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Photos courtesy of Robbie Brown.

One year ago, a new independent literary press in Long Beach was just an idea in the minds of Nancy Lynée Woo and Sarah Thursday. Fast forward to now and Lucid Moose Lit has come to fruition with some 80 contributors in its debut release, Gutters & Alleyways: Perspectives on Poverty and Struggle.

Woo said the idea for Lucid Moose was conceptualized after she saw a vibrant grassroots community and poetry community within Long Beach.

Lucid03“I saw the potential for combining the two,” she said. “They are both really active, vibrant communities, which I love. I wanted to be able to use the literary arts as a way to affect tangible social change. Long Beach is full of fresh, innovative voices that operate from a truly relatable level.”

Woo and Thursday began getting to work on Gutters & Alleyways in May. Within in four weeks time, the pair had received more than 450 submissions of poetry, 50 submissions of prose and 100 submissions of visual art.

The idea to create an anthology on works based around poverty soon became an easy decision.

“Both editors have had their own run-ins with the dark side of destitution, and we wanted to provide space for others to share their experiences—not to fetishize or romanticize poverty, but to provide a real, intimate look at people’s experiences,” she said. “It was about trying to give voice to a pervasive condition that many people find hard to talk about, or don’t want to look at.”

Woo, who grew up in Orange County, said she began noticing a poverty problem after the recession. She ultimately believes people have a skewed idea of poverty, and she hopes Gutters & Alleyways will help shed light on the issue.

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“With any major social issue, there is a lot of fear, confusion, blame and mistrust associated with poverty,” she said. “We wanted to start breaking down these perceptions, or at least start questioning them. One of the biggest moments I had in college was when I found out how the income gap between the rich and poor was drastically increasing in the United States—and sure enough, we’ve seen the Occupy movement, high unemployment and increasing downward mobility just in the past few years. At this point in time, I don’t think you can talk about poverty without talking about class inequality and shifting power structures. The middle class is eroding and with more people falling in class, there is a lot of room to talk about what is happening.”

Terry Wright, a Long Beach-based author featured in Gutters & Alleyways, said she did not find the subject of poverty difficult to write about.

Lucid01“I work with a lot of students who come from high-poverty neighborhoods and families, so that impacts them every single day,” Wright said. “And because I care about them, it impacts me too. Plus I went to a progressive school for graduate school, and we spent a lot of time thinking about the power differentials that poverty derives from and perpetuates. I think the more difficult thing is to tackle it in a way that’s not a cliche or using cliched images. And staying conscious of your own position of privilege.”

Fernando Gallegos, another author in the anthology, said working with Lucid Moose was an easy experience.

“From my experience, both Sarah and Nancy are very empathetic with those they interact with, the subject of poverty and the struggles that our local communities are dealing with,” he said.

Woo said Lucid Moose’s next release will be called Like A Girl: Perspectives on Feminine Identity and Development.

“With domestic violence, women’s reproductive rights and sexual assault blaring in the headlines, we want to open up the conversation in our next issue to ask, how do we think about girls?,” she said. “How do we (as women or girls) think about ourselves? What are the underlying social assumptions about femininity and how can we examine or challenge them? All through the lens of personal, shared experiences.”