The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence

L.R. Berger recently visited Camden, New Jersey for an event with a Peace Community there. L.R. does many good things for peace and she gives wonderful readings. "The Unexpected Aviary" was well received. Thank you Cassie MacDonald. Thank you LR.

"Remembering Who We Are: The Poetry of Living into Nonviolence." This gathering (will be) was an opportunity to taste and see. If violence is, as John Dear has said, “forgetting who we are,” nonviolence is a means for “re-membering” who and whose we are. We’ll deploy poems and stories and gesture to ground ourselves in the power and grace at the heart of creative, active, spirit-centered nonviolent being and doing. LR Berger works as NE Associate of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service as educator, poet, and counselor working with victims and perpetrators of violence through Restorative Practices. She is an advocate for the arts as means for social and personal transformation. Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service works around the world offering nonviolence education and information programs. The Peace Community in Camden is part of this church community.

L.R. Berger, author of "The Unexpected Aviary," won the 2003 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry. Her book has been reviewed in Field and Pleiades. L. R. Berger's work has been supported by The National Endowment for the Arts, The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, The PEN New England Discovery Award, The American Academy in Rome, The MacDowell Colony, The Appalachia Poetry Prize, The Blue Mountain Center and Hedgebrook.

Berger writes of her poems, "The world dares us to love it: that poignant, sturdy brand of love that can sometimes be wrestled out of the condition of our lives. These poems are driven by an ongoing necessity to take up this dare. They are both the means by which I wrestle and the hard-won outcome: a record of how I persisted, faltered or came to arrive at something approaching this love. "

Below, L.R. pictured in Camden's Sacred Heart. L.R. Berger is the New England Associate of Pace e Bene.