Courtesy photo
By Darlene Donloe
Contributing Writer
LOS ANGELES — In the spring of 2018, six aspiring writers met in the home of actress/author Denise Nicholas to exchange ideas and personal stories about their unique experiences and perspectives.
Nicholas, best known for her role in the television series “Room 222,” “In The Heat of the Night” (she also wrote six episodes) and in several films including “A Piece of the Action,” “Let’s Do It Again,” and “Blacula,” had already written her first novel, “Freshwater Road” and was interested in sharing her knowledge of the writing process, she had garnered from a Journeyman’s Writing Workshop run by writer/teacher Janet Fitch.
The group has some high-profile members, including Charles Floyd Johnson, Otto E. Stallworth Jr., Denise Billings, Gwendolyn Williams, Hattie Winston and Nicholas, who became the Longwood Writers Workshop, named after the street on which they gathered.
They met bi-weekly at Nicholas’s home and then via Zoom during the COVID pandemic.
Their efforts culminated in an anthology called, “A Gathering of Voices,” a varied collection of personal, introspective, and lyrical stories.
The stories resonate with memories of struggles they’ve waged, battles they’ve won and lost and many experiences that illuminate their mature wisdom and hard-won resilience.
Members of the Longwood Writers Workshop will have their first book signing for “A Gathering Of Voices” at 3 p.m. April 19, 2025, at the Nate Holden Performing Arts Center, 4718 W Washington Blvd.
Tony, Drama Desk, and NAACP-nominated actor Rocky Carroll (CBS’s “NCIS,” Broadway’s “The Piano Lesson”) will moderate a discussion with the authors. Phylicia Rashad wrote the book’s foreword.
“The workshop began as I had fallen into a creative slump,” said Nicholas, an original member of the Negro Ensemble Company in New York. “A book I’d been trying to hammer into place for a while seemed to be playing hide and go seek with me.
“Based on the excellent experience I’d had in writer Janet Fitch’s Journeyman’s Workshop some years earlier, I decided to give that kind of process a try to see if it would push me in my own work.”
The workshop went through a couple of iterations. The first one, which included four would-be writers, didn’t work out. Nicholas finally settled on five individuals with backgrounds in the arts and writing.
“The five people who made the cut had either excellent background in or near the arts, had a dream of writing and had begun their own journey as artists,” Nicholas said. “Of the five, I already had excellent relationships with Charles Johnson, Hattie Winston, and Dr. Otto Stallworth. The two “newbies’ were Denise Billings and Gwendolyn Williams. All five had professional backgrounds, excellent work ethics and a desire to improve their work.”
Johnson, an Emmy Award winner, is a television and film producer with a career spanning more than five decades. Among his many credits is the award-winning “Red Tails,” the motion picture that portrayed the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed African American pilots of World War II.
He also executive produced “John Lewis: Get in the Way,” the ground-breaking documentary about the life and career of U.S. Rep. John Lewis.
“We all were so excited to work on this project,” said Johnson, who also associate produced the long-running shows “Magnum, P.I.,” “Quantum Leap,” “JAG,” and “NCIS.” “When we started, we were all thinking about working on our memoirs. When the pandemic slowed us down, we found we had a lot of material that may not be in our memoirs. I stopped working on my memoir to do this.”
Johnson said that he realized he had much to learn about writing once he was fully immersed in the process.
“I used to think I was there after a draft or two,” he said. “When we got together, I learned so much more. I learned it’s not very good when it’s written on paper the first time. I learned about constructive criticism. One of the things we discovered was that we were safe in the workshop. What happened on Longwood stayed on Longwood.”
“I learned that my first and second drafts are crap,” said Winston, an actor, singer and producer who audiences know from television, film, and Broadway. “It varied. There was a format. We would go away and write and come back with eight to 10 pages of material. We would make copies of those pages so everyone could read what we had written.”
Winston said the workshop members would then read their work out loud.
“Everyone would tell us what they thought,” she said. “It wasn’t anything like, ‘this is good and bad.’ It’s about what if you put this paragraph here, or start with this thought instead of this thought. What is it you are trying to say? It was meticulous. It was like being a doctor.
“We learned more about the English language, sentence structure and what makes a story interesting. We were critiquing because we cared about each other. The other five people wanted my work to be good. And I wanted their work to be good.”
Winston, who is married to conductor, composer, arranger, orchestrator, record producer and music director Harold Wheeler, said she learned something about herself as a workshop member.
“I learned that I’m stronger than I thought I was,” said Winston, who was a founding actor of the world-renowned Negro Ensemble Company in New York. “I learned that I really love learning. New information coming to me gets me excited.”
One of the personal stories Winston shared in “A Gathering of Voices,” is a secret she has kept for decades. To heal, she shared the story of being raped several times by her father when she was a teenager and a virgin.
“I’m still hesitant,” she said. “It’s still difficult to talk about it. I’ve been ashamed of and lived with this all of my life. Very few people know about this. My father raped me. It was horrible.”
Winston said she ended up running away from home.
“The only solace I could think to go to was school,” said Winston, who grew up in Mississippi. “I never told people that story. It wasn’t just one time. I felt safe with my writing group when telling them about it. I dealt with it myself. I told my dean, the principal, the police, and I went to a home. It was like a terrible B movie I never talked about.”
Johnson also revealed something personal that most people didn’t know.
“One of the pieces is called ‘In The Middle of the Night’ about my pancreatic cancer journey, which happened during the pandemic,” he said. “It’s often a death sentence. I told the group about it, and they said to write about it. I was very vulnerable writing about what I was going through.”
Johnson revealed that he went through an eight-hour surgery and endured “severe chemo” for seven months.
“Now I’m better than I thought I would be,” he said. “At one point, I lost my hair. I also got down to 140 pounds. Now, I’m back to 180. I wanted to get it off my chest. Most of the pieces in the book are about life lessons in some way. There’s a lot of stuff we imparted in the book.”
Johnson said he doesn’t want the book to be for people his age but for young people to figure out their lives.
The compelling narratives in the book speak to readers of all ages who are looking for confirmation that the challenges and adversity presented by life’s struggles can be overcome with hard work, a never-ending belief in oneself, and the willingness to persevere through every hardship.
“We’re very proud of this book because it talks about many wonderful life lessons,” Johnson said. “We made it entertaining as well.”
“If you get nothing else out the book, I want people to know and say, ‘I can do it,’” Winston said. “That thing you are afraid of, you can do it.”
“I hope that readers of the anthology will enjoy the ride that these wonderful stories will take them on,” Nicholas said. “Relax, read, and enjoy.”
To reserve complimentary tickets to the book signing, visit https://bit.ly/AGatheringofVoicesBookLaunch. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
Darlene Donloe is a freelance reporter for Wave Newspapers who covers South Los Angeles. She can be reached at ddonloe@gmail.com.
