The Story Circle Project: Latinx Women in Queens

This is the individual and collective story of a group of Latinx women in New York City. Over the course of a year, twenty-four women participated in Story Circles, with three to seven participants in each group sharing their journeys to the United States: the trauma beforehand, the obstacles and brutality of migration, and the struggles, challenges, and opportunities they encountered in the United States. The women (cisgender, heterosexual, LGBTQ+) came from Latin America and the Caribbean. They are undocumented; most live in western Queens, and most have children.

Waging Dialogue: Talking Across Divides

If you go to YouTube and search for Alice Maher and Bobby Powell, you will see me engaged in a Zoom dialogue with a man who was at the US capitol when it was stormed by Trump-supporting Republicans on Jan 6, 2021. He was convinced that the event was set up by the FBI.

The Things They Wrote

Sharing our stories helps us to understand our experiences and begin to move forward in our lives. One year after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic overwhelmed the world’s healthcare system, the Things They Carry Project was launched, offering free online writing workshops (co-led by a therapist and writer) for frontline workers.

@ Work

Zoe Beloff and Eric Muzzy created @ Work, an exuberant documentary public art installation that includes fourteen life-size canvas banners depicting images in oil of essential workers who were so vital to the survival of the city and all of us during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Canvassing as Political Therapy

NOPE: Neighbors Defending Democracy is an all-volunteer group based in Washington, DC. Canvassing for Democratic candidates in battleground states, they approach voters with a respectful curiosity that seems related to the stance the analyst takes in practice. Surprisingly often, this leads to fruitful conversations across ideological, geographic, racial, and class-based divides.

Passage

Passage is an interdisciplinary call-and-response poetry, music, and prose project inspired by grief and created at the height of the pandemic. The project hinges around a single poem written by poet, scholar, and psychoanalyst Forrest Hamer, PhD. Dr. Hamer sent me, a practicing psychologist, cellist, vocalist, and composer, his poem, “Passage,” after I had asked if he had any poems about the ocean—the greatest destroyer, life-giver, and, in many ways, teacher of loss. Held by his words, Hamer’s poem spoke deeply to my feelings of grief. And I was inspired to create a series of musical pieces from his single poem. Afterward, I shared the music with him. He was, in turn, touched.