By Emily Dietrich ’85
Marilyn J. Bruno ’69 cares for her ninety-two-year-old mother (E. Alda Bruno, above) and aunt Irma Micera,
in their Coral Gables, Florida, home. (Photo: Bill Cooke)
Vickie Martin ’04 and her family always “assumed” Martin’s mother would care for Martin’s grandmother in her own home until she died. But when Martin’s mother unexpectedly died, “the responsibility fell into my lap,” says Martin, who is now the long-distance primary caretaker for her eighty-nine-year-old grandmother. Similarly, Nancy Willbanks ’77, chief financial officer of Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services, found her mother widowed, homeless, and without income after her father unexpectedly died. These women are part of a cultural and demographic shift that will affect the hearts, minds, and daily lives of many alumnae in the near future.
Statistics reveal the magnitude of the shifts in aging and eldercare: 43 percent of caregivers for elders are now fifty and older, finds a study by the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC) and the American Association for Retired People (AARP). Eldercare is not affecting just the “sandwich generation”—those squeezed between raising children and caring for parents—anymore. The “young-old” are now taking care of the “oldest-old.” And there are more of the oldest-old needing care for a longer time. The fastest-growing age group in America, according to the US census, is centenarians, predicting protracted care needs.
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By Caitlin Healey ’09
When you think of video games, you probably picture a geeky teenage boy camped out in a living room, chomping on potato chips while piling up points racing from one virtual level to the next. (You don’t imagine girls at a slumber party playing Super Mario Brothers, right?) The $42 billion-a-year worldwide video-game industry still reflects this stereotype, but career women in the field—such as Patricia Su Yin Kallusch ’93—may help change all that.
If you think video games are just kid stuff, think again. They’re the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment industry, and computer- and video-game sales are expected to surpass movie box-office revenues by the end of 2008. Grand Theft Auto IV, released in May, set a record for day-one sales in any entertainment sector.
Kallusch, who played video games casually while growing up, wondered how she would use her MHC studio art degree. Internships with a New York City sculptor and in the design department of DC Comics made her realize the broad possibilities of commercial art.
The video-game industry began to boom while Kallusch was in her mid-twenties. “Three-dimensional animation was really taking off,” she recalls, and 3-D artists originally interested in film careers took notice of the skyrocketing video-game sector. Armed with an MFA in computer animation, Kallusch built a career as an animator and video-game environment artist, then moved up the managerial ranks as though mastering levels in one of the games.
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Patterns are important to Marcia Katz Birken ’71. As a mathematics professor at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) for nearly three decades, Birken taught about the elegant patterns numbers make. But a nature tour of Yellowstone National Park in 2005 sent her love of patterns in a new direction. “I was looking at the same things everyone else was, but I saw different things. They’d see flowers; I’d see rotational patterns in the petals. They’d see a landscape; I’d see patterns repeated in the meanders of the river. They’d see birds; I’d see how the feathers grew.”
(Birken Photo: Leichtner Studios)
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By Eric Goldscheider
Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez with his "daughters" Krysia Villón ’96 (left) and Milagros “Millie” Cruz ’87 (Photo by Ben Barnhart)
Professor of Spanish Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez remembers his fortieth birthday party in 1994 as a death-taunting celebration. No one present thought the guest of honor, even if he was lucky, would survive until the millennium. He was gaunt to the point of wasting, and suffering advanced AIDS symptoms, including the loss of an eye. “It was a farewell to Alberto. But then, Alberto never died,” recalled Sandoval-Sánchez during a recent interview in his College Street apartment about a mile south of campus. He still refers to the 1990s as “the time I was dead.” (More)
Words Worth a Second Look
N o n f i c t i o n
Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Save Them
By Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen ’94
(Vintage Books)
Eco-tourists need look no further than Disappearing Destinations for a guide to Earth’s breathtaking but beleaguered splendors. From Puerto Rico’s phosphorescent bays to the boreal forests of Finland, the authors show environmentally responsible travelers how to enjoy (and preserve) fascinating but fragile wonders on all seven continents.
