Music Credit: Excerpts of guitar music composed and performed by Jorge F. Hernández, used courtesy of Mr. Hernández. Brando Skyhorse: People act in very individualized ways that sometimes defy explanation or categorization, and that’s really interesting to me, because that’s real. That’s what I feel like the idea of what it means to be an artist: to try to explain why people do irrational things. At least, that’s why I’m an artist. Jo Reed: That is writer and one of the 2015 judges for Poetry Out Loud, Brando Skyhorse…and this is and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I'm Josephine Reed. Brando Skyhorse had a childhood to be reckoned with….he grew up in Echo Park Los Angeles---he had five stepfathers, most between stints in prison,  he lived with his mother and grandmother who had a very complicated relationship, his mother had a tremendous sense of fun, a flair for drama, and an intense violent streak. A great storyteller, she earned money as a phone sex worker. But she expected her kid to do well in school and Brando did--- eventually winning a scholarship to Stanford. He went on to a career in publishing before writing his own novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park--which received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award for a distinguished first book of fiction. He followed Madonnas with his memoir, called Take This Man—a tough-minded look at his complicated childhood when he was always uncertain about what was true and what was made up. Jo Reed: Brando, let’s begin with your name. Brando Skyhorse. Because there is a story there-- Brando Skyhorse: What a story, right? Jo Reed: There is a story. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. It’s a story that I’ve gotten used to telling many times, over the years. So my mother was very enamored with American Indian culture, and this was the late ’60s, early ’70s. And I’m sure, as many of your listeners would probably remember, though none of my students have any knowledge of at all, Marlon Brando turned down the Oscar for The Godfather in 1972, and he sent up an American Indian woman named Sacheen Littlefeather to refuse the Oscar, because of the depiction of American Indians in Hollywood films over the years. And my mother was really struck by that. And so, when it came time for her to have a child, Brando was the only sort of logical conclusion that she came to, though Pacino was a close runner-up. So, Pacino Skyhorse-- I don’t know. That might’ve been my-- my entire career as a writer might’ve gone in an entirely different direction. Who knows? But when my biological father abandoned us when I was three years old, I was-- my birth name was Brando Kelly Ulloa: U-L-L-O-A. It’s a very unusual Mexican name. And my mother decided that, simply because I was born a Mexican, and that she was a Mexican as well, that was no reason that we shouldn’t become other people, and so she decided to reinvent both of us as American Indians. And she had been corresponding with a man that she ha, I guess, through a sort of prison connection magazine, named Paul Skyhorse Johnson. He was incarcerated in Illinois. And he, quote/unquote, agreed to adopt me as his own son, and I didn’t know any of this until I was about, maybe, 12 or 13 years old. I had clues, but-- so, basically, I was reinvented as Brando Skyhorse. And then, when I found out the truth, my mother decided that... well, I mean, she basically decided that we should keep living our lives as American Indians. And so, after I was 12 or 13, even though I knew I was Mexican, I knew my Mexican name, I kept telling people that I was American Indian, because that story just seemed easier than the story I just told you right now. Jo Reed: There is something so American about that story. Brando Skyhorse: It is, isn’t it? Yeah. Jo Reed: It’s like Gatsby. Brando Skyhorse: It’s like-- yeah, but in a poor neighborhood. <laughs> Jo Reed: Exactly. Brando Skyhorse: Without all the parties. Jo Reed: Without the parties. But, you know, America-- it’s where you reinvent yourself. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. I think that’s true, and I think it touches on a lot of dynamics and themes that are certainly interesting to me, as a writer. You know, growing up in Los Angeles, literally, the town which reinvention-- if reinvention could say-- if you could say that reinvention was born in a particular city, L.A., Hollywood-- that would certainly be it. And certainly I’m familiar, especially in my neighborhood, about people who have come from Mexico, assuming different identities, perhaps being in the country illegally. All of that is sort of taking place around us, and I think that my mother sort of found the perfect place, basically, to pull this off for both of us. Because, you know, the idea of two American Indians living in a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood, the fact that that would seem more plausible than the fact that we were just two Mexican Americans living in a Mexican-American neighborhood, it’s really quite interesting. But I think everyone wants to believe in reinvention. You know what I mean? Everyone wants to believe that, you know, these sort of unusual people that we meet-- you know, fantastical storytellers, because my mother was a hell of a storyteller-- what a wonderful sort of story to believe, that right here in front of you is an American Indian, you know? When was the last time you met one. Jo Reed: I know exactly what you mean, and -- and the name she chose…her name. