People @ Goddard

Choreographer Twyla Tharp reminds us that “Gathering chaos into a satisfying order is a daunting challenge. You have to train for this struggle.” I value deeply her observation as an affirming call to action. Like many of our students, I also completed my undergraduate studies as an adult learner. Over the course of my journeying as learner and educator, I've discovered that our relationship to the pursuit of knowledge is often based on the fear of what we lack, need, mislaid. It excites me to support my students in naming their fears and mining the “chaos” through practices and stages of learning that are adaptable and carefully considered. When inspired to read/see/hear/migrate across disciplines, boundaries and taboos, we move closer to mapping and perhaps finding solutions for addressing the ethical and moral dilemmas that drive human nature.

When asked to name myself I respond: Artist/Scholar; Trans-disciplinary Writer and Knowledge Worker.

My passions as an artist and scholar are worn as theoretical undergarments and concerned with how we really “wear” our most compelling ideas. As a trans-disciplinary writer, my fiction, essays, and performance-based works have been published and staged in the United States and internationally at universities: Oxford, Rennes, Málaga and Mὕnster. Recent writer fellowships and residencies include: (VCCA) Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, (FAWC) Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and group art shows in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Singapore.

My creative and intellectual practices synthesize the arts and sacred-ethics/rationalism, human sustainability, and literary, social, and cultural theories. Theories that explore race, gender identities, class and community-building, when partnered with creative sites, are powerful tools. When examined as hybrid/integrative narratives, we see them in performance and literary texts, sound design, technology and social media, architectures/design and visual arts. In storytelling they might be called: (auto)ethnography, fiction/novel, orality/spoken-word/poetics, memoir/truth-telling and reconciliation. The point is - they transform us - challenge myths, dilute assumptions, insist upon justice, and encourage (out)rage and laughter.

When wedded to critical thought, trans-disciplinary practices remain vital ways of exploring structures of consciousness and human potential. Critical thought, compassion and reasoning are more vital now, during a particularly heightened time in the world when nearly any thinking that instigates questioning beyond the obvious or relies on intuited gifts, is seemingly less valued.

It requires daring and courage to be curious. How do you practice, imagine and write change? Usually it requires dissatisfaction or betrayal to finally ask an effective question. What colors your voice, your wisdom? How do you unpack complex and difficult thoughts without losing the joy in which the experience or resistance might be contained? How do you respond to and demystify power and dominance? How do you shape tools of expression? How are you grounded? Where's your tree?

Currently I'm pursuing the Ph.D. in Leadership & Change at Antioch University, and Writing Faculty in Arts & Science at New York University. My studies focus on issues of sacred intellectualism, creative practice and ethics for navigating the post-modern eras.

Websites:
http://about.me/pamelabooker
AfroBeat journal
Barnes & Noble Book Blog

I am the first of the first generation of North Americans on my mother's side of a large extended family. I love language, poetry and story, and understand, from my earliest home, the power of narrative, the centrality of culture, the magic of art, to shape our imagination of self and social possibility.

My life's work has been a deep engagement with the wonders of learning and community building, within a "griot" or bard tradition. As an artist and a scholar - a poet, a writer, a storyteller, a teacher, a cultural historian, a librarian, a researcher, an animator - my work has been, at heart, an interdisciplinary course of study in how we might name ourselves, dance, sing, sculpt, recreate ourselves, into a just world.

My "field" is feminist, "Africanist", humanist, and generalist. I've tutored neighborhood kids and assisted in coordinating international cultural education projects, written about the hermeneutics of "black" vernacular performance and struggled to find the form for teaching and learning in our most embattled social locations. I currently serve as a teaching artist, assistant professor and resident storyteller on the faculties of Eugene Lang College, and The Hayground School. I remain a student of language, poetics and ancient performance texts. I received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for my work in African American history and the Griot tradition.

I've done undergraduate work at Sarah Lawrence College; graduate work in librarianship and women studies at St. John's University and The City University of New York respectively; doctoral work in African American history at The Graduate Center; and lots of learning and teaching in public libraries and schools. I've learned from my "students" that each place of pedagogy is a location for magic and metamorphosis. This keeps me going, writing, imgaging, searching.

My publications include the books Khoisan Tale and Bridge Suite: Narrative Poems Based on the Lives of African and African American Women in the Early History of These Black Nations. (Storm Imprints, 1998); the forthcoming novella "Medea"; We Stand Our Ground: Three Women, Their Poetry, Their Politics, a collaborative book with Kimiko Hahn and Susan Sherman, (NY:Ikon Press, 1988) and co-editing Art Against Apartheid: Works for Freedom. (NY:Ikon Press, 1986).

When an editor approached me about writing a history of the telescope, I immediately declined. I didn’t have a science background; I’d never written about science. But then the editor said, “Think of it as an essay,” and I haven’t looked back.

What changed my mind was the realization that as a writer, I should be able to approach this topic, however daunting, just as I would any other. And that lesson is at the heart of what I try to teach students of Creative Non-Fiction: the element of narrative. Facts are facts, but the tools of fiction—characters, conflict, dialogue, action, setting—can transform useful information into compelling tales. My educational and professional background is in both fields—journalism and fiction. By combining my experience in conducting research with my experience in constructing narratives, I try to make even a somewhat esoteric subject accessible to a general readership.

In my most recent book—The Four Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011)—I tell the behind-the-scenes story of the discovery that won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, complete with bitter rivalries and fruitful collaborations, blind alleys and eureka moments. The science is the accelerating expansion of the universe, but the scientists are what drive the narrative.

My two previous books also cover the history and philosophy of science for non-specialist readers, Seeing and Believing: How the Telescope Opened Our Eyes and Minds to the Heavens (Viking, 1998), and The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes (Viking, 2004). I'm also the co-author, with Temple Grandin, of The Autistic Brain: Thinking Along the Spectrum, to be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the spring of 2013. Although I have continued to write about non-scientific topics (and have published short stories through the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and in Ploughshares), my primary focus has become the intersection of science and culture. My essays and articles on that subject have appeared in various sections of The New York Times as well as in Smithsonian, Discover, Natural History, Esquire, Outside, Seed, and many other publications, and have aired on National Public Radio.

My book The 4% Universe received the 2012 Science Communication Award from the American Institute of Physics and was longlisted for the Royal Society’s Science Books Prize.

I have received a 2008 Fellowship in Science Writing from the Guggenheim Foundation, a 2007 Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and an Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grant from the National Science Foundation. My books have been translated into sixteen languages.

Throughout this surprising (to me) turn my writing has taken, I have always asked myself two questions that I also encourage students to ask of themselves:

1. Have I explained this topic in such a way that I would have understood it before I started my research?

2. Have I found a way to illuminate the human drama that is at the heart of every narrative, whether fact or fiction? If the answers are yes, then maybe I am -- we are -- heading in the right direction.

Teaching dramatic writing isn’t like instructing someone how to ride a bicycle or mend a broken pipe. Writing is unique and idiosyncratic, a deeply personal form of communication. It’s informed by not only the past and present, but by one’s identity, imagination, values, aesthetics, politics, sense of humor, appreciation of tragedy. At the same time, good writing demands not just aptitude; it requires intense discipline, resilience, openness, and patience. It takes bravery, a clear eye, and heart. As a teacher, I try to encourage personal expression while reinforcing the discipline of craft. I help students identify and clarify their voice and the story they’re trying to tell. At the same time, I teach them the basic tools of dramatic writing and how to use (or perhaps even subvert) them: structure, plot, character, action. How do you shape a play, anyway? Or a screenplay? How do you maximize the potential of the stage or screen? Most of all, I try to empower all my students to open up to the vast creative potential within them, and to help them find its best expression.

As a playwright, I wrote the stage adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (Dramatists Play Service), The Arrangement, Where It Came From, Open Spaces, and the book to the musicals Merlin's Apprentice (with Stephen Cole & Matthew Ward) and Allison Under the Stars (with Zina Goldrich and Marcie Heisler). My one-acts include Memento Mori (Smith & Krauss), Pandora, Dreamtime for Alice (Farrar Strauss, Dramatists Play Service), Rapid Eye Movement, Seventh Word Four Syllables, and Death and the Maiden. My one-act play Guts was produced as an independent film, which aired on PBS. My plays have been produced at NY’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, Pan Asian Repertory and Ohio Theatre, and nationally, at the Long Wharf Theatre, LA’s East/West Players and Stella Adler, Palo Alto’s TheatreWorks, Denver’s Walden Family Playhouse, Honolulu’s Kumu Kahua Playhouse, and others. I attended the 2000 Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and won a Drama Logue Award for Outstanding New Play for Open Spaces.

My nonfiction book Flow: the Cultural Story of Menstruation, co-written with graphic designer Elissa Stein, was published by St. Martins Griffin in November 2009. In 2010, two graphic novels  that I wrote with my partner, playwright Laurence Klavan, were published by First Second Books: City of Spies (artwork by Pascal Dizin) was named One of the Best Books of the Year for Children by Scripps Howard News Service; and Brain Camp (artwork by Faith Erin Hicks) was named One of the Best Graphic Novels for Teens by the American Library Association.
 
I’ve also written extensively for television. I was nominated five times for the Emmy and four times for the Writers Guild award for best writing, all in the children’s category. In adult nonfiction, I won a WGA award in 1996 for Best Documentary for PBS’ Paving the Way. Other documentaries include Icebound, AMC’s Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust, WLIW’s Through My Eyes, and the 3-part PBS series, The Meaning of Food.

I live in New York City and am a member of the Writers Guild of America East, the Writers Guild of Canada, ASCAP, UAW 2322, and Ensemble Studio Theatre.

Goddard not only deepened my creativity, it prepared me academically for my doctoral program. My focus was on short story and novel, but culminated in the writing of my memoir. I had two advisors; they were quite different, but held their own strengths. As different as they were, they both brought great skill to my program. The residencies were a time of fellowship, networking and intellectual conversation; they have been unparalleled in my life. I am a one-woman Goddard spokesperson. Where I find myself is where I find myself talking about Goddard. If you'd like to talk about Goddard, call me!

I have twenty+ years experience working as a community and regional planner for nonprofits; community-based organizations, social enterprises and government agencies. My work emphasizes social, economic, ecological and racial justice advocacy, cultural preservation, poverty alleviation, community engagement, localism, community asset development and grassroots, community based planning.  I have significant experience developing social enterprises and worker owned and cooperative businesses, regional approaches to cultural heritage development, sustainable agriculture, land and natural resource management and designing and developing specialized business incubation services including commercial kitchens, business incubators, public markets, farmers markets, cultural festivals and sector-based  approaches to product, market and workforce development.

My broad professional and personal goal is to work with people to create vibrant, exciting, livable, sustainable, socially justice communities that contribute to the well being and evolution of all living things! I am very interested in using design innovation to engage citizens in multi-disciplinary community planning and social change activities, especially youth. 

Specialties

Progressive Community and Regional Planning, Design Innovation, Social Enterprise Development, Worker Ownership, Business Finance and Planning, Leadership Development, Community Economic Development Finance, Nonprofit Organizational Development, Teaching, Community Organizing

Born in shadow of the Shoah, the stories about home repeatedly told within the culture of my youth emphasized the losses incurred during the Polish pogroms and the forced displacements of the Soviet Gulag era. In attempting to make sense of these intergenerational narratives, I have come to identify three separate yet interconnected loci where home is imagined and experienced: within the body, amidst sentient relationships, and in association with place. At the center of this inquiry into the ontology of home is a series of reflections about home’s properties, associations and manifestations (or lack thereof) in the political, cultural, emotional, and embodied realms.

Once the fracture of home becomes part of individual and communal history, how can a new connection to dwelling be cultivated and affirmed in wellness? This question is both pressing for me personally and I believe central to the ethos of the 21st century: My history is not very different from many peoples’ histories around the world whose internal sense of home has been fragmented and whose houses have been destroyed through domicide. To effectively catalyze and support wellness relative to forced dislocation is a question of some urgency as more than 22 million people are living as refugees or internally displaced persons.

As a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded Humanities PhD Candidate at Concordia University’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture my project entitled Radical Beauty for Troubled Times: the (un)making of home examines the role that beauty plays in the process of homemaking in the aftermath of forced displacement. More specifically, this work entails a critical reflection about the ambivalent role of beauty in identity politics: how beauty, while vital in sustaining communities, can also be used to perpetuate fixed identity reflexes stemming from the need to survive dislocation. Working with a variety of research/creation methodologies – including live art community performance and oral history – my analysis involved an examination of how the narratives of home created by cultural projects such as the “Jewish Home Beautiful” community pageant (written in the 1930s and performed ever since in Jewish congregations across the United States and Canada) have shaped the settling at home of Jews in the “Promised Land” and the ways in which this settling has led to the uprooting of the Palestinian people and the destruction of their way of life.

Along with Johanne Chagnon and Louise Lachapelle, I co-edited Affirming Collaboration: Community and Humanist Activist Art in Québec and Elsewhere (Engrenage Noir / LEVIER, LUX Éditeur and Detselig Enterprises Ltd., 2011). I have co-directed LEVIER from its inception in 2001 through its closure in 2012. For the past ten years LEVIER has been funding community art and activist art collaborations while developing pedagogical material aimed at supporting socio-politically engaged art practitioners and the communities with whom they collaborate while moving the field further with respect to critical thinking and theoretical analysis about this practice.

Other recent publications include: “Close Proximity” (in Performing Ethos: An International Journal of Ethics in Theatre and Performance, 2010); “Performing Beauty, Practicing Home: Collaborative Live Art and the Transformation of Displacement”  (in Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, 2010); “Performing Aesthetics, Performing Politics: ‘The Jewish Home Beautiful’ and the Re-shaping of the Jewish Exile Narrative” (in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, 2010); “The Sensuous is Political: Live Art Performance and the Palestinian Resistance Movement” (in Somatic Engagement, 2011); and “Once a Russian, Always a Jew: (Auto)biographical Storytelling and the Legacy of Dislocation” (in Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies, 2012); “Too Many Aboriginal Women ‘At Home’ in Canadian Prisons” (in À Bâbord, 2012); and “Co-Activating Beauty, Co-Narrating Home: Dialogic Live Art Performance and the Practice of Inclusiveness” (in Creating Together: Participatory, Community-Based and Collaborative Arts Practices and Scholarship Across Canada, forthcoming).

My involvement with the Montreal Urban Aboriginal Community Strategy NETWORK began in 2008 and has continued ever since. Currently I am a member of the NETWORK’s Steering Committee, the ART ∙ CULTURE Committee, and the Ad hoc Committee working to establish an Aboriginal community, cultural, art venue in Montreal.
In April 2011, I assumed a two-year appointment as a member of the Visual Arts, Media Arts and Arts and Crafts Advisory Board for the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
In addition to the SSHRC Graduate Fellowship, I have been the recipient of grants and awards from Goddard College’s Faculty Development Fund; the Wetstein Fellowship, Concordia University Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies; The Franklin Furnace Performance Art Fund; the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec; and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Visit My Website: www.devoraneumark.com

Like a number of women writers, I haven’t followed a conventional academic path.  For ten years, I worked in New York at AMS Press while I completed my BA and MFA Degrees at Goddard.  Afterwards, I spent several years at Harvard Magazine, writing my first book of poems (That Mulberry Wine, Wesleyan) while I acted first as Fulfillment Manager (a tough title to live down) and then as a member of the editorial staff.   Following my first teaching job, as the writer-in-residence at Sweet Briar College (VA), I earned a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah.   I’ve taught in various writing programs, undergraduate and graduate:  Old Dominion University, Ohio University, University of South Carolina, Harvard, and Lesley University’s low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing.  The Mark of Flesh, my second book (Norton), entered me into a conversation about poetry that still absorbs me:  What’s the role of the writer in the world?  Why are many women writers still second-class citizens in the literary world?  How can music and metaphor instigate transformation in the writer and the reader?

Poetry, in my experience, emerges from the deepest levels of the psyche.  It is only roughly occasional.  It’s almost a truism that language can be transformative and that transformation loves language. Though poets are moving away from the idea of a stable first-person, any practitioner of self-reflection knows that the stable self is chimerical.  At about 3:00 p.m. on a long workday it’s amusing to remember this. 

Work in the world can be beautiful.  A third book of poems, Visitor at the Gate, currently circulating, has become a labor of its own. A new book, still in imagination, seems to want the hybrid—a mix of poetry and prose first experimented with in Visitor.  The poems have earned prizes and fellowships:  an Academy of American Poets Award; the Grolier Poetry Prize; a PEN Discovery Award; a fellowship in poetry to Breadloaf; a Pushcart Prize; and multiple stints at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Individual poems have found homes in Blackbird, Boulevard, Poetry Daily, Georgia Review, Memoir/And, Triquarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, Seneca Review, and Harvard Review, among others.

Labor of any kind speaks to us of time, of money, of values, of where in the moment we are and what we must do. To be the director of our BFA Program invites labor to speak to me in a new way.  I gratefully offer the skills that I’ve learned through many decades of writing, teaching, administering, and living. Together, we’re enabled by genres, theory, cultures, eras, craft, and imagination.  As the fifteenth century Indian poet, Kabir, has said: “Listen carefully,/Neither the Vedas/Nor the Qur’an/Will teach you this:/Put the bit in its mouth,/The saddle on its back,/Your foot in the stirrup,/And ride your wild runaway mind./All the way to heaven.”

Siobhan’s bachelor program focused on ear acupuncture as an addiction treatment. She’s since used it to help 9/11 survivors, and wounded veterans.

When I first came to Goddard, I had an idea to open a treatment program for substance abusers—but who knew what was going to happen? On September 11, 2001, the hospital where I worked was just blocks from Ground Zero. I started a clinic that provided 40,000 acupuncture treatments to rescue workers and survivors. People said, This helped so much.

Goddard gave me confidence to proceed with my passion and my goals of bringing a component to my hospital that was entirely new.

When I went back for my Master’s, I just immersed myself in the environment here. Goddard is really on the vanguard of creativity; it’s different from anywhere else I’ve ever been. My advisor and others were superb, and the learning experience will be with me for the rest of my life.

I’m doing some unusual stuff; I’m really on the edge. It’s a little difficult sometimes, but I still have Goddard with me, to keep me going. The spirit of Goddard is, “Follow your true inner belief and don’t let go of it.”

Goddard is like the wind in my sails.

My main interests have to do with helping students rigorously challenge popular assumptions about education by employing thoughtful methods of research and sound reasoning. Politically I am committed to social justice education based on a class analysis and working towards evidence based methods. I have been a faculty member at Goddard College since 1990 and a Liberal Studies professor in Toronto. I am also board president the John Howard Society Toronto, a non-profit organization committed to social justice by helping men in conflict with the law. 

I value art for its ability to create a kind of knowledge. Art allows us to look at something in a new way. I do not set out to represent what is already known, but to look at what is there through different lenses. Art can tell stories that otherwise remain untold. We are able to say things that would otherwise be unspeakable and hear from multiple perspectives. Art is a way to test a thesis. As often as not I am faced with an opening of possibilities rather than any definite conclusion. Time based and installation works draw us into these possibilities using sound, light, space and motion. Visual associations create meaning using histories, dreams, visions and emotion. The marrying of these elements in unexpected juxtapositions can destabilize the compulsion to stay with the familiar and allow the incomplete and uncertain to be savored and explored…

My work attempts to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I am fascinated with how people make meaning, and how that meaning is applied in our lived lives. At its core my work deals with the relationships between memory, nostalgia and meaning and how this complex web plays out socially, politically and emotionally. At its most obvious, my work deals with issues that I am passionate and curious about: race, gender, sexual orientation, class, mass amnesia, the effects of new technologies on our collective consciousness and visions for creating new possibilities.

My philosophy informs my practice…

“... the function of art is to do more than tell it like it is—it’s to imagine what is possible.” bell hooks envisions art in the way that I embrace my role as an advisor-as an engaged, dynamic practice. My work is grounded in the experience that learning is interactive. Transformative learning is most likely to occur when we are personally engaged with the material and perceive the subject matter to be directly relevant to our own lives. I work with students to contextualize their work within the world.

I have often said that what I really do is translate, remind people of what they already know and empower them to use it and develop it further. I facilitate. I see my role as a “teacher” in a similar fashion. I am not there to “deposit” knowledge, but to co-create it. . This is an interactive process that involves discussion, reflection and action. It begins with questioning what we “know” and continues with an acting out our preoccupations and curiosities. How did we come to know what we believe to be true? How can we expand our signifying systems?

Other interests: I have practiced social work in residential centers and city schools for the past 17 years. I will be moving these skills in 07-08, to commit more time to working at the college level and to give more time to my own practice. I am also the founder and director of an international artist and activist group, the Evolutionary Girls Club. The group is an inclusive group of artists and activists. Anyone can join. The name is a play on the old boys club. Wo(men) have been represented by male verbage throughout (his)story. The “boys” get to be honorary “girls” for a change.

We have done shows in many countries around the world, usually as fundraisers or in conjunction with events that take on social issues. The group has published compilations and books. We are working on obtaining a space that would also function as a community arts center/gallery in the city where I currently reside, Rochester, NY.

I had a very positive overall experience at Goddard. I’m a great fan of Harry Potter; and Goddard was my “Hogwarts.” I’m a playwright and I wrote a musical for my thesis project. I owe a great debt to my two advisors. I was allowed to chart my own direction, learn from my mistakes—but always with the knowledge they were there to catch me when I fell, or set me upright and send me on my way again. The residencies were short (too short), intense, but full of laughter, tears, and camaraderie. I made friends I will have forever. I entered Goddard saying, “Why am I here? I’m not a writer.” I left saying, “I am a writer, and I do belong.”

As a teacher, I try and discern where a writer is going, and then guide them towards the best form to carry the story--whether poetry, fiction or non-fiction. Once I have a good sense of the core ambitions and sensibility of the student, I rely on a range of literature that will point the way stylistically, shake them into a different perspective or let them know that they’re on the right track. The point is to inspire confidence in the search for the right form, and this may include trying on different genres or revising through exercises that range outside the expected narrative. I often ask writers of non-fiction to read poetry and dramatic monologues to deepen an appreciation of emotional tone, quick characterization or the impact of repeating imagery. Having poets try on dialogue or explore juxtaposing sections within a long poem also expands the conversation between narrative and lyric. Rewriting is essential to making a manuscript work and developing a relationship to the rewriting process may be the most valuable thing that can be learned.

I have taught inside and outside the academy--teaching writing to teenagers at Downeast AIDS Network supported by a Puffin Foundation grant; to elders in community centers and to women in prison as well as teaching undergraduates and graduate students at CCNY; NYU; Hampshire College and The New School. I have had residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony and the VCCA among others, and I have been nourished by collaborative experiences with composers, artists and other writers. I have published four books of poetry--the most recent, Ten Minutes, was published by Firm Ground Press in 2006 with an October Book Launch at the Bowery Poetry Club. The previous collection, In the Open, was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. I edited The Wild Good, Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love, Anchor/Doubleday, 1996 which called on my experience in independent publishing at Granite Press. Two other poetry collections, Shooting at Night, supported by the Maine State Commission on the Arts & Humanities, and native tongue, were published in letterpress editions. My poetry has been widely published in magazines and anthologies, including The Women’s Review of Books, The Kenyon Review, Cream City Review and Things Shaped in Passing: More Poets for Life Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, ed. Klein and The World In Us eds. Georgiou and Lassell. I have written reviews for The Nation, Lambda Book Report and OutWeek, and published non-fiction in A Woman Like That, Avon Books, ed. Joan Larkin. As librettist and conceiver of the opera, The Singing Bridge, I received support, with composer Anna Dembska, from Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA/NEA; the Davis Foundation; the PatsyLu Fund of Open Meadows and LEF Foundation. The Singing Bridge premiered at Maine’s Stonington Opera House in 2005, produced by Opera House Arts and directed by Richard Edelman. I have co-translated contemporary Spanish poet Jesus Aguado with scholar/translator Electa Arenal, and we held Aguado's first bilingual reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC to coincide with his first trip to the USA in November 2006. In 2003, Arenal & I received the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at the Sante Fe Art Institute to translate a selection of poems by Aguado entitled what you say about me. We have published co-translations from Aguado's poetry collections, Like the Oar That Cuts the Current: Poems of Vikram Babu and what you say about me in Poets Against the War, edited by Sam Hamill; Tarpaulin Sky and in Sirena, a publication of Johns Hopkins University. As Founder/Publisher of Granite Press (1973-89), an independent poetry publisher and letterpress print shop, I published Grace Paley's first book of poems, Leaning Forward, and the bilingual anthology, IXOK AMAR.GO: Central American Women Poets for Peace, ed. Zoe Angelsey. I curated A Different Light’s Poetry Series in NYC in the 90's, and I have spent many years working as a poetry advocate and thinking about the importance of poetry in the health of many cultures has marked my work and life. Please visit my blog, for more information on my work.

My desire to teach has always been fueled by my passion for social justice, sense of social responsibility, and tacit knowledge of and love for people. Early on, I learned how to reach students and create safe and challenging learning environments. Through thirty years of educating others and myself a pattern of constant interaction between theory and practice emerges. New knowledge has always elicited action for me; action in the classroom has always fed my desire to know more.

I received my BA in Education and my Teacher Certification twenty-six years ago. After working as an elementary and middle school teacher in Norway for six years, I enrolled in a graduate course in Curriculum and School Development. This course challenged my classroom practices and opened my eyes to previous invisible patterns of exclusion and privilege. Growing up in Norway as the daughter of Norwegian and German parents I learned early on that there is more than one way to see the world and be seen. Now I was finding tools to further this learning.

I left Norway knowing that I wanted to use my new knowledge to create and implement strategies for change in the classroom and in schools at large. I also wanted to learn more about feminist theory and inter/multi culturalism on micro and macro levels. At Goddard College, I was able to explore these issues through my M.A. studies, my teaching through eleven years, and collaboration with my colleagues engaged in critical examination of their work.

My doctorate work at the University of Vermont allowed me to explore program development, leadership studies, organizational theory, and the ins and outs of academic research, allowing me to reach a larger audience than I could through college level teaching. Most essential to me though, was my study of white lesbian parents of African and African-American adopted children in Vermont.

My own striving for critical, reflective and applicable knowledge fuels my passion for teaching. I believe that each of us has the potential for learning, is interested in learning, and I believe my task as an educator is to support or provide the students in finding the tools and the learning environment that allows them to excel as learners in the context of local and global communities.

For fun I like to be outdoors, hiking, camping, skiing, sledding, swimming, traveling, building or gardening. I am the happiest in wide-open spaces, at the coast or in the mountains. Vermont feels like home, but my connection to Norway is embedded in my bones. The intersection of language, place and self is one that always draws me in and teaches me new truths.

Selah Saterstrom's thesis manuscript, The Pink Institution, was published by Coffee House in 2004. She is also the author of The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press, 2007) and is on the faculty in the University of Denver’s graduate creative writing program and in the Naropa Summer Writing Program. Read her blog at http://divinatorypoetics.wordpress.com.

