A Personal Thanksgiving Reflection
Giving thanks for the little college that nurtured my creative spirit
In past years, I have written Thanksgiving reflections on various themes, including how it’s a rosy settler myth that retells a scene of Native people sitting down to feast with newcomers, conveniently skipping over what happened next: brutal, genocidal colonization by the Europeans.
The American Thanksgiving myth is also about how the great abundance of the land, in plants and wildlife, was taken without reverence or gratitude by these same settlers.
From the historical centuries-old Thanksgiving holiday, in other words, you can draw a straight line to America’s present-day reality as a white-supremacist extractivist nation teetering on the edge of social and climate collapse.
But that is not the story I want to dwell on this Thanksgiving.
Today I want to give thanks for Elizabeth Blodgett Hall, brilliant daughter of a wealthy settler family, who in 1965 gave up her privileged position as headmistress of a posh girls’ boarding school to turn her childhood country home in western Massachusetts into a different kind of institution: a residential school for bright teenagers who craved a freer, deeper, more exuberant form of education than was available for high schoolers at the time.
Betty Hall founded Simon’s Rock College, the first early college in the nation, perhaps in the world; attracted an outstanding set of maverick scholars to staff it; got it accredited to award the Associates and Bachelor’s degrees; and ran the place with panache for about 10 years, until the financial reality of being a start-up with a big beautiful campus but no endowment made it essential to find a larger partner.
Enter Leon Botstein and Bard College. I was a student at Simon’s Rock in 1979 when Bard took over fiduciary responsibility for the school. It was presented as a move to save the college from ruin, and indeed, the little early college that could chugged along behind Bard’s engine for another 40+ years.
Leon, as we in the Bard family call him, liked Betty’s early college idea, having been a prodigy student himself, and he ran with it, founding the Bard High School Early Colleges as public-private partnerships along the lines of my high school alma mater, Hunter College High School in New York: an admission test to enter, free to attend thanks to state public school subsidies, non-residential, with four years of accelerated rigorous academics starting in 9th grade and culminating in the AA degree, two years “early.”
Now the early college model is spreading even further, as many other ordinary colleges recognize the value of offering early college classes to high school students ready for more challenge.
So Leon could legitimately frame his recent announcement of the imminent closure of Simon’s Rock as a “success story.”
Betty Hall’s unorthodox idea has now become mainstream, giving students across the country many different routes, including many that are free and non-residential, to getting out of high school and into college early.
The beautiful 280-acre campus in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is expensive to run and maintain; there are too many employees for the shrinking pool of students; and Bard was no longer willing to keep little Simon’s Rock on life support.
It won’t die entirely though: it will move to a smaller campus next to the main Bard campus on the Hudson River, and be reinvented as a smaller institution, still residential but also welcoming day students from the more densely populated region of Dutchess County, New York.
It will start in 9th grade and culminate in the AA degree, like the other Bard High School Early Colleges, with the old Simon’s Rock BA (which was already technically a Bard College degree) remaining on in theory, but probably mostly vestigial in practice.
I give thanks that Simon’s Rock was able to survive as an independent early college as long as it did, and I am also grateful that it is going to live on in a streamlined form in a new location, with at least some of the current faculty and staff invited to move over to the new campus to transplant the Simon’s Rock spirit.
As a child, I played in the then-new buildings and around the ponds at Simon’s Rock with my best friend Audrey, daughter of founding faculty member Eileen Handelman, a brilliant physicist.
I spent four formative years as a teenage college student at Simon’s Rock, graduating at age 19 after spending a year writing a 100-page thesis on “Androgyny in the Novels of Virginia Woolf” under the guidance of beloved faculty members Natalie Harper and Jamie Hutchinson.
I worked for a while as a journalist in New York, but missed the intellectual stimulation I’d received in college, and so found myself drawn back to academia for a doctorate in comparative literature at NYU.
When I returned to the Berkshires in 1994 with a baby on my hip and a new PhD in hand, Dean Pat Sharpe hired me as an adjunct to teach the general education seminar, a job I thought would keep my hand in teaching while I focused for a while on motherhood.
The adjunct job turned into a 30-year commitment.
Like any long-term relationship, my time at Simon’s Rock has had its ups and downs. The institution has disappointed me at times, and I’ve born witness to damage done to others, too. I guess that’s likely to be the case in any workplace, including institutions of higher education.
But all in all, I’m thankful and proud to have been part of realizing Betty Hall’s vision. It’s been a privilege to guide and learn from so many generations of bright, bold, searching young people, and to watch them go on to make such valuable contributions to the world.
My current focus on “writing to right the world” grew out of teaching many, many classes in which we studied the activist writers I now call “worldwrights,” some of whom are included in the three anthologies I edited during my time at Simon’s Rock.
