Monthly Archives: May 2023

By Julia M. Klein

Kay Redfield Jamison's eloquent writing on mental illness has bridged art and medicine, the personal and the professional. An expert on bipolar disorder, Jamison revealed her own struggles with the illness in the 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind. She dissected the relationship between mania and creativity in Touched With Fire and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire. She explored the distinctions between grief and depression in another memoir, Nothing Was the Same, about losing a husband to cancer.

"I have been interested in psychological suffering and different ways that society and individuals deal with itgood, bad, and indifferent," says the professor of psychiatry and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. "I have a lot of respect for psychotherapy when it's done really well and dismay, like many, when it's done badly."

Her latest work, Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind (Knopf, 2023), is not a conventional history of psychotherapy. Instead, Jamison draws on an idiosyncratic catalog of personal obsessions to illuminate the broader topic of psychological healing and healers. The book represents "an archipelago of thoughts, experiences and images," Jamison writes in its pages.

The title is lifted from a poem by World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon, who had a productive and mutually admiring relationship with the anthropologist, psychologist, physician, and British Army captain W.H.R. Rivers. Rivers treated the poet when he was consigned to a mental hospital for the anti-war views he developed in the trenches. Feeling a responsibility to the men in his command, Sassoon later returned to the battlefield, where he was wounded but, unlike fellow poet Wilfred Owen, survived the war.

"Sassoon would say that Rivers gave him a place to be known," Jamison says. "From the first time he met him, Rivers understood him better than anyone had." Their relationship models the "therapeutic alliance" that Jamison and other researchers consider the most important component of successful psychotherapy.

The "free-flowing" (in Jamison's words), nonlinear narrative of Fires in the Dark zigzags between past and present, covering a dizzying array of topics: Neanderthal mourning rituals, Greek medicine, the Arthurian legend, the singer Paul Robeson's tumultuous and multifaceted career, and Jamison's own experience of disease and treatment. "The history of healing, like anything profound, is not particularly linear," Jamison explains.

Assuming "that psychological suffering goes back to the earliest times of our species," Jamison says she was interested in the origins of psychotherapy in religion and magic. She underlines that, in addition to medicine and therapy, healing may require the support of family and friends, books, music, work, and other activities that imbue life with meaning.

Though Fires in the Dark is wide-ranging, it is also, at times, Hopkins-centric. Jamison devotes her first chapter, "The Shadow of a Great Rock," to William Osler, one of the four founding physicians of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Though Osler wasn't a psychiatrist, his gentle, confident, and comforting bedside manner had "a very therapeutic effect on people," she says. "And he came to know grief so profoundly because of the death of his son [Edward Revere Osler] in the First World War." In the aftermath of that death, books and especially the poetry of Walt Whitman provided some solace, Jamison writes.

"Psychotherapy, at its best, helps you expand your life and your mind. It doesn't just bring you back to where you were. ... But in an ideal world, it would make you open to other experiences and other ways of dealing with things."

Jamison says she also "got off on a tangent about nurses" who chronicled their World War I experiences. Among them was Hopkins' Ellen La Motte, who authored what Jamison calls "a very short, very bitter, but beautifully written memoir" about her wartime service in France. "One of the major themes of the book is accompaniment[the idea] that psychotherapy is accompanying someone on a very difficult journey," Jamison says. "These nurses did that in a very prescribed way. From the bedside to the operating room to the body bags, they stayed with people."

Jamison devotes considerable attention to the "astonishing" career of Paul Robeson, the actor, singer, athlete, lawyer, polyglot, and civil rights activist whose life was clouded by segregation and harassment by the Cold Warera House Un-American Activities Committee. Robeson also endured repeated hospitalizations and treatments for what was then known as manic-depressive illness.

"Wherever he saw suffering, he bled," Jamison says. "Because of his political beliefs and unwillingness to bend to a completely tyrannical government, he doesn't get the kind of recognition that he probably should."

While researching the book, Jamison says she was "struck by a lack of exemplars in people's lives," an absence that the heroes of literature could potentially fill.

