Gold Is an Appropriate Metaphor: Writer, Producer Alle Wims & the Ms. Alle Show
Ms. Alle Wims graduated from the Build Institute, the program that targets minority entrepreneurs, on a Saturday and by the next week, the coronavirus hit big. The local schools closing will temporarily ding her tutoring day job. And no library for a month means no producing her show, the Ms. Alle Show, for Access Fort Wayne. Wims will have to go digital (Facebook and Instagram), the original plan before it matured through Build. (She’s spending her self-quarantine time wrapping up a long-sitting book.)
Her business will be nonprofit... for now. When she learns more about how to make money, she’ll think about changing its status. It’s time to think outside the box and master plan.
Wims is a F.W. native. She could’ve went to South Side. She went to Northrop, ran track, and competed in the 100 and the 4x100 meters at State. She won on that stage -- State Champ -- in the relay. But an athlete not moving, out of boredom, will find other ventures. She joined the speech team just “to see what it was about.” She did a collage of Langston Hughes poetry for her tryout. They put her on the varsity by accident, she said. Oops.
“The best moments are when I’m not over thinking something.” Wims ended up winning in the poetry category, surprising everyone and herself. “They treated me better after that. [And that] became a pattern in my life because prior to that, they weren’t sure where I was going with it. I felt they didn’t believe in me.”
Wims was one of those always-expressive kids. “I love to act, talk.” One time in middle school, she drove a teacher to tears while reciting Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Less Traveled,” after putting, she said, “feeling and emotion into it.” Maybe she was onto something cool, she thought.
She was something of a writer; she wrote random stuff. She wrote a song for a Mary J. Blige contest in a XXL hip-hop magazine that she wasn’t supposed to be reading (“but did anyway”), but she never mailed it. Some writing just needs to exist as proof to the author that it could be done.
Wims didn’t really write poetry seriously, she said, until her senior year of college at IPFW. She started off at HBCU Clark Atlanta in Georgia, where she majored in Mass Media and learned TV, radio, and film hands on...the hands on approach is what she really liked. “I loved being around black people, all creative and all intellectual,” she said. By then, she was full on artist. The tuition cost brought her back to Fort Wayne to IPFW, where the learning wasn’t as hands on and the black artist community wasn’t as robust. She majored in communications, minored in theatre, and interned at 96.3 FM in 2009.
In 2010, she had a daughter. By the time she graduated two years later, she was writing poetry, her poetry, frequently and purposively. Writer Ketu Oladuwa gave Wims her first stage to perform her poetry, at one of his open mic events.
Her poetry dealt with life issues, experiences and relationships, but she felt her blackness so her words reflected the uplift-ment of embracing one’s roots. Her work in Fort Wayne spurred a move back to creative-rich Atlanta, where she lived and labored for four years. But by then, she found the artist market congested. She explained her point naturally in metaphor. “Not everybody is a basketball player, but they want to play. (Laughs.) That’s what I found in Atlanta.” It’s the one benefit, she said, about living in the Fort versus the Dirty South: room to flex. Fort Wayne has its inherent problems…this is the sentiment of this writer and Wims herself…but it allows for “goldmine” opportunities. But you gotta dig deep. “Fort Wayne is a worker town.” (She’s looking for a film crew. See her email below.)
She made the decision to leave her new daughter in Fort Wayne, in care of family, while she pursued her Atlanta dream. Like then, she has no regrets about it, especially living in this town when the prevailing thought is to set aside the ambition, raise a family, and be cool with it. “But I couldn’t give up on my dreams and my creativity,” Wims said. “I care about my child but I’m not in a place in life that I feel my child can be proud of, nothing to leave my child now.”
Wims was to be co-featured at Ketu Oladuwa’s Public Square Poetry Xtended event, along with George Kalamaras, but the April 9 reading was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alle Wims, the Ms. Alle Show
Email: MsAlleShow@gmail.com
Facebook: TheMsAlleShow
Instagram: Ms.Alle
I run Scrambled Egg(s) Design and Productions, based out of Northeast Indiana. In addition to producing in-house company projects, I also create advertising materials for companies and organizations, with an emphasis on interactivity.