It was a festival of great writing at Sundays Blogade Brunch in Kensington. Here’s a selection from Luna Park Gazette.

On my first day as a student at Brooklyn Technical High School, I was so frightened I couldn’t enter the building.

I was terrified by this huge, forbidding structure that looked like a state prison and seemed to be inhaling students off the streets by the hundreds. I was scared of the Fort Greene neighborhood, so different in every possible way from my little enclave in Bay Ridge.

My father had given me a lift in his car that morning and he quickly sensed my anxiety—there was no way to miss it. Instead of getting angry or shouting “Be a man!” and kicking me out of the moving car, he took me for a spin around the block.

As other students went inside, we cruised in the vicinity of this massive fortress like a four-wheeled sputnik orbiting a distant planet. My father told jokes and stories to calm me down while I gripped the armrest to keep from jumping out the window and running all the way home.

People who live in this up and coming area today wouldn’t recognize the place it was in the seventies. There were burned out houses on every block, suspicious characters on every street corner and an amazing shortage of white people.

With my father’s help, I finally calmed down, got out of the car and started my high school education. It was a long time ago, and I like to think I handle could things better now, but I’ve never forgotten those warm-up laps around Fort Greene Place in my father’s car.