Heather Baukney Hansen is a freelance journalist, environmentalist, and world traveler based in Colorado.
Diva: Defiance and Passion in Early Italian Cinema
By Angela Dalle Vacche MA’80
(University of Texas Press)
The “diva film” became popular around the turn of the twentieth century, as artists questioned what it meant to be human in an increasingly mechanistic world. Diva is the first authoritative study of this genre, whose films denounced social evils and explored new models of behavior between the sexes.
Angela Dalle Vacche, an internationally recognized expert in European cinema, is an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture.
A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
By Christopher Benfey
(The Penguin Press)
A meditation on a moment in history, Benfey’s book seeks to show how some of the most famous writers of the nineteenth century responded to the Civil War and the era’s dynamic aesthetic, in part, with allusions in their work to the effervescent hummingbird.
Christopher Benfey, professor of English at MHC and an Emily Dickinson scholar, is also a critic and essayist.
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The importance of fresh water is hard to overstate. So are the pollution, drought, and mismanagement that are severely challenging the world’s rivers, lakes, ponds, and wetlands. Sandra Postel, interim director of MHC’s Center for the Environment, is a fresh water expert. We talked to her over the summer about why water matters.—M.H.B.
Q: You have described rivers as the “blue arteries of the earth.” Can you explain their importance?
A: I think of rivers as an important part of the planet’s circulation system—a fundamental part of what makes the planet function. They transport critical nutrients and elements to the ecosystems. Rivers help keep the earth alive. (More)
Their belongings and expectations in tow, firsties came to campus in late August for Orientation—and their first taste of college life. From the looks and sounds of their large gatherings in Chapin and small-group circles on the greens, MHC’s latest student crop will not disappoint in the classroom or out in the world. Here are a few details about the incoming class:
A decade ago, people from other countries flocked to America for high-quality healthcare delivered with limited delays. Today, “medical tourism” consists mainly of Americans, Europeans, and Canadians traveling to developing nations to receive the same care at rock-bottom prices.
Andrea Ponce ’09 (left) thinks this new twist may help ignite her beloved Guatemala’s floundering economy. “I think that medical tourism is a great way to start offering services to developed countries and empower our economy,” she writes in an e-mail from home.
Daughter of a surgeon and a tour operator, Ponce began examining Guatemala’s prospects for the emerging medical tourism industry for a visit Guatemala’s renowned volcanoes, lakes, and Mayan ruins.
The demand for medical tourism is certainly there, Ponce says: many Europeans and Canadians are tired of the long waiting periods for surgeries common in their healthcare systems. And forty-five million uninsured Americans represent a virtually untapped market.
That’s good news for Guatemala. A decade after a peace agreement that ended thirty-six years of guerrilla warfare, 32 percent of the population of this tropical beauty lives on less than $2 a day.
Ponce, who plans to get her MBA after graduation, hopes the burgeoning industry will alleviate some of the pressure for many of her compatriots to emigrate for work. “I want to create opportunities for Guatemalans so that they do not have to migrate to other countries,” she says.—M.H.B.
For the past five years, Gail Hornstein (left) has sat in on support groups organized by people who hear voices.
Across the United States and Europe, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses are coming together to share their stories, to devise coping strategies, and to reframe what it means to be “mentally ill.” Hornstein’s new book takes readers inside this world.
A psychology professor at MHC, Hornstein has always been interested in states of mind beyond the normal. But it was not until she did the research for Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, to be published in March 2009, that she came to understand “what a truly patient-centered approach could achieve.”
“I was forced to reject much of what I learned in graduate school and from other professionals,” says Hornstein. “People who have been diagnosed with mental illness have been working for more than thirty years to develop alternatives to mainstream psychiatric approaches. It’s important to listen to their ideas.”
