In the past year Francis X. Charet, BA & MA in Individualized Studies faculty member and coordinator of the consciousness studies concentration, wrote and co-authored a number of articles: 1) Co-authored with Hillary S. Webb, “Doing Consciousness Studies at Goddard College,” Anthropology of Consciousness (2007) 18: 51–64; 2), co-authored with Hillary S. Webb, “Approaching Consciousness Studies,” New Perspectives (2007) Summer: 50-52; 3) “Writing, Healing, and Emotional Well-being,” in The Power of Words: A Transformative Language Arts Reader, edited by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Janet Tallman (Keene, New Hampshire: Transformative Language Arts Press, 2007); and 4) “Consciousness,” Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (New York: Springer, forthcoming). Francis served as chair of a panel “Consciousness Studies and Education” and presented a paper on the same subject at the World Congress on Psychology and Spirituality in India in January 2008. He has been invited to submit his paper for publication by the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

Her experimental film, Notes in Origin, was included in the Double Vision Berlin/Toronto show at Kine Berlin Arsenal in November 2007. She will be featured speaker at the Grande Prairie Regional College Speaker Series in September 2008, with a talk called “Mind and land: vision and intuition in the open air.” The press page for the event is at http://www.sfu.ca/~elfreda/press/presslinks.html.

She was just selected as Poet Laureate of Kansas, beginning a two-year term in July of 2009; in addition to giving readings and talks, she will be facilitating writing workshops, and training local writers, educators, community leaders, artists, etc. to lead ongoing writing circles throughout the state of Kansas. She has three books forthcoming in 2009: The Sky Begins at Your Feet, a memoir on cancer, community and the earth; Landed, her forth collection of poetry; and My Tree of Life: Writing and Living Through Serious Illness, an anthology she's editing. In the last year, she organized the 6th annual Power of Words conference, which featured Julia Alvarez, Bread and Puppet, Kelley Hunt, Rick Jarow and others; gave readings in Kansas and Missouri; led facilitation workshops in Kansas and Tennessee; and presented writing workshops at Turning Point in Kansas City for people with serious illness, and in Lawrence, KS. on finding your calling. She will lead, with Kelley Hunt, Brave Voice: Writing and Singing for Your Life, May 10-15, 2009 in the Flint Hills of Kansas. An essay she wrote, "Dragonflies and Inky Blackness: Raising a Child with Hidden Disabilities" will appear in a forthcoming anthology. She continues to serve on the Transformative Language Arts Network Council, and the Continental Bioregional Congress Coordinating Council. She also started and now regularly contributes to several blogs - one on Goddard's MA in Individualized Studies Program (WorldsofChange.blogspot.com), as a Transformative Language Artist (TLAzine.blogspot.com), and her own blog (CarynMirriamGoldberg.blogspot.com).

Katt Lissard

Katt is a 2009 Resident Artist at Mabou Mines Theatre in New York City, where she is work-shopping Outpost, a performance piece about her experiences in Lesotho, southern Africa as theatre director, teacher, foreigner. Lissard spent most of 2005 in Lesotho on a Fulbright – teaching in the National University’s Theatre Unit, directing plays, and researching the theatrical response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. As an outgrowth of her work, in June 2006 the Winter/Summer Institute (WSI) was launched in Lesotho, of which she is Artistic Director (www.maketheatre.org). WSI brings together performers and directors, students and teachers, from three continents to create collaborative theatre in Lesotho about HIV/AIDS. Through a 2008 Jerome Foundation grant administered by Cornucopia Art Center in Lanesboro, Minnesota, Lissard created an installation piece, Mostly Water, with flood survivors, school children and environmental activists in the Root River Valley. She also received a 2007 Art Matters individual artist grant for her ongoing theatre work in Africa. Lissard’s work as playwright and performer has been seen at NYC venues, including: Dixon Place, HERE, The Arclight, and NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing; throughout Lesotho; and at the Performing Arts Centre of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her most recent pre-Africa play, The Law of Falling Bodies, was part of the 3rd Millennium Festival. Katt is a two-time MacDowell Colony Fellow; a visiting writer in Long Island University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program; and a frequent project collaborator at the State University of New York’s Empire State College in Manhattan.

Ralph H. Lutts

Two selections from his earlier article on the American chestnut trade were reprinted in Mighty Giants: An American Chestnut Anthology (2007) edited by Chris Bolgiano. His extended essay “Literature: The Nature Fakers” appeared in Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relation (2007), edited by Marc Bekoff and his review of Robert W. Righter’s The Battle Over Hetch Hetchy appeared in American Historical Review (2007). His short essay “The Idene: An Early Appearance of the Meme’s Meme(s)?” recently appeared in Skeptical Inquirer (2008). He presented a paper titled “The Discovery of Place” at the Fifth Environmental Writer’s Conference in Honor of Rachel Carson conducted in June 2008 in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. This was supported in part by Goddard’s Faculty Development Fund. In July he participated in a meeting of past presidents of the American Nature Study Society to celebrate the organization’s centennial and chart a course into its next century. In August he participated in a workshop on mosses conducted at the SUNY School of Environmental Studies and Forestry’s Cranberry Lake Biological Station in the Adirondacks.

Lise Weil

Lise recently received grants from both the Canada Council on the Arts and the Quebec Council on the Arts for her memoir-in-progress In Search of Pure Lust. She has also been awarded recent fellowships at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and at Hedgebrook Writers Studio. Beyond Recall, a collection of the last writings of artist and writer Mary Meigs that she compiled and edited, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in biography in 2005. She is currently editor of Trivia: Voices of Feminism, an online relaunch of the award-winning feminist literary review Trivia: A Journal of Ideas of which she was founder and editor. Her creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Descant.

MA in Individualized Studies

Recent Faculty Accomplishments