ART FOR THE BOOKISH: When Authors Inspire Artists

By Margo Hammond

Every year on our wedding anniversary, my husband and I try to include a museum visit in our celebrations to remind ourselves that marriage is an art. This year — for our 25th on August 25 — we went to an exhibit at the Morean Art Center called Bookish. It was the last day of the show.

For the group show, artists had been asked to submit works based on a book they loved. Their entries were given the same title as the book they chose.

It was an inspiring concept.

Nearly 200 artistic — sculptors, fine art painters, printmakers, photographers. a jewelry maker, mixed media artists, collagists, a Florida folk artist, an Eckerd College student, a Pinellas County school teacher and, appropriately for an exhibition entitled Bookish, a book editor — heeded the call to link books with art.

Tampa Bay Times book editor Colette Bancroft contributed a portrait of hard-boiled crime novelist Raymond Chandler. Labeled The Big Sleep (after Chandler’s first novel featuring iconic detective Philip Marlowe), the piece earned Colette one of the show’s Honorable Mentions. (Colette was my successor at the newspaper, then called the St. Petersburg Times, when I retired as book editor in 2006)

Another former colleague of mine from the St. Petersburg Times also turned up in the show: photographer Joe Wallis. Joe, who works in black-and-white film, also received an Honorable Mention for his entry: a gelatin silver print inspired by Alwyn Scarth’s Vesuvius, a biography of the fiery volcano. 

One of my favorite pieces in the show was inspired by one of my favorite books: Connie Mae Fowler’s Before Women Had Wings. Rebecca Skelton (who is married to Wallis) contributed an angelic figure made with copper wire and wings with hanging feathers. The piece was awarded the Mark Pfeiffer Memorial Award for Sculpture. 

Rebecca wasn’t the only artist to choose a book that I loved.

A robust sculpture by Sallie Hackett Brown that combined parts of pitchforks and barbed wire captured perfectly the grit of working class America that I remembered from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Mary Helen Horne’s textured collage of entangled branches beautifully caught the spirit of The Overstory, Richard Powers’ powerful novel celebrating the intricate communication network of trees.

In Eileen Goldenberg’s mixed media piece, The Handmaid Tale (Margaret Atwood), the grotesque visage of clay popping out of the canvas seemed appropriately terrifying. 

Donna M. Richardson chose to illustrate Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye with a black-and-white drawing of two black figures with bright blue eyes set against a dizzying background of colorful pinwheels, echoing poignantly the novel’s theme of racial disparity. Richardson won the Margaret Murphy Steward Best of Show for the piece.

Ka-Rim Troyli’s pastel portrait of a bowing nude seemed to spring right out of Octavia Butler’s science fiction tale Wild Seed while Joe Terrana’s acrylic painting of ghostly disembodied heads was an eerie evocation of John Grisham’s heart-pounding legal thriller, The Runaway Jury. Terrana capped an Honorable Mentions for his Grisham piece. 

It was fascinating to see how these artist chose to translate books I had read into art. Many of the book titles, however, were entirely new to me. But many of these books are now on my reading list, so intrigued I was by the art they inspired.

Thanks to Judith Villavisanis’ eye-popping mixed media piece of a tree come to life under the light of a full moon (which won the show’s Raymond-James Sponsor Award), I now want to read Canadian Deborah Dunleavy’s  2015 young adult novel about sex, death and grief called The Truth About Trees. Villavisanis’ more demure figurative paintings are currently on display at the Brenda McMahon Gallery in Gulfport. 

Also on my must-read list now is Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by English biologist Merlin Sheldrake. Two artists picked this book: Amanda Izzo created a nature-inspired quilt painting while printmaker Peter Shurtz chose to honor the book with a gouache on paper rich in earth tones.

    I found two works in the show that were prompted by poetry collections: Riley Kinkade’s Lost in My Mind, described as a collection addressing mental health issues such as depression and anxiety, and Devon Attaei's I Can't Sleep...

To illustrate the Kinkade collection, Susan T. Martin, an artist with a bipolar disorder, painted a bespectacled woman in front of a bookshelf filled with cat books. She seemed to be reading Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes” to her cat. I’m not sure how this connects to Kinkade’s poetry, but it certainly piqued my interest to find out.