I have been affiliated with Goddard for nearly twenty years, first as a faculty member and then as a Program Director.  I continue to find it an enormous privilege to lead such a unique community of writers and learners.  I believe that an individualized approach to the teaching of writing is the only truly effective way that writing can be taught, and I am deeply committed to the kind of transformational learning that is at the heart of a Goddard education.

I am the author of I Am the Word: A Guide to the Consciousness of Man’s Self in a Transitioning Time (Tarcher/Penguin, 2010), The Book of Love and Creation (Tarcher/Penguin, 2012), and The Book of Knowing and Worth (forthcoming, Tarcher/Penguin 2013). 

My work for the stage has been produced internationally and includes plays, operas, solo-performance work and text for dance.  My plays include Mystery School, performed by Tyne Daly, the stage adaption of War Letters, with Treat Williams and Mario Van Peebles, Terminal Bar, Moon City, Body Parts and The Pompeii Traveling Show (NY Drama League Award).  My operas include Red Tide, Long Island Dreamer and Lamentations and I collaborated with Shapiro and Smith Dance Co. on Never Enough and Notes from a Séance.  I completed credited rewrites and additional material for the national tour of Tallulah, with Kathleen Turner and Truth in Translation, commissioned by the Colonnades Theater Lab and South Africa’s Market Theater.  My work has been performed at venues including The Sundance Film Festival, The Long Wharf Theater, En Garde Arts, The Ensemble Studio Theater, The Joyce Theater, The Minnesota Opera New Music-Theater Ensemble and the Public Theater’s “Wake Up Call” series.  My plays are included in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Short Play series.

Stephan Ross (RUP ’59), born Szmulek Rozental in Lodz, Poland in 1931, is a survivor of the World War II Holocaust, having endured ten concentration camps in five years. He arrived in the United States in 1948 through the U.S. Government Committee for WWII Orphaned Children, determined to better himself and the world. After getting a BA in Sociology from Goddard, Ross went on to receive his MA in Psychology from Boston University in 1962 and worked for almost 50 years as a counselor for disadvantaged youth in Boston.

Among Ross’ many contributions to elevate young people from the effects of poverty was the creation of fee waivers and funding assistance from the College Board for impoverished youth in Boston to take the SAT and apply to college. Owing in no small part to Ross’s efforts, SAT fee waivers are now a nationwide program of the College Board.

Beginning in the late 1980s, working with then Boston mayor Ray Flynn, Stephan raised more than $14 million from public and private entities to erect the New England Holocaust Memorial and World War II Veterans Memorial. The Veterans Memorial was built to honor American troops who liberated the Dachau Concentration Camp. The two memorials stand together near Faneuil Hall, on Boston's historic Freedom Trail.

“Goddard nurtured in Stephan, the way it does in all Goddard students, a drive to understand life experiences and translate that learning into actions that address the roots of the problems we face in society,” Goddard College President Barbara Vacarr said. “He is a living example of what a Goddard education is all about: an activist-oriented, rigorous academic inquiry that compels students to take action to effect change in our local and global communities.”

Students are often instructed to “write what you know.” I prefer the suggestion, “Write what you deeply and truly want to know.” I write in order to understand. This process began with the diaries I kept as a child. At age twenty-five, I sought through my memoir Solitaire (Harper & Row, 1979) to understand anorexia nervosa – years before “eating disorders” became a household term. In my first novel, Face (Warner, 1994), I explored the identity collisions that so often occur within mixed-race families. My second novel, Cloud Mountain (Warner, 1997), was my attempt to comprehend two grandparents I had never known and, through their story, a father who always seemed an enigma to me growing up. In my third novel, Flash House (Warner, 2003), I struggled to make sense of the unintended consequences that so often occur when well-intentioned people – and cultures – attempt to “rescue” those who don’t necessarily wish to be rescued. And most recently, in Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders (Warner, 2007), I’ve tried to make sense of all that I could not understand about eating disorders when I was recovering from one back in the 1970s.

I believe writing is a journey as varied and unpredictable as each writer’s curiosity. In my opinion, the role of a teacher is to offer students support, encouragement, and constructive criticism to facilitate that journey. What a writer needs to hear is not so much what a teacher likes as what works, and what doesn't. Does the piece hold together with a consistent and authentic narrative voice? Is the world as created on the page believable and vital? Are the characters and their problems compelling? Is there passion in the prose? Of course, when the answer to these questions is no, the job of the teacher is to offer suggestions for fixing the problems – but not to explicitly spell out how the fix “should” be done. I believe that good writing can be nurtured. It can be assisted. It cannot be imposed. My goal as a teacher, then, is to equip students with the necessary skills to make the writer’s journey. They must dig deep within themselves to discover where that journey will take them. My own writing career has led me in many unexpected directions both on and off the page. My fiction and nonfiction have been published in periodicals ranging from Self and Cosmo to the literary magazine Other Voices, as well as in several recent anthologies. I’ve served as president of the national writers’ organization PEN USA, and mentored young novelists through PEN’s Emerging Voices program. At UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program I’ve taught a variety of classes and workshops. And at age 50 I decided to earn my MFA through the Bennington Writing Seminars. Returning to school for this degree was a gift to myself and to my career. The journey is ongoing. For more information, please visit my web site at: Aimee Liu.

I have been engaged as an artist for more than twenty years in a practice that includes visual art production, installation, writing, sound, book works, film and performance. This is how I make my living. Joining the faculty at Goddard in 1998, represented the first "job" that I’ve had since I became fully self-employed in 1984. I live in Newfoundland, the youngest and economically poorest province in Canada, though one of its richest in culture, history, and traditions of survival. It is both a challenge and a privilege to thrive as an artist and filmmaker in such an environment... distant from the wealthy centres, committed to the margin and the possibilities it holds. Most of my work, in one way or another emerges from this PLACE, and the daily power of wild nature that has remained un-mastered and uncontrolled, here in the North Atlantic.

My art practice is extremely diverse... crossing boundaries of discipline, media, and process. I work in the landscape with site specific installations, in the studio with 2 and 3 dimensional media, at my computer with digital imagery, and out in the world at large, with sound recorder, a 16mm or video or still camera. I make meaning in whatever media seems best suited to throw my voice to the audience I want to speak with. I have installed transient works that lived in wheat fields in rural Alberta, mapped the domestic landscape of coastal British Columbia, the badlands of the Canadian prairie, and rural Japan. I have made films that speak to people who might never enter an art gallery. I have created work that emerged from, and now lives permanently in, a small rural fishing community. I have made books for children, drawings for banks, and have produced and installed work that speaks to doctors and medical students in the school and hospital corridors where they work.

For me, this is one of the most provocative thrills of practice... finding the way to throw the meaning... the voice that my audience can "hear." I am process and community-based, rather than product oriented; my practice focusing more on ways of seeing and knowing that on the manufacture of rare and beautiful objects for consumption... though I am deeply engaged in the process of "making" and "forming"... very grounded in those rituals of a physical body interacting with the material world. I also continue to exhibit in the traditional gallery system, in artist-run-centres, and my work has been shown locally, nationally, and internationally, and is in major public collections, including that of the National Gallery of Canada.

In addition to my solitary practices both in and out of the studio- I also work with others- collaborating with individuals and communities, sometimes in the arts and often outside those boundaries.

I spent two years as the first Artist-in-Residence in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University, where I taught medical students, undertook research into how they learn to see and know the body, and produced a large and diverse body of work which reflected on the clinical and medical education communities. This work can be seen on-line at An Artist in the Halls of Science.

I LIKE working with non-artists…whether they are fishers or farmers, scholars or med students, it keeps me thinking and learning, languages strategies, ways of thinking, working and dreaming.

Since 1987, I have also been working as an Art Director and Production Designer in the independent film community, collaborating with writers, musicians, actors, film artists and crews, to bring some one else's vision to the screen. My work in the film industry has had major impacts on my studio practice, offering opportunities to collaborate, rather than author, to stretch my skills materially and in a design context, and to grapple with issues of representation, appropriation, and the role of film in rendering a unique cultural voice, in an environment still dominated by big-studio Hollywood. It has also privileged me by embedding me deeply in a creative and cultural community which is larger in spirit and in context than the world of the art gallery, and which balances the solitary work of my own studio practice.

I am a practitioner... a working artist. I am a feminist; a political activist, an anti-colonial, and an ardent learner who has struggled to transgress the boundaries which fragmented knowledge when I was a student... whether they are between Art and Science, male and female, rational and intuitive. The perspectives that I try to bring to my interactions with students in the arts, are those of engaged, self-examined, and strategic creative practice within communities, however they might be defined. I believe that the artist in whatever discipline, has a crucial and fundamental role to play in the elaboration and representation of cultures, in the investigation of both cultural and individual voice, in the invention and examination of knowledge, and in the re-enchantment of our relationships with one another and with Nature. My work with students has enriched my life and my practice immensely... enlivening my deep curiosity about how and why we make meaning, challenging my spirit, my thinking and my heart, and re-invigorating my commitment to a community of diverse creators who are continuously engaged in learning. To see my work in all disciplines, please visit www.pamhall.ca.

Current Research Interests: medicine, health, the female body; the practices of fishing, farming and other human physical engagements in Nature; Ethics and Moral Geography; Art and Science; the politics of culture and empowered voice; post-colonialism; theories of knowledge, cognition and perception; and art, media and cultural practice, both historically and in a contemporary context.

Sharon Cronin has over twenty-five years of experience in bilingual and culturally relevant early childhood and elementary education. She earned her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Bilingual Education with an emphasis in African American Studies from the University of Washington; her Master of Arts Degree in Human Development with a specialization in Bicultural Development from Pacific Oaks College Northwest; and her Doctoral Degree in Curriculum Instruction majoring in Bilingual Education, Multicultural Education, and Literacy, with cognates in Special Education, Caribbean Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology from the University of Washington. At the Center for Linguistic and Cultural Democracy, Dr. Cronin co-leads the Teaching Umoja Participatory Action Research 15-Year Commitment, examining the ethnic identity, bicultural, cross-cultural, and tri-literacy development of children of color, along with a team of 40 co-researchers from across the United States and Port Royal and Moore Town, Jamaica.

She is co-author of Soy Biling_e: Language, Culture, and Young Latino Children. Through the Soy Biling_e Network, Dr. Cronin further develops and promotes the Soy Biling_e Adult Dual Language Model for early childhood and elementary teacher education. She is currently lead faculty for the San Francisco State University CAD (Child and Adolescent Development) Head Start Dual Language Program and faculty with the Praxis Institute for Early Childhood Education and Praxis at Goddard College. Sharon is a founding member of Seattle-based Grupo Bayano (African Caribbean Music and Dance).

Trustee Emeritus.

Bio coming soon

I am excited by the wide variety of forms and concerns of contemporary writing at the turn of the century, and as a teacher I am committed to representing and celebrating this range. I enjoy the exploratory and experimental forms of writing as much as I appreciate meditative and philosophical conventions. When teaching creative writing workshops, I often encourage students to experiment with and expand their writing styles by trying new forms. I also urge students to think of their work as a book, or a project, rather than just one piece of writing after another. My primary interest in writing is in how it is an especially useful way of thinking or sorting through the world, so I like it when students bring outside concerns into their writing so as to expand their work outward beyond emotion or self exploration. In my own poetry, I explore a documentary poetics that is concerned with social realism but avoids the conventions of realist, naturalist, and confessional genres. My work moves between lyricism, explanatory prose, and theoretical discussion. Publications include: This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2004); Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Response won the National Poetry Series award in 1995 and is available from Sun & Moon Press.

In addition to poetry, I also write literary criticism; Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity was published by University of Alabama in 2001. And, I co-edit the journal Chain with Jena Osman.

My best skill is asking questions, both of others and myself. My academic training is cultural anthropology, music, and design. I’m now in just my fifth calendar year at Goddard, but I have wanted to be involved with the College since the 70s when Goddard’s Institute of Social Ecology was a living legend in the worlds of both sustainable resources and progressive education.

For fifteen years, I taught environmental design, community energy planning, and indigenous politics at Governors State University, the experimental non-graded campus within the Illinois system. Simultaneously, I took as much work as a jobbing violinist as I could find—everything from recording a commercial for a muffler company, being part of the stage quartet for Rev. Jesse Jackson, and performing with the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra. Tonalities and rhythmic patterns are native to my meaning-making capacities.

I’m very interested in research on mirror neurons, especially as this relates to multi-tasking. For example, I’ve found that sometimes imagining practicing my violin in very precise ways sometimes has the same effect as working with the physical instrument. Grappling with anthropological theory mysteriously builds my violin technique and sharpens my intonation. I love these kinds of simultaneities and coincidences as much as I do anomalies.

My most well-known (and controversial) research is a geometric theory of planetary resources and climate--the earth energy grid. This model is a mnemonic frame for me to store and retrieve what I discover in my life and work—which is almost always from a transdisciplinary perspective. The geometry of the grid lies at the heart of much sustainable construction and theory.

In 1994, I joined the full-time core interdisciplinary doctoral faculty at the Union Institute and moved from Chicago to the coast of Maine.

Along with classical and rock performances, I recorded CDs as soloist with Tim Janis (Celtic) and Dunne Roman (New Age).

I traveled to supervise student work in countries as different from each other as Papua New Guinea, Australia, Russia, Brazil, Finland, and much of Europe. With 9/11 came a crushing sense of myself as not unlike Nero, fiddling while Rome burned, and it haunts me to this day. I do not play as much right now.

I left Union in 2005, wanting to be involved more directly as a U.S. citizen in the global culture. I joined the graduate faculty of the international School of Public Policy & Administration at Walden University.

I advise on sustainable technology, especially food and “homeland security” issues. Still, my heart beats fast in the realm of magic, consciousness studies, and ritual performance. I am always excited to discover intersections of my worlds.

I encourage students to pay attention to analogous discoveries they make in their own life processes. My basic belief is that any discovery actually reveals the identity of self. Connecting with that power is, for me, the promise of soul.

Website:

www.missionignition.info/bethe

Baba Israel (IBA '04, MFAIA '08) is a New Yorker, hip hop emcee, poet, and beatboxer who has toured across the United States, Europe, South America, Asia, and the South Pacific performing with artists such as Outkast, The Roots, Rahzel, Ron Carter, Afrika Bambaataa, Vernon Reid, and Bill Cosby.

Baba has been featured on MTV, BET, and VH1, and in the films Breath Control, The Freshest Kids, Freestyle, and Hip Hop for Hope.

In 2008, he was selected as part of Lincoln Center's Rhythm Road, touring Asia and the South Pacific with the Dana Leong Project. Together with Yako 440, Baba was named in URB Magazine's prestigious NEXT 1000. Their latest album, "Beatbox Dub Poetics," is available at CD BABY.

Baba is also active in his community, conducting workshops and assemblies at schools through Open Thought Arts and bringing theater to underrepresented communities through Playback NYC Theater Company, which he co-founded.

Baba Israel graduated from Goddard College first with a BA in Individualized Studies (IBA) in 2004, and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts (MFAIA) in 2008.

You can visit his website at www.babaisrael.com.

If you are looking for a graduate program in creative writing, look no further! I read brochures, visited campuses, figured out costs and then visited Goddard. The search stopped. I had come home to Goddard. It can be your home too. Give me a call and we can talk about the Goddard experience. As a dramatic writer, I discovered a family of writers who have had a profound impact on my work and work ethic. We even have a Google group that keeps us connected, nudges us to keep on writing and provides an incredible base of support. As part of the Goddard family, I am not working alone. You will be amazed at the caliber of instruction and personalization that Goddard provides. My advisors were stellar and brought me to a new level of professionalism. They are now always a part of whom I am. Call me, write me, and most of all, really consider Goddard.

I entered Goddard intent upon discovering ways to bond together people of differing cultural and ethnic backgrounds. My studies and research took me from Cultural Anthropology to Psychology to Philosophy to Semiotics realizing, on the way, that my ultimate goal was to understand and find ways to resolve Prejudice. In an effort to find solutions there came an unexpected twist to her studies; I decided to write a young adult’s novel to teach children how to positively engage other cultures. In the end Intercultural Interaction and Prejudice Prevention through Theory and Creative Writing became my thesis. Currently, I am editing my book and looking forward to its publication. Please, contact me with any questions you may have about the MA in Individualized Studies Program. I look forward to talking with you about Goddard and hearing about the ideas that impassion you.

So much of psychology involves thinking on multiple levels, attending to the smallest details while keeping an understanding of the whole. I bring this perspective to working with students, both as a method of teaching and a skill to teach. My goal is to work collaboratively with students to identify specific areas of learning within the larger context of professional objectives.

I am a licensed clinical psychologist and certified health services provider in Massachusetts. My career is a combination of teaching, clinical work, research, writing, and professional activities. Conducting psychological testing and assessment, I work with children and adults. My background in psychotherapy has been primarily with adults in individual cognitive-behavioral and behavioral therapy. I also have experience with substance abuse treatment, group therapy, couples and family therapy, brief therapy, and feminist therapy. Most clients with whom I work have been low-income in both rural and inner city settings.

My primary area of research is in lesbian psychology with a particular focus on the development and disclosure of lesbian identity. I examined the relationship between mental health and being out for lesbian and bisexual women. For my research, I have received a number of awards. Recently, the areas on which I have focused include, lesbian and bisexual women of color, lesbian and bisexual mothers, and the role of the ex-gay movement and reparative therapy on public policy. For many years I have been active in, and dedicated to, the work of Division 44, the Society for the Psychological Study of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Issues, serving on the Executive Committee and as the 1999 Division 44 Convention Program Chair.

It begins with the land, a farm yard in the Peace River Country of northern Alberta. Sky, seasons, weather, beauty and labor. Many books. From twelve, and since, and still, a journal. At fourteen, a camera. Many more books. Two friends who are that because they also like the bush. Late in high school, beginning to read philosophy. A university in the east. Want to learn everything except science and math. Do. Buy a much better camera. Film school in London. London itself. The women’s movement. Begin to make experimental films at the London Film Coop. Finally old enough to want science: physics, cosmology, optics, meteorology, geology, botany. Experimental film and scientific images are related, I come to think. Art is about changing state, learning to perceive and teaching what’s been learned. Scientific images do that too.

Need to be in my own country again. Go back to the place where I grew up and spend three years alone, taking pictures, writing, shooting film, recording sound, learning to see more than I ever thought I could. There are other kinds of land too: tree planting work, relief camp attendant work on oil rigs. Back in the city, I make a multimedia show with the materials from the years in the country. It is called Notes in origin. Travel with the show to Melbourne, San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, London. High art is lonesome work, and I miss the land. Get involved with Strathcona Community Garden, a four-acre site in a warehouse district in the downtown east end of Vancouver. Learn to survey, lay drains, build forms and pour concrete, save seed, write polemics, make an impression at city hall, work with every kind of journalist, fund-raise, build community alliances, commission an architect, supervise youth corps groups, all while working with the realest, sharpest, most down-home, individualist, maverick souls in the city.

Meantime, things have changed: personal computers, complex systems theory, scientific visualization, cognitive science, neurophilosophy. It’s time to go back to school, because now it’s going to be possible to rebuild cognitive theory and make an epistemology that works for art.

Toward the end of the doctorate it begins to becomes clear that the story ends with land as well as beginning there. Land and mind. Their relation, their defense.

I can support student work in linguistic and non-linguistic media: in photography, film, video, writing, environmental sound composition, and in digital media, including the web. Currently writing about electroacoustic music, mathematical and scientific visualization, the philosophy and neuroscience of perception, imagining, language, and metaphor. I have been particularly taken with nature writers, English and American Romantics, early twentieth century fiction in English, women’s fiction, journal writing, and science fiction. Also interested to work in the anthropology of place, ecological theory, urban agriculture studies, landscape design and architecture.

My doctoral work was a self-designed interdisciplinary program for which I have worked in philosophy, computer science, communications, cognitive science, and most recently in neuroscience. My doctoral thesis is a website as well as a book project called Being About: Perceiving, Imagining, Representing, Thinking. It is posted in the theory section of my web worksite.

Since coming to Goddard I have been developing a comprehensive vision for the new area of Embodiment Studies. My residency workshops have included sessions on seeing, theory, research, language, writing and embodiment, somatic processing, the unconscious, the cognitive significance of birth, and spirituality and the body. I host an embodiment website to compile material on these topics, and edit a semester magazine featuring student work.

For me, art (whether it be the making of objects as in visual art, the shaping of feeling. experience, event into stories or poems, the participation in a musical event and the energy that is created through the structure of sound, the creation of a performance or group celebration) is a way of interacting with the collective and individual energies and thought patterns in a way that brings them into a perceptible form that can be shared with others. It is a way of thinking, of giving form.

My grounding in the arts is primarily through a twenty-five year practice of painting, and now sculpture within the last four years, with experience in theatre, puppet theatre, singing, and creative writing. At this time, I am interested in work that can further awareness of the interconnections of nature and humanity, and reinforce a sense of hope and responsibility for our thought/action in the world. In art, we can see the results of our thought and action in the forms we create. Taking those just a step further, we begin to see the forms of the society and culture within which we live as something in which we not only participate, but also upon which we each individually have an effect.

I have worked with students in a wide array of projects and inquiries, from work in the "traditional" artistic modes (painting, sculpture, dance, performance, installation, film, writing) and various combinations of these, to those which seek to extend the "palette" beyond traditional art materials and elements into new arenas. I enjoy the challenge of finding new "forms" that emerge out of the establishment of a new set of coordinates and of finding ways in which links can be established. In the past few years, my attention has been drawn to environmental health issues and modes of healing. My interests and background also include mythology, medieval studies, gardening, poetry, and Indian cooking.

I started life in a rather tight, island-nation that thought itself “white,” was translated through various cultures (mostly "Eastern"), and languages, and spent twenty-odd years working in another, sometimes (but not in all ways) even tighter, self-consciously not-white and not-brown, often quaking, island-nation. I’ve spent the past 3 years trying to fit in to US culture/s, first in Arkansas, now in Vermont and owe such learning as I’ve managed to the staff and participants of the ARC Arkansas arts center where I’ve been a volunteer drama and fine arts facilitator. I can't for certain say which culture/language has most blinkered me. I can say, with some authority, that island nations can be as insular as continental versions; and that culture is (but not necessarily inevitably) a prison.

My official "field" is Cultural Studies, and that inefficiently covers ever so many sins: colonial and post-colonial histories, languages, translations, literatures, the invention of Others, of nations, and discourses of development; the influence of economics, sciences, religions on constructs of race, class, sex/gender, abilities, multiculturalism, and discriminations associated with them; the roles of intellectuals in the construction and dissemination of knowledges. . . . I’m delighted to engage with students interested in any of these matters but have recently been rather obsessively pondering (with Goddard students) the possibilities of embodied and subversive research methods and presentation of research that might more effectively help shape a just and equitable society.

I am also passionate about all kinds of art, like fiction and theater (particularly comedy) that peel away cultural layers. I was involved in “social action” theater in Japan for many years, write this and that, and perform when allowed. For the past three years, I’ve been privileged to facilitate improvisational theater classes and direct the annual ARC Arkansas performing arts camp for adults with developmental disabilities who attend camp from various parts of the US. I delight in the complexities and magic of the Goddard learning model, and am reliably determined to join students in facing our academic demons—with humor and growing self-esteem—so we can put our theory into healthy & ethical practice in sensible -- if wild -- ways.

I am a New York-based composer, sound/installation artist and electro-multi-instrumentalist. My work is deeply rooted in audio/visual and audio/gestural interactivity, and is influenced by post-Cagean compositional strategies, and the poetic and gestural non-materialism of the Fluxus arts movement. As a performer, my tools are electronically-processed accordion, laptop electronics, acoustic piano, and amplified objects; and my visual materials include objects, video, drawing and photographs.

For the past several years, I have been developing a series of interactive sound/image pieces that are inspired by the structures of Rube Goldberg's circuitous machines, and have been performing these works in both the United States and Europe on an ongoing basis – most recently in May 2008 at the Contemporary Art Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. An important conceptual thread running through these pieces is the discovery and expression of metaphors for the slippage and tension between object and meaning that occurs through the passage of time. As both a sonic and visual artist, I try to build and layer idiosyncratic systems and structures that point to these shifts in meaning.

Other recent projects include the New York premiere this past spring at Roulette Intermedium of ob-jest, the jettisoned: 15 short electronic works for 4 speakers, with a live ensemble featuring Highland bagpipes, cello, amplified objects, and electronically-processed accordion; and the completion of Faulty Objects, an hour-long audio work scored for amplified objects, laptop electronics and accordion feedback. The piece is based on a 10-channel installation work that I presented in New York last year at Diapason Gallery for Sound and Intermedia, and will be released on Important Records in Fall 2008.

One important focus for the past 20 years has been the development of an individual textural and gestural language on my electronically-processed accordion -- which I view as an extended instrument. During this time, I have also explored density, gesture and interactivity with a wide range of electronic instruments, sources and processes-- analog and digital, including: synthesizers, live tape manipulation, analog effects boxes, Foley, samplers, and generative sound processing. I have also recently been working to extend my performative scope through the design of a series of digital controller sculptures to be used with my customized processing software.

All of these explorations have been - and are currently - greatly augmented by ongoing collaborations with many and diverse sonic colleagues. Of critical importance has been my longtime participation in the vital community of musicians in downtown New York City who are committed to the exploration (together) of a wide range of artistic/improvisational/compositional strategies and expression. As a member of this community, which is by now both local and global, I’ve had the opportunity to develop recording and performance projects with artists who challenge me both conceptually and aesthetically: including guitarist Nels Cline, saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, and bagpiper David Watson; and sound artists Anne Wellmer, Stephen Vitiello and Michael J. Schumacher, among many others.

As an educator, I want to support students’ pursuit and articulation of a personal creative vision, and to facilitate their absorption of the range of materials, processes and resources that are available in order to help them achieve this. This is with the recognition that this may at times seem like a risky endeavor – full of experimental moments of “not knowing,” that may or may not lead to a clear creative outcome – yet is indeed a worthwhile process that can provide a vital sense of agency to any artist.

I have taught music improvisation and composition, sound art, and multi-media performance at the college and graduate school level: conducting workshops, classes and master classes at music and art academies in the United States and Europe, including the Integrated Media Program and Music Department at California Institute for the Arts, Mills College, the University of Michigan Music Department, and the Hochschule fur Musik, Karl Maria von Weber in Dresden, Germany. I have also led workshops at artist-run music improvisation schools and collectives in New York City and in Europe.

My work has been supported by grants from Meet the Composer, American Composers Forum and New York State Council on the Arts; and residencies from Harvestworks Media Art Center, New York City; and the Frei und Hanseastadt Hamburg Kulturbehoerde, Germany.

