(written November 11,2019) In honor of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), I returned to the notebooks, dusty under my nightstand, filled with the work I’d done with Peggy. In the spirit of honoring my writing, my self, and my sanity, I walked my 19 -month-old son, who had not napped for the day, a mile to the library. When his chirpy banter slowed, paces from our destination, I exhaled as I lowered his stroller seat, both of us reaching equilibrium. I wheeled us into the library and returned to pieces I’d scrawled in Uniquely Yours. Magic to return to this piece, written 8 years from the experience and now 2 years past that. Another type of magic, Green Windows’ workshops are and aren’t about the process. I know she tugged something from me with her prompt, the trust in the room and the timer. I don’t know the prompt, and it doesn’t matter. Written likely in 10 minutes, my piece sits complete. As I reread Athens, GA 2009, I inhabit the smaller clothes and forgotten shoes of the narrator. I poke open the door and wander about. It’s about the process and it’s not. I’m using a timer for this meta exercise in which I’m writing about what I wrote in Uniquely Yours, but I sit alone. As the timer slows, I’m not shifting to the new energy when we share and appreciate one another in Uniquely Yours. I’m grateful for this piece I wrote, a capsule, and for now knowing this process/not process. I know a hint of that community will see me, honor me by taking in this blog post. Athens, GA 2009 by Catherine Mencher (written March 9, 2017 in a Uniquely Yours monthly workshop) Head out the laundry room door, and there’s a trampoline from Craigslist. Notice the two trailers on the back right. One of them might hold a family. There’s a plastic trike on the dirt in front. There’s a rag over the window. The other one houses a glasses-wearing white man who comes by to collect Tom’s cigarette butts. Put them in a New York Times newspaper bag for him. On your left of the trampoline is a two-story house. A new dad. Talk to him about how the weather in Athens, GA has changed since he was a young kid. Remember to reject Southern stereotypes. Curve around the trampoline, notice my half-hearted DIY project: wine bottles buried in the dirt all cockananied and inconsistent. Be impressed by the strawberries Vanessa planted. Talk to the very old widow who lives in the teeny brick house next door as she hangs her thin house dresses out to dry. When she says her and her husband lived here when it was just a hill, remember. Remember the sprawling apartment complexes just a few doors down, remember the shady house with the guys who shared their coke and dressed you up just one road down, remember the public housing two stories tall just at the corner, and feel sad for her. Give her a hug.
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In September, we asked Green Windows participants to respond to a survey to gauge the impact of our work since we began Green Windows in 2008. The respondents exemplified the diversity of participants in our workshops:
70% of respondents participated in more than 10 workshops, with 39% attending between 11 and 50 and 31% attending more than 50. Here's what we learned from them:
THANK YOU to everyone who responded to the survey!
Check out Peggy's Creative Dialogues - you can bring her unique facilitation skills to your workplace! The monthly workshops rely on donations. Thank you for supporting this important work, if you can!! So fun! Here's what we did: We actually all wrote to the same prompt. We had several rounds and each time had volunteers read their writing to everyone, with the mic. The we switched partners. So we got to know different writers, too! Here are some of the prompts: - calculated perforated holes - blue glow - riveted soaking trousers - overlooked misgivings As always, we were struck each time by how differently each writer responded to the same prompt! Stay tuned for more FLASH workshops!
