TLA Network Inaugural Awards: Vanita Leatherwood, Outstanding TLA Practitioner

November 25, 2023November 25, 2023 / Individual Poet / Leave a comment

Vanita Leatherwood exemplifies what life-saving difference one person can make. As the Director of Community Engagement at HopeWorks of Howard County – which provides support and advocacy for people affected by sexual and intimate partner violence – Vanita has founded TLA programs for survivor wellness, youth leadership, community self-care & social justice, and Dragonfly, an artsandtransformative justice magazine.

An award-winning poet with a MA in Transformative Language Arts from Goddard College, Vanita says, “The power of words led me to a place of safety, eventually to a place of joy, to that place within that I call the ‘YES.’ That’s part of what I wanted to create at HopeWorks – that’s what Dragonfly is; an opportunity to explore, learn, feel, connect, rebel and grow.”

We are honored to present our inaugural Outstanding TLA practitioner award to Vanita for her compassionate leadership, visionary program design, and community social justice programming, all of which she does with the heart of a poet and soul of a change-maker.

Here is a list of the programs Vanita has created:

Magazines (Founder/Editor): Dragonfly arts & transformative justice magazine and Cultivate youth arts magazine
Our Voice Project Monthly Support Groups: Preservation: Survivor Self-Care Circle, Reclamation: Adult Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse Support, and LOVED: Survivor Self-Care Circle for Black Women
One-on-One Self-care Sessions with Survivors: Poetry N2 Wellness
Newsletter: Journaling Our Voice
Speakers Bureau Training
The Survivors Health Project Monthly Groups: ARTiculation: Support & Education Group for Survivors Living with Chronic Health Conditions and Thriving Together: Survivors Mental Health Awareness & Wellbeing Group
Devised Theater, Creator & Producer: Telling This Truth at Slayton House Theater
Educational Curriculum (public programs): Over a dozen programs, including Self-care & Social Justice Events, Know My Name: Self-care and the Healing Journey for Black Women, The Organizational Equity and Inclusion Project, Ain’t I a Woman: Using the Arts & Humanities to Explore Oppression and Revolution, Unapologetic: Using Arts and Humanities to Explore Revolution and Oppression, and WOMEN-Global: Using the Arts & Humanities to Explore Oppression and Revolution

Outstanding TLA Practitioner: Vanita Leatherwood — presented by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg at the 2023 Power of Words conference.

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Dragonfly Magazine Call for Submissions: Dragonfly arts & transformative justice magazine is a publication of HopeWorks of Howard County Maryland. Themes for submitted work (visual, literary, and musical) should focus on reflections about activism, oppression, love, advocacy, hope, transformative justice, trauma, racial and gender equity, intersectionality, relationships, healing, or self-care. Writers/Musicians/Artists do not have to be survivors. Submissions accepted until Jan. 31, 2024. Find all the details here.

Find more about Hopeworks here and more about Vanita’s TLA business, The Yes Within here.

Poems as Catalysts and Seeds to Plant Change — By Tracie Nichols

April 4, 2023 / Individual Poet / Leave a comment

Tracie Nichols is offering “Listening With Our Bodies: Writing Toward Resilience” through TLAN April 19 – May 10. Register by April 10 and save 20%. Details here.

August of 2021 found me deep in the magic of “Future Casting,” an online class offered through the Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN) and facilitated by the astonishingly creative Caits Meissner. In the sixth and final week, Caits suggested we write a statement of poetics. For me, this was a very new and not entirely welcome idea. The following is what I wrote in response to that invitation. (Warning: this piece mentions violence and employs some salty language.)

For most of my life, whenever anyone asked me to summarize myself or my art I panicked, froze, then fled, usually leaving a comet tail of epithets. If cornered, I deflected. “Want to know me?” I’d hiss, “Go read my poems. They’re scraped from the inner walls of my ascending aorta.” Similarly, questions about my writing process often ran into a big old slammed door of “none of your damn business.”

I always thought it was because I’m an introvert with a bit of social anxiety. Lately, though, I’m coming to understand that it’s because writing poetry is how I wrote myself back into a breathing presence in my own mind and trying to codify that feels like I risk diminishing its creative, sustaining, power. Sharing my purpose and process as a poet feels x-ray intimate.

