Margaret M. Blanchard's Books

Hatching

By: Margaret Blanchard,M Blanchard

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A sick child's fate falls into the hands of a psychology intern. What he chooses to do secures her future. Manuel Flores, shattered by war, builds a shelter for Brigid, who has SCID (severe combined immunodeficiency ). This solution protects her, provides sanctuary for Manuel's restless spirit, and allows them both access to a natural setting. As Brigid grows, this nest starts feeling like a prison. She longs to get outside, beyond what she can see. Though it ultimately separates them, she pushes through cracks, then barriers, to open possibilities for Manuel. His mother, Elena, helps reunite them and, in turn, grows beyond her own boundaries of grief and aging. Although of different generations, each main character hatches. Each emerges into a wider sphere after struggling out of a tight shell. Exploring the theme of containment this novel reveals security's limits as three very different persons nurture each other through passages of growth, loss, commitment, parenting, discovery. From the sterile atmosphere of an urban hospital to mesas of the desert southwest, Brigid moves, by way of eastern woodlands, from cell to cosmos, from confinement to freedom, from cramped city to the vast expanse of starry night skies. Insightful, engaging, touching.

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Page Count

458

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

059517695X

ISBN 13

9780595176953

Where?

An Allegorical Novel

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

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Where?

An Allegorical Novel

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

In Where? Xavy, the endearing narrator of Who? is invited by Grace, her old friend from the Baltimore womens community, to investigate the disappearance of a friends daughter. Their reunion in Vermont after twenty years of separation provides the home base for an inquiry leading Xavy high and low, from coast to coast, and beyond. Issues of faith, mercy and redemption play out within a contemporary tangle of belief systems and allegorical exploration. In the process Xavy and Grace and their friends examine remnants of feminist activism as well as recent issues like marriage equality for lesbians and gays, and the rise of the occupy movement. Throughout Where? Xavy provides insightful and amusing commentary on current issues, as well as themes of place, belonging, and home. As Xavy and Grace renew the friendship between them, they reflect, from the perspective of aging, upon the trajectories and rewards of their unconventional lives.

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Page Count

271

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1491722762

ISBN 13

9781491722763

Change of Course

The Education of Jessie Adamson

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

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Change of Course

The Education of Jessie Adamson

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

This novel of ideas describes change in the lives of a student, Jessie Adamson and her faculty, Dr. Sophie Green, as well as to their innovative graduate program. Moving through the program, Jessie overcomes obstacles and faces tragic life events to discover meaning and fulfillment. Sophie, facing retirement, reflects upon her long teaching career and mulls over the state of education in the United States. The program, designed to place students first in their own educational journeys and guided by committed, energetic but beleaguered faculty, is wrenched out of shape by self-serving administrators. While competing forces merge into a perfect storm of faculty conflict with administration, the program demonstrates its transformative power through the relationship between Jessie and Sophie, the power of their learning community, and the effects of the program's distinctive design on the lives of learners. "Margaret M. Blanchard, educator, author, and NAPT board member, modestly describes Change of Course as a novel of ideas. While it undeniable is that, it is also so much more. True, this novel is an extremely erudite, well-researched book that not only references theories from multiple disciplines and traditions both East and West, feminist thought and traditional ways of thinking, delightful passages of fiction-- a story within the story, but also includes poetry. The novel spins a web of interconnected questions that grow out of the richness of these fields: 1) What does progressive, holistic, collaborative, democratic, student-centered graduate education look like? 2) How shall we think about creativity and its relationship to human growth and development? What is the place of subjectivity and intuition in research? 3) How do the expressive arts therapies differ from talk therapies and where do they overlap? Can feelings be educated through the creative arts? 4) Can we create a whole language therapy that would reconstitute the original unity between sound, gesture, image, movement and words? Might a unified arts therapy offer a medium for enhancing emotional intelligence? 5) How does progressive education help to guide the learner to want to cultivate larger worlds and to inhabit contexts more expansive than themselves? How does the process of innovative education transform both learners and mentors? 6) What keeps educational institutions vital and growing? What convergence of factors leads to their decline? 7) How does systems theory help us understand the impact of a given political moment on the collective and the individual within educational institutions? These questions should be of wide interest to all educators and learners. However, without the array of memorable characters whose lives we get to know from viewpoints inside and outside themselves, this novel would not hold our attention. Central to this book are the lives of Jessie Adamson, the adult learner, her mentor Dr. Sophie Green (who is struggling with the prospect of retiring), and Jessies field supervisor, Keyla Gold; their work together, which Blanchard records in detail, demonstrates the best practiced offered by the innovative, low-residency program from which Jessie graduates, transformed by the process into a confident knower who trusts herself. Blanchard creates a canvas which also includes memorable vignettes of other students and mentors who have dedicated their lives to building and preserving this program. "Blanchard allows us to see the strengths and vulnerabilities of her characters and convincingly shows the complex process of inquiry through which Jessie works with her mentors to develop her own ideas for her final project focusing on expressive arts therapies. The principles of learning embedded in this novel are also central to the philosophy and training programs of the National Association for Poetry Therapy, which gets a cameo appearance when Jessie is introduced to poetry therapy at a national conference. After attending only a few workshops, she is soon sorry she only signed up for one day and is particularly moved by the non-judgemental quality and safe atmosphere at the meeting. In one workshop free write, she allows herself to express powerful feelings about a family tragedy which allows her transform grief. "Yet, in spite of the very positive depiction of innovative adult learning, Blanchards novel also has an underside. Even as she applauds the powerful and positive transformations brought about by this form of education, she also exposes the heartless, corporate mentality brought in by the new administrators of this fictional institution who are incrementally dismantling the progressive program whose accomplishments Blanchard so proudly displays and whose dissolution she shows us with deep sadness. This aspect of the novel can be read as a kind of caveat for all progressive institutions that are seen as marginal in times of a conservative back-lash, but we must have hope that with the recent change of administration, we may be entering a different historical cycle in which educational innovations will be encouraged, not destroyed. This novel is sure to provoke more questions than answers, which is what progressive education at its best intends. The beautiful many-chambered nautilus on the cover of Change of Course offers a welcoming invitation for us to take heart and possibly to change our own course of living. -Evelyn Torton Beck, author of Nice Jewish Girls