Websites: Diapason Gallery, Artist Page, MySpace Page

Theressa Lenear has over 36 years of experience in the early childhood field. In that time, she has worked with many young children in multiple settings in both Alaska and Washington. Her current focus centers on teaching, mentoring and coaching those wishing to strengthen their skills in providing services and resources relevant to the diverse children and families in their communities. She earned her Master of Arts degree in Human Development with a specialization in Bicultural Development from Pacific Oaks College Northwest. She is currently a doctoral student with the Praxis Institute for Early Childhood Education pursuing her degree in Human Development and Social Change. Working in her community is a cultural expectation and a collective responsibility. Theressa co-leads the Teaching Umoja Participatory Action Research 15 Year Commitment with Dr. Cronin in examining ethnic identity, bicultural, cross-cultural and triliteracy development of children of color. This work is a collaborative effort with diverse co-researchers from across the United States and the communities of Port Royal and Moore Town, Jamaica. As a member of the African American Childcare Task Force and the Culturally Relevant Anti-Bias Education Leadership Group, Theressa is actively engaged working with others on issues of equity and social justice.

Will Hamlin taught at Goddard College from 1948 to 2001. He cared deeply about literature, art, education and the natural world, and served Goddard for fifty years in his renaissance fashion. 

He was passionate about education and the philosophy of education. Versed in Dewey, Kilpatrick and other luminaries of the progressive education movement, he worked to realize their ideas at Goddard with the students he mentored and taught, as well as other faculty and staff.  For decades, he worked as the College’s editor, writing and editing the catalogue, the Goddard Bulletin, and other publications. 

Will loved language, and tended to its details and precise usage.  He crafted the ideas of Tim Pitkin and his other colleagues into articulate prose that represented their vision in the larger world.  When focus at the College sometimes drifted from the ideals of progressive education, Will reminded his colleagues and students – sometimes none too gently – of the importance of Goddard’s mission, and its stewardship of larger principles.  We are grateful for his lasting contributions to the College.

Will passed away on August 4, 2009.

While I have lived nearly half of my life in New England (the New Hampshire and Maine seacoasts and western Massachusetts) I think of myself as a Southerner. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky – a pretty amazing place. It’s a large city with the feel of a small town. My family lived just on the edge of a major park system so as a kid I had hundreds of acres of woods, fields and creeks in which to loose myself. As a young girl this gift of ready access to the natural world gave me a remarkably huge amount of space in which to move about and a great launch pad for seeking out independence.

I believe in callings and know that mine is education – broadly defined. I look back over my life and the markers for many of its peaks have been some sort of educational experience. These experiences have shaped my sense of identity, helped me discover my talents, carried me to people I cherish and given meaning to my life. Education has been one of my most significant means of personal and professional transformation. I regard it as an incredible privilege to try to support others in their own journey of self-discovery and impact.

I’ve had a variety of experiences in education. Some of my favorite have come through my roles as the Assistant Director of an Upward Bound program, the Director of Corporate Training for the University of New Hampshire’s Browne Center for Experiential Learning, as a core faculty member with the Antioch New England Department of Organization and Management, the Coordinator of the Social Justice Training Program at UMASS-Amherst, as a trainer with Project Adventure, and as an Outward Bound instructor.

For over 25 years I’ve worked with a wide range of public and private sector organizations as a change agent in the fields of training and organizational development. My broad areas of focus are organizational development/multicultural organizational development; strategic planning; executive leadership, management, and team development; diversity training, and group facilitation. Attention to multiple bottom lines that include thriving and productive organizations and communities, environmental sustainability and ecological justice are an inherent part of this work.

My personal and professional interests in social justice and progressive pedagogy combined with my experience in organizational development and systems change are part of the path that led me to Goddard.  My primary interests here fall at the intersection of social responsibility, social entrepreneurship, environmental sustainability, ecological justice and progressive education as a means of personal and societal change.

I live with my partner in Dover, NH. We’ve both got a great affinity for animals – cats and dogs for her; dogs and horses for me. My favorite non-work activities are reading, watching movies, and walking with my dog in the woods.
 

I interpret my role in Goddard’s student-centered approach to learning as one where I’m both guide and fellow traveler – an ally in intellectual adventure and active exploration. A crucial part of my job is to facilitate the defeat of the self-censor, to help quash that negative inner voice that Schiller called the “watcher at the gates of the mind” that examines ideas too closely, stifling the creative or expressive or investigative process before it can even begin. I try to engage in the MA in Individualized Studies Program's interdisciplinary “conversation” with students in the most progressive way possible – to challenge, encourage and assist in the kind of discovery that leads to creation and then, hopefully, to action. As a civilization, a world, we’re teetering on a highly cliched but quite real precipice and are desperately in need of those startling, creative and activating discoveries if we hope to survive.

I’m a writer, director, performer and activist. For the past four and a half years, my artistic work/life has been connected to Lesotho, southern Africa. Since January 2005, when I arrived on a Fulbright to teach, create and direct in the National University’s Theatre Unit, I’ve been navigating the tricky cultural terrain of the small, mountainous country and making theatre there. Though completely surrounded by South Africa, Lesotho was never under the apartheid regime, so if Westerners have heard of the country at all, it’s because of Bill Clinton and Angelina Jolie, their celebrity appearances prompted by the obscure nation’s astonishing HIV infection rate – the 3rd highest in the world. Lesotho is a country in transition, where the old traditional ways are clashing with globalization’s onslaught and the nation’s rich cultural backbone is splintering under the weight of the growing schism. This stark social dichotomy provided a challenging frame for the evolution of my recent theatre work, an organic “next step” in looking more closely at questions around art and activism and what it means to be both insider and outsider.

My early work in Lesotho was focused on teaching, directing and essentially producing theatre events – some connected contextually to the HIV pandemic, others set in a more purely performative frame. As an outgrowth of that work, the Winter/Summer Institute in Theatre for Development (WSI) was launched in June 2006. WSI is a multicultural collaboration between faculty and students from three continents, and community participants from the rural mountains of Lesotho (www.maketheatre.org). Since 2006, the Institute has challenged participants to create collaborative, issue-based, aesthetically provocative theatre pieces. Our performances thus far have focused on the role of gossip and silence in the spread of HIV; on power, denial and stigma as they influence choices people make in response to the virus; and on examining the rapid spread of HIV through relationship networks involving long-term, concurrent sexual partners.

I’m a returning Goddard faculty member, having taught in the IMA Program from 2001-2005. I’m also a visiting writer in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Long Island University, Brooklyn; and, since 1993, I’ve been a frequent instructor and project collaborator at the State University of New York’s Empire State College in Manhattan – a program that, like Goddard’s, grew out of the progressive education movement of the 1960s and 70s, and which is currently the U.S. academic base of the Winter/Summer Institute.

As a 2009 Resident Artist at Mabou Mines Theatre in New York City, I’m creating a new piece called Outpost. My work as a playwright and performer has been seen at a variety of NYC venues, including: Dixon Place, HERE, NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, the ArcLight, St. Mark's in the Bowery, and the former Circle Rep Lab; as well as at locations throughout Lesotho, and at the Performing Arts Centre of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. My most recent pre-Africa play, The Law of Falling Bodies, was part of the 3rd Millennium Festival.

Representative Grants/Awards/Affiliations: 2009 Mabou Mines Resident Artist Award, IRT Theatre Residency (2008), Art Matters Individual Artist Award (2007;1990), Jerome Foundation Grant/Lanesboro Residency, James William and Elizabeth Hall Award for Innovation from Empire State College, Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, The Colgate-Palmolive Fund & the Colgate South Africa Fund, The Lotta Crabtree Theatrical Fund, The Jewish Foundation for Education of Women, and The Heidtke Foundation. I’m an Affiliate Artist of the New Georges Theatre Company and a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow. I’m also a founding/core member of the activist artists’ group Mouths Wide Open.

Upcoming/Recent Projects:

• As a 2009 Residency Artist at Mabou Mines Theatre in New York, I’ll be creating a new, collaborative theatre piece, Outpost, which goes up the end of May
• March 2009: The Winter/Summer Institute offered a 3 day Residency in New York City, with an opening event on Friday March 6th co-hosted by The Brecht Forum
• September 2008: Through a residency at the IRT Theatre in New York, I work-shopped Excavation, a collaborative performance piece about the brain and memory.

Coordinator, Community Education Concentration 

I spent sixteen years as Dean of Antioch University's Philadelphia Center, overseeing programs in education and human services for working adults. Earlier in my career I worked as an elementary and special education teacher before entering the mental health field. I have worked with a clinical team in a Residential Treatment Hospital for emotionally disturbed children, which was affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania. I was a member of the staff to develop the first Community Mental Health Center in this country at Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

My work in the field of Human Development has led to a very active role with advocacy and direct service organizations. I have chaired the Board of Directors of the Education and Center of New Jersey and the Education and Law Center of Pennsylvania, a board on which I continue to serve actively. I have also chaired the Board of North City Congress of Philadelphia, a direct service organization for Senior Citizens that I have been involved with since 1976.

I am interested in education as an empowerment process for adult learners, particularly in regard to urban education and minority issues. This is my second professional association with Goddard. In the past, I worked with Goddard undergraduate students who held field placements in innovative public school projects and human service agencies in Philadelphia.

Trustee emeritus.

Bio coming soon

Over and over again I’ve been led to the water’s edge. To thinking about the relationships between history, language and location. To what lies in the space between what is articulated by tongue and mind and that which is felt in the gut. I have been thinking about how history, even events prior to one’s own birth, has an impact upon our lives and affect who we are. How we live and breathe. Speak or not. Whisper or sing. Self consciously blurt or ceaselessly ramble. How history affects one’s relationship to language. One’s understanding and relationship to others and to oneself … and how all this, affects not only the work one produces but ‘how’ one builds. Although I grew up on a potato farm in South Eastern Alberta (in Canada), my adult life has been spent back and forth across the country living in Montreal, then Calgary, back to Montreal, and eventually to Vancouver, near where my grandparents lived prior to the Second World War (the fishing village of Steveston, B.C.). This is where Ojiichan (my grandfather) fished and built fishing boats, Obaachan (my grandmother) worked in the cannery and tended her chirashi perennial garden, and where they raised their family before their forced removal from their home and community; before they were sent as laborers to a sugar beet farm near a French speaking town in Manitoba. It was there on the west coast that I really began reconsidering my own relationship to water, having first learned about mizu out there on the prairies. I have been trying to understand this complex space where water meets land meets water meets land meets water … I am interested in spaces between and in discovering what might be experienced and understood in these relational spaces. If you asked me to describe myself, I might say I'm a visual artist and writer who's practice involves installations, page and bookworks, performance, video and sound pieces, collaborations, and ongoing projects of gathering and dispersal. Or I might respond by saying that I was a taiko drummer when I lived in Montreal; that I used to dream of being a pool shark or a country singer; that I love the color red; that I often feel the significance of the seemingly insignificant; that I am learning to self heal, remembering how to self heal; and that I deeply believe that learning and healing are ongoing, life long processes. I might tell you that I taught at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, at Concordia University in Montreal, and at the University of Calgary in Calgary. Then again, I might respond by simply saying I love the Rockies; that I still feel a close connection to Montreal; that I eventually grew to feel at home in Vancouver; that I currently live in Washington, D.C.; or that I still consider myself a prairie farm kid. Then again, I might tell you about the time when …

AJ Russo (BA '88-'89) spent time in the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) summer program at Goddard College, and now works as a freelance editorial and motion graphics producer in Brooklyn, New York. 

AJ recently produced, with director Dennis Trainor, "American Autumn: An OccuDoc," a full-length feature documentary about the Occupy movement.

"It was a fantastic experience for me as a filmmaker and also as an old progressive," says AJ.

AJ is also finishing up the graphics package for a short documentary with Pakistan-born independent journalist Madiha Tahir.

Since being initiated into a priesthood of Khemet (ancient Egypt) at the age of fourteen, I am called by the name Herukhuti (pronounced heh-ROO-koo-TEE). I am a critical theorist and philosopher, social and cultural scientist, sexologist, cultural worker, shaman, artist, author, and transformative education scholar-practitioner. For me, education--at its best--is a liberatory practice. It is the cultivation of human potential for personal and community development. As an educator, my role is to hold sacred space for mystery, the miraculous, and meaning to unfold. I believe when they unfold, learning occurs for all involved. Oftentimes in the West (United States, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia) we think of such learning as sweet, polite, clean, manicured, and polished. Because of my background in African ritual, I have come to know that mystery, the miraculous, and meaning can often appear ugly, smell funky, and sound profane. I invite and appreciate multiple forms of learning into my learning environments. To that end, I am currently involved in two epistemological movements: Decolonizing and Reconstructing Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Practices (DRE) & Afrocentric, Decolonizing Queer Theory (ADQT). DRE is a framework for the work of scholar-practitioners that is guided by principles of social and ecological justice as well as a deep appreciation of Indigenous knowledge and wisdom. ADQT is a way of understanding how Blackness and queerness are culturally, spiritually, and sexually interconnected as sources of liberatory power. In 1998, I founded Black Funk: The Center for Culture, Sexuality, and Spiritual, a sexual cultural center dedicated to providing a space for the exhibition and exploration of sensual awareness, sexual consciousness, erotic power, and pleasure. Black Funk is a gathering place for sexually liberated people of color to express themselves and enjoy erotic events, demonstrations, and sexuality-related classes. In 2004, Black Funk launched the popular, provocative web site http://www.blackfunk.org, providing users with an online source for news, information, and community on topics related to culture, sexuality, and spirituality from a conscious, funky perspective. I am also a former high school teacher and youth theatre director. I taught humanities/social studies and theatre at the School of the Future, New York City in the mid-late 90s. My theatrical work with students led to productions at the first New York International Fringe Theatre Festival. I have been writing poetry for about twenty years and stage plays and social/cultural criticism for the last 10 years. My writing has appeared in Ma-Ka: Diasporic Juks:Contemporary Writings by Queers of African Descent; African Voices; Women In The Life: The Premier Lesbian Website and Monthly; and Think Again, as well as in various academic journals and publications including Sexualities; Journal of Bisexuality; Innovations in Transformative Learning: Space, Culture, and the Arts; and Blackberries and Redbones: Critical Articulations of Black Hair/Body Politics in Africana Communities. My first book, Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, Volume I (Vintage Entity Press), a fiery collection of essays, poetry, and experimental writing, has been used in colleges and universities across the country. As an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense, my research and teaching interests include: embodiment and consciousness; (queer) phenomenology; African culture, cosmology, ritual, and spirituality; Trickster mythology; Diasporic studies; sex and sexuality; sexual scripts theory; “the uses of the erotic as power;” bondage, discipline, domination, submission, sadism, and masochism (BDSM); culturally-relevant HIV education; chaos theory and complexity; cultural studies; human development; social change; Black youth activism of the 1960s; Black Feminist Thought; Afrocentric Thought; Black Queer Theory; performance and performativity; Theatre of the Oppressed; European male supremacy and European cultural hegemony; epistemology; qualitative research methods (particularly narrative inquiry, ethnographic inquiry, interviewing, and focus group); participatory action research and collaborative inquiry; Indigenous Knowledge Studies; Afrocentric Decolonizing Queer Theory; and Decolonizing and Reconstructing Epistemologies, Methodologies, and Practices; organization development; and systems thinking.

While those are my immediate interests, I am intrigued by opportunities to work with students in areas for which I have a limited background but which provide great co-learning experiences. I enjoy serving as companion and critical friend to students working on areas that are unfamiliar to both of us. I was initiated into the Shrine of Amen Ra at the age of 14 by Khafra Ndongo Amen, I studied Mdu Neter (hieroglyphics), Khemet cosmology and mysticism, Tai Chi Chuan, Chi Gong, and Hatha Yoga as well as mysticism with the late Sufi master Genghis Nor and Dagara shamanism and cosmology with Dr. Malidoma Somè.

I focused on playwriting, and had a truly amazing experience. When they told me it would be life changing, I was skeptical, but it was just that. I got an amazing amount of attention and feedback from my advisors. I emerged with a full vision of the kind of writer I wanted to be. I graduated from Harvard College, but I learned more at Goddard than I ever did there. It’s an amazing model of education and it works.

Christian Peet is the author of The Nines (Palm Press, 2006), Big American Trip (Shearsman Books, 2009) and of the forthcoming No Evidence, No Jury, No Justice: The True Story of Jeremy Barney (GenPop Books, 2012). Peet is Founder and Editor in-Chief of Tarpaulin Sky Press & Online Journal. He taught Poetry and Creative Writing at Brooklyn College & Hunter College (CUNY) from 2004-06.

Nagueyalti Warren came to Goddard College's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program in the summer of 2003, wanting to complete a novel and to improve her ability to write poetry. Having worked for 15 years as an educator and administrator (assistant and associate dean) in a research university in the South, Ms. Warren writes, “To become a better writer and complete two creative projects was always my goal—not the acquisition of another degree. Fortunately, I was able to do both—the projects and the degree.”

A Cave Canem fellow, Ms. Warren has published her poetry in Essence, Gathering Ground Tenth Anniversary Anthology, Obsidian II and The African American Review. Her manuscript, Margaret (circa 1834-1858), which was completed at Goddard, recently won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize, with publication by Lotus Press. Her appointment to the core faculty in African American Studies at Emory University took place Fall 2005.

Calyb Hare is the Assistant Field Manager of vegetable operations Drumlin Farm, a Massachusetts Audubon nonprofit, educational farm in Lincoln, MA.  He is fanatical about local food and spends his days cultivating his relationship with the land and people of his community.  His duties include plant and soil health, educating interns and summer day campers, and collaborating with restaurant owners, chefs and CSA members on vegetable distribution and sales and farm to table education.

As the Student Trustee to the Goddard Board of Trustees, he is also a full-time student at Goddard College in the Individualized Bachelor of Arts program in Plainfield, VT.  He is in his third year with Goddard and is beginning his senior thesis on democracy in education.  He is passionate about Goddard and hopes his place on the Board of Trustees will give him the opportunity to support the College by being active in board fundraising and enrollment efforts and in helping to develop student leadership practices.

As a Goddard enthusiast, Calyb is already preparing himself for a graduate degree in Education at the Plainfield campus.  

My work has been in my writing, with teaching as an outgrowth of my writing concerns. I have written twenty-five books of both fiction and non-fiction. I would characterize most of my fiction, which includes six novels and a collection of short stories, as literary fantasy. Unquenchable Fire won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in Britain, while Godmother Night won the World Fantasy Award. Though my non-fiction books have included work on such areas as Stone Age religion (The Body of the Goddess), most of my non-fiction has centered on the symbolic interpretation of Tarot cards, a subject much bigger than the popular image of fortune-telling. As well as creating my own deck, with images inspired by prehistoric art, I have written general books and books on specific decks, such as Salvador Dali’s Tarot. What unites my fiction and non-fiction is the exploration of imagination as the ground of creation. My books have appeared all over the world, in nine languages. My earliest teaching was writing and literature at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. Since then, however, I have taught many workshops on Tarot in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, as well as occasional writing seminars, including a two year class on myth and creative imagery in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

My approach to writing begins with each student’s goals. Against the familiar dictum to “write what you know best,” I advise people to write what they care about most deeply. From this beginning point I work closely with each person to strip away whatever is sloppy, received wisdom, lazy, or a disguise of what the writer really needs to say. I encourage writers to think through what they are doing, to write passionately but question themselves in revision, and to get to the core of their own style and make it work for them. For more information, visit my web site Rachel Pollack.

Sebastian Marino is hereditary chief of Hatohobei State, a small island and a coral reef in the West Pacific Republic of Palau. He has been working with his community to develop a shared vision for the Helen Reef Conservation Area - the largest marine conservation area in Palau. His Goddard MA in Individualized Studies thesis examined the importance of indigenous conservation knowledge and described the process he used to build this community vision. The results of this project now serve as a road map for his community's work to protect the reef.

Watch Marino on Climate Change TV!

I’ve lived in Australia, Canada, China, Ecuador, England, India, and the United States. The communities in all of these places have taught and shaped me. I started writing fiction in the early nineties in a correspondence program in Toronto – I believe the first of its kind in the country. Over the years, I’ve learned, and I continue to learn how to recognize the seeds of a project and know that it’s growing. I’ve learned over and over that you have to believe in yourself first and foremost at the start of every single creative project in order to be able to pull it out of the air and sustain it from beginning through to the middle and on to the end. Persistence is what it’s all about.

Conflict, struggle, and pain are central to creative writing, as they are in life. But through these things we are able to see joy more clearly. By showing us disconnections, we see desires, hopes, and connections – this is the stuff of writing. Fiction and Creative Nonfiction are my greatest literary loves. Together, we can look at what these genres borrow from each other and how they are fundamentally different.

I look forward to developing your goals with you, goals that are relevant to your life, and making your study a positive, rich, and passionate experience. Together, we will nurture the seeds of your writing project and take it through the stages of its growth. We will read and write hard together, and we’ll focus on elements of craft to help get your work to the place you want it to be. Writing is process, and I’ll strive to make revision feel a natural part of that process.

I teach and write fiction (from short-shorts to short stories and novels) and creative nonfiction (including memoir, personal essay, travel, and ethnographic writing). My job is to touch your broadest human aspirations, and also to be a part of your conversation about how your writing connects with the bigger world around you. I enjoy working with other writers to find the best ways we can do that.

I’ve published short stories, personal essays, travel writing, and scholarship that focuses on gender and media from a global perspective. My documentary film, about women in China, aired nationally in Canada, and won the REEL Women’s Film Festival Award for International Development. I’m currently working on a novel set in India in 1857 about two empowered women – voices that for the most part are not in our history textbooks. Right now, I’m concerned with the writer’s role in making the past active in the present and how we can contribute to future visions. My passions include the short story form, from both global and American perspectives, and ethnographic writing that serves as communication for positive intercultural exchange. I am interested in human rights, global development, and gender issues. Can we slough off our cultures to reach universals in human experience? I think this is at the heart of all my writing.

Again, I look forward to hearing about what’s important to you, through your unique voice on the page.

Shortly after graduation, I was telling an acquaintance about the low-residency Goddard program. “Oh, a distance program,” she remarked, with some disdain. I continued on, saying that in the Goddard program, I spent more face-to-face time with faculty than in a traditional classroom-based program and experienced deeper and more meaningful dialogue than I had with faculty in the classroom. And in the end, my learning in the MFA-IA Program turned out to be the most valuable learning experience in my life. Living in Tucson in 2004, I applied to the program in response to a lack of fulfillment in my art practice. In this practice, I created visual art and exhibited it in juried exhibitions in the U.S. While my resume was getting longer, my heart was getting smaller. I’ll never forget the day that I received a letter of acceptance from the Program Director. Elated, I then proceeded to calculate the total cost of enrollment in five semesters. Fortunately, I had the wisdom to step through the fear of the financial burden and to go off to my first residency. Later, I realized that my fear was not so much about the cost, but about the fear of opening up to new perspectives, about the fear of letting go of my established way of making art. With each succeeding semester, I opened my eyes more and more to myself and the world around me. Now I see how my close relationships with faculty and fellow students made this possible. Today I continue to practice art in Tucson—now with an open heart. It’s a practice that invites others to participate in the creation of art. Increasing self-understanding in me and in others leads to greater openness and lessens the gap between self and other. I no longer care how long my resume is. I do care that my art practice is of service to others. Please call or email me and I would be delighted to tell you more about Goddard and answer your questions.

I hold a dual doctorate in Clinical and Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology. Currently, I am working at a human services firm in Washington, D.C. as Director of Quality Improvement and Behavioral Health Care. The major focus of my work is on program development, evaluation, and performance.

In addition, I oversee the implementation of quality improvement practices at all levels of the organization and develop improvements to processes and systems through the application of systematic techniques. As Director of Behavioral Healthcare, I supervise, motivate and guide the professional development of independent contractors providing clinical services and I have a small private practice. I have over twenty years of experience in the field of mental health and have worked in a variety of clinical, school and community settings.

I have been an independent consultant in the Washington Metropolitan Area for the last 10 years where I have provided training to schools, government agencies, non-profits, for profits, churches and professional organizations. My specialties are in the areas of community, team and organizational development.

I am on several non-profit Board of Directors and part of the Quality Council for a large Managed Care Organization and the Department of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. I am a member of Chesapeake Bay Organizational Development Network, and the American Psychological Association. My interests are in helping family and organizational systems develop strategies and interventions they can use to empower themselves and become more balanced and effective in their interactions.

My hobbies include tennis, traveling, bowling, singing and exercising.

Pete Hocking is an interdisciplinary artist, activist, and teacher based in Providence, Rhode Island & Provincetown, Massachusetts.

His studio practice focuses on personal narrative and the construction of identity within the context of contemporary social and political life.  He is co-founder and collaborator on several community-based initiatives, including New Urban Arts, Community MusicWorks, Project Eye-to-Eye and Equity Action.  In addition, he has served on many boards of directors, including Southside Community Land Trust, AIDS Project Rhode Island, and The Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. At New Urban Arts he was an Artist Mentor Fellow from 2007-2009 and periodically serves as a Community Story Teller.

From 2007 to 2011 he served as interim director of Rhode Island School of Design’s Office of Public Engagement. Prior to that, for more than seventeen years, he was on the staff of the Howard R. Swearer Center for Public Service at Brown University, where he served as director from 1992 to 2005. As the Swearer Center's director and as an Associate Dean of the College, he worked to develop university-community partnerships, innovative leadership pedagogy, undergraduate research opportunities, social entrepreneur projects, and to integrate community-based learning with academic study. In addition to teaching at Goddard College full-time, he periodically offers courses in social practices in the arts, leadership, Queer Studies, Illustration, and ecology/sustainability at Rhode Island School of Design.

Teaching Philosophy and Areas of Interest:
As a teacher, I am committed to the intrinsic dignity and value of each of us as learners. I believe that we rarely acknowledge and embrace what we truly know. We are taught not to value what we know; instead being directed to trust on facts, figures and experts who tell us that they know more. The process through which we come to understand ourselves as theoreticians, meaning makers, and actors-in-the-world is sacred to me. I am committed to understanding how we "own" knowledge, and believe the arts to be a critical means through which we can articulate and convey our knowledge to others. I believe that artists hold a special trust in our culture as makers of critical meaning, as translators of ideas, as theoreticians, and as seers.

My theoretical preoccupations include Progressive Education and arts pedagogy; the American Transcendentalists and American intellectual history; Queer Theory and LGBTQ history; Phenomenology; ecology and sustainable systems; the public engagement of artists; and documentary practice. As an adoptee, I am interested in adoption rights and the effects of trauma on identity formation.  I primarily work as a visual artist and writer. I love comic books.
 