"One of the things that psychotherapy can do is make people find courage to deal with adversity. Psychotherapy, at its best, helps you expand your life and your mind. It doesn't just bring you back to where you were, although that's greatI mean, nobody's going to complain about that," she says. "But in an ideal world, it would make you open to other experiences and other ways of dealing with things."

Though Fires in the Dark is not a memoir, the book is, in part, autobiographical in its emphasis on the literature, music, and role models that have been most meaningful to Jamison. She hopes that meaning is generalizable to her readers: "It's saying, 'Bring in the things you love in life. Build an island that is of your own devising. Make it full of things that give you sustenance.'"

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A history of healing | Hub - The Hub at Johns Hopkins

One morning in early May, J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell made history as the first nonbinary-identifying actors to be nominated for Tony Awards. The night before the nominations were announced was the first time that either performer had attended the Met Galaor, as Newell calls it, our Tony nominee party. A couple weeks later, the pair met with TIME together in a Midtown caf close to both of their theaters to discuss the nominations, Ghee for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for their role as Jerry/Daphne in Some Like It Hot and Newell for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for their role as Lulu in Shucked.

Neither are newcomers to Broadway. Ghee made their debut as Lola (a drag queen who helps save a failing shoe factory) in Kinky Boots in 2017, and Newell made theirs the same year as Asaka (the Earth goddess) in Once on This Island. (The two go way back, having met at a performance of Kinky Boots.) This year, Some Like It Hot and Shucked were also both nominated for Best New Musical, meaning that Ghee and Newell originated their roles on-stage, and can make them their own.

Those roles feel tailor-made to their performers: In Shucked, Lulu is a small-town whiskey distiller who brings down the house with a standing ovation in the middle of Act I with Independently Owned, a show-stopper about not needing a man.

Newell says they are learning from Lulu about gradually opening up. That in my own independent life, there is something else to have, there is another person to be had, that can meld, mesh well into this independent life that I live.

And in Some Like It Hot, based on the 1959 Billy Wilder film that starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, two musicians, Jerry (Ghee) and Joe (Christian Borle), must flee Chicago after witnessing a mob hit. They go undercover in drag, joining a traveling all-girl band, but Jerry, the bass player, finds himself drawn to his newfound persona as Daphne.

Of course, doing Some Like It Hot and bringing men in dresses back to Broadway, everybody has feelings, Ghee says. So theyre concerned about how its going to be perceived and received. And there were moments where I was like, cant we just be artists and create?

In conversation, Gheein a black, strappy, leather top and pleated miniskirtand Newellwearing a white, puff-sleeved top and a set of feathery lashesvamp and riff and ricochet off of each other, toggling seamlessly between thoughtful and funny. They discussed their characters, who their art serves, and what winning really means.

This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

Alex Newell belts during rehearsal for 'Shucked' at a studio space in midtown Manhattan.

'Shucked'Emilio Madrid

Ghee: You know how to make the church go up in a way of, Im using what I got today. Using the gift. So it is definitely such a formative way of learning yourself as an artist.

Newell: And your instrument in general. You create your own style in church. The fact that gospel and hymns have their own diaspora inside a genre, that we can have a Lecresia Campbell giving us operatic tones into a belt, and we can have pop from Mary Mary. Thats that artistry of finding yourself and your voice.

Ghee: When I started doing drag, I used to say I never imagined myself doing it, which was a complete bold-faced lie. I was young Lola playing in my moms clothes as a kid, and using blankets as trains and making dresses. And so it was me tapping back into the little version of me, and that freest, most imaginative person, and having complete creative control of how I can be effective with my gifts.

Because Im always trying to be intentional with everything that I do, and especially with drag, and so it was my way of: How am I ministering to people? How am I reaching hearts and souls and minds through this artistry? So it really helped me free myself in every way.

Newell: Well, you know, I wasnt in drag ever until I won RuPauls Secret Celebrity Drag Race. No, I guess I never knew what drag was for so long, because I didnt know what I was doing when I was putting on my mamas heels and tromping around the house. Honey, I cried the day my foot went past a seven. I cried.

