Making New Links

Remember back in March when, to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, we posted a call to action on this blog - urging wwp members and friends to use this year to bring to light the story of a woman who came before us, and whose life might run the risk of being lost to history if we didn't do something concrete to mark and record that life? Out of this call to action came the inauguration of the wwp Philosophy Club and our first six-week series connected to it, entitled The Invisible Matron. When the series drew to a close at the end of May, the lives of 9 hitherto uncelebrated extraordinary women had been recuperated by partipants and brought into dialogue with our philosophical discussions around voice, liminality, and the aging female body.

On a more personal note, and in that same post, Linnet spoke of a personal project that she was undertaking in the hope of finding out more about three shadowy female relatives in her family - one of whom was her paternal grandmother who had lost contact with her father back in 1930 when he was just two years old. Beyond knowing her name, Linnet knew nothing of this woman and had never even seen a photograph of her. Six months later, the photograph of a beautifully flapperesque Hylda Louise sits on Linnet's mantelpiece, and the pieces of her grandmother's colourful life are slowly falling into place. Among these pieces is the discovery of two half-siblings that Linnet's father never knew he had. Linnet is travelling to England next week to meet one of them, and will no doubt know a lot more about her grandmother by the time she returns. At wine women and philosophy we speak a lot about things we can do to open the door to more imaginative futures...In this case, a subscription to ancestry.com has closed the door on an imagined past and opened the door to a whole new family!

And speaking of making links...While Linnet is in London she will be attending a philosophy discussion put on by Philosophy For All entitled "What are you thinking about?". She will also be meeting with PFL founder and the editor of Philosophy Now magazine, Anji Steinbauer, to talk about teaching philosophy in an adult education context, about designing philosophy programs with women in mind, and about the creation of an exciting new London-based initiative that brings philosophy to the public - the London School of Philosophy.

Remember those field trips back when you were in elementary school?...Does anybody smell the whiff of a wine women and philosophy field trip to London in the works?...

Manifesta for a new day

Dear valued members and friends,

We have been doing some serious thinking about a new direction for wwp. As you will gather from the manifesta that appears below, our current emphasis is much more on the teaching of philosophy than on activity-based getaways. For those of you who know us and our history, we welcome your input. For those of you who have yet to discover wine women and philosophy, we will be interested to hear if our ideas appeal to you.

Members may be interested to know that the manifesta as a literary form and rousing call to action will be the focus of our December salon evening. More details about this event will follow soon. In the meantime, don't forget our upcoming salon evening on October 27th which takes the form of a debate between those age-old tropes assigned to women: 'The Good Girl' and 'The Bitch'.

wine women and philosophy manifesta

Wine women and philosophy is a philosophy school with a difference. What makes us different? In a nutshell, we turn living rooms, wine bars, and country retreats into classrooms. We cater solely to women. And we find ways to make philosophy pertinent to women's lives.

We don’t promise that philosophy will save your life…But we are convinced that it will make your life a lot more interesting. This is how we do it.

As educational entrepreneurs we put women first.

• we admire women who have the courage to walk through the door and who are prepared to take the risk of learning something new
• we treat every woman as a person who thinks unlike any other person, and who has thoughts, ideas and sensibilities that can enrich learning for others
• we ask ourselves constantly how we can meet women’s educational aspirations and give them a learning experience that they value
• we believe that every woman who challenges herself to learn something new opens the door to a new way of engaging with the world.

As committed professionals we design unique educational experiences that take seriously each woman's creative and reflective side.

• we create friendly teaching and learning environments in convivial locales
• we provide a safe place for women to find their voice around the issues they care about and to be opened to issues that they might care about in the future
• we are developing a challenging, rigorous and fun way to learn which encourages everyone's contribution
• we embrace a feminist pedagogy that challenges authoritative 'expertise' ; that values and builds on women's individual life experiences and backgrounds; and that seeks to broaden the idea of what education is and who gets to participate in it.

As hands-on philosophers we are dedicated to adventurous thinking.

