CG: I’m interviewing the amazing Raquel Almazan, a fellow playwright who also an actress, educator, film director, dance practitioner, and art activist. She has been awarded numerous grants and received numerous awards. And she has participated in writing development workshops with such brilliant artists as David Henry Hwang, Lynn Nottage, Theresa Rebeck, Charles Mee, Edward Albee, Horton Foote, Morgan Jenness, Julie Harris, Naomi Ilizuka, and Carmen Rivera.

Some of her plays include La Paloma Prisoner, CAFÉ, La Negra, When I Came Home, La Migra Taco Truck, Dar a Luz, Does that Feel Good to you My Lark? A Doll’s House Adaptation, and Cross//Roads: Re-framing the Immigrant Narrative.

From her website:

“Raquel was born in Madrid – Spain, is also of Costa Rican descent and has lived most of her life in the U.S. As an interdisciplinary artist she holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting from Columbia University. B.F.A. in Theatre from University of Florida/New World School of the Arts Conservatory. She develops work as a writer, director, actor, dramaturge and is also a Butoh dance practitioner. Almazan is the Artistic Director of La Lucha Arts, producing several of her original works, including Latin is America, a play cycle and lecture-performance, a collection of bi-lingual works in dedication to each Latin American country.”

We are talking about her play La Paloma Prisoner, a richly imagined play that is pageant, ritual, crime drama, prison play, and an historical epic that comprises vast sweeps of eras and geography. It’s also a play about mothers and daughters, sisterhood—for better or worse, and goddess archetypes. In other words, it is ambitious and daring and transformative.

In Raquel’s words, “This new play centers on a woman nicknamed “La Paloma” who targets men who rape girls. During her incarceration, male rapists throughout Colombia continue to turn up dead, leading the public to believe La Paloma may have magical avenger abilities. With the spread of the beauty pageant obsession in South American prisons, this group of incarcerated women organize “The Parade of Prisoners,” calling on ancient rituals of adorning the warrior. These women’s stories interweave Colombia’s social, political, and spiritual history. With their newfound power, the women redefine beauty, their own humanity, and their identity as labeled criminals. La Paloma begins to revolutionize not only the women’s lives, but prison society and the world beyond its walls.”

CG: This just an incredible play… Where to begin?  One of the things I love about it, is the recurring themes of mother-daughter love/hate relationships…This is one of the bones I have to pick with the so-called traditional canon, which is, of course, written by men. People defend it by insisting that it is universal in its themes. To that, I always ask, what about mothers and daughters. Shakespeare is filled with father-son conflict and reconciliation, drama often stoked by out-of-wedlock sons and laws of primogeniture that dictated only the first-born would inherit the estate of the father… But where are the mother-daughter scenes? There are some blink-and-you-miss-it ones in Romeo and Juliet, but that’s pretty much it. So I love how much you treat themes about mothers and daughters in this play.

RA:  First, I’d like to deeply thank you Carolyn for the wonderful words in describing the play and for framing the play within this context.
When I first started working in maximum security facilities; there was an immediate mother-daughter bond that happened between the women. It wasn’t just about mentor-mentee, it was beyond the relationships that they had come to cultivate on the outside. Many of us, I think, knew the feeling of a parent rejecting you or having violence associated with one of your parents, so there was a bond there, that someone would take care of you.

Immediately I realized that coming in and doing this work was about forming families very quickly, and realizing “I’m the mother” and other times “I’m the daughter, I’m receiving so much right now, and I’m being held.” So I think that was really the impetus to have so many mother-daughter relationships in the piece. And looking at the world outside of this structure of men to be quite honest, that this was a world in which masculine energy wasn’t penetrating, and so there was this extreme focus on feminine divine energy and feminine healing and for me I looked at that through the prism of mother-daughter relationships.

Women have these instincts, as mothers, that we are going to protect, that we are going to protect ourselves and our communities, yet we’ve normalized seeing that as a masculine trait.

“The love between mother and daughter, the Oro and Diana characters, who are outside of society create their own personal society of righteous crime. To remove themselves from helplessness and poverty they create their own code of violence- of thievery to survive, their code is what serves them. What has been taken from them returns to them by the opportunities of gaining what they need.

When your own mother, biological mother, cannot protect you, who becomes your mother, your guide? That’s the big question for me, who is the person who is going to protect you? In oppressive societies, I look at it through the lens of women, who is going to become my mother, who is going to become my protector, and I think that Paloma takes that role.

CG: And ritual… La Paloma Prisoner is so filled with allegory, sacred objects, song and dance, I felt that the entire play was a ritual of healing and exorcism. Where did that come from? Are you a witch?

RA: Lol… I am absolutely a witch!
In my practice of theatre I seek to create an alchemy of the body, space and spirit. This includes the audience’s participation in this experience. To transform ourselves we must actually change the molecules in the space and this is a conscious effort in how as writers and directors we approach the process and staging techniques of theatre.

The play also has many extended dance/ritual sequences that counter balance this violence with healing. Based on Butoh dance and cultural rituals we take back the body as an anonymous figure that is being processed for a jail sentence in the beginning of the play to the journey of the end of the play- where the woman explore their new bodily identities that take form. The body is the conduit of the holy spirit. We need not be separated but to honor the body in space is to join our heart, mind and spirit.

In the world of La Paloma Prisoner, the play offers a spiritual communication with those who have died. The play has a series of celestial meetings between the women and their loved ones. The wall that closes the women in also creates a need for us to break into this world, when Paloma becomes a celebrity of vengeance for women around the world, physical walls begin to tumble down. A portal opens.

In Colombia, The worshipping of the Guativita Lagoon Goddess by the indigenous Muisca people, involved the beautification of the body, the ritualization of the body, that involves painting the body gold and adorning the body with colorful dress and jewelry. The beautification of the body is also a symbol of health and fertility. I endowed the characters with the agency of honoring their fertility, power and sexual potency that does not need the dependency of men. The ability to call on the spirits with this worship often calls on altering the body and preparing the body for this type of spiritual exchange.

The modern use of makeup in the pageant as a mask is used in this exchange today in order to call on the Patron Saint of Prisoners, The Virgin of Mercedes takes place on Sept. 24, every year at the Buen Pastor Jail.

The use of song was inspired by the opening song of the pageant when I visited Buen Pastor, the women celebrated 200 years of Colombia’s independence by singing the national anthem.

At one of the facilities in South Florida I brought in a piece of fabric, going back to the essentials of theater, that one piece of colorful fabric that turned into all these other literal things, and also expressive things, where you could dance with it in rehearsals. They really were taking to these colors, and they said, “I would like to adorn myself with that, with this feather boa,” and then that became this portal. When we put it on and we did a dance, it was as if they were somewhere else, it was very transportive, and it was just like having that one piece of material that connected them not only to femininity but to identity.

The dove Paloma bird is often a symbol of peace and the animal has the ability to spiritually release the dead. Paloma birds honor the dead by leading spirits to their place in the after life. Paloma in the play leads men to their afterlife as a vigilante figure.

She also transforms the harm done against her and manifests it into a power. Instead of letting the abuse done against her destroy her, she wields a force to help others, and to end the cycle of violence against women by committing her own violence directly against the abusers. This is a revolutionary concept for women to defend themselves against their abusers in their home, work place and societies at large. She can be seen as an anti- hero because of her use of violence- but that is a question I leave for the audience. The supernatural aspects of her power is also a question for how we view our physical reality. Those who can enter the metaphysical world can have the power to travel in and out of supernatural worlds.

I also believe that the dead spirits of women fuel Paloma and aid her power to break barriers out of the jail. Celestial forces transcend the physical world.

