Amena Brown:
Hey, you all, another episode of HER with Amena Brown. This week I'm doing an episode called, Behind the Poetry where I share one of my poems with you and talk about the process of how the poem got written and ready for stage. This week, I'm sharing my poem Roots and Wings. And in this poem, I tell the story of one of my first times ever performing my own poetry. Take a listen.
Amena Brown:
I didn't mean to do it. I mean, they sold me out. And as soon as he asked were there any poets in the house, I was the one that got finger pointed, pushed and shoved the center of a carpet stage, a tiny bookstore, Montgomery, Alabama. It was called Roots and Wings. And I was probably standing somewhere between Nikki Giovanni's Love Poems and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. And I think I recalled Nathan McCall, because it definitely made me want to holler. When I looked out at the 50 some odd of my classmates faces staring back at me while I nervously tried my photographic memory trying to recall the words on a page I'd written over and over again, but never imagined I'd say out loud in front of anyone.
Amena Brown:
I couldn't believe that anybody was on the edge of their seat listening to me. I was only 17, but somewhere I found the courage and it carried me line for line until the end. And even after all the hugs and smiles from friends, I was still shaking. And that's when I knew this was real. That's when I knew that words have wings. That they're kind of like birds, but mostly like children who you groom and raise. You hope you've shaped them well. That a sky that has no limits will receive them. That someday somebody will take them home, call them their own, that they will find a place to belong.
Amena Brown:
See, I came from a line where righteousness ran through the blood like sugar and rolling stone daddies. And maybe the people who were pushing me had been here long before my classmates. Maybe my grandmother and my grandfather and their preacher, sisters and brothers were pushing me too. See, they fed me parables and I acquired a taste for truth. They stood behind pulpits and I stand behind this mic, but just like them, I got to get on my knees and hum prayers when words don't suffice. I got to learn to sing the hymns that can not be found in hymn books. Learn to lean on everlasting arms and hold fast to the words that only God can write on hearts because these hands, they never knew cotton, but the hands that did, they knew how to spin stories. Knew how to sew quilts of memory so I could see my family history in a stitch.
Amena Brown:
And every time my grandmother speaks, I realize that words have roots. That they're kinds of like trees, but mostly like seeds who you groom and raise. You hope you plant them well. That fertile grounds will receive them. That someday somebody will take them home call them their own. That they will find a place to belong. And words keep encouraging me to dream. Keep reminding me that God listens when I sing. And that's how I know this is real and I am still shaking.
Amena Brown:
So I think I wrote this poem around 2005 or 2006, because I believe I was writing this poem for a slam competition. And if you are listening to this and you are not familiar with slam poetry, the type of poetry that I perform is called spoken word poetry, and slam poetry is the competitive side of spoken word poetry. So all slam poetry is spoken word, but not all spoken word is slam poetry, okay. But at the time I was competing to be on one of the slam teams here in Atlanta. The team that I was competing to be on was what was then the Java Monkey slam team. I believe I was writing this poem to use in one of our local competitions.
Amena Brown:
Basically how the competitions worked is you competed in your local poetry venue over a period of several months. Each month, the top two winners went on to the finals and every year there would be one finals slam where all of the top two winners got to compete. And then the top five scores, see, here I go again. You all know we went through this when I was trying to say the word horror, so I'm pretty sure I don't really say score. I'm pretty sure it's just score and you all just add the ER on the end. But the top five people who scored the best or scored the highest, right, those five people became the slam team.
Amena Brown:
So I believe I was working on this during that time. And it's also an interesting time for me to think about as far as the season of my life I was in, when I was writing this because it was around, it was around '05, '06 that I also went through a church breakup. Any of you that either grew up in church or have attended church at some point in your life, know that sometimes it calls for a breakup. I had been attending a church all through college and into my early to mid 20s, and some really unhealthy things happened at the church. There were a lot of things that imploded during that time.
Amena Brown:
I had really spent most of my college and early 20s life really very busy in church doing a lot of volunteer work and leadership things and performing and writing poetry and stuff like that. So when I went through my church breakup, I returned back to the poetry scene, which is where I started performing. And I guess I should have started there. I started performing poetry towards the end of high school, and it was maybe around '96 when the movie Love Jones had come out that I had started writing poems. I was starting to ... Well, I guess I should say that I started writing poems that I wanted to perform. If you're familiar with the movie Love Jones, which is a fantastic black romantic film starring Nia Long and Larenz Tate. If you haven't seen it, go watch it because it's amazing.
