Somerville's Vie Ciné: Provides healing with the stroke of the brush.

 

Interview with Doug Holder

Recently I caught up with Somerville artist, and therapist Vie Cine, the founder of the therapeutic arts organization "Paint Your  Truth."

How has it been for you working your craft in Somerville?

I’m the founder and lead facilitator of Paint Your Truth, a mobile process painting workshop series I began in 2016 in response to the #MeToo Movement, inspired by the work of Tarana Burke. Our mission is to prioritize self-care and healing for those most often excluded from traditional mental health services—especially survivors, BIPOC communities, and others at the margins.




My first workshop was held at the Hyde Park Library and was attended by Andrea Campbell, then Boston City Councilor, now Attorney General. Since then, Paint Your Truth has grown into a community-driven platform for emotional wellness through art.




I began facilitating workshops in Somerville in 2021 through the ArtBeat Festival, and I’ve loved building relationships here. There’s something deeply moving about seeing familiar faces return year after year—proof that this work resonates and leaves a lasting impression. It affirms what I’ve always believed: that community-based art therapy is not only valid but vital.




In 2025, I’m hosting a five-part workshop series titled the Paint Your Truth Community Healing Series 2025, held at the West Branch and Central Branch of the Somerville Public Library and at Arts at the Armory Café. These free workshops are supported by the Somerville Arts Council, Mass Cultural Council, Blick Art Materials, and Arts at the Armory. I’ve attached the promotional flyer for Paint Your Truth Community Healing Series 2025 with the dates, location, and details for every workshop. I dreamed of expanding our reach in 2024—and now, to see that dream realized in a city I’ve grown to love, with support from local institutions, is a true gift.

Your organization is a therapeutic arts organization. Explain.

In a world where mental health care often remains out of reach, especially for communities facing systemic barriers, Paint Your Truth creates an alternative path—centered in art, community, and empathy.

Our therapeutic approach is grounded in process painting, where the emphasis is on expression rather than perfection. Participants are invited to explore their emotional landscapes with compassion and curiosity, without judgment or expectation. It’s not about making “good art”—it’s about being honest and brave enough to show up as you are.


The Paint Your Truth Community Healing Series 2025 provides a safe, welcoming space where participants can reflect, release, and reconnect. We normalize the full range of emotional experiences—joy, sadness, grief, confusion, relief—and foster open dialogue around mental health. Our goal is to help people feel seen, supported, and empowered through creative expression.

You wrote that some of your clients paint images of self-care. What does that look like?

Self-care in our workshops looks different for everyone—and that’s the beauty of it. One person might paint a quiet sunrise, a symbol of hope. Another might express rage in bold red strokes or grief in stormy grays. Some create affirmations. Others make abstract pieces that defy explanation but feel right.

What unites all these images is the intention: a moment of choosing oneself, honoring one’s emotions, and making space for healing. The canvas becomes a mirror, a release valve, and a place of reclamation.

You said you worked with Andrea Campbell, a then Boston City Councilor, on this project. How did she help?

In 2016, I reached out to every Boston City Councilor to invite them to attend Paint Your Truth’s inaugural workshop. Andrea Campbell was the only one who personally responded. Her presence and support were meaningful—not just because of her position, but because she showed up with sincerity.




That day, I remember clearing my entire Saturday to do outreach. I sent over 20 emails and contacted staff to ensure the invitation was received. Andrea’s willingness to engage gave the project early credibility and helped me believe in the importance of what I was creating.

What positive results have you seen from your work?

The most powerful outcomes are the stories participants share with me:

“I haven’t felt this peaceful in years.”
“I didn’t know I needed to cry until I picked up the brush.”
“I felt seen.”

I’ve witnessed people reconnect with parts of themselves they thought were lost. I’ve seen friendships form among strangers. Some participants return year after year, bringing loved ones and spreading the word. The ripple effect is real—this work creates healing not just for individuals but for communities.

How can people get involved with your organization?

There are three key ways to support Paint Your Truth:Follow and share. Spreading the word helps us reach those who need this work the most. We’re active on:Instagram: @PaintYourTruth_
Threads: @paintyourtruth_
Bluesky: @PaintYourTruth.bsky.social
Facebook: Paint Your Truth
Twitter: @PaintYourTruth
Or reach us directly at PaintYourTruth.Art@gmail.com for workshop inquiries.
Attend a workshop—and bring a friend. Whether it’s at ArtBeat, a library, or a pop-up in the park, our sessions are always free, community-focused, and designed for all levels of artistic experience. Show up for yourself and let the art guide you.
Support us financially. Book a private process painting session: tailored workshops curated by me with a focus on sound therapy, emotional care, and community connection.
Make a donation to help us keep workshops free and accessible to all. Every contribution directly funds supplies, space rentals, and artist stipends.
Donate via PayPal here or use your device's camera to scan the donation QR code on the promotional flyer for Paint Your Truth Community Healing Series 2025.

