On my right, three rows back and seven chairs over, a woman began to sob heavily. Usually, sobbing doesn’t happen in my class on authenticity. My classes on recovering from illness, living with dying, happiness after loss—these are guaranteed sob fests for at least one or two attendees. The authenticity workshop—not so much. After a few moments, her tears were…
Every so often—in every teacher’s life—there appears a student whose dedication and progress confirm what we’re trying to do in the classroom, reminding us that our work really works. Hilda was a case in point. A psychologist in her mid-sixties, with an antiquated top knot and bifocals clipped to a chain around her neck, Hilda looked like a maiden aunt…
In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to remember an extraordinary weekend of poetry, learning, and community. Last December, I joined a troupe of 20 writers and poets at a Garrison Institute workshop called “Imagining Your Voice on the Page.” The idyllic grounds, under a blanket of freshly fallen snow, seemed to tuck us in for three days of…
As a literate society, the idea that reading fiction makes us better people is ingrained in us. However, even if reading fiction makes us more empathetic people, the relationship between empathy and action has been the subject of debate in the academic community.
Photographer and author Bill Hayes’ most recent book, Insomniac City, is a memoir about his partnership with the belated Oliver Sacks and set in his beloved New York City. Like Sacks—who is one of the greatest contributors to our understanding of the brain and neurodiversity—Hayes is a keen observer and documenter of his fellow human beings. When Sacks and Hayes…
The poems here—roughly “scenes” in which two elderly women read the news, a young woman considers the wonderfully temporary nature of her body, and an elephant meditates on the trauma of bearing witness—reflect my longstanding fascination with voice. Although I’ve been performing poems for twenty years, I’d never studied voice directly until I attended the Garrison Institute’s “Voice on the…
In September, the cast and crew of Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser, a made-for-TV-and-online opera, shot two episodes at the Garrison Institute. The setting both inside and outside the Garrison Institute was perfect for these chapters of the Vireo story, which is about the nature and uses of female hysteria through time, as witch-hunters, early psychiatrists, and modern artists variously…
Composer, singer, filmmaker, choreographer, and director Meredith Monk recently led a workshop at the Garrison Institute entitled “Voice as Practice: Instrument of the Heart.” We caught up with her before the workshop to discuss art as a spiritual practice and the pervasive sense of busyness that so many of us seem to feel these days. Monk was in New Mexico when we…