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An Interview with Ruth Farmer

IMA director Ruth Farmer is featured in an interview with Susan Moul, IMA graduate and co-founder of The Magazine of Yoga.

Come visit the site and read Part 1 of the interview here. Ruth tells us of IMA students, "Those kinds of learners want peers, advisors, guides, and they are interested in earning a degree. They want individualized. Their lives, their professional lives, or their personal lives make it such that they prefer low residency, but they don’t want to be alone."

In Part 2, right here,  Ruth and Susan talk more deeply about the becoming a leader, tinkering, identity and trusting the process. She says of the IMA program's low-residency format, "Even before this technological revolution, Tim Pitkin (Goddard’s founder), and others at Goddard, realized the value of the intensive, low-residency education model. In the IMA program, intellectual exchanges during workshops, advising meetings, workgroups, in the dining room and in the dorms inform and energize students’ independent studies, as well as faculty teaching. Most of the IMA faculty have been with Goddard over ten years and are also working elsewhere in their respective fields. They model the commitment to life-long learning that we expect of our students."

Together, these two interviews give you a nuanced view into how individualized study unfolds at Goddard, and whether it might be just the ticket for your life's calling.

Blogs from Our Graduates

Several IMA graduates are finding their path into businesses and organizations by making it and walking it. Read about what some of our alumni are up to these days.

Anne Smith studied sense of place, creative writing and especially memoir, and place-based community building during her time at Goddard. Out of her studies, she also started her own business and blog. In One Little Window, she writes about building community, raising her son, and making things to become more self-sustainer and close to the sources that sustain her. Quoting Eleanor Roosevelt in her sidebar, she reminds us ""One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility." This blog explores everything from preparing to raise to chickens to feeding the birds to resurrecting a 1942 knitting pattern. The blog is accompanied by Anne's business site, One Little Window, which brings to readers ways to buy vintage clothing sewing and knitting patterns as well as eco-products Anne makes, such as cloth napkins.

Scott Youman's new blog, This Energetic Man, is a marvel of a website when it comes to great writing prompts, inspiration, vision and replenishment. As Youmans describes his site, "This Energetic Man is a space on the Interweb to share my work and insight as a Transformative Language Artist. My work involves writing and the use of poetry, literature and myth to provide experiential workshops that help expand and affirm our humanity. The insight I offer, imperfect as it may be, arises from my work and continued interest in personal growth, spirituality and anti-oppression work." His site also lists writing workshops and retreats he offers.

Jeanne Chamber's great blog, The Barefoot Heart, isn't just the "ruminations of a red dirt girl" but powerful good writing about life and meaning, punctuated with ample humor. Jeanne describes herself as "a complicated simple girl fluent only in southern and english, i feel beautiful when wearing dangly earrings and dresses that caper. sundays are my most creative day, so i try to have at least 7 sundays each week. whether telling them in cloth, clay, or chirography, stories are my oxygen, characters my blood." Her posts include musings on bioquiltographies, travels with outrageously intriguing characters, explorations of the ordinary in which all manner of magic resides, plans and revisions of plans to live with greater vividness, seasonal transformations of us, and there's even good eats: occasional recipes. Much of her writing lands on how we can bring ourselves greater power and voice through simple, constant and nuanced awareness. 

Visit all these blogs to see what Anne, Scott and Jeanne are cooking up, and how it might enhance your own possibilities.

Poet Laureati: A National Convergence of State Poets, Featuring Two of Goddard's Faculty

Walter Butts

Two of Goddard's faculty are state poets laureate -- W.E. Butts, who teaches in the Individualized BA, is poet laureate of New Hampshire, and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, who teaches in the Individualized MA, is poet laureate of Kansas. Now the two will be meeting in Kansas as part of a national convergence of poets laureate Mirriam-Goldberg is organizing with other Midwestern poets laureate.

Cover photo for An Endless Skyway

The gathering March 13-14 in Lawrence, Kansas, includes readings, an auction to have dinner with a poet laureate, museum tours of the world-renowned Spencer Arts Museum with a poet laureate, and an all-day conference featuring panels on poetry as it relates to healing, the land, spirituality, publishing, making a living and the process of writing; and all-star readings."When we started organizing this, I thought maybe we'd pull in ten or so poets, and I'm blown away that we have 20 coming," Mirriam-Goldberg said. "Most are coming on their own dime because of their belief in the power of poetry, community and what can happen when we all come together."

What will happen when they all come together? "We're not completely sure, but I know the conversations will be fascinating, the poetry will be overflowing, and we'll probably do a good combination of lamenting the loss of arts funding in our states and telling stories that make us fall over laughing."

Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The other poets coming includi former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser, plus Marilyn L. Taylor (WI), Peggy Shumaker (AK), Karla Morton (TX), Walter Bargen (MO), Mary Swander (IA), Sue Brennan Walker (AL), Bruce Dethlefsen (WI), Lisa Starr (RI), Denise Low (KS), Norbert Krapf (IN), Marjory Wentworth (SC), Mary Crow (CO), David Romtvedt (WY), David Evans (SD), Jonathan Holden (KS), Joyce Brinkman (IN) and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda (VA). This event is also the book launch for An Endless Skyway: Poetry from the State Poets Laureate of America (Ice Cube Books).

