Filmmaking, Poetry and the Disobedient Body: Alexandra Hartman

Alexandra (Alex) Hartman came to Goddard to change directions in her life. She planned to lead writing workshops when she left Goddard, but something more local soon emerged: the body. “The IMA encourages students to find our own direction by trusting the process and following our study wherever it takes us. So I’d repeat to myself, ‘Trust the process, trust the process,’ and when things got strange and I didn’t know why I was reading about cannibalism or scarification, I’d repeat, 'trust the process,' until those words became a mantra.”

What emerged for Alex was a deep study of what it meant to live in a body, particularly a body with a tendency to be disobedient. "As part of my process of struggling to emerge as a grown person, I kept running into all of these shoulds and should-nots that related to my body. I began to see them as obstacles to my growth, and I realized how much of my life was spent listening to my fears. But when I started listening to what I really wanted to do, lots of times it was stuff I wasn't supposed to do, and I had to think hard about who was telling me what to do and why, what were the consequences, and why did I need to break rules?”

As an artist, poet, and long-time professional web designer, Alex communicated fluently through images, color, texture and voice. “Film was a really good amalgam of all I was into, but I didn't want to go into filmmaking. I didn't think I had enough time, but I kept hearing this voice in my head that said, 'You must make a film.' And I don't usually hear voices in my head.” Alex took a semester off, taught herself filmmaking, blogging on her progress and posting her efforts until she was ready to come back and put together a body of her body-oriented work.

The result was a 33-minute film called The Word Made Flesh, which coalesces, with the help of Duke Ellington's appropriately-named signature song – “Body and Soul” – 11 short films. She blended footage from found home movies, vintage soft-core porn and educational films, music, and her own filmmaking. Her study also drew on the fields of embodiment studies, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, women's studies and poetry, “and how everyone is looking at the body in those fields.”

Did making this film and coming to Goddard bring Alex the change she sought? “Oh, hugely! It allowed me to be who I am and to be as strong as I can be. I'm not the same person I was when I came to Goddard – I was timid and tentative, and now I'm operating on my own accord.”

See Alex's film, and the blog she used to chronicle her process of teaching herself filmmaking, her poetry, sources, video and visual concepts and much more at Alex's website.

Pictures of Alex, and several stills from her film, The Word Made Flesh.

A Marriage of Spiritual Memoir & Community Workshops: Suzanne Adams

When Suzanne Adams started IMA's Transformative Language Arts concentration, she was already changing her life as a freelance writer and suburban stay-at-home Houston mother in a household of males. While she didn't know what she was shifting toward, she had a sense that this change involved creative writing, community work, and spiritual growth.

She soon herself immersed in writing as a spiritual practice, studying spiritual autobiography, and TLA as a tool for social change and personal growth for girls. One faculty member with an evangelical Christian background suggested Suzanne explore healing stories within the framework of Christianity; another faculty member, who specialized in feminism, prompted Suzanne to write about feminist theology and mythology. Another faculty member’s expertise in workshop facilitation was invaluable in furthering Suzanne’s goal of offering expressive writing workshops in the community. By the end of her studies, she wrote Reclaiming the Lost, a powerful body of essays on spiritual questioning and questing, writing as a calling, and how her changes catalyzed profound changes in her marriage. Accompanying the memoir was a study of mythology, theology, history, literature, sociology and psychology as it related to her topic; and a practicum focused on expressive writing for teenage girls. The writing especially allowed her to write herself into voice, identity, and stronger connections with her family, female divinity, and the wild.

Since graduation, Suzanne was admitted into the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, where she found strong encouragement to revise the essay collection toward a memoir about how one spouse's spiritual development can actually strengthen, and not necessarily, tear apart a marriage. She found even more support from her husband who, after reading her essays, even ones that weren't very flattering of him and their relationship, said to her, “This is your story, and I think you've written it in such a way that would help others, and I encourage you to continue this work.” Suzanne says that his response, “helped us to work for more transformation along the way.” She soon starts working with Farnoosh Moshiri through Moshiri's Studio 16, a highly competitive writing workshop. She's also presenting "The Sacred Knowledge of Myth," a workshop at the Power of Words conference at Goddard College Sept. 3-7, organized by the TLA Network.

She also started leading workshops in her community. “It's All About You,” a workshop fostering empowerment, self-discovery and self-esteem for middle school girls, that she first piloted as her TLA practicum at Goddard, is now on its feet at a Houston area middle school as a project of ARTreach, a local grassroots arts organization. Adams is in the middle of facilitating two 90-minute sessions twice a week for five weeks, helping girls negotiate media influences, discover their voices and visions and dismantle damaging messages through writing and art exercises and discussions.

Suzanne found her time at Goddard turbo-charged her quest to write and seek spiritual connection. “When I finally got there, that (being at Goddard) was the biggest catalyst of all. I was taking little baby steps up until that point, and the transformation that came propelled me full-speed ahead,” Suzanne explains.

Right Livelihood

The term "Right Livelihood" may be rooted in Buddhism, but it's particularly relevant in a time of economic crisis, and many people needing to re-evaluate how they make a living and new ways to do work in the world. Right Livelihood connotes using your gifts, talents and experience to serve your community, doing work of meaning. In the IMA program, we focus quite a bit on Right Livelihood and how you can design a course of study that enhances how you interface with your work, community and passions.

