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!

Connecting with Self, Others & Nature: Brian Moore & Transformative Language Arts

Brian Moore, a graduate of the Transformative Language Arts concentration of the IMA, writes about how we can use the written word to connect with ourselves, our communities and the earth for Alternatives Magazine:

Within and around the earth,
Within and around the hills,
Within and around the mountains,
Your authority returns to you.
–A Tewa Pueblo Prayer

The poem above has great significance, for it is in the context of the earth, hills, and mountains—indeed, the landscapes in which we live, move, and breathe—that we express and embrace our own unique authority, connecting with those other sentient beings, human and other-than-human, with whom we share this planet.

To read more, visit the site,

In Praise of Goodness

Goddard faculty member Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg was recently interviewed by Diane Silver, a writer who keeps up the blog, "In Search of Goodness," a 365-day quest to answer an impossible question. Here's an excerpt from Mirriam-Goldberg's interview:

DIANE: What about poetry and goodness?

CARYN: Poetry and poetic language – which I would extend to memoir, novels and short stories, spoken word and song writing, just everything we can do with language — it’s all about, at its best, taking life and encapsulating it, and passing it on to us in a way that we can see more who we are and how we live. Even speculative fiction shows you a lot about how you live or about how people could live or what people could become. I think the arts serve as a mirror of where we are, but also of a larger vision of where we could be and also historically where we have been. For people trying to cultivate goodness in their lives I don’t think they can do better than to turn to the arts because you’re going to see things there. You can hear it in song, you can see it in painting, you can listen to it in a spoken word performance.

DIANE: It’s a matter of looking at it, but also maybe participating in it? I know that writing has taught me a lot about myself.

CARYN: Creating it, looking at it, doing it. You can see in all these things — what’s the word I want? — you can see your reflection. You can also see where you might be limiting yourself, where you might go instead, through the use of writing, through imagery and rhythm. Imagery speaks to our five senses: smell, taste, touch and so on. Rhythm — just the sounds words make when they’re put together — kind of jars us out of that thick layer of stories and myths that I talked about earlier. We can kind of lift it up and look underneath it. You can use that as pathway to connect to who you are.

Pictures: Above: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg; below: Diane Silver

Helping Teens Empower Themselves Wherever She Lands: Heather Davis

When Heather Davis was in the Individualized MA program (Transformative Language Arts concentration), she focused on how spoken word performance and writing could help at-risk teens find their feet and walk toward better lives. She didn't realize at the time that she would be aiming her own two feet around the country, starting up projects for teens to empower themselves.

While she did her practicum in New York City, she soon moved to Austin, Texas, where she co-founded an affiliate of 826, a non-profit focused on empowerment through literary. The Austin Bat Cave now has several staff people, vibrant community support, and offers after-school, in-school and other programs such as music writing, gender identity exploration, filmmaking, hip-hop poetry, college essay writing and making literary journals.

About three years, pregnant with her first child, Heather and her husband decided to move to Portland, ME to be closer to their families. Once she arrived, she discovered the Telling Room, which was modeled after the 826 program, and she showed up on their doorstep. "They needed someone with my skills, so I started coordinating volunteers and grantwriting, and now I work on fundraising, grantwriting and future program development." She's currently raising funds to launch an after-school program for refugee and immigrant teens from the war-torn, impoverished countries of Sudan, Somalia, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan who have settled in the Portland area. "Schools have a limited ability to serve these kids because of budget cuts," she explains, and furthermore, the kids have just come through horrendous losses as well as dislocation. "Some of them had their parents killed and all kinds of things. We help them tell their stories and also find emotional support, and the academic and literacy component they really need."

Looking back at Goddard, which she graduated from in 2005, she says, "I went there knowing I wanted to do something in the education world and writing world, and it all clicked. Before I came to Goddard, I wasn't really part of any serious discussion about how to do the kind of work I wanted to do. The emphasis on right livelihood helped me move beyond the 9-5 capitalist worker bee mentality. The freedom of the individualized program let me design exactly what I wanted to do."

In addition to living out her own right livelihood in Portland, she's also joined a writing group with several TLA graduates, and she's taking writing workshops to work on a book about the six months she lived in a teepee in the desert, another place her feet took her.

