Fall 2014 COA Magazine

CREATIVITY: THE ARTS

COAVolume 10 . Number 2 . Fall 2014

THE COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

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COAThe College of the Atlantic Magazine

Creativity: The Arts

Letter from the President 3

News from Campus 4

Donor Profile • Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 9

CREATIVITY: THE ARTS

Introduction • Catherine Clinger 10

Leaping into the Feature • Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes 12

Trouble Dolls • Jennifer Prediger '00 17

Creativity in Motion • Tawanda Chabikwa '07 18

Evolution, Creativity, and Art • A Dialogue 22

Seeking Form • Miles Chapin '10 24

Creativity • The Paths 28

Creative Activism

The Restaurant 30

The Future We Bought 32

Reclaiming Land, Connecting Communities 33

You: Unplugged 34

Poetry • Gregory Bernard '16 and Molly Caldwell '14 35

"Leta" • Grace Goschen '17 36

Alumni & Community Notes 40

On the Doorstep of Europe • Heath Cabot 47

Elmer Beal Retires 48

2014 Commencement Address Excerpt • Mary Harney '96 49

"I want to dance until I disappear, because at some point everything is shed, you're finally as you truly are meant to be — creativity, vitality, life."

Tawanda Chabikwa '07 (photo by Craig Bortmas)

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The stories in this issue reflect quests. They are personal accounts of alumni, faculty, and students striving to reach out, to connect, to change. Through them we see how we all seek to understand ourselves, our mortality, and our relation to our chosen worlds — from humanity's ancient heritage to the emotional and physical currents of daily life. Miles Chapin '10 carves a four-ton granite block in hopes of connecting two nations — and a smaller block to speak of love. Alexis Gancayco '17 draws a heart eighty-four times in a piece stretching twenty-eight feet as a response to the death of a friend. Tawanda Chabikwa '07 dances, chants, paints, and writes to instill some of the tremors of the primordial balance between humanity and nature into our twenty-first century world. With her distinctive humor, faculty member Nancy Andrews explores human consciousness. Others expand art into public activism to connect a community, confront bureaucracy, or simply remind people of the joyful satisfactions of sustenance.

Such efforts galvanize our full selves. As Ashley Bryan, artist, sculptor, children's book writer, and COA friend says, "The desire to create is what identifies us as being human." (An exhibit reflecting Ashley's life, produced with the help of a host of COA people, is in the Blum Gallery through February — so visit!)

As I write this, the full October moon is rising. I wake to the aroma of wood smoke in the glow of golden birch trees, and fall asleep to the glimmer of moonlight on Penobscot Bay. In the news, emerging from miseries of war, disease, and politics, is the revelation that cave paintings on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia were created some 40,000 years ago. These paintings are as old, or older, than those on European cave walls. With this evidence that early creativity spanned the globe, scientists are saying that humans were likely making art even before the rafts of Homo sapiens left Africa — possibly even before we became human. Art, these scientists suggest, accompanied a huge growth spurt in human intelligence — something faculty members Helen Hess and Bill Carpenter speculate about here.

When I look at the blue-gray nightscape cast by the radiant moon, I have to wonder, did this surge in creativity evolve so as to comprehend the beauty of our world?

The faculty, students, trustees, staff, and alumni of College of the Atlantic envision a world where people value creativity, intellectual achievement, and diversity of nature and human cultures. With respect and compassion, individuals construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations.

COA is published biannually for the College of the Atlantic community. Please send ideas, letters, and submissions (short stories, poetry, and revisits to human ecology essays) to:

COA Magazine, College of the Atlantic105 Eden Street, Bar Harbor, ME 04609 [email protected]


Volume 10 · Number 2 · Fall 2014

WWW.COA.EDU

Donna Gold, COA editor

EditorialEditor Donna GoldEditorial Guidance Heather Albert-Knopp '99 Lynn Boulger Catherine Clinger Dru Colbert Darron Collins '92 Jennifer Hughes Katharine Macko Bob Mentzinger Suzanne Morse Steve Ressel Eliza Ruel '13 Lauren Rupp '05 Josh Winer '91Editorial Consultant Bill CarpenterAlumni Consultants Jill Barlow-Kelley Dianne Clendaniel

DesignArt Director Rebecca Hope Woods

COA AdministrationPresident Darron Collins '92Academic Dean Kenneth HillAssociate Academic Deans Catherine Clinger Stephen Ressel Sean Todd Karen WaldronAdministrative Dean Andrew GriffithsDean of Admission Heather Albert-Knopp '99Dean of Institutional Lynn BoulgerAdvancementDean of Student Life Sarah Luke

COA Board of TrusteesBecky Ann BakerDylan BakerTimothy R. BassRonald E. BeardLeslie C. BrewerAlyne CistoneNikhit D'Sa '06Beth GardinerAmy Yeager GeierElizabeth D. HodderPhilip B. Kunhardt III '77Anthony MazlishSuzanne Folds McCullaghSarah A. McDaniel '93

Linda McGillicuddyJay McNally '84Stephen G. MillikenPhilip S.J. MoriartyPhyllis Anina MoriartyLili PewHamilton Robinson, Jr.Nadia RosenthalMarthann Lauver SamekHenry L.P. SchmelzerStephen SullensWilliam N. Thorndike, Jr.Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15

Life TrusteesWilliam G. Foulke, Jr.Samuel M. Hamill, Jr.John N. KellySusan Storey LymanWilliam V.P. NewlinJohn ReevesHenry D. Sharpe, Jr.

Trustee EmeritiDavid Hackett FischerGeorge B.E. HambletonSherry F. HuberHelen PorterCathy L. Ramsdell '78John Wilmerding

COA indicates non-degree alumni by a parenthesis around their year.

Cover: Tawanda Chabikwa '07, photographed by Craig Bortmas (see page 18).

Back Cover: Beech Hill Farm by Ezra Hallett '17. As part of Dru Colbert's Activating Spaces: Installation Artwork class, Ezra turned one of the outbuildings of Beech Hill Farm into a camera obscura. The building became a large-scale pinhole camera. Should you have entered it during the installation, you would have seen this image projected on 10 by 6 feet of sheets hanging on the back wall. The back cover is a digital photograph of the actual projection.

Phot

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Bill

Car

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COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 3

When I consider COA, I think of creativity, for it is one of the most important characteristics we like to cultivate among students, faculty, and staff at College of the Atlantic. My use of the verb cultivate here is strategic because from my experience you neither teach nor learn creativity, but are rather exposed to conditions that encourage it.

Though creativity shows no bias when it comes to disciplines of thought, influencing outcomes in fields as diverse as political science, two-dimensional design, and micro-biology, COA's strategic lack of departments and focus on interdisciplinary approaches more forcefully inspires creative thought. Asking students to apply classroom learning to projects and problems is also something of a catalyst to the creative process, though one can certainly exhibit creative thinking in purely theoretical realms as well. And being at the controls of your own curriculum — that is, designing your own course of study around what you're interested in, what you're perplexed by, or what you're trying to solve — almost requires our students to think creatively about their own education.

You're not likely to come away from reading this issue with a blueprint for how to live a more creative life. That's not our intention. But the pages that follow dispel the myth of creativity as something only for the slightly touched, savant painter, or the scientist suddenly possessed by some mysterious, revelatory "a-ha" moment. When I consider creativity and the creative life, I think of my favorite artist John Coltrane whose wild, sometimes superficially incoherent improvisation is neither random nor mysterious. Coltrane's inspiration emerges from one of the hardest work ethics in jazz, from repetition, from attention to detail, and from supreme concentration and presence.

I like to think our work and our scholarship here on the COA campus, in the Mount Desert Island community, and across the world echoes Coltrane's focus on presence and practice and, in so doing, cultivates the creative spirit amongst us all.

From the President

Darron Collins '92, PhD

Darron, his daughter Molly, and Ashley Bryan at the opening of A Visit With Ashley Bryan (see page 7).

P.S. I want you to know that College of the Atlantic's annual report, previously mailed, will now be offered online each January at coa.edu/developmentliterature.

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4 FIND MORE STORIES AND PHOTOS AT NEWS.COA.EDU

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER

A PRINT SHOP IS BORN BEECH HILL FARM BOUNTY

THE GREAT WEST MONSTER COURSE NEAR CALAVERAS

RICH BORDEN: A FACE OF HUMAN ECOLOGY

EARTH IN BRACKETS AT NYC'S CLIMATE MARCH

BLUM GALLERY PRESENTS JENNIFER JUDD-MCGEE (′92)

AUGUSTJULYJUNE

NEWSFROM CAMPUS

Degrees are handed to 76 students from 15 nations and 20 states, including Sean Murphy, the first male staffer to receive a BA, following in the footsteps of former staffers Pamela Parvin '93 and Patricia Ciraulo '94. Commencement speaker Mary Harney '96 (see inside back cover) brings tears to many eyes.

The New York Times publishes an op-ed by Doreen Stabinsky, faculty member in global environmental politics, calling for a global carbon emissions cap, plus substantial investment to make it happen.

Summer events range from a conversation with Jenny Bicks, Sex and the City and Men in Trees writer, and faculty member Jodi Baker, to genome research with trustee Nadia Rosenthal discussing her work in regenerative medicine with Steven Katona, former COA president.

The Peggy Rockefeller Farms obtains a commercial agriculture permit allowing it to fulfill more college and community needs, raising 30 sheep, 50 egg-laying hens, 200 meat chickens, and tending more than 50 apple trees, ½ acre of organic vegetables, and 30 acres of hayland.

Princeton Review rates COA as #3 among top liberal arts schools for "professors get high marks," #9 for best food, and in the top 20 for faculty access, quality of life, and financial aid.

Washington Monthly calls COA one of the top 100 "affordable elite" schools.

The Hatchery, COA's venture incubator, is asked to be a founding member of the University Network of Incubators and Accelerators, administered by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Rice University in Texas.

The year opens with 107 new students — 80 first-years, 23 transfers, and 4 graduates. They hail from 14 nations and 30 states, joining 264 returning students.

COA stands in the top 100 of US News & World Reports' annual rankings, the top 15 for best value, and the top 10 for international students on campus.

Some 20% of COA students, numerous alumni, and faculty and staff attend the People's Climate March in New York City Sept. 21. Alumni Matt Maiorana '11 and Juan Carlos Soriano '11 are on the organizing team.

As they travel the national parks for the Great West 3-credit "monster course," 8 students and faculty members Ken Cline and John Anderson, affirm that water defines the region.

Michelle Pazmiño '17 heads to South Korea as an invited participant of the UN Conference on Biological Diversity.

At the Society for Human Ecology conference faculty member Rich Borden is honored as a "Face of a Human Ecologist" with a plaque in the George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History.

Jay Friedlander, faculty member in socially responsible business, gives a TEDx talk on his concept of the abundance cycle.

Singer-songwriter Dar Williams performs at Gates Community Center ahead of an appearance with Ani DiFranco in New York City.

The Earth in Brackets team is invited to UNFCCC planning meetings in Venezuela as civil society members. Klever Descarpontriez '16, Adrian Fernandez '15, Hiyasmin Saturay '15, and Julian Velez '15 go, along with faculty member Doreen Stabinsky.

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The Fund for Maine Islands Takes COA OffshoreThe COA community has just gotten a whole lot larger. From a small college on a Maine island — albeit a bridged one — it now embraces many of Maine's unbridged, year-round islands. A grant of two million dollars from the Partridge Foundation has created a partnership between COA and the Island Institute, known as the Fund for Maine Islands. The fund will enhance collaborations between the two institutions on issues relating to energy, education, agriculture, and climate change on the islands.

The inaugural project began in September, when fifteen COA students, two alumni, faculty members Jay Friedlander (sustainable business) and Anna Demeo (director of energy education and management), along with individuals from Long Island, Monhegan, Peaks Island, Swan's Island, and Vinalhaven, and two Island Institute staff members, flew across the ocean to the Danish island of Samsø. Through a community-driven, grass-roots effort, Samsø — half the size and one-third the population of Mount Desert Island — has become carbon negative, producing more energy, renewably, than it can use.

In an intensive study that deepens COA's hands-on approach to education, the students are taking a coordinated schedule of three classes (a COA "monster class"), combining the engineering and financing of renewable energy and conservation strategies with the aim of applying these approaches to MDI and Maine's island communities. After the fall term, spent partially at the Samsø Energy Academy, the team will continue to develop

locally appropriate renewable energy strategies for Maine islands.

The fund was announced in August at a launch celebration held at the home of former COA board chair Sam Hamill in Maine's Seal Cove, and attended by renowned journalist Bill Moyers. This fund will empower COA and the Island Institute, "to search for solutions to sustain the ecosystems of these coastal islands," and to share the innovations with the world. Said Moyers, "From this seed in this place can come a new paradigm for the future."

Moyers concluded his remarks with a tribute to Partridge Foundation donor Polly Guth (see Spring 2011). "Once upon a time I might have thought a small island off the coast of Maine hardly the place where a partnership could be forged that might show the world this better way — one of obligation, reciprocity, and cooperation. I would have been wrong. The future begins here and now, this evening, in this small but significant place, this Isles de Polly, with each and all of us."

COA President Darron Collins '92 sees this connection as modeling an essential educational approach, combining the research efforts of the college with real-life applications that can solve, he said, "fundamental challenges that face islands and remote communities elsewhere." Collaboration is essential, added Rob Snyder, Island Institute president, "We could never do alone what we are now able to dream up and implement together."

The COA contingent arrives in Samsø. Back row: Energy academy staff members Michael Larsen, Michael Kristensen, Jesper Roug Kristensen, and Anne Boisen Albertsen. Third row: Zabet NeuCollins '16, Lauren Pepperman '16, Kate Unkel '14, Luke Greco '16, Wade Lyman '15, and Andrya Russell, MPhil '16. Second row: Nick Urban '15, Saren Peetz '15, Nathaniel Diskint, MPhil '16, Zakary Kendall '17, Navi Whitten '17, Surya Karki '16, and Sam Allen '17. Front row: Jay Friedlander, faculty, Rebecca Coombs '15, Anna Demeo, faculty, Malene Lundén and Mads Lundén Hermansen, energy academy staffers, and Paige Nygaard '17. Photo by Søren Hermansen, Samsø Energy Academy director.

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6 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE

Students in the Wards: Interning at Mount Desert Island HospitalBAR HARBOR, ME — It's one thing to be interested in health and medicine; it's quite another to experience life within a hospital, day after day. An arrangement with Mount Desert Island Hospital now offers COA students an internship within the intensity of hospital life — from toe amputations to childbirths.

"The veil between in-class theory and medical practice has been lifted for me," says Linnea Harrold '15, who spent the summer as the program's inaugural student. "I had the chance to see firsthand what clinicians do, how they interact with patients, the ways they work as a team. I learned so much from just watching how everyone works together, and from talking to patients and their families. It is such a rare and fantastic opportunity."