When I was a child, I was in so much pain—so deeply psychically displaced—it seemed I was only holding on to this world by a forefinger and thumb. My seventh grade art teacher tossed me a rope when he asked our class to write a poem in response to an art film of stampeding wild horses. There were foals in that snorting, screaming, rampaging mess. I recognized their terror and out-of-control turmoil. I felt it in my body and then streamed those messy, shouting word-feelings onto the pages of my tidy school notebook. And that, as they say, is where it all started.

I continued writing poetry to locate myself in myself and in the world, to imagine a place where I belonged, to make a space for myself that made sense despite nearly nothing around me doing so. The process of writing poetry—at least the way I interpreted it—let me circumvent my indoctrinated, gas-lit mind and write what my body felt, noticed, and perceived. I could write about the tall white pine tree and how I first, finally, felt real belonging when wrapped in their branches, listening to the wind.

I write because words and images live in my bones and itch. I write so those words detach their atoms from my marrow and coalesce themselves into poems. I write because my arms ache from holding the unflinching truth of violence in one hand and the equally unflinching truth of compassion in the other. I write to make sense of violence: the large and small violences we impose on each other, the cuts and digs we carve into ourselves, the narrow, restrictive, suffocating norms a culture inflicts on its members, the ongoing rape of this planet. I write to find respite in everyday moments of connection and the steady reliability of natural rhythms—small, quiet things like morning following night. I write because my body is etched with violence and betrayal and understands how finding respite in small, everyday beauties helps survival turn the corner into living.

In the beginning, I wrote so I could know I existed. These days, I write because I hold the truth of both violence and compassion in my body and I know there are people who need to hear that is possible. I write because I have lived sixty years of life in the face of a beginning that should have ended me and there are people who need to know that’s possible, too. I write poems to be catalysts. I offer them as seeds. I hope they plant change.

Tracie Nichols is a Transformative Language Artist writing poetry and facilitating writing experiences from under two old Sycamore trees in southeastern Pennsylvania. She is the Co-founder of two writing groups, as well as a board member and newsletter editor for the Transformative Language Arts Network. Putting her master’s degree in Transformative Learning and Change to good use over the past two decades, Tracie has designed and facilitated many virtual and in-person lifelong learning experiences on a truly wide range of topics for small groups. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Rogue Agent and Text Power Telling as well as two anthologies. You can connect with her at https://tracienichols.com/.

Changing Myself with Words: A guest post by TLAF Certificate Graduate Sharon Bippus

October 11, 2022October 11, 2022 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Editor’s note: Sharon is a graduate of the Transformative Language Arts Foundations Certificate program. This blog post is one of five reflection posts she submitted as part of the certificate requirements.

As an adult, I know I can rewrite my story.

Changing the World with Words is one of the required courses [to be offered again in 2023] in the Transformative Language Arts Foundations certification program. In my opinion, it brings to mind the famous quotation erroneously attributed to Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Apparently, this is actually a paraphrase of a longer idea that Gandhi expressed:

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.

In this vein, I wonder if a better name for the TLAN course would be “Changing Myself with Words.” It seems a slightly easier place to begin before I actually tackle the reformation of the entire world.

In an interview I heard last year, the Irish poet Padraig O’Tuama discussed the healing effects of writing poetry to a younger version of himself who had undergone a severe trauma. He stated:

There’s something so redeeming for me all these years later to be able to speak that poem back to that frightened 18-year-old…somehow eventually to have recovered the capacity to be able to say something back. It doesn’t undo it, but it’s enough. I can somehow feel like I’m able to have a conversation between the me then and the me now. That is enough, and I can examine it.

Like O’Tuama, I have the ability to use my words to examine my past. Through my words, I have the power to write my own narrative and develop a new story for myself. For me, that change in perspective began after attending the first day of Changing the World with Words. When we met on Zoom, we were given five sentence stems to use as we introduced ourselves to our new classmates. One of the prompts seemed innocent enough:

When I was a kid, I wanted to be…

From my perspective, the other participants must have spent a few enjoyable minutes reminiscing about their favorite childhood memories and games – playing dress up, playing with imaginary friends, playing outside with the neighborhood kids – because the answers they shared were exciting and diverse. One wanted to be a dentist, another a potter. There was a teacher, a welder, and an actress. Most people listed multiple future professions and abilities – so many choices that revealed great imagination and inspiration.

My response was, “When I was a kid, I didn’t know what I wanted to be.”

