Author, professor finds magic putting ink to paper

Emily Ruskovich may have been a shy student in school, but she, like many other writers, learned early on that she could find her voice through pen and paper.

In an interview with the Alturas Institute this month, Ruskovich, a novelist and professor of creative writing at Boise State University, recalled the exhilaration she felt the moment she learned, as a young girl, that she had the ability to capture her thoughts just by making “little ink marks on a page.”

Storytelling is something Ruskovich has always enjoyed, since she was about four years old. Today, those years of passion for writing have come to fruition in the form of her debut novel, “Idaho,” her writing reaping widespread acclaim from critics everywhere from the Idaho Statesman to the New York Times.

Inspired by her childhood growing up on Hoodoo Mountain in the Idaho Panhandle, Ruskovich's "Idaho" has been described as a story of love, violence, forgiveness and mystery. It became a shortlisted finalist for the Dylan Thomas International Prize, as well as the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Best First Novel and the New York Library’s Young Lion’s Award.

Ruskovich said she has felt grateful to able to be able to share her voice with an ever-growing audience of readers across the country. Though the voice she shares sometimes comes through characters she creates, Ruskovich said fiction helps her to learn more about herself.

“I do find that through fiction, I am able to express parts of my real self,” Ruskovich said. “Sometimes I learn things about myself through the characters I create, and yes, this does make me grow as a person, to always be writing from a place of compassion.”

Ruskovich is an alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a prestigious, graduate-level creative writing program where she began her initial work on “Idaho.” Ruskovich said she was encouraged to keep writing and challenging herself by her instructors, writers she had admired long before she stepped foot into the program, including Marilynne Robinson, Michellen Huneven, Lan Samantha Chang and Ethan Canin.

Now with a published novel under her belt and another one on the way (she’s not giving away any details just yet, but continues to be inspired by her friends, family, and the landscapes of her childhood), Ruskovich has advice for young writers who may be struggling to find their own voices, or who fear they will not heard until they are published.

“My advice is to devote yourself whole-heartedly to your characters, to really pour your heart into your work, and to try not to think so much about publishing while you're still immersed in the story,” Ruskovich said. “Think instead about the people of your novel. Care for them. Learn from them. Love them for their own sakes. Though publishing a novel is truly amazing, I also feel that the work itself should be its own reward, its own pursuit,  worthy of your commitment and your labor because it is the thing you love.”

Asked about the emergence of fellow women’s voices across the country, Ruskovich said all women can feel a sense of empowerment and solidarity when those who have been silenced are able to come forward and hold others accountable. She believes it is especially important for girls to be taught from a young age to speak out “when things are not right.”

Now caring for a brand new daughter herself, Ruskovich said she hopes she can give her daughter the kind of childhood she had, “a childhood of imagination and kindness and the beauty of the natural world.”

For more information on Emily Ruskovich, visit http://www.emilyruskovich.com/.

Author of ‘Educated’ says finding her voice was ‘gradual’ process

Ask Tara Westover where she went to college, and you'll probably assume she'd been preparing for it since kindergarten.

She graduated magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008, received the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship award, earned an MPhil from Trinity College, was a visiting fellow at Harvard University and was awarded a Ph.D. in history from Cambridge University.

And yet, Westover spent her childhood growing up on a quiet mountain in rural Idaho, raised by zealous, survivalist parents in a strict version of the Mormon faith; fully believing, for a time, that she would never go to school.

And she did not - not until she was 17 years old, at the persuasion of her older brother. She entered college not knowing what the word “Holocaust” meant or what the Civil Rights Movement was, and for a while, shared her father’s paranoia of the evils of the government, the Illuminati and modern medicine.

Westover details all of this and more in her debut book, “Educated,” a memoir in which she examines the ways her lack of a formal education as a child impacted her life as a young adult.

