From Ceremonial Village To Network
Transformative Language Arts and the Power of Words Conference: the roots
Second Wednesdays from now through September we’re running a special series exploring how the Transformative Language Arts Network’s (TLAN) Power of Words conference builds vibrant, vital, connection and sparks growth and change in people and communities. Enjoy!
The following is an excerpt from “Finding Our People in a Ceremonial Village Disguised as a Conference: A Short History of the Power of Words Conference” by TLA founder Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, first published in (the now dormant) Chrysalis: A Journal of Transformative Language Arts, 2015.
“I have found my people here.” Over the years, dozens of people have told me this at the end of their first Power of Words conference. Bringing together our people is what this conference is all about, but starting and sustaining an annual conference requires a group of people willing to journey through uncertainty, confusion, financial losses, awkward moments, surprisingly bad timing, and a whole lot of work to create and hold a place where our people can gather.
That's what I always envisioned the Power of Words (POW) conference as: a clearing in the woods, a gathering place on the prairie, a shelter in the storm. TLA, unlike anything you can spin into a sound bite or put on a fortune cookie's slim piece of paper, is both basic and complex. Explaining to people how it's all about “social and personal transformation through the spoken, written and sung word”--as we do for the MA in TLA at Goddard College1–is like pointing to your friend and proclaiming, “Good person who will change your life!” The specific is the way to the universal in any strong poem: describe a gingko tree as “billowing fans of dark tree tripping up the sky,” and your reader can enter into the moment with you and find a new way to relate to any manner of tree. Invite someone to sit at a picnic table with you and six others on a dewy September morning, talking about what matters most in our lives, and that someone can land on innate resonance in his/her/their body and soul.
In this way, TLA invites us to use the language arts—whatever we create alone and together with words—to convey, explore, question, and deepen what we know of ourselves, our communities, and the world.
Unless people have experience with TLA coalescing community and meaning, it's hard to fully comprehend the full possibilities of TLA as a profession, community, field of study, and calling. The conference, in a nutshell, is a a kind of ceremonial village where we can do and live TLA, drawing from writing, storytelling, theater and other forms of TLA both in planning and holding the event, and at the event, investigate, question, discover, and celebrate many forms of TLA for many peoples.
Bioregional Roots, and One of the Biggest Blackouts in History
After the Transformative Language Arts MA program began in 2000, I began to see the need for some kind of TLA gathering, one in which people who are studying, practicing, exploring or otherwise living TLA could find each other for greater inspiration and information, but also to grow TLA beyond one small college program. While there are many events—conference, symposiums, workshops—in related expressive arts, movements, and practices, there were none that I could find that brought together people drawn to language as a transformative art across the spectrum of individual and cultural change.
From my decades organizing and participating in Continental Bioregional Congresses, I came to this task somewhat hard-wired to seek structures and supports that helped make the conference more like a ceremonial village in which we live out TLA, finding ways to integrate along the way what we're discovering. In the bioregional movement, we adapted the term “ceremonial village” to connote a gathering in which we were making a transformational and communal space through ritual, art, and community-building. In such a space, the emphasis shifts from only networking and information-sharing to encompass helping participants find their own best truth, practical wisdom, and language for how to live in greater balance with the earth.
Translated into the Power of Words conference, this ceremonial village shifted us away from an event focused on participants receiving knowledge and toward greater possibilities for participants integrating, questioning, and revising what they're learning to construct their own deeper knowledge.
To move this direction, I knew such an event would do well by adopting some of what we do at the week-long bioregional congresses, such as talking circles (sometimes called clans), in which a small group, no more than seven people, gather each morning to share what we're experiencing, and the questions haunting or holding us without others interrupting or trying to fix us. I also imported the congress's structure to some extent with space for interest groups, open time for readings or performance, and integrating what we believe in--the power of words aloud and on the page--into how we organize the event.
In 2002, I took my ideas to Goddard College, which happily agreed to host the conference and support my time doing the organizing for a conference in the summer of 2003. It was clear to me then that it would be ideal to start the conference at the college, where we had the advantage of a physical place where we could host the event and an academic program (the MA in TLA), but eventually it needed to be the project of a TLA not-for-profit organization so that the conference could eventually bring together many organizations, institutions and individuals focused on TLA to cross-pollinate. In turn, the conference, with somewhere over 60 people attending regularly, could also help fund a not-for-profit TLA organization.
Our goals that first year at Goddard were modest. We hoped for 30 people to come learn about and experience TLA, and I invited Gail Johnson, the first TLA graduate, and an astonishing playwright who used her art to bring her Washington Island community (off the north shore of Wisconsin) together to tell its story and history in poetic monologues. Sherry Reiter, poetry therapy pioneer, was also one of our keynoters. We set the conference for mid-August, 2003, just as the Goddard residency for the Individualized MA program, which TLA is part of, was ending so that students could stay for the conference, and we had others interested in TLA coming, mostly from the northeast.