Rather than accepting the drugs and behavioral treatments favored by professionals, the people Hornstein writes about recover mainly with support from their peers. In the groups they organize, patients encourage one another to describe, often for the first time, what the voices in their heads are saying, and to analyze traumatic experiences that seem linked to the appearance of symptoms.
“Medicalizing these experiences tends to create passivity,” she says. “If the medication doesn’t work, people don’t know what else to try. Peer support groups teach them a range of ways to help themselves.”
In her book, Hornstein introduces readers to some of these people, including historical figures and contemporary activists. The book’s title refers to the jacket made by Agnes Richter, a woman institutionalized against her will in 1890s Germany. Every inch of the garment she fashioned from her institutional uniform is hand-embroidered with an autobiographical text recording her experiences.
For Hornstein, Agnes’s jacket symbolizes “the conundrum we face in understanding madness. People have an intense desire to tell their stories, but we can’t always grasp their meaning.” Hornstein hopes her book will serve both the storytellers and her readers.—M.H.B.
Learn More: To see Hornstein’s 600-title bibliography of first-person narratives of madness, go to www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/misc/profile/ghornste.shtml. For information and links to the psychiatric survivor movement, go to www.freedom-center.org or www.mindfreedom.org.See below for excerpts from Mieke Bomann's interview with Hornstein.
Excerpts from an interview with Gail Hornstein
New Book
My new book is Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness. The subtitle captures a key part of what it is about: my search for a different way to understand mental illness. I don’t use that term [mental illness]. The people I’m writing about reject that particular way of framing what they are more likely to call emotional distress.
Madness
The people I’m writing about in this book are people who have themselves experienced emotional distress—some historic figures, some contemporary activists, some of whom live in Northampton or London or elsewhere. Madness is the word that is preferred by the people I’m writing about. In a more profound sense, I use it because it has precisely the kind of symbolic resonance that I’m trying to encourage readers to have. I’m trying to get them to think about states of mind that are seriously disturbed without presupposing that they have a biological cause. I’m trying to decipher the meanings of madness using an archeological metaphor rather than biological.
I am taking the readers in this book on a journey to meet many of these people, to participate in their meetings and gatherings and plunge into different ways of thinking about mental illnesses.
I want people to know that the methods that the survivor movement has come up to help people are as effective as or more effective than the treatments of mainstream psychiatry. It’s helpful for family members [of people who] have been diagnosed with mental illness. This is a really positive message.
Peer Support
I’m a PhD psychologist who is reframing her own understanding on the basis of what these people are telling me. I’m rejecting much of what I learned in grad school and what colleagues think, and presenting the viewpoint that patients themselves have come up with. And a word like madness is part of that.
The people I write about are people who have joined together—mental health professionals are allies but not leaders—and the core method of helping people is a peer-support model that is based on an understanding of emotional distress as trauma, and other abuse. (An overwhelming number tell of trauma.
The Hearing Voices Network in England has hundreds of peer-support groups. I started one here in Holyoke. In these groups people who have the experience of hearing voices (not called schizophrenic experiences) see what can they do to help themselves if they’re frightened by them. Some hear the voices of their dead husband and it’s reassuring.
But for those that are tormented, the Hearing Voices Network has pioneered a self-help model where people come together once a week in groups that are not run by mental health professionals, just voice hearers. I have gone to dozens of these meetings. They talk in ways that they are rarely able to do in the mental health system. They are asked what the voices are saying and when and where. What these groups do is help to identify triggers and coping strategies. It’s such an insightful and optimistic approach and really interested in what’s going on in people’s minds.
Resilience
Psychiatry in the last years has become very narrow—here. It’s not nearly as narrow in Europe … The British National Heath plan now sends practitioners to meetings of the Hearing Voices Network to learn how to deal with potential crises and alternative treatments. Medicalization of these experiences tends to make people more passive—and if the meds don’t work, they don’t have any choices. A lot of my book is about resilience—in terms of mental health. Many of us have come to understand that in physical health we shouldn’t just wait until we catch a disease, that we can do things to make ourselves healthier. Wellness. What I’m saying is that the psychiatric survivor movement has set up ways for emotional resilience so that if bad things happen to you, you can cope with them better.
