ArtStorming the Art of Remembrance: Deb Todd Wheeler

What if a walk through the woods could hold your grief and hand it back as something living? We sit down with artist Deb Todd Wheeler to explore Radio Silence, a geolocated audio walk at Brookline’s Lost Pond that folds field recordings, original songs, and quiet conversation into a moving ritual of remembrance.

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Music for ArtStorming was written and performed by John Cruikshank.

Transcript

Season Two: Art As Legacy

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Have you ever wondered what makes creative people tick? Where do their ideas come from? What keeps them energized? What kinds of things get in their way? Is their life really as much fun as it looks from the outside? Hello, I'm your host, Lily Pierpont, and this is Artstorming, a podcast about how ideas become paintings or poems, performances, or collections. Each episode, I'll chat with a guest from the arts community and we'll explore how the most creative among us stare down a blank canvas or reach into the void and create something new. In our inaugural season, Artstorming the City Different, we dipped our toes into the vast ocean of creativity with a focus on some of our favorite creators of Santa Fe, New Mexico. That conversation was enjoyed by artists and non-artists alike because it showed us how we can all benefit from learning how to generate something from nothing, dream bigger, charter new territories, and solve problems in new ways. In season two, we're going to take that concept of generating our lives with intention to the next level. This season, we're talking about legacy, art as legacy, and how the most creative among us tackle this rich and deeply personal subject. Welcome to Artstorming The Art of Remembrance. So, how do you turn a personal tragedy into a gift for the community? Well, today we're artstorming with artist Deb Todd Wheeler about Radio Silence, an audio walk that she created in Brookline's Lost Pond after the loss of her son Lucas. In this conversation, we're diving into how she uses art to navigate grief, honor memory, and find a way to heal alongside nature. It's a beautiful look at how even our darkest moments can lead us to deep connection. I am with Deb Todd Wheeler, and um I know of you because of your brother-in-law, Daniel, who has known about this project for a little while. We were waiting for season two to kind of come on board so that I could talk to him about his artwork. And in the process of talking to him about his artwork, he told me about your amazing project. So, first let me open by saying my deepest condolences for the loss of your son, which is the inspiration for your work. And from there on, I'm gonna let you take the mic and tell all of our listeners what is the project, how was it inspired, your whole story?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Wow. Well, uh, thank you for inviting me on. So lovely. And for Dan for recommending. My project is called Radio Silence, and it is an audio walk, a geolocated audio walk located in the Lost Pond outside of Boston Mass in Brookline. And let's see how to begin.

Lucas’s Passing And The First Shrine

SPEAKER_01 3:07

Well, just parenthetically, I have family in Brookline, and so yeah, and so what you don't know is that this summer I almost pounced on you because I was doing an East Coast trip to visit relatives and some of my uh cousins who are in Brookline, and it was an end-of-life situation with one of my cousins there, and I had to debate whether I was gonna come up, try to find you, and have our conversation face to face, and maybe even walk Lost Pond so that I could really have the whole thing come alive for me. But I had the puppy in tow, and so it it just got it got nicked. But anyway, so you're in Brookline and start at the beginning.

