Residency Workshops: A Sampling

As the fall 2009 residency approaches -- Aug. 7-14 -- so do a charm of fascinating workshops. Here's a sampling of what will be offered at the residency, and what kinds of workshops in general are offered (including everything from moss to birth to dancing with the devil).

Moss, with faculty member Ralph Lutts: We walk through (and on) a world of wonder at our feet, but pay little attention to it. This is the world of mosses. There are more different species of mosses than any other group of plants other than flowering plants. You can dry them, store them for years, add water, and they will continue to grow. They are extraordinarily beautiful. Have you looked closely at them? In this non-technical workshop we will take a close look at mosses. We will discover their distinctive ways of living and their places in the environment. We will also take a close look at their beauty and learn how to tell the difference between species. Join us as we explore this amazing new world at our feet.

Cognitive Significance of Birth, with faculty member Ellie Epp: We’re mammals. We come into being cell by cell inside an already existing human body. As we grow from two cells to many, the means by which we perceive and feel construct themselves in reference to a small, tight, wet, and instantly provident bedroom. Then comes an extraordinary passage, violent and outrageous, in which immensely strong waves of force bear down upon us to eject us into what must seem a cataclysmically foreign world. How does this central fact of human embodiment inscribe itself in our physical and thus our psychological being? Can we detect its traces in our intuitions, our metaphors, our habits of feeling? Our religions and philosophies? As a root both of brutality and of hope, structural traces of birth and prenatal life are visible in poetry, philosophy, science, spirituality. This workshop is an introduction to a form of self-investigation which thus also becomes cultural investigation.

Marketing Your Business, Project, Art or Organization Without Losing Your Mind, Blowing Big Bucks, Or Selling Your Soul, with faculty member Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and special guest appearance by faculty member, Katt Lissard: So you have an idea for a business, project, performance, or organization, and you know it's the right thing to do, but how do you build excitement, interest, and support around your vision? In addition to working collaboratively with others in your community, addressing real needs, and following your calling, you need to market what you're doing in a way that is true to your work, and ethically in concert with your values and community. Effective, ethical and creative marketing can help you reach new audiences, members, clients or customers; find and keep funders; and make vital connections with others doing similar or complementary work. Come learn how to create your own website, business cards, postcards, find funding and fiscal sponsorship opportunities and do ethical, far-reaching, low-cost or free outreach.

Ethics – Whose Story Is it? With IMA student Kathleen Connolly and faculty member Jim Sparrell: In this workshop, we will consider ethical questions related to telling your story or doing research that involves other people's stories. Our aim is to facilitate a discussion as a group about what it means that someone could be “hurt” by the telling of a story, and what it means to “speak your truth,” by developing questions that we might consider to help in making difficult decisions and break out of dichotomous thinking. In addition to sharing anyone's experiences of telling stories and hearing responses (bring your story!) we may consider recent controversies involving writers such as Honor Moore, Kevin Rouse, Linda Grey Sexton, James Frey, and Lauren Slater. Technology permitting, we will try to listen to or watch some relevant interview segments from these people.

Ah, Raza! The Making of an American Artist, with IMA faculty member, Gaelyn Aguilar, and special guest Gustavo Aguilar: In 1996, percussionist and composer, Gustavo Aguilar, experienced a moment of psychic disequilibrium that prompted him to examine what it meant to identify himself as an American artist. Set against the backdrop of Aguilar’s border town hometown of Brownsville, Texas, Ah, Raza! The Making of an American Artist traces a line of continuity to the spaces that have mapped themselves out onto him, and to the people whose dispositions are also his own. Intertwining various sonic environments (sound ethnography and an original score) with an intersection of a multiplicity of gazes (video ethnography and still photography), Ah, Raza! is a confederacy of components that broadens one’s vision of how to be what one is.

Images of Islam, Reflections in Contemporary Western Culture, with Francis Charet: Islam is perceived as a radical, violent, fundamentalist and authoritarian religion, one that subjugates women. Or, alternatively, as a tolerant, sophisticated religious tradition that created the basis for a flourishing culture and civilization. These images are taken up, mirrored in the media and advocated by specific groups, resulting in a confused mix, often without clarity. The intention of this presentation is to explore some of these images, unpack them, and see what credible or otherwise foundations there are for them, in order to generate a conversation and open up the subject with a view to deepening our understanding.

