Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Lisa Shalom. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Lisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I have had the opportunity to speak my poetry on concert, festival and slam stages all around the world. Spoken word poetry has served me so well on so many levels that I created a program to share the medium. One of my most meaningful projects has been putting together “Spoken Wordicine: Let Your Words Be Your Medicine”. For about a decade now, I have had the honor, joy and privilege of facilitating this program for teens, adults and businesses, exploring the spoken word art form as a means of authentic and embodied expression. This workshop is held live in community (online or in-person) for folks from all walks of life.

I should mention that while anyone is welcome- this work is most def not for everyone. By design, participants who sign up will meet with their resistance. We are invited to get comfortable with being damn uncomfortable. We actively carve out space to look it in the eye- everything. All of us. All the places we’ve been, the choices we’ve made, the tragedies, triumphs and mundane components of our past as well as the entirety of who we’ve become along the way. We make friends with ourselves and invite into warmth all the parts of self we may have cast out into the cold.

They say that shame dies when stories are told in safe places. We summon the courage to shine a flashlight into the dusty corners of our experience and tell some of the stories we find there, in part because our stories own us until we quit running from them, turn around and own them instead. James Baldwin says, ‘Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.’ For those ready to invest in moving beyond the comfort zone, this work has proven life-changing and the feedback from graduates is exceptional.
That is wildly meaningful to me.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

Having visited all seven continents and having lived on four of them as a frontlines activist and healing arts practitioner, I have collected a brimming treasure chest of wackadoodle tales. I occasionally venture onstage to share some of these stories. I also teach poetry workshops, whereby participants from all walks of life are afforded a toasty incubator to hatch theirs. My path has led me to suspect that little has the power to instantly create empathetic connection so extraordinarily well as diving in and massaging our messy, paradoxical, human stories into art that we share around an attentive campfire. Depending on how we tell a story and on the audience, stories hold incredible power as agents of social change and personal transformation, and each of us has access to this medium because everyone has a story to tell- even if we don’t think we do.

To me, stories are our heritage as humans. Civilizations are built and crumble through their influence. They allow us to try on fresh lenses and invite others to try on ours. They are an avenue to generate meaning when life moves mysteriously. Telling our stories gets us to quit stuffing down raw truths that we hide from ourselves and others, allowing us to lighten the loads we carry, both individually and collectively. Stories build bridges. They invite us to become the architects of how we process, frame and relate to the content of our experience. They give us agency in determining how we piece together meaning from the rubble after things fall apart. There are endless layers of deliciously rich nutritional benefits available when we create a story-share feast, and this is why I initiated “Spoken Wordicine: Let Your Words Be Your Medicine,” a storytelling poetry program for the bold.

We’re here to sweat some. With the proper priming and a safe container, we don’t just share our stories when we share our stories. We move into all kinds of growing edges. Radical truth-telling. Deeper layers of introspection and insight. Writing and wordplay skills. Active listening muscles. Confidence, acceptance and trust in self and other. All of these areas are stretched, strengthened and squeezed. We bond, we integrate, we release, we reclaim, we transform, we soften, we bloom. It’s major. It’s a mental and emotional fitness toning workout. We claim our true height, our voice and the seat of our power. We give meaning to where we’ve been a bit of shape to the next chapter ahead. With a pen and some paper, we move mountains of energy.

So “Spoken Wordicine” is a process open to those who are willing to get brave, honest and deliciously uncomfortable. We turn toward our life experiences and assemble our stories into written poetry which we speak aloud into safe space. (It’s one thing to write a story out and to tuck it away out of sight. It’s another thing to speak it out to listening ears and let ourselves be seen with “vulnerabravery.”) Here we offer the gift of allowing another to walk a mile in our shoes inside of an intentional container. There are inevitably tears, there is always laughter, there arises everything in between and it’s all very much allowed. The program consists of six weekly labs of learning and practicing tools for sharing our stories in a live online community setting. I also teach this work in-person in high schools, corporate settings and leadership conferences.