In it, she tells of her father’s paranoia surrounding liberal infiltration of public schools, medicine and even the church-owned college she pursued. Rather than attend school like her peers, Westover stayed at home with her family, helping her mother concoct herbal remedies or assisting her father in the junkyard. But she could not shirk her own desire to attend school.

It was a situation that could stifle any child’s voice, and Though Westover eventually found hers, she said, in an interview with the Alturas Institute this month, that she is not sure exactly when that happened. To many people, she said, having a voice is about having both the standing to speak and the standing so others will listen.

“For many years we’ve had certain groups of people, including many, many women, who lacked that standing either in their own minds or in the minds of others, or both,” Westover said. “For those women, to find their voice means to reject the limitations that have been put on them by other people; it is also to reject the limitations that they have put on themselves by allowing others to define them.”

This last year has stretched Westover. Since the publication of “Educated” early this year, Westover’s account of the of the events of her childhood have been read by thousands of strangers. She has been acclaimed by critics from the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, gone on book tours across the country and was even featured in Vogue.

“I wrote a book, quietly, by myself, and suddenly people started listening to me,” Westover said. “No one was more shocked than I was.”

While her voice is finally heard in “Educated,” Westover said finding it was a gradual process. Part of that process is recounted in her memoir, in which she recalls being persuaded against her inner thoughts and desires by other members of her family. She also examines the ways in which her years-long subjection to her father’s strong opinions continued to shape her own understanding of the world, even after she left his house and became open to an education.

Before putting her story to paper, Westover found the details of her upbringing ugly, meaningless. “Educated” recounts numerous instances of abuse by family members, traumatic experiences, embarrassment, gaslighting and shame. Westover said she needed to turn the grisly details into something she could live with in the end.

“That was my whole aim,” Westover said. “It’s wonderful that others find value in it - that people are so profoundly capable of empathy that they can read a story about a stranger and find themselves in it - but when I was writing, I wrote for myself. Not so much to make sense of my life, but to try to make art out of it. To make it beautiful, even if some of the beauty was mournful.”

While the rest of her year is packed with upcoming book tours, Westover is already planning future projects. She has taken an interest in rural education, saying the topic could take up a large portion of her next year, possibly in the form of a writing or documentary project.

"I'd like to shed some light on it, try to bring the unique challenges facing rural kids more into the general consciousness," Westover said.

For more information on Tara Westover, visit https://tarawestover.com/.

BSU program director finds power in words

Ever since she was young, Elizabeth Gutting knew she wanted to be a writer.

She wasn't just good with words. ("Word" was and is her actual middle name, by the way, passed down to her by her grandmother, Virginia Word.) They became her way of expressing herself; of understanding the world around her.

As a child, Gutting said she felt empowered at the encouragement of her parents to speak her mind. She had her voice.

But as she got older, she found not everyone wanted to hear what she had to say. Finding her voice, Gutting said, would be an ongoing process throughout her life.

She remembers losing that voice for a time 10 years ago, while teaching English on a Fulbright fellowship in South Korea, in exchange for the valuable experience of learning to listen and take in the new and foreign world around her.

But it was while she was there, gaining new skills and experiences, that Gutting said she also found her voice, in a way. Knowing she wanted to continue writing, she made the decision to eventually move back to Washington, D.C., where she would earn her MFA in fiction at George Mason University.

“I knew I still had stories I wanted to tell,” Gutting said in an interview with the Alturas Institute this month.

From there, doors began to open that would guide Gutting to a successful career centered around writing. She joined the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, where she became the program’s director, and spent much of her time introducing D.C. public high school students and other audiences to real writers and authors.

Now the program coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at Boise State University, Gutting said being a part of the creative writing program has been one of the highlights of her career.

As a woman who has found success doing what she loves, Gutting recognizes how far women across America have come in finding their voices, while acknowledging how far they still have to go.

While she is grateful for the cultural shift that the #MeToo Movement has put into motion in the last couple of years, Gutting said some women’s voices are still elevated over the voices of other women who have not been heard in an active way, such as low-income immigrant women.