CG: Blood. Talk to us about blood. When I look at the classic Western plays in the canon, and especially the epic ones with large casts and huge themes… there is a lot of blood. The heroes litter the stage with bodies. Women’s theatre has always seemed to me to be at a terrific disadvantage because we have not been warriors in the same sense as men, who train to become soldiers and march off to territorial wards. But, of course, we are incredibly warriors in reality… just unsung. In the yin-yang world of patriarchal theatre, we are the bearers of life and  men are the destroyers of life. What I love in your play is that your women get to be both. And they don’t just grab the gun in self-defense and off their batterer. These women kill, with intention, with gusto, without remorse, and with absolute premeditation. Where did you find the archetypes for this… and then the courage to put them on the stage? And how are they received?

RA: Woman as warriors is an ancient concept that is being revisited in the jail of Bogota. The parade of prisoners – the day before the pageant is an event where the women adorn themselves in a variety of wardrobes, costumes and personas. Some include ancient indigenous dress of the people who inhabited the Colombian region before colonization.

There are rules of sacrifice in the world of the play, rules of the ancient world and the roles the modern characters play out in the play- a new cycling. Whether you live in small tribal communities, small towns or a large metropolis, we are all playing roles that make that society function.

Being in an all woman’s jail- Paloma refers to it as a kind of freedom where she is surrounded by the worship of feminine dynamics and re- building of women’s community. But the jailers, reporters, solider, father, and men that were part of the women’s past break in and out of the play- that represents the constant forces that play against women around the world.
Every woman in the play has their own justifications for their crime that is deeply interlinked with their life experience. So when we create a justice system that does not take into account the societal conditions under which people are tried, this will create an environment of retaliation. The crimes committed against women, murder- rape, verbal and physical abuse leaves a lasting mark (that Paloma can recognize) not only on the men who committed these acts but on the world energetically. This physical act of abuse can manifest negative and positive metaphysical forces. Paloma is able to harness these forces, she embodies them, they run through her, transforming her into her animal guide. She both then carries light and dark energies, she is a conduit for all the forces, she opens herself for them to enter her.

Does female vengeance create a balance in the universe, to counterbalance all the violence and hate created by men? This is a question Paloma battles with.

When Paloma thinks there will be a film made about her, it leaves a mark of immortality while she very well knows she could be murdered at any minute. The Greek Gods and myths were scripted, the Kings and Queens of Shakespeare, the historical figures that were wealthy always got their stories recorded and dramatized.

But why not the average person who struggles, the ones that are seen as too small and insignificant? Paloma makes herself into a figure that can not be ignored, made historical, given value to, made into a God, so that no one could claim that she suffered and acted in vain.

CG: So finally… Can you tell us something about the development history of this play? Have you taken it into a women’s prison and if so, how did that go? And where are you going with it?

RA: I was moved twenty years ago when I first stepped into a maximum security facility for women to train as an arts facilitator and was startled, not only because of the stark physical conditions, lack of human contact devised by the system but by the communal history of abuse that the majority of the women shared. I myself being a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault was immediately connected to the necessity to process and stage narratives that needed to be reclaimed by women in the system.
My major catalyst for the La Paloma Prisoner Project comes from my experience as an arts facilitator with Art Spring Organization to incarcerated women at two maximum security prisons in South Florida. This play fuses years of activism in the field and continued work in New York at Rikers Island, Horizons and Crossroads detention centers for youth as well as the Chelsea detention center for women with Dream a Dream Project.

The script has been in development for over ten years, across four countries. Workshop production at The Signature Theatre off-Broadway. (Selected for World Theatre Day: Performing Gender and Violence in Contemporary National and Transnational Contexts Conference in Rome, Italy. Tre Roma University reading) (Women’s Playwrights International Conference- Stockholm, Sweden) (The Lark Play Development Reading, NYC) (Labyrinth Theatre Intensive reading) (Staged Reading at La Mama ETC and INTAR). Critical Breaks Residency directed by Estefania Fadul (Hi-Arts). Attendance in Bogota, Colombia at the (Buen Pastor Prison) for the Annual Celebration and Beauty Pageant.

The play and a portion of it’s programming has been accompanied by post-show activities with criminal justice activists, extending audience engagement and citizen action events; including panel discussions, The Impacted women series and tours of the play to facilities.  

(The Impacted women series) was funded by the Arthur J. Harris Award at Columbia University; an initiative that combines women who have experienced the criminal justice system alongside performers to engage with audiences with the themes of mass incarceration. On June 1st 2017 excerpts of the play were performed at Greenhope Services for Women as well as Queensboro Correctional Facility for Men in New York City; in collaboration with impacted women.

This is the second of a two-part interview with Keita Whitten. Click here to read  Part One.

SE spoke openly about terms like “transference” and “counter-transference,” reminding us this is ALWAYS occurring. Yes, professional protocol and ethical practices of standards are important to guide our professional relationships. The truth is --when you embrace the science of epigenetics--elements and their environments are not static and they are constantly shifting, exchanging information--even in a sterile room. And, rather than ignoring this, what I now know is that every interaction with a person, an environment or an animal involves a certain amount of transference and countertransference of information through adaptation--in this case the nervous system. In reality our nervous systems are constantly responding and adapting to environmental cues, internally and externally, all the time. In contrast, traditional psychology and allopathic medicine teaches that we--the practitioners-are the experts, and that, to guard against biases, we must remain objective--distant from the other, “the client” and that  environments are to be controlled/ manipulated in order to have untainted outcomes.

I know I am veering off subject, but I think is an important divergence. I would go a step further to say, transference and countertransference are how we understand how things work or don’t work. We, people, animals, are constantly evaluating and adapting to the world around us. SE taught us how we do this through our nervous systems each day, each moment. You can’t shut it off. And when we try to, we are missing vital sensory information. For example, we all talk about cognitive dissonance, right? There are lots of explanations about what it is and why it happens, right? Let’s’ agree for a moment with the basic understanding-- it’s a mental discomfort resulting from a clash of values or beliefs. Here’s the thing: What if I said there is also sensory dissonance? No, scratch that. I propose cognitive dissonance is actually a result of sensory discomfort--a stress response to a threat in the external environment. And it shows up as cognitive dissonance when we have overridden our sensory information.

When I have worked with clients who experience explosive anger, I now call it "sensory dissonance." What that means is that they are receiving cues both internally and externally, but trying to override this with reason. Ultimately,  whatever they are trying to override with reason--fear, despair or the feelings of betrayal-- will manifest as sideways behaviors and cognitive dissonance. Working through an SE lens, I help people to identify sensory cues both inside and outside of themselves--cues that are often become overridden and lead up to these sideways expressions such as explosive anger and rage.  Here's another way to look at this: By the time one is raging, it’s usually because the person has already overridden the sensory inputs--including the role of transferences and countertransferences. Today, somatic psychology is a lens through which I observe everything, everyone--including myself.

Coming back to your question, SE and Yoga were ways that helped me frame an embodied holistic approach with the science to back up how it worked. Teaching yoga taught me the importance of mindfulness, the ability to slow down and to practice awareness of our embodied consciousness. With SE, I now had the science to demonstrate these connections between embodied consciousness with stress responses and how to support the body’s own healing process. Early on in my practice, I  learned this level of practice would ultimately uncover an adversities and traumatic experiences. In the ACEs study with Kaiser Health and the CDC, they found that, out of 17,000 participants (white and upper middle class with access to private health care), about 70% had like  adverse experience scores before the age of seven.

Dr. Nadine Burke, now the first appointed Surgeon General for the state of California, educates about the vital health implications of toxic stress and the wear-and-tear on the immune system, when we do not address trauma and ACEs from a biological, embodied approach.  

This data made me pause and think for a moment. I then started to realize that the way we diagnose people is all wrong--the DSM5 is wrong! And, we (therapist, counselors, psychiatrists, all of us) are continuing to prescribe pills, diagnoses and apply psychology like all Western allopathic medicine--WE TREAT SYMPTOMS, not root causes.