Also inspired by poetry, mixed media artist CeCe Skeith offered a dream-like piece in homage to Devon Attaei’s I Can’t Sleep…: a photograph of a reclining woman severed into strips set among shredded paper and broken watches. Of course she can’t sleep!

I found several pieces in the show based on children’s books.

Appealing to the kid in all of us, Rusty Hammer’s playful wood sculpture of a tower of dogs was inspired by 100 Dalmatians by Dodie Smith. It won the show’s Tim Salen Memorial Award.

 

Peter Hynes’ sculpture of clay and acrylic was animated by the original 1740 version of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Villeneuve. A riot of color, it won the John Eckerd Memorial Award.

 

A minimalist bas-relief by Marie Hammer (part of another artist couple in the show!), made entirely of simple wood pieces, brought to life Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. And I half expected Eckerd College student Atlas Chamber’s whimsical rabbit, straight out of Alice in Wonderland, to hop off the pedestal and yell “I’m late, I’m late.”

But then again, a lot of the works in this show seemed to be pushing beyond their normal boundaries. I was struck by, for example, how many of the paintings on display popped out of their usual 2D state. It was as if the book ideas that inspired them could not be limited to a flat surface, but needed to emerge full blown like the images in our heads when we read. Especially enchanting were the wire whiskers emerging into space from Judy Vienneau's entry based on Life Lessons from the Cat, one of the titles in the Chicken Soup for the Soul series by editor and publisher Amy Newark. Vienneau, the founder of Founder and Director, Gulf Coast Artists’ Alliance, Inc., specializes in wire sculpture, mixed media with wire and graphic design.

The work based on the classic Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea also floated out into the viewer’s space, artfully conveying a strong environmental message. Depicting a ship made of two plastic bottles navigating through a sea of corrugated cardboard and paper fish with paper seabirds flying above, artist Dean Fortune mixed media artwork wryly included the label Twenty Inches Under the Sea. Beneath that title was a pull chain with the instructions: Pull Gently Please.

 

Fortune supplied the artwork in rooms at TradeWinds Island Resort and decorated its walls with paintings of fish. Check out a fly-through (a computer-animated simulation) he created for the 2019 Christmas card he designed for the St. Pete Beach hotel.

Some of the pieces in the show left me wondering just what the artist was trying to say about the books they chose — especially if it was a title I hadn’t read yet. Was Kathy Smith inspired by the alcoholic writer in Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend when she painted a man cradling a glass of red wine or was the man in the painting her own lost weekend?

 

Kenwood-based Richard Pollin’s photograph shows a young bearded, long-haired, shirtless man who fell asleep while reading The Absolute Male, a collection of drawings of male nudes by realist artist Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). Was Pollin’s commenting on how boring Eakins' obsession with male nudes was or did he want to provide us with a modern update of the Absolute Male?

 

And who is The Keeper of Happy Endings in the Barbara Davis’ novel Lisa Bagley chose for her piece, a dynamic landscape made of flowing ribbons that seems to move through space?

I guess I’ll have to read the book to find out.

NOTE: A version of this story was posted in Arts Coast Journal on August 30, 2022.

   

Celebrating the #LiteraryLifestyle

Arts Coast Journal has asked me and a number of others to follow for a year the activities of area arts organizations that have received a Pinellas Recovers Grant from Creative Pinellas (via a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts American Rescue Plan). The idea is to gather stories about these groups for a book promoting the importance of fundings for the arts. I'm proud to be part of this project. 

I was assigned two organizations: The Cultured Books Literacy Foundation and TheStudio@620. Cultured Books is a children’s bookstore in a predominantly Black neighborhood which champions stories that provide positive images for Black kids. Through its foundation, it is encouraging reading as a community activity. TheStudio@620 is a unique center that for the past 18 years has promoted inclusion in all of the arts. I look forward to learning  more about both of these institutions.

Below is the first in my series on Cultured Books, posted on the Arts Coast Journal site earlier this month. 

                                                                                                -- Margo Hammond

“Fostering a #literacylifestyle by exposing children to the world -- through art, music and books!"

                                                              -- Cultured Books founder Lorielle Holloway

 

The Cultured Books Literacy Foundation is a nonprofit, book-promoting organization with an unusual mission. Unlike most literacy programs which look to the needs of individual children, CBLF is interested in fostering literacy throughout an entire community — the Black community of South St. Pete.

