Mike Moriarty is a local Ann Arbor writer. He is the president of the collegiate poetry troupe Ann Arbor Wordworks. This entails running meetings, organizing Wordworks instructors for the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, and making final decisions on content for their big upcoming show, Homegrown, which is this Friday, January 29.

Being president doesn’t put Moriarty in a position of power. “It’s not about authority. It’s about understanding that in a collaborative process, not everything can be a group decision. I’d be like the point guard of the Wordworks starting five.”

Currently, Moriarty’s biggest project is Homegrown. “Homegrown is a collaborative poetry extravaganza with what we hope are many of the best collegiate poets in the area,” he said. “I feel like I can foresee a time when I’ll be reading poets and writers and a Wordworks member will have just been declared the new poet laureate and I’ll be like, ‘Hey! I know that poet!’ and my boss will come to me and be like, ‘Moriarty, those fries aren’t going to cook themselves.’”

Other then spending the last several months on the show, Moriarty released his first collection of poems, “The Ill Lad and the Odd MC”, last spring. Copies are available at Falling Water, the Washtenaw Community College bookstore, and through his website, www.booksmoriarty.blogspot.com. They will also be for sale at Homegrown.

Moriarty is busily involved in the writing community of Ann Arbor. He is the program assistant for the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which includes teaching workshops and bringing in other writers to teach as well. He helps run other large-scale projects like Poetry Night in Ann Arbor. He is also a coach for the Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam Team.

All of these aspects of Moriarty’s writing career boil down to one question:

Why do you write?

“It started with me and my friend Eric writing raps together. I guess I come back to that because I feel that there’s something important about that being the genesis of my writing.

I think it partially comes down to two people with a desire to be creative who didn’t have any mode of expression, and the only form of creativity that we pursued as listeners or an audience was mid 90s “gangsta rap”. I think the raps that we were writing were sort of a kin to the raps that we were hearing put through the filter of middle class white teenagers, involved something with the need to speak oneself into existence or to be perpetually creating the person that I want to be, which manifested in the imitation of their confidence and swagger—that was the initial spark which has the fundamental joy of creating something that’s your own.

Now, I don’t think anyone can say there’s one reason. There’s need to connect with other people. Catharsis, the thrill of constructing something meaningful with your wits and a writing utensil.

I sucked at visual art, never learned to play an instrument, but when I looked at writing, even if I sucked initially, it might be something that I could conceivably learn to be good at. Ballroom dancing in the dark sort of describes my writing process, which ironically is another thing I’m not good at, even with the lights on.”

When Moriarty isn’t writing, he watches cartoons, fantasizes about playing the piano, or calls his cats “cuties”. “I call my cats cuties on pretty much a daily basis, or multiple times in a day,” he said. Moriarty spends a lot of time with his family. “I’m really blessed because I actually like my family, which I’ve come to understand a lot of people my age don’t,” he said.

Mike Moriarty will be performing this Friday, January 29 at Homegrown at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater. Mike will also be performing at the February Tea Haus reading with Wordworks, reading love or anti-love poems.

For tickets to Homegrown, contact Jeff Kass at eyelev21@aol.com.