I was embarrassed when I read that sentence aloud. I was the only one in the group without a dream or an imagination. What did I do as a child? I read. I watched TV. I drew pictures and floorplans. In middle school, I took sewing lessons in Home Ec. But most of all, I kept to myself. I had learned at a young age that to reveal any personal information was to open myself to ridicule. Today, as I look at the list of the activities I enjoyed as a young person, I realize that I could have fantasized about being a writer, an actress, an artist, an architect, or a fashion designer, but I don’t recall ever having those thoughts. It’s hard to imagine a future when you’re busy simply surviving each day.

Now, as an adult, I know that I can rewrite my story. I can acknowledge what that little girl wanted to be. She wanted to be held in a warm embrace. She wanted to be encouraged. She wanted to be seen and heard. She wanted to feel valued and accepted. She wanted to know that someone supported her.

She wanted to hear the words “I love you.”

I can’t change the past, but I can use my words to reassure that little girl. I can offer that innocent child-that-I-was compassion and tenderness. I can use my words to work through issues and to achieve clarity, and in turn, the woman that I am now can dream of changing the world one day.

Sharon Bippus, PhD, is an ESOL (English to Speakers of Other Languages) instructor who finds inspiration in the intersection of creativity, mystery, and synchronicity. As an undergraduate, she was awarded two scholarships to study in Germany which fueled her desire to learn more about the diverse world we live in. Since that time, she has taught English in Slovakia and China and was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Western Russia. She currently teaches ESOL at a community college in the suburbs of Houston, Texas where she works with students from all over the world. In her free time, she enjoys mixed media, collage, and photography and has received training in trauma-informed expressive arts and nature-based therapeutic practices. She is a SoulCollage® facilitator, a Veriditas-trained labyrinth facilitator, and a student in the Haden Institute’s Dream Work Program.

Photo: Pixabay

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Healing, One Letter at a Time: A guest post by TLAF Certificate student Sharon Bippus

September 12, 2022October 11, 2022 / Joanna Tebbs Young / Leave a comment

Editor’s note: Sharon is a student in the Transformative Language Arts Foundations Certificate program. This blog post is one of five reflection posts she will be submitting as part of the certificate requirements.

I have always loved children’s literature – the illustrations, the simplicity of the language, the uplifting stories. So imagine my surprise when I was triggered by a picture book as I was browsing in a bookstore in my hometown of Houston, Texas in the fall of 2018. I was still carrying that anger when I sat down at a restaurant a short time later. As I waited for my food, I wrote the following on Facebook:

I went to Barnes and Noble this afternoon, and I saw a new children’s picture book called H is for Harvey. It contains sentences such as “H is for hurricane blah, blah, blah” and “H is for hope blah, blah, blah.” The very last sentence is “H is for happy.” Apparently, the home of the author of this book didn’t flood and has her happy, normal life back. How nice! So I’m going to write my own Hurricane Harvey book. It’s called P is for Post-Traumatic Stress. I was playing with that idea as I went across the street to have linner (too late for lunch, too early for dinner) at La Madeleine. When the cashier gave me the “P” spoon, I knew it was a sign! I’ll be posting the story in the comments below…

While not appropriate for a children’s book, what followed was an outpouring of my grief, anger, and confusion.

P is for panic, what you feel when you know for certain that your house is going to flood.
P is for patience, something that you lose.
P is for privacy, something else that you lose.
P is for pain, something that you feel a lot of.
P is for psychiatric, the kind of help you need now.
P is for puppy, like the one who lives in #187 and was able to enter #190 and pee on the floor because we no longer have any walls dividing us.
P is for paper plates, what you have to use because all of your dishes are packed away.
P is for pessimism because it’s been over a year and your house still hasn’t been repaired.
P is for property value, something that has gone down about 35%.
P is for plummet, what happens to your energy level.
P is for pregnant because one of my former students had a baby since Harvey. He and his wife actually produced a living, breathing human being faster than my house could be repaired.
P is for pray, the only thing I can do at this point.

Now I am writing the sequel to this story. It is mid-August of 2022, and the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Harvey is approaching. I’ve been thinking about how to commemorate this event that turned my life upside down on August 29, 2017, and I realize that now I can find comfort in the letter “C.” The book I would write today is called C is for Complex PTSD.

While there are similarities, Complex PTSD differs from PTSD. A simple definition is that Complex PTSD refers to an accumulation of traumatic events that usually occurs in childhood whereas PTSD is the result of a single event. What I didn’t understand at the time is that I was reliving the emotional trauma of my childhood through the events that surrounded Hurricane Harvey.

