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Writing for Health and Healing Online Retreat February 20-21, 2021 DOMINICAN UNIVERSITY of CALIFORNIA Low Residency MFA in CreativeWriting 1

Saturday, February 20 12:00-12:45pm PST: Welcome Session Welcome to the WHH retreat. Meet faculty and other retreat participants. 1:00-3:00pm PST: Writing Workshops WorPkersfhorompe1d: bTyoJeannndifFerroMm:aNrcahrrative Writing about Place with Thomas Burke, MFA faculty, and Vivian Bruce, MFA student. Place—geography, grand or intimate—is the focus of this prose writing workshop. Working in fiction or literary nonfiction (personal essays, travel writing, nature writing, health humanities, memoir, biography), connections to place will be explored. Workshop 2: Expressive Writing with Joan Baranow, MFA faculty, and Katie Arnold, MFA alumna. Expressive Writing is a practice that developed from the research of Dr. James Pennebaker, who found that writing about traumatic life events can help people gain insights, release stress, and even attain a new perspective on the past. The benefits of expressive writing are not limited to those who have experienced severe trauma—the current pandemic alone has taken loved ones from us and curtailed many of the activities that previously brought us solace and pleasure. For this workshop I will offer on-the-spot creative writing exercises that will encourage reflection upon experience through the medium of metaphor and the meaning of memory, in order to strengthen our resiliency during this challenging time. 2

Workshop 3: The Magic of Everyday Moments with Kim Culbertson, visiting MFA faculty and Allison Baldwin, MFA student. Writing is about noticing, about being present in a moment – awareness of that moment’s attributes, possible meanings, and shape. Writing is about a point of view, ours – but also the one we construct. Join us to practice writing exercises that zero in on these moments worth noticing, the moments that help us heal, stay grounded, and find our voice. Workshop 4: Poetry: Balancing Image to Statement with Indigo Moor, visiting MFA faculty. Introduced by Sandy White, MFA student. Images allow readers to be sensory participants in a poem. Statements permit the poem to move from one point to another. In this workshop, we'll look at how poets work to balance these two forces. Workshop 5: You are an Expert in You: Writing to Heal & Improve Your Experience as a Patient with Beth Toner, registered nurse and MFA student. The health care system can be notoriously difficult—and sometimes even dehumanizing—to navigate. And, when we are a patient, we are at a distinct disadvantage: We are ill, injured, anxious, frustrated—never good foundations for effective communication and advocacy. This workshop will explore how we can use writing to process a past (or ongoing) patient experience, move toward healing, and build our skills and confidence for our next patient experience. 3

Workshop 6: Dear Cancer: Palliative Letter-Writing with Sonya Evans, English teacher and MFA student. Those affected by disease of any kind are often left with unexpressed feelings that may impede healing. In this workshop you will have the opportunity to communicate those feelings through the process of writing letters directly to the illness itself, or to anyone involved in any stage of the process - from diagnosis through recovery. Because these letters are not intended to be sent, there is no need to hold anything back. Experience the transformative power of freely telling your illness, pain, doctor, or coworker how you really feel. 4:00-6:00pm PST: Keynote Keynote: \"Who Your People Be\": Towards a Groundedness in the Freedom of Lineage with Raina J. Leon, visiting MFA faculty. One of the most psychological and ideological destructions that can be perpetrated is in the destruction of the spiritual repositories: temples, gravesites, archives, and other sacred sites. In the dust of the past, we grow, but in salted earth, there is barrenness. In this session, we explore lineage (chosen, community claiming, and blood lines) as a pathway to individual and communal healing. The talk will include poems centered in BIPOC voices and ways of knowing, oracle practices, and writing prompts. 4

Sunday, February 21 3:00-3:30pm PST: Info Session: Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican CA (optional) Learn more about the low residency MFA in Creative Writing program at Dominican University of CA. 4:00-6:00pm PST: Panel Discussion Shakespeare in Prison with Perry Guevara, Dominican Faculty, Lesley Currier, Marin Shakespeare Company Director, Dameion Brown and Juan Carlos Meza. As part of their social justice programming, the Marin Shakespeare Company offers theatre classes in prisons. Director Lesley Currier will discuss how engaging through drama and Shakespeare's plays can be transformative. Returned citizens Dameion Brown and Juan Carlos Meza have trained in the program and now perform professionally with the company. They will join the panel and speak about their transformative experiences. This event will be moderated by Dominican faculty Perry Guevara whose service learning classes engage directly with this work. We would like to thank the Entrekin Family Foundation for their generous sponsorship of our Shakespeare in Prison panel. The foundation’s main purpose is to promote the works of quality writers and poets regardless of race, creed, or religion, primarily in our local community. 5

