Trinity Magazine: Fall 2005
Trinity Welcomes Sharon Lamont Charde �64 for the Second Annual
Sowers� Seed Program
For the second year in a row, Trinity�s Cap and Gown Weekend
festivities began with the Sowers� Seed lecture. Established by
Kelly Snider Dunn �64 and her family, the Sowers� Seed Program
highlights alumnae who have incorporated the Catholic traditions of
service and social justice that are central to the Trinity
experience. The mission and teachings of the Sisters of Notre Dame
de Namur are special gifts at Trinity, and through the generosity of
the Sowers� Seed Fund Trinity is able to share these gifts with new
generations of Trinity students.
The inaugural speaker last year, Marie Dennis �64, shared her story
of work with the Maryknoll organization, and her years of advocacy
for some of the world�s most impoverished populations. This year,
Sharon Lamont Charde, also a member of the Class of 1964, brings a
story that is closer to home. Charde has spent many years conducting
writing workshops with incarcerated teenage girls in Connecticut.
Her talk at Trinity, along with writing workshops for students and
for Trinity�s community partners over several days, was
inspirational and resonated deeply with today�s students. The
presentation culminated with a poetry slam in which Trinity students
shared writings that were both spiritual and insightful.
The following excerpts are from her lecture.
 I
am so very grateful to all who invited me to speak this year as a
Sowers� Seed lecturer; �. Never in my most quixotic dreams would I
have imagined I would be back at Trinity in this role � in the
Chapel, no less.
I have always wanted to change the world. My time at Trinity, in
the early sixties, nurtured that desire. It was a time of great
idealism�. Our young and thrilling president in the time we called
Camelot, John F. Kennedy, said, �Ask not what your country can do
for you, but what you can do for your country.� With his
assassination, those words took on a greater meaning. We were meant
to � give to those who had less than we had because we were lucky
young women with great gifts of mind and heart�.
At Trinity I lived in a community of women, as I had in high school
�. Even though it was very much a man�s world at the time, I know we
felt the collective strength that comes from being part of such a
community. Senior year, I was part of a group that tutored black
teenage girls at Notre Dame Academy on North Capitol Street; they
were the first persons of color with whom I had ever had a
relationship. I had lived in a completely segregated world. I was
fascinated and compelled by lives so different from my own �.
The �real sixties� were just hitting with their screams for
reshaping the world � however, many of us preferred to stay safe in
our �cookie-cutter� structure. �On the outside most of us looked the
same in our madras shirtwaist dresses� but on the inside many of us
had the seeds of radical behavior growing. And but for the fact that
I became engaged to a Georgetown boy who was already in medical
school, my life might have taken a very different turn. [After
graduation] I went into one of the few acceptable professions at
that time for a woman � teaching. [It was] a Catholic high school in
Philadelphia: 2,000 students, half of them black�.I truly hated
teaching that year, but I loved those girls. All they wanted to do
was talk � about their families, � their many problems. I felt
overwhelmed, but I did what I could. And that was my favorite part
of teaching, hanging out with the girls, talking and listening. I
recognized how useless the curriculum was to these inner city kids
�.They needed help in coping with their lives. There was tremendous
prejudice in that school, not just against the girls of color but
also against me, the only married teacher. [After having my first
child] I stayed home and had another. I didn�t want anyone else
raising my kids�. Those were very hard years, light years away from
my privileged Trinity existence of such a short time ago�
I became deeply involved in the education of my sons �and was
elected to the local school board. I was passionate about the
women�s movement and local politics�. In 1980, I went back to school
for a counseling degree. It seemed like everyone I knew talked to me
about his or her problems, and I had plenty of my own. �I felt a
great load on my body and my soul. And I wanted to change the world
more than ever, my small world as well as the larger one.
 So
began my 25-year career as a family therapist. I saw injustice on a
whole new scale�.I was shocked that the mental health center had no
groups for women�. Until the �80s most of those in the helping
professions were male. What could they know about real women�s
lives? About raising children? About the suffering caused by gender
and power imbalances from which they benefited? �. I saw those
injustices everywhere. I guess you could say I became a crusader for
women. But they were still white women, in my little northwest
corner of Connecticut.
In May of 1987, my younger son Geoffrey died �.Everything
changed. My older son Matthew graduated from college and left home.