Bob Herbert is done with French art history.
After nearly a half century of scholarship on the likes of Seurat, Impressionism, and Renoir, the professor emeritus of the humanities turned to the work of an Amherst-based artist, Orra White Hitchcock, whose nineteenth-century lithographs, woodcuts, and watercolors were known, but whose travel writings were virtually undiscovered—until he stumbled on them.
Herbert has now edited and published Hitchcock’s diaries, which he came across in an archival folder while investigating her artwork at the Amherst College library. Familiar with her lithographs of the Connecticut River Valley that had been previously exhibited, Herbert was surprised and delighted to find her witty journals.
Married to Edward Hitchcock, a prominent geologist and onetime president of Amherst College, Orra describes in a “plainspeak” style what she sees during two trips, one to Europe and the other to Richmond, Virginia. “Unlike other travel diaries, she’s writing to herself. She’s not thinking of others, but merely what she’s seeing,” says Herbert.
In addition to publishing her diaries, Herbert is the co-curator of an exhibition of her art scheduled for October 2010 at Amherst’s Mead Art Museum. Some of Orra’s published illustrations of her husband’s work will be shown, along with several dozen watercolors of plants and large classroom charts and drawings (including prehistoric fossils).
If his move from fine art to science illustration seems jarring, consider this, he says: much of his research was devoted to the work of Seurat, an artist whose exploration of the science of color is evident in his technique, which came to be known as pointillism.
“My interest has been all along … in the relation of art and science,” says Herbert, who is now at work editing Hitchcock’s husband’s travel diaries. Bob Herbert has just begun, again.—M.H.B.
Professors TomWartenberg and Rachel Fink introduce Speedy the chameleon to a second-grade philosopher.
Philosophy instruction for young children got a boost recently when Professor of Philosophy Thomas Wartenberg received a three-year, $56,000 Squire Family Foundation grant to continue work in the field. One course he teaches now sends MHC students out to teach philosophy in several Pioneer Valley elementary schools. The grant will help spread philosophy for kids to more schools. Check out his site at www.teachingchildrenphilosophy.com
Reading in common
Racial tension, family disintegration and reunion, and personal identity figure prominently in author Danzy Senna’s debut novel, Caucasia, which has been selected as this year’s “common read.”
Assigned to incoming firstyear students, common-read books are often incorporated by faculty members into their curricula. Alumnae clubs frequently add common-read books to their rosters too. Caucasia “is a compelling narrative that will encourage you to explore your own views of race and class, identity and community,” said college President Joanne V. Creighton. Senna has been invited to campus to discuss her work.
New Dorm Opens Doors
Construction is finished, and 172 lucky residents—first-years to seniors—have moved into the first new dorm built here in forty years. The winter Quarterly will feature a photo essay on the new residence hall and its denizens.
This has gotta hurt …
In preparation for their upcoming seasons, Mount Holyoke’s fall athletic teams begin training at the end of August. Workouts are designed to increase conditioning and agility. Players work hard, both individually and as a team, to improve before regular season contests begin.
Student Leaders Around the Globe Gather at MHC
After two years of planning, Women’s Education Worldwide (WEW) hosted its first Student Leadership Conference at MHC in June. Some seventy students from five continents took part in leadership and skill-building workshops. As they got to know one another and learned new skills, participants developed personal projects to implement in their home countries. Conceived in 2003 by the leaders of Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges, WEW was organized to foster exchange among colleges and universities and to advocate for the education of women.
Some Facebook groups we think we’ll join….
