TheBurg

N athaniel Gadsden's Writers Wordshop attendance is small this night. It's the first Friday after the holidays. ree people have come out in the cold to join Nate Gadsden at Midtown Scholar Bookstore. When it's time to share thoughts and readings, Wordshop veteran Diana Carel-Diaz produces a creased, browned sheet that may have once been legal paper. "We love dogs, but we have cats," she says in introduction. "I just pulled this out after I don't know how many years." She begins to read amid book-lined shelves of contemporary fiction, the works of Terry McMillan and Walter Mosley behind her. Her voice twinkles with mischief. Her words sparkle, capturing centuries of feline mystery. "Slippery, skittish, fawnish thing, incarnate king with wit and sting/ slender, impertinent little slip, impervious, quicksilver wit," she reads. "Obstinate, obstreperous and loud/cruel, treacherous and proud, the disappearance causing grief was, like yourself, beyond belief," she continues. "What mercurial unjust thief could turn your substance into air, transfer you to an unseen lair? Your presence still is everywhere." Since 1977, Writers Wordshop has hosted words expressed in poetry, prose, song and stories about family, friends and whatever may have happened that day. Gadsden is the founder and driving force who has turned the power of the written and spoken word into a means for change and self-fulfillment. PoWer AND IMPACt Gadsden is a Harrisburg native—a William Penn High School Tiger, he notes proudly. He discovered poetry in 1968, when his basketball coach ordered the players to stay away from racial unrest roiling the city. e coach brought in the Rev. Belgium Baxter, who talked of peace and broke out in poetry. "I was so impressed with the power and the impact that I started writing myself," says Gadsden. ough he believed in the "quote-unquote revolution," he chose the peaceful path of Martin Luther King Jr. and "was never a person that would get out there and throw Molotov cocktails." "I wanted to be a person who spoke about the issues," says Gadsden. At what was then West Chester State College, he delved into the poetry scene. Coming home to Harrisburg after graduation, he got involved with Mim Warden and e People Place, now the arts facilitator Jump Street. ey got a national grant to bring giant names in poetry to little, ole Harrisburg—Amiri Baraka, E. Ethelbert Miller, Gwendolyn Brooks. ey also embarked on something homegrown to encourage the aspirations of writers. A typo by Warden turned "workshop" into "wordshop." ey added Nate's name to distinguish it from other "wordshops" in the United States, and Nathaniel Gadsden's Writers Wordshop was born. e wordshop has been in different spaces citywide over the years. Its current home, every Friday of the month except 3rd in the Burg day, is Midtown Scholar. Five special programs are held at the Pennsylvania State Museum yearly. Gadsden also takes wordshop variations to other venues—a Harrisburg School District after-school program, county departments, state prisons. He shares poetry as therapy, because, in his life, amid the disappointment and rage of "discriminations, segregation, shootings, marches," he has found solace in poetry. "e poets allowed me to say it and feel it and at the same time not go to jail over it or kill anybody," he says. "It gave release. It's not just about bees and trees and the birds. It's about real people." It'S theIr WorDS Gadsden is the kind of person likely, at any moment, to run into someone whose life he has touched. During this interview, sitting in e Little Scholar section of Midtown Scholar, urban planner Tashya Dalen was at the next table with her children. She remembered Master of Words Nathaniel Gadsden builds his legacy, one poem, one person, at a time. by M. DIANe MCCorMICk

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