For our intro program graduates who wish to continue on, we have SWUPS, which is the Spoken Wordicine Underground Poets Society. SWUPS is available only to those who have completed the Spoken Wordicine workshop series. SWUPS is a deep dive into the creative zone where we strengthen our existing container to further our creative process on a regular basis. Almost everyone who has graduated Spoken Wordicine has chosen to continue on with at least one semester of SWUPS.

The community and creativity that has resulted from these programs has been beyond my wildest dreams. I am always humbled by the courage that my students demonstrate and how the choice to get out of the comfort zone invites magic to come alive in a palpable way. Participants from different ages, stages in life and places in the world often become fast friends where initially, they might not have imagined they had much in common. This work shows me how thirsty we are for sincere and basic human connection in an era of highlight reels and filters. It shows me how generative and healing the craft of storytelling can be when we walk each other home through rain and shine, just by holding space.

This work has a somatic component as well. Trauma can surface during the writing phase and so as not to retraumatize ourselves, we work some tools for practicing self-regulation, titration of awareness and accompaniment where we may be accustomed to white-knuckling things alone. Two decades of background in the healing arts comes in handy for this portion of the work. So we hone our poetic storytelling craft, but we also develop intimacy with ourselves and others and allow old stuff to surface- not to drown in it or wallow indulgently, but to liberate that which has been burdensome and to celebrate that which wishes to be commemorated. Maya Angelou says, “There is no greater agony than the burden of an untold story inside you.” I couldn’t agree more, and I’d like to humbly add that there is little as relieving as owning and sharing a story that has been shoved into the shadowy recesses. The darker side of our experience will quietly chase us and hunt us down when we pretend it doesn’t exist or try to run away from it. When we turn to face a truth which is ready to surface, and courageously speak it aloud, we integrate, and the folks listening get to do the same while receiving the gift of walking a mile in our shoes. Massive.

I am proud to have won the storyslam at the legendary Moth storytelling event the first time I got on the mic to share. (Come see me and other storytellers at the Grandslam in San Francisco at the Herbst theatre on March 22, 2024!) I am also over the moon to feature friend and bass-master virtuoso, Victor Wooten, as a guest speaker in our last few SWUPS, and to be conducting personal coaching sessions for the outrageously talented Cali-based rap mogul, Mozzy. If I am most proud of anything, though, it’s the campfire circles where we share our poetry pieces with friends and family as part of the Spoken Wordicine workshops. I have watched interpersonal relationships go from strained and silent to strengthened and repaired, I have watched coworkers in corporate environments go from competitors at each others throats to teammates and allies, I have witnessed empathy and understanding emerge from situations thought to be irredeemable. I have seen all kinds of lightbulb moments. I have watched people go from hiding situations about their health, sexuality, mistreatment due to weight/race/religion, etc. to standing up and speaking into the unknown with quivering voices only to finally find a soft place to land where previously there had been an abyss. I can think of no greater honor than continuing to probe the depths of the art of storytelling through poetry, where I get to indulge my passion for highlighting common ground, frolicking with rhythm and breaking down the science of wordplay.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

The artform that I work with is itself a practice in the cultivation of resilience. We visit stories from the past or present that might be tricky and we lean into what feels broken with the purpose of springing back into shape or watering ourself into a sense of wholeness again. Here’s an example-

I went through a difficult breakup with a well-known percussionist who wrote a chorus and a beat for a song about our breakup not long after we ended things. He asked me to write a spoken word piece that would sit on instrumentation that he had already composed. I knew that if we recorded something together, he would put it out on YouTube and that it would reach many people around the world. I also knew that this was an extremely tender subject for me, as I was in the thick of the pain of parting ways. I debated whether a musical collaboration would be a good idea or whether it would leave me too exposed in an already-raw place. Aside from loving the challenge of writing poetry for a piece in 11/4 time signature, (I am a rhythm fiend,) I told myself that I should experiment with what happens when you just tell the tangled truth and allow yourself to be seen in it, even if it paints you as something other than a glossy human who has all their shit tied neatly in a bow. (Novel!) So I went for it. Writing and speaking to a rough experience forced me to be with it. The pain of it. The words and actions I couldn’t take back and the things that were too late to say or do. I had to grieve, and I had to name the faces of that grief in the art, and then I had to speak it out loud, where there would be a spotlight on me inside of my amplified, broadcasted and sloppy mess.

