After Giving a Talk in a University Classroom, I’m wondering. . .
Founder’s Blog #5
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

In last week’s blog, I anticipated a visit to a class in Domestic Violence – an opportunity to reflect with others on how the creation of spaces to evoke the tenderness of truth does effect sustained peace. I was prepared to examine how the effort to prevent violence against women and children does support women’s voices, their senses of selves, their refusal to further submit themselves or their children to violent partners.

Why did I not anticipate (you would think I would be prepared by now) the unconscious ways in which that space devalued my experience rather than a statistic-drenched voice?

I know classrooms, feel at home in them, know it is not the concrete block walls, the airlessness, the unwieldy tables and chairs which facilitate disengagement.
So, it’s not a question of interior design, though surely, surely we can do better than classrooms which resemble factories.

What facilitates engagement is the presence of a welcoming consciousness I call leadership, conscious feminine leadership. (Men can lead this way too, and some women don’t!) In my working-class family, where I learned most of what I know about leading and failing to lead, it was called good manners.

So, yes, I was perplexed by the professor’s reluctance to honor my request to have students sit in a circle: too much trouble, got to put them back, who’s going to do it?
Amanda, who invited me, jumped in to lead the students to a re-arrangement, made sure the chairs were replace at the end. And how hard was that?

Perplexity gave way to dismay when the professor did not join the circle, sat behind it / us working at his computer, now and again listening in, once asking a question. When he walked out while I was talking I was REALLY amazed. I stopped, noted to the students the power of reflecting on what is happening in the moment, sometimes called the elephant in the room. Hmm, I’m sitting here wondering why your teacher walked out of the classroom. (Silence, shock, smiles, fear.) I only felt a little silly when he returned a few minutes later, realizing he’d likely gone to the restroom, but still. . . His lack of listening, lack of engagement signaled to me–and to his students—lack of value in my voice, my presence.

I truly, truly believe there was no animus there, no design to rudeness, yet I wonder how to read the lack of engagement? I was invited by a student—with the teacher’s permission of course—-but does that mean I was of less value?

It is fashionable theses days to lift up the value of stories, but I don’t see much beyond buzz coming out of that. I don’t experience grant proposals, or classrooms, or boardrooms, as being hospitable to stories or to experience, unless it can be counted or quantified. Never enough time; never enough space, never enough money to listen to and to tell stories.

So, we do more research, commission another study, publish another scholarly book,
invite another expert from out of town to lecture several thousand people who go home largely unchanged, or changed by not knowing how to connect the change to action.

Voice-ViolenceFounder’s Blog #4
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

It is early morning, though lighter than it was last Monday at the same time because of the “falling back” of the clock. I am sitting at my desk pondering a talk I’ve been invited to give in a Domestic Violence class at Northern Kentucky University.

Invited by a young woman who is a student in the class, I am to talk about what I know about the relationship between women’s voices and domestic violence. Many, many thoughts flood my mind; many, many feelings flood my heart as I sit with this topic.

What comes to me first is a recent visit with my seventy-eight-year-old cousin, Jim. A victim of small and large strokes over the past few years, Jim can no longer connect words with meanings. My brother, Keith, cousin Zella and I sit with Jim in the social room of the assisted care facility where he lives. Jim’s voice is barely audible, and to make matters more difficult, a big screen TV no one is watching is tuned to Very Loud. Keith, Zella and I huddle around Jim; his lips are moving, low word-like sounds are emerging. I think I catch the word, “Shelby.”

“He’s asking how’s Shelby,” I tell my brother. This may be a clue that Jim knows us, as Shelby is Keith’s daughter, my niece. The effort to connect is enormous as is Jim’s anguish as he tries to reach us; our anguish as we try to receive him is also intense.

I do the unthinkable –ask the gossiping aide if she will turn the TV off, as no one is watching it, and our cousin is having a hard time making himself heard. Without a word, she aims the remote towards the television and lowers the volume a few notches–very few. I want to slap her. What provokes my desire for violence is not that she refused my request to turn the TV off. Rather it was her refusal to connect to me as a human being, to hear my voice, my story, to acknowledge my humanity,

Voice. Connection. Violence. Disconnection.