Amena Brown:
But in watching that film, Larenz Tate plays a poet, a spoken word poet in the Chicago poetry scene. And this was the first movie that I remember seeing where I saw someone performing poetry like that. And I was immediately like, I have to do this. I have to go home and do this. So that's what led me into performing, and I'll talk more about that when I tell you the real life story behind the story that is in the poem itself. So when I moved to Atlanta for college, I moved here to attend Spelman College, shout out to all my Spelmanites listening.
Amena Brown:
When I moved here to Atlanta to go to college, Atlanta had then and still has today a very thriving poetry scene, but there was something about that era of time that I moved here. I moved here in '98. This was right as we were about to see television shows like Def Poetry Jam show up on the scene. There were just a lot of ways that spoken word poets were beginning to become a part of more of a mainstream lexicon, not just the underground community of us that were going to open mics and things. But where I lived in San Antonio, when I was growing up in high school at that time, there was no poetry scene in San Antonio. So, I went to my first real adult open mics when I got here to Atlanta. And now I'm not just watching a poet perform in a movie, but I'm watching poets that live in the city where I live, and of course in my mind, at 19 years old that are grown adults, have apartments and houses and jobs and taxes, right?
Amena Brown:
So this was the stage where I started performing and started to realize that it wasn't just that I loved writing, but I also loved performing. And it was in those rooms that I really cut my chops learning how to perform poetry, right? Well, shortly after that, I really got involved in a college ministry that was connected to the church that I was going to at the time. So I left a lot of what was the local poetry scene after a few years, because I got really busy doing a lot of church stuff. And so, when the church breakup happened, that was the perfect reason for me to return back to my roots and go back into the open mic setting. The open mic I went to was an open mic we used to have here in Decatur actually, which is a city, a little outside of Atlanta, and it was this venue called Java Monkey.
Amena Brown:
Java Monkey was a coffee house. The coffee shop portion where all the seating and the coffee bar was, they also had a wine bar, but it also had a patio, a covered patio outside. The covered patio area was where the open mic was hosted. I spent a few to several weeks just staying there through the whole open mic. I don't even know if I actually went up to perform every week. I was just there listening to everyone and I realized during that time that I didn't have a lot of poems that told my own story. And hearing the other poets tell all of these different stories of their life, but through various angles, some of them were telling really heartbreaking stories of abuse or assault. Some of them were telling vengeful stories of a breakup. Some of them were telling stories of the cities or States or countries that they were from originally. And I realized in not just in listening to their stories, but also in talking with some of the other poets that I needed to share more of who I was in my poetry.
Amena Brown:
And I know to some of you who may be avid readers or avid lovers of poetry, you might think, well, that makes complete sense, why would you not think that you should share your story in your poems? But, because I had been doing poetry in a very specific church setting, the church setting where I was performing by the time I got into my early to mid 20s was not only a church setting, but it was mostly predominantly white settings, mostly very conservative church settings. I was performing poetry in a particular part of the church service where the singers would be singing a worship song or a hymn, right? So there were only certain types of poems that could go in that part of the service, and I just ended up with a very large repertoire of poems that could go in that part of the service.
Amena Brown:
When I went back into the open mic space, I realized, oh, I've been writing this poem for that particular moment, but there are a lot of moments that could be great to hear a poem and a lot more of those moments require more storytelling. And then, I had that panic that I'm sure a lot of writers have where it's going to require of you to tell a story about yourself and what story will you tell that will actually be interesting enough? I didn't feel like I had a lot of dangerous or super provocative stories to tell, but as I said, really learning under the poems of these other poets at the open mic, I realized that's a part of the amazingness of poetry that even things that may seem like they're ordinary or may seem like they're not deserving of a poem are completely deserving of a poem because basically everything is deserving of a poem, right?
