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.

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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.

Amanda : Writing, Art and Environment

Amanda Sandos, a current IMA student, is studying environment art through visual arts and creative writing to explore the deep ecology connections between animals and humans. A staff writer for Got2BeGreen, and a volunteer at the Maier Museum of Art, Amanda is a former zoo keeper with extensive experience with both animals and art. Check out her blog about life on this wild planet.

Chilean Flamingo, Lake Natron, Northern Tanzania

I stand at the edge of a flock, on the shore of this parched bowl, the base of a volcano. Ten thousand birds flag their heads from side to side, necks stretched, marching in rows.

The quills on their backs click like beads when Masai women walk, barely heard over the honking chaos. Every year when the rains come, the lake rises from cracked earth,

they wade through bubbles, mixing blue-green algae and brine shrimp. If the earth is quenched they build, scooping and stamping, stamping and scooping, clapping

their feet, molding mounds, growing thinner, feathers frayed, caked, matted. She’ll perch at the top of her turret and sing – soft, lyrical – stretching towards any who walk past,

resting her neck against the one who stops, hoping he’ll rub his neck to hers. She’ll close her eyes and return the caress of the one standing with her in this boiling lake.

The one who will share their roost, turn their chalky egg, tend their chick, preen and feed, protect until these waters recede.

This year, they waited for the sky to open, but no rains came. Tonight, as the sun sinks, they lift their wings and fly, without ritual, without young.