Newell: Very different. I always say drag is appreciating the womans body, in a way. And appreciating what life started out of. To appreciate our moms and our idols and all of that good stuff, and to really exaggerate the beauty of that form and that art.

Newell: Ill be honest, Im tired. I am exhausted. Mine is particularly strange, because I do the opening number, I have a 40-minute break, and when I come back on stage, its the number. Im just like, Ah! And its such a big thing from zero. I just jump in and feel like Im shot out of a cannon.

Ghee: By that time, Im warm. Im working towards that point in the show. And there are shows where Im like, Where am I pulling this from today? But I get into it and it is that giving into Daphne and that freedom to find the joy every time. And it cracks a part of me open every time.

Ghee: Changes every day. And I love it. I love being able to step in and be like, OK, what am I finding today? For them and for myself. What kind of freedom? What kind of joy? And bringing myself to the day in the moment, and then also leaving space for exploration and uniqueness. Very intentional of, like, Oh, this is very close to home and purpose-driven. But then also, how do I expand within this?

Newell: When Lulus singing the song, it is male-driven, about how this independent woman has done everything without a man. Ive done the same exact thing. I havent had a partner thats attached to me. Its just been me. And half of that creates a callus over the emotion of not needing anyone.

But then knowing that its OK to want it and to have it. It is OK to be independent and still have the things that everybody else does. I mean, there is the one line. Its so small, it happens so fast. And its, There might be someone that I aint met yet.

Newell: Well, you know, I modeled my Lulu off of Delta Burke and Julia Sugarbaker. Im the hybrid of both of them on Designing Women. And its me but heightened in the fact that I am loud. I am very outspoken. But I do have a filter, which is shocking to most. I do think about what Im going to say. Lulu does not. Lulu, if it comes up, it comes out.

Ghee: The creative team really trusted me and gave me the space to go. They really were like, We defer to you.

When I say to Christian [Borle, who plays Joe/Josephine] in Act II, when hes like, What do I call you? Jerry? Daphne? And Im like, Either is fine, as long as you do it with love and respect. When people ask me my pronouns, I say, All things, with respect. I understand that the world is conditioned to respond to what they see. So theyre always going to immediately say he/him. But I dont expect you to know what I am feeling and what I am carrying that day. And what Im presenting doesnt necessarily attach to what I am. And I walk in the fullness of who I am at all times.

J. Harrison Ghee performs as Daphne in 'Some Like It Hot.'

Marc J. Franklin

Newell: You dont see it coming.

Ghee: Truly.

Newell: You dont see that youre gonna laugh about something that you need to fix.

Ghee: One of my favorites is when Kevin [Del Aguila, who plays Daphnes love interest] says in the show, The world responds to what they see. And everyones like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and then, Well, the world doesnt have very good eyesight. And youre like, Ah. Oh, right. Thats very true. In so many ways.

Newell: Ours is just blatant. Our Plan B joke is blatant. Maizie [Lulus cousin], she needs to find a plan B. Even though most people are trying to put a stop to Plan B. No ones expecting to laugh for two hours and then hear a joke like that. And literally say, Heres the mirror. If you feel uncomfortable, youre the problem.

Newell: Baby, I dont know. The change itself is an extremely hard one to make. Because if we sit here and we talk about why the categories were separated at the beginning, it was to give other people than cis white men awards. And we did take gender off of some awards in the U.K., and the only thing that won was cis white men. And I said, Ooh, we just went right back to where we started. So I dont know what that looks like. Its a deeper conversation. I think its adding a category, widening the horizon of the category.

Ghee: Weve got to free ourselves to see ourselves. We really got to give ourselves the permission to be like, You know what, we can do whatever we want to do. We do shape society and culture. Lets be ahead of that, and let us make the room and the space for everybody at the table to do all of the things.

Newell: In my spirit, Ive already won. Not a statue, not anything. I created a lane for somebody after me to come and do exceptional. I have created space and created conversation and made the ruckus that needs to create active change. If I win, yay, Ill put the statue in my bathroom. And Ill play with it every time I brush my teeth. And Id love it.