For example, one of my clients taught me a different way to understand bipolor disorder. Assessment took months to uncover contributing external factors like the fact she was exposed to longterm neglect before the age of seven, manipulation like gaslighting,  and rape and other sexual abuse--and therefore the needed treatment was not pharmaceutical (in some cases medication may be required initially to calm/stabilize a “wacked” nervous system), but required a holistic approach based an understanding of ACEs and  mind-body-soul synergy to support the creation of balance/homeostats. Over time this client began to discover the need for changes in her lifestylem including proper rest, diet changes, and letting go of toxic relationships. With these changes, our sessions, and additional support from homeopathy, she was able to lower her lithium dosage, and her symptoms--including manic flares--began to minimize, which were possible due to her new understanding of the "pain body." The difference was this: These behaviors were there, but less intense, so that she was able to build the capacity to recognize the buildup before the flare-up, allowing   the pain body to chillaxe  and begin to heal its soul wounds.  

Then I realized, another profound aspect of the ACEs study: What about ALE (Adult Lived Experiences)? If the ACEs study surveyed a majority white population, then what would be true for people of color, women, and women of color? What would external stress factors such as poverty, racism, and oppression-- including substance abuse and domestic violence play in the role mental /physical health and dis-ease? While genetics does not determine health and emotional well-being, epigenetics does!
 
You  asked about my new THRIVE initiative for 2019. Based on this new understanding, I knew then I could not see all clients because I no longer wanted to do "bandaid work." I wanted to help heal soul wounds. I instantly became aware I had to change how I practiced, including who I saw. And this why today I only work with trauma. Back to the original ACEs population study: With all the recent research about health disparities for communities of color, including women, I realized I wanted to serve the most vulnerable populations--that is, girls and women of color.

CW:  I am seeing more and more healers who are not taking insurance. Can you talk about that?

KW: Why don't I take insurance? The simple answer is, SE a, like acupuncture, reiki or homeopathy does not provide enough “empirical” evidence to support how it works for insurance companies to pay for our services. Insurance companies need justification to pay for services. With this justification comes the demand for qualitative, evidence-based practices using levers of variables to determine outcomes. Clinicians have to provide a diagnosis during your first visit, then write up goals and objectives that support the diagnoses, and the come up with arbitrary phrases like, "Client/subject will manage emotional outburst by 50%, by learning how to express their feelings."

We clinicians spend numerous hours trying to add it all  up to justify services, and  many make it up, and we all know it's BS--but it’s the only way one can get paid. There are insurance discrepancies in terms of what gets paid out, based on what is called "pay-out tiers," which are different with every company.  For example, one company might pay you $99 while another might pay you only $65--for the exact same service. And confidentiality? There is no confidentiality with insurance companies.  Your information belongs to them to use to qualify or disqualify you.

When I was taking insurance, I received a notice stating  I was over-using a diagnostic code based on the demographics of my colleagues who practiced in the area! Can you guess what it was? The code for trauma. This was  a real eye-opener! Apparently my colleagues in the field really do not have an informed lens on ACEs and trauma. To be fair, it's probably more of a billing issue, but this means I can't record what I see and suspect, because I will not be paid, and I will not be paid for using a model like SE, because it’s not  sanctioned by Big Pharma and the medical communities.
 
When I feel doubt about what I do, I like to recalled the words of one of my clinical supervisors, “You may not have chosen to work with trauma, but trauma has defiantly called you!"  Looking back on my life, I would agree. Each experience has been very informative. And because of my story, I feel I am able to relate to people’s pain, which disarms the power imbalance very quickly.

Nadine Burke says that when people ask her how she can you work with trauma,  she gets excited and replies, “because its fundamental hopeful work.” I would agree, and this is especially so working with women of color.  I’d like to end with a reference to the works of Anne Wilson Schaef’s book, Meditations For Women Who Do Too Much.  Her daily affirmations are a reminder of the vitality of why I do what I do. I  know intergenerational healing will take two generations. I will not live to see it, but through the work I do I have hope my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will experience healing through collective and conscious community parenting. I am still unpacking fifty-three years of experiences,

Ashe

Redefining Therapy website

Keita Whitten…  one of the most amazing women I have ever met, and it’s my privilege to interview her today! Keita is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a Masters in Social Work, specializing in trauma. She is launching an initiative in her practice to focus on women and girls with trauma/PTSD history, especially women of color.
 
What is so radical and so powerful about Keita is that, in an age of hyper-specialization where every malady must be micro-coded for the insurance companies and superficial resolution, she is conscientiously doing the opposite—slowing down and widening the concept of diagnosis to look at all aspects of the mind-body-spirit connection, as well as the socio-politico-economic-environmental contexts that are impacting her clients.

CG: So… Keita… I love the description of THRIVE, your new healing initiative with women and girls. But before we get to that, can you fill us in on your journey toward finding your niche in the world of counseling and healing.  It’s been a journey with some seeming dead-ends and detours, and I think that these are an important part of your perspective today.
 
KW: Yes, and you’re right the journey of how I have come to build “Thrive” is a personal journey which is also reflected in how I approach my art and my writing. The reasons I shifted from a traditional therapy practice to a practice that involves healing includes a very personal journey of unpacking and healing my own soul wounds.
 
The idea of focusing on women and girls started in the late 80s, after I suddenly found myself violently divorced after just 3 years of marriage. I was living in the bohemian artist community of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, New York.  Looking back I now realized I had severed these ties, because I had bought into the belief I had to grow up- “Adulting” is the term my second son (now a Man) uses to describe putting his own art on the back burner to “be a responsible productive adult.” I cringe every time I hear him use this word. It’s a word I still struggle with to justify why I do not embrace my own art.

I can recall the immensity of the financial stress, we were shouldering as new parents. We were not making it on his electrician’s apprentice salary. And I remember feeling personally responsible for our financial situation. After all, I was a stay-at-home mom. I remember thinking I could be like the frontier wife from The Little House on the Prairie. She did everything by hand. She took care of their home, never complained, while he built their home, hunted worked at the mill. They were partnering, a team. I so desperately wanted them to be us—a team. In addition to the night feedings, cloth diapers, homemade baby food, all domestic duties- involving a 3-story walkup each day (with an infant and stroller), carrying laundry to the laundromat, going to the grocery store, getting up at 5 AM to prepare his breakfast, packing his lunch (with little notes of appreciation and encouragements tucked inside), planning and preparing dinner, and then cleaning up afterwards! I began searching for ways to bring in extra income to help alleviate my husband’s erratic mood swings. I discovered I could take in other people’s children – so they could go to “work”—to help provide extra income for my family.  Deep inside I wanted to pursue my art too, but it was a luxury “we” just could not afford.

Adulting meant I had to continue to prove I could take care of myself without being a burden. I keep searching for options. Around this time, I began attending Boricua College. One of our required classes was called “colloquium.” Looking back, I now realize this class was designed for student success and retention. I enjoyed colloquium. It was the only place I could connect with other adults and check in about our experiences in school and lives outside of school. A couple of times after class my instructor would pull me aside, asking me about comments I had made about my home life, and husband. One day after class she handed me a Domestic Violence Wheel. I had no idea what it was. This was the first time I had ever heard anything about domestic violence. I didn’t even know there were names for the things I was experiencing.  I just thought the sudden violent moods swings, the yelling, the drunken episodes, and disappearing acts were all part of normal everyday married life. I can recall thinking I had to hide this wheel at home and read it when he was not around.
 
I want to fast forward for a moment. In my field of somatic trauma phycology, we identify 4 responses to threat, AKA “adverse and/or traumatic experiences.” Most only know about “Fight or Flight.” There is also Freeze and Fawn.  Today I will focus on Fawn because I view Fawn as an opposite response to Fight with gender specific implications. For example, in traditional forms of psychotherapy Fawn responses are often people who are misdiagnosed as codependent or victim. Characteristics include Appease / Submit / Resignation /Befriend. Fawn people adjectives include pleasing others, scared to say what they really think/feel, talking about others instead of self, are Angels of Mercy, overcaring, suckers, easily exploited by others, hugely concerned with what others think of them, a yes person. A collage of mine describes Fawn this way: It [Fawn] has also been referred to as the Stockholm syndrome, and historically more females respond in this way than males, who tend to have the physicality to fight or flee more easily. It takes self-blame and shame out of the equation, for example, when the victim is befriending and going along with the abuser/ perpetrator and not understanding later why they acquiesced in the situation and didn’t respond with  fighting or fleeing.

