Starting to resemble the likes of Kelly Square, the Dirty Gerund’s roadshow has evolved in its latest iteration, now with three roads to travel.

What started with a single poetry slam road trip in 2024 rapidly evolved into a multifaceted traveling side-show of sorts for The Dirty Gerund Poetry Show. Staying true to it’s namesake, the roadshow is how we refer to all the different ways in which we bring our poets & ruckus on the road to other mics/venues/communities.

In 2025, the roadshow split into two paths to travel: you could continue to go around the Northeast with the original slam team, and then a new pop-up all-ages traveling show emerged that would come to you. We brought the Gerund ruckus to three Worcester-county all-ages venues that year: a cafe, a museum, and a gallery.

In 2026, the roadshow expands in a new way,,, and continuing to write this in third person is impossibly strange; hi, my name is Nic Jean, and I am the roadshow‘s ‘ringleader’. Over the past couple years, I led the slam team, organized the pop-up shows, and coached the poets through various workshop series’, some of which I created and led and others where I hired guest-speakers to teach craft and share their perspectives as current and former slam poets.

In the background, I made a point to start documenting participating poet’s questions, hopes, and goals. After expanding the scope of the original roadshow to start the pop-up shows, I started listening for community feedback from the new audiences and venues we brought the Gerund to. There was a recurring theme across the board: Worcester poets have ample opportunities to perform, but limited access to learning and mentorship regarding slam.

I mean, it makes sense, right? Slam started as a bar game in the 80s, why would there be formal learning opportunities, that doesn’t really add up. But, it became a culture shaping literary force that so many poets find their voice and place in, and some make careers out of, but, where do you start? For many of us it was YouTube, or a SlamFind webform that listed an open mic with upcoming qualifiers, which then fell to luck or fate that you’d be free that night of the week and confident enough to go talk to a stranger about poetry you’ve maybe never shared with anybody before. If you’re really lucky, you might have a friend that knows someone who used to do slam and get to meet them. This sort of, knowing a guy who knows a guy, approach to finding a mentor isn’t particularly kind to someone who’s nervous, who’s pouring their heart and soul into journals and spending years watching poets online wishing they could do that, when they absolutely can.

Worcester has a fantastic arts scene. There are so many supportive and kind people in every medium doing everything they can to encourage others. This is why I strongly believe the way we continue to make poetry more accessible in Worcester is to mirror the namesake of the roadshow, and take our questions that have gone unanswered locally on the road to bring back answers from other communities. What are they doing that works? Can we do that here?

So, the roadshow’s third ‘leg’ of sorts is an educational endeavor I’ve named after the titles I’ve been giving all our roadshow posts: Postcards From The Road

I have been awarded a 2026 WAC Fellowship, and through it will soon begin traveling around the US to visit poetry communities, and talking to slam experts and community leaders, to bring back as much insight and perspective as I can for the poets of Worcester to learn from. While I can’t realistically transport a full team of poets around the country on this endeavor in the same way I have driven us around the region, I can pack my luggage full of notes and stories to bring home for them all to benefit from.

You’ll be able to travel the third leg of the roadshow with me virtually, by following the Postcards From The Road series on my Substack, dropping next month. In the fall, I’ll be hosting a local workshop series based on everything I learn through the project (a sort of evolution of last summer’s Dirty Work Slam Camp) which will be open to the public for any/all writers & artists to learn from.

We recently announced the 2026 slam team leader, the dumpling queen herself Bailey Magpie. So the original leg of the roadshow is in great hands, and I’ll still be organizing our pop-ups, even if I can’t attend them myself. That said, I’ll only be on the road some of the time, so you will certainly still catch me most Mondays at the Gerund, and I would love to talk with you if there are questions you have for me to pack into my bag before I go.

The Postcards From The Road project is supported in part by a grant from the Worcester Arts Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency #WACFunded #PowerOfCulture