Slice of Life: 3 AM of the Soul

 

I have had a number of friends who lost loved ones over the past few months. When I first lost Dianne-- my wife--she spoke to me--through subtle ways--through birds ( we agreed on those as messengers), my dreams, my cat Klezmer, and even her voice--when I was in the limbo between sleep and wakefulness As the years went by--I felt less connected. The other day, while in bed," I asked the universe, god, or a benevolent spirit, " Is Dianne still here?" It was of course a rhetorical question, during my 3AM night of my soul. Just after I asked the question, the cat jumped on my bed and started sniffing furiously, and my Alexa turned on and started to say something--I couldn't hear it--but I was surprised because I didn't prompt it and it was in the next room. Now of course--this can be explained logically. But I choose to believe it was Dianne--she is still around--her spirit hovers over my bed, my bald, and freckled head. So for those of you who have lost a love one--he, she or they --they are there, accept that ethereal stroke of your hair.... . "Ah! Sweet mystery of life..."

Red Letter Poem #250

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #250

 

 

 

 

Valentine to Jimmy Piersall

Even if you hadn’t cracked a hundred homers

and rounded the bases backwards,

even if your mitt couldn’t reach

from the starstruck green of center field

straight up to Mars

to snatch fly balls from the sky,



I would have loved you.



Because you feared no one. Because

when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s

words did not fumble in your mouth

but hurled like a stream of tobacco spit.



I was small, had yet to find my voice.


––Susan Eisenberg

There is a reason we create grand statuary––and place them high on pedestals, above the ground we mortals walk upon. We elevate these expressions of the extraordinary so everyone will have to lift their eyes to see them, their glorious heads haloed by sun and sky. These days, true heroes (and, to be clear I’m referring to towering figures of any gender; the term heroines has come to have a diminished stature of late) are an increasingly rare commodity. In this encompassing media landscape, it seems we quickly begin uncovering their flaws and failings even while the marble or bronze is being unveiled. Some even suggest that people first exalt their heroes so that, subsequently, they can have the pleasure of tearing them down. But the societal need to discover and spotlight our champions––those who are born with extraordinary gifts, or work diligently to perfect their skills, or stand with an unswerving commitment to some enduring principle: this is quite an interesting thing to consider and is brought to mind by Susan Eisenberg’s delightful new poem.



In our cultural climate, sports figures are often accorded the hero’s laurels; but Susan is recalling a simpler time (before mind-boggling half-billion-dollar contracts, and ESPN fanfare.) She’s celebrating the great Jimmy Piersall who signed his first baseball contract with the Boston Red Sox at age eighteen and, in 1950, was one of the youngest players to ever play the game. (I should add that Susan, a Cleveland girl, first saw him play during his time with the Indians.) Piersall became an All-Star center fielder but excelled at the plate as well (he still holds the Sox record for garnering 6 hits in a single nine-inning game.) Yet his behavior often extended beyond the capricious, becoming erratic and sometimes violent. He would get involved in brawls, on and off the field, which led several times to minor league demotions. Still, his career spanned 17 years, playing for five teams. But one of his most lasting impacts came with the publication of his memoir Fear Strikes Out; in it, he revealed that he suffered from bipolar disorder and had experienced a mental breakdown––but determinedly fought his way back to health and the sport he loved. This was at a time when sports figures kept such ‘dark’ secrets hidden from the public, but Piersall’s honesty helped so many suffering their own double lives.



Susan, you may know, is a poet and retired electrician; she’s the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Stanley’s Girl (Cornell)––as well as the nonfiction (and New York Times Notable) book, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction. When I first came across her poetry, I was impressed how her verse often celebrated the blue-collar working experience in a country not always appreciative of its labors. But now Susan is also a visual artist, oral historian, and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center––which, to my mind, begins to flirt with hero-status. Her poem today touches on Piersall’s gleeful on-field antics. Not surprisingly, this felt thrilling to a young girl who might not feel so free to express what was curtained off inside the mind. “Because you feared no one. Because/ when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s/ words did not fumble in your mouth...”. The possibility that authority might be defied and unbridled individuality expressed––this was, perhaps, the first liberating poem seeded in Susan’s consciousness. And its relevance today is underscored by the news story just unfolding from a current Red Sox outfielder, Jarren Duran. He revealed in a new documentary that he was almost broken by his sense of failure and, in 2022, attempted suicide. We are overjoyed that he was unsuccessful––not only because he has since become a marvelous player (voted MVP of the 2024 MLB All-Star game), but because the emotional courage he is displaying today will likely save other lives.



