Friday, October 9, 2020 on Zoom
6pm Tucson (MST) / 8pm Central / 9pm EST. Event is ASL interpreted.
Advanced purchase required. Ticket sales close at midnight Oct 8.
Regular $20 / Discounted $15 / Gift-a-ticket $20
KPI will donate Gifted tickets to women of color and Deaf community members who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. Contact Tina@KorePress.Org to request a Gifted ticket and she will be happy to get you access.
When you purchase tickets, you will be sent Zoom access instructions just prior to the event.
The Motherfield is a movement of radical mothers dedicated to telling complicated truths and listening to other women. Story-coaching, knowledge, and event support is shared by storytelling alumni and staff to sustain the effort of building connections and communities of care through story telling.
Kore’s seventh listening session in this series presents six amazing mother artists, educators, writers, makers, and activists. Based on Kore’s online essay series and newsletter feature, “Notes from the Motherfield,” the LIVE event presents spoken work by rad mamas across the US telling their unique truths in 10-minute stories about the wild, wooly, sacred, thorny, liberatory, stunning, real and sometimes painful encounters while mothering.
Help us kick-off the Fall 2020 season with these six superheroes:
Much of Gayle Brickert-Albrecht’s early education was situated between the crawlspaces and cedar-shake roofs of the custom homes their father built in western Washington. Lured to the Sonoran Desert by college friends in 1978, Gayle (they/them) continues to manifest their father’s legacy of self-reliance and artisanal ingenuity in the slow-baked lo-fi renovation of their Barrio Hollywood home. A science educator and queer thorn at TUSD for 30+ years, they look forward to reimagining the intersections of work and community in semi-retirement. Gayle’s family includes two adult sons and two grandchildren, as well as a 7-year-old daughter they co-parent from a distance.
Letty Moran is a native of the Southwest, born to Mexican immigrant Deaf parents. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona and proud CODA (Child of Deaf Adults). Letty is a Sign Language Interpreter by profession but an Ally and accomplice at heart who is married to her best friend with three beautifully unique kids. They too teter-toter into different cultures and worlds like their mama, who takes after her Apa’ as a storyteller, maybe not in the English sense but in the colorful, visual, attention-seeking, never-ending saga and richness way that is Deafness.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier’s work has earned nods and awards from authors and entities ranging from Nikki Giovanni to Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket to Antonya Nelson to Billy Collins; from HBO to Zoetrope: All-Story. Her shorter work appears in Glimmer Train, ZYZZYVA, Hyphen,The Mississippi Review and elsewhere. Frazier recently relocated from California—where she’s served as a San Francisco Library Laureate—to New York, for a professorship in creative writing and digital storytelling at SUNY Oswego.
Barrie Cole is a Chicago-based writer, playwright, essayist, monologist, as well as the mother of two bonafide teenagers. She is the author of numerous essays, stories, hybrid works ,and plays some of which include Reverse Gossip Elevator Tours, Meaning is Tricky, Fruit Tree Backpack, and Reality is an Activity. She has written original works based on the alphabet exploring a great variety of themes and has performed them in dozens of places since 2005. She is excited to have created a new one one specifically for KPI’s Note’s From the Motherfield.
Cindy Trejo spent her early childhood in the city of South Tucson, gleaning elder wisdom through her Grandma Toña’s storytelling, who lived next door. This foundation of cultural and familial wealth would support her journey to higher education as a non-traditional student. She earned her BS in Family Resources and Human Development as a single mother of three, her Master of Business Administration while working full time, and is currently a mature PhD candidate in Mexican American Studies in the twilight of her career. Because education changed the trajectory of her life, she has dedicated her career to strengthening educational systems leading to high school and post-secondary advancement for underrepresented students. Cindy has worked in Arizona in public health, K-12, and higher education settings.
Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, and a visual artist whose work often explores the space between personal and cultural histories. Her essays have appeared in Guernica, Narratively, Longreads, Brevity, Literary Hub, and Vestoj, among others. Her first book, Certain and Impossible Events, was selected by Cheryl Strayed as the winner of the second annual Kore Press Memoir Contest, and will be published in January 2021. She earned an MFA from Portland State University and is a recipient of the Creative Nonfiction Writers Fellowship. She grew up in the woods of Southern Connecticut and now leads an unfancy life in Pittsburgh with her husband and their son.
Regular $20 / Early Bird $15 / $20 Gift-a-ticket and have it donated to a BIPOC woman or Deaf community member who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend.
Ticket sales close at midnight Oct 8.
The concept of the motherfield was coined by Joy Harjo on her blog long ago and refers to the imaginal colliding that happens in the motherfield––where only truth exists—somewhere between grief and beauty, the ineffable and mundane, boundlessness and numbing routine lies a sacred, and profane space. We speak, and listen to, these stories to keep the narratives about mothering complicated, to pierce the veil of perfection and silence, and to make manifest our invisibilized labors. We see you, we hear you, we appreciate you!
See more Motherfield info, bios, and links to videos of the stories here: October 25 2019, August 16 2019, April 12 2019. Individual videos will be regularly made available from prior shows.
You can listen to an interview of Lisa Bowden by Eva Romero on KXCI’s Artistories about Notes from the Motherfield LIVE here.
In Notes from the Motherfield, we enter into these spaces and listen to one another’s unique stories in order to keep narratives about mothering complicated and multiple. To pierce the veil of perfection and silence, and to keep the often invisibilized labor and oppressions of women and mothers accessible. We see you mamas, we are listening with our ears and our hearts.
You can support this powerful storytelling program and the intersectional feminist work of Tucson’s Kore Press Institute here.
KPI is a nonprofit working at the nexus of arts and justice dedicated to radically connected communities, to amplifying women’s voices, publishing, and social justice education. Kore Press is one of the four remaining feminist presses in the country that has lasted over 20 years. Kore’s award-winning work has impacted communities locally and nationally for 27 years.