“Because I am among the group of women that society is actively listening to at this moment in time - I am white, educated, and in my mid-thirties - I am aware that I’m benefiting even more than many others,” Gutting said. “I think that just means that the women who are being heard need to help champion those who are still not being heard.”

As it stands, Gutting continues to hone her voice through writing, something she said she has never been able to not do. Her goals are to publish the novel she is currently working on, and to inspire her son to pursue his own passions when he grows older.

“I will say that since the birth of my son (he’s now two years old), I often think of the example I want to set for him,” Gutting said. “And I want him to see both of his parents doing what they love, and following their dreams, so that one day, he will do the same.”

Elizabeth Gutting is the MFA Program Director at Boise State University.

Public speaker, blogger seeks to improve the world for her daughter and others

Shortly after returning from maternity leave to her job at the firm, Jeanette Schneider, author, speaker, financial client advisor and blogger, was attempting to bridge the gap between work and caring for her newborn child when she experienced gender-based discrimination at the hands of a colleague.

“One of the first things our sales executive asked when I returned was my plan to make up all the revenue they lost while I was home with my daughter,” Schneider told the Alturas Institute in an interview this month. “I was tired of wearing the power suits and I wanted to be myself, not the version expected of me.”

It was a defining moment for Schneider; one that uncovered both an anger and sense of advocacy within her. When Schneider was later asked to be a go-to advisor to other women in the office who became pregnant, she was hesitant to do so, made reluctant by the lack of positive, real world advice she had to give.

“I remember telling one (advisor), ‘So basically, when you come back to the office, forget your baby,’” Schneider said. “‘You are not a mother when you are in the office. You have to trust your caregivers and just get your head right immediately.’ They were very sad conversations.”

A proud mother of one, Schneider said she sometimes grieves for the discrimination her own daughter might face in the future. Going through the motions yourself is one thing, Schneider said. Imagining your own child going through the same experiences, “You become a mama lion. You want to make it better.”

Though she did not know it at the time, Schneider’s negative experience returning from maternity leave would later become a catalyst for her founding of LORE Advocacy, an organization of women “who aspire to change the world through a gender lens.”

Founded on Valentine’s Day of 2015, LORE was a love letter to women, Schneider said. Her accompanying blog, LORE and Little Things, is a culmination of writings, advice and media geared toward women empowerment and advancement. Her new book, “LORE: Harnessing Your Past to Create Your Future,” comes out Sept. 15 and aims to help women transcend their self-imposed limitations.

“I had an idea and wanted to help women and girls,” Schneider said. “I simply continued to pull at the string and it always took me back to that experience (returning from maternity leave.) It was a big moment when I TRULY realized I wasn’t like the men at the table. I was a mom now. I was “other,” and it felt terrible.”

For Schneider, sheer data has been a mighty tool in her personal fight for women’s rights and equality. After facing gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace, and upon her firm’s investment in the gender lens movement, Schneider said she began discovering data, actual numbers, that both confirmed the wrongness of discrimination and harassment in the workplace and proved what she had known about women all along - that their presence in a company helps it perform better than a workplace that is not so diversified, a fact that has continued to be of interest to investors.

“I needed the data to back the feeling that the way things were going was wrong,” Schneider said. “Once I had numbers at hand and a little girl looking up at me asking me to make the world a better place for her - I had no choice.”

As women continue to find their voices and advance in the workplace, the movement will mean everything, not just for the daughters of the world, Schneider said, but for the global economy and social structures. Meanwhile, Schneider will continue working toward her goals of creating better messaging for women around the world and helping them to reclaim their voices.

"I am now surrounded by other strong women," Schneider said. "We seem to find one another. Finding my voice has given me permission to create a platform for other women to show up as their whole selves as well. It has truly right-sized my life and I live far more authentically and can go home each night knowing that this is the woman I want my daughter to see. This one. Not the one before her."

