“Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing the Story of Buddha’s Wife”

with Barbara McHugh

Thursday,  November 21, 2024 at 3 PM Eastern Time  

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Recently, especially since the pandemic, many fiction writers have been soul-searching: In these times, why write made-up stories? Don’t we have enough of them already? Perhaps only narratives of actual people in real situations are important for our sense of reality. In this presentation, Barbara McHugh talks about what is unique to stories as an art form and why we need to keep making them up. Using her novel, Bride of the Buddha, and other examples, along with what she’s learned in countless fiction-writing workshops, she shows how stories—from folk tales told by grannies to modern narratives created by so-called solitary geniuses—embody our values and thereby enlarge our felt sense of who we are and what our relationship is to the
universe. She also discusses the necessity of story variants to keep us from getting trapped in any single narrative, including the ones we invent to make sense of our lives.

Bride of the Buddha began as a response to the refusal of many of the author’s women friends to bother with Buddhism at all, because its founder had abandoned his wife and child. She wanted to explore the story from the point of view of the deserted wife in a way that, even if the Buddha isn’t exonerated, the practice of Buddhism is. The more research she did, and the more she wrote, the more she felt compelled to make a radical change to the story. She ended up having the Buddha’s wife disguise herself as a man in order to join her former husband’s all-male monastic community. That got the author into trouble, but it also convinced her of the importance of story-making in all its forms.

Barbara McHugh is a poet and novelist with an interdisciplinary PhD from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union. To support herself as a student, she did everything from assembly line jobs to door-to-door sales and social work in all kinds of neighborhoods. She also has worked as a book doctor/writing coach and taught graduate courses on subjects such as the relationship between evil and the attempts to annihilate it. Her novel Bride of the Buddha (Monkfish Books, 2021) won awards for literary and general fiction. Her poems have appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, The Magnolia Review, Steam Ticket, Brushfire, Straight Forward Poetry, and others. She enjoys hiking, traveling, and chasing total eclipses of the sun.

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event. 

“Goddesses of Healing of Ancient Greece”

with Eftyhia Leontidou

Thursday,  November 7, 2024 at 12 NOON Eastern Time  

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Anyone who has visited Greece would probably be familiar with the most common Greek expression, «γεια σου», meaning “to your health!” This phrase is used as a greeting, as a wish, as a blessing, or as a toast when raising glasses. «Γεια» or -more correctly- «υγεία», meaning health, is personified by the ancient Greek Goddess Hygieia; and is the root of many words used in different languages in association with health, cleanliness and sanitation, e.g. hygiene. Hygieia is the most well-known ancient Greek Goddess of healing, but there are quite a few more, e.g. her four sisters, daughters of the god of medicine Asclepius (Panacea, Iaso, Aceso and Aegle). Other healing Goddesses are exclusively associated with birthing/childbirth, e.g. Eileithyia, or with decent and painless death, e.g. Artemis.  I will unfold their stories and their symbols, particularly the snake, whose venom can kill or heal. These Goddesses of medicine promote health on the physical, emotional and spiritual plane; but emphasis will also be placed on the healing needed by our relationships, our societies, and our planet, Mother Earth, all of them wounded by millennia of patriarchy. 

Since the earliest matriarchal human societies of prehistory, healing has been a women’s art. Nowadays, although female healers outnumber their male colleagues, they still fight to earn their rightful acknowledgement in the health system. But the medicine women of our times also have to be warriors, as they fight for women’s rights; against the trauma of violence against women; for the healing of the planet and against destructive acts and practices. In this war they are guided by the archetype of the Goddess Athena, who was worshipped as healer and warrior, among her other qualities.

Dr. Eftyhia Leontidou MD, is a Greek Obstetrician- gynecologist, who has spent all her life healing and empowering women, as a health professional, as an author and as a feminist activist. A lover of music, archaeology, mythology, travel, photography, and Tai chi, and a member of the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights, she owns a well- informed archive of various kinds of documents on women’s issues. Eftyhia has written and translated many articles on women’s rights and health issues for medical and feminist magazines in Greece and abroad. She has also coedited and contributed as an author, translator and photographer in many collective women’s books. Her activities include lectures, seminars and workshops for doctors, medical students, women’s groups as well as battered, unemployed, immigrant and socially excluded women, in collaboration with women’s and cultural organizations, groups, schools, parents’ unions, local authorities, and the European Union; in addition she has taken part in training programs for the police on violence against women.

For more than 50 years she has been active in the autonomous women’s movement being a member of self-examination, feminist activist and feminist spirituality groups in Athens. The last two years, 2023 and 2024, she contributed to the Glastonbury Goddess Conference as a presenter. Her latest project, called Feminist Gynecology, consists so far of three books: 1) Goddess in Action – Childbirth, 2) Female Sexuality – From Flesh to Spirit, and 3) Female body – A Mystical tour.

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Scholar Salon #79 November 21 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time

Truth, Lies and Possibilities: Writing about Buddha’s Wife 

with Barbara HcHugh

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Save the date and watch for details :

Scholar Salon #80, January 7 2025 at 3:00 PM Eastern Time, 

with Vicki Noble

This Salon recording will also be available to members when processed after the event.