With this knowledge, I am writing a new story:

C is for clarity, what I have gained since learning about Complex PTSD.
C is for cathartic, the releasing of grief through the infinite number of tears I have cried.
C is for compassion, what I need to give to my inner child.
C is for curiosity, the ability to stay open and continue learning.
C is for consistently, the way I need to show up for myself day after day.
C is for my creative practice, one of the ways that I heal.
C is for change, what I am doing with my life and my outlook.
C is for connection, the healing relationships I forge with people, nature, and myself.
C is for care, specifically self-care, actively taking steps that contribute to my well-being.
C is for calm, what happens after the storm passes.
C is for the courage to heal myself.
C is for the commitment to live my best life.

C is also for closure which I will commence by returning to the letter “P.” This particular “P” was a gift from a friend who added it to my Facebook post back in 2018:

P is for permission, permission to own my feelings and permission to express myself.

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Finding What’s Underneath “I’m Fine,” a guest post by Sinclaire Dickinson

April 27, 2022 / Joanna Tebbs Young / 1 Comment

I recently led a TLA-inspired workshop at a yoga studio where I guided participants in a movement practice and prompted them to write about how they felt afterward. I’ve been a student of somatic movement and embodiment for a few years and have had powerful shifts in my way of being after certain practices. While you can feel the shifts, they can be hard to articulate.

In hosting this workshop, I sought to help people capture what arose in their bodies during one of these practices. I planned movement focused inward (interoception) followed by movement focused outward (exteroception) and was curious to see if descriptive words would flow out of people when asked to journal after moving using stems like “My body feels…, my breath is…”.

I discovered that the words may bubble up, or they may stall entirely; it depends how concerned the mover is with getting them just right, as labeling our internal experience with truly representative words can be tricky. Having words flow out can be lovely, but sometimes it’s a slow process to get to a more honest representation of your state—positive or negative.

During our discussion period in the workshop, a couple of the participants expressed having some difficulty and even hesitance in labeling what they were feeling. The labels felt definite and they questioned if they were completely accurate. I appreciate that; words can fall short of our human spectrum of emotions. Still, putting internal experience on paper, crossing things out, workshopping, and finding better words, did bring some insights.

When one student, Erin, first scanned herself, she self-reported to be “fine.” I’m fine, I’m here, I’m not really anything. When she was invited to elaborate with more words, she discovered that what she was experiencing was actually a bit more positive.

My body has a gentle warmth, my mind has no apparent presence of stress, I’m kind of relaxed. She wondered if this might be an appropriate use for the word “happy.”

Erin decided yes, she was happy. Not only was she willing to assign happiness to that moment, she realized there were probably many more times within her life where she checks in as “fine” when she might instead use “happy.”

“How are you?”
“I’m fine.”

With such a spectrum of emotions and words at our disposal, think of how often we assign ourselves “fine” and close off to more nuanced possibilities. What if instead, we open ourselves up a bit more with our words? Even if we don’t find ourselves to be “happy,” we could likely learn more about our own experience than what “fine” will teach us.

I plan to challenge myself and my participants to play with their own labels, not fearing their permanence or precision, but trying them on and seeing what it feels like to embody them. In the same way that donning a smile improves your mood, can donning “energized” reinvigorate you in a mid-day slump?

I approached this workshop curious about how movement would guide diction, but now I’m equally interested in diction’s power to guide movement and experience. It’s a feedback loop that goes both ways.

Thank you to Erin for voicing what I’m calling what’s underneath fine. May we all lift up that dull gray rock and peek under a bit more often.

*Erin’s name has been changed.

Sinclaire Dickinson is a yoga instructor, humane education student, and exploratory communicator from a marketing background. In her writing and studies, she focuses on how we might address problems in the environment, human rights, and animal welfare by becoming more conscious of our daily experiences and cultural norms. Connect with her at https://www.linkedin.com/in/sinclaire-dickinson-3a134557/.

Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

New Scholarship Fund Supports Access to Conferences and Classes.

November 11, 2021November 11, 2021 / tlancoordinator / Leave a comment

The Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund was established in the fall of 2021 to honor the founder of the transformative language arts and the TLA Network. The Fund provides Power of Words Conference and TLA Network classes support for both BIPOC people and people who are living with serious illness and/or disabilities.