• we bring the word ‘excitement’ into the teaching and learning of philosophy
• we employ innovative teaching methods that breathe a breath of fresh air into your life
• we speak from the heart and work hard to make sure that our words aren't empty, or overly laden with jargon
• we champion more imaginative futures for ourselves and for those with whom we teach and learn.

As dynamic animators we are proud to offer a philosophy program that is accessible, vibrant and well thought through.

• we start with a topic: past topics have ranged from Funny girls in film to the trope of the Invisible Matron ; from How we look at photographs to Finding your body in your favourite poem
• we then link a theme to that topic: for example, our look at family photographs becomes a way to explore the place of nostalgia and memory in our lives; our dip into your favourite poem opens the door to discussing the difference between reading poetry for what it says (the realm of representation) and discovering within that poem the traces of a living, breathing body (the workings of affect)
• we introduce, next, some philosophical concepts to highlight connections between topic and theme, and to build a shared language that helps to prompt our collective working of ideas and individual understandings: Roland Barthes' notion of punctum, for example, builds a bridge between the piercing effect that a detail in a photograph can have on us and its triggering of a memory pang; Julia Kristeva's interpretation of the rhythmic and womb-like chora, for example, enables us to better grasp how certain styles of writing are more bodily than others
  
• we use props!...drawing on a variety of conversational forms, playful exercises and artifacts we turn abstract concepts into grounded insights, taken-for-granted assumptions into interesting questions. In this way, a cookie cutter and a piece of dough become a way to understand how ‘the male gaze’ works ; sifting through a box of seemingly random objects illuminates a post-structuralist line of flight.

As a passionate team dedicated to enriching women’s lives through philosophy, we love those things that make us feel alive.

• aha! moments
• questions, questions, questions…
• messy thinking, u-turns and loose ends
• friendships blossoming out of shared learning experiences
• an individual woman suddenly discovering her 'inner philosopher'
• a growing number of women realizing that philosophy is for them.

Interested? Excited? Want to know more? We are eager to tell you about our salon series, our philosophy club, our membership schemes, our activity groups, and our up-and-coming educational offerings in a wine bar near you!

Email Linnet or Rona at wwpgetaway@live.com

New Salon Season Kicks Off With A Spotlight on Women's Poetry

It was with joyful hearts and poetry on our minds that wine women and philosophy members came together yesterday evening for the first salon of the 2011 Fall season. About a month ago we had asked members to use the balmy evenings of August to look up some female poets and to lose themselves in their poetry. It quickly became clear that our members had done just this...Which meant that with favourite poems in hand and a range of conflicting emotions around how poetry either spoke to us (or not) at the ready, we were soon on our way.

The conversational approach being highlighted on this particular evening was the show-and-tell format - a technique developed in the late 1940s by elementary teachers in North America to help young children become more comfortable with public speaking. Rona provided us with a brief history of this peer-to-peer learning approach and those present were quick to recount their own experiences of show-and-tell sessions at school. Then it was time to get going with some show-and-tell experimentation wwp style!

Our first task was to establish our respective relationships to poetry. Memories of feeling intimidated by poetry's seeming inaccessibility at school, of suffering humiliating memory blocks when reciting a poem at the front of the class, of failing to come up with the 'right' interpretation of a poem on an exam, of never really getting what all the fuss about poetry was about, of finding it a comfort for lonely times, of seeing it as something mysterious that only a chosen few could ever penetrate, all came flooding back. Along with these memories came a growing understanding of why poetry seemed to shut so many of us out - that idea that there was just one possible way of 'reading' a poem that one either 'got' or not - and of how a different approach to this literary genre might help to make it less prohibitive and more appealing.

To this end, Linnet proposed a bodily approach to engaging with poems. First, she presented what she termed 'Derrida's Dilemma' - that is, French philosopher Jacques Derrida's lament that words on a page are but the "dead remains" of the living body that penned them, and his gloomy conclusion that short of tapping into a vein and pouring our blood right out there onto the page, we must resign ourselves to the fact that writing is, on the whole, woefully devoid of the body's vitality and variegated textures. By way of a response, Linnet suggested that Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva's understanding of words as being a combination of untamed rhythmic bodily tones and more stabilizing denotative meanings might provide a way out of this impasse.