“It’s not just about focusing on the children,” the foundation says on its website, “It’s about supporting and involving parents as well.”

    

For CBLF, literacy is a lifestyle.

The anchor of the foundation is Cultured Books, a pop-up children’s bookstore and art gallery in South St. Pete. Sharing the space at number 833 with Green Book of Tampa Bay, another non-profit, and The Well, a mental health center directed by LaDonna Butler, it looks out onto an historic corridor -- 22nd Avenue S. Dubbed "The Deuces" after its double 2s, it  was the heart of the African-American community when Blacks were not allowed to live in other parts of the city.

Instead of dwelling on segregation, however, the bookstore  is “curated to foster a love of self by highlighting Black joy narratives,” says Cultured Books founder Lorielle Holloway. It is  stocked with multicultural volumes written to empower children to believe in themselves and create a sense of community, to foster pride by showing positive images and telling inspiring stories about people of color. Reflecting perfectly that mission is the image, shown above, of an exuberant Louis Armstrong on a mural by Herbert Davis at the Creole Cafe, right next door to the bookstore.

“To show our children our stories don’t begin with struggle,” says Hollaway (above) who is a mother of three girls ages 3-12. 

The bookstore’s art gallery, dedicated to exhibiting art rooted in literacy, also is community-driven. It includes the paintings and collages produced by kids who have participated in the foundation’s Book Report Project. 

The Book Report Project gives kids the chance to create a book report about a book they have read and then use it as currency to purchase another book. The book reports can be in any form. Kids can choose to submit a traditional written report but they can also create a musical composition, poetry, visual art (a drawing, painting or collage) or a podcast. Kids just fill out a survey, pick a book, read it and when they hand in their report on the book — in whatever form they have chosen – they can get another book of their choice at Cultured Books. 

The goal of The Book Report Project, says the project’s mission statement, is “to build children’s positive coping skills in the face of adversity by providing reading and creative outlets.” Hollaway calls herself a Founder, a Dreamer and a Book Pusher. Every second Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. she pushes books in front of the store at the Deuces Sidewalk Market, organized by Deuces Live, the nonprofit advocate organization for the Deuces corridor. 

Hollaway also pushes books out into the community — to help foster the “lifelong journey of literacy” in south St. Petersburg. Currently one of the most popular events offered is Breakfast.Literacy.CommUNITY -- known as BLC -- a party in the park held on the first Saturday of every month at the Thomas "Jet" Jackson Recreation Center in Wildwood Park, where books are served up with breakfast from Pop Goes The Waffle, a Black-owned business, and Jug, a local farmer. 

Since May, thanks to CBLF’s The Art of Literacy Residence Program, breakfast and the book readings are followed by a workshop created especially for the event by visiting literacy artists. May’s theme was “Affirm” and began with a reading of "I Affirm Me: The ABC's of Inspiration for Black Kids" by Nyasha Williams, illustrated by Sóf’ya Glushkó, followed by a poetry workshop created by visiting literacy artists Yuki Jackson and LaTreca Ali.

The June BLC was postponed, but in July participants — Cultured Books calls them “bookworms” — came to the park for a reading of "Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America" by Carole Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jamey Christoph. 

After a breakfast that included waffles from Pop Goes the Waffle, visiting literacy artists St. Petersburg photographers Tre Butler and Byron Boykins led kids around the park to take photographs à la Gordon Parks, the first African-American to work as a staff photographer for Life magazine. 

Each child was given a Polaroid camera and instructed to take five photographs of anything that struck their fancy. When they returned to the picnic area with pictures of trees, fences, cars and, in one case, a flower held aloft, everyone took a Polaroid selfie. Then they were given a picture frame so they could mount their park pictures with that selfie. Finally, they were asked to write down six words about their experience on a slip of paper and include that in their framed montage.

The Art of Literacy Residence Program that creates these workshops is made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Pinellas and the Pinellas County Board of County Commissioners.

Community partnerships have been the key to the Cultured Books Literacy Foundation’s success. 

Before the pandemic hit, Hollaway pushed poetry books in the garden at the Dr. Carter G. Woodson African-American Museum as part of the SunLit Literary Festival's Kid’s Lit! Poetry event. 

