The Desert Pilgrim Services
Mary Swander is available to conduct workshops and retreats centered around her new memoir
The Desert Pilgrim: En Route to Mysticism and Miracles
(Viking, 2003). Injured in a car accident, Swander made a pilgrimage to New Mexico where she sought the aid of traditional Hispanic and Native American healers in her recovery. In Albuquerque, she encountered Father Sergei, a Russian Orthodox monk whose barrio church is hidden away on the once-proud Route 66, now the terrain of crack dealers and the homeless. In his backyard, Father Sergei grew herbs for the
curandera
, Lu, in the pharmacy across the street. Lu's herbal cures are legendary. Together, these two healers led Swander through the "dark night of the soul" to look inside herself and to the Divine for strength and meaning. Lu took Swander on a trip into the New Mexico landscape to harvest herbs and return with a more profound sense of desert spirituality.
The retreat will include a reading from Desert Pilgrim and a discussion of the role of women healers through western civilization. Participants will be encouraged to meditate on the courage and strength they have found during times of crisis in their own lives, and share stories of healing--whether physical, emotional or spiritual-they've witnessed in their own pasts. Swander, who is also a licensed and certified massage therapist, will discuss the use of some simple herbal remedies and alternative healing techniques.
Driving the Body Back Services
"In
Driving the Body Back
, the extravagant personalities of Mary Swander's ancestors seem to push and extend the boundaries of her poetic form. Every line of Swander's new volume is as carefully crafted as those in
Succession
, but its larger design is more spacious and flexible, making room for enormous humor, a compelling narrative progression, a rich sample of Midwestern idiom, emotion that is powerful and enduring, elaborate and brilliant studies of nine eccentric relatives, genuine comfort, and some of the best stories any American poet has supplied us with in a long time." -Joyce Dyer, in
Poet & Critic
With a unique blend of poetry reading, puppetry and fiddling music, Mary Swander, author, Teri Jean Breitbach, artistic director of Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre, and Guy Drollinger, musician, bring Driving the Body Back to the stage. Mary Swander and Teri Jean Breitbach dramatize the monologues of Swander's award-winning book of poetry that tells the stories of an unforgettable family of eccentric characters. This evocative piece incorporates movement, found objects, a child's doll, and painted silks with Swander's resonating language. Fiddle music underscores the themes and provides transitions between the lively, funny and moving scenes of immigrant pioneers, bootleggers, butchers, and bird watchers.
This performance piece is suitable for adult audiences--not children. For information about fees and booking, call Mary Swander at 515-294-3373.
What critics are saying about the performance:
"Teri Jean Breitbach's interpretation of Mary Swander's haunting prose about the deaths of some unique family members mesmerized the audience just as powerfully as a flickering cabin fire. With a simple array of objects, characters were created and relationships were established in such beautiful simplicity that it made me re-think the true essence of puppet theatre. The manipulation of objects to tell a tale was never more evident to me than in this chillingly beautiful intermingling of movement, object and word."
-Reay A. Kaplan,
The Puppetry Journal
in response to a performance at the National Puppetry Guild
"Thank you so much for the brilliant ("stunning" is the word I keep hearing) performance at our recent Western Literature Association meeting. A number of members told me it was their most memorable time at the conference." -Susan Maher, President, Western Literature Association
What critics have said about the book:
"A marvelous collection of folk humor, wild ways and down-home storytelling.
Driving the Body Back
is a sometimes harsh but always deeply compassionate narrative, and so well constructed that the reader occasionally forgets, as one does with
Arabian Nights
, who is doing the telling and why. And one doesn't care. It is enough to let Miss Swander's characters enthrall and teach the stories of their lives."
-Louise Erdrich,
The New York Times Book Review
"From the hard task of wresting sustenance from the soil to the hard fact of thawing the ground for burial, Swander's concerns affect us all. If you complain that poets write only for themselves and other poets, this may well be the book for you." - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This poem-in-voices, this narrative-eulogy, this American Gothic celebration is that original and rare thing: a sustained work of art wholly at one with what it makes. Neither simply lyrical nor sequential, it is a single, simultaneous gathering of mourners, relatives, characters, those left behind, those who, in both tragedy and comedy of circumstances, must, against the silence, speak for themselves. Driving the Body Back is powerfully aural, even choral, in ways we expect of an earlier, regional American literature, from Sherwood Anderson to Faulkner to Eudora Welty. There is really nothing to compare it to in our poetry." -Stanley Plumly