You could say the inaugural conference was both charmed and cursed. Our timing coincided perfectly with the blackout of 2003, which wiped out electricity in seven northeastern states and Ontario, precisely all the places most of our participants were traveling from to come to us. Vermont was charmed electricity-wise, and Gail was still able to get here (she had landed before the blackout, which affected hundreds of flights), but Sherry was stuck in Brooklyn.
We still had a spectacularly-TLA time together writing, telling stories, sharing vignettes and skits, and in general, finding there was a hunger among and beyond us for this kind of gathering, even and especially as darkness surrounded our light.
The Magic of TLA in Performance and Conversation
We had a commitment from the get-go to not only invite in presenters of color, but also a broad spectrum of people who write, tell stories, do spoken word, create plays and collaborative performances, sing and make music, and do any number of things with words to catalyze enduring change and healing. We also aim for a mix of keynoters–at least one person who's relatively well-known enough to draw in participants along with others who should be recognized. For instance, in 2007, David Abram, award-winning author of the life-changing The Spell of the Sensuous; Allison Adele Hedge Coke, Native American poet, writer and storyteller; Nehassaiu deGannes, playwright and actress; Taina Asili, activist singer-songwriter; and Devora Neumark, installation artist who, at the time, was hauling her entire living room set out to a public plaza in Montreal to invite people to sit and have conversations with her in public.
Here are some moments from the early years that broke my heart wide open for the better:
Rhythm and blues singer-songwriter Kelley Hunt, at the end of her performance at Goddard College in 2010, left the stage, still singing with all her heart, as she backed up through the audience that was giving her a standing ovation.
Gail Rosen, a fabled storyteller and founder of the Healing Story Alliance, told riveting stories of finding meaning after surviving the Holocaust through sharing the life of Hilda Stern Cohen, a story she went on to publish as a book, integrating into it her own stories of seeking healing through the spoken word.
Tom Janisse, editor of Kaiser's Permante Journal on Narrative Medicine, brought himself along with four physicians to present extensive workshops on how writing, for healing professionals and people living with serious illness, is its own enduring medicine.
Gregory Orr, poet and writer, read from his then new collection of poems, Concerning the Book Which is the Body of the Beloved, while reflecting on how poetry saved his life after, as a child, he accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident.
Kao Kue, a Hmong poet, singer, and spoken word artist, sang, spoke poems, and told stories while using the Hmong flower cloth making tradition to reveal how layers of stories are stitched together to create a community story of her people re-inventing their lives after escaping to the U.S. from Laos during the Vietnam War.
Taina Asili, solo and with her band, exploded onto the stage with songs of freedom and justice, harkening back to her Puerto Rican roots and weaving into her performances stunning poems that speak to the generations lost and the generations to come.
Jimmy Santiago Baca not only keynoted at our 2012 conference, but he participated fully in every session, cheering on especially the writers and storytellers who publicly shared their work for the first time. Every meal, I saw him talking passionately and listening deeply to conference-goers in the wonderful dining hall of Pendle Hill, the retreat center where we met in 2012 and 2013.
Julia Alvarez was who I called when, two weeks before the 2008 conference, our main keynoter canceled. I knew she lived in Vermont, and it turned out she could not only come but was willing, based on our budget and more based on what we were about and how much it meant to her, to show up for far less than her fee. Introduced by fellow Dominican Republic poet Marianela Madrona, she presented one of the most stunning talks I've ever heard on the power of words.
Over the years, our Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN) has grown, hit some walls, worked our way through, learned a great deal about how to work together from a distance, and landed on this realization: any organization worth its salt must be in a state of continual experimentation to figure out the best way to proceed, improve its processes and offerings, and seek resilience and innovation. To this end, we're now immersed in a strategic planning process and we're still learning how to make community together, using TLA to grow TLA in the world.
Come write with us: TLAN events & Classes
You can find the full list of classes, free community events, and our annual conference here. Scholarships are available.
Transformative Language Arts Network Community Circles
20 July 2025 5:00-6:30 PM (EDT) • online • Free and open to all • We're gathering to have a conversation that could lead to, as one former participant said, "...connection points—a deeper heartwork of listening and sharing." Join us?
The Magic Eye and Writing From Body and Place: A Workshop and Reading// with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
26 July 2025 2:00-4:00 PM (CDT) • online • Come unearth more about how writing can be a practice of coming home to our bodies, communities, and eco-communities.
24 August 2025 5:00-6:30 PM (EDT) • online • Free and open to all • Performances and presentations of their work by TLAN members followed by an artist talkback. Join us!
2025 Power of Words Conference
03-05 October 2025 (CDT) • Unity Village, 1900 NW Blue Parkway, Unity Village, Missouri • "The Transformative Language Arts conference provides a home for artists, writers and musicians who want to help create a peaceful world. I go to learn, I go to contribute, I go to sustain hope." — Diane Glass
This program has since ended, but TLAN offers a Certificate in Transformative Language Arts Foundations for people interested in diving deeper into TLA as a practice.