Thank you to our speakers & workshop leaders! Allison Baldwin is a poet whose work combines authenticity with sass. She laughs with her entire body, marathons crime television, and writes poems that are “unpredictable, but still make sense.” Most recently she has been published in Intercultural Press and Ghost Heart Literary Journal and served as Project Coordinator for the Access Granted Project, a photo essay/community writing project that centered the lives of those with disabilities living in New Jersey. She has facilitated and participated in a variety of open mics and workshops, and is thrilled to be in her first year of Dominican’s poetic medicine program. Joan Baranow is the author of In the Next Life, Living Apart, and two poetry chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Forklift OH, Poetry East, JAMA, and elsewhere. She founded and teaches in the Low- Residency MFA program in Creative Writing at Dominican University of CA. With her husband David Watts she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her feature-length documentary, The Time We Have, presents an intimate portrait of a teenager facing terminal illness. Dameion Brown had his first ever public performance playing the title role in Othello at Marin Shakespeare Company in 2016, for which he won “Best Lead Actor” from the Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Award. Since then, he as appeared in The Seagull at Utopia Theatre Project, Waafrika and The Farm at TheatreFirst (winning another BATCC award), Dance of the Holy Ghost at Ubuntu, and as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing and Pericles at Marin Shakespeare Company. He is now a full-time Artist-in-Residence at Marin Shakespeare Company where he acts, teaches at-risk youth at youth correctional facilities, and serves as a community ambassador and sought-after inspirational speaker. 6

Thomas Burke is Assistant Professor at Dominican University of California. He is the author of the fiction collection Where Is Home from Fithian Press. His work has been published in The James White Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, The Chiron Review, and the Evergreen Chronicles; in webzines; and in anthologies including Queer and Catholic (Routledge). Twice nominated for a Pushcart prize, he received the Steven L. Smith Prize for Gay Fiction. Kim Culbertson is the author of the YA novels Songs for a Teenage Nomad (Sourcebooks 2010), Instructions for a Broken Heart (Sourcebooks 2011), which was named a Booklist Top Ten Romance Title for Youth: 2011 and also won the 2012 Northern California Book Award for YA Fiction, Catch a Falling Star (Scholastic 2014), The Possibility of Now (Scholastic 2016), which was named a Bank Street Best Children’s Book of the Year (2017 edition), and The Wonder of Us (Scholastic 2017). Much of her inspiration comes from her background teaching high school since 1997. In 2012, Kim wrote her eBook novella The Liberation of Max McTrue for her students, who, over the years, have taught her far more than she has taught them. Lesley Currier is the founding Managing Director of Marin Shakespeare Company. She holds a B.A. in Religion from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Frances LeMoyne Page Award for Theatre. After a season acting at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival, she studied at U.C. Irvine’s M.F.A. Program in Acting, before being invited to Marin with her husband Robert to found Marin Shakespeare Company. Since 1989, she has produced award-winning summer productions, provided work for thousands of theatre artists, created education programs that serve over 5,000 students each year, and founded Shakespeare for Social Justice which provides rehabilitation through Shakespeare in 13 California State Prisons. 7

Sonya Evans teaches high school English in Marin County. She is currently completing her final semester of Dominican University’s MFA in Creative Writing program and is working on a play. A recent cancer survivor, she has experienced first- hand the healing power of writing as a means of creative and cathartic expression and looks forward to sharing it with others. Perry Guevara joined the Dominican faculty in 2016 and is, at present, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society. He is also the director of the undergraduate minor in Performing Arts & Social Change, which features a distinctive curricular partnership with Marin Shakespeare Company’s theater-prison program. He has authored essays on such topics as the history of medicine through Renaissance literature, embodied cognition, affect theory, and Shakespearean pedagogy in prison. He is presently writing on neurotechnology and experimental theater. Judy Halebsky directs the Low-Res MFA in Creative Writing at Dominican University of California. She is the author most recently of Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Judy is the author of the poetry collections Tree Line and Sky=Empty which won the New Issues Prize. Her chapbook Space/Gap/Interval/Distance won the Poets-Under-Forty award from Sixteen Rivers Press. In addition to poetry, she writes plays, performance texts, and does live storytelling. To learn more about the MFA program, write to her at: [email protected] 8

