Kristin Leigh Gans’ only intention that day just before Thanksgiving 1996 was to drop off some discarded clothes for the homeless. Arms filled with the harvest of a fall closet-cleaning, she opened the front door of the Community Kitchen and headed straight for the donation room. What she saw, however, was hard to ignore: men, women and children huddled against the stark walls, biding time until their next meal.
“I just looked around and saw all sorts of people sitting on the floor, slumped over,” she recalls. “I saw in their faces such despair. It just seemed so gray to me there, so lifeless, and I thought, I’ve felt like that before.
“I felt stuck at the time,” adds the 22-year-old writer. “I wasn’t doing anything with my life, and I didn’t have any real goals. I wasn’t going anywhere. I didn’t have the problems that they had, but emotionally I felt we connected.”
What happened next surprised even the outgoing Gans. On impulse, she marched into the shelter’s office and asked to speak to a director.
“The idea just hit me,” she later wrote in an essay. “I find myself trying to explain it without making it sound as if it were a calling, but I can only characterize it as so.”
Assistant Director Charles Hughes was impressed with Gans’ enthusiasm.
“There must be some talent here that nobody sees,” she told him. “I believe these people have something deeply important to say. Will you let me teach a creative-writing class here?”
Hughes simply nodded.
“I was thrilled,” he says. “We had talked about doing something like this with our education program. And in walks Kristin.”
Back at home, Gans sat down to write a formal proposal to present to the board of directors. After struggling for some time with the format, she crumpled the paper, tossed it aside and began to write from the heart.
“Writing helps me deal with my troubles,” she quickly wrote. “It draws me closer to myself, and to others, and makes me feel proud of myself. I have come to understand that what I write is mine and cannot be wrong because it is felt. I believe that, if given a chance, your homeless clients will feel the same way.”
Not all of the board members were convinced, but they agreed to let the young volunteer try her hand at teaching the class. Gans was nervous as she prepared for her first weekly lesson. She wasn’t a teacher, not even a college graduate. The closest she’d ever been to interacting with homeless people was helping serve Christmas dinner at the Kitchen at age 17. She still lived at home, working in her father’s pool business. No one in her family had ever suffered from poverty or homelessness. But she’d always been drawn to people in need.
In the classroom, Gans took a deep breath and began to explain how cathartic the writing process can be.
“At first everybody was pretty leery of me because I was so young. Nobody really talked at first. They just sat there. They even told me (weeks later), `I didn’t think you’d stick around.’ “
Gans proceeded to read one of her self-searching poems. Halfway through the recital, David, a man known for his rageful drinking episodes, pleaded with her to stop.
“We all sat there in silence while he just sobbed. Finally he said, `OK, I’m ready now. I’d like to hear the rest.’ When this happens, I just tell them to take their time. You can’t pull down the whole wall; just take it one brick at a time.”
It took several weeks for Gans to break through those walls. She introduced writing exercises to help them reveal their true personalities, challenged her students to express their feelings, both painful and pleasant, and encouraged the daily use of gratitude journals.
“I didn’t know how to approach these people who were older and who had been through so much more than myself. I wasn’t sure how to speak to them. But I took it very easy. We went very slow, and we were very patient. Everybody worked on his or her own track.”
The barriers started to crumble. “Little Bit,” a prostitute who hadn’t spoken at the first meeting, asked to read her poems aloud at the second.
Thomas, whose chronic depression had for years overshadowed his writing talent, told Gans, “This is the one hour of the week that I look forward to.”
Johnny, who had started using drugs after losing custody of his children, scribbled his teacher a note, “I want to thank you for showing me how to take small steps to get back on my feet, that this is a journey and not a one-day miracle.”
Gans, who typed each handwritten poem, essay and short story, noticed how much her students enjoyed seeing their work in print. She passed out copies of a mock publication to the Community Kitchen directors to get their reactions, “and they loved it. So I thought, Well, we can make a newspaper.”
Gans filled 12 pages with poems, photos and personal testimonies, designed the layout and withdrew $300 from savings for printing. Then she presented each “staff writer” with a set of business cards. In February 1997, three months after the first writing class, the newspaper made its debut with a mission statement that began: “UnSheltered Voices exists for those who all too often feel ignored and for those who feel comfortable ignoring them. It is the written word that makes the impact.”