During the course of my studies at Goddard, I focused on creating peace in education and integrating the arts into elementary classrooms. This information was vital to me as I am creating an alternative school for students 3-12. My advisors pushed me to do my best work and encouraged me every step of the way. They guided me by making helpful suggestions and supported my process. The residencies re-charged me. They inspired me with the workshops, peer discussions, and special speakers. I became focused and motivated also. My experience at Goddard gave me confidence and a powerful feeling that I am capable of being the change I want to see in the world. Studying at Goddard was hard work ,but was also a joy. It was the best choice I could have made for what I wanted to study. Absolutely!

I am so pleased to introduce myself to you and to contribute again to a learning community that has so deeply impacted my development as a healer and a human being. I am a clinical herbalist and health educator in Central Vermont. Emphasizing whole-person healing, my “medicine bag” includes Western herbal medicine, healing foods and functional nutrition, the biological sciences, Traditional Chinese Medicine, bodywork therapies, and mind-body techniques (meditation, breathing exercises, journaling, drawing, mindful eating). My clinical work stresses our innate tendency towards health and the profound impact of synchronizing our lives with the rhythms of our local ecologies. In addition to my practice, I am a research specialist for the International Centre for Phytotherapy’s EXTRACT database, collecting and analyzing evidence-based data relevant to the therapeutic use of plants. As well, I write a quarterly, clinically-oriented article for UnifiedEnergetics, a journal dedicated to preserving and exploring consciousness in health and medicine. I co-direct a local school/clinic called the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism.

I serve as guest faculty in the Southeast Center for Herbal Healing’s three-year clinical training program in Asheville, North Carolina, and staff summer herb camps for kids, sponsored by Food Works at the Two Rivers Center for Sustainability. I am also a volunteer practitioner at the Sage Mountain Herbal Free Clinic which operates out of the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic in Barre, VT. As a graduate of the country’s first accredited Master of Science degree in Herbal Medicine, I have been blessed with exposure to an amazing breadth and depth of information, studying both evidence-based and traditionally supported clinical applications of herbs in Western, Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions. I am well-versed in the life sciences of anatomy and physiology, pathophysiology, phytochemistry, botany, and phytopharmacy, while remaining grounded in traditional ways of knowing and seeing – energetic assessment, skilled intuition, and direct communication with the plants. Through the study and practice of Zen Shiatsu, my interest in Traditional Chinese Medicine was piqued and, after further exploration, I incorporated Five Element theory as it relates to emotional and psychological health into my practice. I am currently investigating the integration of clinical aromatherapy with this Five Element approach to psychospiritual wellbeing. A life-long vegetarian, I have explored a variety of eating and cooking philosophies, including macrobiotics, veganism, and paleo-diet and strongly believe that food is our first and best medicine. Inseparable from my interest in food is an understanding of the politics of food availability and the impact of commercial food production on human and environmental health. In the past, I have farmed organically and biodynamically and have a basic knowledge of the practices of permaculture. I have also lived in intentional communities, which focused on sustainable food production and consumption, conservative and alternative resource use, consensus-based, non-hierarchical social structure, and personal transformation. In tandem with my interest in food and agriculture is my profound concern for our relationship with wilderness and the planet as Gaia. The foundation of my work in this area is my relationship with the land itself and the inspiration gained through our direct communication. Here, my studies of ecology, psychology, feminist/gender/queer studies, and Buddhist philosophy intersect, birthing a sense of urgency about our ecological and spiritual separation from the land. With that urgency comes a call to inspire others toward practices that affirm interdependence and acknowledge the indwelling spirit of nature. In addition to the breadth of my experience and interests, I hope to offer students guidance in creating a viable career path in the health arts and sciences. As the healthcare climate is continually evolving, graduates of this program will serve as bridges between the current failing system and an emerging system of wellness. I have first-hand knowledge of seeking education in a budding and unlicensed field, one that straddles worlds both ancient and modern, intuitive and scientific. Though I will certainly share resources and guide around pitfalls, more essential is my desire and ability to nurture in each student the personal inspiration that calls them to healing work. Through deep listening, honest reflection, and joyful collaboration, I aspire to cooperatively cultivate a powerful and effective expression of each student’s personal source of authority. This authority will become their navigator in uncharted waters. I approach my role as a faculty member with the same spirit and objective with which I approach healing work: I serve as a dedicated partner in transformation. I believe education can be viewed as a dual process of acquisition and evolution. While acquisition involves gathering information and resources, which enhance and refine the learner’s chosen path, evolution gradually reveals innate gifts and wisdom. Common to both processes is the act of transformation. In this way, the whole person is educated through a cyclical process of expanding and honing, shedding and unfolding on all levels of being. As a mentor during the acquisition process, I see my role as that of an instigator ~ one who incites curiosity, voracious experimentation, far-flung theorizing, and steadfast focus. As a partner in the process of personal evolution, I can offer various practices that foster personal reflection, right-brained engagement, and interaction with the natural world to promote the process of self-discovery. I will urge definition of the core values driving the students’ life and work. With awareness of what informs their actions and how their lives are already flourishing, students can then craft a vision that incorporates their inherent strengths, their value-oriented goals, and their evolving sense of place in the world. Through this transformative model, individuals are empowered to reveal and engage their deep passion for life in service of the whole. The possibilities for global change latent in education that engages the whole person are what draw me to this work. To sit with individuals in healing partnership is a profound honor, yet to be able to participate in the metamorphosis of a wider population through education is an equally humbling privilege. I offer myself as an instrument of transformation, guided by my own personal vision of sacred, juicy, vibrant living. Additional Training: Mind-Body Skills, Center for Mind-Body Medicine, Washington, DC; Foundations of Nutrition, Rooted Wisdom Center for Wholistic Living, VT; Traditional Herbal Diagnosis, Matthew Wood /Sunnyfield Herb Farm, MN; Avena Institute Herbal Studies Internship, Deb Soule, ME; Swedish/Esalen Massage Technician, Heartwood Institute, CA; Zen Shiatsu Acupressure & Whole Foods Nutrition, Heartwood Institute, CA

Fred Wilber is the owner and founder of Buch Spieler Music in Montpelier, Vermont. He was born in New Berlin, New York, in 1951. When he was in second grade his family moved to Clifton Park, New York. Wilber’s interests during his junior and high school years were music and filmmaking. In fourth grade, he began playing the piano and making super 8 movies criticizing the Vietnam War and child abuse.

In high school, Wilber was elected senior class president even though he didn’t want the position. His friends, who thought he should run, collected enough signatures to get him on the ballot. His campaign speech advocated for more freedoms and opportunities for self-direction for seniors. The speech was reviewed by the class adviser who felt that it was too radical. Wilber wrote a new speech and got it approved, but delivered the original anyways. The teachers were shocked, the students cheered, and he was elected president.

Wilber graduated from high school in 1969 and applied to Goddard College. He graduated from Goddard in 1973, with Buch Spieler Music as part of his senior study. The business enters its 40th year in January of 2013.

Over the years Wilber has been a member of many musical ensembles, including Butch Casio, Ken Sleeps Naked, Maddub, and, now, MadMan3. He also served as the director on the Twinfield School Board for six years and was a founding member of the Onion River Arts Council.

Wilber married Patty Morgan in 1985. Their daughter, Morgan, was born in 1986.

Walter Butts, a beloved Goddard faculty member and dear friend, passed away on March 31, 2013.

Everyone who encountered Walter has a special story to tell about him. He had a memorable way of connecting that was deep and personal.  Walter served as faculty in Goddard's BFA in Creative Writing program for 5 years.  He shared so much of himself with us; in his writing as a poet, in program blogs, with his students and colleagues.  At his passing, he was the presiding New Hampshire State Poet Laureate. 

Our love and support go out to Walter's wife, the poet, S Stephanie, their daughter Amy and her family.  And condolences to all in the Goddard community who were touched by Walter and his work.

Walter's Faculty Bio

I am committed to a responsive, student-centered approach that recognizes strengths and potential, focuses on personal interests and goals, and, hopefully, leads to significant creative growth. As a graduate of the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College, I greatly value the learning opportunities unique to individualized studies.

For me, the student-teacher relationship evolves in the same sense that the activity of writing seeks discovery. Regardless of pedagogy, the objective should be self-affirmation through the exploration of language and development of critical thinking skills. I believe my task as a teacher is to establish a dialogue with each student that facilitates personal inquiry within the context of both traditional standards and experimental options. Comprehensive readings of relevant literature should be incorporated into this process, with subsequent learning actualized through student writing. The student therefore becomes aware of both the possibilities and limitations inherent in language, and gains familiarity with a range of writing strategies, ultimately arriving at one’s own voice and style.

Writing is my way of engaging with the world around me and making connections between the inner-self and our social environment – essentially, investigating what it means to be human.

The recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations and a Massachusetts Artists Foundation Award, I have published poems in several literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, and Poetry East, and my work has been anthologized in the Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Books, 1996), Open Door: A Poet Lore Anthology 1980-1996 (Writer’s Center Editions), Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press, 1999), An Endless Skyway: Poetry from the State Poets Laureate (Ice Cube Books, 2011), and elsewhere. I am the author of Cathedral of Nervous Horses: New and Selected Poems (Hobblebush Books, 2012), Radio Time (Cherry Grove Collections), named poetry winner at the 2011 New England Book Festival, Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café, which was selected as a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, and chosen winner of the 2006 Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize, and other books and chapbooks.

I have given readings and conducted poetry and multi-genre writing workshops for various institutions and organizations including the University of New Hampshire, Southern New Hampshire University, Colby-Sawyer College, New England College, Cornell College, Philips Exeter Academy and The Unitarian/Universalist Fellowship of the Poconos (where I spoke on “Secular Faith & the Poetic Spirit”).

In March 2009, I was appointed to a five-year term as New Hampshire Poet Laureate, and am therefore engaged in ongoing efforts as an advocate for community based literary activities throughout the state In October, 2011, I hosted the New Hampshire Writers’ Project “Poetry & Politics Conference.” Poets Laureate from across the U.S. gave statewide reading tours and gathered for panel discussions. I have taught courses in film studies and the humanities, and have an active interest in Eastern philosophy, myth, religion, literature, the cultural influences of African American music, and race relations in urban America.

TRUSTEE EMERITUS Peter Morse Donovan, CFA

Born:  Washington, DC, 1943

Education:  Goddard College, 1965 - B. A. Economics; Chartered Financial Analyst, 1987

Business Experience: Jones, Kreeger & Company, Washington, DC, 1965-66. Wright Investors’ Service, Milford, Connecticut, Investment Analyst, 1966; Managing Editor of ¬In¬vestment Publications, 1968; Assistant Vice President, 1969; Vice President, 1971; Senior Vice ¬President Administration and Finance, 1978; Executive Vice President, 1983; President, 1988-2002; Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer 1996-present.

Chief Executive Officer of Wright Investors’ Service since 1996; Wright Investors’ Service is an investment man-agement, advisory and service organization, founded in 1960. WIS exercises direct respons¬ibility for the management of over $1.5 billion in pension and other investment funds including mutual funds. WIS also manages the investments of institutional investors and bank trust departments, and provides wealth management services to individual investors throughout the United States.  Through its web sites www.wrightinvestors.com and www.corporateinformation.com WIS provides investment analysis of 30,000 companies worldwide. 

Directorships/Trusteeships:  Chairman of the Board of Directors, The Winthrop Corporation and Wright In-vestors’ Serv¬ice, Inc. President and Trustee of five Mutual funds that make up the The Wright Managed Equity Trust and The Wright Managed Income Trust.

Public Activities: Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Goddard College, Plainfield Vermont; Chairman of the Board of Trustees of The School for Ethical Education, Milford Connecticut; Trustee of the Pequot Runners’ Club, Southport, CT. Former Trustee of Hall-Brooke Behavioral Health Services, Westport Connecticut and Former Member of the Advisory board of the Sacred Heart University School of Business, Fairfield Connecticut;

Author:  Co-author of Worldscope Industrial Company Profiles and Worldscope Financial and Service Company Profiles.

Societies and Clubs:  Member of the CFA Institute, The New York Society of Security Analysts, The Hartford Society of Security Analysts,  The Army and Navy Club, Washington D.C., The Union League Club, NYC, The Pequot Yacht Club, and The Pequot Runners’ Club.

Address:  Wright Investors’ Service, 440 Wheelers Farms Road, Milford, CT 06640. Telephone:  (203) 783-4400 Fax:  (203) 783-4401  e-mail: donovan@wrightinvestors.com
            

My activism took root in North Carolina during the turbulent, liminal 50’s and 60’s. Fighting for social change and seeing it come into fruition – of a sort – gave me hope as well as faith. I have always lived in the borderland between pragmatism and idealism because I know that hearts and laws change at vastly different rates. This border existence is a place of learning. I live with the past and in the present, while envisioning and preparing for the future. I’ve marched, boycotted, written letters, organized conferences, donated money, and amassed thousands of volunteer hours. In these small ways, I help to improve others’ lives. In these small ways, I help myself to become a better person. I learn about the things that make this planet a more humane place.

Several years ago, my life changed professionally and personally. My Master of Science in Administration informed my work as an administrator in colleges, community organizations, and public relations firms. But something else called to my spirit. I moved with my partner from Brooklyn, New York to Charlotte, Vermont. I earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing and Literature. Teaching and writing have since become primary vocations and are acts of hope and faith. In addition to serving as a faculty member in Goddard’s Individualized BA and BFA Programs, I teach online and face-to-face courses at local colleges. I am also a writing coach for a management consulting service. Through these experiences, I learn at least as much from my students as they do from me.

Writing is a daily practice. In my journals, I draft and revise poetry and prose, constantly learning and relearning about the world in which I live. I have been an educator for over twenty years; yet, I approach teaching with the attitude of a novice. There is always something new to learn. On the page and in the classroom, I experience the excitement and trepidation that comes with showing up. Sometimes not much happens. Other times I am aware of breaking through: To express myself as I intended. To express myself in ways that surprise me or others.

Like writing and teaching, gardening, raising chickens, and caring for my Cairn terrier are daily activities that sustain me spiritually and emotionally. This work constantly takes me out of my comfort zone where learning can happen.

As a Goddard faculty member, I have worked with students interested in Literature; Creative Writing (particularly Personal Narratives and Poetry); Myths, Legends, and Fairy Tales; Community Activism; Women’s Studies; Music; Race and Racism; Education Theory; Gay and Lesbian Studies; American Studies; and Popular Culture. Coursework in other colleges includes Shakespearean Drama, Seminar in Educational Inquiry, American Literature, and Rhetoric.

All my life I have been drawn to books and stories. I see my work in clinical psychology as helping people to tell their stories, and to tell them in new ways, with new metaphors, new words, and sometimes with new characters. In college I studied religion, philosophy, and literature, changing my major to psychology in my senior year. I obtained a Master’s degree in social/personality psychology and wrote my thesis on gender and conversational dominance. During my pursuit of a degree in clinical psychology, I studied depression and cognitive biases and worked on finding commonality between cognitive and psychodynamic theories.

I completed an internship at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School where I remained part-time for about ten years as a Fellow and Assistant Attending Psychologist. I was taken by the relational work being done there, and at the Stone Center, which valued personal connection, empathy, and individual narratives. I also worked in an inner city community mental health center in East Boston. I was moved by the courage and strength of people struggling with homelessness, drug addiction, trauma, poverty, racism, and serious illnesses, such as schizophrenia. During that time I also worked with children of the city and was struck by their will to thrive and vitality in difficult circumstances. I have been in private practice in Portsmouth, NH since 1991 where I work with adults, children, families, and consult to community agencies and schools.

Although I have studied, cognitive, psychodynamic, and interpersonal approaches to psychotherapy, my work has been as influenced by listening, and learning from my clients. They can be good critics and teachers, too. In education, as in therapy, I seek to help people look at the assumptions underlying their beliefs and become critics of their own narratives. I believe community, connection, and developing a spiritual understanding are important to the process of growth and that both student and teacher can be changed in the process of education. I also believe that the process of scientific discovery can help us to see the world and ourselves in new and different ways (remember Galileo).

I serve as a contributing editor of Mars Hill Review, where I am responsible for the music section, but also publish occasional essays, interviews, and book reviews. My interests are primarily in folk, blues, gospel, Celtic, and music from other countries and cultures.

Chris Millis graduated from Goddard's low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program in 2007.  His first novel, Small Apartments, has been called “zany” (The Washington Post), “hilarious… an impressive achievement” (The Post-Star) and “the kind of cinematic debutante that goes home to bed with Oscar” (Vancouver Sun). The critically acclaimed novel has been adapted into a movie starring Billy Crystal, and it premiered at South By Southwest 2012.

Millis had already achieved the kind of success many writers only dream about when he decided to come to Goddard to study writing. So, we pose the question, "If you’re already published, why come to Goddard?" Read the interview with Chris to learn more.

Program Officer, Ford Foundation

Initiative: Expanding Livelihood Opportunities for Poor Households

Wayne Fawbush is a Program Officer with the Economic Opportunity and Assets Unit of the Ford Foundation, focusing on rural economic development. His work concentrates on helping families improve their livelihood and wealth-building opportunities through the employment of “triple bottom line” development practices that promote positive changes in equity, environment and the economy.

Before joining the Ford Foundation in 2007, Wayne was executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund. As its first director, Wayne grew the fund into an innovative economic development entity focused on helping communities and businesses in rural Vermont improve their economic base and sell forest and agriculture products in profitable markets. Previously, in the Clinton administration, he was deputy for program operations for the Farmers Home Administration at the Department of Agriculture.

Wayne served for 16 years as a representative and senator in the Oregon Legislature, concentrating on economic development in rural areas. He also owned and operated a pear and blueberry farm in Hood River, Ore., for 20 years. Wayne was an officer in the U.S. Air Force, including a tour in Vietnam. He earned a master’s degree from the University of Oregon.

Wayne Fawbush
Program Officer
Economic Development Unit
Ford Foundation
320 East 43rd St.
New York, NY 10017
w.fawbush@fordfound.org
212 573-4918
(Our grant making team includes Grants Administrator Benjamin Afrifa, b.afrifa@fordfound.org and Administrative Assistant Kamara Haynes, k.haynes@fordfound.org)

Goddard was a perfect fit for me. I am a self-motivated person and Goddard allowed me to follow my interests, with the added benefit of wonderful guidance from my advisors. I formed close friendships during the residencies, and consider that a very significant part of the program. I feel much more confident as an artists, and much clearer about my direction. The entire institution, with its non-institutional atmosphere, also contributed to my experiences.

Her Goddard senior study, “Unwrapping Chocolate: An Ethnobotanical Study of Theorama Cacao,” had prepared her well for winning the Food Network's "Sweet Genius" competition in 2012.

Having worked for several years as a chocolatier, Neely was familiar with cacao beans – the seeds harvested from fruit on cacao trees. (Theobrama cacao, the Greek name of the tree, translates as “food of the gods”).

During her first semester at Goddard, Cohen honed her culinary arts skills by training at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York City. For her second semester at Goddard, she landed a placement as Executive Chocolatier at ChocoMuseo, a museum in Cusco, Peru, devoted to understanding the history and production of chocolate. While there, Cohen had the opportunity to spend time in the Amazon rainforest and to see cacao trees in their native habitat.  Like an artist getting to know her raw materials, she learned how to roast and ferment cacao seeds and to create cacao paste.  At ChocoMuseo, Neely created chocolate recipes and taught visitors the bean-to-bar process.

Her senior project expanded on her Peruvian experience with research on the historical, agricultural, medicinal, and folkloric aspects of cacao.

One of Neely’s future goals is to open a chocolate café where people can enjoy creative varieties of chocolate while also learning about the bean-to-bar process. In the meantime, anyone can try one of Neely’s brilliant desserts by visiting Cambridge, Massachusetts, and heading over to Central Kitchen, where she is Executive Pastry Chef.

When Claudia Turnbull's children were grown, she decided to learn more about a meditation practice stemming from Vedic teachings she had been following for thirty years. She needed either a low-residency or a distance learning program that would allow her to study wherever she was. She chose Goddard's low-residency MA in Individualized Studies degree program, where she explored concepts of consciousness within Indian philosophy and wrote A Spiritual Memoir for her thesis.

Jonathan Katz (BA RUP '71) is a comedian, actor, and voice actor. He is best known for his role as the animated Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. Katz attended Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont with playwright David Mamet, with whom he remains close friends. Katz co-wrote House of Games with Mamet and had small roles in the Mamet-directed films Things Change, Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner and State and Main.

Katz is the chief architect of the Goddard College Storyphone, a project of Goddard's 150th Anniversary Celebration. 

I love working with Goddard students, for like you, experiential learning has been a life-long passion for me. I enjoy helping students find ways to use the world around them as the classroom. I also love the challenge of working with students who have a lot of different interests and want to find ingenious ways to cross the traditional discipline boundaries.

My work is in psychology, in movement arts, and living on the land raising goats, vegetables and chickens. I am a psychotherapist in private practice. In the past I was director of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of Vermont. Before moving to Vermont I lived in other countries for many years.

I am fascinated by the human psyche, amazed by the wisdom of the moving body, and find hope in the growing worldwide movement for a sustainable planet. In my work as a therapist, I am constantly surprised, for I find our multi-layered human psyche to be endlessly fascinating. I’m amazed at how our experience of being a person changes throughout our lives – and even from moment to moment!

The questions I am now researching in psychology are: How to use body awareness and expressive movement as a way to more deeply understand our experience? How do psychotherapy, spirituality and the imagination intersect? And, what are the ways that psychotherapy can work more on the front edge of social change? The tools I use in my practice are: depth psychology, expressive therapies, self-state therapy, Jungian psychology, and body-oriented psychology.

When I teach Tai Chi, Aikido and Authentic Movement, the question I’m exploring is how we can directly connect to the life force that runs through our bodies and the Earth. I love asking questions and I love working with the questions students are asking. I wonder about everything. What is the nature of the self? What is the meaning of life? I love especially the questions that open up into deeper questions and hold us in that tension between our yearning to experience the world as meaningful and knowable, and our yearning to experience it as infinitely mysterious.

In the 1960s and '70s I put a pack on my back and hitched through Asia, the Middle East and Europe looking for answers. What I found were more questions. I settled in Paris for 8 years – a city that thrives on questions. Returning to Vermont in 1979 I joined the movement for sustainable communities and social justice.

For the past 20 years I’ve been a practicing psychotherapist – a profession that is in love with questions. And out in the country on a hillside, my dream has come true of living on a small farmstead with my spouse, raising goats, chickens and vegetables. Here on this little piece of Earth, I find myself wondering about sense of place and the human spirit, and what happens when they intersect. And what happens when they don’t.

Formal Education: Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor; MA in Psychology, Norwich University, 1990; Graduate work in Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1966-67; BA in Far Eastern Studies, Earlham College, 1965.

Life Learning: The most important learning experiences for me have taken place outside of the university. I have learned from people and their stories in many different places from an Appalachian coal mining camp where I lived as a community organizer, to the rainforests of Borneo where I had the privilege of being invited into tribal villages. I learn from the honesty and openness of my clients in my therapy practice. And, of course, I learn from you, the students and faculty members of the Goddard community who don’t stay with the easy answers, who celebrate the imagination, and who do things that really matter to you and to the world.

2012 Alumni Outreach Coordinator, Goddard College

June 2010—2012             Goddard College                                         Plainfield, VT

Library Assistant                Contact:  Clara Bruns

Duties:

• Support Reference Librarian and Materials Acquisitions Librarian.
• Staff Circulation Desk, assist students, reshelve books, etc.
• Receive and fulfill archive requests.
• Research and curate historical exhibits.
• Manage Art Collection and art database.
• Curate Art Exhibits.

October 2011—Present*     Goddard College Board of Trustees       Plainfield, VT

Staff Trustee  *three year term

2009—Present                      Goddard College Art Committee             Plainfield, VT

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE.

January 2006—June 2010               Goddard College                             Plainfield, VT

Mail Room Coordinator/Library Assistant     

Contact:  Clara Bruns—802-454-8311

May 2005—January 2006               Turtle Creek Builders Ltd.             Warren, VT

Carpenter                                          Contact:  Dave Kerr, Supervisor—802-223-1468

March 2004—April 2005                 Mountain Café                                 Montpelier, VT

Head Cook/Manager                       Contact:  Michelle Sipka, Owner—moon2chu@mac.com

Duties:  As the head cook and manager of the café I had to keep inventory, make orders, cut checks, make prep lists, do the prep, direct other employees, run the line, clean up, do the dishes, pay-roll.  I also oversaw an extensive renovation of the kitchen, price analysis, installation of the safe and security systems, helped develop store policy, etc.

June 2003-March 2004                     SAIRS Construction                       Woodbury, VT

Carpenter                                          Contact:  Jon Sairs, Owner  802-456-8165

December 2001-May 2003              Beau Jacob Builders                        Wexford, PA

Assistant Supervisor                      Contact:  Tom Brown, Supervisor  412-780-0395

Duties:  Managed subcontractor accounts, supervised jobsites, ordered materials, handled inspections, prospective clients, onsite work including experience with heavy equipment and general carpentry.

January 1999-December 2001        Goddard College Work Study      Plainfield, VT

Writing Center Tutor                      Contact:  Carol Dickson  cdickson@putneyschool.org

December 1997-December 1998    Goddard College Work Study      Plainfield, VT

Technical Services                            Contact:  David Ferland  802-454-8311

EDUCATION.

B.A., Goddard College, 2001

ORGANIZATIONS.

Founding Member of the Golden Dome Musician’s Collective & State and Main Records Label.

2010—Present

I treasure the opportunity to be a part of the HAS program at Goddard, where creativity, passions, ways of knowing, and dreams and concerns for our world and ourselves meet in vibrant collaboration. This is a place of deep honoring, curiosity, engaged conversation, mindful interaction, and commitment to collective well-being and transformation. Each of us participates as both learner and teacher. As a faculty member, I delight in nurturing that fertile growing edge of each person, sharing resources, diving into the depth and breadth of their cherished interests and concerns, witnessing the emergence of human beings and their studies that are unique and glorious expressions of their particular gifts.

I have worked for the past 25 years as a psychotherapist, teacher, and community organizer, in settings which include a prison, family therapy center, community-based counseling and action centers, universities, and private practice. Expressive arts therapy (particularly sandtray therapy, writing, family sculpture, authentic movement, drawing, and painting) is among the modalities I teach and practice. I see imagination and creativity, which infuse experience with beauty, mystery and wisdom, as humanity’s participation in the universal activity of creation that is life.

Another of the health-sustaining interests that fire my spirit is community: intentional communities, community ritual and celebration; mutuality of care and respect, reliable holding environments for making transitions through the lifespan, alternative egalitarian economies, restorative justice, healing communication and public dialogue, community involvement in social change and response to trauma, global community initiatives, interspecies community, and ecological identity and sustainability. I am currently collaborating with others in my part of Maine to create an alternative economy and an annual festival, which will integrate healing arts, applied arts, Puppet Theater, and rites of passage in celebration of and deeper communion with the natural world.