For the next little while we explored and experimented with Kristeva's notions of phenotext and genotext, of the symbolic world of grammar and syntax and the semiotic bodily drives, of straightforward texts that are pleasurable to read and reflect upon and unruly texts that, unprompted and in spite of ourselves, produce a visceral and sometimes violent bodily response. Picking up on Kristeva's belief that poetry, more than any other literary genre, provides us with the best way to explore how the writer's fleshly body lives on in the words that she produces, we discussed the rhythmic and tonal aspects of poetry that help us to tangibly feel the presence of that body. We also speculated on how best to go about sensing and savouring this body's sonority and tactility, its motility and materiality, even its smell!

Though not all of us felt quite ready to abandon the idea that a poem's principle worth lies in its literal meaning, everybody was at least prepared to consider the idea that words, if allowed to swell on the page, to dance before us, to jostle and jive and come alive, might provide us with a means to becoming active participants in the poem itself. In this way, we began to engage with poetry not as an exercise of the mind, but as a physical experience with the power to either move us or not. If nothing else, we acknowledged that such an approach could open the door to appreciating a poem - to truly loving a poem - even if we had no real sense of what that poem was trying to say.

Then it was showtime. In turn, each of us introduced and read the poem that we had selected on the basis of it having touched us in some way - among our guest poets were Maya Angelou, Alison Pick, Anais Nin, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Muriel Rukeyser, Jacqueline Bouvier and Elizabeth Bishop. It should be noted here that 3 members chose a poem by Maya Angelou - two of them even choosing the same poem (Phenomenal Woman). As for our task as audience members, it was not to engage with each poem's meaning. Rather, Linnet encouraged us to listen with our bodies and moreover, to listen out for the body of the poet as evoked in and through the words she used and the spaces she left between them. Again, this way of appreciating poetry was not always self-evident...If there is one thing that formal schooling appears to have taught us well, it is that the message lies in the analysis and not in the affect. Still, wwp members are no strangers to experimentation and taking risks when it comes to new approaches to learning and by the end of the evening, we were finding some unexpected rewards and stumbling upon the occasional revelation as a result of allowing our bodies to do the thinking.

Thank you to all those members who attended. We were impressed by the zeal with which each of you undertook the assigned homework and the depth of insight that each of you brought to the group discussion. Wow! It felt so good to be back stretching concepts and working ideas with all of you!

Our next salon evening takes places on Thursday the 27th of October and takes the form of a debate. In the blue corner, the good girls. In the red corner, the bitches. Watch this space to find out more.

Women and Poetry Salon Evening on the 8th of September

The next salon evening is a month away. In preparation, we would like our members and guests to select a short poem that speaks to them in some way, and to bring it along to be shared with the group. In keeping with wwp tradition, we will work our poems through a conversational form. This time, it's the "show and tell" format that prompts our experimentation. In the spirit of wwp, we also encourage members and guests to select a poem by a female poet.

Are you a poetry buff?

Or is poetry, for you, a load of duff?

This evening offers the perfect opportunity to explore your own relationship to poetry and how it makes you feel - be that good, bad or indifferent. It also looks at poetry through the lens of affect - examining why certain poems either move us or not, and what kind of philosophical contribution a good poem makes to the world. Not too sure where to start?


Here is a list of some well known poets you may enjoy checking out:

• Emily Dickinson (pictured immediately above)
  
• Wendy Cope
  
• Dorothy Parker
• Gwendolyn Brooks
• Sylvia Path
• Elizabeth Bishop
• Carol Ann Duffy (pictured below)
  
• Louise Bogan
• Muriel Rukeyser
• May Swenson
• May Sarton
• Maya Angelou (pictured top)
  
• Hilda Doolittle

We will be equally excited to learn about a woman poet who is less known, perhaps, but important to you. We look forward to seeing you on September 8th - same time, same place - and we hope that you are enjoying your summer. For more details about our salon evenings please contact us.

