By Brian Dunlap

Laughter spilled from the crowd as stories and memories rose from the stage.

It was a Saturday night at the nearly full theater at Beyond Baroque. Peter J. Harris answered journalist Rex Weiner questions, recounting reading with Lucille Clifton as a young writer, writing The Black Man of Happiness as he faced foreclosure, his time spent attending the Anansi Writers Workshop at the World Stage after moving to L.A. in the early ‘90s. It was gripping, informative, accidently instructive, but most of all the talk revealed one versions of a writer’s life. It revealed a happy black man.

In the audience were other L.A. poets: V. Kali, Jerry Garcia, Luis J. Rodriguez.

But Peter J. Harris made sure to discuss the anthology, Voices From Leimert Park Reduex, in which he wrote the forward, and in which two of his poems are included. To point out the important artistic place The World Stage and the Anansi Writers Workshop in L.A.’s black community, the wider literary community, and in Peter J. Harris himself, he calls the storefront venue in Leimert Park, where these poets honed their chops, “a storefront with a halo.” He read from his forward where he says, “I was looking for a home,” after moving to L.A., “I found it in the three-hour gathering who come together at 7:30 pm on Wednesdays…”

Peter even reminisced about when he used to regularly attend the critique section of the workshop. He said how awful, some of the poetry was from the younger poets, their rage infused political polemics, that drew from the same small well of language, saying the same thing. They hadn’t yet learned nuance. But to the dedicated poets, the community of The Stage and the workshop helped mold them into better poets and better people.

Yet, the night came to a close with an audience question about happiness, how to be and maintain being happy and how to be happy as a black man. “But never happy-go-lucky,” as he reminded the audience.

“Think how revolutionary that idea is,” said the author, whose book The Black Man of Happiness won a 2015 American Book Award, “that a black man can be happy.”