• MoHos for Naming the New Dorm After Stephen Colbert
• Mount Holyoke College:Studying Harder Than Your School Since 1837
• Mount Holyoke Biologists ... We Are Naturally Selected
• I’ve Been Menaced by the Mount Holyoke College Skunk
Moushumi Khan ’93 (left) was awarded the Alumnae Association's 2008 Mary Woolley Fellowship and received $7,500 to begin research for a book examining the issues facing New York Muslim immigrants after the attacks of 9/11.
Khan, who ran her own general law practice serving working-class immigrants in Queens, New York, after 9/11, found herself acting as a bridge between government agencies who needed help from the Muslim community and Muslims fearful for their rights.
“My [Muslim] clients told me of FBI monitoring in their neighborhoods … at the same time, some government agencies were trying to reach out to the Muslim population … to elicit their help in fighting terrorism and to reassure them of their rights. I found myself serving as an intermediary between them,” Khan wrote in her fellowship application.
A legal and social analysis of the Muslim American immigrant community, informed by her experience as one of the few attorneys who directly represented them post 9/11 and worked with government agencies and think tanks, will fill a void in the literature, she says.
Khan, a recent graduate in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, begins research for her book this fall.—M.H.B.
Need help organizing your career? Director of Alumnae Career Services Cori Ashworth is here to lend a hand! The services she offers and the issues she can help you address include career and life transitions, self-assessment, identifying new areas of work, job-search strategies, coaching on interviewing and networking, and editing tips for résumés, letters to prospective employers, bios, and personal statements.
Office hours are Tuesday–Thursday, 2–4 p.m., and Tuesday and Wednesday, 7–9 p.m. (Evening appointments are by phone.) To make an appointment, call 413-538-2080. Many questions can be addressed by e-mail, as well. Don’t forget to check out the career resources available on the Alumnae Association Web site (alumnae.mtholyoke.edu) under “Programs and Services.”
In today’s competitive market for top-notch students, faculty, and donors, colleges are eager to bring to their boards trustees who demonstrate leadership, strategic communications skills, and personal integrity. Ellen Hyde Pace ’81 (left) is primed and ready for the challenge.
Nominated this summer as alumnae trustee of Mount Holyoke by the Nomination of Alumnae Trustees/Awards Committee of the Alumnae Association, Pace is expected to be elected to the five-year term during the association’s annual meeting in May 2009.
A resident of New York City, Pace is currently managing director of the marketing communications powerhouse Young & Rubicam. She previously worked at J. Walter Thompson and DMB&B, and has for the past twenty-five years helped to deliver and manage integrated marketing strategies for global clients such as Colgate Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Successfully managing diverse teams to help build the businesses of leading global corporations has been a highlight of Pace’s career. “Ellen knows when to lead, when to listen, but most important, how to motivate a team of leaders to agree to decisions and action,” said one colleague.
Her multifaceted volunteer work for the college and the Alumnae Association has shown her focus and talent, said another reference. A Communications Ad Hoc Committee member of the association since 2005, Pace helped to formulate the association’s ten-year strategic plan and has served as a lead gift chair for her class, class Cornerstone chair, and head class agent. She received a Medal of Honor in 2006.
Married since 1999 to Anthony Pace and mother of twins Liz and Leo, Pace worked in Australia for several years early in her career as an advertising account manager for DMB&B. Her experience in long-range planning, recognizing trends, and helping a particular product evolve while retaining its proven values are all relevant to a trustee’s role, she noted in her personal statement.
“Mount Holyoke is positioned now and in the future to leverage its unique profile as an educator of women in the world. The college’s truly global student body and commitment to empowering women to act make a compelling story,” Pace added.—M.H.B.
As the association bylaws state: Names of additional candidates may be submitted to the Committee on the Nomination of Alumnae Trustees/Awards provided that the nominations shall be by written petition, signed by at least 100 voting members, no more than 30 percent of whom shall be from the same class or from the same club area, and such written petition is received by the executive director by January 15 of the year of the election. Nominations by petition shall include the written consent of the nominee to serve if elected.