Week 6 of the Philosophy Club: Say Hello, Wave Goodbye, to the Invisible Matron

Alas, our journey into the ins, outs, and betwixt-and-betweens of the Invisible Matron came to an end on Thursday evening, and what a finale it was! Our standpoint in this closing session of our six week Philosophy Club series was that of autobiographers, which meant that the time had come to turn the spotlight on ourselves. Though this might have caused some distress in the early days of our adventure together, we were all quite comfortable embracing our inner matrons and negotiating the line between feeling seen and unseen out there in the wider world...In part because, through our readings and group discussions, we had come to consider midlife as a pretty exciting place to be at in our lives; in part because we were recognizing the new freedoms and meaningful connections that lay in not being central to other people's lives, but rather to our own.

It was an evening of revisiting some of the highlights of this shared philosophy experience - personal revelations that came of communal writing exercises, insights into how each of us learns and teaches best as explored though our membership salon evening in early May, research projects into female family history that have gained a momentum of their own and will be carrying on far beyond this current series. It was an evening that delved into the history of women and the autobiographical genre - examining how in times gone by, it was the letters and diaries of "great women" that spoke to the pains and sacrifices, the successes and accompanying swagger, that came of their achievements, and not their published autobiographies which were narratively flat, assumed a passive voice, and were all too quick to attribute any hint of accomplishment to Lady Luck or some Higher Force. For the few "great women" of yore whose stories were actually deemed worthy of an autobiography, the hard truth of what it entailed to dodge convention, to be "great", had to be concealed. The only acceptable way to come across in one's autobiography was as an exception to the general rule for women with its emphasis on domestic servitude over public service, with its prioritizing of marriage and child-rearing over education and a career. If this societal agenda meant that this very small band of storied "great women" were denied the opportunity to serve as either models or mentors to girls and women hoping to follow in their path, it goes without saying that women deemed anything less than exceptionally "great" were entirely overlooked when it came to the autobiographical form.

A different voice started to emerge, however, in those personal memoirs that accompanied the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. Feminist thinker and literary critic Carolyn Heilbrun speaks of a voice that was no longer speaking from the sole standpoint of "the exception chosen by destiny or chance," but rather, from a plethora of standpoints: "lesser lives, great lives, thwarted lives, lives cut short, lives miraculous in their unapplauded achievement." It was with this opening up of the autobiographical genre in mind that we set about assembling our own stories of Self: releasing our creative juices to the tune of the dizzying spinning of Mary Daly's radical Spinster scribes; taking a page out of Germaine Greer's book as we assumed an "outward gaze" in order to see not the "I" of the male gaze, nor the self-conscious "I" of our own "mind's eye," but an "I" that, in giving in to wonder and feeling the immensity of a world beyond our-selves, could actually become a Self - calm, detached, joyful, integrated, whole. Thus, in a series of quick exercises, we located and experienced that Self in different paintings around the room; in the poetry of Emily Dickinson - "Ourself, behind ourself concealed/ Should startle most;"; in concepts that had stuck to us through the course of this six-week series.

A reading of these "autobiographical" sketches brought the evening to an end, and with it, a great sense of achievement and a heartfelt moment of celebration on the part of the graduating class of the wwp Philosophy Club's 2011 Spring Session. For my part, I am just astonished at what we have created by way of a living and breathing philosophy around the figure of the Invisible Matron. If anything is going to shatter the myth that philosophy is stuffy and inaccessible and dry, this is it!

Though it is sad to see this fantastic group of women disband and this rich experience come to an end, I take heart from poet Elizabeth Jennings' words: "The poem leaves you and it sings." As we take leave of each other, the song begins. As we step a little more boldly, a little less gingerly, into our respective thresholds, we know that this is the place where, as women, we write our own lines.

A pay-it-forward salon evening celebrating 'The Invisible Matron'

"Women have no history," wrote Virginia Woolf in 1929. She was commenting, here, on women's invisibility within the histories passed down through the male line, on women's absence from the histories recounted through art and literature and philosophy and science, on women's erasure from the histories that chronicle important events and notable people, on women's voicelessness when it comes to speaking out and being heard above the din of those histories which, for centuries, have droned on and drowned out all other histories. In the words of Virginia Woolf, "The corridors of history are, for women, unlit." In the words of Brenda, who participated in last Thursday's salon evening, "What can we do to ensure that 100 years from now, women of our generation have not been similarly rendered invisible in and by society?"