Her bookstore also partnered with The Deuces Live to present an International Film Series at the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Suncoast, showing films, bringing books and providing snacks at the historic Royal Theater down the street from the bookstore.

During the pandemic Hollaway paired with Tamia Iman Kennedy, founder of Black On the Scene, a production company that guarantees space for Black creatives, to launch Read About It, an unscripted web series that takes viewers on literary trips around Tampa Bay to promote reading and literacy. 

In the pilot episode — Read About: Art — then 11-year-old Nadia and 9-year-old Ava Hardy, two avid readers (and daughters of Hollaway) are inspired by their reading of Kimberly Drew’s book "This Is What I Know About Art." The sisters board a bus to seek out art spaces in the Tampa Bay area where they can find Black representation in art.

They meet up with digital artist Nick Davis to see his Black Is Beautiful portrait series, view the murals of Ya La'Ford (who lives in St. Petersburg’s Kenwood district) and tour the Derrick Adams: Buoyant exhibit held in 2020 at the Museum of Fine Arts. Produced by Kennedy and directed by Moji Wilson, the pilot was an official selection of the Sunscreen Film Festival in its Web Shorts category in 2021.

From the 2020 MFA exhibit Derrick Adams: Buoyant 

The Read About: Art pilot is available for rent for a 24-hour streaming period on Vimeo for $1 – but, lacking funding, no other episodes have been produced.  “We have so many episodes in mind,” says Tamia Iman Kennedy who produced a trailer to promote the series. Take a look at it here.

Many of the partnerships between the Cultured Books Literacy Foundation and other nonprofit groups have been ongoing and going strong. The WORD! Initiative and Keep St. Pete Lit still fill book boxes in South St. Pete with purchases from Cultured Books as part of their Word! Book Boxes project, a free book swap. 

Cultured Books also supplies books for the Barbershop Book Club, a project spearheaded by barber Antonio Brown which holds book clubs for kids every Wednesday at nine Pinellas County barbershops.

Earlier this year The Barbershop Book Club along with Shaping The Early Mind partnered with the foundation to conduct a mixed-methods study called St. Pete Reads! The study addressed the literacy gap between Black students and non-Black students in Pinellas County and how community plays a role in closing it, concentrating on family literacy engagement in south St. Petersburg.

Ninety-minute paid focus groups were held at The Well, and the Enoch Davis and Childs Park Recreation Centers throughout April and May. “Ambassadors” recruited from the community — young people, caregivers (parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and older siblings), and literacy stockholders (educators, mentors, community leaders and youth pastors) — addressed how family reading programs and community engagement in literacy could contribute to the success of early learning and social development among Black youth and families, to point out the obstacles and barriers to literacy head-on and offer solutions. Participants received a $15 gift card, meal and swag bag. 

The data that was gathered will be used to better understand how to improve reading programs in support of Black youth and families in south St Petersburg.

. . .. . .  

In November — which is National Family Literacy Month — the group is planning to celebrate its first St. Pete Reads! Literacy Day, offering an opportunity for youth and families to learn what literacy resources and programs are available to them locally. Also in the fall Hollaway hopes to revive a popular Cultured Books’ program that has been on hiatus – SLC or Skate. Literacy. Community – a gathering at Campbell Park Skatepark at Campbell Park Elementary School, 600 12th Street South, that combined reading with skating on skateboards and roller skates.

Hollaway likes to quote Edward Hale, grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the American spy during the Revolutionary War: “I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.” 

Her own resolve to do something began in 2012 after George Zimmerman was acquitted of all charges for shooting Trayvon Martin because he claimed to have felt threatened by the 17-year-old unarmed boy.

“Something was not right,” she told herself. The non-guilty verdict “lit a spark in me to do something,” she said, speaking online at CreativeMornings/St. Pete, an organization connecting creative communities in more than 210 cities across the world. Cultured Books eventually became that something. 

Born out of protest, the bookstore – and The Cultured Books Literacy Foundation that has grown from it – looks to promote positive stories about Black people and people of color.  “We have so many episodes in mind,” says Tamia Iman Kennedy who produced this trailer to promote the series.