I love working with teenagers because I learn from them. And it's fun! I started working with teens in 1995, with the ATD Fourth World Movement in a vacation house for poor families outside of London. Teens said, "No one is working with us. Will you work with us?" I said, "Sure!" having no idea that I was making a career choice. One of those teens, Bea, and I continued to work together for several years within the youth branch of ATD Fourth World and she continued to work with teenagers well after she no longer was a teen herself. Bea and her mother, Moraene, both work as anti-poverty activists, as experts with first-hand experience of poverty. When I recently saw Moraene, at a conference in France, she introduced me to one of her colleagues: "Bea might have gone down a dangerous path if she hadn't met Peggy when she did." Youth workers often don't know the effect we really have, so that was wonderful to hear. But what was remarkable for me is that it's thanks to Bea that I've been working with teenagers, and loving it, for 24 years. Bea and I changed each other's lives, and those are my favorite stories. Teenaged Bea showed me around her Hackney neighborhood, told me stories about her life, introduced me to her friends, answered my questions and helped me figure out how to work with teens. She began my understanding of the struggles many teens face that I never had to face, but also of the strength, creativity and profound sense of justice that teens can bring to that struggle. After London, I spent four years working at the international center of the ATD Fourth World Youth Movement, outside of Paris. The Youth Movement brings young people from very different backgrounds together, as equals, in social justice, anti-poverty projects. I was working with young people from different countries, with different first languages, with widely varying formal education and literacy levels and facing very different kinds of challenges. There was Richard who lived with his Roma ("gypsy" or "traveller") community in a camp with no running water outside of Paris; Luke, who was going to University in Berlin who had had family on both sides of the wall; Marie who was learning circus arts to entertain children in hospitals in Brussels; and so many more. We brought them together very carefully and intentionally with a methodology that has been developed over decades and is now called Merging Knowledge. But even with this methodology and other techniques such as Theater of the Oppressed, and our purposeful facilitation, much of which I recognized later in "Restorative Justice" practices, I was consistently impressed with the capacity of these very, very different young people to overcome the barriers between them to fight for justice for all youth. That capacity gets dimmed as we grow older and I knew I had a lot to learn from it. This knowledge, of how much there is to learn from bringing very different youth together, was solidified after a group of Slovakian, French and Belgian youth I was leading on study trip in Bratislava was attacked by skinheads on a public bus. This is a story for another time, and one I have written over and over without ever being satisfied [we all have those stories]. But the most important part of the story, for me, was the incredible way the young people, who had not had an easy week, came together and supported each other in the days after the attack. In 2002, I moved back to the States, very much motivated by the desire to learn from young people in my own country like I had been learning from youth in Europe. While waiting in France for visas to come through for my French husband whom I had met in the Youth Movement, I put together a data base of youth-serving organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area. When we finally settled in San Francisco, we both found very interesting jobs in youth organizations and we were both shocked by how youth from "disadvantaged" backgrounds were being treated. The bar was consistently being lowered for them. Staff were condescending and preachy. And no one seemed interested in learning from the youth themselves. We had been trained to keep the bar high for all youth, knowing every youth would need different kinds of support to get there. We'd learned to be patient and persistent, creative and team-focused. Most importantly, we'd learned to listen to the youth themselves, as the experts on their own lives. My (now-ex) husband (and still best friend) eventually gave up on American non-profits which are overly guided by grant cycles and which put so much financial investment into executives who, especially at that time, seemed so far away from the lives of the youth they were meant to be serving. Eventually I found two organizations and one new methodology that would allow me to work with youth in a way I believed in outside ATD Fourth World: The Beat Within, The Oakland Public Library, and the Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop method. I've been volunteering with The Beat for eleven years in the local juvenile hall, and for the last year in San Quentin State Prison. The purpose of The Beat is to get the experience, thoughts and creativity of youth, especially incarcerated youth, out into the world through writing workshops and a magazine. The public library, for which I've worked, mostly part-time, for over ten years, is all about seeing the full complete person in front of you, finding answers to their questions, and being a gateway to knowledge sources and community they might not find elsewhere. The AWA method sees every person as a creative person and sees brilliance as being rooted in one being true to oneself. I've been using AWA in Green Windows workshops since 2008. Through all these jobs, bits and pieces of work cobbled together to almost make a living in the Bay Area, I have learned a lot from young people in my community. The boys killed on the street in the "bad" parts of my town (parts I live and work in, happily) aren't just boys, they are our boys. I know the shooters and the shot and know choices they face and choices they do not have. Thanks to The Beat, I know a lot of their hopes and loves and dreams and I've seen those turn to despair when their future is no longer imaginable. I bring these hopes and these despairs into everything I do