Transformative Language Arts and Reclaiming the Erotic: Jen Cross and Writing Ourselves Whole

Jen Cross began with a hunger to study transformative writing, especially how it could help people, particularly sexual trauma survivors, reclaim the erotic and live more vibrant lives. Her passion led her to write this manifesto now posted on the website of her writing workshop business, Writing Ourselves Whole:

A Manifesto I believe...

• that writing has the power to affect transformation, to spell out not only how we feel now but how we want to feel, how we believe we can feel.
• that we expand in our erotic possibility when we become deeply aware of one another's truths and desires.
• that there’s a power in writing about sex explicitly and in community, using charged and taboo language – we take that charge and make it our own electricity, utilizing it for our own ends instead of remaining subservient to it.
• that much of our sexuality and our erotics is manifested through language–one of the ways to alter our reactions to all the sex-negative messages we are force-fed from birth is through practice and play with new language, in a less-charged space than a bedroom, alone or in the presence of others struggling and playing similarly.
• that we all need safe space in which to be our whole, complete and complex erotic selves – to delve into the desires that we've learned or been told don't "go with" our particular identities.
• that, finally, when we risk empowering and transforming ourselves, we transform and empower the communities we exist within–and changing our communities means that we are changing the world!
  

With such an expansive view of writing, spirituality, sexuality, the body and the body politic, it's no wonder that Jen is a gifted workshop facilitator in San Francisco who has helped many people create communal change through individual transformation. She credits Goddard with helping her articulate a theoretical framework for these workshops as well as Amherst Writers and Artists and Pat Schneider for giving her an ethical framework for non-clinical writing workshops.

Like many students, what Jen ended up studying wasn't what she initially planned. “When I began my studies, I had a deep desire not to focus my studies on sexual trauma survivor communities – I was still battling that internalized shame, of course, and a sense that real academics don't talk about their experiences of trauma. Where do these ideas come from that they get so lodged in us? However, midway through my second semester (it never takes long at Goddard), I finally allowed myself to hone in on the issues of sexual trauma, creative writing, and access to erotic language.” The essay she wrote on this topic become the first of many essays that composed her powerful thesis project that also included her poetry and prose.

“I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to dig into those difficult places of my history during my work at Goddard, and I am thankful, too, for the ways that the program encourages intimate and personal interaction with academia, ideas, theories, so-called certainties -- I got to experience that inevitable and beautiful tension upon realizing that I had to bring myself into all the work that I do. Disconnecting through some veneer of 'objectivity' just doesn't fly -- not at Goddard, and not in the real world of transformative/expressive arts and, you know, that other real world of true human connection and love.”

In addition to her writing workshop business, Jen has published in many journals and anthologies. See www.writingourselveswhole.org, and her blog for more information. See an audio piece by Jen at the Arts and Healing Network.

Awakening Through Pilgrimage: Angela Mullins

Angela Mullins, an accomplished flutist who has performed and taught around the country, came to Goddard with a yearning to go on a pilgrimage – a sacred journey to a site of religious and spiritual significance. So she set out to study pilgrimage, which she defined as “an intentional journey in which the pilgrim communes with the divine, communes with the divine, contemplates his/her life path, and renews his/her connection to the sacred.” Inspired by a pilgrimage to Camino de Santiago in Spain before she started the IMA program, she focused her IMA studies on pilgrimages to China, Tibet, Bolivia, Peru, and even Paris. The journeys culminated in her thesis, Awakening to Awakening: An Intimate Exploration of Pilgrimage, a comprehensive exploration of the traditions, psychology, and religious roots of pilgrimage, and a beautifully-written memoir of her own journeys that also includes her sparkling photographs.

Mullins explains that the study “allowed me to integrate parts of myself that never integrated before. When I first went on my original pilgrimage – to Santiago – that itself unraveled my life in a powerful way, and I realized that writing was going to be really important to my life, but the process of studying pilgrimage at Goddard and integrating my own experience to the depths of my soul, and my writing and study, enabled me to realize my work and life don't have to be separate things.” Along the way, she also took her bamboo flute with her on many journeys, and played around the world, offering her music and collaborating with local musicians. “Being in other cultures, I learned how music served culture, and how music is beyond high art and is its own pathway to healing.”

