WRITING TO RIGHT THE WORLD INTERVIEW BY H. CANDEE

Bay of Fundy. Photo by Carmen Mikol

JENNIFER BROWDY PhD.

UPDATE | Writing to Right the World

Interview by Harryet Candee

Hi Jennifer! How are you doing? What’s new in your life since our last talk? Jennifer Browdy: I think each of us has a COVID story we’ll be telling for the rest of our lives—where were you when the COVID lockdowns began? How did you weather that horrendous storm? My story is that I had just come up to Nova Scotia, Canada, where my family has a home, for my March 2020 spring break from the college where I teach, Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington MA. I was planning a getaway of 10 days. It turned into an epic 18-month sojourn, as the college shifted to online teaching and I was able to work remotely, by the sea, in this beautiful place I have come to love so much. For all the turmoil and uncertainty of this COVID time, I am grateful for the door it opened for me to have a kind of solitary retreat, calming myself way down from the frenetic pace I’d been keeping up before. Out of that tranquility came my new book and its companion card deck of images and writing prompts, along with a newfound facility with leading online classes and writing workshops, which I find I thoroughly enjoy!

Thank you for allowing me to look through your new book, Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, Inspiration for Writers & Seekers. How many books do you have out now? This is the third in my purposeful memoir series, which began with my own memoir, What I Forgot…and Why I Remembered, and my writer’s guide for memoirists, The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir. I have also edited three anthologies of personal narratives by women from Latin America & the Caribbean, Africa, and North America. And then there are all the books I have edited and published for others with my small publishing company, Green Fire Press.

Among many things I love about your new book are the photographs. All of them are of nature’s bounty along the coast. Where were you and was your book completed in this location? This is the first book I’ve done that brings together many different strands of my interests and talents, including photography. I’ve been interested in photography since I was a kid— in fact one of my first jobs was staff photographer of a newspaper. When I began visiting Nova Scotia regularly, in 2006, the beautiful landscapes and seascapes rekindled my interest in photography; all the photos in both my book and the card deck were taken along the South Shore of Nova Scotia, which is where I worked on both projects during the long months of COVID lockdown. The book weaves together my experience as a teacher and scholar of personal narratives, with my own personal history, and my more recent work as a writing coach and workshop leader for memoirists. It’s divided into eight chapters that I frame as Quests for the thriving future we all desire, for ourselves and our communities, including the larger Earth community of which we are all a part. In each Quest chapter, I consider a different quality

Lupins by the Seas Jennifer Browdy, PhD Photograph from, “Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, Inspiration for Writers & Seekers

that we will need for our individual and collective well-being: Clarity, Courage, Vitality, Guidance, Love, Community, Joy and Freedom. Each chapter briefly discusses my own search for that quality, and introduces purposeful memoirs by the writer-activists I call “worldwrights”—people like Jane Goodall, Terry Tempest Williams, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, John Perkins and many more, who have made a positive difference in the world, and have also written memoirs that leave us clues as to how to do that kind of personal/political/planetary work in our own lives. To that end, each chapter ends with a series of prompts for writing and reflection, so that the reader can use the book to advance their own quest for a thriving future—exploring the past in order to better understand the present, and to step more intentionally into the thriving future that we are here, in this time and place, to co-create. The photographs provide additional inspiration, a reminder of why it’s so essential to do the work in our human realm to protect and nourish the beautiful planet that gives us life.

Can you talk about how the card deck fits into the book project? How do the visual images help promote the thought process needed for writing memoir? I have enjoyed working with Tarot and other oracle decks over the years, and have been surprised at how the right card seems to spontaneously surface from the deck when I shuffle it and ask a question. I wanted to create something similar using my own images and writing prompts. So I assembled 54 of my favorite photos of Nova Scotia, and paired them with 54 of the thought-provoking writing prompts I have dreamed up in my years as a writing teacher and workshop leader. The idea is to use the deck as a starting point for writing memoir—each card is like a portal you can step through to explore different strands of your life experience. There are cards relating to each of the eight Quests in my book; cards related to the four elements I used as a structuring device for my own memoir (Earth, Water, Fire, Air); cards related to ancestry, family and place, as well as “wild cards” like Allies and Demons. I really had fun writing the prompts and pairing them with evocative images, and early users of the deck have reported that as with Tarot cards, it is remarkable how the right prompt seems to emerge when you approach the deck with an inquiring mind. Have you had a gust of inspiration from anyone in particular you would like to tell us about? There are probably many, since you refer to many great people in your newest book. Tell us about one or two of them, and what we can learn from them through their work, and through the introductions your book provides. I have been teaching a college class called “Writing to Right the World” for a long time, along with related courses like “Women Write the World,” and “Leadership, Writing and Public Speaking for Social and Environmental Justice.” For these classes, I assembled a wide range of writer-activists from various cultural backgrounds and different moments in history, from Plato to Virginia Woolf, and on through the 20th century right up to the present moment. I call them “worldwrights,” a term I coined taking off on the word “playwright”— playwrights write plays, worldwrights write to right the world. In my new book, I include short, inspirational introductions to some of my favorite worldwrights, some of whom are well-known, others less so. For example, I talk about the pathbreaking Chicana queer activist, Gloria Anzaldua, whose work has so much to teach Continued on next page...