I want to ask the students in the Domestic Violence class to consider–no, to feel in their bodies– the desire to connect and how the voice is critical to bringing what is INSIDE (feelings, needs, names for things, names for self) OUTSIDE.

I want to ask them to feel, to remember on the pulses how it is to be not heard, misheard, silenced. Thinking of the unvoiced in their lives, the longings and feelings not given to words. To remember the joyful burbling of babies when they are safe, when their inchoate sounds are welcomed and responded to by loving adults. To remember the fury – the voices of babies whose needs are frustrated by their lack of words for things, by overwhelmed and exhausted parents.

Here is today’s list of what I think I’ve learned from creating places where the voices of women and girls are welcomed into space.

1. We must intentionally create places which do not replicate the shapes of command and control rooms: board rooms with lecterns, lecture halls for the masses, pulpit frowning down on rigid rows of pews; face-the-back-of-your-neighbor’s-head rooms where dominance is practiced in all its subtle and not-so-subtle ways: debate and gotcha critique, sound-bites, counting the numbers of angels on a pinhead, legalisms and evasions, rhetoric and high levels of abstraction disconnected from stories. (I fantasized violence in my frustration at Michael Mukasey’s inability to answer directly whether water-boarding meets his definition of torture. How have we devolved to the point at which we’re not so sure this “rises to the definition of torture,” without understanding that if our leaders don’t call it torture, they are supporting its use?!)

2. Places – in which things are given the truth of their names by the people who have had the experiences – are round; they are reverent; they have at their center the desire for healing. I call these places we construct, at and through Women Writing for (a) Change, ones which have “The Acoustics of Intimacy.”
They are womanned by teachers, not lecture-type teachers, charismatic “Dead Poets Society” type teachers, but teachers / modelers / fierce guardians of a new paradigm of laying stories down like so many quilt pieces, and fashioning meanings, policies, strategies from what – in all its complexity – is actually happening in the lives of as many people as you can get around the circle. I am so frustrated by places which are said to be about making the world safer for women, which replicate the shapes and techniques of what causes the violence: experts who lecture, people in suits who jockey for power, fight with one another for the “funding to create programs.”
I’m reminded of the late Audre Lorde’s dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” She also wrote, brilliantly that “If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.”

3. It is not enough. And yet: try to get funding or acknowledgement, respect, a fair hearing for the creation of places such as I have described in battered women’s shelters, in classrooms, board rooms, think tanks, and – if you are lucky – someone will pick up the remote control and make a grudging, insultingly casual response. The “external conditions” are what seem to matter: nice buildings, impressive logos, dealing with emergencies, urgencies of one kind or another. No. External is not enough and it is all that action for change acknowledges: new initiatives, new programs, new procedures – none of them new, because none include places to evoke the voices which carry the internal conditions which cause us to oppress and allow ourselves to be oppressed.

E.M. Forster said, “Only connect.” I say, if we can create conditions to affect our experience of time, surely we are capable of creating conditions to change what has been so endemic and enduring as to seem “normal” – the silencing of the personal, intimate voice in nearly all public spaces from assisted-living rooms, to hospital rooms, airports, hotel lobbies, bars, mammoth sports stadiums and post-modern architecture (which is all about edgy appearance and nothing about hospitality). How much better it is to create conditions for tenderness, carried into the world on the wings of our fragile / beautiful voices.

The Great Both/And, Take 2
Founder’s Blog #3
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

Every act of organizing is an experiment. We begin with desire, with a sense of purpose and direction. But we enter the experience vulnerable, unprotected by the illusory cloak of prediction. We acknowledge that we don’t know how this work will actually unfold. We discover what we are capable of as we go along. We engage with others for the experiment. We are willing to commit to a system whose effectiveness cannot be seen until it is in motion.
from A Simpler Way, by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, p. 74

Last blog I promised to reflect on some of the Both-Ands which are held within the ongoing experiment that is Women Writing for (a) Change and all its offspring, offered here in birth order, as I recall it:

Young Women Writing for (a) Change
Writing for Change Consulting
Women Writing for (a) Change on the Radio
The Women Writing for (a) Change Foundation
The Feminist Leadership Academy of Cincinnati, which has resulted in sister schools in:
Bloomington, IN
Burlington, VT
Grand Junction, CO
Birmingham, AL
Indianapolis, IN
Louisville, KY
Traverse City, MI
Portland, OR

This, readers, is merely the tip of an iceberg which shows no signs of melting! When I say that I hope it is about a tipping point, a cascade of conscious feminine events, I am not being ambitious in the growth-for-growth’s-sake way of the conventional world, in which bigger is always assumed to be better.