For ten weeks, Linnea shadowed hospital physicians and nurse practitioners, spending two weeks with each of five specialties. She discussed her observations with

practitioners daily, and each week met with Betsy Corrigan, nurse educator, along with the program's director, Edward B. Gilmore, MD, MACP, the hospital's chief of medicine. "The program was very positively received by colleagues," he says. "Each day Linnea would read about situations she encountered, and return with questions the next day. All the preceptors enjoyed having her around — she even inspired them. One of the refreshing things about bright and perceptive students is that they ask questions that make you think."

"We are so excited, grateful, and appreciative of the opportunity that the hospital is giving our students," adds biology faculty member John Anderson who oversees students interested in medical careers and worked with the hospital to arrange the program. "This is infinitely more powerful than classroom experience; it will prove invaluable in launching a new generation of health professionals."

Current intern Emily Peterson '15 agrees. "I'm excited to apply what I've learned in John's human anatomy class to the hospital setting," she says. "I'm getting an authentic glimpse into the medical field. I've been most surprised by how emotionally intense it can be. It's one thing to read about a health issue; it's another to experience it with a patient."

Her internship completed, Linnea refocused her senior project. Having experienced MDI's hospital — and patients coming in for everything from bug bites to forty-foot falls off Cadillac Mountain — she will look at ethical issues in international aid, and how physicians cope with the often extreme lack of resources.

And the most rewarding aspect of the internship? "The birth of a new person into this world," Linnea says. "The tension, anxiety, pain, and emotion are so overwhelming that the relief of the infant's first sounds brought tears to my eyes. It is the most magical thing I have ever witnessed."

"This internship has been great! I'm getting an authentic glimpse into the medical field," says Emily Peterson '15 (right), as she begins her day interning at Mount Desert Island Hospital by consulting with physician's assistant Kate Worcester.Photo courtesy of MDI Hospital.

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ISLESFORD, ME — When Ashley Bryan tells a story, his fingers snap, his feet tap, and his voice quickens and slows, covering several octaves. He pulls the meaning out of each word, the sound out of each syllable; to him words, like people, like all of life, are momentous. This artist, storyteller, children's book writer and illustrator, puppetmaker, and humanitarian lives just off the shores of Mount Desert Island in the village of Islesford on Little Cranberry Island. Visits to his home, which is filled with artistic miracles — sea-glass stained glass windows, found-object puppets, large-scale flower paintings, and a global toy collection — have inspired legions of COA students. Ashley, now ninety-one, received an honorary MPhil as COA's commencement speaker in 1996.

This summer, thanks in large part to the help of the COA community, the exhibit "A Visit With Ashley Bryan" was launched on the island by the fledgling Ashley Bryan Center. Working with Betts Swanton '88, arts faculty member Dru Colbert designed the exhibit. Aiding them were Eli Mellen '11, MPhil '14 and Danielle Meier '08. Photography lecturer Josh Winer '91 coordinated the process as project manager.

"My involvement has been a labor of love," says Dru. "It is a small reciprocity for Ashley's generosity to COA over the years. Many, many faculty members have taken students out to Islesford to have them feel the palpable energy and spirit that Ashley has toward creative work and life. His philosophy is so close to our human ecological framework: making art from what's around us, and using art to help us see the world more fully."

The exhibit features the astonishing range of Ashley's work and his life in art. Born in the Bronx to parents from Antigua, his childhood was filled with music and color until he was

COA Artists Help Make Ashley Bryan Exhibit HappenA Visit With Ashley Bryan at COA through February

"I want people to have an experience of delight that will tap something so at the roots of enjoyment that it will lift their spirit," says 91-year-old artist Ashley Bryan of the exhibit of his life and work designed by faculty member Dru Colbert (with Ashley, above), along with Bett Swanton '88 and many more COA helping hands. Photo by Josh Winer '91.

drafted from his studies at Cooper Union into the segregated United States Army. Even on D-Day, Bryan concealed a sketchbook in his gas mask to draw his fellow soldiers, seeking, he says, "to preserve my humanity."

The exhibit is in the Ethel H. Blum Gallery through February. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 11 am to 4 pm. Please call 207-288-5015 to be sure of hours during COA's winter break.

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Pipes & Pollution: Students Help Ellsworth Upgrade Drainage By Elena Piekut '09, Ellsworth Assistant City Planner

ELLSWORTH, ME — Lately in Maine, when it rains, it pours. In Ellsworth, where the Union River Watershed's 500 square miles of drainage meet the ocean in a heavily trafficked urban area, rain flows from roads and parking lots through storm drains directly into Card Brook, the Union River, and Blue Hill Bay.

Ellsworth's larger parking lots and stores, many of which were developed in the 1960s and 1970s, sit within the Card Brook Watershed, one that students — under the guidance of Ken Cline, faculty member in environmental policy and law — have been working to improve for more than a decade. Recently, the stakes have been raised. Card Brook fails to meet water quality standards under the Clean Water Act. The likely cause: stormwater runoff from impervious areas.

With Card Brook on the Environmental Protection Agency’s list, Ellsworth can no longer ignore water quality issues. The problem is even more pressing with increases in water quantity

associated with climate change. Along the Maine coast, extreme rain events are now more frequent, more intense, and have shifted in seasonality, with more storms occurring earlier in the year when soils are already saturated from snowmelt. Flooding is a real, costly consequence of local climate change.

COA's Land Use Planning class, taught by Isabel Mancinelli, faculty member in planning and landscape architecture, and Gordon Longsworth '91, GIS Laboratory director, specializes in taking on real, local problems. Last spring it focused on Ellsworth's stormwater drainage in the urban core area of the Card Brook Watershed. As assistant to Ellsworth's city planner, a position I've had since 2012, I helped guide the class — while building my own GIS skills.

Students looked at the location of drains, pipes, and culverts; utilized sophisticated LiDAR topographic data to create maps modeling water flow; updated impervious surface data; considered emergency management;

walked the brook's banks; and proposed green infrastructure solutions. In June, the class presented their findings to members of the planning board, city staff, and local engineers.

The audience was impressed. The students offered a cohesive analysis, educating and energizing our stakeholders. They helped us move forward by providing new data and figuring out what we still need to learn. We're ahead of the curve for a small municipality right now — COA's work helped us win a state grant to collect more data on our stormwater infrastructure.

Ellsworth's next step is to seek funding to implement solutions, hoping to build resiliency against a changing climate and maintain a healthy stream in the center of the city's commercial area. As the students wrote in their presentation, "Card Brook provides a rich ecosystem where frogs and beavers make their home, flowers bloom, and sounds from the city's traffic disappear."

When city officials realized that Ellsworth's stormwater runoff system needed help, COA's Land Use Planning class created detailed maps, such as this one of the area's soil drainage capacity (above left), often using LiDAR, a remote sensing technology measuring distance by analyzing the reflected light of a laser beam to determine the shape of the surface topography (above right).

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Trustee Cody van Heerden is on her third master's degree. At twenty-two she began an MA in geology at Brown University; she then took an MS in oceanography at the Darling Center of the University of Maine. Now that her children have finished college, she's investigating how institutions change, focusing on Maine's lobster industry. Come June 6, 2015, Cody will become the first COA trustee to earn an MPhil in human ecology while serving on the board.

"If I was going to talk the talk, I just felt I should walk the walk," she said over a glass of lemonade at the coffee shop just outside of the three-story Artemis Gallery in Northeast Harbor, which Cody co-runs with Deirdre Swords (wife of Michael Boland '94). Her face, rimmed by shoulder-length straight brown hair, mingles the intensity of the eager scholar with motherly concern.

"I was a trustee, I love academics," she says. "I took an economics course with [COA faculty member] Davis Taylor and I thought he was one of the best teachers I ever had, and that

just inspired me. I was able to see the world through a different lens and I thought, why not take the next step? I knew it would be very challenging, but it's good to challenge yourself. And I really wanted to experience COA in that way, to have the pleasure and privilege of focusing really deeply on something."

The experience, says Cody, has been transformative. The questions of sustainability and resiliency in Davis' Ecological Economics class changed how she looks at what's happening to the earth. She's also studied water issues with law and policy faculty member Ken Cline, and the philosophy of nature and mind with philosophy faculty member John Visvader. "The best teachers I've ever had have been from COA," she adds, without a flicker of hesitation.

Raised outside of New York City, Cody spent summers on an island in central Maine's Belgrade Lakes. "We bathed in the lake using biodegradable soap, we had kerosene lamps, no electricity; we came and went by boat. I liked being outside in nature.

Growing up, catching frogs and turtles after school was my favorite thing to do." Cody almost applied to COA during the school's formative years, but her father thought she needed more structure. Besides, it was at Colby College that she met husband Christiaan van Heerden. That was before he left Colby to become a boat builder and naval architect, which led them to Mount Desert Island, and ultimately linked them both to COA. For after Cody spent a few years at the Department of Environmental Protection, Christiaan took a job with The Hinckley Company and the couple, with their first baby, moved into a home his family had on the island.

Schooling their two daughters immersed Cody in Blue Hill's Waldorf-inspired Bay School, where she taught math for a number of years, rewriting the curriculum and gaining solid insights into how people learn. In 2005 she joined the COA board, seeing in COA qualities similar to the Bay School: "Community. Regard. Respect. Those change everything," she says. "It's what I look for in my life." The connection deepened when Christiaan enrolled at COA, finishing his BA in 2009.

Cody's ties to the college now extend to Artemis Gallery, which tends to hire from the COA community and has featured work by COA students and alumni during each of its three years. This fall, the gallery became the site for the Activating Spaces: Installation Artwork course taught by arts faculty member Dru Colbert.

And what does Cody receive from these connections? "The satisfaction of knowing that COA does what it does, of being a part of that. Unless the world becomes a little bit more like COA, we're in big trouble."

Donor ProfileWalking the Walk: Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15By Donna Gold

Trustee Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 hikes the Italian coast with her daughters Eliza and Alexi. Photo by Eliza van Heerden.

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One Meditation on CreativityBy Catherine Clinger, faculty member in art and art history

Creativity happens, it does not wait for something to happen. Remaining in a state of anticipation or expectation may prevent us from harnessing our self to a deeper world where potency is paired with disintegration, images form and dissolve. Creativity calls for perseverance, humility, and a devotion to dreaming here in the phenomenal world where the sacred is concealed in plain sight and we miss its signs if we don't pay attention. It is the act of coalescing focus even as the subject of one's attention shifts and changes shape; becomes a line, a circle, a number, a tunnel, or disappears altogether. Creativity is the coming and going, immersion and resistance within a

Creativity is not Art, although Art may be a consequence of creative deliberation. Creativity can be both tender and mighty in its nature; an aggregate of processes and patterns, formative before form. Creativity is movement during stillness, toil during respite. It doesn't always get it right; however, one could argue that it should do no harm. It is not a stopping point or an end, rather it is a ceaselessly evolving tale that describes and constructs experience all at once. The act of creation restores myth to its old dignity and, in so doing, paradoxically builds new mythologies that disrupt timeworn solemnities.

To be is to bring oneself into existence; to imagine is the activation of being-ness beyond a calculated existence; to create is to convert imagination into being. Creativity is the act of

chooses to build a world with, whether it be a world of ideas or things, animate or inanimate; and this mindfulness may be one of the principles of Creativity — the ability to develop concentration without stagnation and to privilege reverie without elevating one's self above another entity.

In our day, the word is bantered about, sometimes with great care, sometimes with great incredulity, often enough with a modicum of lazy application. How do we speak of Creativity here

our gentle nature as an institution.

The Heart is the Hardest to Break, The Heart is the Hardest to Heal by Victoria Alexis Gancayco '17, sharpie on paper and stitching; detail; composed of individual pieces 4"x3½" stitched to extend to 336"x4"(see also pages 28–29).

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Every artist begins somewhere. When Nancy Andrews, faculty member in performance art and video production, was nine, she drew a pastel "of a very lonely tree" that made it all the way to the Montgomery County Fair. Today her work has been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, but her most ambitious work is still ahead. With three decades of diverse artistic production behind her, this drawing, painting, puppet- and video-making Guggenheim Fellow has embarked on her first feature-length film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. Behind it will be the queer, complex creativity that expressed itself in a neighborhood art class in suburban Washington, DC circa 1970.

Not that everyone endorsed Nancy's vision quite as heartily as those fair officials. That lonely tree? "Well, the

kid next to me in class could draw Superman perfectly, and that's what I thought you had to do," she says, laughing. "But I suspected that that wasn't true." The daughter of a successful engineer and a former secretary, Nancy knew what the inside of a museum looked like. "One of the markers of middle class aspiration was giving your children cultural experiences: piano lessons, visits to cultural spaces," she says. If the slip of a girl had her bullies, she also had the work of her particular favorite, Paul Klee, to admire — and a burgeoning imaginative life of her own.

Today, much of Nancy's work draws on vaudeville and early film influences. In her world, song-and-dance might punctuate a scrupulously silent animated sequence. Crisp fields of black and white give way to shadows.

And, as in her Ima Plume trilogy (Monkeys and Lumps, The Dreamless Sleep, and The Haunted Camera, created between 2003 and 2005), a film noir homage centered on an artist who attempts to illustrate the unseen, imagination becomes something to investigate. Did her open approach to mystery, her attraction to bathos and black humor coalesce at art school? "Actually, I think my fifth grade teacher is responsible," says Nancy. Mr. Grossman introduced his class to Shakespeare, The Three Stooges, old radio shows, pulp fiction, and opera. He even projected the silent horror classic The Phantom of the Opera onto the classroom movie screen from a 16mm film projector. "I loved all of it," she says. "I had a lot of those 'That's what I'm talking about. That's it,' moments."

Leaping into the Feature: Nancy Andrews' Strange Eyes By Michael Diaz-Griffith '09

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Rebel, rebelFor college, Nancy headed to the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a photography major, "we learned about composition, light, contrast — the basic building blocks of cinematography." She'd been playing around with Super 8 cameras for years and, in addition to film production and film history, took MICA's first course on video technique. She describes borrowing avant-garde films from the Enoch Pratt Library back when a reel in your hand might be the only way to see a particular, potentially life-changing film. With punk rock in the air, it was also a good time for rebellious do-it-yourself art-making. Studying abroad in England, Nancy photographed the butcher hanging slabs of beef — and made earrings out of the prints. Recounting this to the LA Record recently, she said, "I also

made a jumpsuit with clear pockets for pictures related to plastic surgery," showing that, for Nancy, art has always been interdisciplinary.

Nancy never did go to film school; she's always been a human ecologist, assembling her films from multiple sources. A decade after graduating from MICA, she began an MFA program at the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, not in film but in performance art. The Art Institute is known for fostering interdisciplinarity, a key factor in Nancy's decision to attend. Why the shift to performance art? "The Baltimore scene," she says, with a wry smile. Intense friendships, communal living, supportive community, cheap rent: after MICA she remained in Baltimore, a perfect city for experimental artists at the time. "It was a real art community. People collaborated and helped each other out. There was nothing to compete for: if people wanted to 'make it,' they moved to New York. We made art because we loved to do it." In this context, almost by chance, Nancy formed a three-person band that morphed into a four-person performance group.