Wondering by the Sea Jennifer Browdy, PhD Photograph from, “Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, Inspiration for Writers & Seekers

us about “Seeking Clarity” despite the many ways that the culture we’re born into can confuse us. I talk about Eve Ensler, now known as V, in the “Seeking Courage” chapter—she has been way out in front of us for many years, modeling how acting with courage in one’s personal life can lead to important cultural shifts in attitudes and behavior. In “Seeking Freedom,” I talk about U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who wrote in her recent memoir Crazy Brave about how her innate yearning for freedom helped her escape her oppressive childhood and spread her wings to become the outstanding artist, musician and writer who inspires so many of us today. From the purposeful memoirs of each of the outstanding worldwrights I talk about in the book, we can see that they all started out as ordinary children, just like you and me—and then, as they moved out into the world, they had the clarity, courage and conviction to put their values into action on behalf of a thriving future for all of us. By sharing their stories, I aim to show that each of us has the potential to make a positive difference in our own spheres of influence. So much depends on how we show up each day—the choices we make and the risks we are willing to take to manifest our vision of a better world.

Jennifer, have you had any epiphany or new wave of energy thought/experience after this book was completed? Maybe it was just for yourself, but are you willing to share it here? This book represents a culmination of my decades of experience as a teacher of the writeractivists I call worldwrights. I was always aiming to inspire my students to take what they learned and apply it to the world around them—I always wanted to break down the walls between the classroom and the world around us, and this desire has only grown stronger as we have moved into our current era of climate disruption and environmental crisis. On the wings of this book, my next project is coming into view: I will be writing a book about my experience as a student and an educator, and the new forms of education that I believe are necessary for a successful transition to a thriving future. Since my 2017 memoir, What I Forgot… and Why I Remembered, I have been talking about the need to “align the personal, political and planetary,” by which I mean we have to take our own personal trajectories and experiences into account as we seek to solve contemporary political and planetary challenges. Young people today need to understand how we got here, as a society, as well as how they themselves emerged from the particular cultural coordinates of their time and place. Interrogating ancestral and personal history through the lens of broader cultural and historical narratives can lead to a deeper understanding of the present moment—what we want to keep and preserve as useful for a thriving future, and what we prefer to jettison as no longer appropriate. It’s essential for the educational process to become more interdisciplinary and multi-faceted. Engineers have to understand ecology and culture; biologists and doctors need to become first-rate communicators; everyone needs a better grounding in ethics and how to forecast the cascading future effects of any action taken in the present. What’s needed is a deep transformation of

Book jacket

Beach Treasure Jennifer Browdy, PhD Photograph from, “Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, Inspiration for Writers & Seekers

our educational mission and process. I’m excited to give my own imagination a free rein to envision the possibilities—and then to think through how, pragmatically, the necessary changes might be implemented, given how hard it can be to instigate change in a huge established institutional system like education. Here again my worldwrights provide inspiration, as each of them has led the way in becoming change agents in a wide range of contexts.

There is a lot of emphasis now on moving forward and getting our feet out of the mud of the COVID year we all just experienced. Somewhat of a Renaissance maybe forming. Have you noticed such a phenomena? I think the forced pause of the COVID period, as well as the many tragic deaths in our communities, led many of us to rethink our priorities. I have felt an increased sense of urgency about putting my shoulder to the wheel of creating a better world, which for me means doing even more with my teaching, writing and public presentations. Before COVID, I was only offering in-person writing workshops. Having been pushed online has actually been a great boon for me, as I am suddenly able to reach so many more people. This year I am offering two online workshop series: “Birth Your Truest Story,” which is for fiction writers as well as memoirists, coled with the novelist Audrey Kalman; and “Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future,” which follows the trajectory of the eight Quest chapters in my new book. I also do a lot of author coaching and developmental editing, all via Zoom. And some of my college classes are still online, which allows students from the US to mix with students from all over the world. If there’s any silver lining to the COVID crisis, it’s the discovery that we can connect with each other through the Internet, without having to drive or fly anywhere. Of course, I would love to do some in-person writing retreats in beautiful places in the future, but for the moment it is exciting and fulfilling to interact with people from all over the country and the world in my online classes and workshops. In the coming years, I look forward to starting an online “Worldwrights Book Club,” which will give people a structure for coming together to read and discuss the worldwrights in my book—there is a reading list at the back of the book that can serve as a starting point and keep us busy and inspired for quite a while!

Where can people find your book and your card deck, as well as information about your upcoming workshops? All the information is on my website, JenniferBrowdy.com. The book launches on November 15, 2021 and will be available to purchase online or at bookstores and libraries. At the moment, the card deck is only available by ordering directly on my website, but I hope in the future to make it available more widely on Amazon and elsewhere.

Thank you, Jennifer! H