Events

UpComing

Free-Write Friday Nights, Weymouth, MA

Past

Keynote, Health Imperatives Staff Day, Plymouth, MA (2015)

Guest, Just Write with Suzette, Milton, MA (2015)

Became Elephant Journal Columnist (2015)

Guest Speaker/Webinar @ The Training Venue (2015)

Poetry Series, Pathways, Martha’s Vineyard with Nancy Slonim Aronie (2015)

The Mind-Blowing Test No One Knows, Mobius, Cambridge, MA  (2015)

Free-Writing Women, Facilitator, bi-monthly writing workshop, Tufts Library, Weymouth, MA & Co-Facilitator, Free-Writing Women, Cambridge, MA (2014)

Guest Speaker: Bridgewater State University, Art as Activism class (2014)

Body Language: Trauma Installation at Mobius with Margaret Bellafiore (2014)

Founded Heal Write Now Blog (2014)

8/5/2014: Press Release

“Trauma doesn’t happen as a story. It happens in the body, as sensations.”
Zahabiyah Khorakiwala, yoga teacher, counselor & survivor of rape

(Boston – August 5, 2014)

Body Language: An Interactive Installation Exploring the Impact of Trauma will be presented at Mobius, Saturday, September 13 at 7 PM and Sunday, September 14 at 2 PM at 55 Norfolk Street in Cambridge.

The exhibit is a result of the collaborative work of artist, writer and professor Margaret Bellafiore with activist, writer & trauma survivor, Christine Cissy White. Their piece is an inquiry into the way trauma and extreme stress are experienced.

Body Language draws on visual art, science, poetry and personal experience geared to an audience of both trauma survivors and non-trauma survivors. “It was as though the world were covered in a veil of gray” Julie Lovely said about the flatness she felt following trauma. At one station attendees will have the option of “trying on” that feeling by wearing eyeglasses with a gray veil. Bellafiore and White have designed several such stations using a variety of mixed media representations to show why and how trauma “stains” the brain and disrupts physiology.

Bellafiore and White’s understanding of trauma is influenced by information presented at the 2014 Trauma Conference in Boston on Psychological Trauma: Neuroscience, Attachment and Therapeutic Interventions as well as interviews with trauma survivors, poetic testimony, independent study and professional experiences related to the symptoms of traumatic stress.

Margaret Bellafiore is a Mobius Artist Group member (www.mobius.org). She became interested in the subject of trauma when she interviewed returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan to college life for her sound installation at Mobius, Combat to Campus, the Voices of Veterans. In 2012 she wrote about this experience for the American Association of University Professors. (http://www.aaup.org/article/combat-campus#.U9_isvldWSp) Bellafiore recently worked on writing projects with student veterans at Bridgewater State University where she teaches art. She also wondered if there was a connection between the denial people have to interpersonal violence and the way society responds to climate change.
Christine Cissy White writes extensively about post-traumatic stress, trauma survivors and developmental trauma. She is published in the Boston Globe, Elephant Journal and Ms. Magazine online http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/02/10/childhood-sex-abuse-silence-equals-shame/ and http://msmagazine.com/blog/2013/05/13/once-again-media-asks-wrong-questions-and-blames-victims/. Her articles, blog and website www.healwritenow.com blog have been shared online by Rick Hanson, co-author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Bellaruth Naparstek, author of Invisible Heroes: Trauma Survivors and How They Heal and the Rape And Incest National Network (RAINN).

“Trauma can have a multitude of consequences: It can produce abject misery, and make people abandon all hope; it can make the lust for revenge the center of people’s lives, at the expense of the ability to rebuild; or it can be sublimated into supreme acts of artistic transformation, and social action.”  

Bessel van der Kolk 

For more information, contact:
Margaret Bellafiore, 781 331 0711, [email protected]
Christine Cissy White, 781-331-4679, [email protected] www.healwritenow.com