As part of our Clemente Holyoke 25th anniversary celebrations, we’re offering an online writing workshop on Wednesday, May 1, from 7–8:30pm with longtime Clemente writing professor Tzivia Gover.
Join Tzivia and other Clemente alumnae for a fun writing workshop and learn how your dreamy imagination can help you tune into your inner storyteller and poet. All you need is a pen and paper — no need to remember any dreams — Tzivia will provide the prompts to get you started.
Email Pam for the Zoom link by April 30. All you need is an internet connection and pen and paper.
Are you looking to restart your education in a supportive community this fall? As you can see in the picture above, we’re a pretty friendly bunch (this is some of the members of the Clemente class of 2023).
In the year-long Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities, we study history, writing, literature, art history, and philosophy together in a small, supportive class. Successful completion of this free (!) course offers 6 credits from Bard College. Many of our graduates go on to study at the Bard Microcollege and other area colleges such as Mount Holyoke, Hampshire, and Smith.
Applications are now open for the new school year, which starts on Thursday, October 5.
Hello everyone! We at The Care Center and Bard College Clemente Course in Holyoke are excited to offer a combo of Cabot Street College summer classes designed to deepen our capacities to name and narrate the facts, joys, and problems of our own lives and the world we share. Each class carries 1 credit from Bard College, and runs from July 11 to August 3.
The morning class, A Nest for Your Mind: Making and Keeping a Journal will concentrate on the private, quiet work of writing for yourself. We’ll look at historical and contemporary examples of journals for inspiration as well as respond to writing prompts. We’ll also learn basic bookmaking techniques so that you can make your own journal by the end of class. (Materials provided.) Tues & Thurs 9:30–10:30am class; 10:30–11:15 optional open work time @ The Care Center, 247 Cabot Street, Holyoke, with Professor Pam Thompson.
In collaboration with Holyoke Media, the afternoon class, Say It Like It Is: Her Mic, Her Voice, Herstory will give you the tools to create podcasts of your own. Learn about the medium and work collaboratively with other women to develop real and personal stories that will become the content for a podcast to be aired for the community. Tues & Thurs 12–2pm @ Holyoke Media, 1 Court Plaza, Holyoke, with Professor Gloria Caballero-Roca and Natalia Muñoz.
The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Holyoke is gearing up to begin our 2022-23 school year soon. Orientation begins the week of October 4, and classes run until May 16, 2023, with a winter break from December 23, 2022 through January 16, 2023.
We offer women in Holyoke, Springfield and surrounding towns the chance to jumpstart their educational life and join a friendly community of women who study and talk and write together — about American history, literature, art history, and philosophy, with an emphasis on communication, via the spoken and written word.
To successful applicants, we offer free books and laptops, as well as childcare for babies and toddlers and transportation (from Holyoke, Springfield and Chicopee).
We are planning to be in person this year, but will consider moving to a hybrid format if public health and our student body seem to need a different response.
Are you interested in going back to school, but looking for something shorter than a full year? If so, consider applying here for Writing the Body, a 3-credit class that runs from July 12-August 25.
Questions? Want to know more? Email Pam, the program director, at holyokeclemente@gmail.com, and let me know the best way to get in touch with you.
Have you always thought about going to (or going back to) college?
You can apply here for the 2022-23 Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Holyoke!
We offer women in Holyoke, Springfield and surrounding towns the chance to jumpstart their educational life and join a friendly community of women who study and talk and write together — about American history, literature, art history, and philosophy, with an emphasis on communication, via the spoken and written word.
To successful applicants, we offer free books and laptops, as well as childcare for babies and toddlers and transportation (from Holyoke, Springfield and Chicopee).
We are planning to be in person this year, but will consider moving to a hybrid format if public health and our student body seem to need a different response. Orientation begins the week of October 4, and classes run until May 16, 2023, with a winter break from December 23, 2022 through January 16, 2023.
Are you interested, but looking for something shorter than a full year? If so, consider applying here for Activism and Black Women Singers: From Spirituals, Soul, Jazz, and Ballads to Hip-Hop and Rap. This class starts September 6, 2022 and runs through October 25 and offers 3 credits through Greenfield Community College.
Questions? Want to know more about college classes at The Care Center? Email Pam, the program director, at holyokeclemente@gmail.com, and let me know the best way to get in touch with you.
I want to share a wonderful story with you that I hope will inspire you and give you a glimpse of what you, too, are capable of when it comes to telling your stories and getting them out into the world in humble, bold, and/or creative ways.
