photo by Thomas Breen

One of the exercises in CLP is about identifying and clarifying our own personal values. We each identify our top 5 values, writing one each on 5 index cards. Then we have to drop one… and another… until we are forced to choose our number 1, top value. What is your current One right now?

I remember that exercise; it was so hard, I really struggled with it. But in a good way; that’s the point, right?

Absolutely. If I asked you to do the exercise right now, what would be your top value and why?

Community. It was the one I held onto then, and I would say that hasn’t changed. Especially now, remembering that we can be in community while we’re physically distant from each other. I hate the term “social distancing,” because it really is physical distancing. I’ve never been on so many Zoom and phone calls in my life; it’s definitely not social distancing.

It’s even more important to remember that we can be in community right now. I’ve been remembering both as a reporter, and as a person.

As a reporter, I’m remembering to seek out the stories that are still really important to me. At The Arts Paper, I have a framework: who is making the art, who is the art for, what is the level of access — financially, logistically, can you get there on the bus? What is the intended audience, is it exclusionary, and to whom? So there’s that sense of community that I try to hold onto in my reporting.

But also as a person, and as a friend, I’ve tried to remember that even if I get stressed out with work, I have to set aside time every day or every other day to just check in on the people in my life. My brother and his boyfriend are in Brooklyn, and that scares me a lot. My mom is in Minneapolis, my dad is in mid-Michigan. So I check in with them. And with friends. Some are isolating alone, or in places where they don’t feel safe, or they feel safe but are still just having a really hard time.

That was a very long-winded way of saying “community.” It’s still a value I really hold onto.

It’s beyond obvious to say, ‘wow, what a time we’re in.’ Within the context of today, but also in general – knowing there was a ‘Before-Covid’ and there will be an after, what is a big, burning leadership question you are wrestling with?

I’m going to borrow from a playwright I talked to over the weekend. One of the things I covered was a 24-hour Quarantined Play Festival. It was really cool — a local playwright and director, Sharece Sellem, came up with the prompts and the projects. One of the playwrights, Lori Sinclair Minor, had written a play about anti-Asian and Asian-American sentiment and xenophobia right now. It was, unfortunately, horribly timely. She said, ‘I want to be able to look back on this time and say that I was the person who stood up for other people, that I was the person who was on the right side of history.’

And that’s also how I feel. So everyday I’ve been asking myself, how is my coverage reflecting the current situation, and also how is it reflecting joy? People making beautiful art, sensitive art, and art that engages with the current moment in really messy ways is all very important right now.

But it’s also this question of: how will I say that I gave to mutual-aid networks at this time. Did I hoard food, or did I donate some of it? Did I keep my money, because I was afraid that I would lose my job, or did I give to others who I knew had less than I did?

I want to be able to look back and say that I did the right things and I helped people. With my reporting, and as a human in the world.

I think Americans are prone to the scarcity mindset. I think capitalism breeds the scarcity mindset. I’m very lucky, in that right now I am financially ok. But I do have these moments of wondering, ‘can I afford to give a couple hundred dollars to a mutual-aid fund.’ And right now, the answer is yes. But I don’t know if that will always be the case.

It’s a weird time. It’s such a weird time.

Truly. And human beings, we’re just not built for managing the unknown very well.

Yes! And I’m angry that the federal government isn’t doing more. There was a really good opinion piece in The New York Times looking at the U.S. versus other countries. At this point, coronavirus is a global pandemic. And so there’s no place, except maybe Antarctica, that hasn’t been affected by this. And it was saying that in other countries you just don’t see the same degree of economic depravity and job loss, because these are countries that give a social safety net to people.

At the end of the day, people who have money can give to mutual-aid networks and that’s fantastic. But a federal bailout of 1,200 dollars per person — if you have a bank account and you’re a documented resident of the U.S. — is not going to cut it. I don’t want to minimize that amount of money, but that’s rent for one month, maybe with a couple of groceries thrown in.

How are you taking care of yourself these days? Physically, intellectually, emotionally, psychically, spiritually, how are you recharging, restoring?

It’s such an interesting question, because my answer is, not very well. I read. I love to read fiction. People Get Ready Bookspace is a little bit of an addiction, everything I have gotten from there is wonderful. Reading really feeds my soul. I love to cook, I cook a lot. And I sleep — I love to sleep.