In addition to her music, she awakened the writer and photographer in her. She says she only started taking her writing seriously right before she started at Goddard. “Up to that point, I was a closet journaler, and would have smacked somebody if they dared to read it, but going on that first pilgrimage, and realizing writing would be an important part of understanding pilgrimage showed me how to follow writing wherever it took me, and how writing was its own pilgrimage path.” What she saw not only infused and opened up her writing, but her photography also as she took thousands of pictures on her travels.

Her pilgrimage continues in several forms. Right after she finished her thesis at the end of 2007, she went to Pisco, Peru to volunteer for Hands on Disaster Response. She currently is on a journey through massage school, and she's studying yoga, looking all the time for how these healing arts enhance and integrate into her writing, photography, and music, and in how she serves her community.

While she continues to teach flute at a studio in her home, perform, and do arts outreach in Washington, D.C. public schools – taking music into the classroom to help students find their own voices – she says her journey in the IMA program and around the world has “taken music from where it was before my life – as an intellectual process – and taken it back into my heart and back into my body. It's also opened up my whole life so that everything I do – music, writing, photography, yoga, massage, everything – now comes from that place within me.”

For more on Angela's reflections, please see http://mysticalroad.blogspot.comand http://mandalajourney.blogspot.com

Photos (from top): 1) Walking along the Camino near Pamplona, Spain; 2) Inside the Inca Ruins at Ollantaytambo, Peru; 3) Flying over the Himalayas: the Rooftop of the World; 4) Sharing melodies inside the Temple of Heaven, Beijing, China; 5) Friends from the Camino, in front of the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain; 6) Connecting with the music inside Templo de la Luna, near Cusco, Peru

Yvette Hyater-Adams: Changing Lives Through the Arts

Yvette Hyater-Adams is a change artist who found, while exploring the art of change, how art can change lives. During 20 years in the corporate world as a Human Resources executive and since 1997, CEO of her own consulting firm, Prime Directive Consulting Group, she has worked with Fortune 500 company leaders to lead change. Hyater-Adams started the Transformative Language Arts (TLA) concentration in 2001. Seven years later, she has infused her work with what she studied at Goddard about how people and businesses can change for the better through re-storying their lives.


Her work was catalyzed by 9/11, which happened less than a month after her first Goddard residency. Back home in New Jersey, she immediately joined ArtistCares. She was soon traveling to New York City and Washington, D.C. to train people who did body work, martial arts, painting and other arts on how to integrate writing into their work, and from the writing, move through some of the trauma from 9/11.


Since Hyater-Adams' graduation, it's no wonder that she went on to found Renaissance Muse, which uses the power of words for wellness, healing, personal growth and a creative voice. She has also developed a Transformative Narrative Coaching training program, influenced by her many years doing professional coaching and her TLA studies, to be launched in June of '09. She is also offering a Foundations of Transformative Narrative Coaching as an introductory program with NTL for the Applied Behavioral Sciences. This program will train professionals who coach or advise leaders in hospitals, non-profits, and businesses to help them examine, affirm and/or revise the stories that guide their lives (Read more about this.)


“This is all founded on TLA – on how words transform people – and on the work I've done with change management programs in my career and academic life,” Hyater-Adams explains. It's also related to her consulting, and workshop facilitation, particularly in communities of color.


“The women of color who have attended my writing workshops tend to be middle class women who are successful in their own lives, but who have been secretly silenced in lots of ways,” Hyater-Adams says, explaining that some have been silenced through physical, mental and sexual abuse, some from low self-esteem and invisibility. “Many communities of color still feel that therapy is a huge taboo....You don't go outside of your faith to deal with your problems. Creating this space through TLA – to use art to transcend experience – is what the writing workshops and coaching methods I use is about. Coaching is not therapy, but a way to look at restorying your experience – what new story you can create that breaks the old story you held.”

All of it leads Hyater-Adams to continue her work as a social change agent, one person, one group, one story at a time.

Transformative Narrative Portrait Workshop February 27- 28, 2009, Philadelphia, PA