Soul-stirring Poetry with Ben Sloan

On Nov. 3, 2023, the Creative Writing Club held a poetry reading event. During this event, PVCC Professor Emeritus Ben Sloan read poems from his new chapbook, Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky, published by Seven Kitchens Press. He was joined by former PVCC student La’Tasha Strother, who read a few of her own creative writing pieces afterwards.

Sloan taught in PVCC’s English department for over 20 years before his retirement in 2021. He has also collaborated with Associate Professor of Theatre Arts Brad Stoller and La’Tasha Strother in PVCC’s Flying in Place productions, a series of stage performances that revolve around the creative writing of incarcerated PVCC students. Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky is the second chapbook that Sloan has published. His first was The Road to Home, published in 2017 by Thirty West Publishing House.

The chapbook features several poems that he wrote during his time teaching incarcerated PVCC students at the Fluvanna Women’s Correctional Center and the Buckingham Correctional Center. It includes a diverse collection of poems about Sloan’s life, as well as four poems inspired by a writer and Holocaust survivor named Aharon Appelfeld who escaped from a concentration camp at 9 years old. Sloan’s work is thought-provoking and descriptive, with vivid imagery of everyday places that ground his poems while simultaneously asking complex questions like, “What do people want, really, or need from one another?”

“My collection is based on experiences I’ve had, the reading I do, my background. So, the book – the collection – is really a picture of me over a period of time; what I think about, what I do, what happens in my life,” said Sloan.

Several short creative writing pieces written by Sloan’s incarcerated students are also featured in the chapbook, detailing their experiences in a correctional facility, their feelings and thoughts, as well as their journey to better themselves. These poems are extremely insightful and provide a look into how correctional facilities treat incarcerated individuals.

“There’s something that’s hard to communicate about, or describe about, people who are incarcerated. There’s a kind of wisdom that they have, is what it comes to, really. They’ve had some challenging experiences, obviously, but they are working to reinvent – rebuild – themselves,” Sloan said of his students.

After Sloan finished his reading, La’Tasha Strother stepped up to the podium. Strother is a former PVCC student who has performed in several PVCC productions, including Flying in Place. Her works have been featured in the Fall Line magazine, and she won the Writing Center’s English 111 Essay Contest in 2021.

Strother read a collection of several creative writing pieces she wrote for her Poetry Writing and Advanced Poetry Writing classes at her current school, VCU. While her works were somewhat longer than Sloan’s, they were just as captivating. She opened with her most recent piece, “River,” which she said she finished only about half an hour before the event. As she read, she tilted her head to the side and nodded in time with the rhythm of her words. Her works often combined a sort of nostalgic childhood feeling with darker, more adult themes of growing up with a tumultuous home life.

“I think that creative writing is just another form of sharing,” said Strother. “If you think of it like having a fellowship time, and there’s this feast of food in front of you, it may have been one person or a mix of people who put it together, but everyone at the table gets to partake in it, and so I think that words and stories have a way of touching people individually.”

Although the event is over, you can still purchase a copy of Then On Out Into a Cloudless Sky for $12 at sevenkitchenspress.com.