Educationally, my doctoral study was in ecopsychology. This work led to studies in psychology and transpersonal psychology, deep ecology, Native American traditions, Eastern faith traditions, feminist studies, and expressions of the shifting paradigm in consciousness, power and knowledge, relatedness, linguistic discourse, education, addiction, health care, and mental health care.

In divinity school, I engaged in cross-cultural, interdisciplinary studies of health and meaning making as they relate to medical practice, public health, mental health care, addiction, sacred ritual, education, and death and dying.

While Kundalini Yoga and anthroposophy (which underlies Waldorf education and biodynamic agriculture) are central spiritual practices and philosophies I have drawn from in my practice and teaching, I have studied and practiced a wide variety of approaches to yoga and meditation. Other healing modalities have included tai chi, acupuncture/acupressure, Ayurvedic medicine, exercise physiology, holotropic breathwork, nutritional therapy, anthroposophic medicine, homeopathy, EMDR, critical incident stress management, herbal remedies, and psychosynthesis. I have found illness, too, to be a powerful teacher.

I love to garden, paint, swim make and fix things; listen to rain, wind, birdsong, trees, and peepers; watch chipmunks, moose, flowers, mists, and the changing light; and celebrate life with ritual, food and friendship.

A thread running throughout all of the above is a profound concern with cultivating peace within and among us; grappling with questions about human nature, cruelty, suffering, and life-affirming response to them; examining the assumptions and dilemmas built into our social structures toward rethinking and transforming them; and restoring deep connection, wonder, and reverence in relationship with all of life.

Additional training: Kundalini Yoga Teacher Training, Kundalini Research Institute; Life-Span Clinical-Developmental Psychology, Clinical-Developmental Institute of Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Gestalt Therapy, Boston Gestalt Institute.

My interests as a writer have always had an international focus, and my plays, musicals and screenplays have often used theatrical conventions and forms from around the world to explore contemporary American subjects.

For example, I have written a Japanese Noh Drama about Elvis Presley (Blue Moon Over Memphis); a musical comedy inspired by world mythologies and Saturday morning cartoons (Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing); and a contemporary drama about the aftermath of terrorism written in the form of a Greek tragedy (The Women of Lockerbie). My play, Into the Fire, draws on the methods of magic realism from Latin American novels to dramatize life in an Alaskan fishing town.

This eclecticism informs my teaching. I try to expose my students to conventions and techniques found the world over in order to build a flexible tool kit that will help them create works that can speak to our global community.

I take a “mechanics” approach in my teaching as well. I like to rip apart plays and movies to see how they work technically and I encourage my students to do the same. I believe that there are no limits to what you can do on the stage, screen or page.

I also believe that the audience is quite adventurous. This comes from producing theater in Alaska for 15 years. I was one of the original company members and the producing director of the Perseverance Theatre, where I learned over and over that audiences will follow you just about any place you want to go provided you prepare them through your craft for the journey.

Recent works include: The Poetry of Pizza, a comedy about love, which is currently being produced in regional theatres around the US; The Blue-Sky Boys, about NASA's Apollo engineers, which will premiere at the Barter Theatre in Virginia in 2010, after winning first place in their annual new play festival; The Velvet Weapon, a backstage farce about the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia , written with a grant from CEC ArtsLink and a playwriting fellowship from the NJ Council on the Arts.

I am currently working on three new projects: Crossing Over, a hip hop musical set in Amish country with composer Stephanie Salzman; an opera based on Edgar Allan Poe stories, with composer Patrick Soluri, which has been commissioned by the American Lyric Theatre; and a new play about military families commissioned by Virginia Stage Company in Norfolk, VA.

Previous plays include: The Women of Lockerbie, published by Dramatists Play Service. It was originally produced off-Broadway after winning the silver medal in the Onassis International Playwriting competition and the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays award. It is translated and published in numerous languages and is produced each year around the US and internationally. Blue Moon Over Memphis is published in Japanese by Musashino University and in the U.S. by Applause Books in The Best Short Plays of 2004. Signs of Life won the Jane Chambers award and was a Pinter Review Prize for Drama gold medalist. It is published by Samuel French, as is Into the Fire, which won the Weissberger Award.

Screenplays: Covered Dishes, written with a commission from Fox Searchlight and Goat Cay productions; and Mexico in Alaska.

Musical works: Coyote Goes Salmon Fishing, with composer Scott Richards, winner of the 2001 Frederick Loewe Award. King Island Christmas, an oratorio written with composer David Friedman, also the winner of the Frederick Loewe Award, which is regularly produced around the U.S. and was recorded in a cast album by 12-time Grammy winner Thomas Z. Shepard; and Goodbye My Island, also with David Friedman.

Website: www.deborahbrevoort.com.

Anna Hawkins had been living in Hawaii for seven years before deciding on Goddard, wondering all the while whether she should return to the mainland for graduate school. At Goddard she studied Jungian, transpersonal, and Buddhist psychology, and then moved into women's studies and literature, along with an emerging interest in embodiment studies. Since graduating, she has been teaching classes in writing and psychology at Maui Community College. She has continued to write, and has been publishing in magazines.

In 1980, I arrived in this country from Cuba. As I was leaving the boat, I was given a can of Coca-Cola. I tried to open it but I couldn’t figure out how to work the tab. Around me, dehydrated Cubans were all trying to figure out how to open these cans. That vision stayed with me for years. Twenty-five years later I wrote a play called Fizzabout Roberto Goizueta, the head of Coke during the New Coke disaster and a Cuban immigrant himself. I realized that to tell Roberto’s story I didn’t have to look far. Roberto’s story is my story. It’s the story of finding your piece of the American dream and not being able to completely understand it or experience it.

Writing a play or a film is a way of giving shape to your past -- those memories that refuse to go away.  For me, writing begins with connecting to your past, to who you were. I love writing exercises because they help you discover your obsessions and interests. Whenever I found myself lost in the writing of Fizz, I’d connect to the way the ten year old boy in me saw the irrational world that I had suddenly become part of. I found that my view of that world was not at all different from the way Roberto saw the world during the lowest point in his life.

Having lived a life with its share of randomness, I encourage writers to introduce a little more randomness into their work. I help them infuse their work with energy, a sense of play and naughtiness. I encourage writers to make decisions and not to brood. I am a big believer in the bold theatrical moment -- the angel crashing through the ceiling, the frogs falling from the sky, or a group of Italian men following Monica Vitti around a plaza. Ultimately, I respond to writers who have a great curiosity about life and who approach the work with questions rather than answers.

I received my MFA from Columbia University where I studied with Romulus Linney, Eduardo Machado, and Anne Bogart. My play Illuminating Veronica was workshopped at the Public Theater and produced at the Pacific Playwright’s Project at South Coast Repertory. The play will be published later this year by Broadway Play Publishing. Learning Curve was produced Off-Broadway on Theater Row. It was published in an anthology of the best plays of 2005. Arrivals and Departures was produced at the Summer Play Festival on Theater Row. Displaced was produced at the Marin Theater Company. While at New Dramatists, I was commissioned to write my first film, Journey to Havana. I have just finished adapting my play Fizz for the screen. With my new play, When Tang met Laika (Denver Center Theater Commission), I am exploring the relationship between the Russian and the American space programs and their efforts to build an International Space Station. I am also in the process of finishing a commission for the Atlantic Theater Company about present day Cuba and the mystery of an invisible Castro. My play, Will in Space, about the effect that Pluto’s demotion has on a couple is being developed at Primary Stages. I am the recipient of numerous awards and commissions including a Princess Grace Award and a James Hammerstein Award for my play Union City, which was produced at EST with Rosie Perez.

Forest K. Davis (1918-2008) graduated from Harvard College before joining the Army Air Force in 1943. Following the war, he finished his studies at Harvard Divinity School.

Forest began working at Goddard College in 1950 as Director of Admissions and Records under Royce “Tim” Pitkin. For the next seventeen years, he served in a variety of roles: Head of Records, Philosophy Faculty, Dean of College Administration and finally, Dean of Greatwood. Forest left Goddard in 1967 to work at Wilberforce and Empire State College until his “retirement” in 1983.

Forest also founded Adamant Press, a publishing house that specialized on educational theory. He wrote and published Things Were Different in Royce’s Day (1996), earth.goddard.edu, The College Since Royce’s Day (2003) and Goddard Themes: From the Seminary into Recent Times-1863-2005 (2006.)

From 1996 to 2008 Forest volunteered in the Goddard College Archives. He and several other former staff members and alumni were largely responsible for collecting, organizing, and preserving the history of the College.

Professor Emeritus, Miami-Dade College
Ormond Beach, FL 

Cliff is a 1965 graduate of the Residential Undergraduate Program (RUP). He has spent his entire career in higher education, attending masters and doctoral programs at the university of Illinois and Rutgers University respectively, appointment as professor of Sociology at Miami-Dade College (1968-2003) as well as adjunct appointments at Florida International University and the University of Miami.

Later in his career, he left the classroom to become a lobbyist for Miami-Dade. He served on the Board of Directors for the Florida Association of Colleges from 1987-1998, chaired its legislative advocacy effort, and has been on the Goddard Board of Trustees since 1998, his way of giving back to the College that transformed his life.

Cliff also has had brief forays into administration with interim appointments as Chief Academic Officer at Goddard in 2000 and as Provost at Florida Keys Community College, 2007-2008.

Cliff has a passionate love of all things aquatic--marine life, water sports, beaches, and boats.  He holds a Coast Guard-issued 100-ton commercial master's license.

I was born in Ecuador, South America and I have worked in the field of bilingual education since 1989. I have worked for many years as an early childhood teacher in multi-age, bilingual kindergarten through second-grade classrooms in Phoenix, Arizona. During these years, I presented at national and international conferences and published articles and chapters about teaching and learning in a bilingual classroom. In 1997, I left the classroom to coordinate a Title VII grant with my school colleagues and we developed a dual language program that strove to put teachers and children at the center.  The core of my work with bilingual children and teachers, has been with Prospect’s Descriptive Processes at the Prospect Center for Education and Research in Bennington, VT.

Now as a teacher educator, I continue to work alongside bilingual teachers and children and often utilizes the Descriptive Processes in my teaching and research. My areas of focus are on collaborative research, in particular issues of literacies and biliteracies, teacher learning communities, the interconnections between art and literacy in an emergent curriculum in a preschool setting. I have taught courses on observation and assessment, teacher research, inquiry and literacy/biliteracy.  For the last two years, I have lead writing seminars for teachers through the New York City Writing Project.

I have been published in the National Council of Teachers of English journals, Language Arts and Primary Voices, and in international journals such as, Lectura y Vida and Revista Mexicana de Investigacion Educativa. I have also collaborated with Carini et al. in writing sections of the book, Jenny’s Story: Taking the Long View of the Child.  Currently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Early Childhood/Childhood Education at Lehman College, City University of New York.

I was born on the Oregon Coast and raised in the Pacific Northwest. After thirty years in Brooklyn, New York, I still “belong to the lesser coast, the greater ocean” (as a poem of mine puts it). How to hold onto both lyrical and political impulses, how to dwell at the conjunction of imagination and craft without giving up on the need to change reality—this effort has informed my writing in many genres. I got my start as a published writer in the lesbian feminist literary movement of the 1970’s, where my editorial work on the journal Conditions taught me the skills of constructive criticism that I now employ as a teacher. My books include three poetry collections; a short story collection; two novels; a collection of essays and reviews; and, most recently, the memoir Apples and Oranges: My Journey through Sexual Identity (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). My poems and stories have appeared in such literary journals and anthologies as Another Chicago Magazine; Bloom; Calyx; An Ear to the Ground; Fence; For a Living: The Poetry of Work; Hanging Loose; The Hat; The Kenyon Review; Luna; Ploughshares; Red, White, and Blues; and Xconnect. I’ve written reviews and literary journalism for Ms., The Nation, Poets and Writers, and The Women’s Review of Books. Awards include an NEA fiction fellowship and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry.

Complementing my work at Goddard, I teach creative writing at Eugene Lang College, a division of New School University. In working with MFA students, I always keep in mind the lessons of critical consciousness and democratic dialogue that stem from a lifetime of community activism centered on social justice issues. My epistolary conversations with advisees about their writing have to do with, on one hand, identifying pre-existing strengths in the work and figuring out how to build on those strengths; on the other hand, I push for consideration of new or under-explored possibilities. I took it as a compliment when a student wrote that she felt “busted” by my probing questions about her creative agenda—“in a good way,” she hastened to add. I think students tend to regard me as a demanding advisor, but also one who really listens and who is equally demanding of herself when it comes to offering a detailed, thorough response combining close analytic reading with a synthetic overview. For a selection of my most recent poetry, fiction, and critical prose, go to Ablation.

I was born in Knoxville and grew up in Blount County, Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. Since then I’ve lived in Baltimore, Roanoke, Austin, San Antonio, New York, and now Norfolk, Virginia. I’m the author of three books of fiction: the novel Bitter Milk (2005) and the short story collections Born on a Train (2003) and Stop Breakin Down (2000), all with Picador USA. I won the Whiting Writers’ Award in 2000 following the publication of Stop Breakin Down. My stories have appeared in Ploughsares, The Harvard Review, The Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Tin House, StorySouth, and Grist, among other journals. I’ve been teaching at Goddard since June 2007.
 
Describing my teaching philosophy can seem almost as difficult to me as writing a novel (which is to say, difficult!) but I’ll try. In a writing class I like to start by asking each student what she most ardently wants to accomplish, so that I can devise an individual strategy to help her see that goal to fruition. It’s my aim as a teacher to foster an environment in which no one abandons an idea simply because its execution seems too strenuous. I urge writers to keep the stakes high in their work and explore without fear, because I firmly believe learning to revise in the true sense of the word—seeing anew—can result in startling and remarkable effects that may have previously seemed impossible. A great teacher of mine, the novelist David Bradley, organized the class I took with him around the principle that “Anyone can write; professionals revise.” When I tell students that I throw away more than ninety percent of my own output, it gives me a platform for encouraging them not to deem a page precious simply because they’ve written it. Several times I’ve taught specialized revision workshops that aim to revise how students think about revision, starting with the etymology of the word revision itself. A writer brings in a story that has lain untouched awhile; after it has been examined, the class generates assignments for new scenes, conversations, and descriptions that must be written. Given a story in the point of view of X, who murders her husband Y because he's been sleeping with her sister Z, the class might direct the author to "write the scene where X goes to buy the rat poison," or "write a paragraph in Z’s POV describing Y physically," or "write the scene where X, Y, and Z all head to the beach to play mini-golf," because while these are experiments rather than prescriptions, in my experience the average X-Y-and-Z story draft fulfills only a smidgen of its tragic, comedic, and situational potential.
 
I realize it can seem anti-artistic to treat a text as a mechanic treats a car on the hydraulic lift—something to be scrutinized, disassembled to find out what is and isn’t working—but that is how I’ve most often succeeded in revising my own work. As a child I was lucky enough to attend a Montessori school where we literally cut up sentences and arranged the fragments in piles marked adverb, prepositional phrase, noun; sometimes I think back on this exercise when helping students identify elements of a story that help it to cruise forward, lurch, or screech to a halt.
 
I grew as a writer by paying heed to other writers’ techniques, but I also became a better reader by learning to read like a writer. Once I’d developed a writer’s sensibility, reading seemed to me like an aspect of the craft, as did other activities in my life: observing, dreaming, walking, waiting. Thus I try to impress upon my students that refining how they conceive of the act of writing can transform the very way they regard themselves and the world around them—and of course I tell them I believe this is a consequence to be desired.

I have been occupied with the creation of images and the birth of performances for the past 20 years. My work can be characterized in a variety of ways - I alternately call myself director, producer, educator, administrator, observer, collaborator, facilitator, leader. But they are all intertwined and the limits imposed by such categories are frustrating; ultimately, no one label makes sense for long.  

My formal educational background is in the traditional theater (where I spent many years believing I wanted to work my way up in the regional theater system to become one of the rare female artistic directors). Even as I pursued a 'career' in time-based theater, I was always strangely drawn to static imagery. I took photographs compulsively in college. I believe this avocation helped me see the stage in a kind of storyboard format, and I strive to use the compositional integrity of static images to shape both theme and narrative.

While completing my MFA in Stage Directing, I concentrated heavily on the heightened language of Shakespeare and had the privilege to observe and work with Michael Langham. During this time I found inspiration in the epic, mythic, larger than life stories of Shakespeare, Racine, Euripides, Webster - where the human struggle was exaggerated, stylization and theatricality were inherent to the structure of the work, and where images could be boldly drawn. It is through my investigations of Shakespeare that I began to develop an enthusiasm for layering and contradictions among the visual, textual and performative elements of a single production, always in a search to understand the contradictions in our relationships.  

Perhaps because of the nature of "directing", as a creator, I thrive on collaboration. All of my work has been built in close partnership with others. I find it impossible to claim anything I have done as entirely my own and I mistrust the very notion of singular authority.  My greatest creative energy comes when there are many voices contributing, and I am at my best when I am able to forge these often diverse practices into a cooperative vision.

My current passion lies in the changing nature of contemporary performance, where I apply both my facilitative skills and the crafts of traditional theater to performative experiments. I believe in beginnings, middles and ends - though not necessarily in that order. I am endlessly fascinated by the myriad ways in which 'stories' can be told. I've worked closely with playwrights and performance creators as a director of readings, works-in-progress and first productions. From 1999 through 2003, I served as the Artistic Producing Director for 3 Legged Race New Theater & Performance, an organization dedicated to the acceleration of invention in new performance. Named "Best Theater for New Work" (City Pages Arts Weekly) and honored by the Minneapolis Star Tribune for "Outstanding Experimental Performance 2003", 3LR earned a reputation for unexpected artistic commitments, vanguard programming and unusual approaches to merging eclectic performance disciplines.

Outwardly, my leadership of 3LR focused on commissioning and developing experimental works poised at the crossroads of live performance disciplines (including dance, circus arts, puppetry/object theater, performance art and their combinations). Over five years, I produced more than 75 new works by diverse artists from across the country including playwrights, sculptors, performance artists, clowns, choreographers, object-makers, aerialists, puppeteers, composers and curious people of all kinds. Working alongside such an incredible range of personalities and aesthetics, I became interested in how it is that artists make good work. What are the tools, the resources, the support systems and the environment that allow for creativity to flourish? What does this artist need that is different from what that artist needs? What makes a dynamic process? About art and art making, I believe that: Collaboration and constant exposure to new ideas keeps work fresh, present and alive; Risk and the failures that inevitably go along with it are a necessity; Experimentation with form, and particularly with methods that are beyond one's comfort zone, lead to unexpected discoveries. Both as a producer and when working with students at all levels, these are the issues I now consider most.

I am deeply interested in social systems, organizational structures, effective and alternative leadership and the complexity of human relationships. This preoccupation runs through all of my work, from my obsession with the crafting of a nuanced relational moment on stage to my passion for building flexible, responsive systems capable of nurturing and sustaining creativity.   How might we work together toward change, toward vision, toward possibility? And, how might we do it even better?

Other points of interest - I am an affiliate faculty member in the Master of Liberal Studies Arts and Cultural Leadership program and the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of Minnesota where I have taught directing, creating the performance, dance production, issues in arts leadership and other courses over the past 13 years. I teach motorcycle-riding skills at community colleges and have become enchanted with the social dynamics of 'motorcycle culture'. I am a committed partner, a lover of dogs, a homeowner, a gardener and a proud Martha Stewart fan.
 

Lynn Larned is a school nurse and teacher in an elementary school in Rhode Island. Her goal when she entered the low residency MA in Individualized Studies program was to become a proficient dreamworker. Her thesis, named from a phrase given by a venerable spider in a dream, was about using dreams as a guide for psycho-spiritual growth and recovery. Since graduating, she continues to practice as a school nurse and teacher but her teaching strategies have changed. She has developed assessments that allow her students to use their strengths and interests in individual ways, where students are allowed to be as creative as possible in demonstrating their knowledge. She also facilitates dream groups.

I am the author (with Ping Chong) of Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo, which had its world premiere at Syracuse Stage and was produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre in New York City.

I am a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, including the 2010 fellowship in playwriting (for my play Name in the Street), a finalist for the Princess Grace Playwriting Award (for my play Wind in the Field), and a Pushcart Prize nominee (for my play The Heart of Fear).

My other plays include Fall/Out, produced by the Kitchen Theatre; The Heart of Fear, published in the journal Stone Canoe; and Northeast, which appeared in the journal Callaloo. Armory Square Playhouse produced Portraits, an evening of my monologue plays Theory of Night, directed by Playwright’s Horizons founder Robert Moss, Love Is a Blue Velvet Box, and Spoons, which was previously produced by Appleseed Productions. My one-man play Carver at Tuskegee was produced as part of Syracuse Stage’s BackStory! series.

My writing has also appeared in the journal Folio, among others, and in the anthology Alchemy of the Word: Writers Talk about Writing. I am Drama Editor for the award-winning journal Stone Canoe for which I have edited for publication plays by Kenneth Lin, Rogelio Martinez, and Chiori Miyagawa.

Since 2009 I have been the resident dramaturg for Syracuse Stage and have worked with Ping Chong on the creation of Tales from the Salt City, which had its world premiere at Syracuse Stage, and with writer Lauren Unbekant on the creation of the one-woman play Woman in a Blue Dress, produced by Syracuse Stage and the Everson Museum of Art in conjunction with the Impressionist exhibit “Turner to Cezanne.”

I have served as dramaturg on more than 15 Syracuse Stage productions, including Moby Dick, The Brothers Size, Red, Caroline, or Change, Radio Golf, No Child…, Fences, The Price, Little Women, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

I have been Visiting Writer at SUNY Oswego and have appeared as a guest on National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More,” discussing race in American theatre.

In addition to teaching at Goddard, I teach playwriting at Syracuse University and at Colgate University. I hold an MFA in Playwriting from Goddard College. I am a proud member of the Dramatists Guild of America.

I am a young scholar and artist with one foot in the academy and one foot hovering over the simultaneously open and dense space that can broadly be called aesthetics (a space whose density and largesse encompasses poetics, performance, and old school stuff like drawing). For the last six or so years I’ve called the work I do “Queer Science Fictions,” or QSF for short. QSF uses a variety of strategies (personal, surreal, and scholarly) to think about and make artifacts related to race, desire, and technology. On the broadest level, QSF thinks about the ways techno science impacts and is impacted by queers and people of color. In my dissertation work at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, I tell stories about chat rooms, addiction, race, publics, fantasies, and violence to think about how desire, difference, and death shape one another in both abstract and everyday ways. I ground these stories in recent local histories that track the disappearance of public spaces, the circulation of sex as a public problem, the effects of HIV/AIDS on gay men, and the increased use of virtual space as means to make contacts and have encounters.

My dissertation project, like most of the work that makes up QSF, is interested in liminal spaces and bodies and things, in the bleed between real and virtual life, between public and private, between hybrids and perverts, between desire and death, and so on. If this brief biographical sketch regarding my interests seems unclear, let me be more to the point: I am well-trained in “strong theories” that critique racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism and other technologies of power and normatively which render forms of difference as problems requiring management, commodities to be branded, or pathologies demanding treatment. I therefore welcome working with students who are interested in learning more about the theories and everyday politics of race, gender, sexuality, and globalization.

At the same time I continue to work from and with these strong theories, I have also begun to open myself up to the possibilities represented by “weak theories,” the speculative and adventurous strategies whose routes and conclusions are rarely predetermined and often unpredictable. Opening myself up to weak theories means that I have increasingly made space for my heart, intuition, and empathy in all the work that I do. However, I rarely, if ever, know where these things will lead me; I wander and sometimes get lost. My commitment to “weak theories” thus means that I am also very interested in working with students with backgrounds in creative writing, art making, and performance (or those who are interested in such practices) who are looking to deepen creative practices with scholarship or who are looking for ways to make their academic work more creative.

Whether working in traditional or creative academic contexts, I believe that my responsibility as a teacher is not to spoon- or force- feed but to facilitate and encourage the fruitful exchanges of ideas and the production of work so that I and the students with whom I work can grow more fully into ourselves. Currently, I’m reading 1970s science fiction and Shakespeare. I spend a lot of time these days thinking about longing, loss, immanence, intelligent design, and infinite possibilities. I’m also working on professionalizing myself within the academy (student loans don’t pay themselves). When not working or daydreaming, I’m doing yoga and swimming.

I am passionate about creating a sustainable, cooperative culture. To me this means working for social and ecological justice, restoring damaged ecosystems, and creating modes of production and living that meet human needs while increasing ecosystem health and social well-being.

My professional experience is mostly in the fields of education and the environment. In graduate school I studied the history of science, medicine and technology, with a focus on environmental history and the history of sustainable technologies. I wrote my dissertation on the history of technologies used to transform human excrement into fertilizer in the U.S. in the 19th century. Through this study I gained a solid understanding of U.S. agricultural and public health history. I love applying the lens of history to my work in sustainability, because I believe that we need to understand the historical roots of our current problems in order to solve them.

I’ve worked as a sustainability educator in both academic and community-based settings. I’ve taught college courses in environmental science, environmental studies and sustainable development. In my local community I coordinated an environmental job training program with an innovative curriculum in environmental technology for unemployed city residents and I currently teach permaculture workshops.

I am also involved with two land trusts that promote sustainability. Since 1993, I have been a member of School of Living (www.schoolofliving.org), a community land trust that holds land in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia and organizes educational events on topics related to sustainable living. I currently serve as their Executive Director. The other land trust is the Gunpowder Valley Conservancy (GVC, www.gunpowderfalls.org), which conserves land in my local watershed and conducts restoration and education programs. As Development Director of the GVC I write grants and support the implementation of projects. My work with these two organizations has given me experience with nonprofit organizational development, strategic planning, and fundraising, which are essential for creating organizations that can implement and sustain community-based sustainability initiatives.

Since 1993 I have lived at Heathcote Community (http://www.heathcote.org/cms), a small intentional community in Maryland, where we practice permaculture (ecological design) and cooperative processes such as consensus decision making. I work in the gardens and am currently helping to develop a sustainable farming business on the land. For me, living in community is a way of creating social change. It has give me the opportunity to participate in social systems that are egalitarian and collaborative, gain practical skills in sustainability, and be supported in personal healing and transformation.

Anti-oppression work has always been important to me and I strive to integrate it into everything I do. One of my main motivations for joining an intentional community as a young adult was the desire to create a way of life that is both ecologically sustainable and free from oppression. At Heathcote Community we work towards dismantling oppression as a long-term goal by educating ourselves about issues of social and economic justice, implementing egalitarian systems and structures within our community, and including social justice as part of our permaculture education curriculum. I’m currently focusing on anti-racism training for whites.