Soon they were playing gigs in DC and New York and were written up in the Washington Post. Encouraged, "we wrote more and more songs, and a friend made us crazy costumes," says Nancy. As a performance art troupe they aired on college radio and appeared in the pages of Interview magazine. They were almost booked for a slot on David Letterman's Late Show — "we were too weird, so they cancelled" — and never quite "made it," but it had a major impact on Nancy's art. Those eight years of performance added another dimension to her work in video and film.

Something "stupid" — and profoundIn her 2009 short, On a Phantom Limb, Nancy collages medical footage, drawn animation, and live action to tell the story of birdgirl, "a human-made hybrid, a surgical creation — part woman, part bird — passing

through death, purgatory, and returning to life." Over the course of the film, birdgirl is literally and figuratively reanimated: returned from near-death and rendered visually intelligible by Nancy's brush — and her performance. On one level, says Nancy, the film took shape like most of her art: "I have what I call a 'stupid idea' and just start working with it. It's a collage process."

She continues: "This one idea always dovetails with multiple other things I'm thinking about. Often these things don't fit together in obvious ways, so I sort of force-fit them and ask myself, 'Why am I thinking about things that wash up on beaches — things that can't be identified or assigned a provenance; and at the same time, Jane Goodall and her research on chimpanzees; and Donna Haraway's cyborg theory? Why am I thinking about these things together?' I don't really know, of course, but I use these questions to begin exploring leads."

The process is fundamentally experimental, involving more mystery, contingency, and uncertainty than you'd expect. "It's like going down a dark hallway and just trying a key in every door until you find one that fits. But it's not a singularity: the key is going to open more than one door. It's a blind faith thing. I also use the metaphor of taking a journey without a map. And so it's very much about finding my way as I go along."

Even on the brink of death. The "stupid idea" for On a Phantom Limb can be traced back to the Intensive Care Unit of Brigham and Women's Hospital, where for two weeks in 2005 Nancy fought for her life, remaining hospitalized for another two weeks. She had undergone multiple life-threatening surgeries; now, wracked by delirium and convinced that her doctors and the hospital staff were trying to kill her, she struggled to survive. Diagnosed at the age of twenty with Marfan's Syndrome, a genetic disorder affecting the connective tissues, Nancy was not new to hospital stays. In her senior

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year of college she underwent open-heart surgery to replace a heart valve and part of her aorta affected by an aneurysm. But this time was different. The surgeries were riskier, and her delusions threatened to pull her under. "I was on a raft, in a space-pod, in a fly-by-night health clinic, in a conference room, in a library, in the arctic, in the desert, and even in a hospital, each with its own terrible narrative," she writes in her blog devoted to the art and science of ICU delirium (nancyandrews.net).

Radically healing artNancy credits her partner Dru Colbert, COA faculty member in art and design, with helping to save her life. In a TEDx talk on ICU delirium, Nancy recounts that Dru "offered me a pencil and paper to make drawings. She asked me to draw the dog that I would like to get once we got home. My first drawings were considerably worse than a two-year-old's, just a series of jagged lines. But after a few days I could draw something that resembled an animal, with legs and ears." Nancy continued drawing, creating "a heroic birdgirl avatar that represented myself." It could fly between heaven and earth "to negotiate the space in between, that space that I had inhabited within my delirium."

The drawing helped Nancy piece back her fragmented sense of self. "By externalizing my memories I began to understand how my version of what happened related to what really happened."

On a Phantom Limb, and the projects that followed, are a result of — and a further step in — this healing, though like many who have experienced ICU delirium, Nancy suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Her comic book, Loupette and the Moon, tells the story of another of Nancy's "avatars," a girl with the genetic mutation hypertrichosis, commonly known as "werewolf syndrome," in which the face and body are covered by a thick pelt of fur. While Loupette's genetic mutation is different from Nancy's, she says, "the struggles are not so

different — from trying to understand who I am as a person with a genetic mutation that is life-threatening and life-changing to determining how to be defined as a person, and by whom to be defined." On the book's final pages, Loupette escapes from the sanatorium where she is unfairly held, flies to the moon, admires a Ziggy Stardust-like magazine, Mutant Style — and scrubs away the monstrous black shadow projected not by herself but by an uncomprehending society.

Post-ICU, Nancy's work externalizes the bad and internalizes the good: a radical aesthetic project with therapeutic psychological effects for herself and her audience. She says that since Loupette began with images, not words, and since text can reduce the primacy of visual narratives, she kept writing to a minimum, allowing readers to "internalize the experience while actively having to work out what is happening." Something similar is at play in her Ima Plume triology, in which Ima says, "There were things I could draw pictures of, and there were things that couldn't be drawn. More and more I was attracted to the second category. There were things I wanted to describe, but I didn't know how. There were things that I wanted to show but there was no way to show them."

Drawing, for Nancy, is an attempt to describe the indescribable, to show the unshowable.

Filmmaking without a mapHer creative process continues to evolve. Inspiration for her 2010 short, Behind the Eyes are the Ears, came in the form of a song cycle, not images. Drawings were developed later; then the processes intertwined, "so that I might go from doing research to writing a song, to drawing an animation sequence, to finding some film footage, to shooting some live action. I didn't do anything in a neat order." That film, about Dr. Sheri Myes and her revolutionary attempts to expand human perceptions and consciousness, generated the idea for The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. She'd

been fantasizing about making a feature-length film for two years. With a month to spare before the COA winter term, and support from a friend who teaches screenwriting, Nancy began to write.

It was a new experience. "If you're making a feature, you want it to have some of the tropes of the popular form: recognizable characters, characters who have relationships, conflicting interests. These things are not my bread and butter," she says with a laugh. "So bringing them to life had to become a focus from the very beginning." Along the way she discovered that "a huge amount of the creativity of making a film comes in the writing." After completing the screenplay, Nancy sent it around to producers — and was told not to expect funding for her first feature. "Just make it and see what happens."

She successfully turned to Kickstarter.com, adding $10,000 from her own pocket. Indie-film websites quickly spread buzz about the film, featuring Michole Briana White as Dr. Myes, researcher in the science of perception, and Jennifer Prediger '00 (see page 17) as Dr. Linda Wiley, her best friend and love interest. "After a near-death experience, Dr. Myes attempts to graft animal senses to the brain to revolutionize human consciousness. She must face the consequences when she uses her own body and mind as a research tool and transforms herself into a creature with super-senses," Nancy writes in an email.

This project has been her most challenging — and rewarding — yet. "It was my first time on a feature set, and I was the director. So I had a lot of learning to do." But while the film may be large, the budget isn't — requiring constant invention. "We're always asking ourselves, 'How do we make a film that looks interesting and beautiful with no money?' — but Dru as production designer and the whole team have done just that. It's challenging, but it makes you more creative."

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Animation stills from The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, featuring Michole Briana White; animated by faculty member Nancy Andrews and SL Benz (Lauren Benzaquen '14).

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Scores of people got involved, from Rohan Chitrakar '04 as director of photography, to COA

locations for free. "There are creative aspects to everything," Nancy says. "Take a scene: you may have it story-boarded out, but when you're working, the actors, the weather, the cars going by — whatever you have to deal with that day, you have to come up with creative solutions."

She learned that "the buck has to stop with the director, one has to make decisions constantly — do we have enough takes? If we spend more time on this scene, what will we not have time for? Is a lighting set-up 'good enough' so that shooting can begin, even if it's not perfect?" As with teaching, the quality of the outcome depends on leveraging collaboration. And enjoying it. "Having all of these skilled people around makes me like a superhero," she says. They give me new powers, powers that I don't possess." When she says that she wants to let "everyone do their job" on set, it's clear that

everyone.

"The editor and I will be working on transitions and one of us will have an idea, so I'll start drawing an animated transition, and we'll end up inserting little bits of animation into the

It's never stopped being inventive." This meant leaving behind the screenplay. "Something works on paper, but then some people watch it and say, 'I don't really believe this relationship.' So you go back to the cutting room and say, 'How can I put this together to make these relationships more believable?' At that point it really doesn't matter what's down on paper. What's happening on the screen has to be doing the job. It's about what I have, not what I wrote."

Referring to her usual, collage-like creative

looking at how it all works together. At some point during editing, that's what this process became, too." Hearing her, you get the sense that she's more comfortable without the map.

a trip we couldn't make without her.

Visit thestrangeeyesofdrmyes.com for a link to the trailer and more on The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes.

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Trouble Dolls

Trouble Dolls The Onion

Nerve BabbleWashington Post's

SprigGrist.org’s

Uncle Kent A TeacherStrange Eyes of Dr. Myes (see previous article

Trouble Dolls

Above: Movie still and publicity photo from of Jennifer Prediger '00 (left)

and Jess Weixler (right). Photos courtesy of Jennifer Prediger.

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Creativity in Motion: Tawanda Chabikwa '07By Donna Gold, photographs by Craig Bortmas

In a cluttered studio in Columbus, Ohio, Tawanda Chabikwa '07 dances along a path of white paper. At the wall, cornered, he stops, but only momentarily. Soon he's upside-down, his weight on his head. The quiet Shona chant that has been playing is silenced and the dancer becomes another sort of creature, arms and legs moving along the wall, a noose-like black rope dangling ominously

near him. Returning to his feet, he climbs onto a wobbling pile of books and balances, unsteadily, then knocks the pile down and he's on the floor pushing the books with his head. Later, Tawanda returns to the white paper, crossing it on his knees and elbows like a penitent, then rising to dance jubilant before collapsing to the ground, almost writhing now. Several times he is back at the wall

and on his head — spinning the world, definitions, himself, upside-down.

The fifteen-minute performance of Digression in the Fourth Movement ends with Tawanda taking a brush and a pail of black paint, materializing his ephemeral gestures on the now-rumpled white paper, which he then rolls into and rises, dancing, the paper echoing the rolled-up skirts of African women. Shortly before the performance closes, the paper tears away and becomes a body Tawanda holds to him, then abandons, ending the dance with gestures intended to cleanse and move on.

With its piles of books, gestural painting, and references to Africa and acrobatics, with its unusual segues, turning movement on its head, this dance could be an autobiography. Tawanda first choreographed and performed it in 2012 in his homeland of Zimbabwe, when he briefly served as artistic director of Tumbuka, the premier Zimbabwean contemporary dance company. A consummate artist, Tawanda is devoted to exploring the currents that flow beneath our lives, the ones that bind us as humans. Stories and myths — whether from science, contemporary theory, or ancient mystics — nourish him, as does the gesture, the movement that illuminates being.

Tawanda dances, yes. He also writes, makes music, and paints. For his senior project at COA, he wrote the novel Baobabs in Heaven, which he later published (see Spring 2011), and choreographed and performed an evening of dance. He is now in a PhD program in dance studies at Ohio State University. But he continues to practice his arts — as well as "hiking and photographing, making videos, reading quantum physics, religious texts, The Economist, and the New Yorker, and spending time on Facebook and YouTube." These media feed him. Digression emerged from some writing

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Tawanda had done. "This happens quite a lot — one medium sparks another, and they bounce back and forth until I find the greatest form for it." In this case, the dance completed Tawanda's prose.

For those of us who struggle with one expressive form, Tawanda's reach seems astounding. When I mention this over lunch in Bar Harbor during a summer visit to Maine, he laughs. "What is the paradox?" he asks. "Time?" I venture. "My mother asks the same question," he returns, and laughs again. Tawanda laughs a lot — possibly a means of deflecting the intensity of his thoughts. But when he dances, this slight, muscular man with dreadlocks falling in curls down his back is both breathtaking and serious: agile, delicate, precise.

"If I could, I'd do it all, all the time," Tawanda continues. "Painting with my toes, writing with my hands, wriggling with my heart." As he speaks, he places his hands in a circle in front of his chest and rocks them, as if rocking his heart, his being.

The longingTawanda's own story begins in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, the second of four children. He describes his education as "little boys in grey and khaki uniforms, shorts, shirts and ties, hats, blazers, and socks pulled up to your neck." His earliest dance training was in ballroom style; his first accolades were primary school prizes for the Lindy hop and cha-cha. Summers imbued another legacy: learning the stories and dances of his Shona heritage around the communal fires of his ancestral village. These movements have since been joined by a multitude of others — from modern dance and rugby to capoeira and salsa. But his days in urban Harare and his ancestral enclave remain central. Though he left Zimbabwe at fifteen, heading to the Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong, and from there to COA, this heritage continues to inform his work.

Tawanda never expected to be immersed in the arts. At Li Po Chun he focused on science until one day he found himself walking by the art studio, looking longingly inside. Chrys Hill, the art teacher, called him in. "'Paints are expensive,'" Tawanda objected. "'It's in the budget,'" Chrys assured him, inviting him to use the studio at will. Soon after, "when life things were gathering in my mind," as he says, and he was wandering around campus hours after midnight, Tawanda found the lights on in the empty arts studio and lost himself inside. That was it. Chrys and his wife Anne became mentors and the couple, along with the art he was making and the dance he began to explore, helped him to understand the questions of a young Zimbabwean in a new world. "I haven't turned back since," says Tawanda.

What began in Hong Kong blossomed at COA where Tawanda studied with arts faculty members Dru Colbert

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Photographer Craig Bortmas met Tawanda Chabikwa '07 at a performance in 2013. He says,"The stage was rich with visuals, Tawanda executed unnerving acts of athleticism (such as climbing a ladder upside down), and he succeeded in creating an amazing mess of the performance space. Quite memorable, to say the least."

For more of Craig's photos visit www.bortmasphoto.com.

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and Nancy Andrews, with literature and film lecturer Colin Capers ’95, MPhil ’09, with creative writing faculty member Bill Carpenter, and dance with visiting teachers. Through math and physics faculty member Dave Feldman's Chaos and Fractals class he found a mathematical basis to his own observations that in seashells and African compounds alike, the whole echoes the part. Tawanda laughs again, "It might as well have been an art class. Dave doesn't know it — don't tell him that!"

Body knowledgeFor Tawanda, the many manifestations of creativity have but one origin: the body. Whatever its form, he sees all creativity as movement. The body is where mind, spirit, instinct, and heart reside. "Everything is body, it's common sense to me," he says. "The writing is alive in body, that's how it comes out, through the written gesture."

In seeking to understand the source of humans' urge toward art, part of Tawanda's PhD work is practice-based research, investigating his own creative process through an autoethnography that's centered in how cultural ideas are learned and carried within the body. "It's the actual movement itself that creates knowledge," he says. Dance, he writes, produces an internal intelligence that lives "at the intersection of multiple fields of knowledge — culture studies, technology, cognitive neuroscience, aesthetics, semiotics, politics, philosophy."

More specifically, Tawanda is looking at the global presence of Africanness as a way of understanding the place of cultural experience within our bodies. To that end, this multi-talented artist has segued into theory, reading everything from ancient African texts to psychoanalyst and revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon, dance historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild, African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, and a range of third-world feminist theorists. "I am in school because reading — yes, deep, nerdy, intense,

verbose reading — inspires me, cultivates my mind, and cultivates my practice," he says.