Dancing with the Devil: Finding a critical voice in writing and scholarship, with faculty member James Sparrell: In this workshop we will examine the value of contradictory or challenging perspectives in grounding work, making it persuasive and interesting, and on working for positive social change. Nothing stands out with uniformity. What is the resistance to this kind of work? Some sources of resistance include reluctance to engage in the arguments or ideas coming from dominant cultural perspectives that have perpetuated and perpetrated abuse, oppression, and violence in the process of domination; difficulty in developing a mindfulness that dichotomies can be transcended; incomplete scholarship; confusing values with logical arguments; and working within a supportive, progressive, (continued) democratic educational environment.

Poet Laureate of Kansas: Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

IMA faculty member and founder and coordinator of Transformative Language Arts Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg has just begun a two-year term as Kansas Poet Laureate. Appointed by the governor after being recommended by the Kansas Arts Commission, the poet laureate travels around the state to promote poetry and the literary arts, something Mirriam-Goldberg has plenty of experience with during the 18 years she's been leading community writing workshops. Mirriam-Goldberg is also an experienced writer, who has 10 books in print or forthcoming, including a new memoir, The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir about Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body, and a fourth collection of poetry, Landed, which will include a CD of the author reading her work along with singer Kelley Hunt performing songs co-written with Mirriam-Goldberg.

On July 1 at the Lawrence Arts Center, Mirriam-Goldberg took the torch, which was literally a giant sunflower (the symbol for the State of Kansas), from outgoing Poet Laureate Denise Low in front of a packed house. The event not only celebrated the outgoing and income poets laureate, but launched the first publication of the new Imagination and Place press, a project of the Committee on Imagination and Place.

During her 14 years at Goddard College, Mirriam-Goldberg has taught extensively in the Individualized MA program, and before that, the combined BA and MA program. She also founded Transformative Language Arts, which provides education for those drawn to writing, storytelling and performing -- using the power of words on the page and aloud -- for community building, spiritual growth, health and well-being, and social change. As someone who's offered writing workshops to a wide variety of people -- including housing authority residents, people of color, adults in transition, teens, intergeneration groups, and people living with cancer and other illness -- Mirriam-Goldberg has helped many find more of what they need to create and share as well as how to make stronger community together by witnessing one another's writing. She has also co-written songs with rhythm and blues singer Kelley Hunt, who performed at the July 1st event, and with Hunt, co-led Brave Voice: Writing and Singing for Your Life workshops and retreats.

"The poet laureate position follows the line of my life," Mirriam-Goldberg explains. "I'll be simply doing TLA on a much bigger scale in my home state and also in other places in the country. My main project for this position, 'Poetry Across Kansas: Reading and Writing Our Way Home,' is a combination of writing workshops, trainings and support for community people to facilitate ongoing writing circles, readings and presentations. I'm also thrilled to be doing a monthly radio show, available in podcasts, on High Plains Public Radio, which will give listeners a writing exercise to try at home as well as expose them to the writing of Kansas and other High Plains writers."

In reflecting on the life she leads, mostly in Kansas but also regularly in Vermont, Mirriam-Goldberg said, "I know that Kansas and Vermont are about 1,400 miles away, but there's a seamless connection between the value of the arts for changing the world both here in my town, which has a long history of social activism dating back to its Free State roots during the civil war, and Goddard College, which has long been a light for changing the world."

Listen to a podcast of Mirriam-Goldberg reading some poetry from her forthcoming collection, Landed. This podcast includes a collection of her yoga poems. See her website and blog too.
Photos, from top, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg; Mirriam-Goldberg, Denise Low and Rick Mitchell from the Imagination and Place committee; Kelley Hunt; driving through Kansas; kayaking in Kansas at Brave Voice.

