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SUMMARY:New Directions Weekend Conference: Caged Bodies\, Freed Minds
DESCRIPTION:November 6 @ 12:00 am – November 8 @ 12:00 am\nCaged Bodies\, Freed Minds \nUnder what conditions are we free to think? To open ourselves to relating across boundaries of class\, color\, and experience? To fully give of ourselves to others and to fully realize our own potential? This weekend\, we will focus on these and other core questions of being within the extended context of incarceration. \nWhy incarceration? A substantial body of literature\, from Karl Menninger’s The Crime of Punishment to more recent works by James Gilligan\, Michelle Alexander\, and many others in the field\, form a chorus proclaiming that our system of incarceration\, particularly in the United States\, is profoundly ill-suited to the task of reducing crime or delivering justice. Instead\, the system is designed to create a criminalized undercaste\, and then to isolate that undercaste from the rest of society. Our society does this in large measure so that “we” who are outside the system have an object—a “them” forced into it—into which we can project disavowed aspects of ourselves and of our society itself. \nIsolated and most often surrounded by high walls that are both physical and psychological\, places of incarceration are largely hidden from view and constitute a closed society that for most of us—particularly those of us who are white and privileged—is fantasized\, demonized\, even romanticized—but never fully conceptualized or experienced. People who have not experienced the carceral system can all too easily live with the belief that its punishments are a productive way of delivering justice; of separating the guilty from the innocent; and of keeping society safe from criminality. Specifically\, from the mostly fantasied criminality of the Other. \nImagined in this way\, jails and prisons comprise a highly racialized world that has been flattened into stereotyped darkness so that the world outside can feel brighter. The truth is of course far more complex than this flattened imaginary. The societies inside jails and prisons mirror in large part the society outside\, placed into a pressure cooker with the heat turned on high. These are extreme environments in which virtually everything that is wrong on the outside—and far too little of what is right—is vividly represented. People who have lived and worked within the carceral system know that its caged world is designed to deaden the mind and spirit that for many have been under attack by our society since early childhood. Yet those who have endured these conditions know things about living that the rest of us do not. \nHow do people who have experienced incarceration manage to open their minds and spirits\, even while under the severe constraints of confinement and oppression? How do people who have not experienced incarceration nonetheless subject themselves to severe constraints on thinking and being even while enjoying the privileges of freedom? And how do exchanges across these boundaries help us all to think more fully about our own humanity and about what a society that values shared humanity would look like? \nWhat can we learn from each other when the walls of incarceration come down? \nWeekend Coordinator – Tom Hennes \nSpeakers: \nJames Gilligan\, MD\, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. From 1966 to 2000 he taught at the Harvard Medical School\, where he headed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry and served as Director of the Massachusetts Prison Mental Health Service. He then \ndirected or participated in other violence-prevention programs in the U.S. and other nations\, and has served as a consultant on violent crime and punishment to President Clinton\, Tony Blair\, the World Health Organization\, the World Court\, and the Secretary-General of the United Nations. From 1999 to 2001 he was President of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. His books include Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic (1997)\, Preventing Violence (2001)\, Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others (2011 – a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year”); and\, as a co-author of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump (2017\, 2020 and 2024)\, a New York Times best-seller. \nMichelle Good\, CM\, LLB\, MFA\, is a Cree writer and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. After working for Indigenous organizations for twenty-five years\, she obtained a law degree and advocated for residential school survivors for over fourteen years. In 2014 Good earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia while still practicing law and managing her own law firm. Her poems\, short stories\, and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies across Canada\, and her poetry was included on two lists of the best Canadian poetry in 2016 and 2017. Five Little Indians\, her first novel\, won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize\, the Amazon First Novel Award\, the Governor General’s Literary Award the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award\, the Evergreen Award\, the City of Vancouver Book of the Year Award\, and Canada Reads 2022. Her latest work is Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous life in Canada. She is the recipient of two Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees and was named the University of Calgary Distinguished Writer for 2024/2025. She is the winner of the 2025 Indspire award in the Arts category and was admitted as a Member of the Order of Canada on October 17\, 2025. \nMario F. Wright\, AA\, is the Founder and Executive Director of Beyond City Limits Inc. (BCL)\, a nonprofit using creative arts\, writing\, and mentorship to open pathways for justice-impacted youth and communities. A formerly incarcerated author and educator\, Mario