LitNYS Advancement: Meet the Mentee, Herstory
LitNYS: Can you describe the work that Herstory does?
ED: For 27 years, we have been working with a network that started as a single workshop, which was supposed to only last for weeks piggybacking off a conference on women breaking silences. I had offered a week of free workshops to any woman in the community who wanted to write her story.
I decided immediately that this was a horrible idea. I had been used to teaching in the university or privately, but one way or the other, it was a consistent space. At the conference I had offered a situation where people might be revealing things that were very intimate and vulnerable in a setting in which a stranger could walk in at any moment. It just felt like a bad idea.
I decided to make a horrible situation a tiny bit better by creating this imaginary stranger/reader walking in on any “page one moment” of somebody’s life. To make a long story very short, I had created the roots of a pedagogy that would occupy me for the next quarter-century, completely changing my life as it would reach thousands over the decades that followed.
LitNYS: Can you describe what the mentorship with LitTAP (nowLitNYS) was like and what you gained from it?
ED: Right when we were doing our first workshops with students who crossed the border, I had these handwritten copies of rough translations from Spanish of a couple of student stories. Gloria and I agreed this work needed to be made into a book, which we were able to publish within a couple of months. The history of Brave Journeys/ Pasos Valientes would not be the same had Gloria (Herstory mentor) not put us in touch with First Book, an organization of upwards of 450,000 educators dedicated to getting books into the hands of students who can’t afford them.
I am very proud to say that with no publicity and no big structure behind us, not only is this book being used in an increasing number of school districts throughout Long Island — it’s an anthology of 15 high school kids who crossed mountains, deserts, and rivers alone — over 8,000 copies have been sold nationally.
When Ira came on as our mentor, in addition to helping us to conceive new ways of thinking about our work in the national arena, he got us involved in staging outdoor events around the intersection of environmental justice and larger justice issues. He helped us during the pandemic to secure emergency funding, while increasing our network. He advised us on NEA, NYSCA, and pushed us to think deeply about what we wanted to do for our 25th anniversary, in terms of celebrating our legacy and taking us into the next quarter-century.
I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have this support and to have our newest LitNYS grant that will allow us to bring the Brave Journeys Study Guide to more school districts and teachers.