In studying while doing, theorizing while making, does he fear that the analysis of creativity will disrupt the source of his art? Tawanda smiles, dispelling the question. "I won't steal from the magic of creativity by speaking its name — why not sing the ninety-nine names of Allah? Why be shy about it — it's only my longing to be a part of this creative flow." Definitions, he says, whether of creativity or the thing one creates, "are places we gather, not places that should put us apart."

Life as ritualThis is not a dispassionate quest. Tawanda seeks to understand how dance is transformative, regardless of the culture. He frequently works collaboratively, looking at both life and dance as ritual. "I've read that rather than performing rituals, most traditional African communities simply ritualize their life," he says. There's a mission driving this life-as-ritual. Some negative attitudes are being imbued as truth within our bodies, he adds, causing a separation between people and within people. His ultimate search is to "harness the healing powers of dance to cultivate more sustainable ways of being."

In Tawanda's dance Inheritance — Dunhu reMhondoro, which he created as part of his dance MFA from Dallas' Southern Methodist University, one performer lifts high above the others, circling the air suspended on a rope. Elsewhere on the stage, five other dancers, all dressed in white, seem to be reaching, searching, while the sounds first of birds, then of beasts emerge over calm, quiet music. Among the Shona people, says Tawanda, dunhu reMhondoro can be translated as the valley of the spirits. It's a phrase used to describe life's journey, which can be perceived as a passage through the wilderness. This journey may be dangerous, but there is protection. The spirits — one's ancestors — walk beside their

descendants, at times appearing as watchful, gentle lions. To Tawanda, this reflects the eternal cycle of life, a river of self that connects in all directions: to one's ancestors, to the as-yet-unborn, and outward, to one's family and community. "The tree would not grow if it did not long for the sun — and the water," he says. Longing, reaching, in all directions.

For many years, though he was on scholarship, Tawanda managed to support the education of as many as fifteen AIDS orphans in his ancestral village who otherwise couldn't go to school. The funds came from ticket and painting sales, and the help of friends. Using art for fundraising is tricky, but Tawanda recognizes few boundaries. "Perhaps because of a short attention span, I tend to think in multiple ways about a single thing and to want to know it. We could go philosophical, spiritual or new age with it, or just pure quantum physics: we are made of the same thing as stars, every single bit of us." Again, Tawanda gestures, one hand circling in front of him, and then both come together almost tenderly, shaping a sphere. "That makes me smile," he says.

As Tawanda works toward publishing his theories of creativity, he continues to pen a second novel, and to paint, make music, collaborate, and dance. "I choose dance because nothing escapes the body — what is more human ecological than dance?" he says, and then, "I want to dance until I disappear, because it isn't dance. At some point everything is shed and you can truly be with people, you feel like you've joined what Rumi calls the 'migration of intelligences' because you've cut the crap, and the tax payments, and the wars, and the jealousies, and fears. You're finally as you truly are meant to be, you just grow — creativity, vitality, life." To see Tawanda's dances and other work, visit ndiniwako.org.

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Evolution, Creativity, and Art: A dialogueBill Carpenter, poet, novelist, and faculty member in literature and creative writing, and Helen Hess, faculty member in invertebrate zoology and biomechanics, discuss evolution as process and metaphor. This dialogue reflects an ongoing conversation on questions of human evolution among faculty members and others, held over dinners during the last few years.

Donna Gold: So, the question is why? Why did creativity, or better, art, evolve? Why is it a universal?

Bill Carpenter: I think the reason why art is a universal is that we needed it. As we emerged as humans we lost our instincts for behavior that would tell us what to do in any given situation. An oriole can make an amazing pendant nest; a hummingbird cannot. Yet a human being can choose to make any kind of nest and also a modern glass house or a wooden house or an earth mounded one. We have that choice because we no longer have the compulsion of instinct. That also gave us a space of freedom, which was unknown and scary and required our creativity to fill.

Helen Hess: I agree with you that the lack of hardwiring and the narrowness of an animal's repertoire is the other side of the coin of our flexibility. Flexibility and plasticity is one end

of a continuum. At the other end is completely hardwired and instinctual behavior. So something that's neurologically very tiny and simple and yet fairly behaviorally complex, like the honeybee, makes these hives and does these dances and has complex parental behavior — but it's all hardwired, while more and more of our behavior is learned through culture.

BC: Yes, we're hardwired for both the freedom and the necessity to create. God was the greatest of our creations, but we didn't stop there, our anxiety caused us to keep creating stories and images so we would understand who we were. Those with that understanding were more fit to carry on.

HH: I think I've got a contrasting perspective. I would say that art and creativity arose as a capacity in response

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to other things that were directly selected for. We're very, very good at problem solving and that requires some creativity. So being creative problem-solvers, we developed this capacity to be creative in all kinds of ways. Problem solving required creativity; the creativity permitted art.

BC: And some of the problems were those of identity and existence, to answer those our problem-solving creativity took an artistic form —

HH: Yes. We were getting more cognitively complex, more aware of ourselves and our universe and why am I here and what happens after I die — well, guess what, in our ability to make art we have this capacity to address those scary questions. And creativity was absolutely needed — and art fulfills even more than that in terms of self-expression and understanding our relationship to each other and to our world. Otherwise how do we get out of bed in the morning? Here's a story that I heard fairly recently. There have been all these efforts to teach great apes how to communicate. Well, one gorilla, in communicating with his human handlers, came to recognize that he was going to die and when he died it was all over. He was an incredibly depressed gorilla. He couldn't get out of bed.

BC: Because we had given him our anxieties without giving him the creative means to resolve them. We should have given him a paintbrush or a piano.

HH: Right, so if art makes you feel better, you just do it and it's going to persist. But you want it to be more fundamentally selected for? BC: What might be selected is the power of art to bring group cohesion. The huge cultural bond of a rock concert for instance. Artistic achievement when it becomes public has the quality of erasing individual differences and binding the social group.

HH: I think the capacity for binding within a group is very much hardwired and universal.

BC: So what are those mechanisms? I'm trying to define creativity a little more tightly, and I would say in art it's specifically the ability to bind a group together, I'm considering art to be public performance, not just individual experience.

HH: That's a surprising characteristic coming from a poet!

BC: Well we all want an audience! I tell students that poetry thought in your head is not yet poetry. When poetry becomes understandable by the group, then it becomes very group binding. And we push and revise until it happens — because the need is not just an individual one, it's shared. I imagine that cave paintings weren't just for an individual's own contemplation but for the community. And some art has almost worldwide acceptance, giving hope that it might transcend competing subgroups and help unify us as a species.

HH: So I would say, the capacity to be creative is a human universal. The capacity to participate in a group and feel group cohesion is a human universal. But how that creativity and binding manifests is going to be dependent upon your culture and situation.

BC: Oh, I think that's right. And I think all creativity is probably modeled after evolution. It is only made incrementally, by small changes. With

the instruments of mutation and death, nature produced this amazing world before we even got here.

HH: I would say we are different because we can use our imaginations and invent something that's never been and we can do that intentionally. Nature can't do anything intentionally. Natural selection is a remodeler, not an architect, and humans are architects.

BC: But TS Eliot said that when you make a poem, you're not building from scratch, you're making a small mutative change to the body of poetry which exists — going back to the dawn of the written word — and you can only add a little bit. So, like evolution, each poem is a slight revision of a global and ongoing body of work.

HH: I can see that revision process being very much analogous to natural selection because natural selection is really good at sorting among all the options and choosing the best of what's available. For the poem, the poet makes what's available, and does the sorting and the judging of which is best among the alternative versions.

BC: Right, but the main thing is you have to be quite tough about killing off the prior forms and moving it forward.

HH: Ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever evolved have gone extinct.

BC: But for the artist, a lot of this takes place unconsciously. By the time you see what you think is a first draft — and this is what the mystery is to me — what process has it already been through? So human creativity and natural creativity follow the same pattern, with a lot of waste and death involved!

HH: So evolution is both a metaphor and an analogy of the creative process, and the driving force and the process that made our capacity as a species to be creative as possible. Interesting!

Creativity was absolutely needed.

… Otherwise how do we get out of bed in

the morning?Helen Hess

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Seeking FormMiles Chapin '10

Miles Chapin '10 grew up on Maine's coast — its

for his high school senior project — science

Even while Miles was at COA, his work was

see page 9

commissions: he's creating a large sculpture for

— Donna Gold

"In my sculpture I use curves and texture to mimic motion and emotion. I carve directly, developing a relationship with the stone, playing with the inter-relationship form has with itself. When I start carving a block of stone, it feels as if it is static or asleep. Carving into each block pulls life into the stone, awakening the stone with each curve and angle. Each piece has its own passage to completion."

— Miles Chapin '10

, granite, 2013, 16"x16"x12"A model of the seven-foot piece Miles Chapin is sculpting for the new rail station in Brunswick, Maine, commissioned by the Brunswick Public Art Group. Three forms weave together in an arch, says Miles, creating an internal space that evokes a sense of place and belonging. Photo by Kyra Chapin '10.

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Photo by Frances Buerkens.

Photo by Kyra Chapin '10.

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Left top: Flux granite, 2012, 13"x21"x10"

"Capturing movement, the granite seems to blow through the space, exploring perceived motion."

Bottom: Sojourngranite, 2013, 14.5"x20"x10"

"A single form on its own sojourn, weaving through space while creating multiple internal spaces."

Right: Euphoriagranite, 2014, 60"x22"x20"

"This is about passion and unity — two rings, appearing separate from one vantage point, come together to form a heart shape, recalling the euphoric feeling of romance. As the two rings meet they lift, suspended as one. It is open and meant to be looked through to its surroundings, creating a relationship."

For more of Miles' work, visit mileschapin.com.

Photo by Kyra Chapin '10.

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NOVELBill Carpenter, faculty member Even a long project like a novel will often spring from an instantaneous moment. In the actual life of the writer an experience seems to resonate. Something becomes a point of focus, and crystallizes into a perception full of condensed feeling. You can think of the whole story in a moment — even a long novel. And often the point where the story started becomes very small in the novel, as the original breakthrough dissolves in the unfolding narrative. My theory is that what appears to be instantaneous is actually the result of a long unconscious process that opens to the writer as a flash of insight. The rest is the hard work of constructing it in time so others can understand. Time is the medium of exchange between writer and reader. You can compare it to the creation of a child — that lightning-like contact between the two creators, opening yourselves up to the unknown of another being. In writing too, you have a moment of connection with another being — your creative unconscious. It's a moment, there's no further contact, then it's a matter of changing diapers and paying tuition!

SCULPTUREMiles Chapin '10 (see page 26)I knew I wanted to use local granite for Nexus, the piece that was going

to the town of Calais, Maine. I found the stone in the woods near an old Calais quarry — I saw the shape and that it had been drilled, and I knew it was the one to use. It's connected to the land, and the quarry drillholes connect to Calais history. The design came from the outer shape of the rock — I often work that way now; I knew I wanted to work inside the stone, to have the open space from which to connect to the landscape. I see the shapes inside as representing the interconnectedness of Calais with St. Stephen, Canada. The opening creates a welcome from both directions; the curve on the inside of the stone mirroring the exterior. To carve the interior, I first read the exterior of the stone as carefully as I could for fractures, then I used diamond blades on an angle grinder, making a series of cuts to remove material before flush

cutting the final surface. After flush cutting each surface I re-examined the stone for cracks. The design was able to be as open as it is because there were so few cracks in this stone, which started at 8,500 pounds. It is now 5,450.

SONGCora Rose Lewicki '10There are stages to how things come about. There's the inspiration moment — something that has happened, some experience, something that is emotionally jarring, whether that's negative or positive, or something that happened to a friend, or in the world. What someone else might scream, or vent, or write in their diary, I turn into songs.

Stage two is using a lot of tools to structure a song, tools that have taken a number of years to build. It's having all the ingredients — chord structure, lyrics, melody — and asking, "How am I going to turn you into a song today?" I absolutely write lyrics first. I used to work the other way around — it was painful. It took me until I was twenty-three to realize that if I switched it, the sky opens wide! It's essential to find your pattern and what works best. So then I tinker with the musical elements until they start to fit the emotions, the first-stage part. I know it's right when it feels good, like when

Nexus, granite, 2014, 120"x60"x60."Photo by Alan Stubbs.

Creativity: The Paths Five members of the COA community reflect on their own creative process

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you hear a three-part harmony and you get that "zing" feeling in your chest. So I'm tinkering, tinkering, tinkering — zing — I'm going to keep that part.

DANCETawanda Chabikwa '07 (see page 18)It usually starts off with a sensation, or a feeling that something needs to be done, to be created, in order to have more flow happen. It's very much a part of my ritualistic way of looking at life. My art is something like that. For example, the dance Tear Gas Anthem came from a time when South African communities were turning against immigrants. People were shot, raped, burned. That conflated with the images of Buddhist priests killing themselves, but reversed. These were Africans turning on Africans. But it's not always political news; sometimes it's just a vision. And then the ritual begins to take place, through time and memory and how these connect to the community. I don't know how else to put it — it spirals out of control or grows like a fractal. After that, it's more looking for and building bodies that not only can be vessels of the movement, but also be transformed by it at a personal level. I'm not making a dance on people, it's collaborative. For me art is part of a much greater ritual of things that I deeply feel need to be expressed

for whatever reason. Isn't everyone's art just them trying to understand themselves better — or just trying to understand?

DRAWINGVictoria Alexis Gancayco '17Art is my mediator for difficult-to-express ideas and facts such as time/space, living/dying. Recently, an experience relating to the death of a close friend has made me think about how fragile, impermanent our lives are; that we must tell the ones we love how much they mean to us while we still can. Over the summer, an image of the heart began replaying in my

mind. I started to draw this image, my heart, your heart, our hearts. Eventually, as I continued to draw, each line and curve became automatic to my mind and hand. I constructed a foldup/foldout accordion volume containing the hearts across strips of paper sewn together. The process of drawing each heart became a meditation in itself. I found this experience needed to be shared. My intent of the piece is for the viewer to engage with images of the heart, contemplatively — a meditation about what it means to be alive, to slow down and feel every second of every beat.

Cora Rose Lewicki '10 performs her "Turn the World" concert at Gates Community Center in 2009. Photo by Jordan Motzkin '13.

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The RestaurantPopping up delicaciesBy Eloise Schultz '16Photos by Becca Haydu '16

Two salads, said Bronwyn. One soup. …

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with Labrador tea from Sunken Heath, a bog at the center of Mount Desert Island.

The Restaurant (also known as the Coop Coöp) has been an annual, student-organized event since its conception in 2012. In those two years it has served more than five hundred members of the COA community and raised over four thousand dollars to support Share the Harvest, a program run through Beech Hill Farm that provides access to fresh organic produce for those receiving SNAP and WIC benefits ([email protected]). The goal of the Restaurant is to provide full, whole nourishment to both volunteers and guests. Whether you come to taste the food or to lend a hand at washing dishes, serving tables, playing music, or preparing and plating food, you are welcome at the Restaurant.