and they make up one basis of my understanding of my community. I am not the same person when, for example, on the same day, I hear news that a 24 year old I've known since he was 15 got his sentenced reduced from 84-years-to-life to 2 more years in the state juvenile facility and news that another, age 19, a youth worker himself, was shot and killed sitting in his car with his girlfriend. I don't want to not know this. I want to know these young people and I want all my decisions to be affected by these events, these youth, these victories and these losses. Thanks to working with the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program for the library, I get to listen to youth speak out on race, gender and justice in ways that my generation cannot manage with such articulation and honesty and respect. And being able to witness teen writers support each other in Green Windows workshops has taught me about listening, about imagination, and about what being true to oneself means today in ways that deepen my trust in the future of our society, if these youth can continue to be themselves and be safe. Today's youth give me hope. Not because they are simply the future, nor because of their own hope. Youth give me hope because they are brilliant, because I can see social progress made within them, because I have so much to learn from them, which means my own life is still evolving. We need to support them, trust them, believe in them, but not step back, not give over. As an adult, I want to continue to listen, to learn and to then see how I, with the wisdom and skills I've gained over fifty years, can help. Let me know if you, too, want to help. And I truly do simply enjoy the company of teenagers. And I am deeply grateful to be doing work I love. - Peggy Simmons PS -if the skills and experience I've gained working with teens over the years could be of use to your group - of adult or youth - please let me know! "Creative Dialogues" is a new name for work I've been doing for many years. With Creative Dialogues, I bring together my skills and experience facilitating groups using creative writing, theater, participatory research, and restorative justice methodologies. Creative Dialogues help people very different from each other get to know each other better and make progress together with their goals and challenges. Facilitation is about more than timekeeping and agenda-building. In any meeting or group gathering a good facilitator will strive to be aware of the whole space and everyone in it. Who’s dominating the conversation? Who’s not participating in any way? Who’s participating in subtle ways? Are we staying on topic? Are we understanding each other? Are we coming to a consensus if we need to? Can we hear each other? Do we need a break? Should a window be opened? A door closed? A facilitator is there for the group, not for themselves and the best facilitators are able to take themselves completely out of the conversation and help the group come to conclusions everyone will accept and in which they’ll see their own contributions. These outcomes aren’t always achievable by direct talking around a table. This is especially true when individuals are very different from each other, with divergent points of view, with varying language skills and/or educational backgrounds, some with more power than others, with differences that come with prejudice and bias, etc.. There are many techniques that can help with these challenging dynamics. Art and creativity can enable a group to level the playing field and grow understanding in indirect ways. Through facilitation techniques that ask us to create together and respond to each other creatively, understanding grows naturally, not through debate or winning arguments, and we are more able to see viewpoints different from our own. Let me know if a Creative Dialogue might be helpful for your group. Please contact me to arrange a free 20-minute phone consultation. More information here. I look forward to hearing from you. - Peggy Simmons I thought it was time again to share some of the work I’m doing in the local juvenile hall (Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center). For the last nine years, I’ve volunteered with the magazine The Beat Within doing weekly writing workshops in the hall and editing the writing for publication. I also facilitate a 5-week poetry workshop once a year in an English class in the hall for the Oakland Public Library, leading up to the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate application deadline (February 5th this year!). With Green Windows, I’m now regularly facilitating a weekly writing workshop with youth in the hall who have graduated from high school. Traditionally, these youth do nothing while their peers are in class. Probation staff in the hall took it upon themselves to organize classes for them: Anger Management, Financial Literacy, Gardening, Sex Ed, Chorus, whatever a staff can offer. You can read more about this program in this blog post from last June. These writing workshops, all of them, have gotten harder over time. I’m not sure why but I have two thoughts: 1) There seems to be more kids who have a really hard time maintaining focus. And the amount of time they can focus is less and less with more and more kids who seem to not ever focus at all. 2) The discipline in the hall has gotten more lenient, which in a big way is a good thing. But it means the kids can go through a whole program and/or a whole class talking to each other loudly, not working, without any consequence or reaction. I have no authority, so I try to convince, cajole, reward, adapt the work to the individual and sometimes guilt-trip by telling them why I am there. I am there to get their own thoughts and imagination on paper. And I am disappointed when I don’t, because it's a loss for me and for the world that might read them. But just being there matters. Even the most recalcitrant writers ask me when I’m coming back. They thank me in the end for “helping me express myself.” They’ll chat with each other about their cases and gossip about their girlfriends through the whole workshop and then tell me that the workshop will help them be creative and control themselves in their future. All of this can happen and be true. I am always drawn back to the idea that just