Bringing Our Light into the Dark
A very good place to start
Welcome to everyone who loves language and believes in the transformative power of spoken, written or sung words. We call that Transformative Language Arts or TLA. We’re honored you’re here, and incredibly glad you are out there in the world, doing what you do, being who you are.
What (the heck is TLA?)
The practice of Transformative Language Arts (TLA) is a profoundly radical response to the fragmentation, isolation, violence, hopelessness, and despair of our culture. In the same way the word “radical” comes from the word “roots,” TLA brings people back to their roots, and from that perspective, gives them a wider view of what they and what their communities might be.
Who (is this bunch of radicals?)
Transformative Language Arts practitioners (TLArtists) include, but are not limited to, singer/songwriters, novelists and poets, spoken word artists, workshop facilitators, educators, actors, graffiti artists, bloggers, community organizers, teachers, therapists, coaches, activists, nurses, and all who believe in, or are even slightly curious about, the power of the word to make fundamental, lasting transformation.
TLArtists bring creative and language arts to varied venues, including community centers, schools, prisons, health centers and hospitals, businesses, research facilities, and retreat centers.
When (actually, how often?)
We will be publishing first and third Wednesdays, offering work exploring TLA in practice—things like case studies and how to stay sane while changing the world with words—and sharing changemaking essays, articles, micro-flash, poetry, songs, monologues, plays and more from TLArtists. (We have a rolling call for submissions.)
Why (now?)
TLArtists of all kinds from around the world are using the power of words to meet this historic moment and we’re here to support and uplift them (you!).
Read on for a revelatory essay by the changemaker who founded TLA and the TLA Network.
Bringing Our Light into the Dark by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
I sat cross-legged on a curb in the middle of New Jersey in the middle of the 1970s and wrote a poem about despair. I was fourteen, it was humid and windless, and I was waiting outside my father’s girlfriend’s apartment to go home where my father and I had barricaded ourselves in half the house while my mother and siblings lived in the other half. It was my first poem, but I told myself that it was as good a time as any to start.
Then again, I already knew how much art saves lives. I had been mitigating the damage from being born into a domestic violence situation through drawing, painting, sketching everything in sight most of my childhood or pouring my considerable energy into practicing “Brian’s Song” on the piano. My parents were too young, too ill-equipped, too broken themselves. I had the bruises to prove it.
So many of us grew up cowering in corners with a scrap of paper or a chorus of hope we had just made up and sang repeatedly to ourselves to crowd out the mother crying, the father slamming his fist through a wall, the ground falling away. So many of us grew up dog-paddling to some island of safety, real or imagined, which for me, turned out to involve making marks on paper one way or another.
I couldn’t imagine what my life would become.. I only knew in those early years of writing by flashlight under my covers, at school when I was supposed to be doing something else, on buses and trains, in cars and doctor offices, that this was the way through. Over fifty years later, I’m still sitting cross-legged, writing on the floral couch I dragged into our living room from a curb.
The next poem and the next taught me to pay attention and stay curious, essential qualities for life, especially when rooted in trauma. That’s the thing about writing: we start with blank space and we turn it into something else while it does the same for us. In the process, we feel just a quarter-inch more alive, a hundredth ounce more committed to staying that way.
When I started writing, I had no idea that this wasn’t just about survival or that it would lead me to many others opening their lives to the page, their pages to their communities. I just had to write. Then to support my habit, I stumbled into teaching and found – surprise! – my callings were twins.
Teaching taught me teaching just as writing taught me writing. I’ve logged enough miles in each to cross this country on blue highways dozens of times: 33 years at the college level, teaching English 101 as a way to write meaning into our lives as well as years mentoring graduate students to design interdisciplinary projects for their lives and communities. All along, teaching spilled over any pretend walls of academia, starting when I began offering community writing workshops, propelled by the notion that since writing saved my life, it could help others do the same.
I’ve worked with farm kids and rich kids tentatively or smugly starting college, adults who blew up their lives or had their lives blown up around them, luminous elders weeding regrets while finally telling their truths. Doors swung open, and my writing workshops and I were invited into community centers, public housing projects, hippie gatherings in the woods, half-way houses for addicts, tiny colleges on the high plains, big medical centers in the city, art centers and open prairies. From the nervous 17-year-old just moved into a dorm, 300 miles from a town of 68 people to the 77-year-old at a writing workshop because he’s scared and shaken by his third cancer, we’re writing to save our lives. From something. For something.
A few weeks ago, I joined 17 people on Zoom, each person here because they’re living with serious illness, part of a workshop series I’ve been doing for a local medical center for 22 years. We looked into the intimate squares of each others’ living rooms, kitchens or bedrooms. Someone wrote about her cancer returning and not knowing if anything could be done to treat it. Someone read her piece about people her age going to bars and staying up all night when she can’t even leave her house. Someone said he’s so lonely and his back and heart ache all the time. Around the fire of our open words and faces, we found warmth and light.
We are here to be stewards of each others’ truths, witnesses to our own preciousness as we unearth and revise the story we’re living. We’re here to be lanterns for each other in the dark, helping us listen together to hear the beating of our good hearts.
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Ph.D., the 2009-13 Kansas Poet Laureate is the author of 24 books, including How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems; Miriam’s Well, a novel; The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community, and Coming Home to the Body. Founder of Transformative Language Arts, she is a beloved writing workshop facilitator and writing coach. She loves life-giving collaborations: she offers YourRightLivelihood.com with Kathryn Lorenzen, Bravevoice.com with Kelley Hunt (including upcoming retreats in the Kansas Flint Hills and in Ireland), and The ArtofFacilitation.net with Joy Roulier Sawyer. She offers weekly “Write Where You Are: A Writer’s Companion” through her Patreon page and her blog, “Everyday Magic” at CarynMirriamGoldberg.com. She founded the Transformative Language Arts Network, an organization dedicated to transforming ourselves through the written, spoken, and sung world (and right now, she invites people to submit proposals to present or perform at the 20th annual Power of Words conference in Kansas City Oct. 3-5).
YEA! Love this good good news! Keep shining our light thru the dark!
Love seeing TLAN on Substack – welcome!