President Rose, Trustees, members of the Alumni Council and McKeen Center for the Common Good, fellow honored guests, friends, family, classmates, collaborators and co-conspirators.
It is with stunned humility that I stand before you today and gratefully accept Bowdoin’s Common Good Award.
When this winter I received a FedEx envelope from the College delivered to our island address, I was gripped by a familiar fear.
The College had finally uncovered some bill I’d not paid!
This is comical in retrospect – I graduated 39 years ago. I know the College finance department is much more efficient than that…
Yet my instinctive fear points to who I am, where I come from, and the ambivalent relationship I’ve had to the College for much of my life – all of which make this award that much more meaningful to me.
I am deeply moved by, and grateful for, the College’s recognition of my lifelong passion for the arts, and of their power in my work in cultural and economic community development in Maine. In particular, in our more isolated rural areas and with our young people. Work I have undertaken, in large part, as a way of returning to the State the great privilege of the excellent education I received here. And everywhere I go in this expansive state, I am awed by the number of Bowdoin alum I encounter serving the common good. It does seem as if the beautiful Offer of the College works deeply in us. With so very many deserving of this recognition, I am especially humbled by this award, one I look forward to sharing with my many peers in service.
Having my my work recognized and amplified in this, the 50th anniversary year of women at Bowdoin, is a huge honor and a tribute not only to me but to the many women who’ve worked collectively over these 50 years to make so much change possible.
I love the word common. I am proud to be as common as they get.
I am a queer, working class activist whose heritage is only two and three generations deep on this continent. My grandparents had sixth and eighth grade educations; my parents were awarded high school diplomas; and it was hoped for if not expected that I would take the next step, to college.
An important part of being common is being PREVALENT: there are many of us. We are not exceptional, and that’s a good thing.
Yet there were not many of me when I arrived at Bowdoin in 1979. My family was always deeply uncomfortable when visiting. I and several of those here today, and many more, quickly learned to create commonality across differences to collectively battle our shared oppressions –boarding school students to financial aid kids, CIS gender to queer, black women to white women.
My best work and biggest successes have always occurred in the creation of these commons – the free, open, public spaces shared by all – and their communities. I am honored to have been one small part of the greater collectives that launched Bowdoin’s Women’s Resource Center, now the Center for Sexuality, Women, and Gender; that created Opera House Arts and restored the historic Stonington Opera House; that is currently forming the Cultural Alliance of Maine to strengthen the state’s commitment to its important indigenous, immigrant, and local cultures.
Every time we come together, for any reason – a meeting, a movie, a musical performance, church - we create new community: unique gatherings of commoners. From each community, we learn something. From each, we are able to launch collective action for healing, for hope, to advance our common good.
Our work is not done. Too much violence, and great and painful inequities, continue to exist and threaten to divide us. And so I will leave you with this. In 1980, one of the first books we purchased for the Women’s Resource Center was lesbian poet Judy Grahn’s The Common Woman Poems. In it she wrote a verse that appeared on many of our walls and T-shirts for years to come, a poster of which has since wound up in the Library of Congress. “A common woman is as common as a loaf of bread,” Grahn wrote.
“And she will rise.”
Let us keep rising. Let us commoners keep gathering in the commons.
Thank you.
