Replies

Blue Chevigny

Ritu Pancholy (L) and Blue Chevigny
Blue Chevigny is a psychotherapist and Vice President of Content at HR consulting firm Culturupt.

Her parents are Paul Chevigny and the late Bell Gale Chevigny. Her sister is Katy Chevigny.

Contents

1 Bio
2 Border Detention Center
3 Advises Patients to ‘Fight’ the Trump Administration
4 References

Bio

Blue Chevigny’s mini bio verbatim from Culturupt:[1]

“Blue Chevigny, LCSW, MPH is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York and New Jersey who utilizes an eclectic mix of theories, including psychodyamic, cognitive-behavioral,and mindfulness-based systems principles.
She’s treated scores of children, adolescents and adults, individually and in family and couples treatment, striving with each to create an opportunity for clarity, relief and development. She believes therapy can help us slow down and be in the moment and embodied in our feelings in ways that bring clarity to our own patterns and to our own potential.
Working collaboratively with Ritu provides an interdisciplinary approach and adds a new layer of complexity and depth.

Border Detention Center

Verbatim from Village Green NJ dated December 15, 2019:[2]

Local Maplewood/South Orange residents Blue Chevigny and Ritu Pancholy travelled together in October for a weeklong volunteer effort in the Dilley Family Detention Center in Texas near the Mexico border. During their time there they met with and gave legal counseling to women detained with their children, awaiting their credible fear hearing for asylum. They will present to the Ethical Culture community about some of the things they learned and insights they gained about the state of the immigrant experience at the border from this unique experience.

Blue Chevigny LCSW, MPH is a social worker and psychotherapist in private practice in New York and New Jersey. She has worked with immigrants in a social work and mental health context for many years and is bilingual In Spanish.

Ritu Pancholy, Esq. is the founder of Culturupt, a HR consulting firm. She is an experienced workplace investigator and an attorney in New York and New Jersey. Ritu has over 10 years of deep experience in handling employment related matters for organizations including public companies and the government.

Advises Patients to ‘Fight’ the Trump Administration

Blue Chevigny was “utterly without hope” and “depressed” after President Trump’s election in 2016. “Every single one of my patients told me they were motivated to resist the coming administration.”:[3],[4]

On the Wednesday morning after the election, I wasn’t sure how to do my job. I work as psychotherapist in New York City.