“We are, can and we will be the stars of our stories,” says Hollaway. “We are no longer the token, the afterthought, the sidekick.” 

Want to Help? Hit the support button on the Cultured Books Literacy Foundation site to partner or collaborate, to volunteer or to become a donor. A donation of $18.69, the average cost of a children’s book, would help keep the Book Report Project funded. Would you like to see more episodes of the Read About It series – or as Hollaway describes it, “this dope show about Black kids reading books while exploring their city”? Donations can be made on the Cultured Books website.

 

The Red Tent: How a Book Launched a Healing Space for Women

By Margo Hammond

    It started with a book. 

   

In 2012, after reading Anita Diamant’s “The Red Tent, Barbara Rhode was inspired to launch a unique program of healing at the Pinellas County Jail for women prisoners Now 10 years later, Rhode’ Red Tent Women’s Initiative, a program that combines group therapy with classes of arts and crafts, has helped over 1,000 incarcerated women work through the trauma that landed them behind bars in the first place, cutting down on their recidivism rates and saving the county a lot of money in the process.

     No wonder Pinellas County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Todd is talking with Rhode, a licensed marriage and family therapist, about starting a Diversion Program that would allow the court to mandate attendance at Red Tent sessions in lieu of sending these women to jail.

     “The Red Tent,” set in Biblical times, imagines a space where women who were menstruating or about to give birth were quarantined. In the novel the women use the space — which they dub “the red tent” — to support each other through difficult times. Reading Diamant’s novel, Rhode began to ask herself: Where was the red tent for incarcerated women? Where were the safe places where women in prison could go to share their stories and heal?” 

     Rhode decided to build one — incorporating the work of two researchers who specialize in trauma: UCLA scientist Shelley E. Taylor, author of “The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing is Essential to Who We Are and How We Live” (a book Rhode had been using in her private counseling practice) and Bessel van der Kolk, a Boston psychiatrist and author of “The Body Keeps the Score.” 

     Taylor’s studies conclude that women and men historically have handled stress and trauma very differently. Since prehistoric times, Taylor says, women have been “tending and befriending” when they are in need. While men are programmed to just suck it up, women appear to be hard-wired to heal their trauma by talking out their stories with other women. Van der Kolk discovered that trauma interferes with the brain circuits that involve focusing, flexibility, and being able to stay in emotional control. He found that bodily activities — sewing or yoga, for example — can heal those circuits by releasing chemicals that relieve stress. 

       Rhode adopted both of these findings and designed an 8-week program that would include both talk therapy and hands-on crafts.

     The arts and crafts, she decided, would come first. “Instead of the women seeing us coming in and and thinking, ‘Oh, here come the therapists, we’re going to be therapized,’ we engaged them first in activities using their hands,” says Rhode. She hung quilts in the space where the women were to meet to create a safe and nurturing environment. “I wanted the women to feel at ease.”

To put women prisoners at ease, Barbara Rhode has hung quilts in the healing space at the Pinellas County Jail where the participants of the Red Tent Women’s Initiative meet. These quilts hang just outside Rhode’s Central Avenue office in St. Petersburg (Photo above & below by Margo Hammond)

     

     The Pinellas County Jail has placed several copies of “The Red Tent” in its library.  From time to time, Diamant corresponds with Rhode, tracking the progress of the project that bears her novel’s name. Temporarily interrupted by COVID, the Red Tent Women’s Initiative program is scheduled to start up again at the jail on July 5. 

 

     I am talking to Rhode in her third floor office on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg. Beside her is a lamp sculpture donated to the Red Tent Women’s Initiative by local artist Robin Roth Murphy. Made from repurposed, reconstructed objects, the life-size piece in the shape of a female figure is entitled Sangha, which, appropriately, means community in Hindi.  “Sangha represents the women in our community who have suffered trauma from past abuse, addiction, and incarceration but have risen to the light,” says Rhode as she sweeps her hand up the sculpture, past its head (a globe) to the lamp shade.

     The reactions from the women who have been in the program, she tells me, have been heartening.  “I never was in the company of other women who wished me good,” one woman said.  “I have never been with women who talked with me so respectively and openly.” One brash, heavy-set woman lumbered into the healing space on the first day and made it clear that she planned to be there for only one session, Rhode remembers.  “I’m not doing any of those damn crafts,” the inmate announced. “I just want to get out of the pod where those women are driving me crazy.”  The prisoner ended up completing the whole eight weeks, embroidering a gift for her 11-year-old daughter. She became one of the program’s greatest advocate.