Raina J. León is an Afro-Latina, native Philadelphian, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate. Juan Carlos Meza was incarcerated at age 19 and released in 2020. While incarcerated he dedicated himself to nonviolence and helping others. He is an accomplished actor through Shakespeare at San Quentin, playing Dr. Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Malcolm in Macbeth, multiple Parallel Play Stories from San Quentin, and many other roles in over 8 years of work in the program. His greatest joy is helping the other people in the program bring their personal stories to life in plays. One other particular group he was proud to be part of is A.C.T. (Acts with Compassion and Truth), designed to stop violence targeting the L.G.B.T.Q. population and gendered violence. Indigo Moor is the Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sacramento. His fourth book of poetry Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, took second place in the University of Nebraska Press’ Backwater Prize and will be published in spring 2021. His second book, Through the Stonecutter’s Window, won Northwestern University Press’s Cave Canem prize. His first and third books, Tap- Root and In the Room of Thirsts & Hungers, were both part of Main Street Rag’s Editor’s Select Poetry Series. 9

Nicola Pitchford is Dominican’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, and in July 2021 will become the University’s 10th President. She has published academic criticism on 20th-century writing, as well as poetry and creative nonfiction focused on place, landscape, and im/migration. Her most recent work appears in the anthology We Are Not Shadows (2021, Folkways Press). Beth Toner, RN, MJ, MSN, is the senior communications officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She has more than 30 years of experience in marketing and corporate communications; she is also a registered nurse with clinical experience in long-term care and community health settings. Beth holds a bachelor’s degree in Communications from Messiah College, a Master of Journalism degree from Temple University, and a Master of Science in nursing from Eastern Mennonite University. She is also a dedicated fan of all things Star Trek, having published a short story in the Pocket Books anthology Strange New Worlds VI. 10

Thanks to our MFA Students and Alumni for their assistance in hosting this retreat Katie Arnold is an MFA graduate from Dominican University and a fiction writer focusing on satire. Katie lives in Chicago where she has spent more than a decade working in corporate training and public relations as a professional speech writer. As a believer in the healing power of writing, she spends her spare time reading, journaling, and confusing her husband with bizarre writing concepts that pop into her mind. Vivian Bruce is a graduate student in Dominican University's MFA program. She writes fiction and lives in Northern California. Christina Lopez Christina Lopez is a prose writer in her first year of Dominican's MFA program. She has a background in environmental biology and toxicology, which she incorporates into her writing. She is the MFA Student Assistant, as well as a QC Specialist aiding Contra Costa County in the COVID-19 vaccination efforts. Cindy Pavlinac is a writer, musician and labyrinth walker. Her photo essays and multimedia productions focus on the ancient power of place and deep community. She occasionally teaches Visual Studies and has a fine art photography studio in San Rafael, California. She wrote presageful science fiction before the pandemic and is now Sandy White is a pastel artist and painter who has always written poetry. She is now confronting her writing muse via the MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry program at Dominican. Sandy manages to wrestle most of her poems to the ground, combining serious levels with joyous levels and levels that should make you laugh, or at least smirk. 11

This retreat is sponsored by the Low Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at Dominican University of California. Our MFA program fosters a supportive community of talented writers who are encouraged to experiment across genres and with new forms of writing. In addition to Poetry, Fiction and Creative Nonfiction, Dominican offers an optional track in Narrative/Poetic Medicine, which allows students to embrace the special role that creative writing can play in the process of healing. Applications are currently being accepted for June 2021 admission. Contact Information: Judy Halebsky, MFA Program Director: [email protected] Natalie Babler, MFA Admin Manager: [email protected] Visit www.dominican.edu/mfa for more program information. MFA Info Sessions Sun Feb 21, 3:00- 3:30pm PST; General Program Information Weds March 24, 6:00-7:00pm PST; Making a Writer's Resume Sat April 17, 10:00-11:00am PST; Writing a Statement of Purpose 12