I am ambitious that the organic growth of our movement will “infect” the culture with health and systemic well-being. A metaphor is taking shape in me as I write:

My brother, Rafe, a very serious amateur mycologist who began his training in our father’s school of woods-walking, found a puffball the size of a soccer ball this weekend in Knox County. I do not exaggerate. He spotted it from the car on his way to a family gathering at Indian Bear Lodge and brought it to show grandsons Max and Joey. He assured us that this was an edible mushroom, and I do remember my mother slicing puffballs and frying them in butter. After the cooks declined to take him up on adding it to the dinner menu, Rafe gave the puffball to Max to take to first grade show-and-tell. My brother is not just rhapsodic about mushrooms, he knows his fungi!

“Did you know,” he asked the puffball-admirers, “that there are thousands of miles of connected membranes under the ground for every mushroom you find in the woods?”

I hadn’t known the membranes were that far-reaching, but it is taking shape in my imagination that this is the kind of “infection” I’m talking about.

Our systems are in decay: governments, schools, health care, despite the interventions and efforts of people of good will. My vision of the WWf(a)C movement is our participation in intricate webs upon webs spurting beautiful and fantastic—nourishing– shapes in the dark woods in which we find ourselves.

The particular charism of WWf(a)C in all our manifestations is our consistent valuing of
• what’s already here, beneath our feet, in the present moment
• the material, messy, unpredictable, mysterious, archetypal feminine
• the capacity for connection vitalized by practices to enhance connection

I’m becoming more aware of how we serve the goal of creating healthy connection and cultural transformation because of a series of both-ands embedded in the very design of our WWfaC culture:

We Both envision And create systems to manifest vision.

We attempt to hold in alignment Both means And ends. Some examples:
• if we are a writing community we use writing and the practices of community in our internal, staff, board and other meetings
• if we consult with an organization whose mission is communication, we work with them to enhance internal communication
• if we work with health-care systems we help create systems which are healthy for the people delivering the health-care

We are working to Both keep the focus on women for a change And be hospitable to men.

We Both honor the traditions of individuals and organizations And acknowledge change as a given in all healthy systems.

We combine, in our organizational design, Both earned income/ revenue-generating containers (the school, the consulting business, the FLA) And donor, grant-supported containers (The Foundation and its programs ).

We hold Both writing as a personal/ spiritual practice And writing for publication or performance.

I’ll close this reflection on Both-And with a quote from the eminent philosopher, Francis Bacon. Darwin used these words as an epigraph to his Origin of the Species:

Let no man think or maintain that a man can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God’s word or in the book of God’s works, but rather let man endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both. (Speaking of Faith, “Evolution and Faith,” American Public Media, SOF.org)

I shudder to think of the ink and blood spilled, the time wasted while icebergs melt,
simply because not enough people have the tools to hold the both-ands surrounding us, as Bacon says, “the word and the works.” To these I would add:

• growth and the necessity to limit growth
• feminine AND masculine
• rigor and nurture
• the value of individual genius AND the value of collective genius
• buck-stops-here decision-making AND listening in community
• heart and mind and will

It strikes me as not only tragic, but painfully ironic that so many current and historical wars are fought on the battleground of religious doctrine. Not only for the obvious reasons that we expect religious people to practice tenets articulated in all holy texts: love of the other AND love of self. I point to the irony of the word itself, religio, which means about (re) connection (ligio).

This ending gives me a beginning for my next blog, should I desire to accept it: an exploration of the much-maligned word, radical, which means simply going to the root (as in radish). Oh, my how we suffer and quibble and disconnect ourselves from one another because of our –what is it? fear? laziness? not knowing how to look underneath, where the source of all usually is, for what we need.