Registration rates are very reasonable (beginning at $65 for the all-day conference), and ample accommodations are available in the area. For full information, please see www.UnitedPoetsLaureate.wordpress.com.

"I Changed My Whole Life": Ashley Gallo and Transformative Running

Current IMA student Ashley Gallo just finished the New York City Marathon, her first time running in this world-famous rite of passage, and in the process, raising nearly six thousand dollars for the American Cancer Society. But she also was running is also core to her Goddard studies. Ashley has been studying running as a source of personal transformation, a way to challenge the mythology of athletes, and to demonstrate how using our bodies for health and speed and strength is the birthright of people of all shapes and sizes.

Here's what she wrote on her American Cancer Society page:

I know I don't look like the typical runner. I never considered myself an athletic person and found even spectating most sporting events to be boring. I don't think I'm ever going to understand how football works and the idea of balls flying at my face is pretty much out of the question. But I always found the idea of becoming a runner someday really sensational. John Bingham, who is known in the running world as someone who runs uncompetitively slowly and for the sheer pleasure of the activity, said, "Everything changed the day I realized that if I were to become a runner, I would have to run with the body I had." So I began. I run based on intuition and because it is incredibly meditative; more prayer-like and holy than anything I have ever experienced. As someone committed to social work, volunteering in the community and helping others, running became the thing I do for myself; it is my connection to the world, it's my connection to my body. Running has become foundational in my construction towards a more holistic authenticity.

I finished my first marathon last year keeping three promises to myself. I wasn't going to stop, I wasn't going to walk any part of it, and I was going to cross all 26.2 miles. Now I am focusing on losing weight and I will be one of 43,000 people running the prestigious ING New York City Marathon this November. I want to see what it's like to run a marathon in a "different" body than the one I had run the first one in. The NYC Marathon runs through all five boroughs of New York, and I have heard people who have finished it say that it was an experience that truly made them proud to be an American. I am excited beyond belief to be a part of something so epic.

In writing about her journey, she says on facebook, "Marathons at some point have to come from the deepest parts of your bones."Ashley has shown us precisely this with her journey, of which she says, "I changed my whole life." Such changes cannot help but to ripple out positive changes to all who know her.

(Pictures from Ashley and her friends, including, from top, Ashley, the running, and after the race, one of her fellow runners, Chilian miner, Edison Pena).

What Our Grads Are Up To: Body Empathy & Touring On The Sly

From leading Body Empathy writing workshops in San Francisco to touring with drummers and a Ghana dance troupe through the Rockies, our graduates are rocking the real world.

On Nov. 13, Jen Cross, IMA-TLA who focused on erotic writing as a pathway to reinhabit the body, will co-present with Alexandra Cafarelli a workshop called "Body Empathy." Here's their description: "What if we could truly experience empathy for our bodies as they are – and then, by extension, for ourselves, as we are? As queer, genderqueer & trans survivors with a wide array of backgrounds and identities in a sexuality-/gender-restrictive culture, our self-protective tendency can be to “check out” by detaching mind from body to such great degrees that it can be dangerous. Physical activity and writing are two ways to check back in with your embodied self.
With deep respect for the privacy and variety in our personal experience of gender expression and our individual histories, this workshop will create safe space for participants to embrace our bodies as they are, and to write the stories our bodies have been wishing to speak, while allowing possibility for the integration of identity and physical presence. Using brief writing exercises and low impact body mindfulness exercises derived from improvisational theater, Zen meditation practice, and the internal Chinese martial arts, participants will have the opportunity to fully embody our gender complexity in a healing and playful environment." For more information, visit Jen's website, writingourselveswhole.org.

Griffin Brady, a recent graduate in world music, cultural studies and ethnomusicology, has been touring with his group, On the Sly and the SAAKUMU Dance Troupe of Ghana, West Africa, heading toward the Rocky Mountains to drum and dance in the new year. In between gigs, Griffin and the community he's coalesced run the Slyboots School, offering workshops on Rhythm Study, Harmony Study, Melody Study, Improvisation Study and Composition Study. He also organizes the annual Slyfest each August. Listen to some of the music and check out one of the coolest, most whimsical and edgy websites around at www.onthesly.orghttp://onthesly.org/

Hybrid Arts Learning at Goddard for Tiffany Beard

Tiffany Beard, a first semester student in the Transformative Language Arts concentration, just started a blog and wrote an article for examiner.com in Washington, D.C. entitled "Hybrid Arts Learning Found At Goddard College." Here's a photo of Tiffany at the August residency sometime in the middle of her own learning discoveries. She describes herself as "The quintessential Renaissance Gal. An accomplished writer, singer, and performer; Tiffany is committed to helping fellow artists collaborate for social change." You can see Tiffany's blog here. Check it out!