We asked for submissions, and you answered!

Here Becca Tarnas shares an essay and artwork from her blog, which houses a selection of Becca’s paintings, academic essays, poems, stories, and plays for the enjoyment and hopefully inspiration of others. Her writings explore diverse topics from philosophy, to ecology, imagination, mythology, archetypal cosmology, and religion. The following essay discusses the work of philosopher Anne Conway, a relatively unknown contemporary of the Cambridge Platonists.

The Infinite Dynamic Stairway: Exploring Anne Conway’s Philosophy

A WOMAN PHILOSOPHER

A sole treatise is all that the world has inherited of the philosophical thought of Lady Anne Finch, Viscountess of Conway, yet aspects of her unique system and cosmology can be traced in quiet echoes through the work of several of the great names that came after her, from Leibniz, Blake, and Goethe, to Bergson and Whitehead, to contemporary feminist and ecological thinkers. Her legacy is obscured, it seems, primarily by her gender, for she lived in a time when a university education was denied to women and her name was not even included on the title page of her only publication.[1] Except in rare cases, such as in the work of Leibniz, Anne Conway’s influence on subsequent thinkers can only be traced by a shadowy similarity of content, rather than directly by name. Yet she has been called “the profoundest and most learned of the female metaphysical writers of England”[2] by James Crossley, and “the most important woman philosopher in seventeenth century England” by Sarah Hutton.[3]

Read on…

Becca Tarnas ’10 is an artist, writer, and doctoral student at the California Institute of Integral Studies in the Ecology, Spirituality, and Religion program in San Francisco. She uses art and storytelling as a means to reconnect with our planet Earth in this critical time of ecological crisis. Becca was educated at the San Francisco Waldorf School for thirteen years before pursuing Environmental Studies and Theater Arts at Mount Holyoke, and she also holds a master’s degree from CIIS in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. She is currently working on an ongoing project entitled ”Women of Words,” in which she is reading the works of 35 female authors from Mary Wollstonecraft to Toni Morrison and writing engaging analyses that can be read.

Interested in submitting your work? Any style, any form, and thing at all may be submitted – articles, essays, short stories, video, etc. Just fill out the submission form!

The Adventures of Elyse Bova
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Elyse Bova has “1837” tattooed on her ass.  There are many ways for people to show their love for Mount Holyoke, but not everyone can be as awesome as Elyse Bova.

Elyse lives in San Francisco with Cam McCaugherty and Jackie Kajos, fellow Mohos. There, Elyse manages a fashion boutique in Haight Ashbury founded by a recent immigrant who supported three daughters on her own. The boutique started out as a fashionable yet affordable clothing shop, however, over the years, the owner was able to save enough money to establish her own clothing line, Audrey 3+1, that is now sold in stores nationally.

Before working at the boutique, Elyse didn’t realize that fashion was her passion, but now her career goal is to be a part of the fashion industry.   Elyse’s next step is to move to NYC.  She plans to attend SUNY FIT and hopes to become an assistant to an international buyer.

Elyse also met her girlfriend, Mahsa Matin, in San Francisco and it is a creepy/adorable story.  On a crowded bus one afternoon, Elyse spotted Mahsa and recognized her from a newspaper article she read about Mahsa’s one woman show.  She stared like a creeper.  Mahsa noticed.  Because Elyse was so distracted by Mahsa’s beauty, she forgot her wallet on the bus.  Mahsa found the wallet and sent Elyse a Facebook message to tell Elyse she had it. She then went over to Elyse’s to return her wallet and they have been in love ever since.

In her spare time, Elyse takes fashion classes at a local community college, does yoga with her girlfriend and models for photographers and artists.  She is also obsessed with Sabrina the Teenage Witch and is currently rewatching all the seasons and can’t get enough of all of the ‘90s references.  Although she knew her roommates would be embarrassed for her, she also admitted that her guilty pleasure is Pretty Little Liars.

She also hangs out with a slew of Mount Holyoke women including Chloe Kramer Baldwin, Stephanie Halstead, Ginnie Venuto, Carlo Butler and Natalie Chang.  She even hired Emily Juarez ‘10 to work at one of her Audrey 3+1 stores for the summer before she heads off to Stanford this fall!  The last thing they all did together was SF Pride which she described as a “weekend of debauchery.”  However, usually, when they get together they are pretty low key.  They like to make food, drink wine, and talk about world issues that are upsetting them.

Like all Mount Holyoke alumnae, Elyse misses her time in college.  She mentioned that she loved the safety and security she felt on campus compared to her life in the city these days. She also misses some of her professors and noted, “Paul Staiti was pretty bomb.”

If you are a 2010er in NYC, look out!  Elyse will be there soon enough as fashionista extraordinaire.  We can only hope that one of the first trends she sets is 1837 butt tattoos.

Prisons, Kittens and Climate Change: An Interview with Page May
By Elizabeth DuMont-McCaffrey

Page May is going to change the world if it’s the last thing she does.  Whether we were discussing her work educating students about climate change or her prison activist book group’s reading list, passion poured from Page and inspired me 1,000 miles away throughout our phone conversation.

Directly after college, Page received the Bill Emerson National Hunger Fellowship, a prestigious fellowship that teaches budding activists about issues of hunger and poverty facing our country and places the fellows in non-profit organizations working to eradicate those problems.  The fellowship sent Page to Washington, D.C (where she got to hang out with nuns all day) and Chicago (where she found love.)