Looking back to my experiences today I realize how sad it was to know back then I had no realization, no connection to what I was feeling inside me—or around me—and how living this way was guiding my actions, my decisions about life and related behaviors. I was simply in survival mode. It wasn’t until about 20 years later, living in Maine, training with the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute (when we as students were required to unpack our own lives), I started to understand my lived adverse experiences with trauma and abuse were also shaped by the intersect of gender, race and heteronormativity. The holding pattern of Fawn reminds me of the macro shift out of the Goddess era in response to rising concerns regarding “male fragility”. This shift fueled by misogyny gave birth to patriarchy as a means to secure male leadership and dominance. As a society we continue to pay the high price of this legacy.

So how did you get from "super mom/abused woman" to the amazing healer that you are today?
 
I arrived in Maine in 1995 with a five-year-old, broke, pregnant with my second child, homeless- fleeing another abusive relationship. I decided to try college again for the third time.  I just had to get it right. There were two children depending on me. And I despised the shame of public housing and welfare. I had an opportunity to go to school under the Parents as Scholars Program (PAS). [PAS was a Maine initiative in response to the 1996 Personal Responsibility Act (under the Clinton Administration) championed by a Republican Olympia Snowe (go figure!) to create educational opportunities for TANF (welfare) eligible recipients.] Even with transferable credits, it took me six semesters—not including summer school—years to finish. I was excited about my BSW—yes! No more welfare! However, my first professional social work job was a child protection agent. (Yep—we even had badges) This lasted only eighteen months before I realized I could not stomach the work.  Colleagues who managed to survive for decades did so using anti-depressants or drinking,  or they suffered from a superiority complex. I knew I wasn’t actually helping “these” mothers or their broken families (who also came from broken families). Instead, what I did see in them were bits and pieces of me. So decided I needed to go back to school to get a better degree.

Needless to say, grad school was disappointing. I found myself taking expectational notice of the language used to teach “human behavior” and psychology, which ultimately blamed and pathologized people—especially women—for their current circumstances. These were the same words (language) used in macro and micro economic classes to describe poverty and who poor people were. I remember having a visceral reaction to a male instructor who glorified himself for his work with “welfare (black- single women) families” back in New York City, as if he was the great White Hope for these poor black families. The more I would try to question  these perspectives as points of concerns, the more hopeless, frustrated, and sickened I began to feel about wanting to “now” become a therapist. And forget about trauma—trauma was not even in the syllabus. I didn’t even know about trauma until my therapist diagnosed me with PTSD—whoa! Looking back, I guess it was naiveté on my part to expect a school of social work to be exempt from the willingness to explore the significance of race, gender, class, and white privilege as crucial underpinnings informing identity politics, juxtaposed against the backdrop of continuous and laborious debates concerning the rights of “the deserving” vs the “undeserving” poor. Having had multiple experiences of being that “population” on the other side of the table, I decided I could not participate in good conscience being yet another “good intentioned” practitioner. I vowed if I made it out of my MSW program, I would not practice therapy.

The reason I am an LCSW today is because of Yoga. After my graduate school experience, I took up adjunct work and Kripalu yoga. And surprisingly I found both very healing. One day in yoga class I literally sprang off my mat and announced to my instructor I wanted to teach, and next thing you know, the resources I needed to attend found me and there I was at Kripalu undergoing my teacher training. When I began to teach yoga I started witnessing emotional shifts occurring within my students on the mat. Some would begin to weep, others would burst out in laughter. I wanted to understand not only what was going on but how could I use “it” to help other people.
 
This led me to rethink my LCSW. However, 3+ years had passed since graduation, and trying to find a clinical track to be supervised proved to be more difficult than I imagined. I was bummed but determined. I had to work my way back into the field starting with BSW entry positions. Finally, I landed a grant position with Community Counseling Center who agreed to supervise my LCSW. This was the same time I heard about the work of Dr. Gabor Maté When The Body Says No and Peter Lavine’s Walking the Tiger: Healing Trauma and brought these two books into my interview stating how I intended to explore these concepts as a therapist in training. My supervisor at the time chuckled, you may not have chosen to work with trauma, but trauma has definitely called you! Little did we both know at the time, she would be spot on. About six months later I found myself registered in the first session SEP training session.

 You see, what I really believe is, it was divine interference through yoga coupled with my graduate school experience and Somatic Experiencing Trauma trainings that called me back to work with people to support their trauma healing journey.

CG: When you were talking about your work, you named Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot and her influence on your thinking. Who is she and what was it about her work that inspired you?
 
KW: Oh yes, one of the requirements of my master’s program was to create a research project. Knowing me, I couldn’t just do a simple quantitative study—no! LOL— I had to explore things, probe and search for deeper understandings. Besides I hated statistics and SPS! I needed something tangible, relatable and alive. When I heard we could conduct a qualitative study, this peeked my interest. My core instructor however was mired in the postpositivist approach to research and told me something to this effect, “qualitative research is merely a quasi- form of research conducted in the field that is not reliable due to the fact that the environment containments the findings unless its conducted in a controlled environment…” I then proceeded to the department dean who tried to reframe what “He meant”. I paused and then announced I would consider a quantitative study if I could explore the implications of psychoimmunology as a lens for clinical intervention in social work. She stood speechless for a second, rolled her eyes and proceeded to tell me that it would be too hard for me, and besides I would have to be a medical student to do that type of analyses. I pouted. I felt like the cat who just lost its prey (huh, looking back on this I can now see how this would have begun a preliminary exploration into what we now call ACEs—“Adverse Childhood Experiences.” No longer feeling enthusiastic about research, I dropped the course until the following semester.

Little did I know there were new instructors recently hired who heard about my research ideas and wanted to support my qualitative endeavors. This is when I was introduced to feminist and womanist ideologies and participatory action research and deconstructing methodologies, which lead me to a qualitative style of research called Portraiture by Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot.  Her method is a social science inquiry that is able to blend art, environment and science, “capturing the complexity, dynamics, and subtlety of human experience and organizational life.”  Of course, that made sense to me—I am an artist, right? Needless to say, I created an elaborate explorative thesis that took more than two semesters to complete, documenting the results of a multicultural program called Dialogues in Diversity at the University of Southern Maine by attempting to combine all approaches. Oy vey!

All this to say, what I took away from this experiment is the fact that Portraiture provides an in-depth layering of how to approach any subject and debunks the idea that environments are sterile. In fact, the researcher is a major part of an environment too, who views and makes meaning of the world based on her own schema, which can and does influence the outcome.  Portraiture taught me to always view things from the eagle’s eye down, the from-the-ground-up view of an ant, and the surrounding context one one’s environment including culture, his-story, art, religion, sociostatus, and geographical location, including climate. And now with my SE training I also include the internal environment of the nervous system. This is what I mean when I say I take a holistic view of trauma and ACES.
 
End of  Part 1
Click here for Part 2

Redefining Therapy website

CW: Today I am interviewing Dr. Janice Liddell, author, playwright, and retired professor and Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs and Coordinator of Faculty Development at Atlanta Metropolitan College. She also served on faculty at Clark Atlanta University for nearly 35 years, as a professor of English, department  chairperson and director of faculty development. So...  Janice, you and I met online about fifteen years ago, I believe… on an international chatlist of women playwrights.  And I remember you wrote a play titled Who Will Sing for Lena?  This is a one-woman play that gives voice to Lena Baker, a black woman who killed her abusive white employer in self-defense. Using the actual actual trial transcripts, you wrote a play that would enable audiences to understand her background and her motivation. That play has had a strong track record… and even a film?