built BCL on the belief that healing happens when people are given room to put down the armor they were never given a choice about picking up\, a philosophy he calls ego dissolution\, rooted in his own journey of learning that being seen in his pain didn’t destroy him\, it freed him. \nMario has authored five books\, including The Janitor: No Such Thing as a Bad Child and Poetic Freedom: Born a Caged Bird\, and teaches directly from his own writing in the programs he runs. He currently leads a college-level Cultural Literacy course at Juvenile Detention Centers along with other programs and is pursuing his own education at John Jay College after holding the CUNY Harry Belafonte Memorial Scholarship and receiving his Associates\, Writing & Literature at BMCC. \nUnder his leadership\, BCL has served 300+ youth and families across 10+ programs in New York\, New Jersey\, and Maryland\, with expansion underway into Chicago\, Milwaukee\, and Georgia. Mario was named 2026 Poet in Residence at Civil Rights Corps and is a recipient of the Canary Impact Prize. His work centers formerly incarcerated leaders\, himself included\, as the mentors and messengers best equipped to reach the young people he serves. Wright resides in New Jersey and has three children. \nBarbara Bethea\, PhD\, PTR\, LCAT\, CASAC\, is the first African American Registered Poetry Therapist certified through the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy (IFBPT) and licensed by New York State as a Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT). Dr. Bethea is also the first African American Certified Mentor for the IFBPT. Dr. Bethea completed her Master’s in Psychology\, Poetry Therapy\, and Counseling at Vermont College of Union Institute and University and her Ph.D. in Expressive Therapies at Lesley University. Dr. Bethea is also a Master-level Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC) through the Office of Addiction Services and Supports (OASAS). \nDr. Bethea has been employed by New York City Health and Hospital (NYCHH) for over 16 years and is the only LCAT-Poetry Therapist on the NYCHH footprint. She retired from Verizon after 25 years of service in 2006. She began her second career providing services on the in-patient units at Woodhull Medical and Mental Health Center in 2008. In 2010\, she began working in the Chemical Dependency program at what is now known as Cumberland-Gotham Health Center. In 2017\, she accepted an LCAT Level III position and began supervising other LCATs at Rikers Island. In 2021\, she was promoted to Director of the Creative Arts Therapy program on Rikers Island and is currently employed. Dr. Bethea is the founder of A.W.E.S.O.M.E. Seminars for You and continues to inspire women through workshops\, conferences\, keynote speaking events\, and spoken word. \n  \nTo Apply: https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/apply/
URL:https://www.wbcp.org/event/new-directions-weekend-conference-caged-bodies-freed-minds/
CATEGORIES:New Directions,Public Program
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20270205T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20270207T000000
DTSTAMP:20260706T211711Z
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SUMMARY:New Directions Weekend Conference: What Moves Between Us: Embodiment and Relating Beyond Representational Speech
DESCRIPTION:February 5 @ 12:00 am – February 7 @ 12:00 am\nThe New Directions weekend will explore forms of human relating that are not reducible to speech\, that exceed and sometimes undo what can be said. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory\, the arts\, and embodied practice\, we will consider how people affect and transform one another through affective qualities such as tone\, rhythm\, timing\, movement\, and intensity— dimensions of communication that operate implicitly\, at the level of the procedural unconscious and often without recourse to explicit meaning. Rather than treating language as the privileged site of relational truth\, we will consider speech as just one aspect of a broader field of embodied relational exchange. \nPsychoanalyst Henry Markman will describe analytic relating as unfolding in time and without prescribed outcome\, creating a shared emotional field that is shaped as much by rhythm\, pacing\, and responsiveness as by words. From this perspective\, the analytic situation becomes a lived\, temporal encounter—an I am with you enacted through cadence\, pause\, and responsiveness rather than interpretation alone. Henry’s work invites participants to consider how such nonrepresentational dimensions of experience shape clinical work\, writing\, and scholarly inquiry\, and how newness and potentiality emerge within relational time. \nThe weekend will include two experiential sessions with musician\, actress\, and educator Abena Koomson-Davis and educator and improv actor Sam Tanner. Abena will help us explore the embodied qualities of lullaby—voice\, rhythm\, repetition\, and breath—as forms of connection that often precede words. Her work will help us experience lullabies as forms of attunement\, regulation\, cultural memory\, and parental address. Sam will lead structured improvisational exercises that highlight responsiveness\, timing\, and the risks of meeting one another without a script\, and he will reflect on how improvisation informs his work as a writer. Both sessions will include audience involvement (in addition to Q&A time) that will serve as invitations to experience directly how tone\, pacing\, sound\, and movement shape relational space. Together\, Abena and Sam offer a way to explore dimensions of encounter that clinicians and writers regularly rely on in their work but may not often have the opportunity to examine explicitly. \nWeekend organizer Gail Boldt will present a paper exploring how her work with children ranging from 3- to 9-years old undid her confidence in the power of speech and representation as primary actors in learning and change. Drawing from case materials\, she will explore the action of non-representational sound and play with materials as processes that shape relational experience and open possibilities for change without relying on interpretation or verbal insight. \n  \nWeekend Coordinator – Gail Boldt \n  \nSpeakers: \nHenry Markman\, MD is a Supervising and Training Analyst\, Faculty Member\, and Co-chair of Dialogues in Contemporary Psychoanalysis at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Faculty\, The Wilhelm Reich Center for the Study of Embodiment.  