Lise Weil, PhD, MA
Faculty Advisor, BA in Individualized Studies Program
I am both a writer and a "recovering academic"—in fact, I have a hard time separating the two. I was a grad student in Comp Lit at Brown University in the mid-70s (the literatures being compared were exclusively those of Western Europe and the U.S. and the authors were 98% white and male) when a book I read called
The Politics of Literature blew the top of my head off. Nothing has been the same since. After designing and teaching one of the first ever Women's Studies courses at Brown, I took a leave of absence and set off for the Women's Writers Center in Cazenovia NY. Several years later I went on to found the feminist literary review
Trivia: A Journal of Ideas, which I edited for nine years. At the initiative of a group of MA students, an online spinoff,
Trivia: Voices of Feminism, was launched in 2004, with me as editor, and is still going strong. I should note that in the memoir I’m now completing,
In Search of Pure Lust, which centers on the grand experiment of lesbian feminism of the 70s and 80s, the resounding failures of that movement play as important a role as its wild and glorious successes.
I moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1990, in large part because of the experimental writing scene here. These many years later I am still in love with this city—for its mix of cultures and languages, its proximity to wilderness, and its cafes and restaurants in which until recently smoking was still allowed.
Lately it’s come to my attention that my primary commitment seems to be to knowing and aligning myself with what IS, no matter how difficult and painful that might be. I credit my longtime meditation practice (in primarily the Zen and Vipassana traditions) with helping me honor that commitment—which, it must be said, is also a source of great joy. I’m also a longtime practitioner of Yang style T’ai Chi, for the past fifteen years with an exacting Chinese master in Montreal; T’ai Chi has contributed to my sanity in more ways than I can say. I’ve brought the knowledge I’ve gained from these body disciplines—which I value as highly as any I’ve gained from books—to Goddard's Individualized MA Studies Program's focus area in Embodiment Studies, which has served as a container some truly groundbreaking student work.
As a reader, I am most powerfully drawn to what I call the literature of extremity, writing by fearless seers who know what the stakes are and tell it like it is. With major exceptions (e.g. Franz Kafka, Junot Diaz) these tend to be women, especially lesbians and women of color, and indigenous peoples from all over the world. I am excited by all forms of theory by and about such writers. Lately I find myself thinking and reading a lot about our relationship with the non-human world, which is going to have to change radically if we’re to have a liveable future, and from which I believe we have everything to learn. It seems to me that any kind of serious thought in this historical moment has to take into account the accelerating threat to our ecosystems posed by human stupidity and greed.
I’ve been teaching writing for a long time, in a wide variety of settings and modes and in a wide range of forms, from essays to creative nonfiction to fiction (short and long), plays, experimental prose, and in-between genres. The greatest compliment ever paid to me as a writing teacher came from a Goddard student who said “Lise could get writing out of a stump.” My fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations have been published in numerous literary journals in both Canada and the U.S. I’ve been awarded grants from the Quebec Council and the Canada Council for work on In Search of Pure Lust, and Beyond Recall, a collection of writings on aging and disability by Quebec painter and writer Mary Meigs, which I compiled and edited after her death, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2006.
I love teaching at Goddard---a good thing, since I've been doing it on and off since 1993. I love the work we do here together, students and advisors, which is always I think on some level about healing from the fragmentation to which we are all heir in this culture, or in the words of Virginia Woolf, "putting the severed parts together." It is work I am excited and honored to be part of.
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