DU Writing Program Faculty as Presenters at Her Story, Our Story the 14th Annual DU Womens Conference
Carol Samson

Six DU Writing Program faculty members participated in the 14th Annual DU Womens Conference. Titled Her Story, Our Story, the conference was held on Friday, March 6, at the Driscoll Center and The Womens College.

As part of the program, day-long activities included exhibits in Driscoll Gallery, table displays of artwork and crafts and jewelry made by women who have an interest in womens issues on a global scale. One table of note was a quilting exhibit created by Professor Frdrique Chevillot, who displayed a handmade quilt fashioned of patchwork squares that repeated a single photograph of Nelson Mandelas face. Surrounding the Mandela photographs, African folk images of people and animals made from black-and-white fabric created an active frame. Chevillot purchased the material in Africa on a recent study trip, and she explained that she bought the material from a woman who had a bolt of cloth with only a few pieces left. She said that other women had made vibrant dresses from the Mandela-printed fabric.

At the conference luncheon, the keynote speaker, Opalanga D. Pugh, a professional storyteller who has facilitated workshops around the world, played an African chime instrument and spoke of the sorting out of cultural tales. Having lived as an exchange student at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa, Pugh has studied tribal storytelling and dance. She currently works as a facilitator and presenter for mental health organizations, outdoor education groups, and corporate businesses. She told stories about learning to see that what appears to be a loss may, in fact, be a necessary loss. She sang the tale of a traveler who learned that the tragedies he was witnessing were not what he had thought, that the sadness and loss he perceived were important and necessary to growth, and that he needed to re-investigate the context in which these events happened to establish their contextual meanings. She also told a tale of a group of women who sat in silence and stillness, absorbing knowledge from a communal source. When they had assimilated the silence, they re-entered the world using the poise of the quiet lessons, the silent and bonding time, to teach other women to find some great and transcendent place above the fray. She asked the luncheon guests to consider the origin of their given names and to see that life is a process of sorting stories. She said the United States is presently sorting out the stories it must live. She said that all stories must be examined and that some stories must be left behind, be abandoned in order that growth and progress can occur.

The break-out sessions in the afternoon were centered on working with womens stories. Three members of the Writing Program Geoffrey Bateman, John Tiedemann, and Eliana Schonberg led a group discussion entitled Writing with Women at The Gathering Place. Along with two members of the staff at The Gathering Place, they discussed the way that the university makes contact and sets up such a program. In this case, the DU faculty staffs a writing program for The Gathering Place, a daytime shelter in Denver that provides support to women and children affected by poverty and homelessness. The panel discussed the trust that must be established between the volunteers and the clientele as the women come in to get help in telling their stories through the writing of personal letters and memoirs. Members of DUs Writing Program faculty and Writing Center staff assist the women in preparing fundraising appeals and grant reports, in preparing resumes, and in experimenting with short fiction.

Three other Writing Program faculty members Linda Tate, Heather Martin, and Carol Samson formed part of a panel called Our Stories Aloud: A Reading of DU Womens Narrative Works. Linda Tate read from Power in the Blood, a memoir published March 2009. It is a family and cultural history told in a narrative form, and it brings to life several generations of the Cherokee-Appalachian branch of Tates family. Tracing the family from 1830 to the present, it is an unflinching, but loving, account. Tate read from a section about her grandmother who ran away from her family to become a carnival worker a carny. [See interview with Tate in this issue of the Writing Program newsletter.] Heather Martin read from a novel that chronicles the lives of five women and their experiences with a mythical object called Latimers Stone. The section she read told the tale of a child who would listen to the terrifying stories told by her Irish grandmother, wondering if the pagan tales were to be whispered below the ears of her god or if they were to be used to escape the waves of criticism from her husband and sons. Carol Samson read a short story entitled Goose Summer, a philosophical tale of a woman who sold greeting cards door to door. The story explores the human need to save and to collect objects of memory, objects of singular merit, objects for which no copy can be made. It is a story that seeks to understand the moments where love assaults nothingness, where absence is brought back into living presence.

The Point Front Page