A few years ago Jackie Velez was in the Clemente class. During one of our discussions about solitude (you remember those, don’t you?) she shared a story with the group about her experience of learning to face solitude when she was confined to the “bing” or “the box” aka “solitary” while serving time in prison. Her perspective on solitude was unique and powerful, and I thought anyone who heard or read her story would be changed by it. I know I had been. I encouraged her to write up the whole story and try to publish it someday. It took her some time, but while doing her coursework for Bard, she completed the essay and sent it out for publication–just as some of you might still do with the Op-Ed pieces you began in class.
Well, we just got news that Jackie’s persistence and hard work paid off. Her essay has been published by Oprah! I like to say, “When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.” So, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating Jackie’s accomplishment and feeling some pride as sister Clementines that we can all make our voices heard. Whether it’s in Oprah or our local newspapers, or via letters to family members or friends, putting thought into our stories and putting our stories out into the world is a powerful act.
Please share a comment about what you liked about and learned from Jackie’s writing if you feel so moved. — Tzivia
Oh, April. We wrote about you in class today, and yellow. We read T. S. Eliot:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land
“The Wasteland”
and Ali Smith:
April.
It teaches us everything.
Spring
and Bernadette Mayer:
Another gray Sunday. Trees turn brownish. We’ll think of yellow.
“April 27,” from Works & Days
I once attended a workshop with Norman Fisher, the Zen priest and poet, in which he gave us a list of words (“acacia, ankles, arguments, asparagus,” the list began; “elegant, end,” the list ended) and the instruction to use each of the words as we wrote for 8 minutes. “No matter what happens, continue to write,” he said.
“Making meaning is not my concern,” he added. “The words are smarter than me.”
He’d been working, he said, “with this particular list of words for more than two decades.”
What do you make of this?
Gather a list of words for yourself. (How will you choose them?) Cut them up. Bag them. Use them.
If you get stuck while writing in your journals this week, I’d like you to think about what Barry is suggesting here about the curious habits of our mind. “Hint,” she writes in tiny, curling cursive a few pages later:
When you get stuck, instead of trying harder, try doing something with your pen that helps you not force things.
What It Is, 170
Or if you are stuck, try this: make a W o r d B a g. See pages 178–183 of What It Is for instructions. This is a great project for enlisting the help of children with writing and cutting and hiding in the bag. Then, when you have a bag full of words, and it’s time for you to write, set a timer for 7 minutes, stick your hand in that bag, grab a word, and write whatever appears, keeping your pen moving…
If you’ve lost your book in the quarantine shuffle, here’s a page of Barry’s words to get you started. Make some of your own, too!
The actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith has made her name writing and performing in plays such as Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and, most recently, Notes from the Field, which examines the school-to-prison pipeline. To create these plays, she interviews scores of people whose expertise and experience have to do with the subject of her investigation, and then she embodies these characters on stage. For example, for Twilight, she interviewed hundreds of people (public officials, residents, etc.) about the riots that happened in the aftermath of the trial of the LA police officers caught on video beating Rodney King. She then constructed the play with monologues taken from the interview transcripts, and she plays every person herself.
Anna Deveare Smith
How did this remarkable woman train to be an actress, to inhabit such varied characters? Here’s what she has to say about what reading (and speaking) Shakespeare taught her about character.
I was afraid of many things. I was afraid of heights… But nothing matched my fear of Shakespeare. …Our Shakespeare teacher was like a racehorse waiting at the gate… She told us on the first day about trochees. Most of us had heard of iambic pentameter: BuhDUH buh DUHbuh DUHbuhDUHbuh DUH. …
“Now, a trochee,” she explained, “happens when the iamb goes upside down. So that instead of Buh DUH, you get BUH duh.”
She maintained that if you got a trochee in the second beat, a character was really “losing it” psychologically, and this “loss” made it possible for you to know something about the character, if you wore his or her words.
Losing it is a good thing in that it is a defeat of an imposed rhythmic structure.
The classic example of everything falling to pieces rhythmically as an indicator of a character’s psychological state is King Lear, who says at one point, “Never, never, never, never, never!”
Which is all trochees.
From this idea, I began to see Shakespeare in general as not so frightening at all. I began to perceive him as a jazz musician, who was doing jazz with the given rhythms of his time.
Character, then, seemed to me to be an improvisation on given rhythms. The more successful you were at improvising on language, the more jazz you have, the more likely you could be found in your language…
Our Shakespeare teacher then gave us an assignment: “Go home, take fourteen lines of Shakespeare, and say them over and over again, until something happens.”
— Anna Deveare Smith, Talk to Me: Listening between the Lines
When Macbeth hears that his wife has died, he says: “She should have died hereafter. / There would have been time for such a word.” The ten lines that follow comprise one of Shakespeare’s most famous soliloquies.
These are the lines for you to repeat aloud and try to memorize. (I know, I know — it’s bleak! And yet… well, we’ll talk. In any case, next week, for our last class, we’ll look at a poem that asks us to to look at life in another way entirely.)
Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities Holyoke 
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