Podcast: Alexandra Hartman on Film, Poetry and the Disobedient Body

Listen to this new podcast on Alexandra Hartman's journey from poetry and web design to filmmaking and the disobedient body. Alex's website, and her entire 33-minute film -- The Word Made Flesh, an be viewed at her website. Her studies that led her here encompassed Embodiment Studies, Transformative Language Arts, Filmmaking and Women's Studies. Listen to our podcast at this link.

Podcasts!!!

We are thrilled to announce that we're now be sharing regular podcasts on WorldsofChange features, including special audio pieces (such as music created by our graduates and students). Please check in regularly, and subscribe to our blog so you can hear the latest!

Taina Asili: Writing, Singing and Facilitating Toward Home

Taina Asili was already a songwriter, artist, writer, activist and workshop leader when she started in IMA's Transformative Language Arts concentration. Through her studies of the power of singing, storytelling and writing to help people resist post-colonial oppression, particularly in Puerto Rico, where both her parents come from, she found her own way home. From that homecoming, she's gone on to create writing, art and music, not to mention some powerfully-needed workshops for many populations seeking their own homecoming. As she explains, “I learned a lot about how my own family – my grandmother, mother and father – passed that tradition on, and I now incorporate very deeply what I learned into the work I create now.”

She's currently plenty busy raising her son, Yabisi, for whom Goddard is a second home, while touring with her band, Taina Asili y La Banda Rebelde, preparing to release their debut album, “Mama Guerrilla” (celebrating the mother warrior spirit), and playing at colleges, festivals, community centers, nightclubs and political events in Vermont, Boston, New York City and Philadelphia. She recently performed at a large May Day event focused on worker rights, organized by a coalition of anti-war and worker-support organizations in Troy, NY. She explains that her new album brings together a lot of what she created during her MA, and also, when she performs, she now talks about that history and the broader transformations possible through the word.

The immigrant experience of her family (although Puerto Rico is technically a territory of the U.S.) also informs her teaching. Her current workshop, “Refugee Voices,” brings together 15-20 refugees from Burma, Iraq, Nepal and the Sudan for photography and poetry, all of which helps them forge community with each other and find a new way of making home in this country. Taina explains, “The first thing refugees have to deal with is finding food, clothing and shelter, but there's not a lot of opportunity to really process the experience of being in refugee camps and then transitioning to this country.”

The workshop not only helps refugees tell their stories through photographs and poetry to each other, but to the larger Albany, NY community. An exhibit at the end of the workshop breaks down barriers between the refugee community and their new-found hometown. “It's phenomenal because the larger community, now hearing the voices of these refugees, really want to support them.” The workshop series, funded by the Capital Region Arts Center, is organized by a coalition of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, Grand Street Community Arts, and the Workforce Development Institute.

In reflecting back on what she learned at Goddard, Taina notes the essential lessons about the ethics of facilitation, “...to really be able to support other people's voices, and to nurture people in their own self-empowerment.” She also learned of multitudes of resources to use, such as the poetry of Martin Espada, suggested to her by an advisor she had, to many workshop exercises she's created for her thesis project, which combined her poetry, music, and a comprehensive curriculum on using writing for social change.

“That personal and social transformation I experienced is something I want to facilitate in others,” she says.

Visit Taina's site for more on her good work. Photos (from top): Taina performing with her band; Taina and family in Puerto Rico; "Refugee Voices" group; Taina Asili

Goddard Students Eligible for Discounts at Rowe and Omega!

Through a partnership agreement, students enrolled in Goddard College programs, such as IMA, are eligible for 20-30% discounts for selected programs at the Rowe Conference Center and the Omega Institute, both of which are in the New England area (Omega is upstate New York, and Rowe in Rowe, Mass.). Some students find it helpful to take workshops at centers such as these to write about in their packets, get ideas for practicums, or just relax between semesters.

The Only Place to Do My Work: Quotes from Current Students

"I feel this program may be the ONLY one that I could be doing right now. It gives me the latitude to explore issues that are important to me and what contributions I can make in the world."
-- Timothy Yuen

"I think that Goddard is the only school that would allow me to do the work I am doing. I am very excited about my work, and I love the level of trust and understanding that I get from the faculty. I think the personal connection and the ability of the program to adapt to fit my needs are what make it so special." Zach Katz