Editor’s Preface

Dear Reader,

In the summer of 2006 peoples the world over woke one morning witness to the escalation of the toll of war in our own time with the bombing of Lebanon. The fury and sound of those endless days of bombing obliterating the lives of women, men and children and threatening to drown out the voice of our essential human relation.

Amid the horror, destruction and displacement, the profound lament, the sound bites of terror and propaganda dividing “us and them”, once more, at that moment, we, a community of artists in creative and academic residence within a small progressive learning project at Goddard College, were engaged in building life affirming, transformative, humanist discourse. This work, Collaborative Voice, arises from that nexus. It is a sample of our engagement with the necessity of making art and meaning during and beyond the war time.

I solicited the work of several artists in our program, work folks were doing at that time, and began to sculpt a selection of our voices, in the shape of the Greek chorus, which seemed to speak, with depth and humanity, thought and imagination, to who we truly are and must become.

The project began as a book and was subsequently transformed into electronic form. Our message remains the same. We offer this voice, in the spirit of us who have, throughout time, called ourselves back to the our shared humanity and the collaborative act of naming ourselves whole, living in the full possibilities of our narrative, with justice and at peace.

Gale Jackson
Brooklyn, New York
December 2007