Compounded Loss And Survival

Birth Of Radio Silence

SPEAKER_00 3:46

It's I was listening to you talk about your own story and the sort of shock of having to jump into uh dealing with sudden death and not knowing where to begin. And Lucas, my son, he wa he died at 18 years old. He died in his sleep of nothing. His heart stopped and he just didn't wake up. That can happen. And so you can imagine the or maybe don't imagine what that might be like. It's terrible. Lucas died, and four or five days later, we right away did a celebration of life when we got a bagpipe guy, and like everyone that we knew. It was so shocking, it's so shocking. It's still so shocking. Everyone who knew Lucas, who knew us, who friends of friends just like came together, and I had called my old assistant, Alison Leighton, who lives in Brooklyn, and she had started a floral business. And I called her like the next day and was like, Can you just load a truck with everything you can find and come up and bring as many flowers as you can and just make something completely magical? And so she and all of my like old students from Mass Art or Mass College of Art, where I taught for many years, and friends worked through the night to make the church, the local church who was letting us set up, make these incredible flowers. It was very beautiful. And the reason I'm talking about the flowers is because those were the day after we had so many flowers, we didn't really know what to do with them. And so I knew of a place in the lost pond that we could um make sort of a shrine with all like more flowers than you can imagine. And that was a place that we returned to over and over again. And I'm not sure how much of this backstory to go into, but like 11 months after that's my dog, 11 months after Lucas died, my brother Rob, who was like my collaborator, my close, closest oldest, he's 18 months older than me. He's a filmmaker, and he took his life. And um after being persecuted by the college he was working for in a ridiculous, I'm not gonna go into it because I'll catch on fire talking about it, in a ridiculous scandal. And that same day my husband found out Rob went missing. My husband Andrew found out he had cancer, and yeah, and then a third thing, and it was like August from Hell, and we searched for Rob for three days, and the whole community. Anyway, so that is the shock that begins my project of being in cancer spouse mode. My son Eli, who was 15 at the time, trying to figure out how to make sure he didn't go mad over the the assault of bad news and loss. And Rob and I had been making music in a band, Lenny Collective, for many years. I said, well, for a few years at the time, and I had written a bunch of songs, and my friend from the band, Terence Reeves, who was everyone was so distraught that Rob had taken his life, asked what we could how we could possibly go forward living. And one of the things we decided to do was record the songs. And we felt like since Rob played bass, that his bass lines still lived in our memories, and that we could just put our minds to to to doing that. And yeah, so I was in that space of trying to move. Keep moving, keep going to appointments, cancer appointments, treatments, blah, blah, blah, recording, Eli to school, all of the things that a mom is like, you know, the juggles while in absolute shock. So I have like two sudden deaths and a good cancer. Um, and Andrew Parentheses is fine. He's good, he's in sweetly healthy now. And Eli, I will jump ahead to my son Eli, who's in senior at University of Vermont in social work, concentrating on he works in hospice, is um, he's a social worker working on bereavement. So his his journey has led him into his life work. And so that those two things are, along with the artwork that has emerged from the trauma of that, those are some of the sort of roses and the thorns. So let me tell you a little bit about Radio Silence, which is the project I led for five years in the lost pond. And it began with a course I took online at the time called Vulture Courting the Otherwise in a Time of Breakdown, which a friend it caught a friend of mine's eye. And we were like, that's a great title. Vulture Courting the Otherwise in the Time of Breakdown. I'm in a time of breakdown. I'm courting the otherwise, uh, and I'm picking through the bones, the dead right now. Terrible. It's it was a course that was online, is it before way before the pandemic? And and it was a global community, and we met, and one of the one of the ways forward in the class was they asked us to pick a non-human site partner. And I thought, oh my gosh, I'm gonna pick Lost Pond. I'm gonna, and they're like, go there, return there, return there. So I'm recording the music, I'm going to Lost Pond, and jump ahead to lots of returning, lots of recording, lots of thinking, recording the site, recording sounds at the site. And one of the things I discovered while I was at Lost Pond was that it is a site of reclamation. It was a super fun site. It wasn't like the old town dump that had been adjacent to it. And so a whole section of it. I'm gonna back up now. This is not gonna make any sense. But the morning that Lucas died, the day after, actually, we went into these woods at Lost Pond. So it's a before his funeral. So if I was gonna do this interview thoughtfully, I would have started here.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Oh no, no, it's it's totally fine to go. I'm following it, Pond. Don't don't even give it a stuff.

Songs, Geolocation, And The Walk

The Shrine’s Living Community

SPEAKER_00 10:52

I would start here because it's and if you read, so the radio silence uh audio walk, I wrote uh made up into all of the walks, into a book of walks, and it begins at this point, which is that we arrive, family arrives into the woods in a stupor of shock, and the lost pond woods were being uh cut down. This whole section of the woods were being remediated. We didn't know why at the time, but it was like not Lucas is dead, and the forest is gonna is being raised. And so we're like screaming, what is happening? Why are you raising this forward? Like the world is ending and I'm in our little backyard. And it was so audio-wise, it was so shocking, it was so screaming trees, and you know, this whole giant area. Well, it was like the earth expressing your own shock and drama. Exactly. Yeah, like it's just like I'm I'm being cut down on my knees. We all are, yeah. So, what the point of that is that when I had this thought that I would take the um songs that we were working on and I would geolocate them in the lost pond. And so we began with a song called Gone, where you're walking up this road and the lyrics to the song, and these were songs written before anyone died, and they were written in a very different thing in mind. But the lyric is if what you know is gone, if what you love is gone, if what you fear is gone. And the idea was like, oh, well, like what's holding you back? If you got rid of that, what would be left? What would you do? And then but that's not what and so, but in this case, once it once the song was finished, we recorded it in the after. So a lot of the sounds are sounds recorded in the space in the lost pond, and they're layered into the music with the rhythm, and you're walking and hearing sounds from before or sounds from another time and sounds of the song and sounds of now, and you enter into the lost pond through this road. And so I geolocated all the songs through the paths, and what that means is if you you have an app, and if you have your app on your phone, which I send you ahead of time, as you're walking, the songs start in your ear. And we walk and hear a song and sounds, and then stop and talk for a little bit, and that happens seven times with seven songs in the cycle. And the peak song is called Bear Hunt, and I'll send it to you, be like, and that is the song that you hear as you approach Lucas's shrine in the woods, which is this beautiful, like covered in flowers and mementos and all sorts of things that people have given. And and we stay at the Lost Pond, if you go in the audio. We stay, I mean, so we stay at the shrine, at Lucas' shrine, for a good amount of time and have a conversation. It's sort of the peak, one of the peak, two peak moments of the walk. And so I finished it, and then I offered it to some friends. And then over time, those are five years, the pandemic hit, and then it there was a really a conversation around grief happening around me, around like the loss of community, the you know, these larger stories of grief that was everything that was being sort of pulled down, dismantled, questioned. And so I found myself doing the walk, you know, one or two people at a time, a couple hundred people, um, a lot of students who were in school and feeling very lonely. Because it was an outdoor thing, it was like, yeah, because it was an outdoor thing, it was safe to do. And it was for me, it was a way to process the what they what Francis Weller calls the five gates of grief, which are you familiar with Francis's work? You know, the to be in witness to not only the the loss of community, but the other many, many losses happening that would emerge through these conversations. And one of the things that was very beautiful and still remains beautiful to me is that when we come down the hill after this song called Plea, we come down this hill and we enter into what is called, and I call it the clearing. And that is the place that was raised when Lucas was died. And when you walk into the clearing, the song has ended, and you walk into the clearing, and everything growing is as old as he is gone, and so it's a space of deep regrowth. So all the trees, all of the grasses, everything growing there is the shape and size of the space between now and when he died. And that I give look back at now the raising as this enormous gift. So I go in there and I just lie on a giant rock, just take it in. Yeah, so the book of walks is assembled geographically. So when you read it, it's like one walk around with one walk around the site through time. So I'll talk a little bit about different converse bits of different conversations and questions that happened along the way of different people. That's my synopsis.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