For the last year or so, many of my patients have been taking up at least some of their time in session to talk about the candidates and the election, specifically their fears about what might happen when it was over, if Trump were to win. I had noticed a real increase in anxiety symptoms in many of my patients. I had witnessed, like many other therapists have written about, that Trump was triggering for people — bringing up feelings and sometimes specific memories, of earlier times in their lives when they felt threatened. Many of my patients have been preoccupied as well with police violence against people of color, which seemed to be more visible this past year than ever before. Others are involved in organizing around issues like increasing the minimum wage and unionization for graduate students. A few were actively involved in the Hillary Clinton campaign and were trying to get out the vote. Not one is a Trump supporter.
Wednesday morning I met with two colleagues with whom I share an informal supervision group every week. We normally take that hour to talk about work and get confidential input on difficult or complicated cases. This week it was entirely devoted to talking about the election results. It wasn’t the first week we’ve spent this way, parsing what’s happening in the world outside, rather than speaking directly about our patients. But this week we were reeling from the fresh news of Trump’s victory, processing what it means, and defining our new reality. We were also worried about how our patients were feeling, and how it would be for us to be in the room with them, feeling as we were.
I see all my patients on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The first three days after Donald Trump was elected president were filled with fifty minute chunks of one on one time to talk with people, real people I know quite well. In that way I was lucky — I got to be with others, in community. These people rely on their therapy sessions — whether it be as a time for unfettered emotions to come to the surface, for their most private thoughts and ideas to be voiced, or to carefully work out burdensome conflicts and dilemmas. This week, I felt so scared myself, so utterly without hope, so depressed, I really didn’t know how it was going to be to have to sit with those people and not betray my own strong feelings of defeat. Also, even if I could predict what I might hear that day from my patients, this question kept zipping into my brain, then running back out because it seemed so hard to answer: Would I be able to help them when I wasn’t sure I could help myself?
In the normal course of a day’s work, on a non-election week, I usually try to encourage patients to take something they are seeing in a certain way, and shift their perspective a little. Many of my patients are prone to negative thinking, and have patterns of expecting worse case scenarios to come true. Many of my patients are depressed and anxious, wrestling with tough existential questions about what the point of life might be and how to find meaning. I might try to help loosen the grip of the worst negative thoughts, letting in a little space for the edge of something positive. I assist with sorting through those existential questions with my patients, with an eye toward finding motivation to go on. When patients describe sudden emotions that feel out of control, we work on accepting those feelings, and also talk about ways to practice being less reactive, ways of tempering one’s self. When they talk about things in absolute terms, I try to shepherd them toward a more inclusive point of view, where no extreme is exclusively true, but instead they can travel a middle path where slowing down, being present, feeling things, and considering carefully are valued.
How I was going to apply any of these concepts to the work this week, I had no idea. To be less reactive, to pause to consider anything resembling a silver lining, all of this seemed utterly ridiculous last Wednesday morning. Outrage seemed the only appropriate reaction. If they felt crazy, I was right there with them. I had spent from 1am when I finally went to bed, until I woke up officially at 6am, mostly awake, or dozing off, and then reawakening to the same feeling of dread I recalled after the attacks on 9/11. I was so tired going into work after election night. I told myself it was going to have to be okay to just be physically in my office even if I had nothing helpful to say. I could just be there for my patients.
Some patients were crying, sobbing through their sessions, others were in a state of fear, many seemed quite disassociated, depressed and professed to being out of touch with any emotion other than a numb shock. One or two seemed angry at me, resentful for having had to come in and talk so soon after something catastrophic had happened. Perhaps it felt like a wasteful indulgence to be sitting in a therapist’s office, or maybe it was too hard to have to connect to someone, rather than remain in isolation. Overall, I felt how a therapist who specializes in grief recovery might feel, sitting with one person after another who had experienced a profound loss. In this case, the loss seemed to be of our country, and life as we knew it.
As each patient came in, I wondered if I would hear them normalizing what had happened, and getting back to talking about whatever had been bothering them the week before. If they had done this, I would probably have thought it was a coping strategy, a way of getting on with the business of being alive. This was okay with me, but I also didn’t want to promote that normalizing. I didn’t want to do the usual knee-jerk thing, of implicitly asking “how can we make this ok?” Any soothing sentence I could think of, any attempt to relax the tension, felt impossible to utter, too inauthentic to even fake my way through that day. I wanted vigilance. I want to be ready to act if Trump does something terrible, and I wanted my patients to be vigilant too.
But none of my patients was looking for me to calm them down. None of them wanted me to make it better. And here’s what was surprising, but shouldn’t have been: Every single one of my patients told me they were motivated to resist the coming administration. Each felt a new commitment to becoming more politically active, whether it be to help others in their immediate community, or to upend their entire lives, rearrange their priorities and completely change their careers and the texture of their daily existence. It was a matter of degree, but this sentiment was universal. More than one depressed patient who regularly struggled to find any energy to do anything seemed more enthusiastic about the prospect of fighting against Trump than they ever had about anything else. They weren’t asking me to soothe them. They were each, in their own way, fearlessly looking at this new reality, right in this moment, and making plans.
What I had worried would be at odds with the usual therapist role — to have to hold the tension, and not calm it, not sweeten it, not make it seem like it will be okay — turned out to be the opposite. It was the perfect embodiment of the therapy ideal, as I see it. Due to the extreme circumstances, the usual filters we apply to everything, the self-censoring we do without even realizing it, was almost absent. I didn’t have to guide anyone to a reason for being, because it was staring them in the face. Thanks to the uncertainty of Trump’s presidency, we were all forced to accept the unknowns of the future. None of my patients seemed more than mildly surprised to see me upset. I think a few felt comforted to have their perception — that this is not normal and is very distressing — validated by the person who always, week after week, makes the case for having one’s feelings
In the end, my patients gave me what I had been concerned I wouldn’t be able to muster for them: a feeling of being carried through those immediate days after what felt like a national tragedy, of having someone (several someones in this case) to listen to, and talk to, who really cared as much I did about what had happened. In the end, their energy for change-making, in the coming period of who-knows-what, allowed a feeling of hope in me to peek out cautiously,and allowed me to access the part of myself that doesn’t yet feel defeated. I want to make that same commitment that my patients spoke of, to remain present in the uncertainty of this week, and next, and to fight for what we believe is right.

