Preamble
Play and collaboration and spontaneity and complexity and creativity and rebellion are at the heart of the Gero-Punk Project.
At the most recent Gero-Punk Salon we engaged in a communal writing project, a version of what the Surrealist André Breton called the “Exquisite Corpse,” a collaborative creative process that taps into the collective unconscious. In our version of the process, we wrote eight line poems, with each of us writing a line on a sheet of paper and then folding the paper so the next writer could only see the line immediately preceding. The poems emerged through each writer’s response to the line before, without knowing anything about the shape of the overall piece. We were all working within the broad themes articulated in the Gero-Punk Manifesto, but each with our own ideas about what those themes might entail.
Over several days I will be publishing the eight Gero-Punk Poems that emerged from our creative play together.
Poem 2
I have come to yet another fork in the road, my journey.
There is a moon, lighting the road ahead
which forks in a brilliant glow of unknowingness of what mystery
that mystery before I began, that mystery that will outlast me.
…that mysterious stuff that binds all of creation together – I listen, and wait.
I keep listening until I understand it, but I haven’t gotten it yet.
But I know it’s more important to dwell in the questions rather than knowing.
And in this time and this place what could be more important than openness to the unknown.
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Written by: Cyndi, Glenna, Jackie, Masaki, Simeon, Aisling, Jenny & Libby
Gero-Punk Salon 12/11/16
About Jenny Sasser, Ph.D.
I am a transdisciplinary educational gerontologist, writer, community activist and facilitator.
I am former Chair of the Department of Human Sciences and Director of Gerontology at Marylhurst University. I joined the faculty as an adjunct member of the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program in 1997 and since that time, I've been involved in designing many on-campus and web-based courses and programs for adult learners, including in Gerontology. As an undergraduate I attended Willamette University, graduating Cum Laude in Psychology and Music; my interdisciplinary graduate studies at University of Oregon and Oregon State University focused on the Human Sciences, with specialization areas in adult development and aging, women’s studies, and critical social theory and alternative research methodologies. My dissertation became part of a book published in 1996 and co-authored with Dr. Janet Lee--Blood Stories: Menarche and the Politics of the Female Body in Contemporary US Society. Over the past twenty (or more!) years I have been involved in inquiry in the areas of creativity in later life; older women's embodiment; sexuality and aging; critical Gerontological theory; transformational adult learning practices; and inter-generational friendships and cross-generational collaborative inquiry.
I am co-author, with Dr. Harry R. Moody of Aging: Concepts and Controversies (now in its 10th edition!) and first author, also with Moody, of the recently published Gerontology: The Basics, as well as author/co-author of several book chapters, articles and essays.
Currently, I work at Portland Community College in the Center for Learning & Teaching Excellence as a Teaching & Learning Specialist and as part-time faculty for the Gerontology Program.
Jenny Sasser, Ph.D.
The Gero-Punk Project 