Matt graduated from Goddard's Bachelor if Arts in Sustainability program in the fall of 2012. Matt is the Founder and Executive Director of Long Way Home, Inc., a 501(c)(3) that uses sustainable design and appropriate materials to construct self-sufficient schools that promote education, employment and environmental stewardship. He first came to Guatemala with Peace Corps in 2002, and was stationed in the town of Comalapa during his service. His Peace Corps assignment was to help the local youth avoid drug and gang activity through clubs and other programs. After two years in the Peace Corps, Matt returned to the United States to begin raising money for a new development project inspired by the need he saw in Comalapa. He founded Long Way Home in the Fall of 2004, and returned to Comalapa in January 2005 to launch Parque Chimiyá ,

Trustee emeritus

In addition to my new role as BA in Individualized Studies Program Director at Goddard College, I am an adjunct professor in Curriculum and Instruction and Technology and Education in the School of Education of Lesley University. I served as core assistant professor for nine years, teaching courses in teacher action research, learning and teaching, equity, leadership, and emerging technologies for education. Most recently I served as the Program Director of Elementary Education at Keiser University in Sarasota, Florida. 

I have taught at the college level in the traditional format, intensive weekend, hybrid and online environments. I have many years of experience as a diversity/educational generalist trainer/consultant. As a graduate student at UMASS, and while a full-time faculty member at Lesley University I coordinated several research projects and evaluation efforts including one for the University of Vermont.

I am a graduate of the University of Rhode Island (BA), the Heller School at Brandeis University (Masters of Management in Human Services - M.M.H.S.) and the University of Massachusetts Amherst (Ed.D). I was a co-investigator of a major Carnegie Corporation grant to improve interethnic relations among youth, and the Director of the USENIX technology grant to mentor youth in three Boston area Computer Clubhouses. Prior to relocating to Sarasota, Florida I served as the education coordinator and Study Skills teacher of the Alternative Education Program (AEP) Summer School for at-risk 8th graders in Woonsocket, Rhode Island for three years.  A chapter on my experience will published in an upcoming book on inclusive education in August 2011.

My areas of interest include the use of technology in education, racial and cultural identity formation (youth and adult) and educational strategies to improve the academic and social achievement of “at-potential” youth. I developed a curriculum on Cultural Identity Groups for use in anti-racism programs in schools. I am passionate about faculty professional development and enjoy working with educators at all levels of the profession.  I am a multicultural curriculum specialist and a consultant for Sarasota County Government’s management leadership academy in Sarasota, Florida where I reside.

My passions are gardening, reading, walking, contemporary jazz, learning to paint on silk and enjoying family and friends.

I grew up in a post-war housing development in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. My parents were card-carrying agnostics living in a neighborhood of Traditional Jews (the synagogue was at the end of our street) and Catholics (their church was across from my school.) I spent many a Saturday morning sitting in our window watching those going to temple walking past our house in their best clothes on their ways to Skokie Valley Traditional, and many a Sunday morning watching those going to church pile into station wagons for the short trip to St. Joan of Arc. On steaming hot days in the summer, I didn’t envy them. All the rest of the time, I did.

From childhood on, I actively searched for a religion to which I felt I belonged. I tried the Big Three; I chanted with Buddhists; I visited the B’ahai, who’d built by far the coolest temple up north on the lake. Meanwhile, my mother constantly took us out of school for matinees downtown: I saw Eve Arden rave in The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Sandy Dennis run her fingers through raw hamburger in And Miss Reardon Drinks A Little, As You Like It, with a whole bunch of old people in it, The Organic Theatre’s famous mostly-nude adaptation of Animal Farm, with a whole bunch of young people in it, Oliver! and a million high-school productions of Oklahoma! When I graduated from Goddard College in the late ‘70s, I thought I had found my true religion: poetry. This was because I got into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Poetry, and I thought it was a sign.

A week into grad school, I realized that sitting around all day writing poetry was not enough for me. Also, I could not quote Yeats. I had wasted my youth on horses, odd jobs and road trips, and couldn’t quote one great writer, let alone a poet. I was an embarrassment to myself. I avoided facing this by enrolling in a course called Basic Playwriting taught by a grad student named Lee Blessing. When the head of the Playwriting Department suddenly quit his job, he was replaced in a matter of hours by an insane Scottish playwright named Tom McGrath, whose exquisite play, The Hard Man, was a huge influence on me, and subsequently by Phil Bosakowski, who taught us that plays were agile things which could be written in a matter of minutes, put on by oneself, and moved on from, like stepping stones, to new places. To me, it seemed like writing a play was just a matter of pumping up a poem. Thus began my journey towards Theatre, my passion, the temple, the church where I belong.
 
The sheer joy of writing sustains me through good times and bad, allows me to discover things I didn’t know, to work out problems I’m too immature to handle yet, to feel love and gratitude in an often unlovable, ungracious world. I like lending this out in teaching. A practical person, I like teaching people how to sell what they write. I crave the freedom of working on a novel in obscurity, and I enjoy the restrictions inherent in writing a villanelle, or a play, or a screenplay. I love inventing people and deeds, and I love working my own life into a character’s, so that I can deny that I ever personally thought or did such things. I teach from the experience of almost thirty years of daily fighting and flying with my talent and my shortcomings and the infinite possibilities inherent on a blank page. I like engaging in dialogue over new work. I ask students to read constantly in order to find out how other writers handle certain things. I encourage a habit of writing to form. I know the psychology of being a writer as well as structure and form, and enjoy sharing this as well. I like helping writers get over the fear of revision, find inspiration, and see all the fantastic possibilities in their ideas. I love narrative and I love busting narrative. I love the stage picture and all the elements of performance that one can bring into an evocative piece of theatre. If I have a static philosophy, it’s something like, as Roethke put it, “…I learn by going where I have to go…”

My most recent play is What’s Buggin’ Greg, winner of the Macy’s New Play Prize, which will be produced by Cincinnati Playhouse and tour during the 2012 season. Other recent work includes a film, Ninja Mom: Mother’s Day, Makeover! a theatrical musical based on the life of Estee Lauder, and new plays, Our Suburb and The Posthumous Democrat. I am also working on a novel called Mass For Shut-Ins. My stage adaptation of Disney’s classic, Snow White, just finished playing at Disneyland for the past 5 years. I’ve written extensively for television, including movies of the week for CBS, NBC and Hallmark. My adaptations of Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and The Boxcar Children, with composer Kim D. Sherman, have toured all over the United States. O Pioneers! was filmed for American Playhouse with Mary McDonnell in the lead. My play The Stick Wife continues to be produced all over the U.S. and Europe. Hearts Are Wild, an original rock musical with composer George Griggs opened in Pittsburgh at City Theater in 2006 and Sabina, a chamber musical about Jung, Freud and Sabina Spielrein, with book by Willy Holtzman and music by Louise Beach, is in the works, as is Club California, a musical about prostitutes in Kosovo, with composer Craig Safan. Heartland, an original musical, also with Kim D. Sherman, has been produced in regional theaters since 2000. I’ve won numerous awards, including an NAMT Development grant at Human Race Theatre, a Rockefeller grant, an NEA and a Gilman and Gonzalez-Falla Award. I am a member of The New Dramatists and The Lark Theatre in New York City.

The IMA program allowed me to combine and explore my interests in environmental and progressive education with my love of and foundation in art. Although I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to accomplish and stuck to it my idea gained a great deal of depth due to the rigor of the program and advice received from my advisors.

My work at Goddard has allowed me to enter the fields of progressive and environmental education with the confidence that what I have to say is innovative, important, and meaningful and to present a product that will actually help change the way environmental education is taught and the way children interact and connect with nature. While at Goddard I wrote and published a book, Wings, Worms and Wonder: A Guide for Creatively Integrating Gardening an Outdoor Learning into Children’s Lives. By embracing the fact that my learning reached such depth in the field, I gained the confidence to apply to present the work at multiple international conferences over the next year (and I was accepted to present at all of them!) and create a business that allows me the creative freedom to do what I love - create holistic outdoor learning experiences with students, teachers, and parents.

Background

A 2012 graduate of the MA in Individualized Studies (IMA) program at Goddard College and a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, Kelly has participated in the development and facilitation of multiple successful school and community gardens. She teaches at Montessori Tides School and in the University of Richmond's Nature and Sustainability Institute.

She is actively involved in her local garden club, her community children's garden, Slow Food First Coast's garden grant committee, The North American Association for Environmental Education, the Association for Experiential Education, and the American Montessori Society.

Kelly is an artist, surfer, musician, gardener, and seasoned Montessori teacher in Neptune Beach, Florida, where she can often be found riding her beach cruiser with her sidekick, Sean.

Visit her website for more information: www.wingswormsandwonder.com

Teaching writing at the MFA level for me is an empathic act that amounts to entering my students’ imaginations as companion and mentor on their writing journey. My task is to see the project through their eyes and then enhance their efforts with my own skills and perspective, which serve as a container within which to bring the project to fruition. “Rules” of good fiction and dramatic exposition must be acknowledged but also, once the craft is mastered, questioned. Genres can be opened up, reshuffled, combined into meta-genres. Working in familiar forms and creating new ones both require literary sophistication. I encourage my students to read in a wide international and historical arena to broaden their perspective from the last few decades of American realism, appreciate the aesthetics of other forms and possibilities, and sharpen their critical faculties.
 
My writing career includes works in a number of literary genres and subjects. They represent, in effect, a series of developmental memoirs. Even as I wrote works of fiction, literary criticism, film scripts, a writer's book (On Writer’s Block), and a memoir (My Time in Hawaii), all belonged to only one genre informed by the same narrative structure--the bildungsroman of a person or cohort group (writers and artists; writers of grotesque literature; a generation of young Americans who came to the Pacific, etc.). My teaching experience ranges from university to workshop to one-on-one in a variety of settings: the universities of Hawaii, California, and Minnesota; the California College of the Arts; proposal writing in the historic first all-Maori small business seminars ever held in New Zealand; the Honolulu Model Cities program, and other venues. The imaginative and the analytical have been mutually reinforcing realms in my development as a writer. Writing The Secret Life of Puppets, a critical study of the supernatural grotesque, became a means of constructing a genealogy for myself as an imaginative writer and locating my own literary sensibility within a philosophical tradition. Many of the diverse subjects of that book were drawn from previous fictions I had written. My latest efforts in fiction indirectly echo and extend these concerns. My first collection of stories, Wild California, was published in the United Kingdom. A second story collection, A Bestiary of My Heart, will appear in fall 2011 from Inkerman Press, also in the UK.

Gothicka, my critical study of the Gothic genre in twenty-first-century fiction and film, will be published by Harvard in 2012. It is a companion volume to The Secret Life of Puppets and traces strands of alternate spirituality in the fictional realm of vampires, space aliens, and other supernatural entities.

I have written seven screenplays, with one optioned (and have adapted my script of Balzac’s mystic novel, Seraphita, as a theater piece with staging designed in collaboration with Mabou Mines puppetmaster Jane Catherine Shaw). I have found writing screenplays an exciting complement to writing prose fiction because both, for me, are intensely visual and landscape-oriented mediums. Writing for film has the advantage of a larger visual canvas of action and spectacle; writing novels and stories allows for more subtle psychological and interior effects. As a screenwriter I am drawn particularly to science fiction and the supernatural precisely because these genres allow a skillful writer to exteriorize the psychological life of a character so that "dealing with one's inner demons" takes the literal form of not-so-alien monsters the character must openly meet and engage. As a prose fiction writer, I have found myself (until recently) sticking closer to what we call “reality.” As a writer of memoir and criticism, I endeavor to bring as many of the techniques of imaginative writing to bear on my work as I can. As a teacher, I try to communicate the common principles that inform all these forms.

I am intrigued how we meet each other with full presence, especially in those moments when we forget where our ‘center’ is. I am curious how we 'flow' energy in our bodies and in our lives. I am interested in epistemology, how we come to know what we know and how we talk and listen with each other about what we know…and the fluid experience of ‘knowing’. I like to think that the moment we think we 'know' something, another, 'knowing' is ready to emerge. Look what happened to Pluto.

I think our potential and “ruach” lie in the ‘places in-between’ in us, in that “liminal” space. I mean the place where boundaries dissolve or blur and we stand on the edge of our becoming, preparing ourselves to move across perceived limits of what we were, into what we can be. The art practices of writing, improvisational music, dance/movement and theatre, yoga, aikido, teaching and other forms of contemplative art-making allow the opportunity to play in this place of “becoming”, inviting us to notice what ‘shows up’.

My classical psychological, philosophical, dance, music and movement training finds comfort in categorization, yet my experience has been that we each are a divine mystery containing infinitely unfolding identities. Training in psychodrama, expressive therapies, Gestalt methods, Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement, Alexander Technique, Process Oriented Psychology, Body Mind Centering, Contact Improvisation, Rubenfeld Synergy Method, Amrit and Kripalu Yoga, Playback Theatre, sound healing and other somatic and contemplative approaches to education, psychology and the creative process provides an opening to play in the mystery.

I suppose that I’m a social artist. I’m interested in art making, faith, politics, spiritual practice and blurring the boundaries between the secular and the sacred in public life. I think the starting place is self-expression. Cultural critic bell hooks calls for an ‘aesthetic revolution’. I interpret this as movement from art making as self-expression to revelation, inviting us to act on what is revealed through our creating...potentially leading to change. The creative process invites that moment where we pause after a creative moment, re-awaken our vision, notice what is revealed and consciously navigate that liminal space manifesting new possibility. Maybe this is the r-evolution.

I think we as teachers, healers and artists shape our lives through the process of creation. The form has infinite variations whether it is an intentionally designed yoga retreat, therapeutic riding center, organizing a health-care outreach program for migrant farm-workers, adolescent male rites of passage programming, scholarship on inclusive yoga practice and pedagogy, creating a documentary on women’s relationship of body, running practice and food, etc.

Lately I've been struck by the statement "We are the ones we've been waiting for." I first heard it sung years ago at a workshop led by Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock. This quote’s origin as I understand it comes from the Elders Oraibi Arizona Hopi Nation prayer. I think we shape and transform our lives by our full presence in the creative process, which in turn inspires our leadership.

As a practitioner of many expressive arts approaches, art practices and somatic approaches, I think our medium, ultimately, is humanity and consciousness. How we choose to use our energy, the stories we inhabit, the ones we tell about ourselves and the ones we compose and co-create inform our individual and collective story, life experience and our reality.

My work as an educator, psychologist and interdisciplinary artist has taken me into elementary and secondary schools, universities, black box theatres, fringe festivals, museums, community mental health centers and agencies, psychiatric hospitals, women's centers and shelters, substance abuse treatment centers, prisons, a broad range of youth organizations and service-learning programs, numerous performance spaces, churches, synagogues, places committed to interfaith dialogue and multi-racial coalition building, Black-Jewish dialogue groups and corporate settings interested in systems theory, teaching/learning organizations and quantum leadership.

I am curious how we transgress socially constructed boundaries and step into that space where cultural knowledge, identity, personal theology, politics, epistemology and love meet.

I've been blessed to teach and perform in southeast, northeast and midwestern regions of the United States, London, Vieques, Puerto Rico, Belize, Toronto, and Cuba, using Playback Theatre, an improvisational story-telling method, socieometry and Process Work (Process Oriented Psychology) as emancipatory practices for dialogue, deepening connections, healing and creating new models for leadership and social change. Serving as faculty for graduate programs in Educational Leadership, Curriculum and Instruction, the Integrative Arts at Lesley University, Multicultural Theatre and Democratic Curriculum at Union Institute and University and most recently teaching courses in 'Organizational Leadership', ‘Ethics’ and “Psychology” has provided me with the opportunity to support diverse learners with attention to interdisciplinarity.

My work as an advisor is to support learners in calling forth their own wisdom, experiencing themselves as reflective practitioners, researchers, scholars, artists and agents of change and bringing their work into the world in meaningful and sustainable ways that inspire joy and connection. And the piece about ‘energy and flow?' That happens mostly when I’m playing with our family band, “Queen Fanifah," my beloved Wylie, aka “Leaf Zebra” and our 4-year-old bundle of joy daughter Hannah, aka “Electric Dread."

Before Goddard, Michael Deragon had been a technical writer and an English teacher in a small town alternative secondary school. He came to the low residency MA in Individualized Studies Program to study surrealism and writing. His thesis was a poetic exploration of teaching, desire, seeing, surrealism and simultaneity. Since graduating he has taught surrealism, poetry and film noir at a New England art school, and he is now studying experimental sound and writing at the California Institute of Art. He has also been publishing poems, and his CD, the great invisibles' you left me haunted - many of whose lyrics were written while he was at Goddard - has been released on broken sparrow records. 

Michael: before attending the individualized masters program at goddard i had always written both music and poetry, yet the poetry never seemed to keep up with music or my own imagination. i hadn't discovered a confident writing voice.

while attending goddard i studied with three amazingly powerful and unique women who altered my writing, my music, my focus and, most importantly, my perspective.

i began working with ellie epp. her suggestions for readings (the descent of alette and time, space and knowledge, most importantly) and vigilant responses to my faltering writings created in me a sense of confidence. her ear became a reason for me to write more. to take leaps. to fail. to recreate. to edit. my writing leapt ahead of me.

next i worked with lise weil, who stretched my boundaries in different ways. lise's extensive knowledge as an editor and her love of helene cixous, carole maso and nicole brossard rocked my surrealist boat and i found new writing mentors. lise's keen editing eye rounded my edges enough so that my writing's focus was now my force of evocation.

last, my thesis advisor, caryn miriam goldberg, a wonderful poet, was implicit in the creation of my book length manuscript (some of which now appears in small journals). caryn cares about every word and every nuance of language. she makes you care about your word choices, your perspectives and how language plays in the minds of an audience.

together these women have been indispensable to my understanding of the artistic process.

From Michael's thesis, what i was wanting:

I begin writing automatically;

a process complicated with mistakes, strange turns, and uncomfortable silences.

Now, I have the attention of my world, what is being said? Is there anything that has meaning? It seems everything has too much meaning. Nothing that last forever. These things, these objects, these thoughts, contradict.

I contradict myself, expand into something different. Explanation is rendered meaningless.

How resplendent things have become when i let these thoughts, these languages, these bodies back onto their natural course. Simply being.

Like the ocean striving for nothing but giving life to so much. Embodiment.

Soy suenos!

Automatic poetry, according to Dadaist Jean Arp, comes straight from out of the poet's bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves. A funnel puts feet into dreaming flesh, stuck into the weight of language as language grows. Sending waves. The automatic sea.

There are no civilizations, nor phantoms, without poems. Automatic writing is wide-open and sticky. Nothing gets in here, or is seen, that isn't wanted.

With my eyes wide open, and the pen moving as fast as I can enable it, there are things here. Odd things. Perfect things? Objects from somewhere foreign. Something suggested. Something flawed. Art exists in the prying open of these heavy ante-chambers of suggestion.

Thought itself is writing. Waves. Language.

The weight of language.

The weight of love.

A pen like fresh warm guts.

My gut crackles within language.

A first time kisser. Each word is a flame eating the air. My words are a gut reaction. This is the language I love. I begin here. Stepping into liquid.

Everything at once like making love, like dreams/nightmares, like the unequivocal hunger of desire, like surfing, like cubism, like dada, like surrealism and dreams.

The erotic fury, says Mexican poet Octavio Paz, in the face of the enigma of presence and an attempt to descend to the origin, into the pit where bones and seeds commingle. I belong to language like violent waves belong to a hurricane. It's visual; it's surreal at times. It is hard and absolute like a ditch carved in granite. A worker's tired hands shake the bride of the marvelous.

"Here are my words."

"Eat them with me."

Waves.

They come like words. Attend to them.

This language evokes the secrets of the unconscious.

Dreaming in the most ordinary places within days and within nights. Beyond

where we stand.Odd objects stand up and do the things they are not supposed to do. Helicopter skies and a sleep light on the wings of a breakfast plate as the woman becomes the warm part of the house.

"You have fallen in love before?"

"You've seen this too?"

The poetic finger, the poetic nail, the poetic nags at the comfortable. We live as we are. Words move the immovable. Let's break away from our rationality, says Futurist F.T. Martinetti, as out of a horrible husk and throw ourselves like pride-spiced fruit into the immense distorted mouth of the wind!

I begin to write. I begin to live.

Surrealism?

I might be a surrealist. I can't determine. I don't want to. I spit up mad words, a bold life, the other, seeing, not seeing, things happening all at once, quickly. Meaningful. Meaning nothing. Felt on the skin automatically. I contradict.

I'm inspired by ferocious states received in dreams, in love, in secret beings.

I want the uncensored and unrelenting feeling of being alive.

I want to be of the mystery. I'm not a surrealist!

My propeller arms, oscillating between something seen and something unseen. At once. I found myself in a dream. The quality of so much.

I write through the clouds and into a house of tongues.I've climbed into the ocean. I've put in for a job out there.

I would be teaching the fish to fly. A career worthy of a lifetime.

Anna Bálint is the author of Horse Thief (Curbstone Press, 2004), a collection of short fiction.

Her earlier publications include a book of poetry, Out of the Box (Poetry Around Press, 1991); and spread them crimson sleeves like wings, poems and stories (Poetry Around Press, 1993).

She co-edited Poets Against the War, an anthology of poems protesting the Gulf War, 1991. Her stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals including, Calyx, Briar Cliff Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Raven Chronicles, Caprice and Stringtown.

In 2001, Bálint received the Starbucks Foundation “Leading Voices Award” for outstanding work with urban youth in the Puget Sound Region in the field of creative writing.

In October of 2012, she was the featured reader at Lit.Mustest, a reading series at the Richard Hugo House organized by Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing students.

She lives in Seattle, where she teaches creative writing in Antioch University’s First Nations program with the Muckelshoot tribe and at the School of Recovery in Seattle.

Liam began his legal career with the Washington office of the Houston, Texas firm of Butler, Binion, Rice Cook and Knapp. He relocated to Vermont in 1983 and joined the Burlington office of Langrock, Sperry & Wool, where he became a partner and where he remained until becoming a founding member of MSK in March 2004.

Liam maintains a broad practice grounded in all types of real estate matters, encompassing real estate transactions and litigation, land use and environmental law as well as condemnation litigation.

Liam's transactional practice focuses on representing building owners and developers to establish and manage their operating entities, to acquire, finance, permit, manage, lease and/or sell (including through "1031 exchanges") a wide variety of commercial, residential, hotel, recreational, office and shopping center properties, and to establish condominiums and common interest communities. Representative transactions include the following:

• Counsel to the City of Winooski in connection with its ongoing downtown redevelopment project. The Winooski project is the largest urban redevelopment project in the state's history, involving the acquisition of 125 acres from multiple owners through sales and condemnation, obtaining master plan approval to construct over 300,000 sq. ft. of retail/commercial space, a 250-room hotel, a 43,000 sq. ft. municipal center, 800 units of housing, and 3,100 parking spaces in multiple parking garages, and then working with private developers to implement the City's vision for a redeveloped downtown.
• Counsel to Vermont National Golf Course in connection with the development of a championship golf course with 250 units of housing.
• Co-counsel to the developer of Maple Tree Place in Williston, a mixed use development with up to 450,000 sq. ft. of retail/commercial/office space, including a cinema, a grocery store, and 50 units of residential housing.
• Counsel in two superfund cases and a number of brownfield cases, where he has represented parties named as "potentially responsible parties" under CERCLA, the Federal Superfund law.
• Counsel to numerous landowners, land trusts and conservation organizations in the transfer of development rights and the creation of conservation easements, including projects with the Vermont Land Trust, the Lake Champlain Land Trust, the Champlain Valley Greenbelt Alliance and the Town of Charlotte Land Trust.
• Counsel to First New Hampshire Bank in the foreclosure, management, and resale of the Burke Mountain Ski Area, among other foreclosure/workout matters undertaken during the downturn in the real estate market in the early 1990s.

• Counsel to Burlington Broadcasters, Inc. d/b/a WIZN, successfully defending a radio station in a decade-long challenge to the location of its tower and antennae brought by a local citizens group.
• Counsel to numerous neighborhood groups and organizations in ensuring that neighborhood and community concerns are considered in proposed developments.
• Counsel to numerous landowners along U.S. Route 7 in the condemnation action undertaken by the State of Vermont in connection with widening that road from two lanes to four.
• Counsel to numerous landowners in condemnation actions by VELCO for its electric transmission lines and facilities in the New Haven to Burlington corridor.
• Co-counsel to the Central Vermont Railroad in connection with the series of cases interpreting the public's rights to "filled lands" along the Burlington waterfront under the "Public Trust Doctrine".

From 1997 to 2000, Liam served as the Chair of the Real Property Committee of the Vermont Bar Association, and in 2001 was awarded the "Service Award" by the Vermont Bar Association. Since 1988, Liam has regularly taught a course on "Title to Real Estate in Vermont" for lawyers and paralegals, and has published a companion publication. He is a frequent lecturer on land use and development law and related regulatory issues, appearing regularly at events sponsored by the Vermont Bar Association, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, and the Municipal Clerks and Treasurers Association.

Born near Wexford, Ireland in 1954, Liam moved with his family to Wales in 1960 and then to Brattleboro, Vermont in 1968. He currently lives in Charlotte with his wife and two sons.

My experience with Goddard was one of deep education and glory. I focused on fiction writing, and learned immensely from my mentors (even if it wasn’t what I expected to learn), and found the authentic sensibility of Goddard to suit me perfectly. I gained the lifelong friendships of a group of women writers (www.corvidwriters.org) and a chance to identify myself personally as a writer. I was utterly changed by my Goddard experience. I am a devoted and connected writer in the world. Because of Goddard, I teach both adults and children creative writing and am currently in pursuit of a college or university position doing the same. I have gone on to write a novel after my short story collection (written during my time at Goddard) and seek book publication, though my writing has been widely published in literary journals. Not only did I become a better writer with Goddard’s help, I became a better person, and one clear about her role in the vast universe.

Clo Pitkin is the daughter-in-law of Goddard's founding president. She married Royce "Tim" Pitkin's son, Belmont. Over the years she has had many roles at the College (student, staff, faculty, friend, and trustee). Student from 1949-1953 After graduation, Tim Pitkin hired her to help survey the upper Winooski valley as part of Title I Grant. The work involved surveying the upper Winooski valley to collect data about people's knowledge of social services. Clo, with the help of Ellen Pitkin, organized and helped run educational conferences at Goddard throughout the 1960s. Graduated from UVM in 1969 with her MEd in Counseling. Director/Advisor of Commuting Adult Program at Goddard College-1968-1969 *The Commuting Adult Program preexisted the ADP program at Goddard. Goddard College-Education faculty, for both RUP and ADP. CCV-1970-1978. Worked with Peter Smith, CCV’s first President, to help get CCV started. While there she helped set up the advising program and designed degree programs, working with low-income people to devise ways for them to continue their education. Goddard College, Associate Director of Admissions, early 1980s. Founder and Director of Woman Centered, 1987-1993. Woman Centered was a woman’s organization who gave workshops to 1,300 women every year. They counseled and supported women, helped them access resources, etc. They worked with Governmental Commission on women, rented a house that also held a Domestic Violence Program and Sexual Assault and Crisis Team. When Battered Women’s Services almost went bankrupt they also moved into the house. It became a place where all the women’s stuff was happening in Central Vermont. Director of Community Services, Central Vermont Community Action. (1993-2000?) Helped to create and implement PIP (People in Partnerships) , a program which sought to simplify and integrate the social services available to low-income people. The state began to take integrate some of the innovations that PIP had come up into the larger social services and governmental system. Goddard Renaissance Committee, 2002-2003. Co-founder of Vermont Peace Academy, 2002. Goddard College Board of Trustees, 2003-Present. *Clo also had a private therapy practice, usually with about three clients, for much of this time.