I’m also very lucky that I’m in relative isolation but with my partner, New Haven Indy managing editor Tom Breen. We live together. We have what we call “good love,” which might be schmaltzy, but it’s true. I’ve read all of these articles, including some that family members have sent me, with titles like ‘What to do if you’re fighting with your partner in quarantine.’ And it’s not that we haven’t had that problem, but it’s like, the world is on fire so we don’t fight about stupid shit. It’s a sense of steadiness, like not feeling the floor is going to fall out from under you.

Also small joys. Everything is blooming right now, because it’s springtime. And I am still able to go outside and walk around. To see the trees really just puts a smile on my face. To be able to eat close to the food chain, and to be able to support local businesses. They’re small bursts of joy. I worry that food gets a little too close to having a Pavlovian response, but there definitely is a sense of satisfaction in making something — knowing you can feed yourself and take care of yourself.

Would you have answered that question differently a month ago, before corona — B.C.?

I’m trying mid-COVID, to establish boundaries — and not doing a very good job. Especially in New Haven and the greater New Haven area, there is an intensely creative cultural community that I’m really proud of. It’s one of the reasons this is my home.

However, it means there are constantly people reaching out who want their book covered, or their play covered, or who think their exhibition is so worthy of coverage that it should push whatever I’m working on. And it’s hard, because all of them are worthy. I’m not just saying that. Almost every project that comes across my desk is really worthy, and my bandwidth is finite.

So the boundary you’re working on is between your personal space and work space?

Yes. And now my personal space is my office, so it becomes harder. And I think it’s hard for a lot of people when those spaces are collapsed onto each other.

What inspires you, gives you hope these days?

Science, actually. I am a deep believer in science, always have been. One of my parents is a physician. I know scientists are out there working their asses off on a vaccine. That gives me a lot of inspiration.

And, I’m incredibly inspired by the number of frontline workers I know. Doctors, paramedics, grocery store workers. They give me a great deal of inspiration and perspective every single day. To a certain degree they did beforehand too — B.C. — but I think nothing magnifies social stratification like a pandemic. I am so lucky. I have a roof over my head, I have food in my fridge, the heat works, I have hot water.

And reading good reporting! The way a sentence can convey news and be beautiful. I love fiction writing, but also essays and news writing. I read a great piece over the weekend in the Boston Review, “Markets v. Lies,” talking about uncompensated labor, among other things. Reading really good reporting inspires me and gives me ideas.

You mentioned one of your parents is a physician. How are they holding up right now?

My dad. He’s in mid-Michigan. It’s not as bad as, say, New York, but it’s still bad. He has a math-science brain, so he’ll provide updates like, ‘this is how the spread of the coronavirus is going up interstate 95 in Michigan.’ Which for him I think is very precise, and for me is just very scary. Because he’s in his 60s, and he’s an asthmatic, and he’s my dad!

Do you have conversations about his emotional state and how he’s protecting himself?

We do, yes. He’s really good about talking about that. He will protect himself to the degree that he can. But it’s scary and at the same time it makes me so angry at hospitals and more largely, corporate supply chains, for not supplying places with adequate PPE. There is no reason that a country with as much capital as the U.S. should not have had oodles and oodles of PPE, when public health experts have been saying for years that the pandemic was bound to happen because of how global society has become.

Do you think about how this crisis might be shaping us, or do you have hopes about how it might shape us?

My hope is that there’s a huge paradigm shift — in this country and globally.

There are things about the U.S. that have been true that have just been magnified. There always should have been universal health care for Americans. We already should have been taking planes less. Factories that emit fossil fuels already should have been running less. We already should have had massive prison reform before a pandemic forced us to think about it.

There are ways in which we were being cruel to the planet that are at least being tempered right now. But one fear I have is that there will be a huge economic push afterwards, and it will result in massive fossil fuel emissions as people try to make up for lost time.

In my utopia we would have Medicare for all and a functioning welfare system and a much bigger safety net. When one dissects the word “welfare,” it just means taking care of people. It shouldn’t have any stigma attached to it. It just means making sure people can eat, and people get access to the public education and health care that they’re entitled to.

I would love to see a major shift in the arts too. In theaters, museums, dance companies — in 3 weeks, the pandemic has shown us a system that was thriving because it relied on freelancers who were not compensated adequately for their labor. The response from a lot of places has just been to issue massive layoffs and furloughs, instead of asking how we can create a model that works for the future.

I read something this morning that MOMA had terminated all of its freelance educator contracts, even while it is one of the wealthiest museums in the world, with a one billion dollar endowment. It’s the huge divide between the haves and the have-nots.