Holy cow. I mean, I remember reading, I guess I first visited this story. It was a couple of maybe a couple of years ago. And one of the things that I also remember being really struck by was that after you moved the flowers to the shrine area, that people continued to contribute to that so that it stayed a living memorial for quite some time, or maybe even till the present. I obviously the the field that that the clearing is nature's tribute to your son, but there was a community tribute to your son that kept on going too. Say a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_00 17:34

Yeah, I, friends and strangers, I would say until this year, we let it pretty much go. It's very gray right now. But until for so for seven years, it was incredibly vibrant. It would never, it would sort of, there would be, it would get a little gray, and then it would be like built up again by something come someone coming by with something. And the there was one, there's one audio walk I was doing with a college student, and we were coming towards the shrine, and I said to her, We gotta hurry because I hear, I hear a lot of children coming behind us. I don't know what it is, but I heard like playing, and the woods are pretty, very empty. It's not called the lost pond for no reason. It's a very confusing set of trails. It's tiny, but it's like you can get lost. But I heard a lot of kids behind us, and I was like, we gotta move. I want us to get into the shrine before whatever is coming behind us, the wall of kid sounds, the screaming comes. So we enter, we grab our earbuds in, we enter into the shrine, the song is going, the lyric is, I'm not trying to break your heart, and you're not trying to break my heart. And we're listening to it, it's like around and around, and then all of a sudden the song is going round and around, and all of a sudden it must have been a hundred kids, like nine-year-olds. They come around us like, and they're around the shrine, they're running around, they're really out of control. And I take my earbuds out and I'm like, hey. And they're like, Do you know the boy in the woods? And I was like, I'm the mom of the boy in the woods. And so they had their own mythology around what who he was, because there's a little picture of him in there and like why he was there. And I realized that there's this whole other life of imaginings of people encountering this space of commemoration. It's not just Lucas, it's like other people who want to come and just be in that in that zone of of commemoration. So it's it ended up being a very, for me, just like not just for me, like a sacred place for for those who stumbled upon it. Because if you see pictures of it, it's like it's big, it's beautiful. So the last, yeah, the last big color of it was his, he died on 9-11, which is also so good lord. I know. I love that it, I love that date because it's like, yep, the whole everyone is like, it's a day of remembrance. And I'm like, yeah, personal and global. So so we get to take a pause in that and re and re-ignite the color in in the shrine. Yeah.

From Private Ritual To Public Practice

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Well, please send me some photographs, your whatever you feel best represents uh various different stages of that living memorial, because that would be a wonderful thing to add to this podcast. Well, I I'm kind of speechless because the number of layers to this is so profound on so many levels that it almost sounds like it was, I don't know, this divine, I don't know, event that your son Lucas was the catalyst for. And to be the person who then ushered that tragedy into this incredibly multi-layered blessing for the community, for the world, as a a model for a way to do this for other people. I it's just there, there's so many beautiful qualities to it. It's really profound. Have you have other people approached you about how to do a walk of grief or a memorial project of this magnitude in other regions of the country?

