From the Farmhouse Table: May 2021
A Love Letter
I love Spring in the Pacific Northwest! It is exuberant in it’s beauty, and begins bursting forth right as I commence my birthday celebrations each year. It feels as though everything blooms just to bring me joy. To borrow from Pablo Neruda, whatever Spring does to the cherry trees, it’s also doing to me. This verdant time is where we see new growth begin to poke through the soil, and I want to share with you what we see fruiting from the seeds planted when I joined the Hedgebrook team as Program Director one year ago.
It was my great fortune to begin this work in a time when the world was stuck at home and the busily humming calendar was cleared indefinitely. An unexpected benefit of quarantine was that it allowed me space to not only connect with the team and begin forging relationships to comprehend the tectonic shifts in the organization, but to examine the whole picture of our programs and the writers they serve. As an alumna myself, I knew there was so much more I wanted to do to uplift and engage this sisterhood. Last year, we successfully collaborated to build and implement virtual programming that brought in participants from all over the world. Our community was hungry for connection and reeling from the global pandemic, so we prioritized increasing accessibility by keeping our stellar alumnae-led workshops affordable. This time was also a state of grace from which I could document our historical impact, evaluate our residency and fellowship programs, and make adjustments with an equity lens.
This year, we are taking another leap of faith into a centralized residency program that serves writers by realigning our adjudication process to ensure applications are reviewed by genre-specific readers. Our Writers in Residence program will be a space of collaboration and cross-pollination; songwriters, playwrights, screenwriters and filmmakers writing alongside poets and prose writers and gathering for juicy discussions and delicious meals. The venerable programs built to make space for these genres in the past are reimagined now as festivals, events for the public to join us in celebrating and amplifying our alumnae luminaries. We hope to manifest even bigger and brighter partnerships, and towards this dream we have new day-long writing intensives coming up (check out the VorTEXT offerings below) and our first-ever Songwriting Festival coming in June! It is clear to me that Hedgebrook thrives with the Radical Generosity of those who believe women change and shape our world for the better, and it begins with the writers who were nourished while they created here.
Really, this is a love letter to Hedgebrook and the team that makes it run because so much happens behind the scenes, unremarked upon. Never did I imagine my day job would be so jubilant, so literally beautiful. In my new normal I am discovering work as a source of joy and inspiration as well as an extended home. As I begin to learn all the glorious faces of Hedgebrook through the changing of seasons, I am awed by the continuous and intentional stewardship of Cathy, Joey, Jess, and the land team. The work of their hands infuses every step on every forest path with welcome, with “you are wanted here.” I want to sing the praises of Kerry, giving her scrupulous and diligent attention to each gift that comes in and sharing the kind notes of our supporters with us. So many of our new sparkly graphics, marketing materials, thank you notes, and video-editing are due to Amanda’s facile creativity, and that’s outside of all she does to support our new leader, our Board and to keep us functioning. Oh, and my beloved Programs team—dear, brilliant Jen and Britt! It is their capable hands that make manifest all our ideas. Every day I look forward to the pleasure of engaging in the visioning space with them. With Kimberly’s deeply compassionate approach to leadership and people-power, our tiny team of mostly newbies is reading books together, strategizing creatively, and fostering a culture of Radical Hospitality that begins on the inside—an offering to each other and ourselves as the women it is our mission to serve. And a baby cherry tree blooms on the land now—a reminder, a promise of the joy that comes when we let Spring in to do it’s thing.
-Amber Flame, Program Director