Today we’d like to introduce you to Danielle Mitchell.
Hi Danielle, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Oooo! I love a good origin story. Where to begin? I work with writers every day, so I know it’s not that unusual that I started writing when I was very young. But I wasn’t one of those really gifted youngsters, much the opposite. I had a learning disability that mostly went ignored and really struggled to learn to read. I was also bullied relentlessly throughout school, and that translated into me being very adverse to asking for help. And where did poetry come in? I have no idea where the notion of a poem came from for me, but I started writing them at around 8 years old.
Since sounding out words was near-impossible (still is!) every word was a sight word, even big ones like “precipitation!” If I couldn’t remember a word completely I had no hope of spelling it. “Egg” for example was “eeg”—I knew there was a double letter in there! “Soap” was “sope” and so on. Everything I wrote as a child is in a barely comprehensible version of English. But I still have some of the notepads with poems on them and I find it all hella charming!
Eventually, I got on track and by the end of 8th grade I was devouring novels way above my peers’ reading level. I read 1984, Brave New World, The Great Gatsby, most of Shakespeare’s plays, and almost everything Hemingway ever wrote all before I entered high school.
I’d discovered my superpower: a passion for the written word. Add to that a creative mind, a ton of trauma and a society serving up misogyny at every turn and we were cooking with gas! By the time I started to think about college, I knew there was only one subject in the world I wanted to study: Creative Writing. I applied and was accepted to the University of Redlands where I took on Poetry and later Women’s and Gender Studies as my majors. In 2008, I graduated with dual degrees and academic honors in each. I was the first person in my family to finish college.
After college, I started to ask myself what area in Southern California felt like home. I first moved to Huntington Beach, because I thought living by the ocean wasn’t a bad place to figure it out. After only a few weeks in Huntington, I realized Long Beach was the spot—my work was there, my new friend group of poets and musicians was there, it had amazing restaurants, neighborhoods, and its own symphony orchestra!
I was now in my mid-twenties, I tried going to graduate school to study more poetry, but I left the program after one month. I had a bad premonition that the poet they would attempt to morph me into is not who I wanted to be. I had struggled in undergrad with a very dispassionate, downright mean, mentor. Someone who I literally worked for (I was her research personal assistant. She had me picking up her lunch and cleaning her office, but that’s another story). So, I started to volunteer for literary organizations, I worked for a poetry reading called Indelible Ink in Pasadena, a magazine called Connotation Press, and Write Bloody Books. I also performed anywhere and everywhere I could find—shows all over L.A., Long Beach, and Orange County.
In 2013, I felt I was ready to start something on my own. My friend Markus D. Manley had just started up Long Beach’s first co-work space. He called it WE Labs, short for Work Evolution Laboratories. It was downtown on the corner of Pine and Broadway. In January, I called him up and asked if we could have a meeting because I wanted to pitch him an idea.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
There are so many sub-plots and side stories I could tell that answer the question “has it been a smooth road?” The millennial urge to say: HOW BOUT NO! But I’ve survived, and there’s something about survival that from the outside makes people want to think: look at you, you’re okay. You made it look easy! It was not easy.
The day I met with Markus to pitch my big idea, which later became known as The Poetry Lab, was one I’ll never forget. We met at a sushi joint across the street from his office. Halfway through lunch he ordered us sake bombs. I was surprised. A sake bomb, which is warm sake dropped into a pint of beer and then chugged before it all congeals, is a celebratory drink, one I drank with my mom on graduation day.
But were we celebrating?
What I didn’t know then was that Markus had already made up his mind about me. We were friends, yes, but this was business, and I was asking to be let in on his baby—his life’s work. I assumed he’d be territorial and protective of that. Except Markus was all about people. He loved people and he believed in the ones he surrounded himself with. So we drank the sake, went back to WE Labs and toured the space, we took his dog Bodhi for a walk, and later we drank some whiskey from a flask someone snuck into his office. We hung out all night in real Long Beach fashion, talking about our hopes and dreams, smoking weed, and falling asleep on the second-hand couch in the corner of the room. I left our “business lunch” at 6am the next morning.
The Poetry Lab launched about a month later on February 14, 2013. Over the next year, we grew the project with twice-monthly sessions. Markus was my mentor, my board of directors, my champion through it all. I had been through a big physical and mental health breakdown in 2012 and genuinely was not sure I was capable of much. Markus gave me the space to try. He didn’t push too hard, he didn’t throw me in the deep end without a floatie. He was reasonable, kind, and present. And the project succeeded, it continued to grow throughout the year and began to earn it’s on following. We met in WE Labs in early March of 2014 to discuss our progress.