Ghee: But it is exciting to see so many people feeling seen and represented who are like, Wow, thank you. I didnt know that there was any possibility for me in this world. And I know that feeling of moving to New York. I wasnt a theater kid growing up. I grew up singing in church. And so it was like, well, I sing and dance and people respond; theater sounds right. Let me go try this out. And then to find Billy Porters album of At the Corner of Broadway and Soul, I was like, Whoa, there is somebody in this industry I can

Newell: See! And be!

Ghee: Something to look up to. So to now be that for somebody else? Again, the winning is already happening.

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J. Harrison Ghee and Alex Newell on Making Tony History - TIME

FLORENCE COUNTY On a wooded bluff overlooking the Great Pee Dee River, a team of archaeologists digs into the Pee Dee region's past.

Artifact by artifact, the team assembled with the help of the Archaeological Institute of the Pee Dee hopes it can reassemble the story of an area of South Carolina replete with history but largely neglected, they say.

Weve got an incredible human history in this part of the world, an incredible history of humans and their interaction with the natural environment. Ninety eight percent of that history can only be understood through archaeology, said Ben Zeigler, Archaeological Institute of the Pee Dee chairman.

Zeigler contends local history has been overlooked due to a lack of resources and a lack of development in the region.

Since 2021, the institute has helped organize a number of digs and hosted lectures on area history. Now, its working on a comprehensive plan for archaeology in the Pee Dee, which will determine where the organization focuses its efforts.

In May, a team of archaeologists spent 10 days excavating a spot off of the Pee Dee River in Florence County that they believe hosted a Native American settlement. A shovelful at a time, they sifted through the dirt, searching for evidence that people had once lived on the bluff.

Previous surveys of the area uncovered evidence from the Mississippian period, which runs from about 1100 AD to contact with European settlers, said Chris Judge, secretary of the AIPD and an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina Lancaster.

This is the zenith of Native American cultural complexity prior to Europeans arriving, right here in Florence County, he said.

Among the artifacts archaeologists have found at the Florence County site are fragments of pottery stamped with the Mississippian Complicated Stamp. Archaeological Institute of the Pee Dee/Provided

The Mississippians originated in what is now Oklahoma, slowly expanding and eventually displacing the woodland cultures that existed in South Carolina previously. However, Mississippian activity in the Pee Dee remains an enigma, according to Zeigler. Evidence of Mississippian settlement largely disappears beyond the east bank of the Pee Dee. Historians dont know why.

Judge hopes that the teams work can begin filling in the gaps in understanding of the Mississippian period in the Pee Dee, as well as what interaction Native Americans at the time had with Spanish settlers as they traveled inland.

Already, the archaeologists have uncovered a number of artifacts at the site in Florence County, most notably shards of pottery, some of which are stamped with a pattern unique to the period: the Mississippian Complicated Stamp, a winding crosshatch made with a wooden paddle. The pattern both distinguished the pots and made them easier to hold, according to Zeigler.

Once identified, the artifacts will be stored at the Florence County Museum, which acts as the regional hub for the AIPD.

Stephen Motte, curator of collections and interpretation at the museum, said historians know little about Native Americans in the Pee Dee. Few archaeologists have studied the area, and what is known is based on limited primary source material. The work done by the AIPD provides crucial clues as historians work to put the regions history back together.

Having the institute available to the museum, that gives us the ability to more tightly focus on the Pee Dee so that over time, as they continue to work and make discoveries, we can better tell the story of the people who lived here before us, Motte said.

Many think Native American activity in the Pee Dee was limited to small, roving bands that lived in the woods. Thats a misconception, Motte said.

In fact, Motte and Zeigler said, societies in the region were large and complex. They had a complicated, hierarchical society. They frequently traded with each other. They grew corn and lived a sedentary life.

People think that they dont know much because theres not much to know, Motte said. But thats not true.

The work of telling a more complete story is tricky, though. Much of it is speculation based on incomplete data. Archaeologists must use the artifacts they find and the data they collect to imagine their way into the past, Judge said.

