06/04/2020
Today we honor Jac Clark '95, MSM '14 for the Marlboro College Alumni Legacy & Impact Project.
After graduating from Marlboro and earning her MFA from Emerson College, she returned to our community to work as a Student Life Advisor, then Director of Housing and Residential Life, and ultimately earned a second masters from the Marlboro College Graduate & Professional Studies. She has since been familiar to students by working with them in various experiential and leadership programs on and around the campus, and as DJ Glitterbear at q***r dance parties.
The threads of her scholarship have come together in many ways. She studied Renaissance Faires with Paul Nelsen and Carol Hendrickson as an undergrad and has followed her calling for being in and creating sacred self-expression spaces by co-founding a Renaissance faire. Her MFA has added an element to inspire her to create theater with young people, and invent DJ Glitterbear, a personality and host for q***r dance parties and drag shows. Her MSM mixes in skills that help her with advising and developing leadership training for adults and youth.
She is currently working with Building a Positive Community in Brattleboro, VT. She is a founding member of the Nature Based Leadership committee for the Center for Nature and Leadership. She says that you can find her, "wandering local mountains and forests writing poetry, touching wild water, leaning back with some trees, or howling with the wind."
She is also a poet who is deeply affected by what is happening to our Marlboro College community. We gave us her permission to share this piece with her (which she also read for the Zoom reading two weeks ago):
Cleaving Marlboro
By Jac Clark
"To Cleave: to adhere firmly and closely or loyally and unwaveringly
And to divide by or as if by a cutting blow
And to separate into distinct parts and especially into groups having divergent views"
There were sheep in a snow-covered field in early November.
The electric fencing right up to the edge of the parking lot.
All white.
Everywhere a whiteness that cast everything into a stillness,
A potential that perhaps one day it wouldn't be so white.
Keeping anything so pristine is nearly impossible,
Particularly when there are children
And animals
And well-meaning adults all around.
You can try to walk barefoot down the slippery slope.
But do I have to be that bad-ass to be here?
I can stay up all night amidst the universal tomes of knowledge,
Pushing, birthing, witnessing inspiration out of sleep deprivation
Out of nerd salvation,
Out at this weigh station
For the wary, the weird, the wistful, and wizened before their time.
The vastness of eternity shuddered, or seemed to
In every star that made her milky way across the sky
I feel myself melting into for the first and last time
In this way
On this hill
The snow is melting.
The mist is forming.
The veil is falling.
I see Her glowing in the window,
Her sadness is about to lift.
We all heard Her, let Her know she was really here.
Like we all were, to learn what it meant
To come home.
"Come away now, Emily. It's time to go home."
II
Home and not
Free and chained
By expectation and need.
"But I don't need you," She said.
"I'm fine here.
My streams, trees, stone, and wind are just as they were.
Whatever gave you the notion that I needed you?
But I know you needed me."
III
With gratitude and apology to Oliver Wendell Holmes
"We have shared the incommunicable experience of Marlboro. We have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youths, our hearts were touched with fire."
