The title, Hospitable Memory, comes from my reading of the philosopher Jacques Derrida who had much to say about ghosts in his concept of hauntology. In this presentation, I pay special attention to the unnamed missing, the buried, silenced, and disappeared. Ghosts are what I am talking about. I wish to remember them in the hopes of giving new meaning to their absences. In my reckoning, ghosts are not only human in nature. Caribou and farm fields, barns and hogs, ancestors and dogs, minks and lynx, landscapes and Paleo Indians—all make their ghostly claims on me. The question about what is preserved in memory and what is effaced, what calls out for justice, and what can be forgotten is my concern. I wish to offer Hospitable Memory so the haunting ghosts may be honored. In my understanding, this is the work of restorative justice. Ghosts who make it their business to remind me of their absence are what this talk is about. The following workshop will give participants an opportunity to explore and come into relationship with their own other-than-human ghosts.

Patricia Reis is a writer and author of the memoir Motherlines, Women’s Voices (with Nancy Cater,) The Dreaming Way, Daughters of Saturn, and Through the Goddess, and the creator/producer of the DVD, Arctic Refuge Sutra. She has a BA from the University of Wisconsin in English Literature, an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Sculpture. In 1986, she earned an MA from the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Depth Psychology and has a private psychotherapy practice. Patricia Reis has held positions as faculty, lecturer, and dissertation advisor and has mentored and facilitated many artists and writers in bringing their work to fruition. She divides her time between Portland, Maine and Nova Scotia.

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