And it did.
“I walked through at lunchtime the day that I got the paper back,” Gans says, “and I could see all the directors flipping through it, saying (to the homeless clients), `This is you? This is really good.’ And the people in my group just smiled. They were so happy.”
Word quickly spread, and local newspapers and TV stations soon featured the class.
“When the reporters came, it was like everything changed around here,” Gans remembers. “Everybody was excited; everybody wanted to be involved because they saw that people were listening. They were so proud of themselves. (The directors) at the Kitchen were coming to me and saying, `I’ve never seen them like this.’ Some of (the homeless) were getting jobs at the Kitchen, doing the floors, serving the food, just excited to be doing something and have people come up and say, `You write well,’ which basically meant, `You’re worth something.’ “
Gans’ mailbox filled with cards and letters.
“Not only did I enjoy the different forms of writing and poetry,” one man wrote, “I was enlightened to the thoughts and dreams of articulate, intelligent members of our society who have fallen on hard times.”
Not everyone was so supportive. When Frank, a homeless contributor, asked the manager of a local establishment if he could drop off some copies, he was immediately asked to leave. So Gans gathered an armload of papers and passed them out on the street.
“One man screamed at me, told me it was a waste of paper,” she remembers. “He was uncomfortable seeing people who were less fortunate than he. I think he felt guilty.”
Soon after, while searching the Internet for facts about homelessness, Gans discovered that her tiny newspaper was actually part of a growing national movement. Then came the call from the National Coalition for the Homeless, based in Washington, D.C. The representative had heard of Gans’ work and invited her to Seattle for a two-day conference of the National Association of North American Street Newspapers, formed in Chicago in late 1996.
When Gans looks back on the spontaneous request that started it all, she sees how far she and her students have come.
“It was strange to me at first because there were so many different problems. It wasn’t like I just had to deal with one person who’d had a bad childhood. There were people who were drug users, people who had cancer, people with really big problems. And on top of that they were extremely poor and homeless. It’s taught me that everyone has his or her own story.”
Thomas now writes a regular column for UnSheltered Voices, is working part time in the shelter’s recycling center and recently moved into an apartment of his own. Soft-spoken Robert, who lost everything he owned after his father died, is enrolled in the Kitchen’s job training and high-school-equivalency programs. Quiet, 20-year-old Cheryl is attending college on a grant and is no longer using drugs and alcohol. All attribute their comeback, at least in part, to Gans’ writing class and the satisfaction of seeing their words in print.
Even the best success stories, however, don’t have perfect endings. When Thomas moved into his new apartment, Gans and her parents took him a carload of clothes, bedding and groceries.
“It upset me after I left Thomas’ apartment,” Gans says. “Even though it was a place to stay, all it was was a room with a very hard floor and a real thin mattress. I opened the refrigerator to put the groceries in there, and he didn’t even have milk. There was no shower curtain. He had a can of water on the stove to heat the water to try to make coffee. He had no clothes, just two shirts and a pair of pants. It was really sad. Even before that, I knew that they had it hard and I knew it was a much different life than mine. But it wasn’t until I went into that building, smelled it and looked around, and realized how excited he was about it, that I thought to myself, I could never do this. If I were to lose everything today, I don’t know that I could be as strong as they are. . . . They’re a lot stronger than the people who criticize them.”
This year, the newspaper will evolve from a quarterly 8 1/2-by-11-inch format into a larger, monthly tabloid. The Community Kitchen has allocated funds for printing and hopes to purchase a press so the homeless writers can produce their own papers as part of the job-training program.
“The thing that makes me happiest about this project is that I see real people, faced with real challenges, coming together, having disputes, having discussions, laughing, revealing themselves, in order to reach one common goal: to be heard,” says Gans. “My ultimate goal is to cover more important stories and clear up some of the myths and misconceptions about homelessness. I want it to eventually free them from where they are now, to help build their confidence and get them out of poverty. UnSheltered Voices could have a lot of meaning if it’s picked up by the right people, who won’t just read it but who will get in on the fight.”