In a 2012 documentary made by Devin Altobello '13 about the Restaurant (devinaltobello.com), Lally Owen '14 commented, it's about "eating not just to eat, but more consciously feeding yourself and other people. Kind of the idea of being held by something that you make, or holding other people and giving that way." The Restaurant serves as a community catalyst: an opportunity to connect over food, support each other's passions and projects, and celebrate our work together.

Students, staff, faculty, and community members work together to create the event, which has a different locale each time. In the weeks before, emails fly back and forth regarding farm culls, foraging excursions, and closets stacked with jars of kombucha and yogurt. In the morning, an off-campus student residence is cleaned and prepared to seat up to sixty guests at a time. The afternoon is spent gathering tables and chairs, while several kitchens across Bar Harbor are orchestrated to the tune of boiling stock pots, chopping produce, rolling pasta dough, and melting chocolate.

The work that goes into the Restaurant itself is hard to quantify. When spending hours juggling hats (in some cases, literally), one's periphery turns into a blur of food, flushed faces, and the tangled sounds of music and conversation. "After sixteen hours of work in those two days, we were so beat that it felt like our feet had turned to pulp," said Nicole. "Addie came out to the couch in the front yard with a fishbox full of warm water and lavender. When we put our feet in that box we all made the same face, which is probably too inappropriate to describe."

What I remember most from each event are the flavors of particular moments and the people with whom they were created: Lally's garlic butter, Addie's ravioli, Nicole's window radishes. I remember the first time that I killed a chicken and watched its blood disappear into the soil at Beech Hill Farm. I remember squeezing custard into countless cannolis with a makeshift decorating bag. Going out with Lisa Bjerke '13 and Erickson Smith '15 in the canoe to gather cranberries. Washing carrots in a bathtub. Singing rounds while scrubbing dishes in a sink full of hot, sudsy water. Crooning "Pure Imagination" into a microphone for guests crammed into a den-turned-dining hall. I remember Janoah Bailin '14, our circus artist extraordinaire, wobbling on his unicycle down a narrow hallway while trafficking dirty dishes back to the kitchen. Waltzing on sore feet to a ukulele chorus. Sprawling on the kitchen floor at the end of the night, dizzy with exhaustion and incredulous joy. Saying with the others: "All of us, together, made that happen."

Eloise Schultz '16 has been a singing dishwasher at the Restaurant for the past three years. In addition to literature and education, she maintains a passion for cannolis.

Photos, right: To entertain the diners, Janoah Bailin '14 juggles (top) and Tomas Von Carolsfeld '14 plays a tune on his ukulele (bottom).

MENUi. Pain a l'ancienne with olive oilii. Chickweed, rabe, and

dandelion salad with a honey & apple cider vinaigrette

iii. Pho made with Peggy Rockefeller Farms lamb and Beech Hill Farm small greens or

iv. Tom kha made with Beech Hill Farm veggie broth

Balfour Farm buttermilk sorbet with Northeast Creek cranberries and a wintergreen honey sauce orApple sorbet made with apples from the island and maple syrup, finished with a raisin lace cookie orBlack walnut honey torte with mascarpone and goat cheese honey cream

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CREATIVE ACTIVISMThe Future We BoughtBy Nathan Thanki '14

RIO DE JANIERO — From around the corner of one of the prefabricated, temporary buildings comes a procession of three young men in suits. Two carry a large scroll. The press, notified a few hours earlier that "something big" would happen here, begin swarming. The blue-uniformed United Nations security guards talk frantically into radios. The atmosphere charges. One of the young men loudly welcomes bystanders to the unveiling of a new piece of international law. The other two men unfurl their scroll, revealing an oversized negotiating text. In the header are corporate logos — Shell, BP, Exxon, Coca-Cola. The title: "The Future We Bought." As the speaker profusely thanks governments on behalf of big polluters for continuing to give them carte blanche, large parts of the audience jeer. Some then take the paper from the men in suits, announcing that civil society rejects this vision of the future. To wild applause, in front of scores of cameras, the oversized document is torn up. Some activists then invite everyone to sit down and occupy the space for a "People's Assembly."

Rio+20 — a.k.a. the UN Conference on Sustainable Development — was noted for its listlessness, epic greenwashing, and obvious corporate influence when it was held in June 2012. The official outcome document, laughably and insultingly titled "The Future We Want," so disappointed even the most reformist NGOs in its inadequacy that after the People's Assembly the majority of civil society participants decided to walk out of the RioCentro convention center. For those who planned, participated in, or watched, the satirical skit and ritualistic rejection amounted to a sort of catharsis. It was all that could be done.

UN conferences are not easy places in which to design anything, especially creative direct actions. The space — physical, political, metaphorical, mental — is not conducive to creative thought. Officials impose a host of restrictions: individuals can't be named, the designated spot is always a dead-end locale, props are hard to get through checkpoints, and you have about thirty seconds to get your message across to tired and indifferent negotiators and confused and bored members of the media. Messaging is pretty tricky: How do you summarize and visualize demands for environmental justice? How do you convincingly critique an entire economic system and offer an alternative in a single poster or action? It is nigh-on impossible. Nevertheless we try.

The impact that is felt by actions such as these is not often reflected in the pages of an outcome document. Rather the impact is subverting and undermining the dominant narrative. Such actions can send a message to other activists: everything is not OK; the technocrats and their business friends do not have things covered; we need to redouble our efforts in that space of struggle. It also sends a message to negotiators and anyone else paying attention: without a social license granted by civil society, there is no legitimacy in the process.

Hailing from the north of Ireland, Nathan Thanki is currently in Peru organizing for COP20 and the counter summit, Cumbre de los Pueblos.

Top: Activists tear up copies of the United Nations document "The Future We Want" at the Rio+20 meeting. Bottom: some members of COA's Rio+20 delegation. Back row: Ana Puhač '14, Bogdan Zymka '15, Graham Hallet '16, Cameron Fenton (Canadian Youth Climate Coalition), Nathan Thanki '14, Adrian Fernandez Jauregui '15, Tomislav Tomasevic (Friends of the Earth Croatia), Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler '14. Front Row: Anna Collins (Global Call for Climate Action), Mariana Calderon '14, Amara Possian (Canadian Youth Climate Coalition), Clara de Iturbe '15. Photos by Ana Puhač '14.

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CREATIVE ACTIVISM: Reclaiming Land, Connecting Communities BOGOTA — The Fucha River flows from pristine mountains into the heart of this city that has been expanding for decades. Its silvery waters, where residents once swam and fished, are now polluted with sewage; its banks a dump site where rats and snakes live among the refuse of street dwellers.

But not all its banks are polluted. After ten weeks of hard work, a garden has been sown in what had been an abandoned plot along the Fucha's banks, its six-hundred square meters piled knee-high with garbage. Project Listen to the River, Proyecto Escucha al Río, blooms in Bogotá's San Cristobal neighborhood, home to displaced, unemployed, and underemployed people, many struggling with drug problems, violence, and the lack of public services.

Rising seniors Maria Alejandra Escalante and Ana Maytik Avirama, both from Bogotá, along with local university students Natalia Londoño and Esteban García, worked for nearly a year planning this garden. A grant from the Davis Projects for Peace — and the help of numerous community members — created an eco-classroom that the group plans to expand, hoping it will serve as a model for future initiatives. With help from many others in the community, the land has been cleaned and cleared, the soil turned, and seeds planted to create a circular garden of medicinal herbs, shaded by fruit and other native trees, and fed by the nutrients from within a compost hut.

The work was hard, the learning intense, and the rewards great, says Maria. "Through instinctive observations — because, honestly, it is hard to learn in college how to work in a real-life context — we began constructing and activating bridges to the community. We have a river to save, a community to learn from and teach what we can, enough funds to start a project, dozens of volunteers, hearts, hands, ideas, and time. The four of us have been activating

the bridges of communication and solidarity between all these pieces."

One essential bridge is to Casa Nativa. This community-based youth group has organized local youth and others to clean the river, plastic bit by plastic bit, re-naturalizing the Fucha and its banks. "These young leaders are changing people's paradigms into a mindset of community-based action, re-appropriation, and self-empowerment," Maria adds.

The other bridge is to the Mesa de Agricultura Urbana, an urban agricultural grassroots group, "composed of the most knowledgeable and open-hearted elders who have given us all their time and support," continues Maria. These people have "life experience on their

shoulders. They have been our most natural professors."

At the end of the summer, the four students organized a community festival, Escucha al Río en Tí, Listen to the River in You. The day celebrated what Maria calls, "the cycle of growth of relationships between alternative groups in the city, youth, elders, and the natural space." More than two hundred people came to plant trees, create a grand community meal, paint a mural, share their community-based experiences, and dance to local bands. Says Maria, "this land, once abandoned, is now filled with the energy and care of people of all ages." — Donna Gold

To find out more, visit davisprojectsforpeace.org/projects.

Top: Ana Maytik Avirama '15 celebrates the planting of the garden's medicinal herb circle.Photo by Natalia Londoño. Bottom: Welcoming sign for the garden. Photo by Tish Oh.

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KELSEYVILLE, CA — Two and a half hours north of San Francisco, the technology capital of the world, some twenty friends and strangers gather in a circle and deposit their cell phones into a black shoe box, which is then duct-taped shut and put out of sight. A basket is passed around with pens and notepads; as each person takes one — their "phone" for the weekend — they introduce themselves, answering the question, "What would you do with your time if you weren't online?"

The art event, YOU: Unplugged, was organized by River Black '12, and attended by Julia De Santis '12, Renae Lesser '12, Matt Maiorana '11, Miguel Valencia '12, and Brooke Welty '11, along with friends from Kelseyville and the Bay Area. It was a form of Social Practice Art — participatory artwork that uses social engagement as its medium. River had interned with a chef and socially-engaged artist whose ongoing project, Dinner Discussion, brought together chefs, artists, writers, curators, and other cultural critics for informal discussions over a gourmet meal. River was hooked: "You mean you can hold a monthly dinner party and call it art?" She liked the collaborative, interactive nature of the form, and that it was happening in non-traditional spaces.

This digital detox emerged from ideas about the urban versus rural pace of life, and creating intentional environments to foster focus and deep conversation. Held at Ancient Lake Gardens, River's family farm, participants immersed themselves in nature and each other without the distraction of modern electronics — leading to some critical thinking about their relationship with technology.

To enhance participation, each attendee brought something to

share. An eclectic array came forth: typewriter, tarot cards, ukulele, food. The group spent their time on activities that most born before 1985

poems, stories, and letters in

longhand or on a typewriter, listening to records, hiking, visiting with the farm's llamas and chickens, sharing communal meals, learning to make spring rolls, and playing the game

watch the stars.

But technology has changed most of us, and this group was curious to discuss how. While many felt anxious being disconnected from their work, many, too, recognized that technology, while connecting people at a distance, also monopolized them. Given less time on the Internet, says River, "participants said they would read, learn to cook, hike and spend time in nature, write more letters to friends, make music."

People enjoyed the notepads, she adds. They "joked around that they were cameras and tried to take pictures with them. They sketched." Julia led an informal discussion on how we die and recorded people's end-of-life wishes.

"I really didn't realize how much I looked at my phone until I didn't have it," says Julia. "And being disconnected — unless it's a planned trip into the wilderness — can be unsettling. I remember thinking: what happens if there's a terrorist attack in New York where my family lives? But removed from technology and our normal social groups, our conversations went deeper."

The next day at noon, the box was cut open, cellphones retrieved, and with hugs and goodbyes, and Internet addresses and cell phone numbers written on their pads, the group plugged back into the world.

— Donna Gold and Julia DeSantis '12

CREATIVE ACTIVISMRiver Black '12 and Social Practice ArtPhotos by Julia De Santis '12

River Black '12

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Mom's KitchenBy Molly Caldwell '14

it used to bethat I couldn't be trustedto properly sweep the excessfrom a mounded cup.Like this — she would saypulling a butter-knifefrom the sticky drawerleft of the kitchen sinkusing the back of the bladeto scrape the cup level.Now, my mother stareswith the eyes of a childwhen I askrosemary or thyme?Somehow believingmy college educationhas better prepared mefor seasoning potatoes.

HomesickBy Molly Caldwell '14

I want to climbdown the storiesof a homethat time has builton my father's faceand swim

where he keepshis bones.

By Gregory Bernard '16

I wrote a poem about Spring,Then crumpled it up and began again.

ThisBeginning againwhile an egg boils in a pot on the stovethe day after Russian Easter.

"Christ has risen"

"If you say so"

The water from the pot splatters on the electric coilsHissingReleasing its vapor like a soul ascending, to what?

I'll begin again.

This Time I'll try not to scarTo tear the skin and peel back, perfectly,the outer shell

To begin again, in this cyclical, seasonal splendor.To shed this veil and reveal the progression of time. To feel nature's pulse, awakening, breathing anew.

*grandfather

Gregory Bernard, a second-generation Russian on his mother's side, was raised in Maine. His grandparents were able to leave the Soviet Union during WWII only to be imprisoned in German labor camps until after the war ended. Eventually, his grandfather, a nuclear physicist, received sponsorship to come to the US.

Molly Caldwell's poems are part of her senior project poetry portfolio.

POETRY

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The wind scattered sand and brush across the desert; the drifts resettled themselves. Leta still didn't know what made the wind. She sometimes imagined a massive man, blowing, blowing; other times it was a giant snake, carving rifts in the sand with his movement, bellowing air across the pocked surface with each flick of his tail. She had never come into contact with either of these conceptions, and she didn't expect to. The secret would be lost if the source of the wind could be seen. Wind is an absence, a shout that returns too late. It was, as her grandmother explained, the light from a star that had already burned out. The desert was constantly reshuffled. When the scientists came, they only had to dig to find whole civilizations. Perhaps the sand only went so far before it hit a heavy rug. Perhaps it all could be flipped with one well-timed snap, and her village could be replaced by another; and perhaps one day a scientist would dig to find the clay basin Leta's grandmother cooked in, and for a brief moment be startled how similar it was to his own. To Leta, this made looking for the blowing man or the invisible snake pointless. Pointless but not uninteresting, and she often went wandering in the desert, a stick and a village dog for protection, some flatbread for eating. She would climb the stands of juniper trees and sap would stick to her feet. Sand would stick to the sap. Months of repetition, and the sand and sap had created a tough husk on the bottom of her feet. During flood season, Leta worked alongside the adult harvesters, shaking rice stalks so that the tiny brown grains fell onto vast tarps. Though she was young, her grandmother insisted she work, and

for three summers she found herself hunched over in the ankle-deep water of the floodplain. Her fingers hardened to crusts, but by the fall she had new feet. The water sloughed off the sap-and-sand husk, like the great snakeskin she sometimes searched for. The water did this, said her grandmother, to all things. It cleansed the village. Without the water, the crops would not grow, and the village would starve. It was for the water that the village survived, and for the goat that the rain fell. It was always a particular goat — male, strong and wily. The village elders, in long, patched robes that collected the dust and excrement on the barn floor, deliberated over the goats for a long time. When one was chosen, they transferred it to its own pen. Each home presented the freshest food they had to the goat, just as they did to brides at weddings. After seven days, the goat was offered to the wilderness.