Autumn, my favorite season, reminds me of a favorite, poignant, tender poem by Wendell Berry:

The Wild Geese by Wendell Berry

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Until next blog,
Mary

The Great Both/And…
Founder’s Blog #2
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

I hereby construct my reader as anyone interested in the history and consciousness of Women Writing for (a) Change, in any aspect of the individual and communal origins of a vision, and in how that vision is clothed in materiality: time, place, energy of relationship, money, conflict, peace-making, and etc. (”Happy Birthday, Woo-Fac,” Founder’s Blog #1, September 6, 2007)

Excellent readers, thank you. I am feeling on more solid ground since my last–the first–”Founder’s blog,” because now I know that you are out there: Jane and Rita, and others who have read me into speech to paraphrase feminist theologian, Nelle Morton, who spoke of the need to “hear one another into speech.”

I want to explore the many faces of The Great Both-And .

(1) In my last blog I mentioned a story about being castigated by a feminist professor when I used mother metaphors in a classroom conversation about the teaching of writing. Her argument as I recall it, (and argument was her specialty in more ways than one, as she was a teacher of Rhetoric with its etymological roots in combat) was that women teachers are “already maternalized,” expected to be nice, to lack intellectual rigor, all of which sets us up to have less authority in our classrooms, to be taken less seriously in our careers, etc.

While all of what she said still seems true to me, eighteen years later, it is also true that a fuller and more powerful strategy than abandoning the feminine at the classroom or boardroom door–thereby, to my mind–agreeing with diminishment of Her—is to include Her, name Her qualities, reflect with students on the need to bring all of who we are into our work.

The Great Both /And is full expression of both the feminine and masculine. The distortions of “living from one side” are evident to an almost apocalyptic degree in the resurgence of fascism, fundamentalism, war, terrorism and rape of the earth. (Oh my.. . .)

(2) A historical / mythological digression. Some of you know that I am a finalist in the national Athena Awards, sponsored locally by Cincinnati Business Magazine. I am grateful and humbled to be recognized for “following my bliss” into an unlikely and unorthodox business which has thrived for sixteen years. Sandra Vogel, Director of Cincinnat E-Women’s Network, herself an award-winner, nominated me, and I am grateful for this opportunity to have the woo-fac vision known by a wider audience.

I am happy to be associated with a Goddess figure in our over-masculinized pantheon of divinities, loving Athena in particular for her independent nature, her courage, above all her reputation as the Goddess of Wisdom. Coincidentally, the very first card I ever received from the Motherpeace Tarot deck by Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel was The Chariot. For years, in the early unfolding of wwfac, The Chariot was a regular draw for me. Here are Vicki Noble’s words about this card:

Traditionally Pallas Athene, as her two names suggest, personifies two sides to her character. Pallas suggests her function as Goddess of storms (she carries the storm-shield of her father) and Goddess of battle. . . . she was valiant, conquering, frightening with the sight of her aegis whole crowds of heroes when they vexed her. But the other side of her character is soft, gentle; she presides over battles not for the sake of blood, like her counterpart Ares, the god of war, but for the sake of victory, peace and prosperity.
(Noble, Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth and Tarot, p. 67)

Yes, it has taken some “going to war” with the way things are to articulate and incarnate wwfac and its offspring. I think of May Sarton’s poem about her mother’s hands, scarred from years of hands-on, gloveless gardening, “We pay with much toughness/ for a tender world.” It is the paradoxical, both/and nature of Athena which draws me, a quality which I have named as one necessary for women who are discerning leadership in our community, whether in Cincinnati or beyond: the capacity to hold paradox.

One thing about Athena which nags at me, though. You may know that she was said to have “sprung from the head of her Father, Zeus,” symbolism of her being “not of the mother,” being of the head, the intellect. Trust me, I value my mind; “having a brain and using it” was the only relatively sure path I knew about to some modicum of self-definition and independence. However, the classic Oresteia chronicles to dangers–to women–of the unreflected-upon Athena-woman.