being there, regularly, even relentlessly, and determinedly demanding of them to be their true selves on paper counts. Who do they count on to show up? Who is asking them to be true to themselves? I’d like to tell you about the young people I get to meet. Here, now, I’ll tell you about two very different people. Kalani has focus and tries almost every time, almost every prompt I give him. He can write short, powerful pieces that make the reader understand a little better what it feels like to be an incarcerated young man facing an uncertain future. He also has a remarkable imagination, able to create both characters and settings that go well beyond his personal experiences. The themes in his fiction, though, are always about family bonds and trying to care for family amidst scarcity, violence and addiction. He has written about the challenges facing a boy simply coming home after school and about a man hunting in the wilderness to get food for his family. Strong bonds between brothers reoccur in his fiction. In all the years I’ve been doing writing workshops in the Alameda hall, I have met few young people with this versatility of talent or this willingness to do real, challenging work. A judge (not a prosecutor, thanks to California Proposition 57), recently decided to put Kalani back in juvenile court, to not try him as an adult and send him to adult prison. This is a victory. I do not know why Kalani is locked-up, though I know it’s serious. I never ask. These young people are not their crimes. Kalani is intelligent, creative, thoughtful, and kind. He prioritizes his family and he tries new things to better himself and broaden his world. Why would I need to know more? Nia is 18 and has been told for months that she’ll be sent to a group home soon. She wants to go home. Why any of that needs to happen when she’s a legal adult, I don’t know. Group homes lie about interviewing her when they haven’t. She is angry. I would be angry too. She is in a class full of young men who miss their girlfriends. She’s a young woman who is easily charming and easily charmed but clearly she draws bold lines around herself. Nia is quick and clever and wants books and poetry with language that doesn’t bore her. She is a clear and precise writer and writes quickly. Every day she’s not in the mood to write, and almost every day she does anyway. One day she said that she was too angry to write. I said, “Write out your anger, don’t hold back, don’t worry about being appropriate, you don’t have to show it to me or anyone.” She did and said she felt better afterwards. In her evaluation she wrote, “I learned that writing down my feelings really does help me cope with my time.” Please feel free to reach out to me with any questions about this work, or if you'd like to volunteer with The Beat Within. Below, you ‘ll find two pieces of writing from Kalani, one from Nia and a piece I wrote in one of these workshops last Fall. - Peggy Simmons Scared
I’m scared because I don’t know what to do I’m scared because I only have 1 life not 2 I’m scared because they offered me more time than I lived I’m scared because I have no control in life I’m scared because I can’t trust no one I’m scared because the ones you love will hurt you I’m scared because no one looking out for lil’ bro I’m scared because I’m not living at home -Kalani The Room The room I was in was small fit about 5 people at most But the room had AC so it was never hot inside. I remember this room because most of my teachers wanted me in detention instead of being in their class. The room walls were all beige with desks all facing the wall. -Kalani 18th B-Day So 2 days ago I spent my 18th b-day in a jail cell. Ever since I turned 13 I always dreamed about my 18th B-Day and how I would have the sexiest dress on with the baddest heels. The longest red hair and makeup to die for. My 18th b-day was supposed to be the happiest day for me. Instead, once I woke up I had to stand in a door and wait for somebody to pop my door. I had to sweep, wipe, and mop down my cell. I was being talked at rather than talked to. I never imagined I would spend the best day of my life in a jail cell. - NiMoney I Want Your Expressions I want your words to come from your bellies I want your words to come out colorful and complex I want your words to shatter your shells So we can really see you We need to really see you I want your words to hit us in the gut I want your words to show us new lights I want your words to shatter our blinders So we can really see you We want to really see you We are stuck, each of us, between walls Walls built between people, between neighborhoods We can’t see each other We pretend the world is the world within our walls We live small. We live blind. We live selfish. Tend our gardens and ignore the smoke on the other side. I want your words, I want our words to explode the walls So we can see each other. - Peggy Simmons, (Written in the last Fall 2017 workshop in the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center SEEP workshop.) The Alameda County juvenile hall has an amazing pilot program for incarcerated youth who have graduated from high school, called SEEP (Student Extended Education Program). Traditionally, and apparently in most juvenile halls, there isn’t much for the graduates to do while their peers are in class. In the Alameda County hall, a small program was started in partnership with Merritt College to give some students college courses. This program runs on love and volunteers thanks to dedicated people like Amy Cheney (who Green Windows is honored to have on our Advisory Board and who used to be the Librarian in the hall) and Louise Anderson (Alameda County Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Commissioner [JJDPC]). Besides this small college program involving a few youth and a few volunteers, there was nothing for the graduates until some JIOs (Juvenile Institution Officers, the Alameda County Probation staff who work with the youth in the hall) decided to create a program. Officer Nicole Perales and Officer Brian Bingham (who also honors Green Windows on our Advisory Board) started SEEP, with no funding, engaging other JIOs to teach classes on life skills, debate, cooking, gardening, whatever skills they could share. They needed to rely on people who had clearance to enter