As part of our Clemente Holyoke 25th anniversary celebrations, we’re offering an online writing workshop on Wednesday, May 1, from 7–8:30pm with longtime Clemente writing professor Tzivia Gover.
Join Tzivia and other Clemente alumnae for a fun writing workshop and learn how your dreamy imagination can help you tune into your inner storyteller and poet. All you need is a pen and paper — no need to remember any dreams — Tzivia will provide the prompts to get you started.
Hello everyone! We at The Care Center and Bard College Clemente Course in Holyoke are excited to offer a combo of Cabot Street College summer classes designed to deepen our capacities to name and narrate the facts, joys, and problems of our own lives and the world we share. Each class carries 1 credit from Bard College, and runs from July 11 to August 3.
Apply HERE
The morning class, A Nest for Your Mind: Making and Keeping a Journal will concentrate on the private, quiet work of writing for yourself. We’ll look at historical and contemporary examples of journals for inspiration as well as respond to writing prompts. We’ll also learn basic bookmaking techniques so that you can make your own journal by the end of class. (Materials provided.) Tues & Thurs 9:30–10:30am class; 10:30–11:15 optional open work time @ The Care Center, 247 Cabot Street, Holyoke, with Professor Pam Thompson.
In collaboration with Holyoke Media, the afternoon class, Say It Like It Is: Her Mic, Her Voice, Herstory will give you the tools to create podcasts of your own. Learn about the medium and work collaboratively with other women to develop real and personal stories that will become the content for a podcast to be aired for the community. Tues & Thurs 12–2pm @ Holyoke Media, 1 Court Plaza, Holyoke, with Professor Gloria Caballero-Roca and Natalia Muñoz.
Apply HERE soon to reserve a place.
Note: Lunch will be provided for students taking both courses.
The Bard College Clemente Course in the Humanities in Holyoke is gearing up to begin our 2022-23 school year soon. Orientation begins the week of October 4, and classes run until May 16, 2023, with a winter break from December 23, 2022 through January 16, 2023.
You can apply here!
We offer women in Holyoke, Springfield and surrounding towns the chance to jumpstart their educational life and join a friendly community of women who study and talk and write together — about American history, literature, art history, and philosophy, with an emphasis on communication, via the spoken and written word.
To successful applicants, we offer free books and laptops, as well as childcare for babies and toddlers and transportation (from Holyoke, Springfield and Chicopee).
We are planning to be in person this year, but will consider moving to a hybrid format if public health and our student body seem to need a different response.
Are you interested in going back to school, but looking for something shorter than a full year? If so, consider applying here for Writing the Body, a 3-credit class that runs from July 12-August 25.
Questions? Want to know more? Email Pam, the program director, at holyokeclemente@gmail.com, and let me know the best way to get in touch with you.
Hello Amazing Women of Clemente,
I want to share a wonderful story with you that I hope will inspire you and give you a glimpse of what you, too, are capable of when it comes to telling your stories and getting them out into the world in humble, bold, and/or creative ways.
A few years ago Jackie Velez was in the Clemente class. During one of our discussions about solitude (you remember those, don’t you?) she shared a story with the group about her experience of learning to face solitude when she was confined to the “bing” or “the box” aka “solitary” while serving time in prison. Her perspective on solitude was unique and powerful, and I thought anyone who heard or read her story would be changed by it. I know I had been. I encouraged her to write up the whole story and try to publish it someday. It took her some time, but while doing her coursework for Bard, she completed the essay and sent it out for publication–just as some of you might still do with the Op-Ed pieces you began in class.
Well, we just got news that Jackie’s persistence and hard work paid off. Her essay has been published by Oprah! I like to say, “When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.” So, I hope you’ll join me in celebrating Jackie’s accomplishment and feeling some pride as sister Clementines that we can all make our voices heard. Whether it’s in Oprah or our local newspapers, or via letters to family members or friends, putting thought into our stories and putting our stories out into the world is a powerful act.
Please share a comment about what you liked about and learned from Jackie’s writing if you feel so moved. — Tzivia
Oh, April. We wrote about you in class today, and yellow. We read T. S. Eliot:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land
“The Wasteland”
and Ali Smith:
April.
It teaches us everything.
Spring
and Bernadette Mayer:
Another gray Sunday. Trees turn brownish. We’ll think of yellow.
“April 27,” from Works & Days
I once attended a workshop with Norman Fisher, the Zen priest and poet, in which he gave us a list of words (“acacia, ankles, arguments, asparagus,” the list began; “elegant, end,” the list ended) and the instruction to use each of the words as we wrote for 8 minutes. “No matter what happens, continue to write,” he said.
“Making meaning is not my concern,” he added. “The words are smarter than me.”
He’d been working, he said, “with this particular list of words for more than two decades.”
What do you make of this?
Gather a list of words for yourself. (How will you choose them?) Cut them up. Bag them. Use them.
Clementine writers,
If you get stuck while writing in your journals this week, I’d like you to think about what Barry is suggesting here about the curious habits of our mind. “Hint,” she writes in tiny, curling cursive a few pages later:
When you get stuck, instead of trying harder, try doing something with your pen that helps you not force things.
What It Is, 170
Or if you are stuck, try this: make a W o r d B a g. See pages 178–183 of What It Is for instructions. This is a great project for enlisting the help of children with writing and cutting and hiding in the bag. Then, when you have a bag full of words, and it’s time for you to write, set a timer for 7 minutes, stick your hand in that bag, grab a word, and write whatever appears, keeping your pen moving…
If you’ve lost your book in the quarantine shuffle, here’s a page of Barry’s words to get you started. Make some of your own, too!
Bard Clemente Course in the Humanities Holyoke 
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