Schneider is a Senior Vice President and Institutional Client Advisor in the financial services industry. She is on the board for Spread the Word Nevada and the President’s Advisory Council for the Smith Center for the Performing Arts. She is a member of the Hall of Fame of the Women’s Chamber of Commerce of Nevada and a 2016 Vegas, Inc. Woman to Watch.

For more information on Jeanette Schneider or LORE, visit https://loreandlittlethings.com/.

Clinical Social Worker, Author Uses Her Voice to Help Others Find Theirs

Carole Geithner has always been fascinated by the ways in which people communicate - or don’t.

In an interview with the Alturas Institute, Geithner said it was with her family of origin, "where direct communication was rare and fraught," that her fascination with communication began.

Now with more than 20 years of clinical social work experience and a Dartmouth College education under her belt, Geithner uses her own voice to help others find theirs. She has spent her career helping children, teens and young adults learn to listen, communicate and cope with loss. Her debut young adult novel, "If Only," published in 2012, explores the complex emotions of a 13-year-old girl faced with tragedy - a story Geithner is all too familiar with.

Readers are introduced to the world of Corinna, a young girl struggling with the death of her mother as she also learns to face the everyday obstacles of being a teen. Though a work of fiction, "If Only" is shaped by Geithner's own painful experience as a young adult - losing her mother when Geithner was just 25, her mother treated at the hands of a doctor who, according to Geithner, "did not listen to his patient."

Since that time, Geithner has taken opportunities to teach communication skills to people of all ages, working as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at George Washington University, where she taught listening skills to medical students, and as a clinical social worker in schools, counseling centers, hospitals and a private practice.

Geithner has enjoyed the challenge of using her own voice to teach people to communicate about tough subjects. In a testament to the struggle of finding one’s voice, Geithner said even she has had moments where hers was difficult to grasp.

“It wasn’t a linear process for me,” Geithner said. “I found and then set aside or lost my voice, and then had to find it again, a number of times.”

She remembers feeling particularly invisible as a foreigner in Japan, where she lived for 2 years in her late twenties (Her book’s main character, Corinna, also takes a trip to Japan, where she comes to learn more about her mother).

Geithner has come to grasp her voice as a therapist, an author and as a parent. She is involved with various organizations focused on helping people overcome loss, including Option B.org, Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), SLAP’d.com (Surviving Loss After Death of a Parent), Gilda’s Club Westchester and the Bereavement Center of Westchester. She also sits on the board for the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and is currently working on another young adult novel centered around a fictional teenage girl.

While everyone is different and has different adversities to overcome, Geithner said everyone can work on improving their skills of listening, learning to tolerate uncertainty and having compassion.

“At each stage of life, with its inevitable obstacles and challenges, we struggle to find our way,” Geithner said. “I dare say, none of us has it all figured out.”

For more information on Carole Geithner, or her novel, “If Only,” visit http://www.carolegeithner.com/index.php.

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Reflects on a Life of Activism

Instances of injustice fill Nobel Peace Prize Winner Jody Williams with a sense of righteous indignation, a feeling that has caused her to take action countless times in the name of peace throughout her busy life and career.

Twenty-one years ago in 1997, Williams became the 10th woman in the world and the third woman in America to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her work to ban antipersonnel landmines, serving as a chief strategist and spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) as it achieved its goal of the Mine Ban Treaty during a diplomatic conference in Oslo that year.   

“I didn’t find landmines, they found me,” Williams told the Alturas Institute in an interview this month, saying she took the challenge from the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and Medico International to create a campaign to ban landmines. The ICBL's eventual achievement of that goal resulted in a treaty preventing the use, transfer, production and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines.

Williams' success with the ICBL stands out as a highlight of her lengthy career, but Williams said it was long before her global-scale activism that she remembers finding her voice and becoming an activist. Defending her handicapped brother when she was a young girl; standing up to bullies in grade school;

these were the initial choices Williams made that would lead her on a path toward global political activism.

