Guest Speaker Session #2: Anne Yeomans

Today, we invited Anne Yeomans to speak to us for our second guest speaker session. It was so nice to see her again after last week with Reverend Sarah Pirtle. We started off our meeting by reciting poems written by Anne Yeomans from her poetry book, We Used To Call Her Mother. One of my favorite poems I had the chance to read aloud was Who Is She, which depicted an identity crisis that Anne Yeomans herself had experienced in the late-40’s when trying to discover what she wanted to do with the rest of her life. After the poetry read-aloud, Ms. Yeomans distributed a dozen flashcards with words written on them. Some of them included Welcome the Unknown and Present Moment. These flashcards reflect the hidden precious moments of our everyday life that we tend to forget. All of the present students each selected one flashcard with a sentence that resonated with them, and later shared in small groups what they meant to them. I was able to share my story about Embrace the Silence to Peggy Huang and Skylar Ricketts. I talked about how I like to be in quiet places and reflect on myself more than spending most of my time with others. They also shared their stories about their sentences, which helped me acknowledge new sides of them that I did not know of. Just like we did with Reverend Sarah Pirtle, we closed the meeting with a prayer. I loved hearing all the different voices harmonizing into one, sweet tone with the collective mind of sending gratitude to the earlier generations of women.

- Katie Kim, Founder and President

It was my first time attending a HerStory meeting today, and I didn’t expect myself to enjoy it as much as I did today. I was pretty hesitant to go because I assumed I would be the only boy–and I was–but Anne Yeomans was so welcoming and made me feel very comfortable. When I stepped in, she gave me a copy of a book her friend had written about the psychology of men and how men respond to male dominance and pressure. I resonated a lot with the book as my mother would always tell me never to be the victim of toxic masculinity and to express my feelings whether that be “masculine” or not. I will definitely show up to future HerStory meetings.

Bright Yang, Participant