reduction is about teaching people how to live, how to develop the skills of how to live. That’s something that takes place over time.”
Concretely, facilitators are trained rigorously for three days on the philosophy of the harm reduction model, where they are taught practical skills like narcan administration and urine testing for fentanyl, as well as two particular psychological frameworks that they are told to concretely plan their teachings around. The first is the 8 Dimensions of Wellness––a model created by the psychologist Peggy Swarbrick in the 1990s, which includes emotional, environmental, financial, intellectual, physical, occupational, spiritual, and social health. The second is the 5 R’s of Citizenship, which stand for rights, roles, resources, responsibilities, and relationships.
They are not taught explicitly to include faith in their teachings, Bellamy told me, but she says each church has developed their own style in the workshops, some of which explicitly include biblical text. To leaders in Imani, spirituality is something far larger than, for example, belief in Christ.
“It’s love,” Cooper said simply, explaining to me the precise reasons why Imani has had such an effect on community members. “You can feel it.” Jimenez-Diaz told me that he includes every name of each participant he has ever worked with in his personal prayers to God; he writes them down on a list and prays for them — but religion is more a vehicle for Imani’s goal of connection than its foundation.
Imani’s spirituality is not defined or enclosed by traditional religion; rather, it arises from a deep intimacy with one another and the self. The church serves as a space for this togetherness to emerge, but it is the people who make the program what it is.
‘The right words for the right moment’
Creating a space that thaws the distance between people is a responsibility that rests heavily on the shoulders of the facilitators. As they lead workshops over the course of 22 to 24 weeks, depending on the program, they are tasked with becoming closely acquainted with each participant and ensuring that the environment they exist in is welcoming. Something that is not scientifically definable is the key cause of success in this psychiatric treatment program: the interpersonal bonds formed are what bring people back, week by week.
At the Casa de Oración y Adoración in New Haven, the church where Jimenez-Diaz works, senior pastor Hector Caraballo will sometimes start workshops with sermons written for the participants. When he first moved to New Haven, he said, it was “overwhelming” to see all the participants in recovery with the responsibility of responding to their needs. But when I spoke to him and others leading the events, their eyes were firm, unquestioning, and lit with desire to understand others.
“It’s a big responsibility,” he says, of writing words to be delivered to those going through recovery. “You want to be able to have an impact––to deliver the right words for the right moment. It’s a burden; at the same time, once you start writing, and you have the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, everything works together.”
The effort placed into responding to spiritual needs has fostered love for the program among participants. Many participants lack jobs and are unhoused, and sometimes enter and leave the prison system; as such, a significant proportion of alumni do not have personal phones or periodically change their phone numbers. Despite these difficulties, many participants have tried to stay connected with the program. At the Varick A.M.E. Church, for example, alumni from past years will attend the graduation of the newest class, where the most recent graduates give comments. Cooper tells me how moved she is by this. “I get texts,” she said. “They’ll come back, asking me how I am.” Cooper herself recalls these participants with fierce compassion: she tells me about bringing her group to a class field trip to the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, where one man watched a play for the first time in his life.
Sometimes, she said, losing participants to overdose during the course of the program happens. People have the space to share their grief––to let it live, and watch it move towards and away from themselves.
Post-graduation, word-of-mouth referral from alumni is often the main channel by which new participants are recruited to Imani. According to Bellamy, at least 70% of individuals coming into Imani programming are not receiving any professional substance use treatment. Imani’s rapid growth over the years is a testament to its ability to reach individuals––and continue reaching those they know––in communities normally distanced from the medical establishment: it has graduated 1,500 participants in Connecticut since its inception in 2017, and expanded to 11 churches in the state. Four Black churches were the first to pilot the program: Varick in New Haven, 224 EcoSpace in Hartford, Mount Aery Baptist Church in Bridgeport, and the Burning Bush Family Life Center in Waterbury.
One year later, expansion occurred to 4 Latine churches––New Beginnings Baptist Church in Hartford, Casa de Oración y Adoración in New Haven, Prince of Peace in Bridgeport, and Oasis of Blessings Christian Center in New Britain, although the New Britain partner has since changed to Greater Harvest Church. Beyond the 8 initial programs, expansion has occurred to Mount Olive African Methodist Epispocal Church in Waterbury, the Blackwell A.M.E. Zion Church in Hartford, and the Spottswood AME Zion Church in New Britain, both serving predominantly Black communities. According to Anderson, they were chosen “because they were working in the community,” aligning with Imani’s harm reduction model. Expansion occurred to Rhode Island in 2021 and Louisiana in 2022; a third church in New Orleans recently completed its training.
