About
Spitfire, a poet, activist and conceptual artist, uses whatever medium necessary to get across the message, song, dance, poetry, rant, diatribe, prints, artist books, and letterpress. From touring a performance piece called “Incest: It’s All Relative” nationally in the 80’s; to a community engagement event, “The Sardine Extravaganza: For the Love of Herring” in 2010; to her current work-in-progress of moving sculptural books “Seven Sacred Sites/Sights,” Spitfire’s work calls us out and in. Spitfire also makes pysanky, Ukrainian egg dying, as a spiritual practice evoking on her matrilineal roots.
Spitfire is the author of two poetry collections, Standing with Trees (2006), and the Body in Late Stage Capitalism (2021).
Spitfire is a pioneering feminist activist. In the 70’s s she worked at San Francisco Women’s Centers, Inc. and the Prudence Crandall Center for Women, and was immersed in the beginnings of intersectional theory and practice. Spitfire earned her BA in women’s studies, produced her first dance performance, called How a Collective Works or Doesn’t, As the Case May Be, and became the Shelter Director of the fourth battered women’s shelter in the country in 1978.
Spitfire attended massage school in ’79 and, in ’80, then moved to Wabanaki Territory (Maine) and started dancing. Both of these body-oriented activities brought her straight into her history and memories of child abuse. When listening to a Vietnam vet on the radio and hearing the symptoms of PTSD for the first time, she said, “That’s what I got.” She created and started to perform Incest: It’s all Relative: a dance/narration in 1982, the same year the state of Maine mandated that professionals report child abuse. Spitfire went on to perform this piece nationally and started doing movement groups for survivors. She attended the School for Body-Mind Centering and discovered how trauma lives in every cell in the body. She utilized movement, bodywork, theater techniques, and the model of co-dependency treatment developed by Pia Melody, with hundreds of individuals and groups, healing the impact of trauma through the early 2000s. In addition to her work with survivors, she developed and taught numerous workshops and classes in embodiment through movement, challenging the patriarchal western paradigm of body-mind, human/nature split.
During the ’80s and ’90s, Spitfire performed solo as well as with the Midcoast Maine–based collectives Dovetail Art Works and Three Ring Opera. She attended many women’s conferences and anti-war demonstrations, started wilderness canoeing, writing poetry, and making art, and produced her first artist book Becoming Visible. Spitfire was a producer and participant in the infamous “Anti-Columbus Day Parade” in 1992.
In the 2000s, she published Standing with Trees and the chapbook Wild Caught, was named Poet Laureate of Belfast for 2007 and 2008, and attended book arts classes at USM, Penland, and Haystack. Spitfire finished off the decade producing with Gary Lawless a multiple-locations event, The Sardine Extravaganza.
Many of the poems in The Body in Late Stage Capitalism were previously published in anthologies, print, and online journals. Spitfire’s latest artistic endeavor is producing seven large-scale sculptural books inspired by a dream, the first, Press On-A Rumination on the 5th Chakra: The Voice, was completed in 2018 and the second, …Now Lie in It, was completed this year. Her activist work continues locally as a voice to end all forms of oppression, the degradation of the planet, and shifting our culture toward a paradigm that sustains and respects the interconnectedness of all life.