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. Well, her name was Maria Teresa Banaga. That was her given name, because her stepfather was Filipino. And she reinvented herself as Running Deer Skyhorse. And again, when was the last time you met a Running Deer? And again, choosing literally the most Indian of Indian names. And people were mesmerized, and I think it’s-- that’s sort of the thing. It’s not-- but for her, it wasn’t just the name; it was sort of her appearance, because she looked very Indian. She had very sort of sharp cheekbones-- her features, her facial structure. She wore turquoise jewelry. She had long hair. She would wear these sort of Indian-inspired blouses, which, in the ’70s, were very easy to find, apparently, because looking at all those old photographs, they were everywhere. So she looked the part, she acted the part, she talked the part. Everything about her was, in her mind, authentic. And when I spoke with a couple of people that knew my mother, in the course of writing this book, she believed it. She legitimately believed she was an American Indian. So it’s hard for me to think about this and feel like-- you know, she wasn’t trying to be malicious. I don’t believe that. I think she just literally wanted to be something that she wasn’t. Jo Reed: Yeah. I didn’t think she was being malicious--in terms of the name change, her behavior certainly was, as you well know, very erratic. Brando Skyhorse: Somewhat questionable parenting techniques. Jo Reed: Somewhat questionable parenting techniques. But her claiming a Native American heritage?. It’s what she wanted, so why not? Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. And the thing that’s amazed me since I’ve published this book is I have met about literally half a dozen people who have approached me at readings or sent me e-mails, and said, “Oh, my mother said that she was an Indian, too.” And I’m like, “That’s a thing? Really?” Like, “There are people”-- I mean, I thought my mother had the corner on that, but no, apparently this was sort of an issue. And I obviously have complicated feelings about it, because I feel that American Indians have had so many things plundered from them-- their land, their culture, using them as mascots for sport teams. I mean, just-- the list goes on and on. But I feel that my mother was trying to access that culture from a legitimately sincere place. Not that that makes it better, but I understand. I understand where she was coming from. Jo Reed: Yeah. I think it’s very different if you’re somebody with power who does that. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. That’s absolutely true. That’s absolutely true. Jo Reed: And your mother embraced it. She, you know, would volunteer with the American Indian Movement, and would call people out on anything she thought was racist.  What happened when you had to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school? Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. I was five or six years old. I was in first grade, and my mother decided that she was going to ask me to not recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Because I don’t know what they do in schools now, but back then, every morning, you had to get up and say the Pledge of Allegiance. And so she gave me a little speech to recite, and when my time came, my first-grade teacher-- you know, a wonderful woman, completely unprepared for what was about to happen. You know, everyone stands up, and I’m in a multicultural classroom that’s predominantly Vietnamese and Latinos, and I stand up and I say, “Well, due to the way that my country has treated my people, I cannot pledge allegiance to this flag.” And she just didn’t handle it well. The teacher did not handle it well. She came over to my desk, literally grabbed me, pulled me out of my chair, forced me to put my hand over my heart-- and my mother loved that detail. I wish I was making that up. But she forced me to put my hand over my heart, and then just threw me out of the class until recess. And again, that’s-- I know it sounds kind of shocking, the fact a teacher would touch a student, but this was the ’70s. It was a very different era. I mean, I remember, in my elementary school, we had a class assembly where our principal said, “Yeah, I have a board here. I will use it if any of you get out of line.” It was a different generation. So I told my mother about this, and of course she was thrilled. Never mind that I might’ve felt uncomfortable or was crying. I’d gotten kicked out of a classroom. I thought I was a good student. And so the next day, a mysterious man who looked suspiciously like a Native American-- had long hair-- somebody from the Indian Center downtown came with my mother and had, I guess, about an hour conference after school with my first-grade teacher. And at the end of the con-- I wasn’t there. I was outside. But at the end of the conference, they all came out laughing, as if it was just the great-- you know, as if my mother had just told the most wonderful story in the world. And my teacher told me, “Oh, well, you don’t have to say the Pledge of Allegiance anymore. You can just sit quietly at your desk, or color, or do whatever it is that you want. You don’t have to do that.” But that was like-- in my mom’s mind, that was a victory. She had somehow struck a blow against oppression. But all she’d really done was taught me that, you know, I was going to have a lot more of these uncomfortable kinds of confrontations, which is why I think I kind of try to go out of my way to avoid them now. Jo Reed: Yeah. Well, indeed, you did. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. <laughs> Jo Reed: Well, you were raised by your mother and your grandmother. Brando Skyhorse: That’s right. Jo Reed: Living in your grandmother’s house. Describe their relationship. Brando Skyhorse: It was very tempestuous, very complicated. My mother and grandmother had sort of different philosophies on how to raise a child, and my grandmother was basically like a surrogate mother for me, which I know sounds weird, because my mother was also living with me, as well. But my mother was, in many ways, almost like an older sister, because my grandmother did all the chores. My grandmother did all the cooking, all the cleaning, washed all the dishes, washed all our clothes, hung up all the clothes in the backyard. She did light yardwork. and she would complain about the fact nobody helped her, but then any time you tried to help her, it’s like, “No, I can do it myself.” But doing all of those things, I think, she felt gave her license to have some sort of say in how I was raised, and my mother simply didn’t feel that way. I think my mother came from that environment of like, “Oh, you know, I want my child to be free, and I want my child to read whatever he wants, and question authority.” But the moment I started questioning her authority, that’s when things got complicated. So it was a really challenging environment, to be between those two positions. And on top of all of that, my mother would constantly bring in a new series of father figures. I had five stepfathers, one about every three years, and I think, in many ways, it would’ve been simply easier if she had left the sort of pseudo father figures out of the picture. Jo Reed: Oh, okay. Brando Skyhorse: Because that also created a lot of tension. Jo Reed: Your mother was a very beautiful woman. It was like she went to the thrift store to find these men. Brando Skyhorse: <laughs> If only we were so lucky. No. She went to prison, actually, for-- Yeah, a thrift store would’ve been fine. Jo Reed: And clearly, if this is the population from whence you are choosing your partner, chances are it might not end up so good. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. I think you’re absolutely right. With the benefit of hindsight, obviously, I think my mother could’ve benefited from, perhaps, a little self-confidence, because as beautiful as she was, and as confident as she was in sort of her invented persona, she also was very insecure. And as she got older, she stopped leaving the house. I mentioned this in the book, but in the early 1980s, my mother, in order to take care of us, started working as a phone sex operator, which I know seems like a really weird, kind of antiquated position now, because it’s like-- apparently, there still are phone sex operators, but-- because you’d think, “Oh, with the Internet and everything else, who would want that?” But there are still people out there who want that actual interaction with somebody that they can speak to on the phone, and believe that it’s real. And as a result, my mother stopped leaving the house, because-- well, she was addicted to the money. It was pretty good. It was tax-free. But you had to be on the phone all the time, and this was before cell phones, where you could just do your job, whatever. She was basically tethered to that house. And so she stopped leaving the house. She started gaining weight. She became very sort of uncomfortable with her physical presence, and so I think that she deliberately picked men that wouldn’t challenge her in any specific way. If you’re on the house and you’re stuck to your job all the time, it’s hard to meet people, especially pre-Internet. Jo Reed: Your biological father, Candido, seems like everybody. You know, we’re all contradictions. On one hand, on the face of it, a hardworking, dedicated man, who left. And on one hand it’s very understandable why he did. That knife that she was holding would have something to do with it. And on the other hand, how can you do this? Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. Yeah. Jo Reed: Because you’re leaving this three-year-old child with this woman who grabs a knife out of the drawer. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. Yeah, I’m glad you clarified that, because yeah, it wasn’t a metaphoric knife. It was an actual knife. It was a literal knife. And I think the thing with Candy, though-- and part of the reason that this book was so positive, such a positive experience for me to write-- you know, I talk about this book in relation to other memoirs, like The Glass Castle or Running with Scissors, or whatever, and I feel like those authors pretty much had everything set in stone with their family. They had pretty much come to a certain place of understanding with their family. But when I started writing this book, when I’d actually sold it to my publishing company, I didn’t know where my father was, and it was only during the process of writing this book that I found him. He was living in Whittier, California, 30 minutes away. He had lived there, basically, his entire life, and my mother had created all of these sort of fantastical outcomes for him. “Oh, maybe the Mexican Mafia abducted him. Maybe he”-- you know, “Maybe he just-- somebody threw a brick at his head and he got amnesia.” All these sort of ridiculous things. But, of course, the simplest solution was the correct one. He just left and started his life over, met a new woman, had three children. So, when I discovered that he existed, I discovered that I also had three brand-new sisters. And in meeting him for the book, and interviewing him, and getting his thoughts about what had happened between him and my mother, those contradictions were still readily apparent. Here is a man who is a hard worker, had taken care of his three daughters. I’ve met them. I love them. They are gorgeous, extraordinary young women. He did a phenomenal job as a father to them. And I have to qualify that with those last two words, because he was clearly capable of it, but at the same time, I just had this blank, 30-year absence. There were no cards. There were no letters. I got no al-- no spousal-- “spousal support.” I got-- you know, there was no money that was ever sent to our house. It’s not like we ever moved. And so it was literally as if he could just sort of compartmentalize that part of his life, put it in a box, and store it away. And the thing that’s extraordinary to me about it is he still had pictures of me, from when I was a small child, that he hid in plain sight. They had family photo albums that, when I met him for the first time, in 2010, or re-met him-- you know, they took the family photo album, and I was like, “Oh, there I am.” And one of my sisters said, “Oh, we thought that was a cousin or somebody. We didn’t realize this was his son that he had just sort of left and taken off with.” So I think that he probably is still reconciling with this, himself, every day. Because we are back in touch, and that’s really fantastic, but I get a call from him once a year. I would like to hear from him more. I don’t. I should probably call him more. I don’t. So it’s one of those things where the ending of this book is hopeful and optimistic, to be sure, but at the same time, it also asks the question, “What do you do once you’ve sort of found the thing that you were looking for, and it’s maybe not exactly what you thought it would be?” Jo Reed: We all behave in contradictory ways. Your mother-- your grandmother-- I mean, all of us. Let’s face it. But what’s interesting about them is they did it writ large. They were very dramatic about how they did it. Brando Skyhorse: Yes. “Dramatic” is a lovely word to use to describe their behavior. I’m going to use that from now on: very, very dramatic. But at the same time, also very humane. Jo Reed: That’s what I mean by “drama.” It was, the good parts were so good! Brando Skyhorse: Sure. Absolutely. Jo Reed: And then, when it was bad, it was so bad. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that it’s really important, as a writer or as somebody who writes memoir or nonfiction, to understand that it’s important to capture all of the good parts along with the bad parts, because that makes a believable character. And there were, really, many wonderful moments that I had with my family. Part of the reason that I loved to read certainly came-- well, it’s that duality. I loved to read because reading was an escape from how horrible it could get in my house. It was an easy way to just kind of shut off and disappear. But reading was also a way to spend time with my grandmother. My grandmother was the one that basically introduced me to the idea of books being sacred, being precious. She was the one that introduced me to the idea of having a library: the fact that you could go to a bookstore and buy books, versus books that you would just get from a library, and that being a very important distinction. She was the one that sort of encouraged this idea of just constantly exploring new writers and new authors, and just reading for the sake of the pleasure of it. And so, again, that duality, like why I love reading: because it reminds me of my childhood, and it reminds me of that connection with my grandmother. But also, it reminds me of escape, too, so the fact that you can have those sort of complicated dual emotions to a particular activity. Jo Reed: You were a very, very good student when you were a kid. You were always in... what do they call-- special classes. Brando Skyhorse: Yeah. I was in the gifted/talented programs. Yeah. And I think, again, part of that was from my own sort of precociousness. I think that, at a certain point, I realized, “Oh, I would like to be doing more.” And it wasn’t like I had a motivated helicopter mother, per se, but it was more like, “Okay, you deserve to be in a better class. We’re going to go solve that problem together.” It wasn’t like, “Oh, put my extraordinary son in a better class.” It’s like, “Well, of course he should be in a better class. Let’s go make that happen.” I think there were certain things that my mother just kind of took for granted, and the fact that I did well in school was one of those things. I never needed any motivation at all. I mean, I think there was this subtle fear that if I didn’t do well, that my mother might do-- I mean, I don’t know how much more worse she could’ve-- worse things she could’ve done to me, but that there would be somehow a worse outcome for me if I didn’t do well at school. But I think, also, I liked school, and the topics I enjoyed, particularly: reading, writing. You know, when I was going to elementary school in my neighborhood, there was a large influx of Vietnamese immigrants, and a lot of them needed help reading. And so, by the time I was in the fourth grade, I was already acting as, basically, a surrogate reading tutor for those students. And I found out I really enjoyed it, and it was really pleasurable. So I guess the fact that I’m a writer and an instructor now makes a lot of sense. Jo Reed: Now, you went to Stanford. Brando Skyhorse: Yes. Jo Reed: And you got a scholarship to go there. Brando Skyhorse: Yes. They were extraordinarily-- they had an extraordinarily generous financial aid package. Jo Reed: Now, you said that you knew that you were going to be a writer. When did you know that? How did you come to that? Brando Skyhorse: I think high school is probably when it first dawned on me, and I think that was in part because it was something I was good at. I didn’t have a lot of mentors, growing up. I mean, that’s kind of an understatement. But I worked with this wonderful history teacher, who I just saw. About one or two months ago, he came to D.C. His name’s Howard Shore [ph?], and he was my eleventh-grade A.P. American History teacher. And I remember him being the first person to kind of single me out, and say, “You know, you’re really good at this. You should think about continuing to do this.” And about a year later, I started my first real romantic relationship. It was-- we were both seniors in high school, and she wanted to know the story of how I liked her: when I knew I liked her. And she was like, “Write it down. Write it down like a story.” And so I thought that would be a really interesting challenge. And so I had one of those old word processors, where you could just see three lines of screen at any given point, three lines of your document in any given point, and it was a daisy-wheel printer, so it would take something like forever to print out-- I forget-- in the little floppy disk. And so I wrote everything on the floppy disk, printed everything out very meticulously, gave her this stack of pages, and she flipped through. She’s like, “This is over 80 pages. I didn’t want the whole”-- I was like, “But I-- you know, I had-- this goes back several months, and this was the first time I saw you, the second time I saw you. Then I told my friend about you,” and blah blah blah blah. And she said, somewhat glibly, “Maybe you should do this for a living.” And that stuck. And then, when I got to Stanford, I had started taking poli-sci courses, and sophomore year I had an English roommate-- a roommate who was an English major-- and just sort of by accident took a creative writing course, and I was hooked. So I feel like all those sort of dots just connected together in the right way. And then one thing that I do appreciate about Stanford is that it did open me up to the possibility of how writing could save my life, in the same way that reading, for many years, had sort of saved my life when I was growing up. Jo Reed: How could writing save your life? Brando Skyhorse: Writing helped bring order out of chaos, and I think that’s part of the reason that the memoir, for me, is so useful, so that when-- you know, if I have a family at some point down the road, I can tell my children, “This is where you came from.” And it doesn’t have to be a complicated, long-winded explanation. It could just be a simple narrative that they can easily follow, easy to read, in a very straightforward way. I wanted to bring order from the chaos at which I grew up in, and I found that writing was extraordinarily convenient at conveying-- at containing that chaos. I could keep it within the boundaries of the page, and I could make things do whatever it is that I wanted them to, and I could express all these sort of complicated feelings that I had, and contain them, and keep them somewhere safe, as opposed to just sort of walking around and listening to The Cure all day, and just being nonstop depressed, and such. I had a place where I could... almost like a container, bas-- like a vault. And I could just sort of put these emotions there, and just sort of freeze them, and then I could come back to them and thaw them out whenever I wanted to. So, for me, it was a lot about getting that chaos together in a way-- or sort of deconstructing the chaos so that it wasn’t toxic; sort of detoxifying my chaos. Jo Reed: What made you decide to write your memoir, Take This Man? Brando Skyhorse: Well, I took a memoir course-- I went to the U.C. Irvine MFA program right after Stanford, because I knew I wanted to write. I was also thinking about law school, and everyone wisely told me, “Go do your MFA, and then you can go get your law degree after.” And then, of course, I met someone in the program, so it didn’t quite work out that way. Then we ended up moving to New York, and so on. But I took a memoir course with Geoffrey Wolff, who is a wonderful instructor, just an incredible writer, very... just-- Jo Reed: Duke of Deception. Brando Skyhorse: Duke-- yeah. He wrote a memoir called The Duke of Deception, which is about his own complicated relationship with his father and his brother. Tobias Wolff, of course, wrote This Boy’s Life. So I started talking to him about my family, and he’s like, “You should think about a memoir.” And he’s like, “You can’t do it in fiction.” He’s like, “Fiction will ruin it, because, basically, you’ll want to give yourself a happy ending.” And I was like, “You’re absolutely right.” Brando Skyhorse: And so I started writing it in 1996, and I have early drafts of that, and I kept trying and failing. I kept trying to put the pieces together, because back then, my mother and grandmother were still alive, so a number of materials that are in this book are from interviews I did for that memoir course from 1996, and I saved the notes and transcriptions and such, and it was really helpful, obviously, in putting this book together. But I knew something wasn’t clicking. And so, basically, my ability as a writer needed to catch up, because I wanted to write the book, but I just wasn’t good enough. And so, basically, now, here we are in 2015. It took me 18 years, basically, to become good enough to tell this story, because it was so complicated, it was so multifaceted, that I needed, really, a skilled writer to be able to tell it. I wanted to tell it, because I wanted to understand how all these things could happen to one family. I had so many friends in high school who would say, “Why do all these bad things seem to happen to you?” Well, here’s the answer. <laughs> For any of them out there are listening, here’s the answer. Jo Reed: You are a judge for the finals of Poetry Out Loud. Brando Skyhorse: That’s right. Jo Reed: Does poetry play a part in your reading? What’s your relationship to poetry, and how is it different from your relationships to other kinds of literature? Brando Skyhorse: I have the utmost respect for poetry, for two reasons. Number one, my girlfriend’s a poet. Number two-- yes, yes, absolutely, and she has just a long bookshelf. We moved down to D.C. for the year, and she had to put all of her books in storage, but the only things she brought with her were her poetry collections. And so I told her, “Okay, here. This part of our bookshelf will be just for your collections of poems, and for any additional collections that you buy down here.” And I think she started with, I don’t know, eight, nine books, whatever-- what is in her collection. And now it’s something like-- it’s a hundred and twen-- I mean, it’s a ridiculous number, but a good way, you know? It’s good that it’s a ridiculous number, because not a lot of people in this country value poetry. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that I know I am a terrible writer of poetry. I love reading it, I love listening to it, I go to lots of poetry readings, obviously, but every time I have tried to do it on my own, I fail miserably. And so I always have the greatest respect for something that’s done on the page that I know I could never do. I think I wrote one poem in college that was inspired by the L.A. riots, and it was just as bad and terrible as you could possibly imagine. And after doing that, I was like, “Yeah, I think I’m just going to stick with prose, because that’s what’s comfortable for me.” But when I was at the MFA program at U.C. Irvine, a number of my friends were poets, and I think the idea of compression, of basically taking these large, complicated feelings and compressing them into prose that’s so chiseled, that’s so tight, the elegance of one simple line, one simple sentence-- you can do that in poetry in ways that really aren’t appreciated in prose, that aren’t appreciated in short stories or memoirs or novels, because I think the expectation there-- you know, you can read stuff for literary pleasure, but the fact is, you have to tell a story. Narrative poetry has to tell a story, too, but the expectations are that you have a page to do it in. And there are many times in which I am jealous of the fact that, if I have a feeling or emotion or a specific moment in time I want to write about, but I don’t want to write an entire thousand words or whatever, I wish I had the ability to just write 10 lines, 20 lines, 30 lines, whatever the case may be, to kind of capture the essence of that moment. I think poets are exceptional at capturing the essence of a specific moment, and they’re also-- poetry is just so helpful in guiding us through those moments where-- you know, you think about all the places in which poetry presents itself in today’s society: weddings, funerals, the inauguration-- all these sort of important milestones where, basically, poetry has a chance to have its say. Nobody would let you read a 14-page short story at Barack Obama’s inauguration. Nobody’s got time for that. But you could convey all these feelings, emotions, you know, so specifically in a poem. And I’m constantly on the lookout for new poems and new poetry to help me learn how to be a better writer, because I think anybody that wants to learn how to write should start first with poetry, because the idea of seeing-- you know... basically, if you look at something in a memoir, something in a novel, every word does its own sort of-- carries its own weight. In a poem, a word has to do the work of four words or five words or ten words. They’re-- every word there has to do so much more heavy lifting, for lack of a better phrase, and I can’t imagine a better place for any writer of any age to begin. And that’s why it’s so exciting to be judging this Poetry Out Loud competition, because to see these young students who are captivated by the idea-- they understand the power that a poem read out loud can have to captivate an audience, to reach an audience, to communicate to an audience-- that’s fantastic. Jo Reed: Because Poetry Out Loud is a competition that’s a recitation competition, it means all these students have memorized these poems, or learned them by heart. Do you think you have a different relationship with a poem that you memorize? Brando Skyhorse:  Yes, absolutely, knowing a poem by heart-- I’m Facebook friends with a poet named Eduardo Corral, and he encourages his students to-- I think that’s actually part of his classroom component, where they have to memorize a poem. And understanding how a poem works, being able to-- without having to look at it on the page, just sort of seeing it in your mind... yeah, it’s extraordinarily instructive. I think that, you know, poets get the opportunity to focus on things that I feel that I would love to spend more time thinking about; the way certain words sound together, for example. Nobody’s going to read through my memoir and look on page 74 and appreciate the way these 3 words in a sentence sound together. But you can do that in a poem, and you can do that, in particular, with a poem that you’ve memorized, because you know it inside-out. And being able to sort of carry this around with you, and being able to recite it to whomever you meet, on demand, that’s-- it’s like carrying your own little library in your head, which I think is just amazing and beautiful. Jo Reed: That is writer Brando Skyhorse. Brando Skyhorse is one of the judges for the Poetry Out loud Final... which will be held at the  Lisner Auditorium, here in DC on Wednesday, April 29, beginning at 7:00 pm. it's free and open to the public, so come! And if you can't make it to the Lisner. No worries, we're webcasting it live. Just go to arts.gov for details You've been listening to artworks produced at the National Endowment for the Arts.  The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at Arts.gov. You can subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U -- just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.  To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.