As you may remember, Orestes has murdered his mother, and the Furies (”Virgins by choice, personifying female power not yet under the yoke of male control”) seek to fulfill their ancient role of dispensing Justice. Apollo, though, challenges the furies to submit to a trial judged by Athena. As Leonard Shlain tells it in his The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, the Furies are reluctant to defer to a third party, even though she is a woman. But smooth-talking Apollo convinces them and they grudgingly agree, assuming Athena will side with them.

Apollo argues that Orestes should not be punished because his duty to his father must supersede any loyalty he might have felt toward his mother. Apollo argues, mothers play a very minor role.

Here is the truth I tell you—see how right I am.
The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed
the new-won seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life–the one who mounts.
(Aeschylus, The Eumenidies, Robt. Fagels, trans.,
Penguin, 1975)

When the Athenians impaneled for the jury split six-six, Athena breaks the tie by siding with Orestes. She claims that respect for motherhood is misplaced because she herself emerged fully grown from the brow of Zeus. Conveniently omitting the fact that she was initially sheltered in the womb of Metis, Zeus’s first wife, Athena disingenuously denies that she had a mother. Later, Athena urges the Furies to abandon their role as forces of retribution against mother-murder and join her as upholders of the law. The Furies, effectively defanged by the trial’s judgment, reluctantly submit. Those who formerly avenged injustices against women are silenced, tamed by a smart goddess who bought into the male system. The Furies will now serve patriarchal culture.

This lay explained to the Greek populace how they came to live by the rule of law, and in the course of doing so, denigrated women and belittled motherhood. (Shlain, Leonard. The Alphabet vs. the Goddess, pp. 150-1)

I must complete this digression, which I hope is as evocative for you as going to our various cultural roots is for me, by quoting Shlain on pre-patriarchal birth story of Athena.

Athena’s birth was equally unusual. Zeus’s original consort was Metis, the ancient goddess of Mind, Measure, and Order. Zeus coveted her power, and to satisfy his urge, he devoured her whole.* Unbeknownst to him, Metis was pregnant with their daughter Athena. Although Metis died, the embryonic Athena continued to grow in Zeus’s brain until her size caused him terrible pain. Prometheus applied a wedge to Zeus’s brow and hit it with a great hammer. From out of the resulting deep fissure sprang Athena, fully grown and fully armed. The goddess of wisdom emerged from the brain of a man.
*Metis in Greek has two different meanings: One is “mind” or “wisdom; the other is “nobody.” One might suspect that the first meaning was the true one and the second one was a later sexist revision. (Shlain, p. 130)

(3) My last, for today, comment on the great both/and comes from sitting with some of the responses to my “Your Voice” column in Saturday’s Cincinnati Enquirer. In my plea that the media and some members of the public stop what I called a public stoning of the devastated mother who left her daughter in the car, some heard me defending the mother and forgetting the child. Nothing could be further from my intentions. I am asking for both: accountability and compassion; personal responsibility and systemic examination,
grief for both the abandoned child, and for mothers who abandon themselves to the care of everyone except themselves, all too often resulting in tragedy across the board.

Thank you for listening. Next week I want to write about faces of the Great Both-And which are evident in the woo-fac community and organizational structure.

Mary

OK, I’m officially over my capacity to keep a lid on it. Each morning when I pick up The Enquirer, I’m in prepare-to-cringe mode. Surely, surely they’re going to stop already with these lurid front-page stories about the unspeakable tragedy of the Nesselroad-Slaby family.

Friday’s front-page photo of what has to be the most unimaginable pain a mother can sustain - of course she’s talking about committing suicide. How can anyone consider this newsworthy, or surprising?

Every woman I know - and in my work I meet a lot of women telling the truths of our complicated lives - is experiencing a toxic stew of “there but for the grace of God” compassion for this mother, not to mention horror at the public stoning she’s undergoing in the media. Most of us can’t even bear to read the details, almost as if tempting fate if we get too close to it.

I know this column is going to draw criticism of how I wouldn’t feel this way if the mother weren’t of my race, class, and yes - even profession. I was a young, overextended public school teacher and mother earlier in my life, toting a child to day care, along with briefcases full of lesson plans and papers to grade, food for faculty potlucks, diaper bag, lunch bag, etc., etc. Now I’m the mother of an adult son and his wife, balancing the burdens of a society that is not set up for the realities of women who need, want, deserve - to work. Not to mention the fact that society needs the gifts and talents of women now more than ever.