It was nearly flood season again, and Leta's feet were heavy as she walked home from school. Her house was within yelling distance of the town, but if she were to yell, Leta knew the desert would just absorb the sound, turn it into scattered blue energy. Her grandmother said that the land was alive, that if she stood still she would feel the ground underneath her feet pound with drums. Leta tried,

but all she could hear was her own blood in her ears, echoing. Leta walked down the long drive to her house. The exterior had been covered with corrugated plastic, and the deck had fallen down the first year they were there. Her grandmother had overturned a paint bucket below the door for her to step on. When she walked inside, she hung her lunch pail on a nail and her grandmother called her to the living room. She padded in and sat on the couch. Her grandmother was a large, colorfully dressed woman with pulled-back hair and a wide, slack grin. Leta looked between her grandmother and the priest. When Leta was orphaned as a little girl, she had been given to the priest for safekeeping; but Aaminah, a dogged widow, adopted her and became her grandmother. Though it had been ten years, the priest still visited them occasionally to express his gratitude for Aaminah's commitment.

This visit, he did not look so much like a ventriloquist's doll. "This season will be very good," said the priest, nodding with the certainty only a man of his standing can have. "I have seen the goat," Aaminah said in a tone of agreement. "A fine goat." She smiled at her granddaughter. "I'm sure Leta saw how full the market was this morning!"

LETABy Grace Goschen '17

"The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a solitary land." — Leviticus 16:22

1

Wind is an absence, a shout that returns too late. It was, as her grandmother explained, the light from a star that had already burned out.

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Leta nodded. The village always swelled past its real size during sacrifice time. The villagers perceived things through a magnifying glass — the goat carried all sin, and the wilderness was the entire world. "I can expect to see you tomorrow morning?" asked the priest, and withdrew from the room. Leta and her grandmother listened to the flurry of chickens that the priest's footsteps had motivated, and then looked at each other with small, curious smiles. "Is the goat leaving tomorrow?" asked Leta. "Oh, yes," her grandmother answered.

2In the morning, Leta wove strands of sage into her soft brown hair and dressed in white. She followed her grandmother to the village square, which sat alongside a deep crag; the crag was thin, easily stepped across, but every year they took the goat from its crate and placed it on the other side; the goat, with its twig legs and narrow gait, could not make it across to the village again. The village square was full by the time Leta and her grandmother reached it; the villagers were bent in prayer, a mass of white humps that resembled a cluster of buds. Leta bent over, too, though she did not know what verse the villagers had reached. Her shoulders, thin, were hidden by the other villagers, and she worried that God would not see her among the hundreds. The priest straightened and the verse tapered to an end. His eyes, buried beneath his skin like two drops of ink, flickered briefly to the sky and back. The sky, Leta noticed, was as clear and blue as the turquoise

she occasionally recovered from dry riverbanks. She hadn't, until that moment, connected the two — she could see now that the turquoise was left by the sky. The priest directed the villagers' gaze at a crate, partially covered in light purple cloth; the priest spoke more words that Leta did not understand, and with a curt, strong pull, removed the covering from the crate. Again, Leta pictured a rug, a single snap, the existence of an entire desert expunged. The goat stood insignificant in the crate; the villagers cheered. Leta cheered, too, but her piccolo voice was as lost among the crowd as her shoulders were. The priest guided the goat out from the cage and fastened a collar around its neck; the collar, a tiny gold cap-shaped bead for each household in the village, caught the light of the hated sun like a prism and threw it upon the villagers' faces. As the priest led the goat away from the crate, it struck Leta that an entire crowd had amassed to watch this man — one man! — and she was filled with renewed respect for the priest's power and command. She watched between the torsos and hips of the crowd as the priest placed both his hands atop the goat's head, lifted them, and beckoned the villagers, family by family, to come forward and touch the goat's collar. The women took the beads between their thumbs and forefingers like a rosary, the men touched the beads with a brush of the fingertips; the children held them like candy. Leta wondered what kinds of sins were being confessed, and wondered also if she could perceive them by the expressions on the faces of the sinners. The women, she thought,

must be more sinful than the men. The way they wrinkled their faces, the way their tears fell! They must have performed terrible things. The men did not look as devastated as the women; they seemed, instead, as though they were following directions; and the children were more interested in the sleek, soft fur of the goat than in the pitted gold beads of the collar. Leta and her grandmother moved slowly without direction; the crowd churned and revolved as each new family was called; Leta was nearly caught underfoot twice; even beneath her dress her skin felt tight and burnt from the sun. A haze had just begun to develop in her eyes when the priest called her adoptive family's name. Leta touched the goat first. She wondered briefly if she would one day atone for the sins of those born before her. Then her grandmother touched the goat, and the crowd digested them again. Two more families were called and then the priest placed a wide board across the crag. Leta strained on her toes to watch as the goat crossed the board with measured and mechanical steps, and then the priest confiscated the board and strode briskly away. The villagers were still; then with grumbles and parting words, they dispersed back to their homes.

3The goat stood on the other side of the crag, bleating feebly until some village boys came to pelt rocks at him; he flared his nostrils at the danger and trotted away. Each new sound pushed the goat further into the desert until there was just a pattern of sand and sky. The desert had the curious ability to distort lines. Nothing appeared quite linear. Direction and horizon

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became circular, cyclical. The goat continued to wander, unaware that the villagers were tracking him in their minds, speculating whether he would die of dehydration, starvation, attack, or disease.

The goat paused as he neared a strip of brush; he bleated again. He had learned to make himself seen and heard; he would be useless to the herders otherwise. The other prey in the desert gave him a wide berth; he was the anomaly that imperiled everyone as equals.

He eventually collapsed in the dishonest shade, his legs folding under him like a marionette. His mouth hung slack as a dog's and his abdomen rose and fell rapidly. When the bushes moved behind him, his instinct kicked him into an unwelcome sprint.

It struck Leta as strange that an entire village could be so sure of a fate, strange that they could speculate about how rather than what, strange

that it was by their hands that they were speculating at all. She also wondered if the goat could experience the sensation of hope and hopelessness, if he could perceive fortune and doom, if he could fear. She was not sure that the goat could comprehend his death — maybe he couldn't even foresee it. But she knew that he could, if nothing else, feel the sun and thirst. She had felt the sun and thirst when she walked in the desert; she had felt the soles of her feet petrify like wood in the creek banks.

4That night, Leta listened to the sounds of discordant cheers and bottles cracking. She stood at her window, elbows on the sill, and stared into the village. She could see the same crowd in the same square, but their

uplifted shoulders had been replaced

with frenzied, colorful ones, and the prayers had been swallowed by yells of triumph.

Leta wondered if the same throats could ever produce soft sounds again.

The villagers were waiting for the rain. It always rained the night

been successful — and it had been, since before memory. The raindrops

eggs; the dust absorbed them in

would grow steadily larger, and even the hermetic desert broke, changed color, and allowed the seeds that had been waiting for months to twitch like eggs and send out shoots. Leta thought the new sprigs of growth must seem like gods to the grains of sand, impossibly tall and impossibly there, appearing overnight and growing out of sight to the sky.

But before it could rain the goat had to perish. Leta had trouble

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explaining how they knew the exact moment of its passage — but the villagers did know. It was a palsy of the land. The desert would shake, settle, and then it would begin to rain. Leta looked up from the mass of villagers to the sky; it was black-blue and as clear as the iris of an infant's eye. The stars were visible to the size of dust. She clambered down from the window and hugged her shirt close to her frame. She wanted to go to sleep, but she sensed the revelers needed an impartial observer.

5In the nearby desert, the goat chewed slowly on a length of sagebrush to soothe himself; his leg was mangled from running. He cried plaintively for his herder, but the desert absorbed all sound into an aphonic hush; it was impossible to tell which direction noise came from. The canyons repelled the sound waves in all directions, and they sparred and echoed in the air until they formed one sourceless chord. By the time the goat noticed the soft scritch, the cat was upon him. He skittered away from the yellow eyes, his legs bouncing in a sepulchral waltz; the cat followed him, with none of the hunched, growling felinity appropriate to its species; it was like a child, unserious, as it swiped; it left five cherry-colored pits in the goat's hide, and the goat fell at the force of the blow, shrilling. The cat lashed the goat again, and then it broke its teeth into the goat's neck. The goat's muscles loosened, and the eye that was still open to the world became glassy and clouded; he drew a last ineffectual breath.

6The sky pulsed and the villagers stopped in a hundred places to throw their gaze towards it, each face the photon of a fly's eye. They shouted with one voice, and a shiver climbed up Leta's back; she too had felt the sky pulse, the ground rock. She knew the goat was dead.

She climbed up to the window again and stared at the writhing villagers. The old women had thrown their hands up to the sky, as if to catch the rain that had not yet begun. The men jostled each other in drunken excitement. Leta cast her eyes towards the stars and searched for a cloud, a whisper of moisture, but could find none. She looked at the ground again, and the juniper trees scraped the sand in the wind. The shouts of the villagers grew more and more impatient; Leta saw the silhouette of a bottle pass over one of the many bonfires, and a guttural roar, an inhuman noise that only humans could produce, erupted. Leta gasped and hid half of her face behind the window sill. She felt both vulnerable and privileged as she watched a fight break out; soon, human figures arched across the fires, as easily flung as the empty bottle. It was remarkable how accurately Leta could recognize the villagers from their silhouettes. The priest was especially easy to pick out, his chambered hat and long robes grim in the firelight. She realized he was walking in the direction of her home and also saw, a moment later, that the villagers were as well. The priest seemed to be maintaining a vesicle of nonviolence around his person, but the villagers were dogged, accusatory; only paces from Leta's window a woman dragged the priest's sleeve down. Leta peaked her ears, catching repeated phrases in the squall of words; the sacrifice had not worked; the rain had not come. The priest spoke calmly, his expression as docile as the goat's; but just as there had been the tint of death in the goat's eyes, there was a sense of outcome in the priest's. Leta, too, shook with intuition. It happened almost too quickly for Leta to perceive. The woman who had grasped the priest's sleeve spat. As the priest turned to soothe her, a man emerged from the darkness; his hand moved swiftly in the smoke, and a brick splintered against the priest's head. He pitched against Leta's window, blood moiling the glass like a dark lens; his face,

varicose and yellow with age, slid down the window, his lip catching and exposing teeth. Leta saw the last delirious roll of his eye, swollen and blue against the glass, before his body fell in the garden.

7Leta walked through town in the morning, her lunch pail slapping lightly against her thigh. She passed the site of the fires and stepped delicately around the distended bodies, brushing her soft, sandy-brown hair from her eyes. Storm clouds gathered easily on the horizon.She looked at the old schoolhouse — in shambles! — and continued into the open desert; the pale dust swirled around her bare feet and the wind plucked tendrils of her hair in its fingers; her breath strengthened with the wind as it drew her further into the desert. She stopped on a low ridge; the heather already appeared purple in anticipation of the rain.

Leta glanced up at a noise in the undergrowth, a honey eye perked. When the bush didn't offer the noise again, she knelt lightly in the sand. After a moment, a cat the length of her grandmother slunk into view; a kitten followed behind, the wind backcombing its fur and exposing a pattern of hollow spots. Leta smiled slowly, and the kitten and its mother dissolved into the sand like the source of the wind.

Grace Goschen '17 wrote this as a midterm paper in Bill Carpenter's Aesthetics of Violence class. Illustration by Carrie Graham, George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History supervisor.

The raindrops were always small at first,

like fish eggs; the dust absorbed them in

self-deprecating puffs.

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A L U M N IN O T E S

1976

Working hard at writing, in 2013 Sally Morong Chetwynd published her novel, Bead of Sand, set in an historical museum village. A second contemporary novel is in the works, and she's begun research for a third story, about a US Naval Academy cadet on board the USS Constitution during the Civil War. As Sally edits work for other authors and rebuilds websites for professional colleagues, she is planning a website to highlight her own work. Her portrayal of a Civil War military engineer can be viewed on YouTube, under Sally Chetwynd.

1977David Winship retired from K–12 public school education and is now teaching at the college level. At a local community college he leads a teacher recertification course, Teaching on The Crooked Road, to incorporate traditional music into K–12 classrooms. He also teaches History of Appalachia at King University, in nearby Bristol, TN, his childhood home. He writes, "Still searching and wandering, though not all who wander are lost." He is serving his first year as president of his local Rotary Club.

1978In advance of Kipling's 150th birthday in 2015, Jackson Gillman debuts Off-Broadway with The Magic of Rudyard Kipling: "Just So" on Nov. 19, during New York City's United Solo Theatre Festival.

Jackson was also a featured performer for the fourth time at the National Storytelling Festival in Tennessee. Come April 2015, at Kipling's historic Vermont home, Jackson will return to offer his Springboards for Stories workshop, designed to help individuals develop their own personal stories. jacksongillman.com/workshops

1981Peter Stevick passed a professional landmark this year. He's published his 40th scientific paper, "Inter-oceanic movement of an adult female humpback whale between Pacific and Atlantic breeding grounds off South America" in the Journal of Cetacean Research and Management. Over the years he has had 11 COA community members as co-authors: COA registrar and Allied Whale staff member Judy Allen, former president and faculty member Steve Katona, Allied Whale research associate Rosemarie Seton, faculty member and Allied Whale director Sean Todd, and alumni Kim (Robertson) Chater '88, Tom Fernald '91, Scott Kraus '77, Jess McCordic '12, Bill McLellan '88, Megan McOsker '90, and Eddie Munoz '99.

1984Laura Starr-Houghton writes, "As our children have grown, with one in law school and the youngest now in college, we've taken the big step of moving away from my husband's family home and into the 'big city' of Concord, NH. We've adopted a newly renovated 1890s house in the south end, and love it! Coupled with a promotion to senior director of consulting operations, we are making our way through empty nester sadness to a new life and liking it a lot!"

1986

Tim Spahr and Troy Thibodeau '04, Maine game wardens, spoke about their work and the making of North Woods Law with film producer Heeth Grantham '94, during COA's summer Coffee & Conversation series.

1989As part of COA's summer Coffee & Conversation series, Linda Gregory led a discussion on changes to the flora of Mount Desert Island with Acadia National Park researcher Caitlin McDonough Mackenzie. Having left California, Linda and her family are excited to be back living in Bar Harbor.

1990Elena Tuhy-Walters was appointed special assistant prosecuting attorney for Ohio's Licking County, Child Support Enforcement Agency. She has closed her law practice to focus on her new duties: trying cases of contempt, discussing job possibilities with obligors, and signing requests to the court to terminate child support orders. She writes, "I love working with a team toward the crucial goal of getting financial stability for children."