JL: Yes, Carolyn we met on the ICWP chatlist and, as I recall, we left the chat about the same time for some similar small “p” political reasons related to our respective identities as minorities on the list. I guess it would be in bad taste to go into any more detail. (lol)
 
CG: Well, not to keep readers in suspense, we were frustrated in our respective efforts to confront racism and homophobia. And, in fairness, it was fifteen years ago.
 
JL: And yes, I had written Who Will Sing for Lena? around that time and since then, it has done fairly well in various places. But the film was a totally different project; it was, of course, related to Lena Mae Baker, but not at all related to my play. Believe it or not, the two are very different perspectives, even of Ms Baker. But as I have always said, Lena helped me to write my play and I told it the way she told it to me.

CG: I just want to tag onto that last comment. YES! Working with historical figures, and especially those in what I call “unquiet graves,” I have had that experience of a presence outside of myself standing by my side and nudging me to tell her story. Practicing theatre as a sacred art… full of miracles. So I just want to say that this recent play of yours, The Talk, is absolutely brilliant, and I would like to see every community in this country mount a production of it. It’s packed with so much… history, politics… but the characters are believable, the dialogue is spot-on, and I had chills over and over reading it…  Beautiful craftsmanship, deep humanity…  just an amazing piece of theatre… but also a tool, a social justice project, a  powerful, powerful way to bring communities together. I was so deeply moved by it.
 
JL: Wow, coming from you as a brilliantly successful playwright yourself, that is quite an endorsement. I am glad it affected you because, truth be told, it affected me even as I wrote it. But I’m sure you know that experience—of being carried away by the work as though you are channeling it. That’s a bit how it was for me.
 
CG: So…  “the Talk”…  First off, before we get into talking about the play specifically, can you tell us to what “the talk” refers?

CG: In The Talk, you have four generations of an African American family, on a Saturday morning… and there is a lot of conflict, because the two youngest members of the family, a brother and sister, want to attend a Black Lives Matter march and their parents don’t want them to go.  Can you talk a little bit about that conflict. They even make their son take off his Black Lives Matter tee shirt.
 
JL: This is a highly successful Black middle-class family and in their eyes, as in the eyes of many “highly successful Black middle-class families,” their success has resulted from them pulling themselves “up by their bootstraps.” They would likely never admit they went to university on an Affirmative Action program (as did I), for example. Additionally, they desire to separate themselves from the more “common” element of Black folks—separate themselves in every way they can. In fact, they tend to look down on the experiences of Black folks who, in their middle-class eyes, are financial, intellectual, educational, etc. failures in life. These parents have tried to shelter their children from these “failures” and serve as models for the successful route of Black people from poverty to wealth; from the ghetto to the suburbs. However, their middle-class Black children are highly influenced by the world outside of their “burbs.” Quincy Jr. is in college with youngsters from all walks of life; Miranda is so attached to her tablet and research on it that there is nothing that gets by her. The children and their parents are in totally different “realities”—and at this point, never the twain shall meet.
 

CG: But the whole power dynamic shifts when the grandparents and great grandmother show up for the brunch.  We see such a panoply of African American history in this family. It’s just wonderful.  Four generations… up from poverty to affluence… but the lynching remains a constant.  Can you talk a little about your process in writing this? Where you got the idea? Early drafts that needed changing? Is any of this autobiographical?

The play is a tad autobiographical in that my Mom is 94 years old and has dementia. My Mom’s parents were sharecroppers, and Daddy and one of my uncles served for a short time as Pullman Porters travelling from Ohio to Canada. One of Dad’s cousins was a career Pullman Porter and we were awed by the few stories we heard about their work on the train. Also, Dad and Mom’s families both migrated to Ohio from Mississippi, but not at all under this kind of duress in the play. So, some parts of the play come from stories I’ve heard or read and much from the tapestry of the Black experience and some just from my imagination.
 
CG: So you have a production coming up in January in Brooklyn… MLK Day, right?  What’s going on with that? 

JL: I am so fortunate to have had my play chosen for a coveted slot in the NYC Frank Silvera Writers Workshop. Of course, true to form, I didn’t do much to get it there; I have my dramaturg and now director, Byron Saunders, to thank for that. He is good for me. He pushes me to do more with my plays beside just finishing them and exerting that proverbial sigh of relief that they’re done. In fact, we have spoken about publishing a collection of all my plays… We’ll see how that goes. Initially The Talk was selected as the first play of the monthly Workshop series (I think there are only five in the series), but I had already made international travel plans for that date. We couldn’t find any other date for 2018 that would fit, so they came up with January 14. Of course, I found this selection very fortuitous when we realized it was MLK Day. To commemorate Dr. King’s birthday with a focus on the progress and process of Black protest movements seems so appropriate. God works in mysterious ways. I certainly hope we can fill the Billy Holliday Theatre (Brooklyn) for that one-day free performance/reading. Of course, I’ll be travelling to NYC as playwright to participate in this exciting spectacle. I can’t wait!!
 
CG: I would like to see this play done in every community… Maybe see about getting some touring productions that are funded to go to different cities.  What are your plans for marketing the work, and do you have any plans to film it? 

CG: Can you tell us about your other plays?  In the past, African American playwrights have had a difficult time getting mainstream productions, unless they were August Wilson and it was Black History Month…  Have things changed? How? Do you feel it is more difficult being an African American female playwright?
 
JL: Well, I have about six completed plays, including one for children, so I guess you can say I actually have “a body” of work. All of my plays are located on the New Play Exchange (shout out for NPX!). So anyone can review them and contact me if they are interested in seeing a full script. Putting them on NPX might be called my one passive stab at marketing (lol). Regarding being an African American playwright, I can’t speak for African American playwrights generally, but of the ones I know up close and personally, it’s rough out here. What I and my playwright friends lament about is that there are so few theatres interested in Black plays or plays written about the Black experience. And the ones that exist seem to want recognizable names or plays that have already proven their value. There are a few stars—August Wilson, of course, and a few others like Lynn Nottage, Suzan Lori Parks, the recently deceased Ntozoke Shange and a precious few others. So, I do think it is difficult being an African American playwright, especially an African American woman playwright primarily because our experiences are just not considered universal enough to give theatres confidence that their audiences will turn out for them.

My experience as a playwright is further complicated by two factors: one is that I am 70 years old. I wrote my first play when I was 50--Hairpeace –and it earned a spot at Atlanta’s Horizon Theatre’s New Plays for the New South Theatre Competition and Workshop. I loved the writing experience, the workshopping and hearing my words on a stage; I had found a new love! But I’m a senior citizen and nobody knows my name. Further, the second factor connects directly to that one--I didn’t come through an MFA program or some other training ground that connects one to the powers that be in the field. I learned the art and craft of writing plays from reading plays and teaching plays. I was an educator—an English professor, chair of an English Department, a university administrator and wrote plays in my “free-time” so as far as the theatre community is concerned, I guess I haven’t earned my stripes in the field; maybe I don’t even exist. Actually, it took me a decade and three or four plays before I could call my own self a playwright, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by the perceptions within the theatre community. I believe my work is good and at this point, I guess I’ve been satisfied with that comfort. When my work is produced, I actually feel I have hit a huge bonus. However, thanks to Byron and now you, I must admit, I’m pretty excited about The Talk and its future.

CG: To get a review copy of The Talk, email Dr. Liddell. She is in the process of publishing it, but can send a PDF copy until such time—hopefully by January. She says, of course, she's waiting now for that World Premier. Producers, go for it! It's going to be The Talk of the town!

CG: So…Cindy Dick, I understand that you have the largest collection of vintage women’s sports cards in the world. That’s amazing. I see that you refer to your collection as “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends.”  How did you come up with that?
 
CD: I first must clarify that I think it’s the largest.  I currently own close to 1,100 original cards between the 1850’s and 1972. The cards also have to be printed around the time the athlete competed.  I tell myself that there has to be a finite limit but even after 23 years of collecting, I keep finding cards I’ve never seen before! I’ve never run across another collector with a similar collection anywhere near this size so I say it with some confidence, but can’t say it unequivocally. 
 