Such was the tone of our fifth session of the Philosophy Club's Invisible Matron series - a session that was extended to all of our membership so that those who hadn't been part of our six-week Philosophy Club experience could get a taste of what we had explored and how we had done the exploring, and those who had participated in it could share their insights and observations about the trope of the Invisible Matron from the standpoint of presenters and teachers. To this end, the evening was divided into three parts - the first an experiment in "pay-it-forward" learning; the second an exercise in collaborative writing; and the third a performative intervention designed to fill those unlit corridors of history with a cacophony of ours and our foremother's voices.

Our "pay-it-forward" learning exercise drew on three inspirational ideas: first, the idea put forth by critical theorist bell hooks at a time when women's studies courses first started making their way into universities, that those who were lucky enough to be students in these classes should go down to their local YWCA or community centre after school and pass on what they had learned to any women who were interested; second, the idea put into action by chef Jamie Oliver, that if you teach a person who has never cooked before how to make a tasty meal, and then get that person to teach another person how to make that same meal, you now have two people who can teach two more people how to do it, and then four people teaching four more, and so forth, until some time later, everybody can make that tasty meal; and third, the idea of speed-dating, which takes an assembly line approach to meeting people and establishing compatibility through getting a room of people to engage in quick one-on-one conversations, before they are moved on to the next person for another conversation.

Our wwp version of this kind of "pay-it-forward" thinking found each Philosophy Club participant taking responsibility for one key word or term that had particularly caught their imagination over the course of the Invisible Matron series, and setting themselves up with a chair opposite them. Members who had not taken the class were directed to the vacant chairs, and when the bell rang, Philosophy Club participants had two minutes to teach the wwp member facing them all they could about their chosen word or term. When the bell rang, members moved on to another chair and gained access to a new word or term. By the end of the exercise, everybody present had been let into the world of "feminist standpoint epistemology" and "liminality", "fragments" and "structures of feeling", finding a "voice" and dealing with "ageism", negotiating "the male gaze" and grappling with "The Invisible Matron" herself! If those on the learning end of this experiment felt like they'd been treated to a crash course in feminist philosophy, those doing the teaching were given a great insight into how the act of sharing knowledges helps to consolidate what you do know and illuminate your epistemological potholes!

Then it was onto our second exercise of the evening - scripting a collective dialogue around a painting by New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins - with Philosophy Club participants who had earned their stripes with this kind of activity over the preceding 6 weeks acting as coaches to those new to the game. Dividing into groups, we set to work...If the object was to "read" what was transpiring between the two women in the painting, the "spin" that each group put on the scene demonstrated both the places where our cultural understandings about women and their ways of relating collude, and the gaps that allow for imaginative lines of flight out of those expected patterns. A particular pleasure was taken in the knowledge that in "spinning" four new scripts out of this early 20th century painting, we were also paying tribute to those "spinster" aunts and cousins who take their title from the ancient female art of spinning threads into a glorious range of multifarious shapes and motifs.

Finally, to our communal reading, in which Philosophy Club participants created a symphony of voices celebrating the lives of those 'lost' female relatives - among them, a number of unsung "spinsters" - whom they had researched on an individual basis. As participants simultaneously read the pieces they had written out of fragments that remained of these women's lives - photographs, recipes, a vanity set, a painting, a hastily scribbled last will and testament, snips of conversation, to name just some of the recuperated scraps we drew upon - those listening to the impromptu performance were able to focus in on individual threads or just let the whole piece wash over them. Like with history, like in the stories we tell about our lives and the lives of others, we can chose to see the trees or we can lose ourselves in the forest. The important thing is that our histories, our stories, get told and passed on so that 100 years from now, at a salon evening somewhere in Montreal, there will be no need to ask where the women are, or why they are missing.

Thank you to all who participated for making this such a memorable event. We will be holding a summer barbeque for members - date to be announced. In the meantime, how about brushing up on your female poets and favourite poems in preparation for the next salon evening on September 8th. A lawn chair, a glass of wine and a book of poetry...what a lovely way to spend a summer's evening!