Imani’s longevity — now at seven years of operation, with more participants registering each week, and new churches being trained in different states –– is unique. Frederick Altice, the director of the Yale Center for Community Research, which assisted Imani with advice on community engagement in its earliest days, told me that a common but problematic feature of Yale’s community-oriented programming is known as “parachuting,” in which Yale researchers will begin healthcare initiatives in New Haven, often with good intentions, and then allow the programs to peter out. Funding structures with limited terms of two to five years can prevent further extensions. But Imani’s earlier success allowed it to receive the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s U01 grant, which now funds ImaniYOU.
“We talked to the people who were going to be using our framework,” said Mark Costa, a Yale research scientist who is a co-investigator for Imani. Having reviewed the results of the earliest roundtable conversations from 2017, he assisted with the design of the project and the collection of the data on recovery, where baseline intakes are compared with qualitative interviews three to six months out. “Many times, people design a solution for people without consulting them, and when it doesn’t work, they blame the people. That’s structural racism.”
The fact that word-of-mouth is Imani’s dominant means of attracting participants speaks to the capacity of feeling –– of love –– to bring people through its doors, to feel transformed, and to tell their loved ones to do the same. This fluid, person-to-person transfer reflects well on Imani’s style of treatment.
‘There’s plenty more’
As Jimenez-Diaz’s session draws to a close, a chorus of amens rises from the crowd. He encourages all to seek freshly-prepared food from the kitchen. Church members lay out the food on the back counter––steaming yellow rice, crisp servings of salad, freshly sliced bananas, vanilla and strawberry cookies, and hot coffee. Participants take rolls of bread from white boxes labeled Imani. As plates are handed out, participants settle back into their original seats.
The music, still faintly playing from the speaker, is now overlaid with murmurs of interaction. Participants make small talk with their tablemates; they offer each other resources they no longer use. Hot steam rises from the plates of rice. They drop off and pick up items from a communal resource table, where warm clothes, and even two boxes of makeup, are laid out. I hear laughter on top of the music, and the sound of Spanish and English rising and falling. The words run together, like honey. Threads raised from the workshop are re-opened, wrestled with, and re-knit. I have forgotten the January chill outside.
“Half of these people don’t eat,” says a woman helping serve the food, referring to the food insecurity faced by many who struggle with substance use in New Haven. As we speak, a participant walks up, asking for more. She smiles at him. “Of course, there’s plenty more.”
After some time, the number of participants begins to dwindle; it is already past 8 p.m., the session’s end time. They take covered plates of bananas to-go and tuck away hoodies from the communal table. They re-adorn their hats and scarves. “I love you,” several say, to one another and to the facilitators, as they leave the room. One by one, they slip through the doors.
As the room mostly empties, I hear the cadence of Spanish. One of the participants is still sitting at the front of the room with Jimenez-Diaz, discussing the Bible. Jimenez-Diaz is reading verses from his phone; he moves from chapter to chapter, citing lines and interpreting them for the participant, who responds. They are rooted there for several minutes, timeless. Finally, when they part, it is with a fist-bump and a handshake.
I walk outside. The tall red cross on the beige exterior wall of the church is there, but I do not notice it. Instead, I see a participant singing Hallelujah to himself as he bikes away into the night. The lamplight catches his red knit cap and sets it aglow.
every stamp I’ve licked and locked on my skin. For every darling I’ve mailed myself to. Rubbing shoulders with birthday cards, tax notices, divorce papers, bank statements. Rumbling down Interstate 75, the mailman hums a lyric about love & somewhere, his wife mouths the chorus over her morning cup of coffee. And I’m sitting in the back of the truck, wondering if you will slice me open with a kitchen knife or tear me apart with your hands, if you’ll hold me up to the sun, read these words in my voice or mouth them on your tongue. It’s been months, dear, and I’m finally starting to understand. All we can do is ask. The space between to & from is the answer. How many times have I lettered myself with cursive this unclean? And of course, you were never the type to attempt deciphering. Still, I keep writing. I have only ever wanted a space on the fridge door. For someone to hoard me like those old photos they cannot recall posing for, hung only to prove they were visible. I was on the road for a long time. I traveled halfway across the world & I am more illegible than I ever was. So how kind, when you’ve arrived at a doorstep and it doesn’t let you in, for the mailman to tuck you back in his pocket, carry you past every stop sign you refused to surrender to. Return to sender. Or