I let the camera be in my face while I talked about the hurt of this breakup with a man who was physically present, right there on the other side of the studio glass in real time. At one point in the video, you can actually see me look over at this guy, and you can observe my facial expression as I notice him texting someone new in his life.

It was a very uncomfortable process, to say the least.

Did it change the facts of the situation? No.

Did it help me lean into difficult emotions, digest them and create something beautiful out of something that felt ugly? Yes.

Did it give voice to an experience that we’ve all had in our own way and build a bridge of connection to anyone who could relate? Yes.

Did it force me to have my own back before knowing whether or not anyone would like or respond favorably to the art? Yes.

Did it allow me to find the power available in the naming and accepting of circumstances in which I otherwise felt pretty powerless? Yes.

Did the feedback allow me to feel accompanied inside of an otherwise lonely place? Yes.

While I would not recommend going down quite such a vulnerable route to my students, (especially not at first,) this particular experience taught me much about what is possible when you take the risk of letting yourself be seen- raw, unfiltered, uncensored, un-aggrandized, un-shrunken, real.

While far from my greatest challenge in life, this experience comes to mind because most folks who wish to join Spoken Wordicine hesitate at the precipice of signing up, citing fear as a reason for holding back. If it’s scary, that’s actually a good sign. It’s supposed to be scary. Just because I do/teach spoken word doesn’t mean I’m not terrified of it, to this day. They say the fear of public speaking is greater than the fear of death. It’s basically the art of practicing public nudity. But we get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and the liberation and resilience that comes with the stretch translates to all kinds of aspects of existence.

(You can watch that video by googling my name along with “Between Our Eyes”. Pay attention at 3:46! Haha)

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I’d love to see an end to celebrity worship in favor of a more circular model of sharing art. I think that we tend to build up a select few, call them artists and forget that artistry isn’t an industry, but is inherent to each and every one of us. It’s a birthright.

When do you call yourself an artist?

When you create stuff that you like? That you share? That other people like? When you stay up until 4 am working on your craft? When you can sell your work? When someone with status taught you how to do something? When you generate a buzz? When you become part of an elite group of socially elevated creators?

Or

Are you an artist because you are alive, here, on this earth? Because there is art in your step, in your tone? Because of your willingness to be here and taste what is in and around you and to respond in your own distinct flavor?

Simply by virtue of the fact that the ultimate creative force is running through your veins and animating your being with Life, you are an artist.

We are expressions of creativity who can choose, ourselves in turn, to create, who are necessarily creating by default at any given moment.

We are offshoots and fractals of art that give birth to more creation, originating in (literal) creative juices which spiral all the way back to Adam and Eve/dinosaurs/amoeba/stardust!

Art is not the packaging of a thought or idea into something palatable for another or for the masses. It is not for those who carry the title, ‘artist.’ Art is a willingness to show up to life, beauty, emotions, ideas, nature- whatever is real and present, and to be with it, explore it, taste it, and offer that back with a unique twist of Light and Shadow with your distinct fingerprints on it. Art is what is born when we listen and share our findings through whatever medium calls, and it can range from composing a symphony to arranging the vegetables in a salad.

It is impossible not to be an artist. When it comes to storytelling, we all have a story to tell, and after over a decade of experience in this work, not a soul can convince me otherwise. Can we hone and refine a craft? Yes. But at the end of the day, art lives through we who live, we who have lived, we who will live. Inevitably. Done deal.

So I think a thriving and creative ecosystem is one where the line between audience and performer is fluid. One where we express to the extent we feel called to do so, without fear, shame, pride or a need to prove to ourselves or to another and without glorifying a certain few at the diminishment of everyone else. Through my work, I can attest that when we cultivate spaces where we can be like a field of trees and flowers- willing to exist in simple, imperfect, ephemeral beauty in different shapes and colors, standing out in different ways and to different degrees, the landscape becomes rich and symbiotic- with room for everyone. That’s the kind of culture I’m up for assisting to establish and the kind of environment where creativity can thrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.shalomtoyou.com/spokenwordicine
• Instagram: @shalomlisa
• Facebook: www.shalomtoyou.com/lisashalom
• Other: email- [email protected]