By the 1960s, Williams had joined thousands of people across the country in protesting the Vietnam War.

Though she would not use the word ‘activist’ to describe herself for years to come, Williams said it was her activism in protesting the war that pointed her in the direction of effecting positive change in and for her country, and that many of her projects throughout her career have flowed from that initial activism.

“If I’d not had a strong voice and clear vision of how I think the world could be made better for everyone, I’d not have been an activist for as many decades as I have been,” Williams said.

Despite what was jokingly said to her by a friend in the antipersonnel landmine campaign after she received the Peace Prize in ‘97, “life has most definitely not been downhill ever since,” Williams said.

She has since founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative, an organization that brings together six women recipients of the Peace Prize to promote of the work of grassroots women activists across the globe. Williams continues to chair the initiative, and is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Global Justice in the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston. She was appointed the “Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professor in Peace and Social Justice” in 2007. Together, she and her husband, director of Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division Steve Goose, hashed out the idea to form a campaign protesting the production and use of fully autonomous weapons systems, officially known as the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.

A highly recognized figure in the world of global political activism, Williams said she feels no need to deviate from the open, honest and straightforward person she always has been. She simply feels a responsibility to be true to her beliefs, values and goals throughout the process.

“I’ve never viewed my life as some sort of popularity contest requiring that I behave in a certain way,” Williams said. “I can look myself in the eyes at the end of the day and recognize that while I’m far from a perfect person, I am a person who does my best to make the world a better place for us all, including people I do not like.”

For more information on Jody Williams or the Nobel Women’s Initiative, visit https://nobelwomensinitiative.org.

Occidental professor talks #MeToo, social justice and the power of finding one’s voice

““Humans spend entirely too much time worrying about what other people think of them. The best way to find your voice is to set aside what others think of you and to focus instead on identifying and pursuing your core values. Decide what matters to you the most, who you want to serve, and how you want to serve them. Then organize your life so that you allocate your time in a way that reflects what you value the most.””

— Caroline Heldman

Caroline Heldman has not been able to remain silent in the face of social injustices inflicted on either herself or the rest of the world.

Instead, Heldman, an associate professor of politics at Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif., has dedicated her voice to lifting up people of marginalized and oppressed populations and advocating legislation and policies that would add weight to their voices. Heldman has spent her days helping women in prison, advocating for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in the U.S. and speaking out against some of the most powerful men in the entertainment industry. To her, her voice is the most important weapon she has in the fight against injustice.

***

Heldman remembers finding that voice for the first time as a child, singing the word “Hallelujah” when she was less than a year old. Growing up in a family of six children, she quickly learned the importance of being assertive at a young age.

“I often find myself speaking truth to power and making statements that are unpopular in order to expose oppression and mistreatment,” Heldman said in an interview with the Alturas Institute this month, “so I see ‘voice’ as being an integral part of my work for social justice.”

These days, Heldman uses her voice for much more than singing (though she also performs in an all-female tribute band to Alice in Chains called Allison Chains, with tour dates coming up in Tuscon and Phoenix, Ariz., next month). Last year, she made her complaints of sexual harassment against Fox News television host Bill O’Reilly public, alongside several other women, whose wave of accusations eventually forced the media mogul out of the network in April of last year.

“I knew I was going up against a giant -- a very powerful man who had harmed a lot of women,” Heldman said, “but I wasn’t afraid to share my experience because it was the truth and the time was right to come forward.”

Heldman said she was surprised to see O’Reilly fired from the network. After all, she had witnessed other powerful predators get away with similar behavior for years. Heldman, who made appearances on the Fox network between 2008 and 2011, has accused two other Fox employees - political commentator Eric Bolling and television producer Woody Fraser - of sexually harassing her as well. 