References

About Culturupt (accessed June 12, 2023)
Blue Chevigny and Ritu Pancholy: A Week Volunteering in a Border Detention Center (accessed June 12, 2023)
Putting Our Heads Together After Election Day (accessed June 12, 2023)
Gettr Post dated Nov 23rd, 2022 (accessed June 12, 2023)

https://keywiki.org/Bell_Chevigny

Bell Chevigny

Bell Chevigny celebrating Grace Paley (2008)

Bell Gale Chevigny (1936 - 2021) was Professor Emerita of Literature at Purchase College and an anti-prison activist: “It was Bell who laid a foundation for how we build an alternative culture and set of systems to abolish prisons.” She was on the board of the Human Rights Defense Center.

Bell Chevigny was married to Paul Chevigny, a law professor at New York University. Their daughters are Katy Chevigny and Blue Chevigny.

Contents

1 Obituary
2 Occupy Movement Support
3 Human Rights Defense Center
4 Not In Our Name
5 References
Obituary

From PEN America:[1]

Introduction

Professor and activist Bell Gale Chevigny (1936-2021) remained a central figure and mentor for PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing Program since its founding in the early 1970s. Throughout her life, Bell taught in prisons, advocated for educational opportunities for incarcerated communities, and promoted the work of writers in prison throughout the country. Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing (Arcade Publishing), her edited volume published in 1999 and reprinted in 2011, represents just a fraction of what she inspired in her students and her tireless volunteer work as part of PEN America’s Prison Writing Committee.
During December 2022’s Break Out, an annual celebration honoring winners of the PEN Prison Writing Awards, the Prison and Justice Writing staff paid tribute to Chevigny with a video celebrating her life and her service to incarcerated writers. The inspiring memorial essay below was written by co-committee member Susan Rosenburg and read in Chevigny’s honor as well. The essay has been reprinted from Variations on an Undisclosed Location, the 2022 Prison Writing Awards anthology.

Obituary (excerpt)

“...Bell Gale Chevigny taught literature inside prisons, and she built networks with others who were doing extraordinary things in relationship to prisoners and their individual lives long before the concept of mass incarceration became a topic of national discourse. Bell connected with people like Buzz Alexander, who founded the Prison Creative Arts Program (PCAP) at the University of Michigan, Hettie Jones, who headed PEN’s Prison and Justice Writing program and taught writing for years at Bedford Hills women’s prison, as well as Gara LaMarche, who as a human rights advocate promoted and supported both the Prison Writing and Freedom to Write campaigns.

Bell never forgot that statistics can serve as a cover-up to the humanity of each and every person imprisoned by this country. She never accepted the criminalization and dehumanization of people inside. Bell always tried to balance the ideas of the individual writer who found their creativity and artistic self while in prison and the need for social movements that actually can have power and bring about change. The tension between artist and advocate was one that Bell embodied.