The following remarks by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg were made at the TLA Network’s online Power of Words Conference, on October 30, 2021.

I am so honored by this fund in my name, which will provide scholarships for people of color, people living with serious illness, and people with disabilities.

Why these communities, all of whom are negatively impacted in our problematic world:

As a survivor of both a very common cancer and a very rare cancer, and as someone who’s had the joy and education of facilitating writing workshops for 18 years for people living with serious illness – patients, survivors, caregivers, and community members, I know first-hand how essential is to to have supported spaces for big writing and witnessing.

I’ve also been involved with disabilities rights and communities through my husband’s work for 30 years as an occupational therapist and activist working with people living with disabilities.

Both people living with serious illness and disabilities, which sometimes go hand-in-hand, are so often limited in accessing workshops and conferences like what TLAN offers, and not just by a lack of wheelchair ramps. The isolation and pain, overwhelm and fear we face in such situations can make us feel so alone with our pain, dread, anxiety, difference.

We are missing such important voices at the table, ones that have so much to teach us about resilience in real-time, what it means to age and change, and how to grapple more directly with being humans who are mortal. Scholarships can help us bring life-giving creativity and community into people’s homes through their laptops.

Black, brown Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other marginalized people of color have too often and so extensively, to the detriment of all of us, been silenced or had their voices abused. My more personal connection is that I live in the home of Haskell Indian Nations University and the ghosts land burial ground where so many children died when it was a boarding school. I’ve also witnessed many people’s stories through teaching at Haskell and facilitating workshops for many years with Indigenous women.

When we started the POW conference, we began with a commitment to continually work on undoing racism and inviting many more voices to the table, or even forgetting the old table and making a new one. From our first conference, we had scholarships for POC, a determination to bring in keynoters from unrepresented communities, and outreach to communities of color. Most arts-based organizations like ours are primarily white and although we’ve come a long way, we have so so so long to go.

Removing financial barriers where and when needed is part of this work, and it also helps foster new leadership and a more attuned vision to how TLA can bring voices previously ignored or debased into our civic conversations.

In 2014, we were able to bring close to a dozen people living with serious illness and disabilities to the POW conference to share their stories and truths. A year later, we brought 15 young people of color, all in the foster care system, to the conference. How wonderful it would be to have scholarship funds available for people who want to attend Angie Ebba’s superb upcoming TLAN class, “Not Enough Spoons: Writing About Disabilities and Chronic Illness” and to next year, have even more black and brown faces, people undergoing heavy cancer treatment or navigating disabilities in an ableist world at this conference.

Please consider giving what you can give to make our offerings more accessible to others. Please help create this new table where we can all come and speak our lives and visions.

Contribute to the Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg Fund here.

All funds will be processed through the TLA Network’s fiscal sponsor, The Foundation for Delaware County. When contributing via FDC, make sure to note your donation is made “in honor of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg.”

Spotlight on the Keynote: Lyla June Johnston

October 5, 2021 / tlancoordinator / Leave a comment

Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous public speaker, artist, scholar and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages from Taos, New Mexico.

Her personal mission is to grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper and to support and empower indigenous youth. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship practices and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.

Lyla June blends undergraduate studies in human ecology at Stanford University, graduate work in Native American Pedagogy at the University of New Mexico, and the indigenous worldview she grew up with to inform her perspectives and solutions. Her internationally acclaimed presentations are conveyed through the medium of poetry, music and/or speech. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in Indigenous Studies with a focus on Indigenous Food Systems Revitalization.

Along with U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, poets Caits Meissner and Javier Zamora, Lyla June will keynote the TLA Network’s Power of Words Conference, to be held online October 28-31, 2021.

Meet the teacher: Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams

October 22, 2020 / tlancoordinator / 1 Comment

Who is Yvette Angelique? Yes, you have niceties in the bio, but who I am is a more profound question.

I am first an artist. I always have been since a little girl playing the organ, then guitar, songwriting, letter writing, poetry, and essay. As I grew professionally in and out of my artwork, I became a strong facilitator of groups and a trainer. This path led me toward all sorts of incredible corporate and community work.

… I always wanted … to live an interdisciplinary life at the intersection of art, activism, and teaching.
Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams

But what I always wanted was to live an interdisciplinary life at the intersection of art, activism, and teaching. I’ve achieved that sweet spot and wish to share my path with others who are thinking about who they are as an artist, how they engage in uplifting their communities, and how they pass on their skill and talent so that others can grow and thrive.