Over the course of her career, some of Heldman’s most important projects have involved working with victims of sexual assault at the hands of some of the most powerful men in entertainment, including movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who currently faces charges for multiple sex crimes, and comedian Bill Cosby, found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault in April. The repercussions for both men have been viewed as signs of progress in the #MeToo movement that began in late 2017, as numerous women began to voice their accusations against Weinstein.

Heldman believes the movement resonates with so many because of the sheer number of people who have experienced sexual harassment and sexual violence in their lives.

“One in six women and one in 33 men will experience this in their lifetime, and survivors are finally being believed,” Heldman said. “This is a turning point in our nation’s history because it’s the first time that so many people have shared their struggle with these issues, and the first time that people are listening to their pain.”

Heldman has also been involved in less publicized cases, frequently visiting the prison cell of Patricia Esparza, a psychology professor who was sentenced to six years in prison for her involvement in the death of the man she claimed raped her, after pointing him out to his eventual killers. Heldman attended the sentencing with End Rape on Campus, an organization she co-founded that lobbies universities to investigate reports of sexual assault on their campuses.

“Yesterday I watched as Esparza was hauled away in handcuffs, charged with a murder she did not commit,” Heldman wrote in a blog post about the trial in 2013. She added later, “Esparza’s story is a classic story of institutional betrayal. She was betrayed by her father and the repeated sexual abuse shattered her sense of safety. She was betrayed by a man who offered her a ride back to school, raped her in her dorm room, then bragged about it to friends and family. She was betrayed by college officials who failed to properly and legally respond to her rape (which is still a problem today, hence the new national campus sexual assault movement). Now she is being betrayed by a legal institution that is sending a chilling message to survivors that they will not be believed.”

Heldman lists her work to help free Esparza as one of her most important projects, alongside her work coordinating rescue efforts in the Langtang region of Nepal after the 2015 earthquake there, working on rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina, co-founding the New Orleans Women’s and Children’s Shelter and the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum.

Her latest goal is to win ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment in 38 states, a hurdle that must be overcome before the amendment may be added to the U.S. Constitution, establishing that the equality of rights shall not be denied on the account of sex.

First passed by Congress in 1972, the ERA was subsequently sent to the states for ratification, but failed to gain the approval of legislatures in at least three-fourths (38) of the states by the original deadline set by Congress.

Proponents of the legislation argue Congress has the power to adjust the time limit set for its ratification. As of June 21, 2018, 37 legislatures have ratified the ERA in their respective states, the most recent being Illinois on May 30, 2018.

“Most people don’t know that women aren’t actually included in the Constitution, which is both symbolically and practically important,” Heldman said. “Women have made progress using laws that were not written for sex discrimination, but those laws are not enough.”

Those laws - the 14th Amendment and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act - fall short, Heldman said, because they require proof of sexist intent, while the ERA would tackle sexist outcomes whether or not they were intentional.

“Passing the ERA would give us a powerful new tool to advance equal pay and protections against domestic and sexual violence,” Heldman said.

***

Heldman said she feels lucky to work in the service of so many important projects that have direct effects on marginalized people. Asked what advice she has for young women and men who are in search of their own voice, Heldman said the best thing to do is to stop worrying what others think.

“Humans spend entirely too much time worrying about what other people think of them,” Heldman said. “The best way to find your voice is to set aside what others think of you and to focus instead on identifying and pursuing your core values. Decide what matters to you the most, who you want to serve, and how you want to serve them. Then organize your life so that you allocate your time in a way that reflects what you value the most.”

Caroline Heldman is the Research Director for the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and co-founded #ERAnow, Faculty Against Rape and End the Rape Statute of Limitations.

Her new book, “The New Campus Anti-Rape Movement: Internet Activism and Social Justice,” which she co-authored, was released earlier this year, and her latest co-authored book, "Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election," is expected to debut in August.

Heldman can be found on her website, drcarolineheldman.com, and on Twitter @carolineheldman.