Amena Brown:
So I was in that space and I think it was around that time that I was starting to think about slam. I really stumbled into slam, honestly. My friend Selida and I shout out to Selida, who's also a wonderful poet. She and I randomly went to Java Monkeys open mic, which was every Sunday, but we didn't know that every second Sunday they have a slam. So we stumbled into slam poetry and had signed ourselves up on the list only to discover it was actually a slam. So we went ahead and did our poems, but that made me want to continue coming back to Java Monkey and seeing if I could write better, if I could figure out not how to replicate what I was watching the other poets do, but if I could figure out what are the stories I know or the stories I've experienced that would be great to share in this type of venue. So it was around that time that I wrote Roots and Wings and then began to perform with it as a part of slam.
Amena Brown:
Now, let's talk about the real life story behind what's in the poem Roots and Wings. So I was telling you all earlier how it was the movie Love Jones that made me want to write poetry. It's interesting because Roots and Wings is the story of a poem in a poem, right? Because the poem that I wrote that I'm talking about in Roots and Wings is actually a poem called Chocolate Mista. What can I say, okay? It was the '90s, all right. Yes, Mista Was spelled M-I-S-T-A the same as the R&B group that sang Blackberry Molasses. Some of you all listening, you all are like, yes, I remember all of this. Okay.
Amena Brown:
So Chocolate Mista was the poem that I wrote after watching Love Jones. I remember I watched the movie in the theater if I'm remembering right, and I did this habit that I would normally do. There are so many classes that I'm sure I wasn't learning exactly what we were being taught in class because I was writing poems during class. I did this all the time. And so, I remember being in class and having one page where I was writing notes from whatever our teacher was talking about, and then another page that I would flip to if it got boring or there wasn't something to write notes about that I was working on this poem.
Amena Brown:
Chocolate Mista was this, it was this imagined world where, I mean, now I could probably compare it to what I was trying to imagine with something like how AFROPUNK was in the before times. And I've never even been to AFROPUNK, but this is just me thinking about what the pictures from AFROPUNK look like, right? And I was imagining I'm at some music festival, and I think I'm imagining adult me, because I'm writing this, I'm writing Chocolate Mista at 16 years old, okay? So I'm imagining I'm at some festival where all of this black music is playing, there are all of these black people there singing and dancing and I'm walking around with my friends, I'm taking in the scene and I see this Black man that I am falling in love with at first sight in the poem and all the things I think I want to say to him. This is the vibe of the poem.
Amena Brown:
I finished the piece and I did something then that I still do now when I finish poems. The first thing I do is I pick a few friends and read the poem out loud to them. This is in part an exercise of getting the rhythm of reading the poem down and also feeling the nerves of sharing it with someone else, right? So I remember doing that with that poem and all of my friends, they loved it. I mean, it's very '90s. It does exist on the internet. There's a part of me that wants to tell you all where it is, and there's another part of me that just wants to leave you, wants to just leave you to your own devices to try to find it. But I had a blog back in the day that is still up. So, I will be nice to you all and put the link to this original poem in the show notes so that you can read what my first spoken word poem was like, okay?
Amena Brown:
So inside of the poem Roots and Wings, I'm writing about my experience performing Chocolate Mista for the first time. I had actually read Chocolate Mista to so many of my friends that I had memorized it. And I will add a layer here that another thing that I was falling in love with around the time of '96 was hip hop. There are a lot of things that draw us to hip hop for those of us that love it. And I say hip hop to mean hip hop as a culture which includes rap music but also includes fashion, includes a certain type of language and wording and lexicon, right? Includes all sorts of things that go beyond just rap music. So, I am definitely like an old school hip hop head or what some people would say like a true school hip hop head. I was falling in love with hip hop in this mid '90s timeframe, but was familiar with hip hop all the way back into the '80s, into the Run-DMC timeframe.
Amena Brown:
But what made me fall in love with hip hop was its writing. I was very drawn to what a lot of the amazing MCs of that time were doing in their writing. That at that era of hip hop, which is one of my favorite eras there was this amazing combination of really dope musicality as well as dope lyricism. So I was also studying Lauryn Hill and Rage and Boss. I was studying as many women who were MCs as I could, MC Lyte and Queen Latifah, but really I was familiar with MC Lyte and Queen Latifah from growing up. I think I was studying the women who were really pervasive in the '90s at that time, their music, their style, Left Eye, Missy Elliott, right?