The Red Tent Women’s Initiative combines hands-on crafts which have been scientifically proven to relieve stress with talk therapy to provide women inmates whose sentences are nearly up the tools to cope with the trauma that landed them in prison in the first place. (Photo above and below from the Red Tent Women's Initiative website)

    Rhode, who grew up on Long Island, has been involved in prison programs since her college days at Hofstra University when she volunteered for Friends of Fortune (an agency that no longer exists) which bused family members up to see their loved ones in upstate prisons. “It was my first introduction to the social justice system,” she says. She also worked at Goodwill Suncoast Residential Re-entry Center, helping women who were serving jail time on drug charges transition back into society.

     According to the Sentencing Project, the number of incarcerated women exploded between 1980 and 2022, rising nearly 500 percent (750 percent in the last decade alone, according to Rhode). Mandated sentencing and the opioid crisis are major causes, says Rhode. Most are mothers with young children, points out Rhode who herself is a mother of three and grandmother to five. The vast majority have a history of abuse, trauma and mental health problems. A report by the Vera Institute of Justice concluded that 86 percent of women in jail have experienced sexual violence and 77 percent have experienced intimate partner violence.

      In response to this crisis, programs promoted during the Clinton and then the Obama administrations, have encouraged a shift in the way these women in prisons have been viewed, says Rhode. “We are not asking women what they did, but what was done to them,” she says.

     Rhode’ staff includes a part-time instructor (Diane Distelcamp) who teaches the women sewing skills. Most of the work is done by hand, but there are some sewing machines available (donated by PTEC) for those who become particularly proficient. Two full-time facilitators (Meg Hogan Scott and Katherine Coulson) provide the women with tools to handle trauma (using a program called HeartMath) and help them connect the dots between their past abuse and their present behavior.

    Rhode, who in 2020 was one of ten women honored by L’Oreal Paris Women of Worth for her “selfless” philanthropic work, now spends most of her time promoting the program (she currently is seeking space and funding for that Diversion Program). 

     Inevitably when Rhode talks to groups about the Red Tent Women’s Initiative, someone in the audience will ask, “Why are you helping criminals? Why don’t you help their kids?” “What I try to make them see is that by helping the prisoner, we are helping their families,” says Rhode. To underline that point, she tells the story of a day in Panera’s when a young woman shyly approached her.  “Miss Barbara?” the young girl asked tentatively. “I don’t know if you remember my mom, but I just want to thank you for helping her.” The young girl had spent most of her childhood in foster homes as her mother returned again and again to jail for substance abuse. Until her mother went through Rhode’ program, that is, and she got her mom back for good.

      Rhode also likes to tell the touching story of when she bought a copy of The Red Tent at an estate sale near her house. “It didn’t take me long after arriving at the sale to realize that something felt odd about this particular sale,” she writes on the Red Tent Women’s Initiative website. “It was as if the owner had left one morning and never returned and they were now selling every single thing she had owned; the comb that still had her hair in it, her worn-out teapot and even a 1/2 bottle of her favorite perfume. I asked my neighbor if he knew what had happened. He explained to me in a low voice that the owner had killed herself recently and that the young woman sitting by the front door managing the sale was her daughter. Before I turned to go, I felt pulled to walk through her bedroom to understand better why she had taken her own life. And, there on her nightstand was a copy of ‘The Red Tent.’”

     If that woman had had a red tent to go to when the world closed in on her, would she have made a different choice? Rhode asks us. “Since that day,” she writes, “I have worked to provide women with a safe place to come together; my attempt at creating a red tent where women could reach out for help, share stories, and mentor the young and in need.

     “In other words, a nurturing, healing place where they could come to tend & befriend.”

Barbara Rhode, the founder of the Red Tent Women’s Initiative, stands beside a poster with a testimony from one of the female inmates helped by her program

Want to help? Donate to the Red Tent Women’s Initiative here.

This article originally was posted in Arts Coast Journal, the online magazine of Creative Pinellas, on June 27 as part of its June Arts and Healing Focus.