What's green and off the coast?

The collaboration between Unity College and a long-time Maine literary magazine!

On Tuesday, March 6th, Unity House hosted a marathon nine hour editorial meeting for Off the Coast: Maine's International  Poetry Journal.  The journal is collaborating with students in AR 2113: Poetry of Social Change.

Five editors -- Michael Brown, Valerie Lawson, Gerry George, Ellen Powers, and Jack Reece -- joined me at Unity House.

The fun began, though, when students started showing up -- a total of twenty students who were ready to raise their hands (or not) in support of particular poems.  Our task was to decide which poems submitted for a special GREEN issue of Off the Coast would make the final cut.  The magazine received nearly 1,000 submissions for this issue, which were reviewed earlier in the semester by editors and students through Submishmash, an online submission manager.

 
Students were only required to attend during our regular class period (4:00 pm to 5:15 pm), but a number of students -- like Frances Roth and Josiah Coyle -- took advantage of the opportunity to begin early.


Some students came early and stayed late, or stayed late and stayed for dinner, or all of the above, like Zach Wigham, Franco Napoletano, Alexandria Campbell, Becky Suzenski, and Rachel Smedley.  We reviewed eighty poems, and finally concluded the meeting at 11:00 pm -- nine hours of solid work, interrupted only by dinner, followed by another hour of conversation.

I made a mac & cheese casserole, and Crosstrax provided the rest of the meal: chili, cornbread and salad.  The cookies I made -- blueberry-sunflower seed-oatmeal -- were not as popular as the cookies I got from Bell the Cat in Belfast, but here's the recipe:

• ½ pound (2 sticks) butter, softened
• 1 c. firmly packed brown sugar
• ½ c. granulated sugar
• 2 eggs
• 1 tsp. vanilla
• 1½ c. all-purpose flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• ½ tsp. salt (optional)
• 2 1/2 c. oats
• 1½ c. dried blueberries
• 1/2 c. sunflower seeds
   

Heat oven to 350°F. In large bowl, beat margarine and sugars until creamy. Add eggs and vanilla; beat well. Add combined flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt; mix well. Add oats, sunflower seeds, and dried blueberries.
Drop dough by rounded tablespoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets.
Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until light golden brown.

Look for the special GREEN issue of Off the Coast around campus on May 1st!

An Artist in the House

Today I had the pleasure of hosting Library Clerk Amy Gagnon for lunch -- but the focus of our conversation was not on the library, much as I love libraries.  We talked mostly about Amy's drawings, paintings, and films, her background as an artist and a horticulturist, and her plans for the new Drawing Club on campus.

The Drawing Club -- for students, faculty, and staff -- held its first informational meeting on February 2nd. Regular drawing sessions will be held on Tuesdays and Fridays between 1:00 and 2:00 pm.  Contact Amy at agagnon@unity.edu for information about the meeting's location.

 

Clearly, we're lucky that Amy is willing to share her artistic skills and experience with us, and I imagine many of us didn't know about her talent and training until now. I found out last semester during an informal chat in the library, when Amy mentioned her artwork.  Curious (is there ANOTHER person at Unity College with a sort-of-secret talent?), I visited her portfolio website, which documents her astonishingly beautiful drawings, including botanical illustrations like this one. . . . .



. . . . . . and her paintings . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . and her photographs.

Amy earned a double degree from University of Maine at Orono in Horticulture and Fine Arts.  Her work has been shown at the Folger Library at University of Maine, and has won a Judge's Award at the Common Grounds Fair.  In addition to assisting students, staff and faculty at the Quimby Library (which she loves), she also creates commissioned art like this painting, one of four that grace barn doors at Beaver Dam Farm Resort in Pomquet, Nova Scotia.

During our lunch, Amy asked me if I had ever done any drawing, and I confessed that yes, I did love to draw when I was a kid.  "Everyone says that!' she exclaimed.  I know what she means -- I often hear the same thing about poetry.  We all have an impulse of some sort to create beauty and meaning in our lives.  My thanks go out to Amy for providing Unity community members with one more opportunity to express themselves creatively.

Institute for Humane Education

Two brilliant, committed activists for humane education visited Unity House today: Zoe Weil, the president and co-founder of the Institute for Humane Education (IHE), and Sarah Speare, the Institute's executive director. We talked for a little over an hour about ways Unity College might affiliate with the Institute to share and strengthen our respective visions for a sustainable future.

Zoe is the recipient of Unity College's 2012 Women’s Environmental Leadership Award. As WE Lead's director Nancy Zane notes in her announcement (which went out today!), "Zoe’s work and the work of IHE blend perfectly with the Unity College mission." Zoe will be on campus on April 10th, participating in a variety of activities, including a presentation at the UCCPA that evening at 6:30 pm. For more information on this event, email Nancy at nzane@unity.edu.

I became interested in IHE after viewing Zoe's TED-X talk, "The World Becomes What We Teach." In fact, I became so interested that I signed up for one of IHE's online courses, Teaching for a Positive Future, "A six-week online course for educators who want to inspire their students to become leaders and changemakers for a healthy, peaceful, and sustainable world." 