In 2009, Bell and I (Susan Rosenberg), along with other artists, activists, and scholars, participated in the Blue Mountain Center’s first focus residency on prisons. At that time Bell was working on editing Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) V19 #1. The issue of the JPP featured nonfiction pieces that addressed issues of punishment and creative resistance and were written by winners of the PEN America Prison Writing Contest. Bell always looked for publication platforms to amplify incarcerated people’s work...
[...]

Writer, painter, professor, organizer, advocate, anti-racist, anti-war activist, freedom rider, beat, Bell was inspired by and contributed to justice in America and around the world. She gave the entirety of her life to this robust, challenging and, often, thankless work. Bell died this past year after a hard and long illness. What she left behind is a beautiful legacy filled with critical thinking and grace. Bell Gale Chevigny sits with the great luminaries of PEN America’s past. Those like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Grace Paley, and so many others, who consistently elevated the writings of the dispossessed. Bell is one of the elders whose shoulders people such as Nicole Fleetwood and Dwayne Betts and Caits Meissner stand. It was Bell who laid a foundation for how we build an alternative culture and set of systems to abolish prisons.

Purchase College Obituary

Verbatim from Purchase College:[2]

Bell Chevigny was one of the founders of the literature program. Throughout her years at Purchase, her extraordinary energy, intellect, joie de vivre, and sense of engagement animated the Literature Board of Study, the School of Humanities, and the Gender Studies program and radiated throughout the entire college. Bell kept up with changes at Purchase while remaining constant in her vision of a public college of the liberal arts and arts that welcomed and continues to welcome all promising students. She was a brilliant teacher and a pathbreaking scholar of American literature, which, in a move way ahead of its time, she reconceived as the literature of the Americas. In that and along with her colleagues across the humanities, she was responsible for the global reach of the literature major and for its welcoming of feminist, anti-racist, postcolonial, and other interdisciplinary approaches to the study of texts in many languages from all times and places.

Bell had a lifelong commitment to a humane and progressive politics and invested much time and energy in causes she believed in while at Purchase and throughout her retirement. A student, scholar and teacher with a passion for literature, she became, in mid-life, a published novelist.
When Bell retired, the School of Humanities honored her by establishing the Bell Chevigny Prize for Feminist Studies in the Humanities which recognizes the work of students who follow in her footsteps. We mourn her loss and celebrate her many legacies.

Bell Gale Chevigny was the author of “The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings” and the novel “Chloe and Olivia”; the editor of “Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing” (A PEN American Center Prize Anthology) and Twentieth century interpretations of Endgame: a collection of critical essays (Prentice-Hall); and co-editor (with Gari Laguardia) of Reinventing the Americas: Comparative Studies of Literature of the United States and Spanish America (Cambridge University Press).

Occupy Movement Support

Bell Chevigny was on the list of “Occupy Writers” who put her name to a statement in solidarity with the Occupy Movement: “We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.”[3]

Human Rights Defense Center

Bell Chevigny was on the board of the Human Rights Defense Center:[4]

“Bell Chevigny is professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY. She has served on the PEN Prison Writing Program for more than twenty years, three of them as chair. The Prison Writing Program offers an annual literary competition to incarcerated men and women nationwide. With the support of a Soros Senior Justice Fellowship, she compiled Doing Time: 25 Years of Prison Writing, a PEN American Center anthology. She has written extensively about incarcerated writers, their struggles for dignity and justice, and their literary accomplishments.

Not In Our Name

In 2003, Paul Chevigny and Bell Chevigny signed the Not In Our Name “Statement of Conscience”.[5] The statement was affiliated with Courage to Resist, Iraq Veterans Against the War, CODEPINK, World Can’t Wait -Drive Out the Bush Regime, Longest Walk 2, United for Peace and Justice and the Revolutionary Communist Party.

References
Bell Chevigny obituary (accessed June 12, 2023)
Bell Gale Chevigny, 1936-2021 (accessed June 12, 2023)
We, the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world (accessed June 12, 2023)
Board (accessed June 12, 2023)
Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience (accessed June 11, 2023)