Over recent semesters, here's a list of Right Livelihood workshops offered at residencies:

* Right Livelihood Panel (featuring faculty and students): What do we mean by this term, and what are ways to bring right livelihood to our current work, create new work, and help others find their own right livelihood?

* Connecting with Community: Making a Living Doing What You Love: How do you make meaningful connections with organizations, businesses and institutions in your community, and how do you nurture and grow those connections in search of relevant, important work that helps you enhance your gifts and also make a living along the way? This conversational workshop will include lots of tips as well as information and handouts on strong proposals, resumes, background material and more.

* Grant-Writing For Your Education and Work: An exploration of grant-writing resources, strategies, follow-up and other considerations, including ample information on where to find arts-based grants, awards and fellowships.

* Finding Your Calling & Making a Living From It: Two-part workshop on bringing to the surface more of what you feel called to do for a living, and then investigating how to begin and sustain an ongoing dialogue with that calling, including using tools such as writing, art, business plans, mapping, visualization and more.

* Planning, Facilitating and Assessing Workshops and other Other Arts-Based Community Projects: Come discuss how to set up workshops, coaching and consulting projects in your community, including ways to make contacts with local organizations, institutions and businesses; how to design and publicize (or assist the hosting organization with publicity) your group; screening participants; developing facilitation arts and skills; and general assessment information.

* How & Why You Do What You Do: Ethics from the Inside Out: All community work has ethical connotations, and how you handle those ethical questions that come up greatly influences the effectiveness of any work you do in your community. Come learn about the ethical dimensions of your work, and join us for a discussion of possible issues you might encounter, how to navigate your way through to the benefit of all, and why community work entails such ethical considerations in the first place. We'll have time for trouble-shooting, role-playing and lots of inspirational stories about how to make your practicum truly rewarding for all involved.

* Whole-Self, Real-World Facilitation: This workshop focuses on how to bring all of your wisdom and intuition to the real and outrageously dynamic world of facilitation. We’ll discuss how to forge a clear understanding of your own motivations and expectations; the role of the facilitator overall and as it applies specifically to you; the importance of sticking to that role (listening versus trying to rescue or fix); and intervention, confidentiality, and resource management for issues bigger than the group. Come share your experiences, callings, gifts and challenges in being facilitated and in facilitating at this interactive workshop.

* How to Do Arts-Related Work & Transformative Language Arts In Your Community: People, Places and Practical Possibilities: Panel discussion featuring students and faculty on specific ways to work with various populations, and approaches such as poetry therapy, journal therapy, educaitonal drama autoethnography, narrative theory, storytelling and coaching.

* Writing Business Plans for Changing the World: Begin creating your own business plan for launching the work of your dreams into the world, and look at how to further develop that plan over time, find needed resources, and start your own right livelihood.

Graduation in Goddard's IMA Program

Just about anyone who witnesses a Goddard graduation walks away thinking it was unlike any graduation they ever saw before. That's because each of our students is, in effect, his or her own valedictorian, sharing his/her story of finding a focus of study of great meaning individually and communally. During a typical graduation, often held in the winter in the Haybarn, a grand old theatre, or during beautiful summer days, in the garden, surrounded by lilies and pines, we of course begin with a speech, or in the case of this last February, a commencement performance by Bread and Puppet during which time, many graduates, students and faculty got to take flight.

Then instead of graduates streaming across a stage, the stories begin. Each graduate is presented by a faculty member, who tells the tale of how this study came into being, what it meant for the graduate, what it means for us, and how it can help change the world in some vital way. The graduate then gets to make his/her own speech, which may entail everything from crying and laughing while thanking a list of family, friends and faculty to playing wooden flute to leading everyone in a sweet old folksong. But in just about every speech and for just about every graduate, we hear how this degree is life-changing, helping students find their callings, do something they didn't think they were capable of, and finding a new way to energize their life, shape their work, and find greater life, spirit, connection and joy.

Graduation is nestled into a weekend of activities, bringing together graduating students along with continuing and new ones, with plenty of time for improntu jam sessions, the student-faculty reading, presentations by graduating students on what they studied that often are some of the most inspiring and mind-blowing moments of all, and lots of time for people to share experiences, encourage one another, and build community.

All photos from February, 2009 graduation weekend.

The Mystical Road: Read a Thesis on Pilgrimage

Angela Mullins, featured several entries back on this site, has just posted her entire IMA thesis, Awakening to Awakening: Journeys Along the Pilgrimage Road. To read about her study -- which encompassed pilgrimages around the world along with investigating the cultural, psychological and spiritual road map of pilgrimage -- please see www.mysticalroad.blogspot.com.
Her work also demonstrates one way to create your own world-changing study.

Three Peas In A Pod: Faculty At Play

In February, at the last Individualized MA residency, which we share with the Health Arts and Sciences program, faculty often met in the dorm each night to visit, relax, and, quite obviously, keep working. The three peas in a pod here are, from left, Sarah Van Hoy (HAS faculty), Francis Charet (IMA faculty and coordinator of Consciousness Studies), and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (IMA faculty and coordinator of Transformative Language Arts). Jim Sparrell, IMA faculty, was the photographer.

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.