No Sleeping: Bedrooms, Light, Preservation

SPEAKER_00 21:26

Um, no. No, I think I think I've well, maybe I've been asked, and and um I wouldn't, I don't know. I think I push people to read the book um and see only because it's got all the good questions and all of the its own sort of not instructions, but it exists as this own ritual where you can experience the space and the community of it outside of Lost Pond. But yeah, I don't know how I I don't know. I'm moving into I I guess it's a moment for me having moved into another project where I've been putting my head up a little bit from my own experience, lifting my head and looking out at I guess I'm looking I'm looking up looking for kinship in the cultural conversation around. Preservation and which I feel like when I was listening to your other episodes or your first episode of this season, really thinking about what that means in terms of legacy and objects and um and how to align with the very urgent cultural conversation right now around the destruction of literal structures and institutions. And there's a lot of I feel like there's a lot of destruction happening. And I'm interested in the people, those people who are connected to the longer conversation of preservation. And in this way, the way the role audio has in such a thing is interesting to me. And yeah, so I I love working with people on trying to help them develop rituals of their own. That is something that I do offer grief rituals and have done that in community to take people on a sort of uh, you know, more metaphoric 90-minute walk through Lost Pond together, away from the space. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Wow, there are just so many things. So in our first, I think it was our first episode, Elizabeth Fergus Jean, who is in uh Michigan, and she creates these labyrinth walks that a very mindful kind of parallel to some of the things that you're doing. But what's fascinating to me that I did not expect was that there would be such an environmental thread through every single one of these episodes. There seems to be a tie-in to and a major metaphor about the legacy of the earth and how we are becoming stewards and what our choices are around that. And so this is it's another perfect tie-in, what you're saying. And I love this idea of um that you're supporting people to create rituals. I mean, you're certainly in a wonderful position to do that, and it's something that we need. And these rituals around the earth and preservation is exactly in alignment with what the conversations that I'm trying to provoke and evoke here in this. So it's so perfect that you're doing this. And parenthetically, we're gonna have a um, you may have noticed this in in some of the materials, but we're creating a virtual exhibition space called Remains to be seen that will be the accompaniment to this podcast where we can have memorial arts objects and projects that we can bring people to in virtual time anyway. So I'm hoping that Lost Pond or the Book Walks can be a part of that exhibition. Yes, indeed. And uh that would be a beautiful way to integrate this conversation into that that. And then we also have a project that we're talking about that is about rewilding golf courses into memorial arts spaces. And I feel like that would be a really wonderful way for us to collaborate and take your project a little bit farther. So we will be talking about that.

SPEAKER_00 26:00

That I love that.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

So tell me the project that you're working on now, how is it manifesting and and what are some of the really interesting things that are coming from it now?

Intimate Audiences And Shared Presence

SPEAKER_00 26:12

It's so convoluted, it might be another whole other conversation. But I started taking pictures of the light in Lucas's bedroom. He has one window, and the light comes in at a certain time of day and makes these incredible sort of shadows and working with a pinhole camera, which is like a box with a hole. And I wrote a piece with video of pictures of other bedrooms that are being preserved, like George Washington slept here, but like um all historic bedrooms from across time, new sites that have been added to the National Register as important sites where people slept. And I'm doing this with my hands. One image dissolves into the next. It's a video of many bedrooms dissolving, dissolving. And I wrote a thought piece around this question about the preservers, those who those of us who who preserve and and sleep and dreaming in bedrooms where no one is sleeping, and you know, Edison's quest to banish darkness from our lives with the and his um bias against sleepers. He wasn't a big sleeper. It's a thought piece around um around lots of different topics around that. And I collaborate with uh an artist named Sumerad. We approached these historic house museums to see if we could perform the piece together in their homes. And so it's that is so cool.

SPEAKER_01 27:43

I have to ask you, is Emily Dickinson's I went to school in the Amherst area. Oh, you didn't I just I kept envisioning uh Emily Dickinson's bedroom as you were describing that.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

Yeah, well, we're we only only want to work really locally because it's a lot of moving parts to do this. So we're in the Boston area and just sort of trying to stay local. We would love to go afar, but it's like a whole other thing.

SPEAKER_01 28:05

Well it's funny for me for you to say that Amherst is afar when we're out here in New Mexico.

Measuring Impact Without Metrics

SPEAKER_00 28:10

That seems like that's like right next door, but I totally get Yeah, well we're we are we are like filthy with old houses here. Um so we the last one we did was at the Gropius House in Lincoln, which is a a treasure, a modernist treasure, that is, you know, was built in 1938 by Walter Gropius, who's like escaping Nazi Germany, which is like perfect timing for us to be in there in that house performing this piece. And it like super touching. We try to get the audiences very I'm interested in intimate audiences. The radio silence audio walk is a very intimate audience, just over time. Many, many people got to see but or experience, but I really like the um the connectiveness of of that tight awareness of who is listening, who is there. And so our audience size for those houses is like between nine and 15 people at a time, come through and we give them food and we like uh help them. What happens when they arrive is they they get to handle some objects that the house has allowed us to touch, and we do these things with them with light, and then we we get the audience to be taking these sort of video pictures of the bedroom. And so by the time I start talking about taking pictures of the bedroom in Lucas's room, they also have just finished taking these images. And so we're sitting together, having done something that is like, I'm doing it, you're doing it, we are doing it. And um, and so Sue and I work in concert to make this thing happen for people that is very edited in action and word, but it is around light, commemoration, preservation, and objects and the sort of like second lives of objects or the persistence of objects through the generations that have been that have been held aside. And so when I was reading your your plan, your exit, your artful exit, the talisman, and I was I was brought to this moment where when we when we're working with a house, the first question is like, is there anything in this house that you will let us touch? And the answer is always no. And so, but then when we're asking further, it's like, is anything getting dusted? Yes. What are you using to dust it? Oh, this brush. Can I touch that? Yes. And then they realize like, we're not talking about so much the things preserved as the tools of the preserver. And what are you using to keep these, to keep everything else kind of still vibrant and not covered in dust? One of the elements of the project is things is dust and light. Um, that's a super convoluted project. People can sign up to join an audience on my website, which I'll put a link to, but it's it's a very small group of people who can who can fit. And we'll we'll be in residence this year at the Forbes House Museum in Milton, Milton Mass. And that's a that's a beautiful house. We had a we did our we did something there this 2025. So we're looking forward to digging in in 2026 to to offer more.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