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238

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1440102910

ISBN 13

9781440102912

Water Spies

A Novel

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

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Water Spies

A Novel

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

Three unlikely conspiratorsan eleven-year-old girl, a retired government investigator, and an activist teacher--work together to block the privatization of a local spring for profit--by initiating action to prevent an out-of-town investor from establishing a water bottling plant. Their collaboration, within the contexts of community organizing and a natural disaster, leads to meaningful transformation for each of them. How they come to trust and depend upon each other provides a wellspring for wider, and riskier, actions. Their exchanges, in the contexts of community organizing and a natural disaster, lead to meaningful transformation for each of them. A tribute to the power and mystery of water. The largeness of spirit, thought, and heart is so clear in Water Spies. --Shirley Glubka, author of Return to a Meadow

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Page Count

311

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1491742305

ISBN 13

9781491742303

Queen Bea

By: Margaret Blanchard

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Queen Bea

By: Margaret Blanchard

Bea Chance is an exceptional woman, inventor and entrepreneur, with a thriving business, successful marriage and four grown children: Dick, her right-hand man; Bruce, a Vietnam veteran; Corey, her only daughter, and John, a disc jockey. A musician and pioneer in technology, she combined her musical and computer expertise to develop a system for musical composition and simultaneous recording and playback which she applied to the teaching of music in schools. When she decides suddenly to retire, partially in response to the death of her husband, her departure sends her family and her corporate, as well as corporeal, systems into chaos. This novel describes how she moves from being a woman with power to becoming a powerful, compassionate woman. Her personal transformation, in turn, has dynamic effects on her own mother, Mildred; her children; her co-worker and left-hand woman, Clare; and her friend Pearl. A reflection on gender and power, loss, metamorphosis and love, this novel explores issues of mothering, inheritance, and generation for modern women. An "oppositional narrative" based on Shakespeare's King Lear, Queen Bea explores what happens when the king becomes a queen and when an ancient tale is translated into a contemporary idiom. "Blanchard's book is bound to become a classic for women's studies and contemporary literature courses alike because it grounds an engaging second wave feminist novel in explicating essays that both honor and explode the typical canon of options used." -Ida Kialutsi, artist and professor

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Page Count

162

Publisher

iUniverse

Published Date

ISBN 10

0595363385

ISBN 13

9780595363384

Change of Course

The Education of Jessie Adamson

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

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Change of Course

The Education of Jessie Adamson

By: Margaret M. Blanchard

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238

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iUniverse

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ISBN 10

1440102910

ISBN 13

9781440102912

Moments with Margaret

A Collection of Poems

By: Margaret A. Pierson

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Moments with Margaret

A Collection of Poems

By: Margaret A. Pierson

There is no available information at this time.

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Page Count

171

Publisher

Xlibris Corporation

Published Date

ISBN 10

1462804748

ISBN 13

9781462804740

The Ancestors of Elmer Edwards

By: Steven G. Mariano

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The Ancestors of Elmer Edwards

By: Steven G. Mariano

A memoir consisting of episodes in the life of Margaret Benham. Its genesis was in the author's participation in "Save Your Life," a memoir-writing group.

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Page Count

445

Published Date

ISBN 10

1604589922

ISBN 13

9781604589924

Book's by Margaret M. Blanchard

Hatching

Hatching

Where?

Where?

Change of Course

Change of Course

Water Spies

Water Spies

Queen Bea

Queen Bea

Change of Course

Change of Course

Moments with Margaret

Moments with Margaret

The Ancestors of Elmer Edwards

The Ancestors of Elmer Edwards

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