Because of Debbie, Page’s girlfriend, Page decided to stay in Chicago after the end of the fellowship. It took time for Page to feel settled, but eventually she found a great community and adopted two stray cats, Charlie and Bazil.  She began working for the Alliance for Climate Education in Chicago as the Education and Media Manager.  At work, she mainly writes blogs, speaks at school assemblies and conducts trainings about the climate.  She is thrilled to be working in a job that combines science, media and public speaking—just a few of her passions.

Speaking of passions, since graduating from MHC, Page has become a prison rights activist.  After reading The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Page was so inspired that she hosted a holiday party where attendees wrote holiday cards to LGBTQ prisoners.  The holiday party was such a success that the group established a chapter of Black and Pink, an organization that supports LGBTQ prisoners. So far the group has been involved in protests, organized movie screenings and read many relevant books including Queer (In)Justice, Captive Genders, and Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline.  Assata, an autobiography by Assata Shakur, is next on the group’s list.

Another reason that Page founded this book group is because she missed the level of reading and learning she had at Mount Holyoke.  She mentioned that at Mount Holyoke, political education was so normalized that she thought that was how life would be outside of college. However, it was hard to keep up with that same level of reading independently, so a politically-minded book group helped to form the same kind of community.

On a lighter note, Page also noted that she misses Mount Holyoke food.  “I don’t cook so that sucks,” were her exact words on that subject.

I asked Page what she is hoping to do next and she replied that she wants to tear down the system.  “We can’t go on this way,” she said.

Catch Her if You Can: Caitlin McDermott
By Natasha Payés

Caitlin’s two loosely braided pig-tails sway from left to right as she whips around the track, one foot crossing over the other. She attacks the curve and relaxes on the straight-away, attacks the curve and relaxes on the straight; her black and lime green roller skates make a soothing zzzzzzzzzz sound. After an hour of ramming her body into others, breaking through packs of aggressive skaters, and completing timed intervals, Caitlin peels off her high waist black and white polka-dot mini skirt and strips down to her red paisley-print boy shorts and black tights. She takes a sip of water and gets back on the track.

That was just the warm-up.

Playing on the Quabbin Missile Crisis and Western Mass Destruction roller derby teams of the Pioneer Valley is just one of the activities she discovered since graduating from Mount Holyoke in 2010. She is known as Rocky Raccoon #594—that’s police code for malicious mischief. As for the Rocky Raccoon, it is the title of her favorite Beatles song which highlights persistence and tenacity—two characteristics that are a must for such a high-impact sport. Roller derby is more than just women in risqué, DIY costumes on skates. This is a sport that defies notions of femininity, encourages men’s participation, and is becoming increasingly popular and widely respected.

“Roller derby has been a wonderful community to get involved in, both locally and nationally,” said Caitlin. “It’s such an eclectic group of people; there are nurses, single mothers, computer programmers, college students, construction workers, doctors. We’re interested in this national grassroots sport and we all have something to bring to the table.”

Finding such a community that resembles anything like MoHome is cumbersome, but somehow Caitlin has managed to find her niche right in her own backyard.

Caitlin is an Easthamptonite through and through. She attended the Williston School as a day student and though Mount Holyoke is only minutes away, she did not discover the college until the application season.

At her mother’s suggestion Caitlin applied—begrudgingly—to both Mount Holyoke and Smith, but was convinced that she would never go to an all-women’s college. Caitlin was admitted to both colleges, but automatically said no to Smith as it was too close to home. And despite Mount Holyoke being dead last on her college list; she attended Experience MHC, the College’s admitted student weekend.

She didn’t want to.
She didn’t want to like MHC.
God forbid she would admit to her mother that she was right all along!

But Caitlin could not deny her feelings, nor could she lie and say she had a horrible overnight experience. She played Apples to Apples with her host for goodness sakes!

The following day, Caitlin submitted her deposit.

Over the course of four years, Caitlin joined a handful of student organizations such as the Mount Holyoke News as the health and science editor; track and field as a thrower; and stage crew. Oh stage crew…so many hours spent setting up and dissembling sets, staying up until the wee hours of the morning with Lauren Darby as they waited for A/C Day and Variasians rehearsals, Las Vegas Night, UnDressage, a capella jams, Thursday Night Live performances, Noche Latina, China Night, [you fill in the blank] to end.

“It was a shared pain experience,” she joked, “But I loved it.”

Following graduation, Caitlin traveled to Australia and worked as a research assistant at the Australian National University with Professor Jochen Zeil, a renowned vision scientific researcher. While there she worked on two projects that consisted of tracking bull ants and studying escape responses in fiddler crabs.

Once the year was up, Caitlin made her way back to the U.S. and worked as an early childhood music teacher in Los Angeles and then as an administrative assistant at the Office of Student Programs at Mount Holyoke.

So what’s next for our fellow Pegasus?

Starting August, Caitlin will teach science at the Peddie School, a private boarding school located in Hightstown, NJ. Although she does not like to admit it, Caitlin is following her mother’s footsteps by becoming a teacher. She plans to pursue a Master of Education degree in a few years. Though she is slated to have a hectic schedule this academic year, Rocky Raccoon #594 is definitely ready for the challenge!