By James Maher
Name: Melissa Hotchkiss (and Jess)
Occupation: Poet and Marketing and Business Development
Location: 5th Street Between 1st and 2nd
Time: 5:45 on Saturday, Nov. 2
I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 24 years this coming January. I’m from Vermont. I’m not sure why I came here. I majored in art history and I wanted to get into gallery work. I had been working in a photography gallery in New Mexico and they had New York contacts, but I didn’t have a job when I came over here. I sort of landed here and then figured it out. I’ve worked for three art and photography dealers and I could not have ever gotten into writing poetry if I did not work with photography for a number of years in my 20s. It taught me a whole new way of seeing.
It was hard at first just landing here. I remember it like it was two minutes ago. I remember getting here, I had these black suede short boots and I was on the corner of 4th Street and 1st Avenue and I’m walking and I just loved it and then I stepped on a mouse that was mangled and dead. For some reason I remembered being so exhilarated by that. I mean, I didn’t kill it. It’s the daily benign craziness that I love.
I’m a poet. I’ve been writing poetry for 21 years. Technically I’m a poet with a stressful day job. My day job is business development at a large accounting firm, but in my off-time I do the editing work and my own poetry. I got a master's in creative writing. I love the East Village and I feel like capturing it. I take a lot of photographs as well, although I love to take one good picture a year. I’ve even done stand-up comedy. I’ve lived like this semi-bohemian life but not in the full way that I used to.
I have one book out called "Storm Damage" and I’m one of the editors for Barrow Street, which is a poetry journal started in 1998. We also create books. It’s almost been 15 years. Barrow Street is named after the street in the West Village where the Greenwhich House Music School is. Prior to that I ran a reading. I have a hard time describing my writing. Right now I’m doing short poems and I’m continually working on my second book. My poems are very spare and I have a lot of East Village poems.
I’m also in a poetry group workshop where we go and share our work, called the Urban Range. One of the elements within our group is the idea of urban poems. The whole sense of urban in the poem or the poets’ psyche. It’s not as if it’s some revolutionary idea, since many people live in urban areas, but that’s part of the group I’m in.
The stories I have are mostly about my apartment building, due to bad neighbors. I live above Downtown Bakery. I’ve been eating there for 24 years — mostly breakfast. I feel like I’m the old lady in the building but I’m not. I outlast almost everybody except for a few others that have been there a long time. It’s one of those buildings where 90 percent is turnover. There was the guy who didn’t understand why at 3 am, blasting his stereo wasn’t a problem. One time I asked him to turn it down and he said, ‘But I just got a new stereo.’
Lately, there was the couple who would fight a lot. At first I could only hear the women and never the guy but then I started to hear the guy. At least he was standing up for himself. I couldn’t escape it — white noise, earplugs. So one night at 2 or 3 am I wrote a note, “I’m sorry you fight so much but the next time that happens I’m calling the police.” I never heard them fight again.
James Maher is a fine art and studio photographer based in the East Village. Find his website here.