And what's the invitation for the participants? You know, once they've had this experience, what are what's the invitation for them to do with that experience?

SPEAKER_00 31:31

We're still working on that. That something happens in there. It we know that something gets communicated around the the darkness, the light, the things that are living in us that need maybe to move a little bit. And um we're hoping that that things just shift a little bit in in um in welcoming the conversation around loss processing. It is a big conversation around loss processing. And so that is one that you I feel like you you don't want to hit directly, you just want to create like a little container for it to move. And lost pond is that container, you could just go through and not say a word and just be listening and something maybe will shift after. And it no sleeping, same. You go through the whole thing, you might not say you the audience doesn't say a word until the very end if they want to, but it's that container for for processing gets ignited a little bit.

Access, Change, And Environmental Threads

SPEAKER_01 32:34

Well, I I relate so much to both of these initiatives because so much of what happens in our culture is we do something to for a direct impact or you know, that some somehow has an exchange. And what you're doing and what we're trying to do are plant these seeds and just create these, this fertile ground, literally, for something new to be brought forth. And that something new has a gestation period, and you can't force it and you can't predict it. But what's what's challenging about it is that you know, you you sort of let this thing go free, and then you have to, I guess it's like raising children, you just have to, you just have to let it go and trust that the butterfly effect will have its way. It's so interesting. So many of the people that I've interviewed in this season are stewards of that kind of project. And they didn't set out to do that, but it's just the result of when you realize that that what we need to do is create a vessel for this experience and then leave it alone. It's so hard in our controlling mindsets.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah, what are the evaluation metrics for such exactly?

SPEAKER_01 33:52

And as a teacher or whatever, I mean, like we all, I mean, even if we're all a nonprofit organization, you know, it's like to get the money, they want the metrics. And how do you measure these things? Yeah, and incredible qualitative experiences.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Yeah, and I think I chose to do it wrestled a long time with writing the book of walks. I knew I wanted to write it. I didn't know whether I didn't know if I wanted to share it. And I'm curious about that in terms of you know, your other guests, but there's one thing to do these loss processing projects that are highly personal. And a lot of it is my it's my own loss processing I'm inviting others into in a very stoic way, frankly. But I'm not sure the value of sharing. Will you put something out into the world? You have no idea how it will be received. It could be received well, it could be ignored, it could be somebody be like, that's garbage. And you really want to have a thing that you really, really, really care about dismissed. I mean, you really can't care, I guess. A and I mean who doesn't care, but but that part of sharing is its own art form. And so in no sleep, so that was how I shared the work at Lost Pot is through the book, which I think is a beautiful experience of reading. I do think that. And um and the No Sleeping Project, we're working this year. Sue and I are working to uh figure out how to share it in a way that is more immersive, maybe artist talk or um something where the work gets shared outside of the tiny container because we're we're super aware of the the limitations. We don't take any pictures in there when it's happening. We don't want anybody to feel like they're part of like a you know, a guinea pig or something. That's like this thing is happening, it's super, it's super effective and and and then we we're done. We leave, we close up, we put our things away and and um and uh thank the house and thank the people and and to the next. And so how you know, so we're thinking right now, like, how do you what is sharing? What does it look like?

New Moon Swim And Ritual Design

SPEAKER_01 36:07

What's well it's interesting that you went from a from a an exterior situation with the book of walks, where it's a self-guided thing. So anybody can walk through that space, they had their own experience, you've created uh, you know, a virtual and augmented experience for them. The bedroom project is much more contained. And so thanks to the video pro aspect of that project or whatever you, you know, that can be shared with a larger audience for people to have their own private experience with what you've given them. But I've I think it's so interesting that you have these two very different ways of access and entry points, you know. And is there any way for you to measure how many people have gone through the lost wood?

