I identify as a scholar who yearns to be a bird, circling the sky on wings of witness to the world. A re-wilded-eco-feminist-poet-philosopher-comedian of joyful defiance, social critique and repair, I’ve long been a woman seduced by language.
A retired front-lines activist, I’ve impersonated an anti-nuclear warrior, psychotherapist, performance artist, womyn’s land resident, and Women’s Studies professor, & now am a proud full-time space artist practicing breathing. Kin with forests and clouds and creatures, now a semi-retired barbarian flitting around in an off-grid, hand-built, recycled straw-bale temple at 7200 feet in the Rocky Mountains.
A Neo-Luddite, my sole life’s goal is to be a good human-animal. I imagine my intellectual work as a social service, a deep pocket of some shared dreams from a public defender.. I’ve earned what I reckon is a PhD and a half with two Masters’ degrees—in Literature from CSU, and Transpersonal Psychotherapy from Naropa University. M.A. + M.A. = MAMA *this is the sum arithmetical formula of my educational career.
Instead of children, I’ve planted trees and activists in this world. For decades as a professor and a performer, I raised rebels and protectors, aiming them in the direction of social and earth justice. The purpose of my research and writing, my teaching and performance and my life, is to illuminate oppressions and our struggle for justice. I focus wide on the elemental crises of Nature, of war, rape, racism, misogyny, poverty, fascism, and assaults on the Earth. As an activist, I target patriarchy’s vicious snarl of institutions. As Cassandra, I raise a storm to warn my people. As a witch I speak for the land.
I’ve always been a radical dyke. Following three years spent protesting nuclear war at Greenham Common Womyn’s Peace Camp, and another five living on Lesbian Lands, I returned to the world of our shared problematic humanity. I worked for 23 years as a radical feminist performer and writer for Vox Feminista, joyfully tossing pollen to the winds of change. I was the children’s therapist for our local Safehouse for seven years, taught Conflict Resolution in Elementary, Middle and High Schools, and then Women’s Studies classes for 11 years at Front Range Community College.
I’ve been arrested for peace nine times.
Need help figuring out this web site? Here are a few quick tips:
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To get back to the starting page from any page, click my name in the upper left corner.
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I’ve organized my content into categories—Vox performances, poetry, and so on. They’re all listed on the left side of every page; just click the category you want.
- Within each category, there are links at the top of the page to the subcategories of that selection. (For example, this category has Bio, About the Navigation, Photo Gallery and Contact subcategories.)
- There’s a link at the bottom of each page that will take you back up to the top, or you can just scroll on through. You can click any of the subcategories at the top of the page or any of the categories on the left (About, Performance, Poetry, etc.), or click my logo in the upper left to get back to the home page.
It’s so very strange to be a writer, tossing this hefty message in a digital bottle out into the deep ocean of minds. Not to know how far into the future these words can reach when i’m gone, or how they’ll be received. Such an odd intimacy to launch my heart like this out to you, when i don’t know who you are or what you like. Don’t know what to expect from you or what you’ll expect from me. What will your standards be for expression? Your ideas about the limits of symbiotic relationship or the event horizon of connection?
This is a harvest from a 66 year old garden of thought, my life’s-work. Sounds so serious. Feels like birthing a bursting star of fractured pixels, an un-calm, never-finished gyre of geodrift orbiting your browse. I imagine a weeping god at a woman’s breast, body bursting into a spray of unfinished images through your eyes. May it be so. I hope you find this wild site pleasing to your heart-mind, and can feel the love within.
For the purposes of definition and clarity, I’ve struggle with the challenge of separating all these words into distinct Categories and Sub-Categories. While chaos is a creative principle, the goal here is ease of navigation. As navigation has always been a weak point for me as a traveler, and clarity holds me hostage at gunpoint, it’s taken me many months to organize this website, who’s point is to organize a writing life.
The challenge of separating and classifying meaning has been steep. I associate separation and division with the hierarchical rankings of patriarchy, the splitting of humans from nature, the atomization of nuclear weaponry, and all the terrible isms of our culture—I want nothing to do with it in describing and presenting my work to you. As for classification, everything here is True Stories; it’s all Activism and Radical Feminist Criticism. It’s all Creative Writing, and Memoir. Every line is a Work in Progress, and every sentence is an Excerpt. Same with the categories of Comedy and Tragedy.
There’s a lot of crossover and bleed-thru here, confluences that flow together. The existential and the economic. The spiritual and the social. The political and the private. Here are poems accompanied by images on video, and poems as text on the page. Vampyra videos and Vampyra scripts. Memoir fragments in poetic form, and lectures on Feminism which became fantasies, poems, essays, memoirs, and performance pieces. Simply said, Dear Reader, there are loads of sub-categories. I trust you will figure it out. If you get lost, all the better. Enjoy the chaos.
If you would like to reach Oak Chezar, please send an email to oak.chezar@gmail.com.
CommUNITY
At Valley View Hot Springs with Dane, Norma, & Artie.
With Artie & Kara.
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Julie Colwell shooting it up at Pride.
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Home
Planting a flag atop the building site. 1999—The strawbale house we build will be called Yashi— from Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood— the name for the second heart that grows in a person and holds all the memories of one’s ancestors. May it be so.
On the scaffold, stuffing clay into straw.
Yashi, finished.
Off-grid solar shed, January.
Inside the round window.
With Julio.
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Growing in summer, legal at last!
Family
The parents on holiday.
Married to Joy, 1994, ceremony in the meadow.
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Nature
Fall aspens.
Turkey butts.
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