All this makes me think of the friends of mine suffering devastating illness, or acting as caretakers for spouses struggling with debilitating conditions. It brings to mind all the artists I know who persist in producing new instances of beauty and delight, even when the world seems determined to ignore them. And still others, determined to stand up for our democratic republic when dark forces are attempting to shatter its ideals. Heroics, Susan reminds us, come in many unexpected forms, and have an effect on people which no one could have anticipated. ‘Finding our voice.’ These, here, are my modest statues built of ink and breath. Am I wrong to think that––right now, dear readers––your minds are serving as their pedestals?

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

 

A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World

The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.

After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.

The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.

When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…

That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.

The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…

The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.

Red Letter Poem #249

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #249

 

 

 

Brief Candle

for Linda Segal-Crawley


I’d like to walk you back to orioles

gorging on spring catkins

under the willow’s sweep.

I’d like to sit with you on the Great Lawn.

Puck and the fairies bless the palace,

the same amphitheater where

Lady MacBeth could not remove the spot.

So beautiful and so terrible, both—

you whispered your last night,

when I leaned in close, still hopeful.



I’d like to be the idiot in the field

who doesn’t know the guitar

has no strings, and plays the song

of a soft-bodied fly,

trapped in amber.

You’ve freed yourself

from your body, from the hospital room

where they spun your blood

into fine particles, no space

between sunrise, and fall of breath.



––Jennifer Markell



At first glance, it’s an unlikely pairing: spring. . .and elegy. But it’s a juxtaposition with a long literary tradition. For every sunny Wordsworth trumpeting: “It was an April morning: fresh and clear/ The Rivulet, delighting in its strength. . .,” you have a sullen Eliot intoning: “April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs out the of the dead land. . ..” It is not only the literal regeneration of the landscape that conjures, in most minds, hope and possibility; it’s the ubiquitous snare of pop song patter and rom-com uplift that seems determined to weld the season to beauty and love, banishing colder thoughts. But when you’ve suffered a deep loss, April is a kind of repudiation of our most innocent expectations: yes, from winter’s gray clutches, the daffodils erupt again––but meanwhile, the dead remain adamantly dead, and dare you to even consider entertaining thoughts of joy. Yet here––at the start of April and National Poetry Month––Jennifer Markell attempts to do just that in this poignant tribute to her beloved aunt, Linda Segal-Crawley: actor, playwright, charismatic role model. On a quiet spring day like the ones we’ve been experiencing this week, her aunt succumbed to multiple myeloma––and the seasonal narrative was forever altered in the poet’s mind. But the creation of a memory poem offers the heart and mind a third option: between celebration and despair, there is the mercurial possibility of creation–– or should I say recreation––of our unfolding now.



Jennifer’s poem begins with a marvelously lyrical phrase that’s emblematic of this life/death intersection: “orioles/ gorging on spring catkins/ under the willow’s sweep.” To me, this wishful ‘walking back’ she describes feels more observed than remembered, a present experience of an old ache. There we are, caught up in the action: sitting with her aunt on the Great Lawn enjoying Shakespeare in the Park in the heart of Manhattan. And I’d be surprised if you, too, weren’t remembering how thrilling it was when some older family member or friend took you under their wing and introduced you to a world beyond your horizon. With the lightest touch, the poet teases out possibilities; one moment, we’re imagining the delightful reverie of a “Midsummer’s Night,” and the next we’re in the windswept Scottish Highlands where Macbeth will meet his fate. The dictates of time and space are subordinate to the mood propelling us. We’re stilled by her aunt’s somber observation––So beautiful and so terrible, both—but the poem allows that feeling to slowly morph into a kind of freedom, an escape from the hospital ward, untethered to the body’s suffering. As Shakespeare’s “brief candle” gutters, we land somewhere “between sunrise, and fall of breath.” This speaker’s life is now permanently imbued with the past (or elements of it,) even while she is contemplating what new possibility is being uncovered at the tip of her pen.



Jennifer’s first poetry collection, Samsara, (from Turning Point) was named a “Must Read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards in 2015. Her second book, Singing at High Altitude, was published by Main Street Rag, and it deepened her vision concerning the interaction between the personal and the global. It came as no surprise to learn that Jennifer works as a psychotherapist with a special interest in the therapeutic uses of writing––because, to me, her poetry always seems in the process of inventing new spaces for the self to inhabit. Like a balance scale, leaden grief weighs heavily in the left pan, sometimes threatening to overwhelm the present moment. But the poet adds one more nearly-weightless page to the right and––for a moment, an hour, a great stretch of hours––a kind of balance returns. We readers can sometimes borrow a poem like this to help offset our own emotional balancing act. It was Edna St. Vincent Millay who challenged “Spring” to account for itself: “To what purpose, April, do you return again?/ Beauty is not enough.” Perhaps. But if we are willing to cherish our grief as well as our joy, both confirm how deeply we love this life. There is a momentum created by our hunger for beauty; it may just convey us to the place we’ve been needing to go.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com