1991At 45.5 feet in length, the second-largest humpback whale specimen on display in North America was installed at Glacier Bay National Park by Dan DenDanto and the Whales and Nails crew. In the photo are Dan,

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Lindsey Nielsen '12, and Joshua (Phinn) Onens '13 standing, with Courtney Vashro '99 in front. Alex Borowicz '14 and Rachel Sullivan-Lord '14 also assisted with the articulation. Dan finds COA alumni ideal for the multi-disciplinary challenges of preservation, assembly, and interpretation.

In August, Natalie Springuel, COA-based Sea Grant extension associate, and husband and former staffer Rich MacDonald sailed the North and Baltic seas as naturalists aboard Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion cruise, their 8th such journey. Daughter Anouk, 7, joined as junior naturalist.

1994 Jennifer Roberts has relocated to Morrison, CO to create a better work and life balance as well as enjoy a longer swimming, biking, and running season. Jen still practices small animal veterinary medicine.

2000Cerissa Desrosiers welcomed two babies into her life this year. In April, she co-opened Endurance Behavioral Health, in Seabrook, NH, an adolescent intensive outpatient and partial hospitalization program. In August, she and her wife Jessica had a beautiful, healthy, baby girl named Phoebe.

Travis Hussey, former Union River Watershed Coalition coordinator, was drawn back to Maine after eight years on the West Coast. He is living in Newburgh.

Shawn and Sarah '05 Keeley and their kids, Noah, 9, and Aliyah, 5, moved back to MDI this summer. Shawn,

former COA alumni coordinator, is now senior development officer at Friends of Acadia. Sarah is taking a breather from homeschooling, getting back into birth doula work, and splashing in the frigid Acadian waters to capture shore-break magic for a budding wave photography business. Noah and Aliyah are excited to be part of the first year of The Community School of Mount Desert Island founded by Jasmine Smith '09 (see page 43).

2002

Rickie Bogle (standing with white sweater, being kissed), married Justin Drake on Aug. 23 in Parsonsfield ME, surrounded by their loved ones, including many from COA. For years they've had a big weekend get-together at their house with Rickie's COA friends and their families. Their wedding was a larger version of this gathering: a fun, light, happy weekend with their favorite people. They live in Portland, ME with their dog, Lola. Rickie has a private massage therapy practice and works as a potter.

In March 2014, Gideon Culman married Anna Shpak. They are expecting their first child in March 2015. Gideon continues to work as a life coach and coach trainer, and has just launched the radio program Legacy Talk Radio at wsradio.com. It features individuals who "use their life as the vehicle to create their legacy."

Ardrianna (French) McLane, COA's director of summer programs for more than a year, has moved to Atlanta to become chief of interpretation and visitor services at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Sandy Springs,

GA, a position with the National Park Service. She thanks the community for "making the last year here as a staffer so wonderful and welcoming." Upon announcing this change, Andy Griffiths, administrative dean, called Ardrianna, "an incredibly quick study, learning all the intricacies of the many summer programs, and expending endless energy facing all the usual and unexpected challenges."

20032014 was full of exciting births at the home of Jean-Paul Calderone and Jericho Bicknell. First goat kids, then ducklings, and then their baby girl, Lyra Barbara Calderone, born July 25.

2004

On April 5, Mukhtar Amin and Sarah Hurlburt ('05) welcomed baby Leila Amin to their family. They write, "Leila is a strong-willed, clear-eyed little person and we are so happy to have her join the family. Three-year-old Salim is excited to have a sister!"

2005

Eamonn Hutton and Amy Hoffmaster '06 welcomed wiggly, bright-eyed, and observant Mirabel Francis "Poppy" Hutton on May 16. She has already enjoyed an early morning trip to the Turrets Seaside Garden (which Eamonn restored for his senior

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project) and visits to old Bar Harbor haunts.

2006Deodonne Bhattarai writes, "This year was one of many changes for us. After four years in Cambridge and two in Washington, DC, we left the city for the quiet of New Hampshire. Our son, Bodhi, was born at home this past May. He has Ranjan's hair, smile, and ability to melt my heart. Ranjan '04 still gets his fix of city life working as a senior product designer for BlackBoard Inc. in Boston, MA. Currently he's finalizing a mobile app to empower teachers to grade on the go. I am finishing my second year working on issues of health equity as a reproductive justice law fellow. Although we miss DC and our COA brunch crew (Lauren Nutter '10, Juan Soriano '11, Nat Keller '04, and Ivy Keller '05), we are definitely enjoying the cooler weather. We've just returned from a month summering in Maine and are settling into life with our new son. Feel free to reach out if you are in the Granite State."

Having completed a second bike ride across the US, Jason Childers is making plans to pursue a doctorate, conducting interdisciplinary research on the diversity of human-ecological responses to climate change. He intends to reach the rural coastal communities of his studies by sailboat. Read Jason's adventure blog at observicuss.wordpress.com.

Beth Gallant married Vincent Chusseau in a small City Hall ceremony in Portland, ME, on Oct. 25, 2013. On Jan. 4, 2014, they celebrated their marriage with family, friends — including Seth Carbonneau '05, Aoife

O'Brien '05, Brandon McDonald '05, Geoffrey Kuhrts '05, Robin Sewall '07, Sam Edmonds '05, and Shane Hall '05 — and lots of dancing. Beth writes, "After spending the past few years between Maine and France, we are happily living in Portland!"

Jay Guarneri and Emma Rearick '08 finally tied the knot in May 2013 with a courthouse ceremony in Monticello, AR. Jay earned his MS degree in spatial information science from the University of Arkansas at Monticello last fall. They now make their home in "the little apple," Manhattan, KS.

Julianne (Kearney) Taylor and her husband, Rustin Taylor, welcomed Adelyn Marie into the world on July 25. She was born at Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth, ME. They currently live in Mount Desert; Julianne has worked at the Mount Desert Elementary school for four years. Both couldn't feel more blessed and are excited to start on this new adventure together as a family.

2007 John Deans, Greenpeace organizer, gave COA's 2014 convocation address in September. "I often feel as though I walk around with a unique kind of freedom," he told an overflow crowd in Gates. "My brain got wired at COA

to not accept the world at its face, to not just go along with the forces of inevitability, of political feasibility. There are exceptions to every rule, and our humanity, compassion, and a just future lie in those exceptions."

After a few years landscape gardening in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Peter Pavicevic earned a master's degree in landscape architecture from the City College of New York. His final project explored ecological restoration of serpentine grasslands on Staten Island. As an apprenticeship toward accreditation, he's been working on a large-scale green infrastructure installation project in Brooklyn.

2009

Marni Berger married Leo Schwach at COA on Aug. 16. They've been partners for years, and together walked The Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in Spain, which was part of Marni's senior project at COA. This summer they moved from NYC to Portland, ME.

Michael Diaz-Griffith and Alonso Diaz Rickards '12 were wed in Mexico City on April 25. After a Pacific honeymoon they moved to New York City, where Michael studies art history and business at Sotheby's and Alonso continues to paint

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(alonsodiazrickards.com). They'd love to hear from COA alumni in the city. [email protected].

In April, Neith Little and Andrew Davis became engaged and moved to St. Paul, MN. She's employed as a county extension educator for the University of Minnesota, primarily working on outreach and education about farming practices that protect water quality.

Founded by Jasmine Smith, The Community School of Mount Desert Island began its inaugural year this fall. Bethany Anderson '13 is excited to be a classroom teacher; Nick Jenei '09 teaches music and Eloise Schultz '16 leads singing. The children of Linda Gregory '89, Sarah '05 and Shawn '00 Keeley, and Lauren Rupp '05 are students. Lauren also serves on the board along with Ed Kaelber, COA founding president, Lynn Boulger, COA dean, and faculty member Bonnie Tai.

2010 Noah Hodgetts received a master's degree in urban and regional policy from Northeastern University in

May and has since been working as a research associate and planner at the affordable housing development firm LDS Consulting Group in Newton, MA.

Becky Wartell announced her candidacy for the Portland School Board District 4 and has been campaigning for the Nov. 4 election.

2011

Alex Brett is cruising between Sitka and Juneau with his work for The Boat Company, an Alaskan cruise company with a focus on conservation and education. In a small-world moment, he met former COA trustee Helen Porter, a passenger on board in August.

2012After a year as the teaching apprentice, Lucy Atkins is now the pre–K and Kindergarten supporting teacher at Juniper Hill School for Place-Based Education in Alna, ME, a small historically farming community in midcoast Maine. The school, writes Lucy, "connects children to themselves, to each other, and to their communities through studying both natural and human environments." She adds, "I love it because I get to spend over half the day outside with young children as they explore, play, and learn in the woods!"

In their continued quest to become a "museum power couple," Virginia Mellen and Eli Mellen '11, MPhil '14 have both embarked on new adventures. Virginia has left her position at the Mount Desert Island Historical Society to pursue a one-year master's degree in arts and heritage at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, while Eli remains in Bar Harbor serving as database manager for the Abbe Museum.

COMMUNITYN O T E SIn May, Rich Borden, Rachel Carson Chair in Human Ecology, and Ken Hill, academic dean, gave the invited presentation, "Human Ecology and Interdisciplinary Education: A Survey of Rural, Urban, and International Partnerships," to a joint meeting of the Commonwealth Human Ecology Council and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Humanökologie in Sommerhausen, Germany. Later, at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Sacramento, CA, Rich, along with Rob Dyball of Australian National University, gave the presentation, "Human Ecology at ESA: An Historical Review." The meeting also featured a book signing for Rich's book, Ecology and Experience: Reflections from a Human Ecological

Perspective (see excerpt in Spring 2014). Rich was elected chair of the society's human ecology section, and he'll be on the organizing committee for its centennial anniversary in Baltimore in 2015.

This summer, in a momentary lapse of sanity, Ken Cline, David

Rockefeller Family Chair in Ecosystem Management and Protection, joined COA alumni Brett Ciccotelli '09, Bob DeForrest '94, and Eric Horschak ('99) in circumnavigating Mount Desert Island in one day by kayak. Highlights of the 16-hour trip were harbor porpoise, seals, many seabirds, stunning bioluminescence, and great companionship. In May, Ken worked with Acadia National Park and the Schoodic Institute to host senior park officials and managers from Chile and Colombia on campus as part of a New England tour of the US/Chile/Colombia Marine and Terrestrial Protected Area Collaboration, and talked to the group about the COA-ANP partnership. Later COA President

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Darron Collins '92, several faculty, and numerous students (some from Chile and Colombia) attended a lunch with the park officials.

Under the direction of arts faculty member Dru Colbert in an advanced visual communication course, Hiyasmin Saturay '15 designed a traveling version of the exhibit on the controversial history of Malaga Island in Maine — "Fragmented Lives: Malaga Island" that Dru created for the Maine State Museum. The exhibit will travel to schools and libraries throughout Maine and New England. This summer, to collaborate with native advisors for a permanent exhibit of Wabanaki history and culture in Bar Harbor's Abbe Museum, Dru attended a Micmac Mawiomi gathering in Presque Isle, ME.

Linear Transitions, the comprehensive jazz improvisation system developed by John Cooper, faculty member in music and composer in residence, is now being used by 60 high school and college jazz programs in 16 states. Cooper recently adjudicated both the 2014 Massachusetts State Jazz Finals, and — for the 14th straight year — the Maine State Jazz Finals. He currently performs with the Portland Jazz Orchestra.

Gray Cox, faculty member in political economy, published the booklet Quaker Approaches to Research: Collaborative Practice and Community Discernment for the Quaker Institute for the Future series published in Belize by Producciones de la Hamaca, Caye Caulker. In June he gave the workshop, "Challenges of a Smarter Planet: Right Relationships on a Wiser Earth" at the Friends Association of Higher Education annual meeting at Haverford College and the Summer Research Seminar of the Quaker Institute for the Future in Philadelphia, as well as presentations of Quaker Approaches to Research.

For those who missed the first COA-connected MOOC (massive open online class), Dave Feldman, faculty member in math and physics, will

be offering another version of his Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos MOOC through the Santa Fe Institute in winter 2015. Sign up at complexityexplorer.org. In August, Dave gave a presentation on his experience teaching the MOOC at a Principles of Complexity workshop at the Santa Fe Institute.

Jay Friedlander, Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business, was invited to speak twice in Japan over the summer. The first was to keynote the Asian Conference on Sustainability, Energy, and the Environment in Osaka. The second was at the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations in Tokyo.

Jamie McKown, James Russell Wiggins Chair in Government and Polity, talked about the early history of intercollegiate debate at the centennial anniversary conference of the National Communication Association in Chicago, IL.

After more than 25 years as a writer, editor and writing coach for papers in New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Rocky Mountains, Bob Mentzinger has joined COA as public relations manager. "This job is a dream come true for me, allowing me to combine interests in writing, the outdoors, education, and campaigns to raise the profile of a unique place full of very special people doing important, innovative work," he says.

During June and July, Chris Petersen, biology faculty member, worked with Katie O'Brien '15, Tyler Prest '16, and the New England Sustainability Consortium based out of the University of Maine doing research on clamflat biology and the pH of local habitats on Frenchman Bay. In addition, with Weronika Grabowska '17 and Zinta Rutins '14 he has begun a toxicology project looking at local adaptation to heavy metal pollution by fish in Goose Pond on Cape Rosier, an estuary dammed in the early 1970s to create the open pit Callahan Mine, now a superfund site. Chris is COA's principal investigator on the

new INBRE grant from the National Institute of Health, from which COA received $454,000 over five years to increase faculty and student training in biomedical sciences.

Plant Ecology and Evolution in Harsh Environments, co-edited by botany faculty member Nishanta Rajakaruna '94, Robert Boyd, and Tanner Harris '06, has just been published by Nova. Nishi also has just been named editor-in-chief of Rhodora, the quarterly, peer-reviewed publication of the New England Botany Club, devoted to the botany of North America. In June, Nishi, along with Tanner and Ian Medeiros '16, presented three papers at the Eighth International Conference in Serpentine Ecology in Malaysia. In October, Nishi was a guest lecturer in the botany department of the Institute of Natural Sciences of Ural Federal University in Yekaterinburg, Russia. He has also been appointed "extraordinary associate professor" at the School of Environmental Sciences and Development at North-West University, Potchesftroom Campus in South Africa. For more publications, visit nrajakaruna.wordpress.com.

In May, biology faculty members Steve Ressel and John Anderson attended the Northeast Natural History Gathering at Sterling College, VT along with students in John's Wildlife Ecology class. While there, Steve led a guided natural history trip on painted turtles. In August, he participated in a science advisory panel meeting on Hurricane Island, ME as part of a strategic planning process to explore future ecological-based research on the island.