Amena Brown:
So that style of writing is also entering the scene of how I wrote Chocolate Mista, but it's also still present in how I am writing Roots and Wings. So Hip hop informed a lot of the writing of the poem I'm talking about in Roots and Wings, and still informed a lot of Roots and Wings as well. So inside of Roots and Wings, I am talking about this moment that I am called upon in the middle of this bookstore. So here is what happened in real life. My senior year of high school, I was a part of a black history club that we had at our high school called Ujima. Ujima was the perfect, it was the perfect thing to be a part of in high school in the late '90s.
Amena Brown:
Ujima was a nod to one of the principles of Kwanzaa and it also included two step teams, one for guys and one for girls. So I was on, I think the one that was for guys was called Tribe and the one that was for girls was called Unity, right? So I was very involved in this club. This was probably the thing that I spent most of my extracurricular time doing that was related to school. The rest of my extracurriculars were spent at church and the choir and those things, but being a part of Ujima was amazing. I mean, we had crucial conflict and bust a rhymes to try to incorporate into our step routines. And if you're not familiar with step as a tradition, it's really a Black college tradition.
Amena Brown:
I think what happened is we had some people that had graduated from our high school that had gone on to be in Black fraternities and sororities and came back to show us how to step and that legacy continued. That's how we were a part of a high school step team. So as a part of Ujima, our senior year, we took a spring break trip to retrace the steps of Dr. King. Bless Miss Sanford's heart who took us on a bus. I just now, as an adult, I'm like, I can't even imagine this, she took us on a bus. I'm sure there were other chaperones, a few other chaperones, because we had another advisor and I don't remember there being parents there necessarily, because I know my mom wasn't. Anyway, I won't tell my other friends from high school, I won't tell their business about the other things that happened on that trip.
Amena Brown:
But regardless, she put all of us on a bus, a bunch of high school students and we rode that bus from San Antonio all the way to Atlanta and the last stop was Memphis. So we're riding from San Antonio, we stop in New Orleans for a little bit, then we stop in Alabama because it takes us getting into Alabama to really pick up on retracing Dr. King steps, right? So we stopped in Alabama, we stopped through Montgomery and Birmingham and then we go into Atlanta so that we can see these portions of Dr. King's experience growing up there where he pastored there, some of those things, Ebenezer, right? And then we end the trip in Memphis where Dr. King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, which is now a museum.
Amena Brown:
But the Roots and Wings part of the story happens when we stop in Alabama, in Montgomery, as I say in the poem at this store, which was called Roots and Wings. I believe it was a Black-owned bookstore. Every now and then when I would do a show and I would do Roots and Wings, there would be someone there who was from that area and would say, oh my gosh, I know that store. I know the story you're talking about. So as a part of our trip, we stop at this store. If I remember right, I think I bought Nikki Giovanni's book of Love Poems that day because we all had a chance to go through the store and peruse and buy whatever we wanted. And there was a man there. I really wish I remembered his name, but there was a man there who was performing his own poetry for us.
Amena Brown:
I want to say he was maybe reading from his poetry book or something. And so he spent maybe 30, 45 minutes sharing his poems with us and we were all enjoying that. And then he said, does anybody here do poetry? Is there anybody here that wants to share their poems with us? I looked around to everyone else, and a bunch of my friends pointed at me. They were like, "She does, she got a poem that she want to share." And I would never have volunteered myself. I wasn't quite at the point where I was sharing my work with other people outside of one-on-one with friends, I had never done something like that in public up to this point of high school. I had competed in some speech competitions at our church. Our church used to have an oratorical competition every February and I competed every February, really, probably starting from when I was in junior high, but I never competed with my own poems ever, ever.
Amena Brown:
So I would memorize other people's work. I'd memorize Maya Angelou or Paul Robeson or James Weldon Johnson. They all had these beautiful long pieces you could memorize and orate, but I would never ever do my own work in that setting. My mom really got on me about it because she was like, other people win the competition because they bring their own original work. And I just looked at her like, yeah, okay girl, but nobody wants to hear my poems except for you and a few friends. And that doesn't require stepping in front of an audience to do it.
Amena Brown:
So basically I got enough peer pressure and enough of my friends pushed me and pushed me and I got up there and I said, Chocolate Mista in front of this poet and all of my classmates. When you hear me in the poem talking about how I was shaking afterwards, I remember one of my best friends from high school, Trey was the first one to walk up and just hug me. And when he hugged me was when I realized that I was shaking, that I had been so nervous to get up there. And also shaking because I was excited. I was excited. The poem was so well received.
