Focus on Fellowships: Noah Falck of Just Buffalo

"One reason we started doing [the fellowships], or one of many, is to bring more of an awareness of Buffalo as a literary arts city, as an artistic location, where you can come and be inspired. We want to change that narrative of what Buffalo is to a lot of people."

LitNYS: Can you tell me a little bit about your role at Just Buffalo Literary Center?

NF: I’ve been the Education Director at Just Buffalo for 10 years. Now we're in a transition phase. Laurie Dean Torrell is retiring next month, and Barbara Cole is moving into the role of Executive & Artistic Director. 

I am moving into a new role that we're calling Literary Director, which is part education, part programming, part community engagement, part curation. It is a unique position with a wide spectrum of responsibilities. 

LitNYS: Just Buffalo has a huge presence in Buffalo. It’s a hub where you provide connection to the literary arts for the greater community, bringing in writers, hosting writing series. You could tell me what the Education Director does, but the truth is, it leads into all these other projects.

NF: That's such a clear articulation of what I do. One of our taglines for the organization is that we educate, we advocate, and we curate. We're trying to do all these things if you can imagine the overlapping Venn diagram. When we're presenting our BABEL series, which brings authors of acclaim to Kleinhans Music Hall, where the Philharmonic performs — it is a curated event but also a community conversation and an educational experience. We invite schools and universities, and also people in the community who maybe don't know, or haven't had that experience with these incredible writers, who are often discussing the state of the world — politics, history, or religion infused with the literature. All of our programs want to hit all of those things — advocacy, curation, and education. 

LitNYS: Can you tell me about the fellowship program at Just Buffalo?

NF: This next year will be our fifth year of offering the fellowship program. It's a newer program. It feels newer because the pandemic doesn't feel part of the timeline, in a way. 

We offer two fellowships: one for youth, high school students (ages 12-18) in the Buffalo area, and a Poetry Fellowship that takes place in Buffalo during the month of August. Like most fellowships, it gives space for writers to be writers. It's paying them, and giving them time to hole up in a comfortable apartment to read, write, or walk around the neighborhood, to be inspired, and have that uninterrupted time to be with their work.

We want to offer a payment, a stipend for young writers between the ages of 12 and 18. Instead of getting a summer job cutting lawns, babysitting, or working as a camp counselor, we pay them to do a creative writing project. We believe that this sort of project is as important as anything else that you may be doing as a high school student.

We have mentors who work with the youth, meeting with them on a weekly basis. We read their work, give them feedback, pair them up with other writers or artists depending on their specific project. The fellowships fall under our Education programs, and are also infused with advocating for creativity and space for writing.

LitNYS: That's incredible. I didn't know you offered a Youth Fellowship.

NF: Since we started the Youth Fellowship, we're seeing that it changes how youth think about what they can do with a project. Here are 2 months of the summer, and we're going to give you $1,200 to realize some sort of creative project. These fellowship experiences have the ability to transform people in the long run.

LitNYS: What are the values of Just Buffalo that play into how you think of the fellowships?

NF: I'll turn to the mission statement for this question, which is about transforming individual lives and communities through the literary arts. The fellowships are using that lens of the literary arts to create transformative experiences. Transformative experiences can be reading a book that you may not have ever read, and that book hits you at the right time in your life, and it opens up a different doorway, or you're given that month [of the fellowship] to just sit with something in your mind that may become a book or a chapter of a story or something else.

I think that even though these may not always feel like active, transformative experiences, they are. And so I think that that's sort of the root of the matter: How can we continue to create — through a small amount of funding — valuable space and time for people to just live in those creative moments?

LitNYS: What are some of the lessons you've learned from hosting the fellowships?

NF: For the Youth Fellowship, we started out trying to mirror the Poetry Fellowship. But it's really completely different. We didn't have a mentor set up for the youth during the first couple of years. We realized that in our weekly check-ins they really needed to have somebody who could oversee them directly. Robin Jordan, our Writing Center Coordinator, has been doing an incredible job of orchestrating a lot of those conversations and setting up mentors that work specifically with youth on the fellowship. 

For instance, the youth don't have to be genre-specific, their projects don’t have to be poetry or fiction. Though, we do ask them in their application to explain what they're planning to do with the summer fellowship opportunity.

We've had a songwriter — somebody who wrote a whole album in the span of two months. We've had a journalist who created a mini-newspaper. What's tricky for us is finding who we know in our network to help these young people dive deeper into the content-specific conversations and also be able to help them scaffold their projects into success. Even though the fellows are young, some of them are wonderfully intense people. We want to give them the space that allows the freedom to be exploratory and successful. 

For the Poetry Fellowship, finding housing where the fellows stay for a month, finding an accessible space for them where they're comfortable and sort of removed, but also in a location where they can have an authentic Buffalo experience can be tricky. Two of the fellows came at the height of the pandemic, and we were completely hands off — dropping food and supplies off in front of the house.

What specific apartment or house, and what neighborhood do we put them in? We've had various conversations about it. I think we're still learning how to best navigate it. But, all the fellows have cherished the experience so far. We have been equally grateful. 

LitNYS: The Youth Fellowship is unique. How do you recruit youth to apply?

NF: We have a weekly newsletter for the Writing Center that goes out to teachers, parents, and all the youth who regularly attend the center. We try to reach out to as many educators and parents and share on our socials.

It's been pretty successful. I think on average, we have around 25 to 30 applications, which isn't a huge amount. But, this is a very specific opportunity for a young person, someone who will want to spend their summer writing a novel or making a movie. I know I wasn't like that in high school, but there will always be plenty of young people who are interested. 

LitNYS: What would you say to organizations and publishers to encourage them that fellowships are, in fact, positive for an organization?

NF: One reason we started doing this, or one of many, is to bring more of an awareness of Buffalo as a literary arts city, as an artistic location, where you can come and be inspired. We want to change that narrative of what Buffalo is to a lot of people who’ve written it off as just snowfall, chicken wings, and football — which is fine — but there's so much more to this community and until you come and have that experience, you don't know.

With Just Buffalo, we're trying to change that narrative through the literary arts — using literary arts as a pathway to say, “Hey, Buffalo's got this thing going on, come in and experience it. Come here and write.” And during the month of August, Buffalo is as beautiful as any city in the country. I’m not joking. It's stunning.

LitNYS: I find it so interesting to hear you talk about how significant place is to the Poetry Fellowship. There’s an understanding of the vast landscape of New York literature. 

NF: Another one of Just Buffalo’s programs is advocating for the history of literary arts in Buffalo. We call it Lit City. It spotlights the iconic writers who've been here — those who have lived here or grew up here. Some people came here to teach at the University at Buffalo during the “heyday” of Buffalo. The program teaches people about Lucille Clifton, Ishmael Reed and Robert Creeley who walked these same streets. There's history here, important roots began growing and continue to grow in Buffalo.

LitNYS: This leads me nicely into the last question. What are some of the exciting projects coming up at Just Buffalo?

NF: We just announced the next season of the Silo City Reading Series, which is a summer poetry and a multi-media event series. We have a local poet reading alongside a visiting poet of acclaim. In between the readings, we have a musical act as well as some sort of visual art, installation, or dance performance.

It all takes place inside a 120-foot-high abandoned grain silo that sits on the edge of the Buffalo River. The poetry fellow will have the opportunity to read at the silos in August with visiting poet Roger Reeves.