A Banquet of Transformative Language Arts!

Join us for a replenishing afternoon featuring a delicious menu of Transformative Language Arts in poetry, memoir, stories, and song.

Saturday, June 15, 2024 from 2-5 p.m. ET/ 1-4 p.m. CT/ 12-3 p.m. MT/ 11 a.m.-2 p.m. PT/ 6-9 p.m. UTC

Enjoy yourself in a welcoming and vibrant community of other creatives. Everyone also gets an ample doggie bag of handouts, plus recipes for great dishes from famous writers, to bring home with them.

Our banquet will be on Zoom, so you can attend from wherever you are without any need to dress up, find a place to park, or figure out what to order.

This event is a fundraiser to help us expand our staff to better serve you and others who resonate with the power of words to spark positive change in our lives and the world.

Your Menu

Welcome and Be Our Guest with your host, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

Amuse Bouche—A Taste of Poetry Aloud with Eric McHenry

Enjoy poetry memorized and recited by Eric McHenry, former Kansas Poet Laureate, and reconnect with the wonder of learning and taking into your memory poems you love.

Appetizers—Measured in Moments: A Taste of Micro-Memoir with Elizabeth Chelsa

Micro-memoir invites you to tell a compelling personal story in under 300 words by focusing on a moment or memory that has shaped you. This taster course will briefly define the micro-memoir genre, share strategies for capturing snapshots in powerful prose, and provide a smorgasbord of prompts for crafting your own micros.

Soup & Salad—Mindful Writing for Conscious Embodiment with Marianela Medrano

Mindful Writing (MW) creates a bridge to healing the self. It facilitates the process of writing from and with the body, bringing attention from the neck down. Mindful Writing is an invitation to write in a less cerebral, intellectualized way, softening to the whispers of a body with the wisdom to guide us to conscious awareness. In Mindful Writing, we observe our behaviors and the cultural, political, and emotional/psychological structures we create. We watch our language and find the etiology of our attachments, beliefs, and views. With our Writing, we shine a light on the perspectives we hold and strive to see our shared humanity thru the lens of love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity.

Entree—Rewriting Your Future with Lewis Mehl-Madrona

Medical and psychological healing is easier when we can imagine where we want to go. People tend to wrestle over how to improve without clear images of the destination. We will explore techniques for creating images of healthy futures and then exploring how that future can draw us toward it. Is it possible that Coyote is right -- the future creates the past?

Dessert—If Music Be the Food of Love: Savor the music of Joy Zimmerman in a short concert

Sit back and savor the original songs of Joy Zimmerman with just the right balance of savory and sweet.

Closing—Hugging Goodbye

Bid your new friends adieu and we’ll send a doggie bag of handouts with you, including special recipes (yes, for real food) by famous writers.

About Your Chefs

A Taste of Poetry Aloud with Eric McHenry, former Kansas Poet Laureate

Eric McHenry is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Odd Evening (Waywiser, 2016). His honors include the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a term as poet laureate of Kansas. His poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The New Republic, The Times Literary Supplement, Field, and The Yale Review. His prose appears in The American Scholar and The New York Times Book Review. He teaches English at Washburn University.

Measured in Moments: A Taste of Micro-Memoir with Elizabeth Chelsa

Elizabeth Lukács Chesla is the author of You Cannot Forbid the Flower (2023), a hybrid novella based on her father’s experiences in World War II and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. The daughter of Hungarian refugees and a mother of three, she earned her MA from Columbia University and spent a decade teaching writing and literature in New York City before moving back home to the Philadelphia suburbs to raise her family. There she wrote books on reading, writing, and critical thinking skills for educational publishers; served as an editor for nonprofit organizations; taught online writing and literature courses for homeschoolers; became a yoga teacher specializing in support for hypermobility and trauma; and co-founded a weekly embodied writing group for women.She now leads writing and yoga workshops, develops humanities content for educational publishers, and serves as an editor for emerging authors. Her work has appeared in Quarter After Eight,The Tattooed Buddha, Another Chicago Magazine, and Flare, a flash fiction anthology. Learn more here.

Mindful Writing for Conscious Embodiment with Marianela Medrano

Dr. Marianela Medrano was born and raised in the Dominican Republic and has lived in Connecticut since 1990. A poet and a writer of nonfiction and fiction, she holds a Ph.D. in psychology and has published numerous poetry collections in English and Spanish. Her literary work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines in Latin America, Europe, and the United States. She is the founder of Palabra Counseling & Training Center, LLC. Her TEDTALK at Ursuline College speaks about her work and research on the Taino people: Embed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pQeBYd2oJk. Dr. Medrano is a certified Mindfulness Meditation teacher. She is a mentor/supervisor for the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, IFBPT. In 2023, she was awarded a grant by the Bess Family Foundation to research interspecies care. She loves the earth and is committed to caring for the pluriverse until her last breath. Dr. Medrano has lectured in many countries, including Spain, India, Colombia, El Salvador, Panamá, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. Website, LinkedIn, Facebook,Youtube, Instagram.

Rewriting Your Future with Lewis Mehl-Madrona

Lewis Mehl-Madrona, MD, PhD is a faculty physician in the Northern Light Acadia Psychiatric Residency Program. He is also associated with the Family Medicine Residency at Northern Light in Bangor, Maine. He graduated from Indiana University, Stanford University School of Medicine, and completed his post-graduate medical training at the University of Vermont. He works with Coyote Institute, whose goal is to bring Indigenous wisdom to the larger world. His PhD is in neuropsychology.  He is the author of Coyote Medicine, Coyote Healing, Coyote Wisdom, Narrative Medicine, Healing the Mind through the Power of Story, and Remapping Your Mind: The Neuroscience of Self-Transformation through Story. His work focuses on the power of story, the neuroscience of story, and story as a tool for transformation. He keeps trying to transform psychiatry to be more humane and richer with stories.Coyote Institute, Coyote Institute Facebook page,Lewis’ website, Facebook page, or LinkedIn.

If Music Be the Food of Love with Joy Zimmerman

Joy Zimmerman is a touring folk & acoustic roots singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Joy’s clear, honeyed voice lights up her songs of hope, resilience, and humor. Her eighth album, The Canvas Before Us, debuted at #8 on the FAI Folk Charts in 2021. A former social worker, Joy is an ArtistINC alumnus and an Artist as Activist grant recipient from the Mid-America Arts Alliance. Joy’s many collaborations include a portrait exhibit she curated based on her song, “Women Who Walked on Water,” at the InterUrban ArtHouse. Joy is the Power of Words conference co-chair. Website, Facebook,Instagram.

This fundraiser offers you a sliding scale of options. Please donate whatever you can to help us grow TLA. Thank you!

Level I: $75 | Level II: $150 | Level III: $250