Unearthing pieces of a stamped pots from hundreds of years ago is one thing. Imagining someone sitting in the dirt, holding a wooden paddle etched with the pattern, pressing it into the damp clay of the pot thats something else entirely.

But as technology advances and archaeologists make more discoveries, theyre getting closer.

At the end of May, the archaeologists along the Pee Dee River packed up their tools, filled in the holes and headed back to the lab, where they will spend the next months cataloging their findings and studying what theyve collected.

For now, theyre hopeful they found something. A pattern of small, dark circles in the dirt could be a sign of post holes for a home built hundreds of years ago. But its just as likely that the circles are the remnants of long-dead trees, Judge said.

Only with further research will they know for sure.

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Pee Dee archaeologists hope to unearth Native American history - Charleston Post Courier

In this case, the interviews begin with archivists at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum not far from the theater as they process the astonishing trove of photographs sent to them by a possible donor who says little about how he got them. The images of Auschwitz leaders and workers enjoying outings and singalongs and rewards for their accomplishments, including bowls of fresh blueberries, seem to say almost too much.

By the time the play introduces another Auschwitz album one that fills the historical and emotional gaps of the first with images of inmates you understand why, as a former Nazi propagandist explains, One must harden oneself against the sight of human suffering.

Yet Im not sure plays should. Blueberries, which closed on Sunday in Washington but will be presented next spring at New York Theater Workshop, is so brisk and unsentimental it sometimes feels merely clinical, or perhaps surgical, its unbearable topic opened up for autopsy.

Thats effective, but the more powerful moments for me are those in which characters vitally and morally involved in the story descendants of Nazis, a survivor of the camp speak from painful experience about the ways history implicates them, and all of us, even as it starts to fade from collective memory. The procedural mysteries of the albums are, after all, less important than the living fact of their irrefutable testimony.

Theater is its own kind of testimony. Blueberries, like Exclusion and Good Bones, uses drama (and comedy) to extend our thinking about the legacies of prejudice and resistance, power and deprivation. But then so does any tour of this history-rich, antihistorical city. As our teacher son walked us back to our hotel after seeing Blueberries, I asked him about a particularly impressive Beaux-Arts building we passed. The Carnegie Library, he said. Its now an Apple store.

Good Bones Through June 18 at the Studio Theater, Washington D.C.; studiotheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

Exclusion Through June 25 at Arena Stage, Washington D.C.; arenastage.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.

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In a City of Monuments, History Lives Onstage and in the Streets - The New York Times

When Dr. Emily Blanck began studying Juneteenth more than a decade ago, a persistent question drove her research: Why did half of U.S. states commemorate this day, celebrating the liberation of enslaved people in Texas more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation? Many states had their own Emancipation Days.

She will share her findings in her upcoming book, Remembering Emancipation: Juneteenth as Americas Emancipation Holiday, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. Blanck, associate professor of history in Rowans College of Humanities & Social Sciences, previously authored Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts(University of Georgia Press, 2014).

Historian

Slavery in the U.S., Juneteenth, American studies, U.S. legal history

The newer book traces 150 years of history, examining Juneteenths spread in Texas and beyond.

Initially, Black communities in and around Texas observed the day with festivals, but in 1980 the state declared Juneteenth a state holiday. It changed the meaning of Juneteenth. It was no longer for the Black community, but for the whole state of Texas to recognize, Blanck said.

Blanck found that Juneteenth was different than other states emancipation days because when Texans moved from the state, they took the holiday with them, celebrating it in other areas of the country.

Grassroots efforts promoted the adoption of Juneteenth as a state holiday throughout the U.S.In 2021, it was recognized as a federal holiday. It became Americas emancipation holiday, Blanck said. In her book, she ties that to the response to the murder of George Floyd, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Juneteenth has a lot of power because it commemorates two important things about who we are as Americans: slavery and emancipation, said Blanck, who is developing a Juneteenth digital archive. By freeing enslaved people, we have worked towards freedom. But we know were still not there.

Rowan University researchers are passionate about what they do. Find more at Meet Our Researchers.

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Studying slavery and the history of Juneteenth | Rowan Today ... - Rowan Today