CELEBRATING SISTERS SINGING
An Unforgettable Evening and the Making of a Film
by Carolyn Brigit Flynn
It was June 2008, and I had been working on a wide-ranging anthology of women’s sacred writing, art and music called Sisters Singing for more than four years. The time had come to release it to the world, and as I began to imagine an opening event to equal the beauty of the book, I did what community people everywhere do: I called a circle. Sisters Singing has work from 137 women artists nationwide, and more than thirty are from Santa Cruz. I wrote and invited them to my living room to plan how we would offer Sisters Singing to the world. Twenty women showed up. And that night, the Sisters Visioning Circle was born.
We sat snug and happy together, sipping tea and enjoying each other, beginning to imagine our opening event. We committed to the idea that we would offer Sisters Singing in a way that would do more than showcase certain people’s creative work: we wanted to enlarge and open all of our human possibilities. The Visioning Circle met regularly over several months; a venue committee was formed and fanned out to view and consider possible spaces. Some women took over food and drink; others got involved with publicity, or worked on the art show. Everyone brainstormed together as we chose dates and finalized ideas. Someone in the circle suggested a web site, which had not occurred to me but ultimately became a mainstay for the book. Someone organized a radio interview and someone else worked with Gateways Books and Gifts, who co-sponsored our opening event. Due to the abundance of wonderful writers in Sisters Singing, the opening night was followed by a three-part reading series at the bookstore.
We chose November 8, 2008. It was a somewhat risky move: a presidential election was in process and the outcome on November 4 was entirely uncertain. It was possible that we would be in mourning, or inside wrenching days of recounts and legal battles. There was always the possibility that Barack Obama would win, but in those days of late summer, as many will remember, that was too surprising and even unlikely an outcome to assume or foresee. Still. We asked our astrologer friends to check the omens for several possible weekends, considered possibilities, and landed where we landed. One contributor was part of Holy Cross Church and suggested that we might be able to hold our opening at their beautiful Hall; ultimately they offered us a generous discount for our literary event on November 8, and that made so much possible. They provided a large, open, well-lit space where we could broadly invite our community, set up an art show, provide music, offer refreshments. I invited an extraordinary musician, Alysia Tromblay, to fly down from Seattle and sing some of the music from the book. We organized an art show, and imagined an evening program of incredible poets who would provide a journey through Sisters Singing. Kate Munger, who has three songs in the book, agreed to bring the Santa Cruz Threshold Choir to sing. It would be as if the participants were standing inside the abundant writing, music and art of the book. Our grand party was coming into view.
But who could know? Who could know that we would need every last one of the 400 chairs at that venue, and that scores more people would be standing in the back and sitting on window sills? That everyone would come out, because Sisters Singing is a beautiful book and they wanted to celebrate with their friends and family who were part of it. . . . or because they liked the sound of the title, and came to see what it was all about. And also out of a plain human urge for celebration: because some grand miracle had happened and an African-American man named Barack Obama had managed to be elected president of the United States.
Somewhere along the way, I turned to Marigold Fine, a writer with work in Sisters Singing and a filmmaker I have known for years. With all of the excitement I felt building, it became clear that we should film our event. We decided to have two cameras, and Marigold enlisted her friend and colleague Chris Thompson to film alongside her, and provide ambient and audience footage as a second camera. The art show was gorgeous, and they filmed it. They caught people streaming into Holy Cross Hall on a beautiful evening, people embracing and greeting, the excited air of possibility and anticipation. Both cameras caught the entire evening from different vantage points: the profound silence of 450 people as each poet read, as Alysia Tromblay thrilled the room with her incredible voice, as the amazing Kate Munger and the Threshold Choir got the huge crowd singing. On and on the gorgeous night unfolded in a way that was something close to perfection—in that each aspect we had envisioned came together to create something large and immense. We had indeed created an evening in which every human present was invited to sing their own song of the sacred as it lived uniquely within them. Everyone left singing.
Marigold and Chris caught it all on film. As I watched the footage several weeks later, I caught my breath. It was just beautiful. Every poet that night had risen to offer her work at its most elevated and sacred, and the digital technology was offering it back to us as something accessible well beyond the event itself. My work as a writing teacher is grounded in the magic that occurs when the written word is read aloud. That same magic had wound itself into our grand opening evening, and the enlivening power when poetry is spoken into the air by the poet herself was captured on film. The evening and all of the subsequent readings during a our national tour were a living extension of the book itself: poetry spoken and sung, as humans have done far longer than we have been writing with implements, alphabets and paper. The spoken word is deep in our long human heritage, and on November 8 high definition digital cameras captured something ancient and ephemeral and sublime and held it as a gift to the future.
With two cameras filming an evening that was over three hours, we had some seven hours of beautiful footage to work with. Marigold and I applied for an Artist Grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County, and received a small stipend to cover the work of editing the film. And together we sat regularly for more than a year, side by side at her computer, stitching together a beautiful, two-hour film. I have never tired of the footage, the poetry, the music singing from the digital screen. Working with Marigold, whose patience, good humor, vision and technical mastery is thrilling to behold, has been a joy.
And now with great happiness we offer this work to the world. The sisters are singing, and they can be found here. The film is an offering to anyone who loved Sisters Singing, to anyone who loves the spoken word, great music, unique art, heartfelt praise of the sacred. It is for those who are more likely to enter this material in a digital format. We say: Come and enter the world of the sisters. They will make you laugh and weep and sing. They will help you believe in the world of human possibilities. They will call you into your own heart. They will invite you to love what is sacred to you, to elevate what you cherish into the great Heart at the center of the world. They will give you hope.
April 10, 2010