Words by Tom Price
photos by Bea Ahbeck

They say words don’t accomplish much.

A group of UC professors, students and downtown merchants beg to differ.

The word — both spoken and written — is doing what many said could not happen. It’s uniting Main Street with Lake Road and connecting UC professors and students with business owners and community members.
It’s poetry readings on Tuesdays, music and short stories on Sundays and writing
workshops on Fridays. It’s a movement

The Word Movement.

Cloaked in the shadows of the dark wood walls of The Partisan, Loren Qualls reads. With his face aglow from the backlight display of his Macbook, he recites verses from a fictional short story with the rhythm of a conga player.

His tempo shifts from frantic to soothing with timely pauses and breaks for humor. This story is dark and gloomy, yet hopeful and sensual. It tickles the same nerves as the intricate dialogue in a Woody Allen film. It’s entertainment in its simplest form — a story.

Qualls is reading a fictional tale that he is still elbow deep in creating, but he reads as though he has rehearsed it for months. It’s the UC lecturer’s first time reading at the Lines of Flight spoken word night at The Partisan — a twice-monthly gathering of poets, musicians and story writers.

Lines of Flight, the brainchild of a UC lecturer, a business owner and a bartender, is one of many reoccurring events hosted by faculty at UC Merced at various downtown locations.

“We are trying to create an emergent collective. The idea is to bring our own backgrounds (the UC faculty and students) and mix much more with the local community,” says Dr. Frederick Young, a UC lecturer and the organizer of Lines of Flight. He says the idea comes from two French philosophers who created the concept of an emergent collective.

“The notion of a line of flight is basically that within any kind of striated space … a kind of conservative space, a rigid space, institutional space, there is always the possibility of the emergence of something new happening.”

The turnout and support has been nothing short of amazing.

“I was incredibly surprised by the turnout. Every seat in the place was taken,” says Partisan bartender and Lines of Flight organizer Kris Robinson about the event’s first night. “The amount of respect people have for the artists is great. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

What has emerged from these gatherings is a new alliance. Business owners like RC Essig at The Partisan and Alex Lu-Pon at Forté Yogurt are reaching out to the creative minds out at the UC and giving them a canvas for their words.

Forté Yogurt is the home of open-mic Thursdays to go with the spoken words nights at The Partisan and J&R Tacos. The Merced Writers Center, a group organized by UC faculty, also holds brown bag writing workshops on Fridays at the Merced Multicultural Arts Center.

“The public university should be porous. We are supposed to be providing service to the community we are in,” says Nick Valdez, a UC lecturer. “We should also be inspiring other people to be creative. That we can do that through the university, and provide this kind of service in the downtown area, I think it’s a part of a larger mission of the public university — one that’s probably been lost in a lot of cases.”

UC student Stephanie Jones clinches her fist and screams: “We ain’t dead yet!”

It’s a repeated and powerful lyric in her original poem “Broadcasted from the Masses.” The large gathering at Forté Yogurt hangs on her every word as she grows louder and bolder with every syllable. “But we ain’t dead yet!”

A beaming smile covers her face as she walks away from the microphone to a large ovation. For one minute and 38 seconds she had an attentive crowd fixated on her every word.

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