His recent book (2022) is Creative Engagement in Psychoanalytic Practice published by Routledge. Among topics in his published work are play in adolescent analysis\, embodied attunement\, aesthetic experience\, musical accompaniment in psychoanalysis\, Bion’s late work\, the analyst’s ethical commitments\, and the relevance of Ferenczi’s mutual analysis. His most recent paper\, in press\, is The Analyst’s Embodied Presence: Working Within an Aesthetic Matrix.  He is in private practice in Berkeley\, California\, where he also consults and leads study groups. \n  \nAbena Koomson-Davis is a performer\, educator\, and wordsmith. She originated the role of Fela’s mother in the Off-Broadway run of FELA! The musical and reprised her role many times in the TONY Award-winning Broadway production. She has performed with Natalie Merchant\, Angelique Kidjo\, and many other luminaries. Abena is the founding musical director for the Resistance Revival Chorus and currently serves as Ethics Chair in the Middle Division of the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. \n  \nSamuel Jaye Tanner\, Ph.D.\, is a Professor of English Education at the University of Iowa. His books Whiteness\, Pedagogy\, Youth and America: Critical Whiteness Studies in the Classroom and Storytelling and Improvisation as Anti-Racist Pedagogy have won scholarly awards. Sam has also written works in science fiction\, memoir\, humor\, and theology. Sam has been teaching\, directing\, and performing improv theater for 25 years. He is a co-founding member of Happy Valley Improv. Sam taught high school English and Drama before becoming a professor. He is also a creative writer and an improviser. \n  \nGail Boldt is a Distinguished Professor of Education at Penn State University and a psychotherapist who has had a clinical practice focused on young children. She is currently completing a book entitled Vital Literacies: Relational Dynamics of Learning and Change (Routledge\, 2027) that explores how working with young children dramatically challenged her faith in the role of language and the representation of ideas in learning and change\, leading her to attend to how sound and materiality\, often operating outside conscious intention\, are central to relationships\, to what is learned\, and to how it is learned. Gail is the Senior Editor of the Bank Street Occasional Papers. \nTo Apply: https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/apply/
URL:https://www.wbcp.org/event/new-directions-weekend-conference-what-moves-between-us-embodiment-and-relating-beyond-representational-speech/
CATEGORIES:New Directions,Public Program
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20270430T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20270502T000000
DTSTAMP:20260706T212135Z
CREATED:20260706T212058Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260706T212135Z
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SUMMARY:New Directions Weekend Conference: Spring 2027 Conference: TBA
DESCRIPTION:April 30 @ 12:00 am – May 2 @ 12:00 am\nTo Apply: https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/apply/
URL:https://www.wbcp.org/event/new-directions-weekend-conference-spring-2027-conference-tba/
CATEGORIES:New Directions,Public Program
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20271105T000000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20271107T000000
DTSTAMP:20260706T212700Z
CREATED:20260706T212536Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260706T212700Z
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SUMMARY:New Directions Weekend Conference: Uncommon Bedfellows: Psychoanalysis\, the Climate Crisis\, and Environmental Bonds
DESCRIPTION:November 5\, 2027 @ 8:00 am – November 7\, 2027 @ 5:00 pm\nImagine for a moment a place that you frequented\, or that had special meaning to you as a child – it might be a beach on Cape Cod\, or a special nook behind a garden shed\, or an apple tree that you plucked from on your walk to school. Now imagine that particular object or place being gone forever\, washed away by floods\, or too polluted to swim in or cut down for a road to be constructed. While those events may seem minor\, if they occur\, we grieve something of ourselves in that loss\, in both memory and in meaning. These places are more than just physical locations: they are repositories of childhood memories and experiences\, making their loss deeply personal. \nWe are living in a time known as the Anthropocene\, a geological age in which humans have become the single most influential species on the planet\, causing significant global warming and other changes to land\, environment\, water\, organisms and the atmosphere\, resulting in the extinction of countless species and massive climate events\, contributing to the losses mentioned above. Wildfires\, massive flooding\, and extreme heat have become commonplace occurrences that all of us have either experienced ourselves or know someone who has. We are at a planetary tipping point\, where every action we take\, every law passed or struck down\, every defense we engage in or work through\, has significant ramifications for generations to come. We have strayed from our connection\, and our place\, on the earth. \nPsychoanalysis has a significant place in this context\, beginning with the work of Harold Searles (1972). Sally Weintrobe (2021)\, a British psychoanalyst\, believes