SPEAKER_00 36:53

Well, I I personally guided like my logbook has 260 people. I think I personally guided, and then other people do it because the code is there, and I that I have no idea. And yeah, I don't know. And I love that it maybe carries on. This the I don't like guiding it any stopped guiding it when Brookline paved over the roots of the moss, and I can show you these beautiful pictures of what it was like when we would walk through the mossy roots of the bog. And the song was this is the song called Surge, and it was written sort of in a way that or recorded in a way that would encourage the sort of tempo, and then there accessibility issues, which I totally understand for people to go through the bog, the city then felt like they had to fill it in. And so now once it got filled in, I was the magic was gone for me. So that's the that I know. I was like, now we're just walking. We were walking before, like in our like step and step and step and watch where you step. And it's like caretaking, and then now it's like you just walk.

SPEAKER_01 38:08

So that so it's when that happened, the magic just well, it's so wild too, because you probably never in your wildest imagination thought that you were starting an environmental advocacy project. But you know, the what you did, and and so I'm very I'm now curious to know like how did the city or the you know the powers that be respond to this project? Suddenly you brought attention to an um a maybe neglected part or not as well known part of your neighborhood, and now all of a sudden it's become a focal point, and people are being drawn there. And so did did the city acknowledge this project if in any official way?

Music, All Play, And Safe Stages

SPEAKER_00 38:46

No, it doesn't. There's nothing like there to acknowledge. The shrine is in the Kennard Woods, where um that has like a beautiful group that has allowed us to be there. Um, but the lost you wouldn't know that this is happening. People are just going through walks, they have earbuds in, you wouldn't know. And it's not something that I advertise. Yeah, I don't, if you can't tell, I'm not a big sharer. I do these projects, they're super involved. They're and then when it comes to sharing, it's a um, yeah, it's a lift. And I'm not sure I'm not sure about the wide audience.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

Yeah, well, I'm curious that m people haven't taken it upon themselves after being moved by the experience to share it. You know, the word of mouth can be a very popular way to share something. And I guess that everybody has just had such a private experience that they have kept it for themselves, which is kind of beautiful, really.

SPEAKER_00 39:47

It's beautiful. And it's it is, I mean, it also is like very much the Boston art community, which is very open, specific, but like through word of mouth, through the artists are willing to do something like that. But you know, that most of the artists in the area that I know, like, oh my God, I, you know, what are you doing? We all want to know what each other is doing. And so within that community, there's good word of mouth. But then beyond that, yeah, I don't know. I yeah the value of these things are so that's so it's so private and so personal. And I think about that with everybody who's who's dealing with with loss and the objects that are left behind and the the unsaid words and the all of the things that need to somehow find a way to cycle through. And yeah, I I would hope that from just watching someone do do it in whatever idiosyncratic way they do it, um, that it would invite people to make your own, find your own thing to to do that that can live in the world and and move the loss through you.

SPEAKER_01 40:59

Yeah, that's so beautiful. And so Lucas has inspired two major projects. Does is there another one on the horizon?

SPEAKER_00 41:06

There there's always another one on the horizon. There's always some convoluted thing boot blooming. Over the course of the last few years, I guess six years, we've been working on this project called New Moon Swim. And it's rituals for uh the new moon to invite sort of beauty in the darkness. And it's a co-created endeavor with um a group of women who every new moon, a different woman over the last six years created a different ritual to address a different part of uh shadow work. And so the new moons we're working on, the new moon swim, trying to figure out how to share those incredible rituals that are that are like I can't even describe, they're so gorgeous. So yeah, so that that's a book that's we're working on.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

So figure out so would somebody from outside of the your immediate locale be able to participate in that? Is that something that has roots or or tendrils? We just ended up and I come.

SPEAKER_00 42:04

I want to come to come now. I what I really want, so we're trying to figure out in the again the same thing. Like we're gonna share these things. And we finished our last season. We do a it was like a um a cycle. So it starts in September, ends in June. We did six cycles, and then I ended the whole thing because it felt like time. So it like, and then we'll if we restart, we want to restart with the um the intention of you know um being able to share wider. And yeah, so we want to we want to be able to understand who is that okay, good. You want to come? Let's go. Yeah, we can't. I mean, are you kidding the brain on this one?

SPEAKER_01 42:47

Are you kidding out in Santa Fe? I mean, you have the entire outside of Sailor Mass, the which universe. Yeah, on the right. That would be really that would be really fun.

Provisional Communities And Courage

SPEAKER_00 43:00

But are you are you still doing music? Uh yeah, that's a big part of my life. This is a side conversation, but when we think about music, I think a lot about Rob. I've written a whole um album post Rob, post-Lucas album, that I'm practicing now to figure out how to share. And um I love those songs. These are the songs of sort of emergence, and um yeah, so that that's one thing. And then the second thing, which is I feel like my legacy, if I was gonna die, my legacy will be in music in a certain way, and I'll tell you what it is. That would be that hold on a second. Okay, so I was raised by two musicians. My parents met on the set of Penn State of Guys and Dolls. My mom was the accompanist and my dad was the musical director.

