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Calling themselves “The Morrigan,” Heather Gawronski, Marty McConnell and Andi Strickland have ditched their jobs and uprooted their lives to live in their van, “Wilma.”
They travel the country performing spoken word poetry. Why?
Because they “needed to speak to as many people as possible,” McConnell says.
The Morrigan’s title comes from a mythological Celtic pagan triple and a single goddess. The prophetic Morrigan has three entities: specter, rage and frenzy. It can appear as a woman among other animals. Its howl supposedly caused soldiers to die of fright.
Gladly accepting this title, The Morrigan’s aim is to raise awareness and “to wake the sleepers” with their intense poetry.
The three women came from very different backgrounds and united in Chicago a year and a half ago.
They were performing together around Chicago when they decided they needed to spread their message across the country. Inspired by a San Francisco group, Sister Spit, the three women decided to shake up the growing spoken word venues in the United States. Hence, the Wandering Uterus Tour, which will make a Cincinnati appearance Aug. 5, was born.
“We are selling books, T-shirts and bumper stickers for gas and food money, and the host at each show usually passes the hat for donations,” McConnell says. “This generally garners us enough cash to buy some peanut butter and bread and get us to the next city.”
The group, McConnell says, also has learned a number of ways “for obtaining cleanliness.”
They’ve talked YMCA employees into letting them use their showers and taken numerous sponge baths in Kinko’s store bathrooms during stops there to check their e-mail.
In Arizona, she says, they even resorted to donating blood for some cash.
On their two-month national tour, which ends Aug. 8, audiences have ranged in size from 10 to 100. The Morrigan performs mostly in poetry slams that feature an open microphone and a featured performer with five judges randomly picked from the audience.
Poetry slams “attract good and diverse audiences,” McConnell says.
The women have performed in some strange places, too, such as an ice cream parlor and a laundromat. They also have been double featured with a 97-year-old woman.
While the three women originally began the tour with the same general goals, they recently have focused on their own personal reasons for the tour. Strickland went into poetry for the writing, the performing and the workshopping.
“I thought I was doing (the tour) to change the face of poetry,” she says. Now, it’s “about the girls.”
Strickland feels a strong connection to teen-age girls and thinks her personal experiences affect her audiences because they are a woman’s experiences. Strickland thought that while men do appreciate their poetry, they were aiming to “give women a place to express themselves.”
The Morrigan tries to affect people through strong issues with feminist undertones “without punching them in the face,” Strickland says.
Gawronski finds her reasons for the tour are mostly “about the act … affecting women.”
Toward that end, they’re making their way from city to city in a van that doesn’t have air conditioning and seems to have an empty tank every time they pull into another town.
“At one point, the back of the van turned into a waterfall during a downpour,” Gawronski says. “The ladder had fallen off days before and rain was pouring through the empty screw holes. I had to climb into the back, pull our clothing bins onto the bed, take the lid off mine and use it to catch the water. … The van, herself, smelled like ass for days.”
But, they say, it’s worth it.
All of the women say they have special memories of young girls approaching them after a show or writing them an inspiring letter about how they will never look at poetry the same way again.
For Gawronski, the tour is about “reconnecting the bonds between women.”
While all three are feminists, they keep that as an undertone in their poetry.
Strickland agrees that the tour is about delivering a message, whether it be about AIDS, lesbianism, prostitution or life in general. All three use their own experiences to express these messages. In fact, the three have changed their writing styles since the tour. Being the most “versatile writer she knows,” Strickland says her style “revolves around her changing month to month.”
Gawronski says her work has grown more honest, and McConnell says her writing has become more generous since working with the group.
The Morrigan appears at Carol’s On Main, 825 Main St. downtown, at 8 p.m. Aug. 5. The three plan another tour next summer, possibly with more women.
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 1999.