In June, Bonnie Tai spent two weeks in the Tanahun District of Nepal,

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working with students and teachers of both the Maya Universe Academy and English teachers in government schools. Maya is co-founded by Manjil Rana ('12), who presented his vision for the school in Bonnie's first Changing Schools, Changing Society class in 2009, and Surya Karki '16. Several students have volunteered at the schools. Benjamin Hitchcock '15, Milena Rodriguez '13, and Emilie Schwarz '17 have taught there; Urs Riggenbach '12 designed and installed a solar array.

Sean Todd, Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Sciences, reports that work began this summer on repairs to facilities at Mount Desert Rock, thanks to a $425,000 gift from the Mars family. Leading the effort are Allied Whale research associates Dan DenDanto '91, COA adjunct faculty member Matt Drennan '86, and lecturer Scott Swann '86, MPhil '93. The work may take three years. First up: boat ramp and generator shed (photo above).

In Memoriam: Daniel PierceMarch 18, 1934 – July 4, 2014

Daniel Pierce had an enormous impact on the college on many fronts — serving as a trustee for ten years, running the Investment Committee, endowing the Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy & Design in honor of his grandfather, the renowned landscape architect and environmentalist, and providing consistently wise (and usually concise) counsel on a wide variety of topics. As trustee emeritus, he continued to run the Investment Committee until just before he died.

The former chairman of Scudder, Stevens, and Clark, Dan was a highly experienced investor and an excellent Investment Committee chair, a critical role at any institution. He was masterful at running meetings, allowing for full discussion while gently but firmly keeping the train on time (sometimes no small challenge at COA) with a wonderful, dry sense of humor.

Dan and his wife Polly were remarkably generous to my wife Genie and me as we began to build a life in Bar Harbor, sharing advice and always willing to lend a helping hand. He was single-handedly responsible for getting me involved with COA, mysteriously inviting me to lunch shortly after we bought our house in Bar Harbor, telling me about this wonderful, small college.

His generosity extended to Milton Academy and Harvard College, where he had gone to school, to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and WGBH, and to Brigham & Women's Hospital, the New England Aquarium, the Trustees of Reservations, and American Memorial Hospital in Reims, France, whose boards he also served on.

He was a delightful man, a mentor and a friend. I remain grateful for his presence in our life at home and with the college.

Will ThorndikeChair, COA Board of Trustees

To welcome the class of 2018, connect the global COA community (and create some buzz), COA asked alumni, students, parents, staff, faculty, and friends to consider September 10 —

convocation — as #CelebrateCOA, and to use social media to share memories, "then and now" photos, and well-wishes for the incoming class. Here are just a few of the scores of posts:

Dorie Stolley '98: "I #celebrateCOA because of lifelong friendships made."

Elena Piekut '09: "I #celebrateCOA because it gave me explicit freedom to

explore, challenge myself, and create an education unique to me."

Jeanee Dudley ('11): "I #celebrateCOA for the incredible friends and mentors I made who encouraged my natural curiosity, offered me unique perspectives, and supported my journey as a young adult. Learning to harness creative thought has made me a better writer and a damn good human ecologist."

#CELEBRATE

COA

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Why We GiveThe Keller Family: Nat '04, Ivy '05, and Michael '09

We give to COA because we — Michael, Nat, and Ivy — lived, studied, worked, and played alongside COA students, faculty, staff, and even trustees for a combined eleven years — making lifelong friends and colleagues while canoeing for cranberries in Northeast Creek; refining, rewriting, and learning the craft of writing; redesigning trails in Acadia, and exploring puppetry, animation, and gardening.

COA is never far from our minds during our daily work and commutes because COA fostered a sense of commitment to the social and natural environment that each of us incorporated into our subsequent studies in law school and current work on behalf of both people and the environment as attorneys in Washington, DC and Chicago. Nat works in environmental law and policy, Ivy in financial regulation, and Michael in immigration law.

Our parents, Tim and Genevieve Keller — academics and practitioners in landscape architecture and historic preservation — still recall a family trip to Bar Harbor in 1989 with three-year-old Michael and seven-year-old Nat, and marvel at the catalyst COA has been in the lives of the next generation of the Keller family.

JOIN THE BLACK FLY SOCIETY

The Black Fly Society was established to make donating to COA's annual

fund easier and greener.

We hope you'll join this swarm of sustaining

donors by setting up a monthly online gift. It's the

paperless way to give to COA.

Follow the instructions at coa.edu/donatenow.

If you want to give to the annual fund by mail:

COA Annual Fund105 Eden Street

Bar Harbor, ME 04609

(Please make checks out to COA.)

Questions? Call 207-801-5622.

The Keller family celebrate Michael's graduation from the Washington and Lee University School of Law in May 2014. From left: Tim, Michael, Genevieve, Nat, and Ivy Keller.

Society for Human Ecology ConferenceOctober 22 to 25, 2014

COA hosted human ecologists from six continents and twenty-five nations during the twentieth conference of the Society for Human Ecology, or SHE. The theme was Ecological Responsibility and Human Imagination: Saving the Past–Shaping the Future, shepherded by Ken Hill, COA's academic dean, as executive director and staff member Barbara Carter as secretary.

Conversations abounded throughout the long weekend, inside and outside the official presenting locales, with many COA faculty members and numerous alumni offering papers and leading discussions. Topics ranged from "Building Sustainable Communities" with folks involved in Samsø (see page 5), to human rights, to food systems, to education and human ecology, to ideas of human evolution.

Human creativity was a central theme with a keynote by artist Louisa McCall, founder of Artists in Context, on "Co-Mingling Artful and Scientific Ways of Knowing," referencing food as art — and going further even than the food articles in this issue (see pages 30 and 34), with images of Natalie Jeremijenko's Cross(x)Species Dinners. The ICU work of COA's own Nancy Andrews (see page 12) was also discussed. Vibrant discussions were engendered, reflecting on the ghettoization of disciplines and whether all humans are equally programed to be artists and scientists, with creativity and discipline necessary for both.

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On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in GreeceBy Heath Cabot, faculty member in anthropologyPenn Press, Philadelphia, PA, 2014

On the Doorstep of Europe is an ethnographic study of the asylum system in Greece, tracing the ways asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and sociability that emerge through this legal process. Anthropology faculty member Heath Cabot centers the book on the work of an asylum advocacy in Athens, exploring how workers and clients grapple with predicaments endemic to Europeanization and rights-based protection. Throughout, she draws inspiration from classical Greek tragedy. Anthropologist Michael Herzfeld of Harvard University calls it, "Original, vividly written, and ethnographically rich," adding that it "breaks new ground as a contribution to the anthropology of law, globalization studies, and the ethnography of the eastern Mediterranean." This excerpt is the opening to her third chapter.

In a spontaneous moment of reflection brought on by a particularly difficult day, this is how the lawyer Phoevi described her work at the ARS [Athens Refugee Service, an NGO in Athens providing services to asylum seekers and refugees]: "It's like you have been given a life raft. You can save some people, but just a few, and you can make space for them. But even though I can save some people, I also have to recognize that the others are going to drown." Phoevi's short statement — delivered between meetings with clients to an audience consisting of just one listening ethnographer — captures the morally and ethically fraught character of asylum related advocacy and support at the ARS. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle invokes a similar — though less powerful — image to describe decisions and actions that are somewhere between "voluntary" and "involuntary." He writes of a ship's captain who throws goods overboard in a storm to save the lives of his crew. Aristotle suggests that in the end, this decision is voluntary, in that the captain himself must make a choice to "move his limbs" and initiate the action. Phoevi, however, raises the stakes, just as Martha Nussbaum [in the 2001 edition of her book The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy], in her engagement with Aristotle, also ups the ante: "things would look different

if the only way to save his ship had been to throw his wife or child overboard." When people, not cargo, must be thrown "overboard," the dilemma becomes even more

pronounced. Phoevi highlights the centrality of contingency, conflict, and disaster in the work of decision making and judgment: how people are always vulnerable to forces and outcomes beyond their control.

ARS work is characterized by what Nussbaum might describe as a kind of ethical "tragedy." While workers offer assistance to some, they turn others away, owing to limitations in labor power and resources, constraints of law and bureaucracy, and ARS institutional commitments. Even the process of granting services to clients is riddled with problems of mistranslation and disconnection, which may further thwart the provision of assistance. The decisions of ARS workers are rarely undergirded with the certainty of those who can know, judge possible outcomes, and choose appropriate actions based on that knowledge.

Rather, according to Nussbaum, in the world of "tragedy," humans — even those who are deemed virtuous — must face the hazards of fortune and severe limitations in their capacities to know (Oedipus) and navigate conflicting gods, laws, and moral orders (Orestes); even "right" action can end in disaster and often death (Antigone).

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There's a worn, cloth-covered book on my shelf called The Rise of Anthropological Theory by Marvin Harris. Elmer gave it to me as a graduation present, twenty-plus years ago. How could he know I'd eventually go off to explore life in the neotropics and finish a PhD in anthropology? The text itself certainly helped get me through graduate school. But it was the context of receiving the book — a gift á la Marcel Mauss with the intellectual and experiential heft inherent in being one of my favorite person's favorite books — that mattered most. And his gift to the world as a teacher and to College of the Atlantic as one of the earliest faculty members and steady keel? That's the priceless gift that no potlatch or kula ceremony will ever be able to repay. We need to at least try. — Darron Collins '92, COA president

Elmer was definitely one of my favorite professors at COA, not only for his depth of knowledge, but for his kind and quiet demeanor that made learning from him so special. I thoroughly enjoyed his Culture of Maine Woodworkers class, particularly for the field trips to Maine small farmers and workers in the woods who were not only practicing sustainable logging techniques, but who also integrated that into their organic farming practices. In his

Marketing Artisanal Foods class, Elmer allowed me to invite my father to discuss his career as the vice president of the northeast division of a large-scale grain exporting corporation and how that relates to small-scale farming, artisanal foods, and the complications corporate agriculture instills upon the small farmer. My father and Elmer got along extremely well; I will never forget that experience. I finished COA with a senior project studying the evolutionary history of small-scale cattle farming with Elmer as my project advisor. He truly was a one-of-a-kind teacher, mentor, and friend — one of the best. — Carter Tew '07, organic mushroom farmer

Elmer was among my favorite professors at COA! He was always available as a professor, mentor, and friend. He encouraged me to question and find my own truth in every situation and invoked my natural curiosity and passion as I looked into our dire food culture and its effect on society. This has led to my career as a health care provider and the ability to see how my patients' health is affected by environment and diet. Elmer was inspirational in the development of my confidence and ability to follow my passions. — Amber Hayes '05, chiropractor

I'm thinking back to 1974. We were looking for an anthropologist with a Maine accent, so we wouldn't scare the natives. Someone fluent in Quechua in case any Quechuans came around, plus a born musician who also shared 96 percent of their genetic material with a lobster. It was a tough job description, but there happened to be an Elmer Beal impersonator in town; and since then he's done more than anyone to connect this school to its own seacoast habitat and the working state of Maine. Elmer has given us street cred and indigenous cover and in certain dark periods when the neighbors said, "What the hell's going on in there?" someone would answer, "If Elmer's mixed up in it, it must be OK." Our zip code may be Eden Street but we can also be a touchy pool of crustaceans and I can't count the times Elmer has stepped in quietly as a mediator, healer, and diplomat to save us from ourselves. This will be Elmer's last commencement, and we not only say goodbye to the outrageous class of 2014 but also to a deeply intuitive human ecologist and native of this island we call home. — Bill Carpenter, faculty member in literature and creative writing, from his 2014 Awards and Gift Ceremony address

Retiring faculty member Elmer Beal (left) and Peter Moon '90.

Photo courtesy of the College of the Atlantic archives.

Anthropologist, cook, fisherman, musician, Elmer Beal epitomizes the breadth of a human ecologist. After studying anthropology and spending time in Bolivia in the Peace Corps, he first connected to COA while working for the Maine Coast Heritage Trust which had an office at COA early on. Soon he began teaching classes in anthropology, bringing students in touch with the foresters, farmers, and fisherman across Maine.

Elmer Beal Retires

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Today I want to tell you the story of an incredible journey. Once upon a time, in a country called Ireland, a four-year-old girl stood in a courtroom as a judge declared she was to be incarcerated in the Good Shepherd Convent Industrial School until she was sixteen. I was that child. My crime? I was born out of wedlock. In Ireland at that time, such children were removed from their mothers; this is how I ended up as a ward of court.

While in the Industrial School, I and the other children labored on a daily basis, scrubbing floors on my hands and knees or wire brushing gravestones until my knuckles were bloody. Of course, having to spend hours working did not allow much time for education, but luckily a kind nun had taught me to read by the age of five. As I grew, I spent every spare minute reading in secret. One day at school my teacher, Miss O'Donnell, who we always called "Miss," saw bruises on my face and arms and realized that I had been severely beaten by a nun for an infraction of the rules.

Miss knew of my love of reading and very quietly told me that reading was a way to take my mind elsewhere when I was being beaten. All I had to do was to remember a story and imagine that I was a character in the story. Miss explained one more thing: that being able to read meant that one could also

teach oneself almost anything. From that day onward, I read every day. I stole books from locked cabinets and bits of newspapers that were used to light the cooking fires and boilers.

At sixteen, I was finally free. The world outside the walls of the only home I had known was a scary place and once again I found comfort in reading. I discovered libraries and set about teaching myself history, literature, geography. I longed to experience the types of adventures I read about, and so I became a soldier and later a fire department dispatcher.

Much later, in my forties, I decided it was time to have a "proper" education. I applied to many colleges only to find my eighth grade education wasn't sufficient for their standards. So I traveled, and came upon a small college in a place called Bar Harbor—and boldly applied. To my utter amazement, I was accepted by COA. I sold my house, and despite the fact that I didn't speak American, I immersed myself in my studies and in 1996 I received my diploma. But the proudest moment I had that day was not being handed my diploma, but rather seeing my mother there cheering for me. Despite the odds I had been fortunate in finding her and she was with me that day.

Like all of you, I had received an education beyond my wildest dreams. However, the most important lesson

I learned at COA is that education is also about how you use it in the world. For me, the lesson was that any person can advocate for the rights of others. I began working for Down East AIDS Network as an educator and then as director. At the grand age of fifty-six, I made a career change, leading to the colorful world of COA painter. The conversations I had with students reawakened my longing for academia. Two years ago I returned to Ireland, that place that had denied me both my mother and my education, to pursue a master's degree in Irish studies, graduating from the National University of Ireland Galway with first class honors.

Some of you may think my life has been hard, but I like to think of it as being full of wonder, beauty, and passion. I think a great deal about the times when someone had faith in me — in my abilities, my intelligence, and in my future. As you graduate, have faith in yourselves, especially in your darkest moments. Have faith in your friends and your loved ones, and even those you know only a little. And have the courage to tell them that you believe in them and their future. But most of all remember to laugh. Embrace the absurd and have a healthy reverence for the ridiculous. Take it from a fully educated person that the line between tragedy and comedy is very thin.

The Incredible Journey of Mary Harney '96, Hon. MPhil '142014 commencement address excerpt

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Fall 2014 COA Magazine

Documents

Transcript of Fall 2014 COA Magazine