How the Garden grew

In 2019, at a women’s weekend retreat, a falconer arrived with a red-tailed hawk on her arm and led a drumming circle. An Indigenous storyteller told stories. A poet laureate brought poetry, and then everyone else did too, reciting what they loved and writing their own. A massage therapist worked on whoever needed it. An artist set up screenprinting, and people went home with tote bags and tie-dyed shirts. One morning we drove to Innisfree Garden for tai chi ch’uan. At night there were campfires.

Nothing about it was programmed. Everyone brought what she had and offered it, and for two days there was a room where women could say difficult things out loud and be met rather than corrected.

The idea that became the Garden of Neuro Institute was simply that the room should not have been temporary.

What we thought we were building

Spaces for women and creatives to gather. Safe enough that people would bring the work and the questions they were not ready to show anyone. That was the whole ambition, and it was meant to happen in person, a weekend at a time.

It was not obvious at the start that this would be a nonprofit. I had come out of Lean startup training and assumed we were building a company. I had also spent years studying hybrid structures, first the L3C and later the B Corporation, largely because I had seen how much financial abuse the conventional nonprofit model permits. I wrote essays about it. Some of the women wanted a nonprofit anyway, and they were right.

Then COVID closed every room in the world.

What happened instead

We moved the work online, onto Mighty Networks. The choice of platform was not a business decision. It was the platform used by the rev angel kyodo williams, with whom I had sat through many hours of meditation, before the pandemic and through it. If it held her community, it could hold ours.

Losing the physical room turned out to remove a limit we had accepted without noticing. Women joined from across the globe, across borders that would have made a weekend retreat impossible. Different countries, different languages, different lives entirely. A core group formed and stayed, and together they shaped the mission, built the early offerings, and assembled our first anthologies of poetry.

The orientation

Everyone who joined in those years went through the same short course first, because a shared vocabulary is what makes a difficult conversation survivable.

It moved through a TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Loretta Ross on calling people in rather than calling them out. It covered the basic principles of Human Systems Dynamics. And it introduced Etuaptmumk, or two-eyed seeing, brought forward by Mi’kmaq Elder Albert Marshall and Elder Murdena Marshall of Eskasoni First Nation: the practice of looking with the strengths of Indigenous knowledge through one eye and the strengths of Western knowledge through the other, and using both together.

What I wanted was a room where nobody looked at the world in only two directions. Our early book club list ran to two hundred titles across feminist, Indigenous and Black history, and people read them.

The Kitchen Table Talk

Our central offering was, and remains, the Kitchen Table Talk. These are deliberative conversations on genuinely difficult subjects, structured so that people leave holding a perspective they did not arrive with. Dozens of topics, over years, with participants who often disagreed and kept showing up anyway.

The form was patterned on the work of Coming to the Table, and on academic writing about decolonizing the mind. The point was never to reach agreement.

What shaped the practice

The Institute is built out of things its leadership went and learned properly rather than improvised. Members of our leadership team came through multiple cohorts of the Inner MBA from Sounds True. My own work in neurosculpting, in psychology, and in global indigenous knowledge systems runs underneath how our spaces are designed and why.

Our simple rules came directly out of my study toward becoming a Human Systems Dynamics Praxis partner. In that discipline, a small number of clear conditions will reliably produce better behavior in a complex system than a long list of policies ever will. Four rules, applied to everyone equally, do more work than a code of conduct nobody finishes reading.

Who has carried it

The Garden has always been an all-volunteer organization. A small number of women carried it through the early years. They built the first websites, the branding and the communications systems. They held the conversations open. They edited the anthologies and designed the covers. They did all of it for nothing beyond wanting the rooms to exist.

Among the first were Anu Anniah, Karen Monteith, Lea Ann Skogsberg, Lisa Bolin, Lisa Tomey-Zonneveld, Pratibha Savani, and Shalu Ahuja.

And Nanci Arvizu, who was the first to get up and dance. If that reference means nothing to you, spend three minutes with this and it will. A person dancing alone is a person dancing alone until somebody else joins, and it is the second one who turns it into something the rest of us can walk into.

We are not going to pretend we arrived here on our own. Those women gave us hours they did not have and love they did not owe us, and the Institute is standing because of it. We love them. We would not be here without them.

Mighty Networks eventually stopped making sense. It was expensive and offered nonprofits nothing. We opened a Slack workspace in July 2020 and ran the two side by side for years before a retired technology executive on our board finished the move in 2024. The Mighty Network is still there on a free plan, quiet now, holding the early years. We stopped using it daily rather than closing it. Google supports us through its nonprofit program, and dozens of other technology organizations that make room for NGOs support us in ways that keep the lights on without a budget.

The anthologies

On November 1, 2021, we published Safe and Brave Space, Volume 1. Two more volumes followed. The poems and essays came from the community, and so did the cover designs, which members still make.

We published it three years before there was an institute. We were not yet certain we would become a nonprofit, or what we would become at all. We were certain we wanted our voices in print, and that turned out to be enough to go on.

What changed is who may send us work. Submissions now come through Submittable, open to writers anywhere in the world, whether or not they have ever set foot in one of our rooms. Submissions are open.

Becoming an institute

The Garden of Neuro Institute was formally established in 2024, five years after the retreat. By then the work had grown past what an informal community could carry. There were publications to run, books that deserved to be in print, and courses people were willing to pay for so that others could attend free.

Back to the campfire

In October 2024 we held our first live writers retreat, at the same place where all of this started in 2019. There were campfires again. One evening someone read a poem she had written about where she came from, and by the time the fire burned down it was clear what the next book had to be.

I Am From was published the following year, the first title under Garden of Neuro Institute Publishing. It was meant to end on Sunday, and rippled around the globe into an Institute.

Where we are now

The Institute publishes books through Garden of Neuro Institute Publishing, runs a family of publications on Medium, teaches live cohort courses, and holds the conversations and book clubs it started with. We are a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses.