Founder’s Story
A Message from V. Hansmann
In June of 2011, I graduated from a low-res MFA with a concentration in nonfiction. As the date neared, I pitched the idea of a reading series to a café in Greenwich Village near my home that offered spoken word programming in the basement before the jazz combos arrived. It was accepted and two months after graduation the inaugural program went off without a hitch. I organized the lineups of readers and emceed, then invited everyone back to my apartment to continue the conversation over pizza and wine.
After ten years of poetry and pizza, the establishment of Prospect Street Writers House was my next step. For me, it changed everything. For you, the discoveries you make here will be incremental – jumpstart your project, nail down that missing or misshapen scene/character/chapter, revive confidence in your poetic vision, meet the new friend who may be that perfect second reader for your manuscript.
Come find out.
But Build a House
Work, love, build a house, and die. But build a house.
Donald Hall
This yearning began in college. I took a survey course on Architectural History because it was reputed to be an easy B. The professor took pleasure in the fact that all the jocks took his course. He flirted with the hockey players, and they flirted right back which made me really uncomfortable. I had issues. I aced it because I loved how buildings looked, the way the styles, materials, and vernaculars shifted over time, and how buildings had an inside and an outside. The next semester I took a poetry-writing course for the same reason. I started writing – sonnets; rhymed couplet epics; jokey things; elliptical sexual fantasy exploits. The professor was only a couple years older than me and already a published poet and noted translator. I had a crush on him. He gave me a B.
Architecture and poetry slipped away. I drank myself out of college. I got married and almost started a literary magazine. I took a job on Wall Street and began to make money. For decades, I wandered through a middle-class wilderness; not sober, responsible, closeted, unhappy. Two semi-miraculous things happened five years apart; I got sober and I came out. Soon, I was single. My freak flag, long furled, began to flutter again. Time passed. Then, at last after thirty years, the office I worked for closed.
In a moment of clarity, I applied to graduate school: no BA and off to get a master’s degree in creative writing. Suddenly, I was in the company of smart people who were fascinated by the same thing – making better sentences. My hero was/is Donald Hall, the Poet Laureate, who wrote poetry and prose both extraordinarily well. His personal life included misbehavior and fortitude. This quote of his holds a special place in my heart: The friendship of writers is the history of literature.
So, I would build me a house, a house for my friends, those writers. I had some money. I found a derelict nursing home on a scant acre adjacent to the college where I got my MFA. It had a proud, careworn Italianate Victorian on the front, a hodgepodge of hallways, spooky rooms, and plumbing off the rear, and a motel-style, single-story excrescence hanging from one side. I bought it, moved to Vermont, and tore most of it down.
The building is beautiful and full of light. I call it Prospect Street Writers House. It’s at the top of Prospect Street and has twelve bedrooms and a yellow front door. I intend to be a poet who runs a business that gives writers time and space to do what they do. How did I get here? Inklings, misdirection, balls dropped, balls picked up, assholes, assistance, impediments, surprises, carelessness, chance. I’ve never started a business before. I must embrace uncertainty. I’ve got a lot to learn. I’m seventy-odd: each day is gravy.