What is your passion? I have a few! One of my passions is to disrupt the starving artist narrative. As a TLA practitioner, I work on my art, activism, and educate/coach others in a one-on-one capacity, as a facilitator of teams, and as a teaching artist with womxn and girls.

There is enough work in the world for all of us.
YVETTE ANGELIQUE HYATER-ADAMS

I am clear what I run as a business is a social arts practice where my time creating new art and engaging with others on social justice issues is healing, creative, and transformational. There is enough work in the world for all of us.

What are your most recent projects? For many of us, this year has been a source of disruption and anxiety-making time. And when space and time wrinkles in this way, it pushes us (and me) into expanding creativity to see what else is possible. Right before the pandemic began to peak in March, I had completed an EP digital chapbook, Something Old, New, Borrowed, and The Blues. It was a fantastic creative project where I blended old and new poems and invested in professional recording time to deliver the product. I was invited by the University of North Florida’s Creative Writing Program to be a guest artist for 2020 on their Eat Poems platform www.eatwords.net. The EP is available for listening on the Eat Poems site and can be purchased via iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.

Last fall, I enjoyed an art residency with Joy Harjo, our U.S. Poet Laureate, as an associate artist. I learned SO much in the small community of poets and the broader community of musicians, theater, dance, and visual artists. The time was freeing and intense. I came back home mid-November and started to work on the digital EP.

Another goodie I started last year and picked up again this year is facilitating girls in the juvenile justice system to write and tell their stories. After writing their stories, they perform them as monologues or like “Ted Talks.” They perform their stories for an audience of leaders in the community who touch their lives: law enforcement, state’s attorney, detention center personnel, social workers, advocates, etc. Through their storytelling, they have been able to make an impact by expanding the mindset of the realities of their experiences and influencing changes in policies and practices. Last year, several state attorney office rules changed to reduce harm due to the girls’ work.

What is essential to know is that the work of healing and transformation is real work where TLAers can earn a living.
YVETTE ANGELIQUE HYATER-ADAMS

What excites you about teaching this class? I am excited to work with folx who are artists, facilitators, community organizers, and cultural workers interested in using their art to engage in community healing and transformation. What is essential to know is that the work of healing and transformation is real work where TLAers can earn a living. I refer to this work as a social arts practice. Use the time spent in this class to take a more in-depth look at what you offer and ways to strengthen your practice earning potential. Unpacking your skills, focusing on who you serve, understanding needs and what you offer—these are the key components to developing your social arts practice into a viable business.

Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams’ latest class for the TLA Network, “Leverage Your Expertise as a Social Arts Practice, for Community Engagement, & Radical Livelihood,” begins November 4.

Yvette Angelique Hyater-Adams, MA-TLA, is the Principal and Chief Storytelling Officer at Narratives for Change. Yvette Angelique is a poet, teaching artist, and proven culture change strategist. Yvette’s recent artistic work includes: a digital poetry chapbook book, Something Old, New, Borrowed, and The Blues; a poetry chapbook, Shut Eyes See; and storytelling performances–See the Girl Monologues, and Europa: Zora Neale Hurston, Carlos Santana, and Me. Her poems appear in journals and anthologies, and her essays and book chapters contribute to the discourse on transformative language arts for personal and social change. Yvette teaches creative writing and storytelling to heal, create literary art, for consciousness-raising and advocacy. She is on the editorial board for the international publication Practising Social Change. She is Chair of the Board of Directors for Alternate Roots, a longtime organization for Southern artists and cultural workers.

How Pictures Heal: Honoring Memory and Loss Through Expressive Writing from Personal Photos, by Kelly DuMar

September 11, 2020September 9, 2020 / tlancoordinator / Leave a comment

We all take, save and inherit photographs of the people, places and things that bring meaning, mystery, hope and connection into our lives. In my upcoming webinar for the TLA Network, “How Pictures Heal,” these treasured personal archives will be the bridge to writing as a means of restoring meaning, purpose, hope and resilience during and after loss. (Learn more about the class here.)

The first thing I invite participants to do is to choose a photo of yourself to write from. Any photo, from any time in your life. It’s best to trust your instincts, and choose a photo that arrests your attention and seems to be whispering – it has a deeper story to tell.