that the spirit of psychoanalysis can offer us an understanding of as well as a direction out of our current situation. In her seminal text\, Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis: Neoliberal Exceptionalism and the Culture of Uncare\, she posits that such defenses as projection\, denial\, disavowal\, and a feeling of omnipotence all play a role in the unfolding of the climate crisis as we experience it today. And because of this\, the moral injury\, or sense of injustice\, about what is happening to the planet affects not only us\, but also our patients as we experience this world together. How do we hold our own feelings\, as well as theirs? How might we imagine a culture of caring as it applies to our planet? How can we foster improved mental health by turning to nature (Adams & Morgan\, 2018)? And because we are writers as well as psychotherapists\, how might we “write wild” (e.g.\, turning to the natural world for creative inspiration) in order to form a “creative partnership with nature” (Welling\, 2014)? \nThis weekend we will examine the intersection between psychoanalysis and the climate crisis\, as well as how this dialogue can enrich our understanding of ourselves\, our patients\, and the non-human world. To advance this objective\, we will consider what it means to “write wild”\, and by doing so explore our attachment to the natural world\, as well as explore what it means to foster a culture of care. This will be an offering of hope and resilience! \nCoordinators: Donna H. DiCello\, Psy.D. \nGUEST FACULTY: \nElizabeth Allured\, Psy.D. is a psychologist/psychoanalyst who co-founded the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America in 2017.   This nonprofit organization’s mission is to educate mental health clinicians\, and the lay public\, about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis and related social injustices.  She served as its co-president\, and currently chairs the Professional Development Committee.  She teaches in CPA-NA’s  Climate Aware Therapist course\, as well as its Climate Café Facilitation Training program.  She began presenting professional papers on mental health and the environmental crisis in 2007\, and since then has presented papers on this topic at national\, international\, and local conferences.  Her writing on the topic appears in Contemporary Psychoanalysis\, Psychoanalytic Dialogues\, and as chapters in psychoanalytic books by Routledge Press.  She has been interviewed by media sources including the San Francisco Chronicle\, Parenting Magazine\, and The Psychotherapy Networker.  She has given workshops for climate activists\, and for undergraduate and graduate students at various academic institutions such as Bard College\, Yale University\, and the Harvard Undergraduate UNICEF program.  She is currently completing a book for Guilford Publishing\, entitled Climate Aware Therapy for Every Clinician.  She is in private practice on Long Island\, New York. \n  \nSusan Bodnar\, Ph.D.\, is on the faculty of Teachers College\, Columbia University\, and is\, among other things\, a walk therapy practitioner in her private practice in NYC. She is also the part-time clinical director of The Wellness Center\, a start-up mental health clinic in upstate New York. She is an associate editor for Psychoanalytic Dialogues and on the editorial board of Ecopsychology and Contemporary Psychoanalysis. She loves to write and recently published an edited volume\, Unmoored Yet Unbroken: Ecopsychology for a Changing World – Stories of Human Nature Relationships (Wiley). Importantly\, she is a great friend of all living things – plants\, animals\, most people and especially her family. \n  \nNickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts\, studied literature at Oxford University\, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister\, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book\, Fanny Says (BOA Editions)\, won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently\, she lives in Asheville\, NC\, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016\, she’s been writing about these animals\, resisting the kind of pastorals that made her (and many of the working-class folks from the Kentucky that raised her) feel shut out of nature and the writing about it. To Those Who Were Our First Gods\, a chapbook of these first nine poems\, won the 2018 Rattle Prize\, and her essay-in-poems\, The Donkey Elegies\, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and was published as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day initiative. Every summer\, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee. She’s a proud Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and is President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets\, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. \n  \nKari Weil\, Ph.D. is University Professor of Letters\, College of the Environment and Feminist\, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Comparative Literature and is the author of three books\, Precarious Partners: Horses and their Humans in Nineteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press\, 2020)\, Thinking Animals:  Why Animal Studies Now (Columbia UP\, 2012)\, Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (University Press of Virginia\, 1992) and numerous essays related\, most recently\, to the fields of animal studies (within the arts and humanities) and to issues of feminist theory and gender studies. Her current research explores the literary legacies of what was known as animal magnetism in theories of affective influence\, tactility\, and traumatic healing. \nTo Apply: https://newdirectionsinwriting.com/apply/
URL:https://www.wbcp.org/event/new-directions-weekend-conference-uncommon-bedfellows-psychoanalysis-the-climate-crisis-and-environmental-bonds/
CATEGORIES:New Directions,Public Program
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