Now, what I fear is going to happen, is that the CDC will lift restrictions sooner than it should, because Trump is a big ‘ole capitalist and capitalism does not do well in a pandemic. We’ll go back to a society that depends on uncompensated or under-compensated labor, the exploitation of especially black and brown and immigrant bodies, and social stratification that comes out of 400 years of institutional racism in the U.S.

That we will have gone through a horrible economic depression, and nothing will change afterwards.

As we reflect here on values, leadership, and hopes for a healthier future, I wonder if you would introduce us to someone you are (or were) close with, who shaped (or shapes) you and how you view leadership and possibility for a better community and world?

My little brother, Benji. He’s not little — he’s six feet tall. Well, 5’ 11.

He works for The Trevor Project, which is a 24-hour, 7 day-a-week anti-suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth. From a very young age, he’s always had a social conscience that is 100,000 times bigger than mine. And I don’t say that to fish for compliments, he’s always just had a very strict sense of right and wrong.

We were one of the only Jewish families in the WASP-y suburb of Detroit where we grew up. When we were kids, the town renamed one of the streets “Christmas Street” around Christmas. He wrote this really irate letter to the local paper about how offensive it was, how they would never re-name it Chanukah Street.

Because he was so eloquent, even as a middle-schooler, people wrote in thinking he was a grown up . People were nasty. He just held onto his belief and didn’t let anyone get him down. But that’s the kind of person he is. He’s always expected a lot of himself, and also given a lot of himself.

Before he worked for The Trevor Project, he worked for an education nonprofit. He’s always had that at the forefront of his mind. In just doing what he does, he has always inspired me to be a better person.

When I made the transition from museum work and academia to reporting about five years ago, it was partly looking at him – and looking at those different worlds — and thinking, I don’t want to be in this very white, white-walled, ivory tower any more. I want to be doing work that puts me in community. It was partly just looking at the way he lives his life.

Tell us more about your transition from museum and academia to reporting?

My BA and MA are both in art history. I really loved art history, and I still love art. I to go museums all the time – well, not now, unfortunately, but I did B.C. I studied art history because I love writing, and I love art.

I was very moved in college because it was this discipline where you have to know a little bit of everything. Which is sort of like reporting, but I didn’t make that connection until much later. You have to know about the political, social, racial history of a period, and then look at a piece of art and ask, ‘how is this person synthesizing all of this.’

I did my BA and then a Fulbright in Paris. I studied how people were writing about French women artists in the nineteenth century. I did my MA, then got a job at the Yale Art Gallery, a teaching position in the department of prints and drawings. That’s what brought me to New Haven.

I was a fellow there for two years. I loved parts of it, including teaching from objects. But it was also a field where everything relied on the level of higher education I had. I would be completely dismissed when, in regular conversations with a professor, they heard I didn’t have a PhD. Like, that was the end of the conversation.

I was planning to leave and return to grad school for my doctorate. I started freelancing for the New Haven Independent, and Paul Bass offered me a job. Instead of going to grad school, I took the job. To this day, it’s the best decision I’ve made in my life (other than maybe going on a second date with my partner of seven years).

Are you an artist?

I used to write poetry, and I miss it. When I was in college, I did competitive slam poetry. If anyone wants to find a way to take all of the joy and happiness out of poetry, turn it into a competition. I was being coached on how to get a 10 out of 10, and it totally sapped it of all its fun, creativity and joy. I do still love reading poetry so much.

Today, I lead a creative writing group through the Wilson Library. Very recently, we’ve gone online. I love taking photographs, though I don’t think of myself as a photographer. I’m part of a group called Mending Minyan – an anti-Zionist Shabbat group. Through them, I’ve become more spiritual in the last year. I don’t think of spirituality as art, but I think of it as intimately woven into arts culture and community.

What do you recommend to us, in each of these categories:

  • Reading – Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernadine Evaristo
  • Listening – everything by Emily King
  • Eating – We’ve been eating a lot of brown rice and kidney beans with lots of dried chipotle pepper. But I’ll recommend Mark Bittman’s No Knead Bread, because it’s easy and you probably haven the ingredients in your house. And kids can make it with you if you have kids in your house.
  • Watching – Unorthodox on Netflix – intriguing, different, not what we were expecting. And Ru Paul’s Drag Race. My brother turned me onto it.
  • Laughing – Check in with a friend.
  • Wildcard – Take a walk if you can. Go outside and take a walk. And if you don’t have legs that will carry you on a walk, move creatively in a way that feels good for your body.

Learn more about Lucy and The Arts Paper

To get in touch with Lucy directly: lucy@newhavenarts.org

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