SCSU’s EDGE (English Department Graduate Ensemble) presents

The Voice of My Heart: A reading by members of the Touchstone Creative Writing Program, followed by a Q/A session

Thursday, March 8, 2007, 6-7:30 PM, English Common Room, Engleman D-253

 

There is no charge for attendance at the presentation. All freewill donations and proceeds from the sale of I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent will go directly to the Touchstone program.

 

            Touchstone is a facility in Litchfield for teenage girls, ages 12 to 17, who are either on parole or serving time for charges. The girls are from the harsher parts of Connecticut’s cities and towns--runaways, disturbers of the peace, truants, drug users and sellers, many taken away from their homes due to abuse both sexual and physical. Many if not all of their parents are drug and alcohol addicts. Most of these young women have received little or no nurturing in their lives. Almost none of them have fathers present in any way…They have lived in “the projects” with rats and cockroaches, horrifying betrayals and daily violence, too many people in too small a space. But they are strong, beautiful, resilient, funny.

           

[After a reading before a state governmental committee in Hartford,] the huge audience of teens, legislators, and teachers were deeply silent as they took in poem after poem about rape, violence and sexual abuse. Here were the victims speaking their truths (Sharon Charde, Speech to Trinity College, 09-29-06).

Sharon Charde

 

A Master’s candidate from SUNY Albany writes of attending a Touchstone reading: “I was amazed by the rawness of the girls’ writing, by their honesty, bluntness, and use of the English language in creative and new ways. While their writing was not of the traditional academic version to which I was accustomed, it was novel, fresh and free from the confines of the academic world. These girls spoke from their heart, revealed their past stories, and read like they were on stage” (Jessica Charde).

 

The Touchstone Creative Writing Program, led by Sharon Charde, has been publicized nationwide via radio and television and through the publication of two poetry anthologies entitled I Am Not a Juvenile Delinquent (copies available at the reading). Charde, a family and marital therapist for over twenty years, is an award-winning poet and author of  Bad Girl At The Altar Rail and Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto . She has led writing workshops and weekend retreats for women since l992. She now teaches a weekly creative writing workshop for incarcerated young women at Touchstone, a residential treatment facility in Litchfield, Ct. She also facilitates a monthly workshop sponsored by the Empowering Young Women Project for local teenagers and the Touchstone girls (Senior Women).

 

For more information:

http://www.nafi.com/program_detail.htm?id=8

http://www.seniorwomen.com/authors/authorpageCharde.html