Black Creative Healing

It’s PART TWO of our collaboration with Clinical Bopulations featuring Van Gammon, American rapper, singer, and songwriter from Fayetteville, North Carolina. This was our first time collaborating with another podcast. You can listen to part one of our discussion over on the Clinical Bopulatations website (HERE: https://clinicalbopulations.fireside.fm/51), or just dive into the recap with us at the top of this episode!

Wanna keep the story going afterwards? You can access the editable Google Doc of our New World Story HERE: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UtnYuUq9FYWSJzbrBYzmFTYOCV7FI0gpRewiAMhLg90/edit?usp=sharing 

And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to Van Gammon on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/vangammon/?hl=en)and go listen to New World!

A full transcript of this episode is available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1ptaukquyp4aodr/BCH%20302%20with%20Clinical%20Bopulations%20%2B%20Van%20Gammon.docx?dl=0 

This episode features your co-hosts as the guests! Adenike and Natasha take time to reflect on what drew them to creating and producing this podcast, and they share ideas for the vision of Black Creative Healing in general. They talk about their values, their work, lives and loves, and take a moment to discuss the importance of addressing grief and community from the center of their most precious relationships. The arts-based collaboration is one that you’ll become quite familiar with, as it is a rewrite of the theme song!

This episode invites listeners to join Natasha and Adenike in honoring and reflecting on the past two seasons as well as welcoming the possibilities that can manifest for season three. We hope you enjoy this collab as much as we did!

Link to a transcript for this episode: https://share.descript.com/view/uwivJly8qgm

Resources referenced:

My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem

You can also visit our new Season 3 Study Room for links to all the resources we may mention this season! Right now the Menakem is listed there, as well as a link back to the Season 2 Study Room!

All these links can be found by visiting https://linktr.ee/BCHpod

Welcome to Episode 204! This episode marks almost exactly 1 year since Black Creative Healing began as a podcast, and we’re marking that occasion by closing our 2ndseason with another multi-guest collaboration.

Yes, you heard right, this is our Season finale! More on that later J

Our guests for this collaboration are Jaia Cooper and Breanah Williams, who have been working alongside us this past semester as work study students from Shenandoah University. Both Jaia and Breanah are students in Shenandoah’s Music Therapy program, and we share our deepest thanks to their professor (and BCH collaborator Hakeem Leonard) for recommending them to us for this term!

Jaia and Breanah have been managing our social media throughout the semester, and introduced themselves early on with their own Instagram posts – they’ve also been behind many of the quotes and quizzes you’ve seen in our Instagram stories. Our conversation leaps right from their introductions into a topic that – unbeknownst to each of us - has been burning in our bellies for a long time to discuss: Abolition. So buckle up and prepare yourselves for a deep and much needed conversation, followed by some teasers of what you can expect in BCH Season 3!

Link to the “plain” interactive transcript of this episode on Descript: ">https://share.descript.com/view/rLNXX9rUA72

Link to the “resource-filled” version of our transcript on Google Drive (with direct links to some of the places and topics discussed this episode: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yNYKaMAycAAH4i5THhMz6hFRYf2m2kHd/view?usp=sharing

Don’t forget our BCH Study Room, where you can find all things discussed in BCH Season 2! https://docs.google.com/document/d/19J1vv918dsws-3Keh_OqFMIC_TYkOtazNIzoVcv1q3w/edit?usp=sharing

And, follow us on Social Media for the most up to date info from us, as well as access to our link tree with even MORE resources and ways to support this work:

Instagram & Facebook: @BlackCreativeHealing

Twitter & Clubhouse: @BlackCreativeHG

Wanna send us an email or a tip via Paypal? Use this address: [email protected]

Thanks for joining us and see you in Season 3!!

We ditch the script for this episode and start with some frank discussions about the last month’s challenges and heartbreaks. We also take some time to thank all our supporters for helping us raise funds for Volcano Relief in St. Vincent! We remain tremendously grateful for all our BCH family, whether you support monetarily or in other ways. Every like & share matters!

This episode’s guest is Cynthia Francillon. Cynthia is a 30-year-old storyteller born and raised in the city of Brooklyn, NY, and currently residing in New Orleans, LA. A descendant of Haitian parents and a self prescribed maladaptive daydreamer, Cynthia believes storytelling + love are the threads that keep us going.

Across the mediums of fiction short stories, nonfictional essays, poetry, short/TV/feature film screenplays, stage + on-camera performance, and audio podcasting... Across genres of romance, magical realism, drama, and comedy… Cynthia asks and tries to answer the questions, “Who are we when no one is watching? Do we like those parts in the shadows? Why do we run from the tenderness we cannot and shouldn’t do without?”