Wow, that really does sound like a perfect match for the Unity College mission!  Stephen agrees, and the President's Office is now offering a scholarship to a faculty member who would also like to take this course online.  It begins February 6th.  If you are a faculty member, please consider taking advantage of this professional development opportunity! And meanwhile, watch Zoe's TEDX presentation!

 

Spring 2012 Semester Starts Today

And what better way to begin than to reflect on student achievements last semester? Check out this video about the Unity College Student Conference held in December, 2011:

CEAH Events at Open House

At the November 12th Open House, Professor Chris Marshall and I facilitated what turned out to be complementary activities across the hallway from each other in Koons Hall.  I set up a group of poetry activities, and Chris set up a Sunprint activity, using materials he collected from outdoors, including the golden Ginkgo leaves from the trees outside the Quimby Library.


Environmental Writing major Hannah Kreitzer was one of several people who stopped by to make their own Sunprints, a process that combines collage with photo-sensitive paper. Participants set up their collages, brought them outside to sit in the sun, and then brought them back inside for a rinse in the sink and some time to dry.

Meanwhile, across the hall, I slapped Magnetic Poetry words onto the white board, along with a few gingko leaves that Chris shared with me. Then, I set up the "Cut-Ups and Collage" activity. This one invites people to use cut-up lines of poems to make their own poems, either by collaging the cut-ups together or by combining the cut-ups with their own words.



Assistant Professor Stephanie (a/k/a Stevie) Wade and Unity student Sharlene Hazen, working separately, both chose to incorporate images into their work, too.





All afternoon, I encouraged people to take free poems from a collection of pages I'd torn out of the most recent issue of Poetry magazine.  Okay, I actually sort of forced people to take them.  I was that crazy lady standing in the hallway yelling "Free poems to good homes!"

Two Open House visitors, Liz and Cathy, stopped by for both art and poetry activities. They had lots of enthusiasm for the
sunprint process. They'd seen Magnetic Poetry before
and created these lines:

I loved seeing the many ways that art and poetry intertwined that afternoon.  Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally at all, Chris and I had chatted earlier that day about synchronicity being the natural state of affairs in the universe -- not the exception we sometimes make it out to be.

Words and images that make our hearts sing are also the natural state of affairs -- like this moment when a milkweed seed and its silky filaments parachuted from a sunprint pile and floated across the blackboard.

The Woman Behind the Unity Nova Experience -- and much more!

My guest for lunch today was Jessica Steele, director of the Unity College Outdoor Adventure Center. What started as a casual lunch turned into an energetic brainstorming session. Jes is responsible for (among other things) developing sites and programs, and training student leaders for the Nova Wilderness Experience. This flagship program sets Unity apart from other colleges as a place that promotes hands-on learning and sustainable human connections, as the students in this video discuss:

The Nova program is also Jes's favorite part of her job. I was struck by how many students in the video mentioned the value of the Nova experience in terms of meeting fellow students and forming connections before the start of classes. In previous blog entries, I've talked a bit about that last idea: creating sustainable human connections.  Today, I realized this blog is helping me get to the goal I set in the first blog entry: acclimating to this place by listening to stories from people with diverse connections to Unity.

But enough about me. What about the apple-pear-spice cake I made today, the one with a maple glaze?  What about the fact that I forgot to put the coconut in it? Jess and I ate it anyway. Seriously, though -- what about that brainstorming?


Jes shared so many fresh ideas today -- too many to discuss in depth in a single blog entry -- so I'll focus on her thoughts about employing existing Nova staff and equipment to run a summer camp for teens age 14 - 18. The idea of a summer camp has been tossed around for a while, but it hasn't been developed. Jes identified these potential benefits to Unity College:

• Connecting with college-curious teens by giving them a sample of the Unity experience;
• Providing more long-term summer employment for student leaders;
• Providing course credit for student leaders;
• Providing internships for student leaders;
• Promoting Unity's identity as America's Environmental College. 

And, of course, more young people on campus in the summer would mean more people to pet Heather and Keeper. They are both in favor of the idea, and they both loved Jes!

Then we started thinking about funding -- what about camp scholarships?  Would any outside funding be available? What if the college developed a summer camp program for a specific, underserved population, like at-risk youth, or teens with Asperger's syndrome or other neurological challenges, or teens with particular wellness issues, or teen girls who aspire to leadership? Programs serving any of these teen groups might qualify for foundation grant funding.

All of these ideas are rich in possibility. And Jess has more: creating a staff version of Nova including weekend trips and day trips, generating alumni help with student recruitment at college fairs and in their local communities through a mentoring program, creating an alumni Nova trip to run each year. My enthusiasm for the potential in all of these ideas was eclipsed only by Keeper's enthusiasm for the potential of table scraps after lunch.  We're all fortunate to be living in a generous community, among the social, intellectual, and creative richness in Unity.