the hall, a proven track record to work with the young people and who wouldn’t require funding. This fabulous, desperately needed program, was also born out of love and runs on dedication. Perales and Bingham have seen and supported my work in the juvenile hall over the years, running different kinds of writing workshops with Green Windows, for The Beat Within and with the Oakland Public Library for the Oakland Youth Poet Laureate program. They knew my love, dedication and clearance and asked me to run a series of creative writing workshops with the SEEP students. Thanks to generous individual donations to Green Windows, I was able to run this workshop for five weeks this past Spring. The creativity of these brilliant and charming young people impressed me, as did their desire to engage themselves while locked up, despite facing uncertain futures or futures certain to contain a lot of time inside and while dealing with all levels of sorrows. Their writing shows they do not easily lose hopes and dreams and loves. I hope to continue to offer creative writing workshops with these young people, in addition to volunteering weekly to run workshops with The Beat Within. Green Windows needs funding to offer them, though, please consider donating. This whole post was written to introduce this one piece of writing, written in the last SEEP workshop. Writing like this implores us to offer these young people as many opportunities as possible to authentically express themselves. Our society has much to learn and gain if they do. - Peggy Simmons Untitled
We were all born with the power of changing the world, emotionally, mentally, spiritually and maybe of course verbally. I stand tall on this lovely morning with my hands bruised from protecting myself from the haters, eyes red & puffy from praying and crying, my body slim but using the bit of strength within my female body. Nobody should be Judged from a record or a misunderstanding mistake. We are human beings, please look at us as one. If nobody wasn't born in different countries then what is a world? Different skin tones matter or what would be the real definition of a human being including their tone that comes out of their mouth? What’s coming out of mine are the last words I am ever going to preach for. They say, “what you do & say will be used against you”. In the system some can control themselves & get away, start over until never again. It is another day that can be brighter but Hey! What about the others “maybe”? Can you at least feed us real food here & there, take us to field trips in the “real life”? Or cook what I enjoy, for I think I still remember how to use my hands. Stress really eats up our cells and DNA including techniques, that nobody made him or me learn. Again they say “get it together this is real life”. Can I be loved one more time? Because that’s the “real life” not the system. 17 years young now. 5 years pass - I am free I could have spent the rest of my life in there, but I did not go down like no SUKKA, fight! Let your voice be heard & the victim get on the stand! I am loved, I started my own restaurant, I travel now. One day when I am 50, miniature me’s will be changing the world Amen. - Xochtil After college, I started journaling. Everyday. I would write as a process of understanding myself better and as a way of saving my impressions of the world around me. I was living in Argentina at the time and there was so much I wanted to capture, to remember, as if writing letters to be opened by another version of myself in another time. When I moved back to the States, my writing became infrequent for a time. I pursued other means of understanding myself, specifically studying plant medicine, movement and massage. At the time that I found Green Windows, I was six months into my studies in becoming a massage therapist with a focus on Eastern modalities. My teachers were training us to look for harmonies in the body, the things that were working well in our clients, instead of focusing on the seemingly hurt or broken pieces that were our clients’ major complaint. The belief is that by finding what is working well, and supporting that function, the body has more resources to heal itself. When I found Peggy and the AWA method, I realized right away the natural pairing of what I was learning in school with one of the guiding principles of the AWA method: look for what is working well. I noticed that, in bodywork as in writing, this type of listening creates a safe place where one can reconnect. From here, we can go into the world a little stronger, more ready to adapt to life’s changes. One of the first things I noticed about Peggy was her ability to reach into the depths of each person in a writing group and spark a match igniting a fury of inspiration, drawing out stories and characters and poetry that set free the writer in every person. The second thing I noticed was the diversity of the group. How rare that such an array of people could come together to create and share. And who was this woman who could speak to all of us? I had to learn more. Building upon the common ground between my bodywork and writing practice, I direct a person’s attention towards harmony and what works to facilitate an environment that invites our most authentic selves to show up. In tuning our awareness in this way, we nourish ourselves and evoke what we wish to create. When we employ this way of looking for what is strong in a group setting, we begin to understand how Peggy can bring together people from such different backgrounds. Still Peggy’s magic lies beyond the trust she has in the AWA method, or efficacy in facilitating it, but rests in her belief in and dedication to making this work accessible to each unique voice as fuel for radical conversations. Expanding upon Peggy’s example, I see that the unique voice can take many forms. I witness how the human body’s movement, like words, is a language expressing a unique story. And from my own experience of the creative flood after being in Peggy’s workshop, I realize that freedom of expression holds the greatest potential to liberate the human spirit, and it is precisely this liberation that drives me in all of my work. - Jenna Frisch, Green Windows Facilitator, former Green Windows Apprentice. |
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