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courageous conversations - an interview with Maureen St Clair

A seed by: Joanne Roberts
Project: MT/AT ToolKit - Capacity building, support, and agency
JoanneRoberts
A self-confessed word nerd, I have 20 years of experience in marketing and communications for small and medium-sized charities – often as the one-woman band! I started my career as a freelance journalist writing about social issues impacting Toronto’s deprived communities. From there I honed my skills in charity communications and have written and produced editorial and promotional content for national and local charities and businesses, Three years as a tutor in English for Speakers of Other Languages have given me an added skillset in facilitation and training, as well as a deeper appreciation for cross-cultural communication.

Disciplines:

Spoken Word, Poetry
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This is an original seed

I first met Maureen St Clair in 2024 when visiting my late mother’s birthplace, Grenada. She had lived there for 30 years working in education and restorative justice.

A visual artist, writer and conflict doula, Maureen is passionate about conflict transformation as a means of liberation, creativity and social change. Her experience as a white presenting person of Irish roots living in the Caribbean forced her to do some ‘hard-ass work’ on herself to reckon with her own trauma and shame responses.

I was intrigued by the concept of ‘normalizing conflict’ and practicing it in community as an inevitable part of a decolonizing creative practice, despite my own conflict-avoidant personality.

Maureen acknowledges that this is ‘slow-down work’ that requires taking time to listen and hold others, but also to recognize different capacities within yourself and others – knowing when to step away without giving up. It means being committed to showing your beautiful and ugly parts.

There’s a cognitive dissonance to embracing non-violent conflict in collaboration that I attempt to convey as glimpses and glitches of colour and sound from village life on the island at odds with the vibrant fluidity of her artwork.

Maureen St Clair

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