I have two goals for the collection; a book and a museum show so I needed a name for the collection.  After mulling the options over with friends, “Tiny Treasures, Giant Legends” was born a few years ago.  The name encompasses what they represent in four words.  The cards are tiny.  Most are smaller than a credit card. Finding them is like a treasure hunt, and they are also treasures of history.  These were the best athletes of their day.  Many were giant legends in the world of women’s sports. Some were the grandmothers of women’s sports, establishing rules and leagues.  Because of these women, we are blessed to have the opportunities we have today.

CG: When did you start collecting, and what was it that got you started.

 CD: I had some baseball cards as a kid – even had a Hank Aaron card but sold them all before I was 10.  I didn’t do anything with cards for 20 years.  Finding a women’s card was a complete accident.  I was at a yard sale in Virginia around 1993 and this little boy was selling his sports cards.  I glanced at the cards on the table and was shocked to see a woman’s card!  I’ve always loved visual images of women in sports so this caught my attention.  It took me a while to define the collection’s time frame of pre-Title IX (1972) cards but now that’s pretty much all I collect. 
 
CG: Can you remember your first card?

CD: I joke that you never forget your first one.  Manon Rhéaume was the card at the yard sale.  She was a Canadian minor league ice hockey goalie.  She also had the same appeal as Danica Patrick (read, she was pretty) and between those two factors, there were great hopes that she would break into the professional league and become a hockey phenom.  Card companies made many different cards of her.

CG: So why women’s sports cards?

CD: I love images.  A picture is so powerful, and with trading cards, the magic is that you can hold your hero in your hand.  And they are neat because they have infiltrated the world of men’s sports cards.  I focus on cards and not stamps, posters, postcards, etc. because trading cards were meant to be collected and traded.  Most cards were made to be sturdier than the other forms mentioned because they were created as a collectible.  I like the older ones because they are rare and hard to find (unlike contemporary cards today) and I enjoy the challenge of finding them.  And, financially, it also keeps me focused.  These trading cards are also artistically beautiful.  I started by only buying cards that used photographs because that showed that the athlete actually was competing. But then I grew to love the lithographs, drawings, caricatures, hand painted cards…all the different styles that were used in the vintage cards. 
 
CG: And if I can get a little personal here… what about you?  What’s your sports history…? Should we have a card for you?

CD:   Lol!  No. I had Olympic aspirations but my talent wasn’t at the same level as my dreams.  I ran track in HS and played college volleyball.  Today, I am an avid cyclist and I swim.

CG:What’s the history of the marketing of these? And were the women’s cards marketed the same as the men’s?
 
CD: Trading cards were initially known as “tobacco cards” in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.  When cigarette packs were first made, they were floppy so the manufacturers inserted a blank piece of cardboard to keep them stiff.  Marketers quickly realized that blank space was marketing space so every topic under the sun is pictured on tobacco cards.  Athletes were one of the subjects and became one of the more popular ones to collect.  These are, therefore, the predecessors of the sports cards we know today.  When women were on tobacco cards, they are mostly seen as movie stars or as ‘beauties’.  Seeing women as athletes flies against the ladylike image that society pushed on women back then.    
 
While most of my cards are tobacco cards, some were distributed with chewing gum, chocolate, shoe polish, margarine, and even a piano!  What puzzles me is that it was not fashionable for women to smoke before the 1920’s.  So I have to wonder, who were they marketing to by adding female athletes?  I’ve asked some card aficionados why manufacturers would include female athletes and the answer is always, “Because they were a novelty.” 
 
The neat thing about the cards back then is that the images do not sexualize the women.  They are athletes.  Today, there is a lot of discussion and research about how women are portrayed in the media so it’s refreshing to see that the majority of these images portray the women for what they were – athletes.

CG: And about collecting…  You began to collect several years before the internet. How did you collect in the early days, and how did that change with the internet?
 
CD:  In the 1990’s I started by asking sports card dealers at shows and stores if they had women’s cards.  Dealers sell what sells so once they knew I was interested they started holding them for me.  They would sometimes even give them to me for free because to them, they didn’t have value.  At card shows, upon asking, I’d often get that blank, puzzled look as if I just asked them something that they had never heard before.

Sometimes they would have a card or two, and sometimes I was even told, “I have coaches wives” or “I have cheerleaders.” This was before eBay became a household name, the WNBA was still a dream, and before women’s soccer exploded.  One by one, I learned of sets where women’s cards were inserted into a men’s sets because women were rarely sold as a set of their own.  After a little while, and armed with knowledge, I'd ask the seller if he had women’s cards. If he said “no” I’d ask if he had ‘x, y, and z’ sets.  He’d pull out the boxes of cards and I’d leave with a stack of women’s cards. I started to get a good collection of contemporary cards…and then I came across my first vintage card and that one card changed my focus. 
 
The Internet opened the world of collecting and at the same time, that accessibility also closed many bricks and mortar card stores. The cards in my collection were printed in 25 countries around the world.  The main challenge with buying over the Internet is trusting that it’s an original card and not a reproduction, while praying it doesn’t get lost in the mail!  

CG: The “baseball cards” of my youth, about men, of course, were pretty much all sports statistics.  But I understand that this is not true about your cards. What are some of the most memorable “factoids” that you have gleaned from your cards?
 
CD:  Yes, I love the stories and language used on the backs of these cards.  My uncle translated the German cards, and he kept coming across the phrase “Olympia of Grace” in German.  We looked it up and discovered there was a women’s only Olympics hosted in 1931 in Italy!  I had NEVER heard of this before.  It was not sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee and Americans did not compete in it, but it did have an impact on the Olympics thereafter.  Italy was a fascist country then and the games were allowed because of the belief that “strong women made strong babies,” so it was acceptable for women to be athletes, as long as they didn’t forget their main purpose in life; being a mother. 
 
With the swimming cards I noticed that the images never showed the athletes wearing goggles so I asked former Olympian and world record holder, Misty Hyman, and she said that goggles weren’t used until the 1960’s.  When I look back at records and distances swam, understanding this gave the times context; knowing that the swimmers could only swim as long as their eyes could withstand the chlorine or salt water. 
 
I learned that women boxed in the 1880’s thanks to the card of Hattie Stewart. Her card is significant because the illustration shows her as both bare-fisted and wearing gloves.  The card is from 1888 and that’s the time of transition between when women boxed bare-fisted, and sometimes even bare-breasted, to the rules boxing recognizes today. 
 
I’ve learned about more stories than I can mention here.  These cards are a perfect way for me to do my own history research with each card I find.  They’ve made learning about history fun!

CG: Talk about the women of color cards in your collection… Who was the earliest one?

CD:  This is an important point.  I like to say that it’s important to acknowledge the women portrayed on these cards, and it’s equally important to acknowledge the ones that weren’t.  Sports, as a microcosm of society, were beholden to the racist beliefs of the times; therefore the collection is mostly of white women.  Financially, it was a luxury to be able to compete, travel, and tour, but the biggest barrier was to be allowed to compete – many women of color were not selected, even if they were of equal or better ability than their competition, when trying out for teams.  
 
My oldest card portrays Kinue Hitomi, a Japanese runner from the 1928 Olympics.  She was the first female medalist from Japan, but she medaled in a sport that she didn’t even train for!  She was a sprinter (100m) and a field specialist.  1928 was the first time the 800m run was offered to women (two laps around a track) and the officials asked who would like to join the race.  She did and she came in second place, earning a Silver medal.  Two side stories – the 800m run did not return to the Olympics for women until 1960 and sadly, Hitomi died two years after her Olympic debut. 
 
African American women from the US don’t appear on cards until 1960.  Wilma Rudolph has several cards, and I have one rare card that was printed in Greece of American Earlene Brown, a Bronze medalist who broke the 50-foot barrier in shot put.   Unfortunately, I’ve never seen a card of Alice Coachman; the first African American to win a gold medal in the 1948 Olympics in high jump.  There have been cards made of her jump decades after the fact.   