Amena Brown:
And to do something like that in front of people that you go to high school with that would boo you with no, with no equivocations. If they felt like you needed to be booed or heckled or made fun of, those people would make fun of you. And the fact that they all applauded me and stood up and clapped for me and said such encouraging words to me, that also made me feel so nervously excited that maybe there was something to what I was doing or what I was writing.
Amena Brown:
So it is this moment in the bookstore that I am describing in the beginning of Roots and Wings, and being there in the store, being called to that space of the carpet. I think I was the only one who was pushed out there to do it. But then being pushed out there and that was one moment of me beginning to discover that I did love writing, but I also loved sharing the writing in this performance stage audience experience. And I think when I get into the second half of Roots and Wings, I'm really reflecting on my Southern upbringing.
Amena Brown:
I actually had a friend of mine, we were doing a podcast interview and he asked me, he said, "Do you consider yourself a Southern poet?" Because he said the South comes up a lot in your work and no one had ever asked me that. And I'd never thought to categorize myself that way, but my roots are very much in the South and I do find that the South and the things that I've experienced with my family here have shown up a lot in my work and that is true of this piece. My grandparents, great grandparents, those two, at least those two and possibly three generations above me on my dad's side of the family is mostly preachers and musicians. And on my mom's side of the family, still a lot of preachers and musicians.
Amena Brown:
My grandmother was playing for the church choir when she was 12 or 13 years old. So I think in the poem, I was trying to work out this idea of what does it mean for us to have roots and what does it mean for me as a writer or as a poet to also be connected to these generations of people that were doing similar oration to what I was doing, but in a very different setting at a very different time, but how am I also connected to them? And I'll tell you another fun fact about me. I thought that I was going to become a preacher. I felt called to be a preacher when I was growing up in church. I intended actually to go to seminary and become a preacher or a pastor from there and it is falling in love with poetry that really led me away from that path.
Amena Brown:
But, I think in this poem, I loved this sentiment that I am standing behind a microphone and my great grandfather who was a Bishop in the Pentecostal Holiness Church stood behind this wooden pulpit, but we are doing similar work and I'm an extension of him, an extension of these generations before me, the ancestors I know, and the ancestors I don't know, right? I think that was a really important thing for me to talk about. Also, I am in a family from my mother and my grandmother, there have been two generations of single parents. So I was making this commentary on what are the things present in my bloodline and part of that is daddy's who have been rolling stones in the family, that's a part of the story. But the preachers and the Holy people, that's a part of the story too and examining what does it mean to have roots, to have wings.
Amena Brown:
You don't have roots or wings alone, or by yourself, it's like your roots are the people you come from. For me, those are my roots, the people I come from. And because they are who they are, that's why I have the ability to have wings to become a poet or a writer or whatever I would have been dreaming to become as this 17 year old now inside of this Roots and Wings story. I love the close of this piece because it always just brings me home to myself when I get to the end of that. And those lines of saying, words keep encouraging me to dream. Keep reminding me that God listens when I sing.
Amena Brown:
I was seeing a therapist and in one of our sessions, she asked me, what are things that I do that make me feel close to God and I told her singing is one of the things I do that make me feel close to God. And singing is not for the most part something that I do publicly. It's not something that I would do over a microphone or in front of a crowd or an audience. Any of you that have heard my poems know that every now and then I have a line or two I might sing, but you won't catch me in front of a band having them go into a whole song and I sing the whole thing. But I come from musical people from musicians and singers, and so, when I sing, I do feel close to God. I feel reminded of my own soul and reminded of the importance of my spirit, and reminded that in my beliefs about the world and about God that there is someone bigger than me, that my voice has an opportunity to connect with God.
Amena Brown:
So what is the real life story behind my first time performing this poem, I did end up doing this poem in some slam competitions. And I think this poem did okay. I don't remember this poem doing amazingly well. And for a slam, you're wanting to get the best out of 30 points because a slam is five judges are judging you. They are chosen randomly from the audience, but they cannot be people that know anyone else who's doing slam that night, and you're scored on an Olympic scale, right? So each person is scoring you up to 10 points with one decimal point. And how they do the scoring is the highest and the lowest scorer of the five judges are dropped and you get the addition of the three middle scores, which is the best out of 30 points. So I don't remember this poem ever being something that got 29 or 30 points in a slam.