SPEAKER_01 43:59

So I have just have to interject that my parents both uh were players in Guys and Dolls. So growing up the whole the whole musical school. My dad was Sky Masterson, and my mom was a hotbox girl.

Creativity Toolkits And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 44:13

It's so cute. All I really need is this girl. Um, yeah, so cool. Yeah, my dad was like a very accomplished jazz musician and businessman, and my mom is 87 and she has an 18-piece jazz band. And in um Guilford, Connecticut, if anybody in Kennecket wants to hire a band, go to Tuxedo Junction, sounds a swing. But for me, like it I never really felt I knew I had music in my body, but I didn't have access to picking up an instrument, making it, being conf confident. But my dad passed away in two thousand four, and then My son Eli broke his collarbone. And I was like, I guess I'm gonna pick up a ukulele. And so I started, I was like, who can be judgy about somebody with a ukulele? And so um I started like just learning the ukulele and then cut to the whatever 2015. Um we like played Iceland airwaves um off venue um with our band, so fun, to learn how to like play an instrument, play a couple instruments, write songs, just keep going, have great friends who are like, we'll help you. You know, my brother is so good, he was so talented. But what I offered in the in my learning was I realized that one of the things that I felt uncomfortable about in in being a learner is being looked at and evaluated before you were ready, but still needing to like practice. And so I started this thing called the All Play. And the All Play started here in my house. I don't have a big house, but we turned it into a stage, and the only people who are allowed to come are people who are gonna play or play together or make a little band, and we pick a theme. You know, the first theme we did was we wanted the kids to know Abbey Road, and so we were like, we're gonna play Abbey Road from the beginning and have dinner. Side A, have dinner, then play side B. And then so everybody like picked one of the songs in groups and learned it, and then we played it out. And then we from there we had like a glam jam. It was all hair bands and the Van Jam, all Van Morrison, and then all different things. And so it's been so many years, and they're actually our friends in Charlottesville started a uh their own All Play. It's our first like franchise of AllPlay, but but for me, one of the things that I wanted to share in that is that that the audience has a job, and it's not to be judgy. The job is to hold the space for the person to do the thing they want to do. And so, uh, so that's the vibe of the, and I think that's like part of my teaching philosophy too. It's it's just like I I want permission, I want love, and I I want somebody to just flourish and feel like they can try and be like ridiculous and bring their best self forward. And so in the all play, the safety of the all-play is is in that no one is there with what that is not putting themselves sort of at risk. So um it sounds horrible, but it's the greatest thing of all time.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

It doesn't sound horrible at all. In fact, again, it sounds like the most exportable to Santa Fe project.

SPEAKER_00 47:40

Yeah, you want to do an all-play Santa Fe, I will help you do that. I you I mean you just need to come visit me. I would like to come off.

SPEAKER_01 47:48

So I mean, I started these art of these art of conversation dinners, which are sort of, you know, trying a little bit of the same thing, try to more of a deep dive into a particular topic. And I invite strangers so that, you know, we can really go deep fast. You would think you couldn't with strangers, but somehow it's easier with strangers than with friends. And it's the same idea, you know, it's you you're you come being committed to be an audience member and hold the space for this conversation, and that the hope is that everybody will spin off and host their own art of conversation, but an all-play man. Oh my god. Boy, could we have fun with that?

SPEAKER_00 48:25

Yeah. I think it's the one of the things that you can do intergenerationally and all levels. So in every like cluster that you need to have like one person who can hold it down, either like a young person who's learning or an adult learner, and you make these groups so that the song is enjoyable for everyone and makes the person learning feel like, oh my God, I'm in something that's like better than I could do alone. But those art of though, I I agree with you, these provisional communities, which is like my specialty, the provisional community, people can hold information for each other and share things in those communities that might worry their families, you know, if they said. But like, um, I, you know, especially in loss processing, you come together and it's like, I'm dealing with this, I'm trying to figure it out, and you just want to say it. You just want to like get it out or like just share it in a way that isn't gonna drag after you. And I I find there's such beauty in those intersections. And hopefully they, like you said, they spin off and um make their own shapes, and people see that there's such beauty in conversation with strangers and in the humanity of people, in the possible humanity. Um Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 49:40

Well, and it requires such courage. And that's the thing that both of these our projects have in common is that the courage that it takes to show up for one of these events, take a chance, be vulnerable, be open. And oftentimes it's the it's there's some somebody else ends up saying the thing that you've been afraid to say, and then all of a sudden, permission is just blossoms. And it's just such a beautiful thing to behold. And it's so hard to describe to other people. Like I, as I've been trying to garner support around this or get other people to participate, not people are happy to come to my house for dinner, that's not the issue, but to to take the initiative to sponsor their own. They think, oh, well, I'm not sure if I know how to do it. So we're we're trying to come up with devices like conversation cards and conversation prompts. I at the last event I had under everybody's plate, we had a strip of paper, a fortune cookie kind of thing. And everybody got a chance to read theirs, which was a thought-provoking idea. Some of them were humorous, some of them were very serious. And I didn't want to put anybody on the spot that they had to answer the question that was underneath them, because some of them are, you know, very rhetorical questions. But what was amazing to watch is that we all read them at the sort of at the beginning of the dinner. And by the end of dinner, in some way, shape, or form, every topic had been somewhat touched upon organically through the conversation. I'm right. You know, it's it's kind of like the the the what do you call it, the conversational version of um improvisational music. You know, it just kind of happened and and it was just it's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