He told me how proud he was of me, how he didn’t doubt for a moment I could do it. Which is wild! Because I absolutely did doubt. The state I was in when we started—the dark hollows under my eyes, my shaky hands, frequent anxiety attacks—it was a huge shocker to me that things were going so well! But not for Markus, he just sat back in his desk chair and smiled, a knowing grin, his black thick-rimmed glasses low on the bridge of his nose. “You’re good at this, Danielle,” he said to me. “Keep going.”
That was the last time I saw Markus alive. He passed from this world very unexpectedly on March 18, 2014 from complications due to his autoimmune disorder at Cottage Hospital in Santa Monica.
We’ve been impressed with The Poetry Lab, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
The Poetry Lab is a place in your community to write, read and collaborate. Since 2013 we’ve held generative writing workshops, critique workshops, and poetry classes led by visiting teaching artists. All of this used to take place in Downtown Long Beach inside Work Evolution Labs, but in 2020, we made the shift to the virtual space along with the rest of the world. For us, virtual sessions were a dream come true, no more commuting across L.A. traffic on a weeknight for poetry class!
In 2021, running The Poetry Lab became my full-time job. It’s a long-time dream of mine to nurture this creative community, to provide programming and support for writers all over the world. We differ from a lot of other educational organizations in that we connect with our community by putting their needs first. My team and I are building a responsive and interactive organization that knows its community members well.
We accomplish this by showing up to classes and workshops and holding space with them. We don’t run completely digital, asynchronous courses, and we, unlike many of our competitors have not gone back to in-person events. We’ve seen many organizations de-prioritize the development of their virtual sessions in order to return to their physical spaces. We’re taking a different approach, our goal is to continue to improve the virtual classroom experience for our members, and to build new ways to make community connections.
I hear feedback all the time that The Poetry Lab experience is different. For one thing, it’s more fun than your typical poetry class. This is not because we sacrifice rigor or the study of poetics, but simply that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. The stakes are low—this is a poetry class! Another reason people feel differently in our spaces is that we know we’re doing the work of healing wounds people have picked up from other academic institutions.
Many folx have experienced trauma inside undergrad and graduate level writing programs. Academic institutions don’t seem to be too concerned these days with how much hardship they impose on people. Everything from predatory student loan companies to cruel professors, and negligent admin—all three things I experience myself during college, nothing I wish to pass on to people. But not passing the trauma on requires intentional work. We have to process our own grief and learn the ways in which systemic racism has instilled in us an expectation that learning systems are punitive and hierarchies of authority and domination must exist in order to learn from a “master.”
The Poetry Lab is here to show people there are alternative ways to educate oneself. It’s about taking back your agency. We call our community members “self-guided learners,” because they are in control of their own educations.
How do you think about luck?
I love the chance to tell some of my story, but there’s so much more to it, from the way I experience chronic illness and anxiety to the trolls that have chased me around the internet for years. So many of us face obstacles like this, the obstacle sometimes is just existing. I don’t focus so much on luck, but I am working on strengthening my sense of resilience. Bad shit is going to happen—how do we weather the storm? What’s left of us at the end of it? My parents are very supportive, as are my wonderful, creative friends.
Nobody does this alone. I think about what Audre Lorde said often:
“Without community, there is no liberation…but the community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.”
My luck is my resilience is my privilege, let’s not ignore the fact that even though I struggled to learn to read I was given the time and stability in childhood so that I did eventually figure it out. So many kids don’t get the chance to develop a love of books the way I did. As a feminist in school I studied equality, but as an adult in the world, I’ve learned about equity. A lot of the work I do now brings up topics of literacy, intersectionality and access. I work to facilitate a community that asks no one to shed their differences in order to enter it. Instead, we work to create and hold space so that you may enter as you are, in your wholeness. I know what this feels like because it’s what I was once given by my friend Markus. So yes, let’s say it, I am extremely lucky.
Pricing:
- Book Club Membership $35/month – includes monthly generative workshops
- The Feedback Circle – 6 week critique group $240
- Brain Trust $5-$25 sliding scale writing workshop
- One-on-One editorial sessions $75 per hour
Contact Info:
- Website: https://thepoetrylab.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/thepoetrylab
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/thepoetrylab
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/imaginarydani/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/the_poetry_lab
- Other: https://instagram.com/imaginarydani
Image Credits
Headshots of Danielle Mitchell (photos in white blazer): Brian Olivia