Amena Brown:
I learned something really powerful and interesting about slam and its relationship to each poets poetry, because slam as an art and as a sport, it's amazing. It's amazing to see and it's amazing to be a part of. I know right now, while we're in the pandemic that's really hard. We'd have to really truly have that experience when we're able to do things in person again, hopefully. But, when you could go to a slam in person, even if you weren't competing to be there, it was just electricity in the air, it felt like. And to be participating in that, to be performing in it also felt amazing because whenever you do a poem in front of a crowd, you always find out from the crowd if the poem is actually working, but slam added some additional elements of that.
Amena Brown:
But I did learn through the experience of taking a poem like Roots and Wings into slam that you can have some poems that may not do amazing in a slam, but they would kill in front of an audience in general and Roots and Wings was one of those poems for me. I never won a slam with this poem. But, this poem actually became a great addition to my poetry sets because it's such a strong piece.
Amena Brown:
How do I feel about Roots and Wings now today? Roots and Wings is, oh my gosh, it's probably, the poem itself is probably 15 years old, 15, 14 years old, but the story inside the poem itself is over 20 years old now. And I still love Roots and Wings. I can tell when I hear the opening, I just, I can immediately hear some of the language and slang that I'm using in the beginning of it, I can tell I didn't write it today. I would not probably have written it like that if I were writing it today, but I love opening my sets with it. I have a lot of poetry sets that I start out with Roots and Wings, because if you're a stage performer, you have, maybe you have three minutes or less to win over the crowd, to prove to them that you're worth listening to basically. You have three minutes or less.
Amena Brown:
So for me as a poet, when I walk out on stage, I don't typically walk out and tell a story first. I would walk out and the first thing I would say is Roots and Wings. Number one, because Roots and Wings introduces me to the crowd. And even though I've been performing for many years and traveling around, I'm not at a place where I get somewhere and most of the audience already knows my poems by heart already. I'm going to a lot of rooms where I'm going to be reintroducing myself and introducing myself to people that have never heard of me or aren't familiar with my work at all. And to start with Roots and Wings, proves to them that I am worth them sitting through however long I have to perform after the 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour, it's proving to them like, oh, okay, she didn't come to play games. She is ready to entertain us, educate us, whatever that is.
Amena Brown:
I also love that in three minutes, there's a lot about me that the audience gets to learn, and you're not going to have that happen in all of your poems or for people who are singer songwriters, you're only going to have a certain amount of songs that really encapsulate an introduction to you. And I feel like Roots and Wings is a perfect introduction to me because it's talking about these early moments. The closing lines, when I'm talking about how I'm still shaking, I still do. Even sometimes when I am leaving recording with you all, I'm saying with you all like you all are here, but you're hear listening but it feels like I'm recording with you. You are like the audience would be if I were performing on stage.
Amena Brown:
And so even sometimes after I record I still am just shaking from making sure I want to make something on these episodes that feels worthy to you to subscribe here, to listen here, those types of things. So I still love that moment of Roots and Wings. And for it to be a poem that I wrote so many years ago and that it still has a lot of life that I still feel something when I perform it, and that people who hear it feels something in that story means the world to me. So, that's Roots and Wings behind the poetry.
Amena Brown:
This week for Give Her A Crown, I'd like to give a crown to Dr. Maya Angelou. She is deserving of many crowns in fact. Dr. Angelo passed away in 2014, but her work lives on and will live on for many generations to come. Winner of a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, she was a civil rights activist, poet, actress, screenwriter, dancer, and award winning author of 36 books. And of those, 30 best-selling books. This year is the 50th anniversary of her autobiographical book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which is the first in a series of autobiographical books about her life. And if you haven't read them, do it now. I never got to meet Dr. Angelo or hear her speak in person, but her work inspired me to become a poet and a writer. I memorized her poems for speech competitions, and then found my voice to write my own poems. Dr. Maya Angelo, thank you for telling it like it is, for sharing your wisdom and your amazing life experiences through your writing. Dr. Maya Angelo, give her a crown.
Amena Brown:
HER with Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network in partnership with iHeartRadio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.