My class “Leadership, Writing & Public Speaking for Social and Environmental Justice,” which I now also offer globally through the Bard Open Society University Network and in distilled form to adults at Bioneers Learning, grew out of my years of leading the Berkshire Festival of Women Writers at Simon’s Rock, and realizing how essential it is that writers who want to change the world learn to speak as forcefully as they write.
It was at Simon’s Rock that I developed the concept of “purposeful memoir,” reimagining memoir as the inner work essential for effective activism in the world, and writing my own purposeful memoir to help me understand the form from the inside out so I could teach it to others.
Simon’s Rock has offered me fertile ground for developing myself as a student, scholar, writer, teacher and human being, and for that, today and always, I give thanks.
Coming up in December…
A Writing to Right the World Summit hosted by Humanity Rising!
From December 9 - 13, I’ll be interviewing some of the most powerful worldwrights I know, online each day from 11 am - 12:30 pm Eastern.
We’ll be talking about how these writer-activists have used the power of creative expression to change the world for the better—and how you can do it too!
December 9—Positive psychologist Maria Sirois talks about how our appreciation for beauty, truth and excellence can make a positive difference for us—and for the world around us.
December 10—Bioneers and Everywoman’s Leadership co-founder Nina Simons shares her unique perspective on the necessity for “full-spectrum” leadership and sacred activism to bring the world back into balance.
December 11—Bestselling author, shaman and activist podcaster Manda Scott will tell us why she thinks imagination holds the key to personal and political well-being, and how ancient shamanic approaches to life and death may be just what we most need now.
December 12—Buddhist dharma teacher Cynthia Jurs joins us to talk about her Earth Treasure Vase pilgrimages and how she practices an embodied, engaged sacred activism through meditation and prayer, ceremony and ritual, pilgrimage and council.
December 13—Global climate justice activist Osprey Orielle Lake talks about her decades of activism at the United Nations and in indigenous communities throughout the world, braiding together new and ancient stories in the quest for a just, regenerative and thriving future for all life on Earth.
Register here to receive the zoom links for this pay-what-you-can Humanity Rising event!
Cultivate your creativity with one of my writing workshops!
My writing workshops in purposeful memoir are intended as creative recharges, a chance to learn and grow with kindred spirits in nurturing places.
I have several opportunities coming up, locally in the Berkshires, online or internationally!
Explore the garden of your life in a special writing workshop series at the Berkshire Botanical Garden this winter!
Come meet other writer-gardeners and brighten up the winter season with the creative bloom of memoir writing in good company!
We’ll meet on four Wednesday mornings, January 29 - February 19, on the lovely campus of the Berkshire Botanical Garden, for a series of memoir writing workshops taking off on the theme of gardening.
Come write and speak your truth with me in this powerful four-session Bioneers Learning online class!
In this hands-on class hosted by Bioneers Learning, we’ll look deeply at some of the major social and environmental issues of our time and consider how outstanding leaders have used creative expression to make a difference.
Inspired by these models, you’ll work on expressing your own ideas with confidence, clarity, and eloquence, in both writing and public speaking, coming away with a portfolio of writing, a recorded talk, and a circle of kindred spirits cheering you on.
Four Fridays, Feb. 28 - March 21, 2025, live online from 12 - 1:30 pm with recordings available.
Come Riding & Writing in Iceland with me next June!
Riding & Writing in Iceland!
June 2 - 8, 2025
The creative tonic of Iceland has to be experienced to be understood.
Come experience the body, mind and spirit glow that comes from Riding & Writing in good company in a beautiful place, warmly hosted by our friends Gudmar and Christina at Hestaland.
Click here to find out more and see beautiful photos from my past Riding & Writing trips to Iceland.
The Art & Craft of Purposeful Memoir: Annual Tuscan Memoir Retreat
September 27 - October 4, 2025
Write, relax, restore your creativity in good company at a dreamy private villa in Tuscany!
There’s a reason writers and other creatives have always flocked to beautiful, sensuous Italy for stimulation and nurturing.
Come with me for a week of writing and exploring the beautiful countryside of Tuscany at harvest-time. Olives, grapes and wine, oh my!
Click here to find out all the details and many photos of my past retreats.
Friends, it’s my pleasure and my passion to support you as we stretch towards living our lives creatively and to the fullest.
The motto of my author consulting business is “Writing to Right the World,” and the motto of my book publishing business, Green Fire Press, is “Books that Make the World Better.”
If these intentions resonate with you and you are working on a book, or have one in mind, don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Supporting creative people bring their work more strongly out into the world is one way I try to make the world better.
A beautiful tribute to our alma mater and a reminder that there is another way to frame every situation. Thank you!
Beautiful summary of all that Simon’s Rock has meant to you and to the community!