CD:  Babe was a force to be reckoned with!  As you know, she endured awful comments from the press because her sheer athletic ability, and her boyish appearance challenged what it meant to be female. But she had some admirers too. She pushed the barriers of women in sports and inspired countless young girls to be like her.   Ironically, Babe’s card is one of the first vintage cards I heard of.  She was my inspiration as a young girl, so, as an adult, I had to have that card.  Because it is part of an American set (Goudey Sport Kings, 1933), and because all the other athletes, except for Babe and Helene Madison (swimmer) are men, the card is expensive if it’s in good condition. I finally won it in an auction and it's one of my most treasured cards.  I have many cards of Babe from different countries: U.S., Germany, Italy, and Holland.   I’ve never seen a card of her playing golf that was printed in the time that she played (she was one of the 13 co-founders of the LPGA in 1950 and she died in 1956).

CG: So… getting the word out about these “Tiny Treasures…”  What are your plans? I see that the Phoenix Art Museum is doing a display of men’s cards. Are you trying to get these into museums?  What about touring into schools?  Internet presence?

I would love to see these in a museum show!  In 2012, the MET hosted an exhibit called “A Sport for Every Girl” but their collection showed mostly cards of illustrations of women playing sports, or women that were dressed as baseball players but were actually the gals that rolled the cigarettes.  Using the MET’s credibility as justification for a show, about a year ago I sent the Phoenix Art Museum a proposal.  The significant difference of my collection is that most of my cards are of actual athletes.  PAM declined.  About a month ago, PAM opened the “Ultimate Baseball Collection” which is a premier collection from the Arizona Diamondbacks.  It was disappointing to see that the women weren’t considered but it was their business decision. 
 
I have been approached by the Women’s Museum of California for an upcoming show about women in sports.  I would love to see this collection in the National Women History Museum in Washington, D.C. as well.  I don’t expect a museum to show all 1,100 cards but it would send an impressive visual message to see so many women being athletes and loving sports since the 1850’s!  I’ve also been asked to give some talks locally by the people that watched the Ignite Phoenix presentation. 
 
CG: What can we do to support your work?

As a follow-up to the Ignite Phoenix video, I created a video to help show that there is interest for a collection of this nature.  It’s hard to sell someone something that they don’t know exists…but if there’s interest, well, many voices are always stronger than one.  Also, I’m looking for a publisher that would be interested in this type of history/collectible/women’s sports book if any of your readers can suggest a good fit.  Most sports books are about men and all trading card books are of men so it’s hard to identify a publisher that would understand the importance of these cards.  If you enjoy vintage women’s sports items, please visit the On Her Mark  website. The funds allow us to do what we do and honor women’s sports history, one great story at a time.     

CG: I'm very happy that you have translated and are producing my play, The Second Coming of Joan of Arc, in Beijing. I was just reading about your play The Rabbit Hole... a lesbian revisioning of Alice in Wonderland. Was that your first attempt to produce a lesbian play in Beijing? How was it received?
 
San: Yes, The Rabbit Hole was my debut as a playwright of drama. I wrote some fictions and fairy tales before, but I always want to write something about lesbians in China, their lives, their love, their living conditions and so on. In 2010, LES+ had publicly staged the first lesbian drama in China, which called The Tower of Joy and Sorrow. This play attracted many attentions of audiences and media in China, from then we found the stage performances is a really good way to show ourselves besides publishing magazine. So I wrote this play and took it onto stage in Beijing earlier this year. Different with our first try on stage, I put some magical realism elements in this play, many audiences said this play is more than lesbians life only. And this time, we attracted many male audiences to watch. I was really surprised about this at first, but afterwards I was really happy about this, because this is what we want, let more people to see us.

CG: How did you find my play and what made you want to produce it?
 
San: It was a really wonderful experience for me to find your play! As I just mentioned, to show lesbians’ life in the form of drama is started very late in China. We lack of experience, lack of funds, and lack of actors…So when I committed to devote into this, I constantly collect a variety of advanced foreign experiences and the classic lesbian scripts to learn more. Then, I found you! Thanks to the internet. You and your plays really inspired me, especially The Second Coming of Joan of Arc. The first time I saw this play, (I brought it form LuLu.com), and I told myself that you should introduce this play to China. Lucy for me, your generous authorization makes all this happened.
 
CG: There are many Western references in the play (for instance, to The Wizard of Oz). How did you handle those?
 
San: Actually, the story of Joan of Arc was good known in China. I think this is mainly because the spread of several classic movies of Joan of Arc. When I do the translation, I studied a lot of information, minimize the difficulties of understanding due to cultural differences. However, the core of this play is not about the differences from Eastern and Western cultures, it’s about the circumstances that we face together.

CG: I understand you have been editing LES+, a lesbian magazine in Mandarin, since 2008. Is this the only lesbian magazine?  Do you have any problems with censorship?
 
San: LES+ is the only paper published lesbian magazine in Mainland China until now. There are few other electronic lesbian magazines, but they only transmitted through the internet. Paper publishing has brought us some financial pressure, but we insist on it, in order to retain this position. Due to the publication censorship in China, We have no publicly released qualifications so far, which means our magazine is underground publish. We sold our magazines in coffee shop, activity center, regional agency point and the online store. We still hold on, we believe that one day it will change.
 
C: What is the legal status of lesbians in China?
 
San: It’s really a complicated issue…Well, we still have no right to get married, and the law does not recognize same-sex relationship. This leads to many same-sex relationship problems, due to the lack of legal protection. In fact, there are also some problems within the LGBT community. When Chinese people mentioned homosexuality, they can only think of gay, but not the lesbian. This is mainly due to the lack of sound of lesbians. We are working hard to change this situation. And we can also see the situation is truly into a better direction.

CG: Have you had experiences personally with censorship or discrimination as a lesbian?
 
San: Lesbians in China of my generation are very different from our previous generation. China is richer, more confident, and more open. So generally, we do not receive a violent discrimination, (except some outlying poor areas, where violence and discrimination are still serious), but discrimination we receive is more intimate, such as discrimination in employment, discrimination at work etc. I had experienced the discrimination in employment before myself. The employer eventually hired a sweet girl who is always wearing a skirt but not me, and the boss told me directly they need a real girl with nice dress to obtain customers favor. I think this itself is discrimination and oppression against women.
 
CG: And.... finally... anything else you want to share with a lesbian-feminist readership here in the US and Canada??
 
San: The voice of lesbians in China is still very weak. Many people turn a blind eye to us; ignore our needs and callings, even including our own parents. Now, more and more of us have recognized this, and we working hard to try to change all this. We are doing everything you have done, and we believe our future will be what you have now been or even better. And we will be so glad if you can pay attention to us, encourage us, and support us. Because as you may already know, we are a family.

San's Mandarin translation of The Second Coming of Joan of Arc,  贞德再临_中文 is available online as a PDF download, or paperback.

Intimate Wars is more than an autobiography. As the subtitle reads, it is “The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom.”  It might also read, “and Who Has Continued The Fight For Four Decades.”

The woman is Merle Hoffman, who established Choices Women’s Medical Center shortly after New York legalized abortion in 1971—two years before Roe v. Wade. Abortion, unlike many other issues taken up by Second Wave feminists, remains as hotly contested and as much of a political football as it was back in the day. 

Hoffman’s book is, frankly, a page-turner. She has not held back from revealing her personal story—one that is fraught with the kinds of contradictions that made for good drama. She unflinchingly documents an era and a battle that have been controversial even among the ranks of activists. And she does something else that this reader found to be of enormous value. She models the attitudes and strategies it takes to win against a formidable adversary. She talks about the deep work, the transformational work necessary to bring about social change, even as she shares the details of her public campaigns.

CG: In your book, you wrote about how “women’s health needed a reformation” and how this realization led you to draft a patient’s bill of rights… which ended up being torn off the clinic walls by doctors. Do you feel that women today are more aware of our  rights when we enter the medical system… or has the tremendous erosion of social services rendered us more compliant?