Truth is, any story of any destroyed mother, any dead child - and that includes Iraqi children and mothers caught in the crossfire of our benevolence - breaks my heart. The best we can hope for in the midst of so much violence, intentional and accidental, is that our hearts might break open to feelings that will lead us to wiser personal and societal choices and values.

Enquirer coverage of this tragedy has had the flavor of tabloid pandering and will provoke only more heartlessness, which leads to more hopelessness - and violence.

Mary Pierce Brosmer of Kennedy Heights is the founder of Women Writing for (a) Change (www.womenwriting.org).

Founder’s Blog #1
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

You heard it correctly: “woo-fac,” the nickname bestowed on Women Writing for (a) Change by Kit Willinhganz who came to Woo-Fac as a writer in WWf(a)C Bloomington, IN and is now planting woo-fac seeds in Louisville, KY.

Yesterday, in the middle of a meeting, I recalled the date: September 5, the official sixteenth birthday of Women Writing for (a) Change, the mother school. *

Here is how I tell the founding story in my ever-evolving book on the woo-fac movement, * (For Want of a Better Word, For Want of a Better World: Women Writing for (a) Change):

When I am asked to tell the story of Women Writing for (a) Change I begin at different points, depending on who’s asking, and on my energy for telling. The least vulnerable and most prosaic version of the story begins: On September 5, 1991, fifteen women gathered in the lower level of the Holistic Heath Center of Cincinnati, in the healing room of somatic therapist, Susan Glassmeyer. Fifteen women, Susan first among them, responded to my offer to be the teacher of women who wanted to Write for a Change, women who wanted to be open to whatever changes would occur in their lives as a result of taking themselves seriously as writers.

And here, 16 years later, I am attempting my first blog entry. If the word, “blog” existed I had not heard it; neither could I have imagined that night

that eight women would be creating Women Writing for (a) Change schools in cities as far-flung as Burlinton, Vermont is from Portland, Oregon (see www.womenwriting.org/ affiliate schools)

that thirty-six women and girls, graduates of The Feminist Leadership Academy of Cincinnati and Young Women’s Feminist Leadership Academy are translating wwfac practices and consciousness into their schools, workplaces, churches, temples, and etc.

that literally tens of thousands of lives have been affected by the power of women and girls telling the truth of their lives through our presence on public radio, in the hundreds of performances and readings featuring our writers, in circles spreading so far from the original stone dropped into the pond of Cincinnati, September 5, 1991, that we have no way of counting.

Happy (Quiet This Year) Birthday, Woo-Fac, may we grow into your growth which—in your fifteenth year took a huge leap from your deep roots!

- - - - - -

My reluctance to begin a blog has revolved, somewhat rat-in-a-cage-ish, around questions such as: who cares? who has time to read it? what is mine to say that has not already been said? how much truth can I tell so publicly, without a sense of connection to the listeners? The most important of questions: who is my audience?

I hereby construct my reader as anyone interested in the history and consciousness of Women Writing for (a) Change, in any aspect of the individual and communal origins of a vision, and in how that vision is clothed in materiality: time, place, energy of relationship, money, conflict, peace-making, and etc.

It was, I think, W.H. Auden who said, or wrote, “whenever I see a poem I have two questions: how does this thing work and who made it?”

Reader, in the reflections to follow, you will—if you are willing–hear stories that will allow you to know the woman who first made this thing, the women, girls, and men who are continuing its making, and some stories about how what we are making works—and doesn’t work–which blind alleys and mistakes are part, if you will, of how it works!

For two small examples of the how it works, I’ll address my asterisks from above:

*the mother school.

I am a strongly mother-identified woman. The most important-to-me, and to the creation of this work poems I have ever written have been, not so much about my mother as an historical person,–that too—but about the rich-in-love, but poor-in-institutional-power-and-respect life of THE MOTHER. THE MOTHERS. I had an early and wordless awareness that “our father was in heaven / our mother everywhere exiled.”
(from “Letter in Spring, Or How You Did It.” )

I have been warned by wiser heads than mine against the mine-field of “mother-daughter” “daughter-mother” metaphors because of the ways, in patriarchy, in which mother-daughter dynamics are fraught with tension and rage, as well as love.