That sounds like this you were saying planting the seeds. It just putting a little bit out that somebody's gonna go in the back of their mind and later on in the evening it'll be like, actually, um that that actually grew into my into some kind of conversational thing. The there was a moment when I first wrote the thing with the bedrooms, I shared it on Zoom with people and I was like, I just want to share you this thing that I wrote, and it's moving and in Zoom, it's it's so one-on-one, and it's just just a listening-watching experience. And I shared it with a a friend from many who lives in Minneapolis, and he and I said, you know, I'm gonna share this with you, but then I think I'm just gonna put it away because I just don't see how I can share it in the world. I just don't see. I can't envision it. And I shared with him, and then he said, you know, I think what you need to do is bring the spirit of the all-play to this bedroom project. He's like, I don't know what I mean by that, but there's some he's like, I think you need to share it in a way that is supported in the way that you're talking about all play. So I love that no sleeping comes from all play energy, and all play energy is a little wild, and no sleeping is not at all wild, but what it does do is ask the audience to be we and we is a a shape, a provisional shape and an attitude, and it's this idea of a temporary connection that you're not a passive observer, that your presence is actually required, not as um not removed, but forward, yeah, and and I feel like in this moment in time, there's so much passive engagement in things, like you know, like ah, all these things are going on, and you're in it behind a screen or behind a paywall or a I don't know, everything there's a passivity in um there's in play.

SPEAKER_01 53:18

And totally get that. Yeah, I mean, because that's exactly this um the immersive quality of both of these things and getting people face to face and part of the whole engagement. There should be like a whole new art form that is that is these things. It's a tip a very specific kind of immersive engagement, yeah, that in that requires people to show up in a way that I it's creative, it's inherently creative because you have to generate, you have to be generative. And I think it's it's a really important invitation for people right now.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

It it is, and I and I can see why somebody wouldn't wouldn't want because it's asking, it's asking a step forward into discomfort. And one of one of the crises of our moment is that discomfort is seen as something to reject, but actually spaces of discomfort is where a lot of action and healing happen. And stepping into discomfort, getting used to that discomfort and getting be able to speak to it, reach your hand out across through it, and and let it be something that you just inhabit your body and not run away from. That's it feels like this moment is asking for that. And so I guess what I'm trying to do is through these through these um audience engagements, re evaluate that word audience.

Closing And Support Appeal

SPEAKER_01 54:51

That's beautiful. And so one of the things that I think we we may have already sent it to you, but it's going to be part, it'll come to you after this. We're asking you to fill out a questionnaire that involves your answers to which will become part of a creativity toolkit that we're putting together for our Substack community. And what one of the new initiatives that we're starting in February is a Substack Live. And so we'll take, we'll extract from our various guest questionnaires exercises that they do use in their practices to kind of engage their own the muse or their own thought process, whatever it is. And we're going to be offering these as a Substack Live. So people will be able to come in, interrupt. We're thinking of it in the same way that you go to the gym or you go to have a spiritual practice. This will be your creativity practice that you can come to as a at a designated time every month, be in community with people, and practice these exercises that we will be offering in a group setting. So when you fill out your creativity toolkit questionnaire, if you'll keep that in mind as a, you know, what we could use for a Substack Live exercise. And then we'll and by all means make it integrated into the projects that you're already doing, what you've gleaned from those. But this is obviously something that we you and I both have an interest in. And so let's see what let's dance, let's see what we can do. I love it. Yeah, that's so perfect. Well, let's just end it there. And I feel like you and I have many more conversations. Oh my God. I had less.

SPEAKER_00 56:29

I'm so glad to know you and what you're doing. It's such important work.

SPEAKER_01 56:33

Thank you back at you. And I feel like I I have a feeling because Daniel and I had an absolute immediate, he's a great friend of my sister's. And when I met him, it was an immediate connection too. And and so I can't wait to give him a big hug and thank him for introducing me to you. And I can't wait to meet you in person. And same big hug. Same. I love that. Thanks for joining us today. Look for us on your favorite podcast platforms or wherever you listen. Your subscriptions, likes, comments, and shares help us to reach more listeners and attract the support we need to thrive in these challenging times. If you love what you hear, please consider making a contribution. We rely on your help to keep these conversations going. Every dollar you contribute goes directly into programs that support our mission. And we've been offered a matching grant that will match every dollar that you contribute. That means more compelling stories, more in depth articles, and an even greater impact on our community. Please visit our website at www.artbridgenm.org and thank you so much for being an essential part of our work.