I am a performance maker and community artist, a witnessing critic and theorist, an educator and a disability culture activist. My journey as an artist emerges from a passionate exploration of performance ethics and community building.

What we call ‘art’ is up for grabs, needs to be re-thought, re-created, every time we step into the river of practice. I know this because as a disabled dancer living with pain and fatigue, I have to subvert the ordinary, have fun in unusual spaces, and find time out of time. For over twenty years, I have engaged community participants gently and with thought in process work. Some of these workshops happened in women’s centers, some in hospices, in mental health self-help groups, with youth groups, with traditional Weavers and Knitters Guilds, with politicians, with people labeled as ‘developmentally disabled’, with cancer survivors, in National Parks, in abandoned buildings, on the beach. In these art journeys, we use what becomes important to us: dance, theatre, poetry, video, mark-making, sculptural attention to material and space, sound art, installation and live presence. Together, we change the world, and create a more inclusive future.

These experiences, and teaching community arts in Wales, England, New Zealand, the US and Australia, created many questions and ideas, which I collected in a how-to tool-box, the book Community Performance: An Introduction (Routledge, 2007).

I am the Artistic Director of The Olimpias (www.olimpias.org), an artists’ collective. We create collaborative, research-focused environments open to people with physical, emotional, sensory and cognitive differences and their allies. In these environments, we can explore pride and pain, attention and the transformatory power of touch. Olimpias artists have deep insight and creative ability, but they might not be able to attend rehearsals regularly and extensively, and they cannot guarantee their presence at any one performance. We make this difference into a virtue, querying art and performance paradigms, and use new media and alternative performance structures to allow for an open work process. We film our process creatively and use multi-channel video installations or telematic approaches to have virtual if not always live presence.

We use presence, slowness, pedestrian movements, a poetics of words and bodies, and the deep affective register of touch to share our beauty and our critique. In most Olimpias sharings in the last year, we invited the audience members to sit in a circle with the performers, to physically engage. To give the gift of closeness, to be near someone whose embodiment is wholly different from yours and to be so in a playful way: that’s what we offer our audiences.

There’s tensions in Olimpias projects such as Anarcha (http://liminalities.net/4-2), an exploration of black culture/disability culture issues, medical ethics and the lasting effects of slavery medicine and racialisation; or Tiresias, a project based around issues of sensuality and sexuality. These tensions of identity and difference emerge in many identity politics and minoritarian art projects, and I am looking forward to fruitful and respectful exchange about art making, cultural identity and poetic politics with students and faculty at Goddard. The Olimpias call for disability culture while we are aware of the limits of this term, of the disconnect between individual experience, historical oppression and the cultural formations we speak into being.

I am a non-native English speaker, a first generation college student with a strong commitment to working class issues, and a feminist. I have lived in cultures where mythological connections to the land and multiple language communities have strong presence in everyday, political and art life. Fractured storytelling, willful mythmaking and an attention to the materiality of meaning-making are part of my creative attention to life.

I bring my attention to process, environmental location and ethical engagement to my pedagogy. My hope is that we can create journeys together towards personal and artistic growth. I see my teaching at Goddard as part of an artists’ conversation, giving and receiving, paying attention. Let us develop attention to the deep patterns that shape our desire to create art. Let us enable an exploration of the influences that shape the art maker and their cultural, historical and political embedment, in order to carry art practice into the future.

My art work, pedagogical labor, activism and critical writing are all part of a continuum. I believe that writing about art extends the circle of art’s reach and political vibrancy, and so I have published widely in journals such as TDR: The Drama Review, About Performance, Liminalities, Afterimage, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and differences. My books include Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge (Routledge, 2003), The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minnesota, 2007). I have also recently published a book of performance poetry, co-written with performance artist Neil Marcus and with photos by Lisa Steichmann, Cripple Poetics: A Love Story (Homofactus Press, 2008).

Beyond my work at Goddard, I am a faculty member at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I teach in performance studies and disability studies. I spend summers in Berkeley, California, and perform or run workshops internationally.

I was in a Masters program in Education when I felt a wave of wanting to be in spiritual practice. A gifted professor wove together Toni Morrison, Freud, the myth of Psyche and Cupid, and the professor’s own interviews with 9-13 year old girls. Voice, resonance, relationship, democracy. "The honesty of things is where they resist." This is it. Raised Jewish, I didn’t speak Hebrew, didn’t know if I believed in God. Can I be a Rabbi? I heard that some Jews see God as the relationship between people. Arms linked. That is where I see God.

The Ven. Bikkhu Bodhi, a Theravada monk living in New York, says that truth telling is something Buddhism can offer social engagement. What are the relationships, processes, and institutions that encourage truth-telling?

And I thought, well, since I don’t believe in God and don’t speak Hebrew, I’ll become a professor. Same thing as a Rabbi, right? I didn’t find it there easily, at least in the rest of my graduate school experience. It was only while on faculty at Goddard that I undid my head and connected to my whole being, since that is what our pedagogy is about.
Since 2005, I've been a member of the Community Economies Collective, a group of about twenty scholars in the U.S. and Australia documenting non-capitalist economic spaces. My focus has been money and banking systems, in particular. I love worker co-ops. I am a fan of auto-ethnography, testimonio, storytelling in its many forms  --from cantastoria, song cycles, puppet shows, and comics to storytelling circles, podcasts, and documentaries.

These days my focus is writing about socially engaged spirituality and practicing Zen Buddhism. I was away from Goddard for almost two years directing a socially engaged Buddhist project with Bernie Glassman at Zen Peacemakers. Until recently, I was an accordionist in a band, and now I'm learning ukulele. My prior research is on art activism.

I am very interested when people say, "This is what democracy looks like." I think we don't yet know what it looks like, and I am drawn to models like sociocracy and consent forms of decision-making. I am devoted to democracy as a spiritual practice and to learning how to do it well.

I have been an artist and an arts activist for over twenty years. My artistic communities have been in Northern California, San Francisco, New York and Minneapolis. I am trained as a theater director and theorist and have directed scores of new works with playwrights and performance artists. Early in my career, I began to adapt, write and direct productions that asked questions about the role of language and linear narrative. Under the influence of Jerzy Grotowski, I began to explore the ways in which meaning could be expressed without language. I created two Shakespeare productions in the woods, where performers used only gesture and sounds to communicate.

As an extension of these ideas, I began to incorporate choreography, still images, tableau, and sound compositions in my work. My recent projects have been installation pieces that utilize live performers, animals, and found texts. These pieces ask questions about the construction of memory and history against the backdrop of “lived” events. I created four pieces on this subject over the past several years and used theater spaces and art galleries as venues. My last piece was an installation in a photo gallery. It involved the choreography of sound/speech, film, trees, mice, projected images and lighting. Please see my website for the most current work.

I am the founder and manager of Minneapolis’ Center for Performing Arts, a converted convent where dozens of artists and hundreds of students from different disciplines work, teach, and learn. At the Center, I spent the last 13 years creating a community of artists. As part of my on-going interest in bringing artists together, I also created performance festivals in San Francisco and New York City. I was the co-founding director of the West Coast Women’s Theater Conference in SF and Co-Creator the first Performance Studies International Conference at NYU. I taught at Macalester College and St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN and New College of California in San Francisco. I’ve been a Visiting Scholar at the U of M in the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies.

My academic writing has been on feminist theory, and feminist performance art. I have written about the aesthetics, creative process and politics of women’s group theaters. My other areas of expertise are in experimental theater, history of the avant-garde, and theories of performance.

Website: JackieHayesProjects.com

In 2009, City Lights published my twelfth book, American Romances, a collection of gonzo essays that put Brian Wilson (of the Beach Boys) and Hawthorne on the same page and reveals the secret sex life of H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man. My previous books with City Lights include The Last Time I Saw You (2005) and The End of Youth, (2003). My book Excerpts From A Family Medical Dictionary (Granta, UK and University of Wisconsin Press, USA) was published in February of 2004. I am also the author of The Gifts of the Body, The Terrible Girls, Annie Oakley's Girl, The Haunted House, The Children's Crusade, and What Keeps Me Here. My work has been awarded the Boston Book Review Award for fiction, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, and a Washington State Governor's Award and a Stranger Genius Award. It has been widely anthologized, including stories in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Five of my books have been translated into Japanese where they are published to much acclaim. My work has also been published in Great Britain and translated into Danish, Norwegian, German, Italian and Dutch. I have also co-edited a couple of books. These include Experimental Theology, with Robert Corbett of the Seattle Research Institute, an anthology that contains poetry, fiction, essays, academic stuff and theater about God and god-substitutes and Looking Together: Writers on Art, with Mary Jane Knecht of the Frye Art Museum was published by University of Washington press in March 2009.

In recent years I have been collaborating artists in different disciplines. I wrote the a libretto for The Onion Twins, a dance opera by Better Biscuit Dance that premiered in 2005. In 2005, my first two act play, The Toaster, premiered at the New City Theater in Seattle. My book The Terrible Girls was adapted for theater by About Face Theater in Chicago and performed there in 2001. I have also written performance texts for Launch Dance company. The Los Angeles New Short Fiction Series adapted four pieces from The End of Youth for performance in November 2003. For a number of years I did a series of irreverent public talks sponsored by the Seattle Opera that offer pop culture/feminist/literary and goofy analysis of opera. With painter Nancy Kiefer, I made a book of text and image called Woman in Ill Fitting Wig. I have read on book tours across the USA and in Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria and Japan.

I have taught for more than 25 years in numerous settings including the University of Washington, Extension, Pacific Lutheran University, Naropa University in Colorado, prisons, senior citizens' homes, libraries, and bars. For four years I was the Creative Director of Literary Programs at Centrum, an arts center in Port Townsend, Washington. For two years I was Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House Literary Center in Seattle where I served as Senior Teacher, met community members for writing consultations, and curated an eclectic reading/performance series. I have also curated readings for The Jack Straw Foundation, Red and Black Books, and my local NPR affiliate. I have served on selection panels for the Millay Arts Colony, The King County Arts Commission, the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, and the Washington State Arts Commission where I have championed the work of both traditional and non-mainstream writing. I have been awarded residencies at the Yaddo Colony, the Hawthornden Castle Writing Retreat in Scotland, the MacDowell Colony, Centrum, The Millay Colony, and Hedgebrook Cottages for Writers. For many years my criticism, reviews, and essays appeared in the Seattle-based arts weekly The Stranger. I have lived in London and Italy and now make my home in Seattle with my spouse, our cats, and an impressive collection of rock-n-roll, classical, and weird CDs.

As I update this narrative in early 2009, I ask whether I still feel as optimistic toward Goddard College as I did when I was completing my BA in 2003. Without hesitation, I answer that the IBA Program profoundly affected me and continues to have positive impact on my life. I studied creative writing, women’s history and feminism. I could not have been happier with the school, from its administration, to the campus, to the advisors and fellow students. Even those advisors with whom I did not formally study were helpful to me when I had questions that pertained to their particular interests and expertise. The residencies were busy and productive. I always looked forward to them. Even with the busy schedule, I made time to write and to explore the campus, the library and downtown Plainfield. My final IBA product was a novel with a creative process paper. Often, when I talk to prospective Goddard students, they express concern about having time to “go to school.” Here is my answer. If you want to make the time, you will have the best times of your life because you will be involved in a program that has far-reaching and long-term impact on the way you act and react, on the way you go about living. When I did the IBA, I was a single mother, full-time employee and freelancer. It all worked out and I was able to get the packet work done. In fact, I enjoyed the packet work. The Goddard community taught me to how to engage with the beautiful and limitless possibilities that result from rigorous, critical engagement and experimentation, from reaching beyond one’s current ideologies and practices to experience personal and professional growth. Please, if you have questions or concerns send me an email.

Trustee Emeritus.

Bio coming soon.

Meg Hammond is the Events Manager at Goddard College. As a collaborative effort with WGDR Community Radio, she coordinates the successful Goddard College Concert Series at the Haybarn Theatre. Meg also coordinates the pop-up Goddard Art Gallery at 54 Main in downtown Montpelier, and other arts events both on and off campus.

She was the former founder and owner of Montpelier's Langdon Street Cafe, a popular art house, coffeehouse, and music venue she and her partner ran for seven years.

Meg sets the stage for anything to happen when she puts on a show at Goddard College!

Meg Hammond | Events Manager
Goddard College | Advancement Office
123 Pitkin Road, Plainfield, VT 05667
802.322.1685 | meg.hammond@goddard.edu

I graduated from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara, CA with my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1986. Before that, I earned a Master's (M.Ed) and a Specialist (Ed.S) degree in Counseling and Psychological Services (CPS) from Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA., where I currently am an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the CPS Department. My professional career has been devoted to the private practice of clinical psychology and I maintained my practice for 27 years in the Atlanta, Georgia area. Over fifteen years of it were spent on the campus of a private psychiatric hospital working with a broad range of clients including substance abuse. In 2005, I retired my private practice and moved to the mountains of north Georgia. I have been teaching at Goddard College since June, 2001.

In my private practice, I served a broad client population including adolescents (fourteen and up), adults, elderly, and couples. I specialized in working with gay men and gay couples. I have an extensive background in neuropsychology and psychological testing including most test instruments.

As a volunteer, I was instrumental in creating Division H, The Division of Sexual Orientation Issues, within the Georgia Psychological Association. The Division is active in promoting LGB research and convention programming. On a national level, I have served for seven years on the Executive Committee of Division 44 of the American Psychological Association which is The Society for the Psychological Research of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Issues. I have also served as president of Division 44 and on the APA's Committee on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Concerns (CLGBC).

On a personal note, I was born and reared outside of Richmond, VA., have an adult son, and served eight years in the United States Air Force during the Vietnam era.

Hi! Chances are, if you're reading these bios, you have questions. I would love to talk to you to help you answer some of those questions as you consider Goddard! At Goddard I wanted to focus on gender studies within music education. I wanted to understand the relationship between the gender of a student and their musical instrument choice. I also needed to complete a masters degree to further my career in education. Goddard was a place that fit my lifestyle. I was part of the first group of students in the 3/4 time degree. Instead of 12 credits a semester, I would earn 9. It took me a total of four semesters to complete my degree. The big advantage I found about this new program was that I could just attend the summer residency and not the winter residency. I could not take a week out of work to go to the winter residency, so the part-time program worked wonders. In place of the winter residency, part-time students attended the July Institute for Progressive Educators immediately following the summer residency. The only downside of the part-time program was NOT going to the winter residency! At the July Institute, we were allowed to bring forth specific challenges and issues in our own teaching to dissect before a smaller group of experienced educators. I was able to connect with other teachers around the country who weren't necessarily in the Goddard program, but came to the week-long workshop for professional development and enrichment. I was able to explore how to bring a more progressive, holistic approach to my teaching within a traditional public school setting. I found my time at Goddard to be extremely rewarding, challenging, and fulfilling.The residencies are the highlight of the program. The openness, support, and flexibility is immense. Within one week you grow as an individual thinker, planner, and optimist. My faculty advisor was wonderful. She was very knowledgeable, caring, helpful, and reassuring. The residencies allowed everyone to be a part of a study group where we would build, tear apart, rebuild, and critique our plan for the upcoming semester, and in my case, the upcoming year. When you hear the phrase, "Trust the process," they mean it. I look back on my time at Goddard with a strong sense of accomplishment, pride, and optimism. I have lasting friendships that started at Goddard. I bring my own research and the "Goddard experience" I had into my classroom everyday. We are fortunate to have a place like Goddard to push the envelope for more progressive, holistic education. Please consider Goddard. I would love to talk with you!!

My 'highest' academic degree, a PhD, is in history. Thinking about the location of the present as part of a continuum between the past and the future best explains for me how this world came to look as it does, and where we might go next. Sustainability is, after all, a question of how we survive as cultures and societies that reach across the stretch of the years, so for me considering history is the logical way to think about sustainability. My academic specialties are the less traditional fields of environmental, agricultural, and world history, because I am most interested in how all the parts of this globe fit together in that river of time, whether the parts are the human and non-human pieces, or the different places on the planet. Reflecting critically on the histories we tell, and the assumptions they are rooted in, connects particular stories to the deeper social points of view that generate them. As a sociological thinker, sociology being the field of my undergrad degree, I also struggle with how the pieces of our personal lives fit together with the overarching structures of power in the world. How do our individual actions create big systems, and how can they challenge them? How do we think about right livelihood and our responsibilities to the world? For twenty years earlier in life, I was an RN and certified nurse midwife, and I retain a passion for public health issues, which was fed by my experience working for an aid agency overseas in Azerbaijan. Public health, too, is a field that links the biggest and smallest scale, connecting an individual's health with the politics and economics and culture that create the health of an entire community. At least as important as all these issues is the burning question of how we think deep thoughts and still revel in the joy of many moments. I mean, I love playing with my cat and loud music and fireworks, and being a mummer in the annual New Year's parade in my hometown of Philadelphia, too. And I love Goddard and working with students. My experiences with a wide variety of educational models, both living and learning with my eleven year old daughter (who has never been to school) and in teaching in different colleges and universities, have taken me ever further from the conventions of 'teaching', and left me cherishing this place. Here, at Goddard, students truly engaged with the wider world use their skills and energy to make change, both personal and social, and I am excited to be able to have a part in that.

I believe that artwork is work and the art-worker a laborer who gives value to substance. The work that the artist does in the world to expand the vocabulary of human expression, to offer access to the unfamiliar and ambiguous is necessary and requires diligence and courage as well as passion. In my own work as a composer and collaborative artist, I am preoccupied with two aspects of music: its capacity to reconstruct meaning by placing sounds of social and emotive significance into the abstract order of acoustics and harmonic logic; and the unique social activity that is music-making.

I am transfixed by the metamorphosis that occurs when an assortment of airwaves transforms through some alchemy of physics, logic, and social conditioning into a conduit of expressive meaning. Understanding the intricacies behind expressive force is like understanding the precise chemical processes that give an organism life. The key difference, however, lies in the fact that art is human; its life-force is our experience, and its evolution our responsibility.

My understanding of music as collective interaction comes from performing jazz, experimental rock, political bluegrass, and avant-garde chamber music. The idea that composition is organized activity, not merely organized sound, has led me to study the relationships between musical content and political intent, and to pursue collaborative work and performance art, organizing action in other media and learning from other artists. In making music, I set out to immerse a listener in something unfamiliar while suggesting some possible relationships and posing questions that I really don't know the answers to. This is also my approach to teaching.

I don't think that aesthetic judgment can be dictated (though aesthetic dictatorships seem to abound). Instead, I find that it develops every time one encounters something new with interest and curiosity. I therefore hope to engage students in a dialogue where I can point them toward ideas that are unfamiliar to them, observe and ask questions, and be there to discuss their concerns and challenge their assumptions as we pursue this important labor together.

Along with all aspects of music, from Renaissance counterpoint to gender in hip-hop, my academic interests include Aesthetic Theory, Moral Philosophy, Political Art, Film and Media Art, Theatre and Performance Art, and 20th Century Russian Literature. I am also secretary of the Open Music Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports graphic and experimental approaches to musical notation and communication.
 

I have just published an erotic novel, Milk, as well as a memoir, Easter Everywhere. These two topics, sex and religion have always fascinated me and continue to be themes in my work. My most recent novel, Jesus Saves, was a New York Times Notable, as was my first novel Up Through the Water. Suicide Blonde was translated into seven languages. I have written extensively for magazines, including Spin, Art Forum, George, The London Guardian Magazine, Mirabella, and The Village Voice. Currently, I teach in the graduate program of both Columbia University and the New School in New York City. In teaching I focus on close readings of master stories to help students work though problems in their narratives. I’m also interested on a prose level in matters of word choice and clarity. But best of all I teach risk and try to help students find their own particular window ledge to jump off from.

Porschia Librecht Baker is an interdisciplinary artist writing an existence in her own vision. Baker's poetry is included in the book CHORUS: A Literary Mixtape. Currently, she is working on completing her full-length play. She is based in Los Angeles, CA.

Artist's Statement: Self-sovereignty is an option with which I thrive and build upon to create an existence in my own vision. I reclaim my birthright to build alternate realities inherent with deeply rich complexities. Central to creating is a malleable livelihood that allows for questions and transmutations so that I remain faithful to naming nations within, faithful to what resonates, faithful to my truth. This is my medicine. I invest in reshaping boundaries while acknowledging the potential limitations in their constructs. I work with the variations of what I know and harp my perspectives of existence. I aim to be communally inclusive so the works' words seep mantra-like with their stories' universality. I maneuver with an assemblage of personal, researched and witnessed cargo. My sensibilities reach from the pit of my desires where what appears to bone black bones is a nourishing container for herstories that arrived before as well as those yet to be midwifed to their breath. These aspects I share are leaves summoning branches rooted in servicing what I believe. This is my self-ordained privilege and a threshold I remember, comeback to, and journey through in order to arrive invoking actuality; a practice of summoning my whole self. With offerings of the celebrations, challenges, teachings, and growths I've been continuously gifted, I return to open space for healing.

Larry Yurdin (BA RUP '67) graduated from Goddard College in 1967 and returned in 1969 as a faculty member. He then organized the 1970 Alternative Media Conference, held June 17-20, 1970, with Goddard students as part of a hands-on course centered on alternative and underground media. (photo at right: Larry Yurdin at the 1970 Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College).

Following his time at Goddard, Yurdin was the manager of Pacifica Radio in Houston, the News Director of KMET in LA, and was a major contributor at many other radio stations. He has a long history in radio, digital media and communications and was an innovative pioneer in the groundbreaking fields of free-form and progressive radio. 

Yurdin came back to the Plainfield campus on May 18, 2013 to attend the 2013 Alternative Media Conference, and presented a history and slideshow about the original conference. See the video below!

I am both a writer and a "recovering academic"—in fact, I have a hard time separating the two. A book that I read as a graduate student at Brown University called The Politics of Literature blew the top of my head off and nothing has been the same since. After designing and teaching one of the first ever Women's Studies courses at Brown, I took a leave of absence and set off for the Women's Writers Center in Cazenovia NY. Several years later I went on to found Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, a radical feminist literary and political magazine, which I edited for nine years.

I resonate strongly to the word "radical"—I like getting to the root of things, both in myself and in the world—and I like to see radical change! Writing I came to see was a way to change things from the bottom up. "If one woman told the story of her life, the world would split open," Muriel Releaser wrote, and I wanted to be there when it happened. As a teacher and editor, I’ve worked with writers in a wide range of forms, from critical and personal essays to fiction, plays, and experimental writing. My specialty is helping break writers out of the academic mold, a form of self-censorship with which I have special sympathy.

I moved to Montreal in 1990, in large part because of the experimental writing scene here. These many years later I am still in love with this city—for its mix of cultures and languages, its proximity to wilderness, and its cafes and restaurants in which until recently smoking was still allowed.

I am a published writer of short fiction, essays, reviews, and translations, and am also an obsessive chronicler of my dreams, which tend to prove an invaluable source of information, about the world and myself. I’m currently at work on a book of creative nonfiction titled In Search of Pure Lust. As a reader, I am most powerfully drawn to what I call the literature of extremity, especially writing by lesbians and women of color and native peoples all over the world, those who know what the stakes are and tell it like it is; I am excited by all forms of theory about such literature. Lately I find myself thinking and reading a lot about our relationship with the non-human world, which is going to have to change radically if we’re to have a liveable future. It seems to me that any kind of serious thought in this historical moment has to take into account the accelerating threat to our ecosystems posed by human stupidity and greed.

Since 1986 I've been a practitioner of Zen and Vipassana meditation and increasingly have come to see spiritual practice as a site of radical change, both personal and political. Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings have been a big influence in this respect; I'm also interested in the ways that women's entry into Buddhist practice in the West has begun to alter the tradition. I've practiced Yang style T'ai Chi for fifteen years and am presently doing so with an exacting Chinese master in Montreal. I bring the knowledge I’ve gained from these body disciplines—which I value as highly as any I’ve gained from books—to Goddard’s new focus area in Embodiment Studies, which has served as a container some truly groundbreaking and compelling student work.

Though a long time critic of traditional education, I also value many of the tools I came by as a product of it. I believe that the more radical our ideas and impulses are, the more firmly they need to be grounded in rigorous and disciplined thinking. Some of the student projects I've overseen are: a feminist critique of American medicine, a memoir of a woman's life lived in conscious communion with animals and the earth, a creative ethnography of Abenaki Indians, a study of lesbian writers and the politics of language, a fictional retelling of the life of Mary Magdalen, and a Vietnam war novel. Though I am unable to identify any trend here, what I can say is that, like so much of the best writing coming out of the U.S. and Canada just now, my students' work tends to be on some level about healing--whether from incest, from anorexia, from cancer, from self hatred, or more generally, from any of the forms of fragmentation to which we are heir in this culture. As I see it, all my students are trying in their own way to piece themselves and the world back together again--and this is work that I feel honored to be a part of.

I’m primarily a maker of narratives—some are used in artists’ books, some become theatrical performances, some find their ways into short stories or puppet/object pieces. Often I find my ideas in history or true event, I don’t make documentaries though—I find myself more interested in an imaginative re-construction of events that examines the emotional relevance of the story. I am always engaged, whatever the medium, in the process of writing text that has the particular quality of being able to be heard.

I also write about architecture and design. I co-authored the national bestseller The Not So Big House, and have also published two other books, including one about cool American garages. My non-fiction writing is always intersecting with my creative work, even in the most esoteric of ways. How is a story like a building? How does style begin to affect structure? (I’m very interested in structure and form and how it can mirror and support subject matter.)

Recently, I’ve helped found a consortium of artists called The Gymnasium, who work collaboratively on both performative and public art works. A new Gymnasium piece, called Force/Matter, combines movement, sculpture, and spoken text to examine how the classical laws of physics can intersect with family dynamics.

Other new work includes Raskol (Ten Thousand Things Theatre, will be produced spring 2009), which has an improvisational jazz score by the Fantastic Merlins. A commissioned object theatre piece will premiere in Philadelphia the fall of 2009 funded by the Pew Theatre Initiative. My short story, “Snow Man,” is being adapted by Open Eye Figure Theatre into a puppet play. Other creative work includes a novel about a hummingbird collector and a screenplay about a man obsessed with footprints.

I view teaching and the opportunity to mentor at Goddard as a form of artistic conversation. I look forward to good conversations that will stretch me as a teacher and as an artist.