So, for example, if Cincinnati is the mother school–and that is what we came, organically and without design, to call it—does that make the affiliate schools, “daughter” schools? And, if so, might not that imply “lesser than” as well as “younger than”? dependency?
You get the drift.

You are going to hear me say this often: I don’t know–maybe–probably–but. . . .

But—there is something deep and important here, a conundrum or paradox we, who are making this thing, stand in every day: (a) we have come to understand that we a part of something much larger and older than the sixteen year herstory of woo-fac, we are one portal, if you will, of the re-emerging value of the feminine, and newly-emerging conscious feminine AND (b) in the material-psychological-archetypal-historical context in which we are “making this thing” The Feminine: our bodies, our relationships, the words used to say us and create us are variously diminished, demonized, misunderstood, and always the site of conflict. Therefore, we must resist fighting over the language we use, and be about the work of standing by and refurbishing —rather than giving into the dominant paradigm, thereby agreeing, for example that “mother” is either ineffectual or domineering.

More about this in a later blog. I have a good story about being roundly and publicly castigated by a woman professor for using maternal images in a conversation about pedagogy.

*Movement

Another word that aroused resistance. In a brief history of containers , let me say that when one class of 15 writers became two classes of 20 writers, became three, I used the word, “school” to name the larger container the individual classes had evolved into. Naturally. I have been a teacher, and have embraced that calling thoroughly since the sixth grade when I knew “what I was going to be when I grow up.”

People have issues with “school” Naturally. Schools, reflecting the culture at large, have often been places where power is coercive as opposed to transformative. However, though our programs are container-defying, or as my friend, Tom Romano, says—approvingly– some forms of writing are genre-defying, I choose “School” and it suits at least a portion of our mission to hold it in fall, spring, summer semesters, and etc..

When the school gave birth to Young Women Writing for (a) Change, numerous community partnerships with social service, arts and civic organizations, a radio show, it also gave birth to a container in which to hold these offspring: The Women Writing for (a) Change Foundation.

Those births caused the vision to need more mothers which gave birth to the Feminist Leadership Academy of Cincinnati (FLA) where we all practiced being conscious mothers what was coming to life.

When women asked me if they could take the work to other cities, some meant having an afternoon’s conversation with me, as if that could convey the work of a decade–but I said: I am a teacher, not a lecturer-spiller-of-seed teacher, but a being-with, learning -with kind of teacher. If you want to do this, you will have to spend time with me, within a community of those, myself included, who are learning as we go, how to create, lead, teach in the manner of that new creature, the becoming- conscious woman. I have created a container in which you can do this if your discernment and mine are to go forward: The Feminist Leadership Academy.

When women asked me how they might ponder more fully the leadership lessons they were learning in the WWf(a)C classes as they used and strengthened their voices. How they might work to make this more explicit in their current professions, I said: apply to FLA.

When I stopped to realize how many times I had been hired to translate the woo-fac culture to the work of management, leadership, healthcare, business, nonprofits, I realized the need for a more intentional container for this set of progeny and Writing for Change Consulting Group was born.

We receive many hits on our website from women in rural areas, women in other countries wondering if we have an on-line program. We don’t, but for about five years various potential mothers have come forward with questions about how to do that. I don’t know the answer-answers, the technical and other answers, but my response is apply to FLA and we will see if that container will take shape.

And so, what to call this container of containers? This community of communities? One day I said, “movement,” and someone near and dear implied, “grandiose.” I was embarrassed, more than that: suffused in that moment with “who do you think you are” shame, a common symptom of well-schooled, working-class, over-achieving girls such as I.

But to be very honest, I got into all this in an effort at long-last to hold on to my words, and not to be shamed out of them because of the projections of a culture that well knows that to take away a person’s power to name herself is to take away her self and put in place a useful piece of machinery.

Movement, until a better word comes to mind, it is.

Mary Pierce Brosmer