From the Farmhouse Table: February 2024
I don’t know how to solve all the problems we are facing today as a society, and the reminder that I am not in control comes more and more frequently. Lately I am meeting the question of what can be done with “what future do I want to build?” As systems and structures crumble around us – and often our faith with them – I cling to the hope that everything I touch is changing toward a better world. That hope grows strong in conversation around the Farmhouse table, while reading the work of the Hedgebrook alumnae that came before me, and through the opportunity to offer programs and public events that bring all of you, Hedgebrook’s growing global community, to witness and experience what is possible when women author change.
Octavia Butler’s 1993 classic, Parable of the Sower, opens in 2024, imagining a fictional future that is eerily prescient to where we’ve arrived. In the new world the characters build, the guiding truth is God is Change – an acknowledgement that everything we know and everything we are will shift. Change is beyond good or bad, it is. With this as our guiding ethos this year, it’s back to the future for Hedgebrook – what we want to change and how we will be changed by it. The future looks like supporting BIPOC healers and activists, as we did with our first hybrid BIPOC Social Justice Convening this past January through funding from the Ford Foundation – seeding not just connection and creativity within the cohort but also a collective invested in real, tangible resource-sharing that produces its own ripple effect. It looks like amplifying our alumnae through our Playwrights Showcase and our Writers Conference. It looks like expanded partnerships, including exciting new opportunities with Butler’s own beloved Clarion West, and it looks like reimagining how to sustain what we do best: our free-to-writers residency program that has radically tended changemakers for over 35 years.
Throughout this year I promise to extend the invitation for you to join me in changing and being changed by Hedgebrook’s future. Imagine that Hedgebrook is not rare, but simply the first of many funded spaces offered for women-identified writers to restore themselves. Imagine what we can manifest: an expansive and abundant world, fueled by the power of our interconnectivity.
-Amber Flame, Alumna & Program Director