I am a writer and visual artist based in Chicago. I work in poetry, prose, essay, and fiction, and my books usually include images. I got my start as a writer in New York City, and the dedication of the experimental writing communities there made me a literary citizen for life and inspired me to start my own chapbook press called Sona Books. Now, in my new city, I am thrilled by the presence of so many grassroots arts organizations and by Chicago’s accessible excellence in art and literature.

For several years I was an academic advisor in a worker education program, and I got my start in teaching and writing at a community-based literacy program in Brooklyn where we, as teachers, believed that “to teach it you have to do it.”  My interest in writing came from my involvement in that community of teachers and learners intent on writing down their stories.

I enjoy encouraging learners to access alternative sense-making spaces within language—spaces outside of traditional logic, explanation, and linearity. This idea of language probably comes from one of my first language memories of listening to my loved ones carry on in their home language, Estonian, and though nothing was translated for me, I loved hearing their sounds and being a witness to that intimate encounter created by language itself. So I delight in those workshop and classroom moments when we encounter a combination of words that puzzles all of us, but also makes more sense than we could have ever imagined. My approach to facilitating writing is to encourage experimentation and to fashion a space that is both challenging and supportive.

In the early '90s I first read Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and knew that I wanted to teach. I respect and cherish the community that is created when learners gather—it’s invigorating and inspires me continually. My creative and intellectual interests hover around hybrid texts—works that blur boundaries between fiction, poetry, the essay, visual poetry, and image; the politics of inscription and traditions of resistance to inscription; social memory and landscaped sites of memory; critical race theory and African-American literature; documentary art practices; eco-poetical concerns and the North American nature writing tradition; working people’s art expressions; gender and writing; and postcolonial theory.

Though I do not have advanced degrees in the visual arts and social sciences, I’ve taken graduate-level anthropology and sociology courses at the New School for Social Research, as well as drawing, painting, and sculpture classes at School of the Visual Arts and The City College.

In the mid 1980s, I became a student of Dr. Howard Thurman's writings and concepts that, then, influenced my search for personhood and spirituality. The areas of spirituality, meditation, gender and racial concerns, and nutrition have become central to my personal and professional life. I have studied holistic health, martial arts, Reiki, and other healing arts. I have an interest in African psychology, womanist theories, substance abuse, family and group therapy, ethics, holistic approaches, sports psychology, pastoral care and counseling, therapeutic rites of passage, social psychology and cultural competency.

I work as a Project Director with Family and Medical Counseling Service, Inc. in Washington, DC. This program is a Comprehensive HIV/AIDS Prevention Education Program called Project Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility). My program provides counseling and testing, resident and staff training and discharge planning for the D.C. Department of Corrections and Corporation of America/Central Treatment Facility. I am a consultant with the Progressive Life Center where I teach the NTU Psychotherapy Course: an African-centered approach to service delivery. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student in the psychology program at the Southern California University for Professional Studies.

Playwriting was my concentration at Goddard. I focused on plot, character development, dialogue, scene movement, and development of the dramatic arch.

The mentoring relationships between me and my faculty advisors were phenomenal. They were supportive and accessible through assignment packets, email and telephone. They encouraged my growth as a writer, introduced me to writing techniques that expanded my knowledge and enhanced my ability as a playwright and academic writer.

What I’ve gained from the residencies is a family/community of writers who share and encourage each other. The workshops at the residencies offer a wealth of exposure to learn the craft of writing in the various concentrations. At the residency students have the opportunity to read their work at student readings, and listen to faculty, as well as visiting writers, read their work. Other benefits are the workshops given by visiting writers. These are wonderful to attend and learn from professionals who are open to sharing their experiences.

My overall experience with Goddard is rewarding, because of the growth I’ve made as a writer and person. I have made lasting friendships during the residencies. The experience at Goddard is one of transformations. I entered Goddard with some confidence in my skills as a writer, and graduated with absolute confidence in my ability to be a professional writer.

Andrea Leebron-Clay is currently vice-president and partner in Regency Pacific, Inc., which provides senior residential services in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California and Hawaii. Trained as a Gerontological Nurse Specialist with additional credentials in physical rehabilitation, Ms. Clay has teamed with her husband, James, to focus Regency Pacific’s corporate culture on the maximization of human potential, whether for residents or employees. She has implemented innovative programs focused on physical and cognitive rehabilitation including participation with the National Institutes of Health in programs for prevention and treatment of incontinence. Projects recognized by the National League for Nursing include rapid physical assessment strategies and nursing algorhythms for accelerated rehabilitation of common geriatric diagnoses.

Leebron-Clay received an MFA in Creative Writing in 2002 and an MA in Sustainable Business & Communities in 2009 from Goddard College. 
 

Philanthropic activities include board memberships for Sustainable Connections, a local organization that serves as a national model for sustainable local living economies and  Project Education, an NGO co-founded by Leebron-Clay to foster sustainable communities and education in Kenya. The Clay Foundation and ClayforEarth are vehicles which also provide consulting and support for a wide variety of both animal welfare and sustainable development projects. When not otherwise engaged, Ms. Leebron-Clay creates documentaries to advance not-for-profit organizations.

The Clays have seven living children, ten grandchildren, and four very spoiled dogs that share space with the ever-present orphaned cats.

Suzanne Forsyth is nationally known in the field of human resources and organizational development.   She is a consultant, lecturer, and writer on workplace issues.  She is widely recognized for significant contributions to human resources and higher education as well as women’s programs.  She has served as President and Treasurer of the National Association for Women in Education; received the professional of the year award from the Human Resources Association of the National Capital Area (HRA-NCA); and served on the national advisory board of Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA-CREF).  She was featured in a book on outstanding human resources executives published by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.  She is Past President of the Human Resources Association of the National Capital Area, and serves on HRA-NCA’s Past Presidents Council.

During her tenure at the American Council on Education, she served as Executive Secretary of the Washington Higher Education Secretariat.  She developed a comprehensive health insurance program for the higher education associations under a Multiple Employer Trust. She developed and led an innovative human resources program with major accomplishments in areas of compensation, affirmative action, professional development, diversity initiatives and organizational development.  She served on the President’s leadership team for 17 years and made many speeches and presentations as part of the ACE Speaker’s Bureau.  She developed a community outreach program for the National Center for Higher Education that was recognized by the Points of Light Foundation. 

She has spoken before audiences such as the Society for Human Resource Management, the American Council on Education, the College and University Personnel Association, American Management Association, The Independent Sector, the American Society of Association Executives, the Association of College Unions International, National Association of College and University Business Officers, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

Ms. Forsyth’s consulting practice is in the areas of organizational planning, retreat facilitation, human resources program assessment and development, change management, compensation strategies, executive search and consultation, workplace communications, professional development programs, executive coaching, Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) training, outplacement counseling, and quality of workplace studies.

Ms. Forsyth served as Lay Leader at Foundry United Methodist Church and as Chair of the Church Council.  She led the church through a comprehensive strategic planning initiative.   She has served on the Board of Martha’s Table, a nonprofit organization serving the city’s homeless and poor.  She was a trustee at Goddard College and has served on the board of the Elsie Whitlow Stokes Community Freedom Public Charter School.  She is currently a member of the Board of the Community Council for the Homeless at Friendship Place and a member of the President’s Advisory Council at Wesley Theological Seminary.

At Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist Church she is a member of the Staff Parish Relations Committee, the Visioning Team and the Advocacy Team, and is currently Lay Leader.  She has served on the board of Palisades Village, an aging in place initiative for residents of Foxhall and Palisades in northwest Washington, DC.

From 1995 to 1999 she was adjunct faculty at The American University.

Her clients include Howard University, Ithaca College, Berklee College of Music, Eastern Michigan University, Cleveland State University, National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Council on Education, American Association of State Colleges and Universities, The Council of Graduate Schools, the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Association of American Medical Colleges, National Association of College and University Attorneys, Howard Community College, Academic Search Consultation Service, St. John’s Church, Lafayette Square. Public Education Network, Maryland Independent College and University Association, University of Montana, Wilson College, National Association of College and University Business Officers, Rollins College, Federal Trade Commission, National Research Council, Investment Company Institute, Jewish Social Services Agency, Berea College, Council on Social Work Education, Pace University, Texas Christian University, Villa Julie College, College of Southern Maryland, Ocean Technology Foundation, Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, Gallaudet University; Association of Governing Boards of Colleges and Universities, St. Timothy’s School,  Ohio University, Miami University of Ohio, American Political Science Association, Plan USA, Goddard College, Washington Tennis Association

Assignments include organization assessments and redesign at Cleveland State, Howard and Eastern Michigan Universities.  She developed a cohort professional development program for administrators at Ithaca College.  She has assisted the provosts at both Ithaca College and Rollins College with strategic planning efforts.  She has done organizational assessments for many of her clients; she assisted Texas Christian University with the development of a strategic approach to compensation.  She currently provides Gallaudet University with a cohort professional development program for managers.  Recently, she conducted a quality of work life study for the College of Southern Maryland.  She has served as faculty, AJCU Leadership Institute.

CERTIFICATIONS:

SPHR – Society for Human Resource Management

Diversity Trainer – Society for Human Resources Management

MBTI Trainer – CAPT

Executive Assessments – Center for Creative Leadership, including BENCHMARKS 360 degree assessment

President, Suzanne Forsyth Associates                                                            2000 Present

Vice President, Kaludis Consulting Group                                                 1997  - 2000

Director, Human Resources, American Council on Education                   1973  - 1997

Associate Dean of Students, Georgetown University                                  1970  - 1973

BS, Psychology, CCNY, Graduate Study in business, NYU

Georgetown University – Present, candidate for Master’s degree in Liberal Studies

Do call me Sowbel (rhymes with global), those who know me well do, and I expect after working together, we will indeed know each other well. If the spelling trips you up a bit, think in terms of “sowing wild oats”.
 
Not long ago, at a seminar run by one of my mentors, we were asked to introduce ourselves by sharing what we believed our work in the world to be—not our jobs mind you, not what our paychecks said was worthy activity, but what we believed we could and hoped to contribute to whatever we defined as the world. I loved this activity because we each pondered, then shared our deepest desires and visions for ourselves and our various communities.
 
My work is engaging, supporting, facilitating, motivating, challenging and sharing in the uncovering of new ideas, new capacities, new ways of perceiving, hidden fears, unexpected delights, and the fortitude for finding one’s way and one’s work in the world. The primary templates or archetypes that guide my actions are those of the artist, the thinker and the teacher but I believe the relational element of learning together also invokes the template of the traveler. And I love to travel (literally and metaphorically)—joining another’s jaunt into some unusual place of study can be as exciting as hopping a train to a new country.
 
Some of my “countries” of study and practice include: empathy, emotions, moral development, attachment theory, adult learning—theory and practice, learning styles, addictions, the function of fear in learning, HIV/AIDS, complementary and alternative healing practices (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, sound, herbs, shamanic traditions, visualization, metaphor, rhythm, guided imagery and music), public health (promotion, prevention, social marketing), psychology and counseling (individual and group), human services, conflict and mediation, , the psychology of dreaming, the construct of difference and the other, group facilitation, stress reduction, metaphor, tolerating paradox, women’s psychology, women’s health, humor, creativity and the senses, expressive arts, poetry, printmaking, painting, and drawing. Facilitating your work in any aspect of one of these “countries” or a combination of several would be a delight.
 
Some other “places” that might serve as locations for your inquiries, that I love and continue to visit but know in a bit less detail, include: social cognitive neuroscience, group relations,  diversity and authority, post-partum depression and psychosis, gender, sex ed, pre and post-verbal trauma, empirical aesthetics, kundalini yoga, siddha yoga, vipassana meditation, house building (from living in a community that designed and built an octagon house and individual shelters—I favored a, kind of upside down basket woven with sweet-smelling ferns), ham radio (N2QNA), rock-hounding and lore, Esperanto (universal languages), and organic gardening. Speaking of places, I was born and spent a good portion of my life straddling the Mason-Dixon line in the diverse city of Baltimore, MD. Baltimore is the home of the world’s largest ball of string, independent film-maker John Waters, The Collegians--an all accordion band that had its own TV show, the Hubble telescope, and marvelous poets and writers such as Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and A. K. Joyce. So Baltimore, with its many ethnic neighborhoods--part small town, part urban center--is a place of great seriousness and great silliness. As a result, I come well practiced in the shifting of perspective and the dialectics of difference. To my relatives in Wallace, North Carolina, we were northerners, to friends in Nashua, New Hampshire, we were southerners, and to affluent uncles in Brazil, we were poor but, inexplicably, had a refrigerator.
 
These shifts in perceptions and identities with their various implications, prepared me to bridge, balance and translate seemingly incompatible, opposing or unrelated disciplines and abilities. For example, I’m wild for the sciences (neuroscience, botany, endocrinology) and the arts. I’ve worked in both domains and I let each inform the other. I’m comfortable with formal, traditional education yet have experience as a learner and facilitator in unconventional and informal learning situations. I have experience working at, and have thought about, “jobs” (the low-wage positions we often leave off our resumes) and “professions” (the salaried positions that are given social value). I was brought up in a very conservative household and have worked in some very radical fields (for their time). I believe all aspects of who we are and what we experience, even those that seem in conflict, are ripe for discoveries. I value any setting and any study that allows as many, and hopefully all, of our parts to contribute to inquiries and goals we set for ourselves.

I had a dream in my early twenties. On a college campus, a group of teachers presented me with a book. Its pages were blank. One teacher let me know I was to fill the book; my learning would come through the process of creation.

I pondered this dream for years. In midlife I considered graduate school, but was put off by many of the advertised programs. Then, when information about Goddard arrived in the mail, my dream came flooding back to me. Come to Goddard the way you are, the college told me. Leave the way you want to be.

I attended a Discover Goddard event. The thought of going back to college in my fifties was a bit daunting--when the presenters explained that each student designs their course of study within a flexible structure, I knew this was the program I was looking for. 

Now the book in my dream is blank no longer. The feedback and guidance of my mentor/advisors helped me to recognize my strengths and passions--and with my fellow students, our diversity of age and background contributed to the richness of our shared enthusiasm.

I've formed personal and professional bonds at Goddard that I hope will last a lifetime. And I've developed a new career that once was just a dream.

An English teacher at Amherst (Mass.) Regional High School, Sara developed the nation's first full public high school course in gay and lesbian literature as her Goddard thesis project.

I had been teaching for a few years, and I wanted to do a low-residency master's in social-justice education. I wanted to determine my own course of study; I also didn't want to leave my job to go back to school. Goddard's program was the only one I found where you could start by doing a whole semester of research, then come up with a curriculum, and then put that into action. I said, "This is perfect!"

Once I clicked with the advisor who was right for me, it was amazing to be able to do all this independent work and have high-quality, one-on-one feedback. By the third semester I was field-testing the course at my high school. The next year my curriculum got approved as a full course offering.

Our course is reaching a diverse population--it attracts male students, students of color, students of all religions, and international students. And it's all thanks to that combination of getting a Goddard education and being able to put it into practice. For me, that was a magical combination.

BREAKING NEWS (1/17/13): DreamWorks Studios has acquired the manuscript to Matthew Quick’s latest novel, The Good Luck Of Right Now. It’s his follow-up to the Best Picture nominee Silver Linings Playbook and was bought by production president Holly Bario.

Big News for MFAW '07 alumnus Matthew Quick: Silver Linings Playbook movie receives 8 Oscar nominations! (1/10/2013)

Pictured at left: David O. Russell, Matthew Quick, Katie Couric, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro.

The film adaptation of graduate Matthew M. Quick’s debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) received 8 Oscar nominations today, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Bradley Cooper), Best Actress (Jennifer Lawrence), Best Supporting Actor (Robert DeNiro), Best Supporting Actress (Jacki Weaver), Best Director (David O. Russell), and Best Adapted Screenplay (David O. Russell).

"There is no doubt this will be a contender….[This is] a film that is worth every satisfying minute you spend with it." - IndieWire

Hailed as a riotous, poignant story, the novel was Quick's thesis when he was completing his MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. When Quick, a former teacher, decided to earn his MFA, his first choice of schools was Goddard College.

“I had heard a lot about MFA programs that produce nothing but highbrow, highly polished academic literary fiction that reads much like everything else that comes out of MFA programs,” says Matthew Quick.

“Goddard’s emphasis on diversity and individuality really appealed to me. I think the Goddard catch phrase at the time was ‘Come as you are, leave who you want to be.’ A lot of other programs I looked at were not really saying anything like that.

"As a former teacher I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted out of an MFA program: self-directed learning that would allow me to take risks and follow hunches, and a safe environment in which I could make the mistakes we all need to endure if we are going to learn.”

My early work as a painter and installation artist explored the decomposing carnival as an emblem of postindustrial New York City.  My imagery consisted of ferris wheels and junkies, fish being bathed in fire hydrant water, and the vanishing pastel colors of signs, bumper cars, and lights.  My work changed as I realized that my paintings were serving as backdrops --- for human behavior.  I wanted to emerge from the discreet relationship I was having with my “amusements” so my ideas could have more immediate contact with audiences – via performance.

The destitute amusement park was symbolic of the failed and dangerous city of my childhood.  The flicker of its dizzying lights was also a metaphor for slipping in and out of the identities I sought to comprehend.  For the last 20 years through performance I have been transforming the autobiographical and social histories that emerge from my biracial heritage. I have created a cast of characters that improvise in everyday social exchange, and perform for the stage.

My performances challenge conventional beliefs about race, sexual orientation, and gender in contemporary culture.  As my European Jewish “bubbie”, I recall the candy-coated pleasures of Coney Island’s. I wax poetic from a park bench about my migration from Virginia to Harlem when I perform as my African-American grandmother. I am camouflaged within disco-era fractured reflections and pass as Greek when I revisit my 16-year-old identity. My alternate avocation as Butch-in-the-Kitchen, enables me to operate a meal plan service that is funded by fraudulent food stamps.  In a torn tuxedo and teetering toupee, I perform as my grandfather, Uncle Bob, a ballroom dance teacher and social maestro from a well-battered 1960’s Borscht Belt mirage.  My personifications of gender and race are subverted through their differences as well as their common embodiment.  Simplistic conclusions about identity are undermined as one character transfigures into another.

In addition to performing as autobiographical characters, I reexamine a lexicon of images from popular entertainment and art that are expressive of my racial heritage.  As a “Borscht Belt” comedian, I deliver a barrage of deprecating “standbys” while re-inscribing this genre’s legacy of Jewish blackface minstrelsy. I eschew the minstrel’s burnt cork for a crimson mask that gets accrued by dunking my face bathing in a 25-gallon tub of borscht.

I also re-embody the Jewish performance artist Eleanor Antin, and reinvent the character of her fictive black ballerina, Eleanora Antinova.  I convert Antinova’s original evocation of Diaghilev’s revolutionary The Rite of Spring into a Detroit Rebellion that is envisioned with the Black Panther Party.  I replace Antin’s original cast of Diaghilev and Nijinsky on wheels with life-size puppets that I animate of Huey Newton and Stokeley Carmichael.  Antin, the white, Jewish straight artist who becomes black for this her ballerina role gets replaced by a white, Jewish, black, and butch lesbian.

The physicality with which I once painted has become transformed into the embodiment of personae. My earliest desire was to represent an antithesis to the artificiality of the amusement park’s candy-coating.  Through dislodging familiar codes of representation, my performances now reflect an optional discourse about identity; they produce an aesthetic of hybridity.  My own identity as a medium and a subject has created a wide and ever-growing range of characters.  My characters seek to rouse dialogue with other urbanites.  The stress, poignancy, bias, and joy that becomes reflected continues to enlarge the frame of my work.

I have performed at art spaces, galleries, festivals, and museums nationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts; The Jewish Museum (NY); Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum of Art; University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA); and Arizona State University Art Museum.  I have lecture at conferences and universities including the Open Engagement Conference (Portland, OR), Intervene! Interrupt! (UC Santa Cruz), Northwestern University, New School for Social Research, New York University, and Wayne State University.  I have been awarded grants and fellowships from the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Urban Artist Initiative, and Skowhegan School of Art.

I am delighted to be a returning MFAIA faculty advisor to Goddard where I taught at Plainfield from 2005-2007 and Port Townsend in 2010. My teaching experience also includes School of Art and Design at University of Michigan, School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Queens College (CUNY), York College (CUNY); and the Harvey Milk Institute of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies (San Francisco).

Saxophone player, composer, pianist, singer, politically committed poet, playwright, Archie Shepp is a legend.  Archie Shepp’s connection with Goddard began in 1955 when he enrolled as a pre-law major on a full scholarship. Soon after, Archie began to write plays and became a theater major. He graduated from Goddard with a Bachelor of Arts in 1959.

In 1965 he released his first album. Since then, he has released more than 60 albums and played on stages all over the world. Archie’s importance in the jazz canon is indisputable. He was a leader in the 1960s black jazz avant-garde, or free jazz, movement, and has played with the likes of John Coltrane and other jazz greats.

His music speaks to a generation that is not content with the status quo, in terms of music and social equality, and he continuously pushes the boundaries of jazz through experimentation and innovation.

Archie Shepp was also an educator for more than 30 years, heading the Black Studies Program at the State University of New York in Buffalo from 1969 to 1971, and teaching at the University of Massachusetts from 1971 to 2001.

Archie Shepp was born in 1937 in Fort Lauderdale in Florida.

He grew up in Philadelphia, studied piano and saxophone and attended high school in Germantown; he went to college, became involved with theatre, met writers and poets, among them, Leroy Jones and wrote: "The Communist," an allegorical play, later renamed "Junebug," about the situation of black Americans.

In the late fifties, Archie Shepp also met the most radical musicians of the time: Lee Morgan, Bobby Timmons, Jimmy Garrison, Ted Curson, Beaver Harris ... his political consciousness found an expression in plays and theatrical productions which barely allowed him to make a living. In the beginning sixties he met Cecil Taylor and did two recordings with him.

Shepp started his own independent label, Archieball, in order to maintain full artistic freedom, to support independent jazz creation and, most importantly, to promote young jazz talents.

Though both of my parents were teachers, I never imagined that I would become one. After studying biology as an undergraduate, I devoted the decade of the ‘90s to grassroots organizing for social and ecological justice, often in collaboration with community groups in other countries. During those years, I led several training programs for new organizers, but I never thought of that work as “teaching.” In the tradition of Paulo Freire, I was simply helping people discover what they already knew. I finally came to understand that’s what teaching is. In 2000 I shifted from full-time organizing to full-time writing and editing. I began teaching in 2006, while continuing to work as a writer and editor.

Just as social movements are born and come to fruition through small steps taken each day by regular people, so do works of literature and art. (That is to say, I’m an aficionado of the practice school of writing.) Fastening words to the page (or screen) is an essential part of every workshop or seminar I lead, just as it’s an essential part of a writer’s quotidian life. As a writing mentor, I bring a toolbox, both literal and metaphorical. It might include literature translated (or not translated) from a language you’ve never heard of; a connection to a writer or artist on the other side of the continent; or concepts borrowed from anthropology, biology, ecology, linguistics, or sociology. It might also include kitchen utensils; glue stick and scissors; postcards or advertisements; original works of art; bottled scents or raw vegetables; or items from a recycle bin, garden, toy box, or thrift shop. In writing workshop—whether our shared space is physical or virtual—I open the box, offer some tools, and we build things (good, bad, and most of all, instructive) together. 

I co-edited Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide (Penguin, 2007) with Mark Kramer. My book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) won the Grub Street National Book Prize for Nonfiction and the International Latino Book Award for Best History / Political Book. I’ve long been interested in photography and book arts; I’ve recently begun experimenting with audio; and I’m thrilled by the possibilities of digital books and online literature. I have studied these media at the Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, Jack Straw Productions, Penland School of Crafts, and elsewhere. My prose began firmly grounded in narrative, but it’s begun bending toward the lyric. Recently, I’ve been writing about indigenous-language literature in Mexico, grief and loss, our national park system, and my neighborhood. 

I have lived in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood since 2005, just a few blocks from Goddard’s Master’s in Education program. I moved the Columbia City for the same reasons that Goddard did. Having grown up on military bases in six states on all three coasts (Atlantic, Gulf, Pacific), I spent a childhood immersed in communities that were culturally, economically, and linguistically diverse. The first time I attended a school in which white people like me were a majority, as an undergraduate, it was a shock. That was not the America I knew.

I write (usually daily); I edit books (usually various shades of nonfiction); I translate poetry and short fiction (usually by indigenous Mexican writers); and I teach (usually in non-traditional settings). Always, no matter the practice or the place, each writer’s social engagement is paramount for me.
I look forward to collaborating with Goddard students to bring good, meaningful literature into being, to share it with a wider community, and to help one another discover what we already know.

In inner-city Cleveland, Mary Ellen Dale has created Dale House, a program that delivers life-changing therapy to teenagers entirely through the performing arts.

I was looking for a program to help me train for working with young people, and Goddard allowed me to choose what I wanted to learn. The program here gave me hands-on experience. You get caught up in it. Then I interned at a family clinic in Cleveland, where I was able to put in practice all I had learned.

I was working with teenagers—but many of my clients didn’t want to be there. I started asking them, “What do you want to do with your life?” And they started telling me. “ I want to be a writer, I want to be a singer, I want to be a dancer.” That’s how Dale House was born.

My whole premise is getting these kids on stage, because that’s where the real therapy comes in. We work all year for the summer community festivals—we dance, sing, read poetry. The children dig within themselves: they find their passion, and we build on that. Kids come to us from all over the city. Once we find the good, we bring it out.

Goddard allows you to use the talents you have, and come out with something you really love—to develop a passion. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure that was going to happen. But after I got started, it was beautiful.

I have been engaged in a rich and exciting career in the field of education for many years. A large part of my professional life was in New York City where I began as a third grade teacher in Spanish Harlem district 4. From there I moved on to higher education, where I taught English-as-a-Second Language, reading, and education methods courses . For the past ten years I have been a teacher educator at Central Connecticut State University.

As a constructivist I am respectful of student diversity and recognize the central role that individual and cultural experiences play in the learning process. However, I also believe that educators must be guided by theory, best practice, excellent interpersonal skills, enthusiasm, and a commitment to quality education underscored by the belief that we are all capable of learning. As an educator, I promote multiculturalism, quality in educational courses and programs, a forward-looking perspective, and always an emphasis on student-centered learning.

In my role as teacher and scholar, I believe teachers have the responsibility to nurture students’ understanding and celebrating of who they are both personally and culturally. Teachers must be willing and skilled in creating instructional contexts where culturally diverse learners can become active partners in the learning process. This implies that in order to teach effectively, teachers should learn about their students’  culture, background, and experience. The two book projects I have been part of Puerto Rico Past and Present: An Encyclopedia (1998) and Notable Caribbeans and Caribbean Americans (2003) propose to provide a resource for this to happen.