Week 4 of the Philosophy Club: Writing Hidden Lives into Visibility

Fresh from our Easter break, the Philosophy Club reconvened Thursday evening with a better sense of who we are as researchers, and a desire to turn those recuperated fragments of forgotten female lives into something lasting and, if possible, reverential. As researchers, we discovered, we were challengers of conventional ways of doing geneology with its overriding attention to timelines and family lines; we were more drawn to the human side - the Hows and Whys - of our research subjects than the Whens and Wheres of their particular time and place; we were prepared to seek out and give credence to an oral account of a person's life, however fragmented and tentative the memories that constituted it might be; we were insecure whilst remaining curious; prone to proscrastination albeit thrilled by the chase once we got there; circumventive though not beyond a tad of the inventive; harried of mind yet dogged in approach. As researchers, we concluded, we were up to the task.

In considering our Invisible Matron grandmothers and great aunts and mystery household members from the standpoint of biographers and storytellers, however, we were faced with the equally daunting task of working out what kinds of narratives we wanted to create. Did we, for example, feel that it was enough to finally grant these women their place in the sun through writing texts that celebrated their hitherto overlooked lives and achievements? Or did we feel it necessary to turn their very absence from existing histories into the actual story we were telling: writing not so much pieces that celebrated these hidden lives as challenged and destabilized those accounts that had left them out in the first place.

This triggered a lively discussion around the nature of change in society, and how best to bring women's voices and experiences into the picture and even more important, make them count. Reflecting on Carolyn Heilbrun's definition of power - that is, "the ability to take one's place in whatever discourse is essential to action and the right to have one's part matter" - we questioned what kind of writing might lend itself most effectively to achieving this end. Drawing on fragments of text that addressed the very process and practice of writing as a social and political intervention, and piecing them together so as to create for ourselves a preliminary mapping of what our Philosophy Club writing project might look like, we threw those traditional ideals of female destiny - safety and closure - out with the proverbial bath water, and opted for experimentation and adventure instead. This direction echoed that taken by many of the "intrepid traveller" Victorian era female diarists whom we had encountered in Betty Jane Wylie's excellent account of women and diary-writing. It also spoke to Janet Wolff's idea of women's writing being akin to a "wild zone" where, in the absence of a script, we have the chance to create something new. As to the issue of filling in the many gaping holes that remain in the lives of the women we are attempting to bring to life through our writing, we grappled with Roland Barthes' suggestion that biography is nothing more than "a novel that dares not speak it's name." If our views on this quote differed substantially, so too did the amount of poetic license that each of us felt prepared to allow ourselves as we stepped into our roles as biographers.

And so to the wild zone...And a collective writing exercise to get the creative juices flowing. Breaking into small groups, we gave a voice to one of Vanessa Bell's nude models: writing a first person narrative for the woman in the painting who, judging by the pose captured by this early 20th century female artist, was doing a good job of subverting the traditional male gaze. Though we approached the exercise with trepidation, we were soon tapping into our collective inner poet. The poetry that came out of this experimental adventure was far from safe, and spoke to anything but closure. Rather, it took chances and opened doors - very similar, in fact, to the experience of aging that this Invisible Matron series is rendering visible to us. It certainly introduced a welcome twist into the birthday toast we raised, complete with cake and candles, to one of our Philosophy Club participants - turning another year older into a genuine cause for celebration.

From collective writing and cake eating, we moved on to an exercise in communal reading...Or at least, a dress rehearsal for the performative intervention that we will make next Thursday at the members' salon evening. Central to this intervention are written pieces that each of us is creating from the fragments that our individual research projects have brought to light: fading photographs, flashes of memory, inscriptions in books, yellowed newspaper clippings, time-worn obituary notices, moss-covered gravestones, a cherished brooch. Bringing these fragments into dialogue with the novels and poetry and works of art and architecture and fashions of the historical times our respective 'recuperated' women lived through is enabling us to evoke a "structure of feeling" around them. Bringing these structures of feeling into dialogue with our personal desires and wishes for our women is enabling our writing to speak both to their times and to our times. In so doing, we write both them, and our midlife selves, into a new kind of living text that scripts women's experiences in a voice that is our own.