Her stories feature Black girls/women/femmes exploring their growth as individuals through acts of intimacy with either themselves and/or their relationships with other women, whether it be familial, platonic, or romantic. You can find Cyn on Twitter as @cynfinite.

In our collaboration for Episode 203, Cynthia, Natasha & Adenike discuss the "big things" that happen when one moves away from home for the first time, the magic of places like New Orleans (which we discovered we'd all lived in before!) and how ancestral stories may serve - unbeknownst to us at the time - as the sparks that spur us onward in our lives.

This episode includes some exciting announcements as we look ahead towards the end of Season 2 in just a few months. So stay tuned for this episode (and those announcements) to drop soon!

For more info on Cyn, check the BCH Study Room link here, which includes additional links to topics and resources discussed this episode!: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19J1vv918dsws-3Keh_OqFMIC_TYkOtazNIzoVcv1q3w/edit?usp=sharing

You can find an interactive transcript of the episode here: https://share.descript.com/view/kzsgBvoDTY2

Brenda Dixon Gottschild is the author of Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance: Dance and Other Contexts; Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era (winner of the 2001 Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Scholarly Dance Publication); The Black Dancing Body–A Geography from Coon to Cool (winner, 2004 de la Torre Bueno prize for scholarly excellence in dance publication); and Joan Myers Brown and The Audacious Hope of the Black Ballerina-A Biohistory of American Performance.

Additional honors include the Congress on Research in Dance Award for Outstanding Leadership in Dance Research (2008); a Leeway Foundation Transformation Grant (2009); the International Association for Blacks in Dance Outstanding Scholar Award (2013); the Pennsylvania Legislative Black Caucus Civil Rights Award (2016); and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2017).

A self-described anti-racist cultural worker utilizing dance as her medium, she is a freelance writer, consultant, performer, and lecturer; a former consultant and writer for Dance Magazine; and Professor Emerita of dance studies, Temple University. As an artist-scholar she coined the phrase, “choreography for the page,” to describe her embodied, subjunctive approach to research writing.

Nationwide and abroad she curates post-performance reflexive dialogues, writes critical performance essays, performs self-created solos, and collaborates with her husband, choreographer/dancer Hellmut Gottschild, in a genre they developed and titled “movement theater discourse.

Our guest's decades of experience are shared with Adenike and Natasha in an intimate conversation about the creative process, and the way racism pulls at the time and energy of Black people, particularly women/femmes. We also discuss embodiment, self-concept and more! Our collaboration culminates in a visceral vocal improvisation that we can't wait for y'all to hear! Check the BCH Study Room link in our bio for more on Brenda, with easy access to additional links from previous episodes!

Link to transcript: https://share.descript.com/view/nAYy4p0MJOk

Links to content discussed in this episode:

Brenda’s website (where you can find information to purchase her books, and more!): https://bdixongottschild.com

Yvonne Daniels: Embodied Knowledge (Book): https://books.google.com/books/about/Dancing_Wisdom.html?id=nhCRJ4u_CYIC

Frank Wilderson - Afropessimism (Book and Theoretical framework): https://wwnorton.com/books/9781631496141

Afro-futurism (Theoretical framework): https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/afrofuturism

Somatic Self-Portrait Exercise: TikTok created by Natasha to demonstrate: https://www.tiktok.com/@blackcreativehealing/video/6937759473989717253

Just in time for the end of Black History Month, our Newest Episode of #BlackCreativeHealing is NOW LIVE! #BCH201 Marisol Norris, Ph.D., is a board-certified music therapist, educator, consultant, and founder of the Black Music Therapy Network, Inc. In our collaboration for Black Creative Healing, Marisol, Adenike & Natasha explore concepts of Refusal and Solidarity. Our conversation and collective art making weaves through personal experiences with mindfulness of Consent & the potential for Harm. 

Our episodes now include INTERACTIVE Transcripts, meaning you can click the transcript link in our show notes and just read it, or you can listen to the episode alongside the transcript with text automatically highlighted as the episode plays to follow along! We can’t wait for you all to enjoy all the new things to come this season <3 

Interactive Transcript Link: https://share.descript.com/view/gCOWfjV8iDJ 

Click that link in our bio to check out this NEW Episode today! 

An additional note: Black Creative Healing collaborations involve informal discussion of issues that are frequently multi-layered and complex. We are committed to doing our best to provide content warnings regarding any language used during our episodes that may be difficult for some listeners to hear. This podcast is not intended to replace any individual’s personal educational or therapeutic work. 