Grief consumed me for years. My life and my marriage were totally
destabilized. My work became harder and harder as my own suffering
got in the way�. It was time to find other tools for coping with
this new life. I remembered that I had always loved writing and
decided to study writing with Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing
Down The Bones�.�Go for first thoughts, don�t think, keep your hand
moving,� she told us. �You are free to write and say anything you
want �.� And I wrote and wrote, the details of his death, my life,
his life. I couldn�t stop writing�.
I had run several women�s therapy groups, but now I wanted to
start a women�s group that would be focused around writing. � I
wanted to work with incarcerated women. Everyone asks me why. I
guess because I have felt locked up myself for years. Marriage and
babies so soon after college, my traditional past with its multiple
rules and regulations, struggles with the injustices of society �
these are some of the reasons. But it is also that old mantra I
learned so long ago � that those of us who have been given much owed
a large debt to the world. In 1999 I heard about Touchstone, a
facility � for teenage girls. I called the director to volunteer,
and I�ve been there ever since. The girls are� runaways, disturbers
of the peace, truants, drug users and sellers, many taken away from
their homes due to abuse both sexual and physical. Many if not all
of their parents are drug and alcohol addicts. Almost none have
fathers present. They have lived in �the projects� � but they are
strong, beautiful, resilient, funny. They are mostly black and
Hispanic. They are different from anyone I have ever known. I adore
them. It is in these young women that I see the face of God. I wish
they could be here to show you their beautiful selves, to speak
their powerful words.
I have come to Touchstone each week for the last seven years. I�m
there for two hours and we write together and share our writing. � I
take their writing home and type it into poems to give back to them
the next week in notebooks and plastic binders. How they love to see
their work in print, their scribbled feelings transformed into art!
� I have [since] organized an annual reading, �I Am Not A Juvenile
Delinquent,� in a local art gallery. The girls are always stunned
that people are so moved and inspired by their poems. � [It is]
always a standing room only crowd.
I have edited and published a full-length anthology of their
work, called I AM NOT A JUVENILE DELINQUENT, which won the 2005
Prevention For A Safer Society Award given by the National Council
On Crime And Delinquency. This year we were invited by the Office of
the Child Advocate to read our poetry at a Teen Dating Violence
Seminar in Hartford. The audience was deeply silent as they took in
poem after poem about rape, violence and sexual abuse. Here were the
victims speaking their truths! Their experience could not be denied.
There is an elite private school in my community, The Hotchkiss
School, attended by both of my sons. � [We] have been joining a
group of their young women students monthly during the school year
to read and write together. I think this is the project I am most
thrilled by. It mixes so many worlds� still the cosmos of white
privilege, but also the street world into which the girls have
brought me�. My niece� did a research project on my group [for] an
independent study credit for her master�s in ESL. The first time she
joined us at Hotchkiss, she was stunned to overhear conversations
around the table about both a recent school vacation trip to
Barbados as well as an arrest for assault and battery and a
discussion of the pros and cons of gang membership. All the girls
are totally open about their experiences, whether shame for having a
privileged life or pain for the rapes and abandonment that are
common to my girls � they come to see that they are all locked up in
various ways, and that a way to freedom can be found with paper and
pen.
The experience of hearing their stories changed me, altered my
perception of the world and made it clearer, somehow more important.
The words were not my own, but they spoke for me�these young women
helped me to imagine myself as someone I could never have dreamed of
being�.
I stay in touch with many ex-residents� some of whom are
continuing to use writing as a powerful coping tool.... This is what
one of the Hotchkiss students had to say about her experience in the
group:
Our feelings of loneliness dwindled away with every poem
we shared with each other in our private group for the two hours
we met � it was a comforting, ambitious, giving family. What
made this poetic medicate [sic] so successful was not just the
poetry. It was Sharon�s presence and unconditional love for the
underprivileged, poor and outcast. �She saw the worth each one
of us possessed posed with our need for love, sympathy and
companionship. We saw in her an unbiased heart that looked at us
with no prejudice, no fear, and wanting nothing from us except
for us to try to overcome our situations, fears and complexes
over our future.
I could ask for no more. My quest to find a wholeness, �to
connect my gifts of writing, creating women�s community as well as
my clinical skills, � have all coalesced into a life�s work in which
I feel I get much more than I give. � All of us are in a boat
together rowing towards being more fully human. They are not
juvenile delinquents and we are not special white people. Our being
present to each other is changing the world, and I at last am a
happy woman, having found on this earth what I have sought all these
years since I sat in this Chapel as a student.
Return to Trinity Magazine Fall 2006
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