MH: In a sense I believe that Patient Power is more important now than ever.  At the time I was calling for a Reformation there was practically no medical information available to patients (mainly women). The language was one that only doctors could understand and this medical language contributed to women remaining passive consumers of their own health care.

I wanted women to be able to understand in plain English what treatment was being proposed, what risks were involved and if there were any options.

Now with the Internet, medical information is available to almost anyone anywhere at any time enabling individual patients to become more assertive—but patients as a class face an even more intractable challenge which is the fact that the doctors are not virtually available.  With the ever rising numbers of the uninsured, the consistent attacks on any government funding to assist the poor, and the egregious escalation of the attack on reproductive rights, women as patients are in an even more precarious situation.

And what is required to make real change to address an inequitable and profit driven health care system is collective action.

CG: What was so refreshing about the book was your absolutely uncompromising honesty about a subject that is often uncomfortable even for supporters. This was one of the (many) passages I highlighted:

"… attempting to simplify the issue, refusing to look at the consequences or true nature of abortion—the blood, the observable parts of the fetus, the irrevocable endings, the power of deciding  whether or not to bring a new life into this world—reduces our capacity  to register the depth of this issue and disrespects the profound political and social struggle women’s choices engender in our society."

CG: How do you deal with the fact that this is the sensationalized focus of anti-abortion groups?

MH: Head on—I acknowledge that abortion is the termination of potential life—and reinforce that it is the individual woman who has the legal moral and ethical responsibility to make that decision. Reproductive justice is a human right—and the denial of rational moral agency to women deprives them of their humanity.

CG: In your book, you talk about the tactics of anti-abortion activists and the need for abortion rights activists to be as visible and as vocal. One of the brilliant actions you organized with the New York Pro-Choice Coalition was a press conference held literally in a back alley, effectively making the point that banning abortions will only drive them underground. Do you feel that there is a need for more of this kind of grassroots activism, or in 2011 has the issue moved to lobbyists and politicians?

MH: Women have to come out of the closet on this issue—in all the years since I have been fighting this issue—admitting that one has had an abortion still remains difficult. It has not become any easier to have abortion without apology. The first action has to be in each individual woman’s heart and mind—to accept her choice as a “mothers act” and bond with all other women struggle to make their own choices. One march-one action is not enough—it can be great theater—but this issue requires a revolution of consciousness—and individual psychological courage.

CG: In your chapter, “The Loaded Gun,” you discuss your work to empower patients in situations involving domestic violence, and how this work translated to your own response to the growing terrorism directed against abortion providers. You talk about the deep social conditioning of women to respond as victims. I see a Catch-22 dilemma here: How can women who do not feel biologically entitled muster the attitude of resistance necessary to defend that entitlement?

MH: See above—which is why each one of us has the responsibility of being soldiers in this battle—and why this war is “Intimate”—because we have to fight it within ourselves—we have to fight the enemy who has outposts in our heads and hearts.

CG: I appreciated your clarity about the roots of the struggle: “As long as people see abortion as immoral, its legality will be in danger.” This obviously is going to take more than legislation. How can we fight and how can we win that battle when liberals lack the monolithic machinery of the so-called Religious Right?

MH: Position the issue in terms of Reproductive Justice and Human Rights—once again-work on women accepting their power as mothers--work in coalition with other human rights struggles--it will take a long time—which is why I always see this as a generational struggle and do not allow myself to become despairing or depressed about the ebbs and flows of the battles—I am grateful to be part of the struggle (can’t say I am not getting tired though!)

Footnote: Merle Hoffman is also the editor of On the Issues: A Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking. The theme of the Winter 2012 issue is abortion.

This interview is part of the “We’Moon Anthology Blog Tour.” What’s that? Well, We’Moon has just published a 30-year anniversary anthology titled In the Spirit of We’Moon ~ Celebrating 30 Years: An Anthology of We’Moon Art and Writing. This anthology includes the work of many of the authors who have contributed to their internationally acclaimed We'Moon Daybooks for the last three decades. They have invited some of us contributorss who have our own blogs to interview each other and then post these interviews on the blogs, which will be linked to their website.  An “anthology blog tour,” right?

 It was my great good fortune to be invited to interview We’Moon contributor Marna… so here goes:

Carolyn: What has been your connection with We’Moon?

Marna: I lived at We’Moon [We’Moon Land in Estacada, Oregon] from ‘92-’93, and helped produce the ‘92 and ‘93 calendars. My work has probably appeared in over a dozen We’Moons [daybooks] since, including this year for which I was honored to be invited to write the holy day writings. We’Moon [daybook] has been a great inspiration for my creative work, knowing that it was going out directly to other womyn and weaving into their lives.

Carolyn: What was it like living on the We’Moon Land?

Marna: I learned about solar and lunar rhythms… due to a donated library of astrology materials from Marcia Patrick from when she lived there. (She was one of the 13 womyn who cursed Wall Street back in the Second Wave.) … So many seeds of my current work and scholarship and spiritual practice are sourced in my We’Moon experience! I learned so much from living in intentional community with other woms, and had creative space to garden collaboratively, learn herbal medicine and gardening, cultivate relationships with the living ecologies and life of the land, a real opening experience! The womyn’s land movement and womyn’s earth-based spiritually have pivotally informed my work and life, inspiring us here in Portland [Oregon] to create for thirteen years a Womyn’s Temple and now inspiring me to heed the call to cultivate a land-based campus with sacred herb gardens, a Hygeian dream healing center, and designing certificate and eventually graduate programs weaving together earth-inspired (ecological) creativity, healing, and hands-on skills in service of earth regeneration.

Carolyn: Wow… Is there information about your work online?

Marna: Probably the more relevant website related to We’Moon is the work I am doing with  Moonifest, a micro-grant nonprofit for women, the arts, and Earth regeneration. Also the graduate institute at the intersection of ecology, creativity, and wisdom traditions I am designing as my doctoral project in Sustainability Education .

Carolyn: That’s a fascinating idea… offering grants of $130, and asking applicants how many of them they need. As a playwright who has often needed to produce my own work, I can confirm how much mileage a motivated artist can gain with just a little financial support. Sometimes, for me, the isolation was as large an impediment as the lack of funds. Getting a grant was kind of like being alone on a life raft and being signaled to by a passing ship. It was a comfort to know that I had been seen, that someone out there was aware of my coordinates. It helped me to know that someone would be coming eventually.  So, what about your second website?

Marna: It has two related informational websites, one related to Gaian Methodologies for research inspired by the living presence of the planet, and one I just developed last winter on Earth Empathy, which offers experiential learning adventures in cultivating planetary compassion (with riffs on spirit of place, body/planet, despair and justice work, and deep time). I am in the midst of developing a resource web page on feminist pedagogy and women's collaborations (Gynagogy), which will be released later in this summer.

Carolyn: I see your “Earth Empathy” site has a page titled “Hope,” where you link to a video of Joanna Macy, where she says, “… recognize that the anguish, the horror even, that we can feel over the devastation that we read about or see or experience—that it’s okay to feel that. We're tough. Because if we are afraid to feel that, we won't feel where it comes from, and where it comes from is love—our love for this world.” This is an issue I’m struggling with right now… the sense of becoming overwhelmed, especially with the situation of Fukushima… There is such a temptation to resort to denial or diversion. Your hope and your activism give me hope. Is there anything else you would like to add?

Marna: What I can offer about my experience both with We'Moon, the land and the Almanac, as well as my experience with the extended womyn's land communities, is to praise the deep fount of strength and nurture they have provided for my spiritual-ecological wholeness and deepening. The newly published We'Moon Anthology is a portal to the song streams of so many womyn artists and writers, sustaining us in hope and justice, what Joanna Macy refers to as the work of the hands, head and heart of the Great Turning. May we each receive this nurture and continue to weave these cultures of regeneration and inspiration and be woven by the spiral thriving of planetary Gaia herself. I look forward to celebrating the sixtieth anthology in another thirty years, 390 lunar cycles from now!