Here are links to some of the authors, books, essays and concepts referred to in this session: 

Sandra Grande https://polisci.uconn.edu/person/sandy-grande/#  

Audre Lorde https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/audre-lorde 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson is available here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653196/caste-oprahs-book-club-by-isabel-wilkerson/ 

Additional References made during this episode: 

Gloria Richardson (the woman mentioned by Natasha notorious for the photo of her pushing aside a military man's rifle): https://bglh-marketplace.com/2017/01/the-story-behind-this-iconic-image-of-a-black-woman-pushing-aside-a-national-guardsmans-bayonet/ 

Decolonized Buffalo Podcast "Sanctuary" episode mentioned by Natasha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqiH_2_pL1M&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=DecolonizedBuffaloPodcast 

The GEMM Theory mentioned by Marisol: Hardy, K. V. (2008). On becoming a GEMM therapist: Work harder, be smarter, andnever discuss race. In M. McGoldrick & K. V. Hardy (Eds.) Re-Visioning Family Therapy, Second Edition: Race, Culture, and Gender in Clinical Practice. 2nd Edition. Guilford Press. 

Definition of Healing Justice, from BEAM.org: https://www.beam.community/healing-justice

Welcome to Black Creative Healing - a Space for Radical Conversation, Mindful Collaboration, and Holistic Visioning, Centering Black Communities.

Enjoy this little peek into our process, with all it's profundity and mischief :-)

A visual version of this trailer is available via our Youtube page: https://youtu.be/Ce7hvz3y1mI

Season 2 coming February of 2021!

Episode Description:

Our guest for this episode is Nsamu Moonga. You can read more about Nsamu via the bio below. In our collaboration for Black Creative Healing, Nsamu, Adenike & Natasha discuss colonialism's impact on African Diasporic Peoples, Indigenous perspectives on creativity, and share in an intimate exploration of affirming each other through music. Nsamu's definition of music is not to be missed!

You can find a transcript of this month’s episode here: https://tinyurl.com/y3y9fhp2

You can find the companion Youtube video (featuring our song collaboration) here: https://youtu.be/xn1rSu_IIo8

Nsamu is a music therapist and psychotherapist born and raised in Zambia. Nsamu earned a BA in Psychological Counseling from the University of South Africa and MMus in Music Therapy from the University of Pretoria. A therapist grounded in holistic anti-oppressive practice, Nsamu works with people exploring health and lifestyle choices, medical complications, human sexualities and gender, spiritualities and religious experiences, psychosocial support, and learning enhancement. His music therapy experience span health, medical, and school settings, and centre human development programing, design and facilitation, community infrastructure and social development, cross-cultural living and working.

Nsamu has provided a Google doc with a thick description of the ritual clip shared in the center of this episode. You can view that narrative here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11MkM3uQJVXKx0AdITuZjRXsVcR2TLTGG/view?usp=sharing  

Don’t forget you can also hit that “support” button to help us keep this podcast going! Every “like,” and share goes a long way too. We continue to be grateful for all those who’ve supported us this month and beyond! Stay tuned to @BlackCreativeHealing on Instagram (and now Facebook! Plus our new Twitter page @BlackCreativeHG) for ongoing details!

Our guest this episode is Jenni Graham, LCAT, ATR-BC, MPS. Jenni is a Nationally Registered & Board Certified Art Therapist & has been working in the mental health field since 2005. She is a graduate of Fairleigh Dickinson University & Pratt Institute; where she earned her BA in Psychology & her MPS in Art Therapy & Creativity Development respectively.

Jenni co-creates compassionate & empowering spaces of healing, liberation & connection by creating space for the full scope of human emotion through a lens of restorative mental & emotional wellness. 

In our collaboration, Adenike, Natasha & Jenni discuss the generational and collective aspects of trauma, as well as the power of art to help bring to the surface and integrate aspects of the self that we may not realize have always been there.

You can find the collaborative art we made together with Jenni (along with prompts for your own visioning process!) by visiting https://ijustwanna.carrd.co/ and clicking the folder titled "Find Freedom."

A transcript of this episode can be found at https://tinyurl.com/y429ag52

Website: www.traumafreeuniversity.com

Facebook Page to Follow: www.facebook.com/traumafreeu

Facebook Private Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/TFUbreakfreecommunity/

Instagram: www.instagram.com/traumafreeu

And! And! Don't forget to hit that NEW "Support" button on our main anchor page - with as little as $1, you can help support this podcast, and the work of the Black Music Therapy Network!