Story Parlor Asheville Interviews Meta Commerse
Meta Commerse has been Story Parlor Asheville’s Story/Arts Artist in Residence for November 2022. Below are excerpts from the talk-back of her show, “Romance, Jingles, and Dreams,” a weaving of monologue, music, images, movement, and selected story readings from Womaning: A Memoir.
Radio Host Hank Eder Interviews Meta Commerse on The Home Business Success Show
Hank’s guest, Meta Commerse, is a former professor of History and English, an award-winning author and healer. She is a word medicine woman in the Southern Appalachian story medicine tradition inherited from her grandmother. Her works include five books, essays, newspaper articles, one stage play, and more to come. A graduate of Goddard College in Vermont, Meta is founder and CEO of Story Medicine Worldwide. A performing artist and vocalist, she is the mother of three, grandmother to three grandsons, and has since 2009 made Asheville her home.
David Rayburn Interviews Meta Commerse About Her Newest book, Womaning, for His Practicing Gospel Podcast
In this episode, David speaks to Meta about her groundbreaking book, Womaning. Click the link below to listen.
Breaking the Silence
The Race Relations Station
Aims for Racial Healing
In 2015, the BBC reported on race relations in the U.S., including survey results that three-quarters of whites don’t have nonwhite friends. America might be composed of people from everywhere, yet today, as in our early history, we live apart from the “other.”
Americans were first divided by race by the slave codes instituted in Southern colonies in the 1600s. The BBC reminds us that since that era, no federal legislation has reversed racial segregation. “Why Are Cities Still So Segregated?” an NPR program, explores this phenomenon. Watch on Youtube
Asheville is promoted as a beautiful vacation destination. But visitors arrive and find a conspicuous absence of people of color at our city’s desirable spaces. Our systemic separation is uninterrupted. It leaves us chronically estranged, ignorant and perhaps even fearful of each other.
Click below to hear part one of David Rayburn’s Racial Healing interviews with Meta Commerse.
The Racial Healing Interviews, Part 2
As Meta said in Part 1, “My work with people takes them to those stories, to those places that they had not told, had not spent time with, but had spent a lot of energy not telling. Working with them, somehow, preparing a way for them to break silence and go ahead and tell it…this is the nature and purpose of story medicine.”
The Racial Healing Interviews, Part 3
This is Part 3 of David Rayburn’s Racial Healing interview with Meta Commerse. In this episode we bring together the threads of Meta’s writing, aesthetic arts and healing arts into the tapestry of racial healing. As David says in the interview, “If we are going to have a better future, especially together as people broken by prejudice, misperception, misunderstanding, and the terrible history of hate, violence, and oppression that is the legacy of white supremacy, we want to know where we are going – a vision of the future and what it looks like – we want a map or guide.”
Performances