Here’s what happened for Grace, a recent participant in one of my workshops, when I invited her to step into the three-dimensional world of her photo – in her own words:

When I was asked to find a picture to write about, I went to the one that I felt more sorrow, the picture that I look at, and wished I could go back to and stop time. There were so many questions, I just saw three cute kids, kind of looking like triplets, the way we looked so much alike.

I chose it not knowing how much the writing would come to life, I went back to that five-year-old who was plucked from her tropical safety net in Costa Rica, to come to America, where the cold hit me from my nose to the bottom of my terracotta soles. I am answering the questions that kept me in that time-warp of sadness. Today, opening up my mind and remembering things I thought were lost in a bottomless pit, the phoenix is rising, and the void of my past and memories of light not darkness are helping me stop, smell, and feel the sunshine that disappeared the night the plane landed in Logan Airport.

Grace’s 1965 passport photo, Costa Rica (Grace is on the far left).

Grace initially wrote what I call the “raw material,” from her photo, by answering question prompts I offer. Then, she continued developing the memory and her writing, and eventually composed a short personal memory piece, “Passport to Snow (1965).” Below are some excerpts from her photo-inspired memoir vignette (shared with permission of the author):

Grace – Always know, that if you keep both feet on the ground everything is going to be all right. ~ Tia Flori

In Costa Rica, where I was born, we run without shoes. We run around in the dirt, but we are always clean. Jabon. Soap. Smell of clean. A nice, shiny black soap with a scent I cannot get out of my system. Sweet, the smell of my grandmother.

I love to wiggle under my grandmother’s porch to eat the chalky dirt. I crave the gritty taste. Light brown to a red, like a spoonful of cinnamon. Me and my sister, Iris, are under the porch, eating dirt. The dirt is moist, like moss.

I am always in trouble…

At five, I feel my feet suddenly stepping into the unknown. I am being led by the hand, by my cousin Gloria, and my grandmother, to stand on a blank, white, piece of paper. What am I putting my feet on this paper for? The cobbler is drawing my feet with his pencil. First the paper was blank. Now I see the imprint of both my feet, left and right.

A few weeks pass, and a beautiful pair of ankle high shoes arrive. First, I smell the fresh paper they are wrapped in. Then I inhale the aroma of new leather. The white patent leather shines bright like the Costa Rican sun. The shoes are sturdy and strong: white with laces, with a terra cotta sole.

I have never had shoes as special as these made for me before. My mother and father are in a place called Sudbury in a state called Massachusetts, in the United States. They tell my grandmother, make sure the children get some shoes, because it’s winter here.

Who Should take this class? How Pictures Heal: Expressive Writing from Personal Photos, with Kelly DuMar
 TLA practitioners at all levels of experience
 Anyone interested in personal and artistic development
 Professionals and para-professionals who work with memory challenged seniors
 Family members of those suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s, and caretakers of those with memory challenges, will find dynamic creative outlets for personal and professional development
 Writers and artists with an interest in exploring the healing aspects of personal photos.

We’ll create a safe and supportive environment, offering respectful support that inspires the development of every writer’s voice. I look forward to working with you!

Kelly DuMar, M.Ed. is a poet, playwright, and engaging workshop leader who generates enlivening writing experiences for new and experienced writers. Her photo-inspired creative writing method elicits profound personal awakenings, deepens connection with others, and fosters beautifully crafted writing in poetry and prose. Author of three poetry collections, girl in tree bark, Tree of the Apple, and All These Cures, Kelly is also author of Before You Forget— The Wisdom of Writing Diaries for Your Children. Kelly’s award winning plays have been produced around the US and Canada, and are published by dramatic publishers. Kelly is a certified psychodramatist, former psychotherapist, and Fellow in the American Society for Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. She founded Let’s Talk TLA, a bi-monthly tele-conference and poetry open mic for members of the Transformative Language Arts Association. Currently, Kelly serves on the board & faculty of The International Women’s Writing Guild. Kelly inspires readers of #NewThisDay – her daily photo-inspired blog – with her mindful reflections on a writing life. You can learn more about Kelly at www.kellydumar.com

Transformative Language Arts Network Blog

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Changing Myself with Words: A guest post by TLAF Certificate Graduate Sharon Bippus

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Finding What’s Underneath “I’m Fine,” a guest post by Sinclaire Dickinson

Spotlight on the Keynote: Lyla June Johnston

How Pictures Heal: Honoring Memory and Loss Through Expressive Writing from Personal Photos, by Kelly DuMar

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