By Thistle Pettersen

“Sisterhood is powerful,” I mutter to myself as I struggle up the hill with the handcart hauling my stuff. My head itches and a rash appears to be spreading on my left arm. I stop to catch my breath and examine the little red dots near my wrist. I am in the woods of Michigan again this Summer, and the heat and bugs are getting to me as we load into our secluded spot at the top of Old Workshop Walk on the Land. Schlepping lots of stuff, much of it I wouldn’t need or use, begins my journey inward onto the Land where the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival happened for forty years from 1974–2015. I am back again this year with Jenna DiQuarto, WLRN’s sound engineer and producer, and we are here for the Women’s Performance Initiative (WPI) (Women Playing Instruments) and Re-igniting Intergenerational Sisterhood Everywhere (RISE). These two festivals sprung up after MichFest was canceled and sisters had to re-group.

After a long, sweaty set-up, I find my way to the showers and rinse off the grime and grit from the day. The divinely silky warm water gushes forth from multiple shower heads as the bathing ladies stand beneath them, blissed out by the warmth and natural beauty of the ferns and trees around us. 

While I am drying off, a woman tells me about the presence of gender ideologues on the Land and asks me if I know who they are and what they are up to.  I tell her I am on the Land for WPI, the women’s band camp for the week, and that I know nothing about it. It feels good to wash off the gender grime and walk into the woods to decide to play music with my sisters.

I will play ukulele every morning in the ensemble directed by the lovely Elizabeth Boyce, while other women gather to discuss class, race, sex, gender, and many other topics unrelated to music at the RISE Festival happening at the same time. Sitting in the WLRN living room studio we set up on that first evening on the land, I look over the two festival programs and regret that there are not two of me.

This is the 14th year I’ve managed to make it to these woods, and I make up my mind to focus on my personal growth as a musician and a woman out and about among other women artists and musicians. I realize now that we’ve over-packed: we’ve brought the whole setup for a meet-and-greet with multiple guests and a raffle with fabulous prizes! I’m disappointed to have carried all of that extra stuff into the woods, but I soon realize I can’t be in two places at once, and it’s in my best interest to get up each day and mix and mingle rather than stay back in the woods on the off chance sisters would find us and want raffle tickets.

A lot has happened in the nine years between the last MichFest and its current iteration in these sacred woods. The first year after its demise, a few heartbroken, homesick women set up a little film festival across the road from the Land, in the National Forest where Camp Trans used to be while MichFest was still running. This Film Fest was small but mighty, an acorn from Mother Oak sprouting and growing so nearby that we could even walk the Land. And we did. That was 2016 and I have been back to the Land every year, except for 2020 when all festivals were cancelled due to Covid. 

The WPI logo this year says that “artistic expression is the oracle of the soul,” so on that note, I am in harmony with the purpose of WPI. I have learned through the years to “fake it ‘til I make it,” and now I can sound halfway decent on my songs. But I still have a long way to go, so I came to WPI to keep finding my voice and the patience to slow down, play in a group, chill out, and enjoy the sights and sounds of music being played by women.

Change happens at these Michigan festivals, especially in this new post-MichFest epoch. Every summer, different organizers set up various events every week, instead of everything happening at once in the first week of August as it did during the forty years of MichFest. For this reason, you may plan for one thing, but after you arrive in the Mother Woods, the festival takes you down another path entirely on the soft forest floor covered in Sister Ferns.

RISE and WPI combined have about 200 women on the Land this year. My experience last year was of 500 women when WPI and Big Mouth Girl (BMG) happened together (I have heard BMG described as “the most Michfestesque of the Fests post-Fest.”), and next year they expect to sell a thousand tickets! Last year, WLRN had a living-room tent down Old WorkShop Walk, and more women visited because the festival was bigger. 

I expected the same thing to happen this year, but it didn’t. A small hollowness in my heart silently grew as the festival progressed, due to this lack of company at our camp. But Fest is always a place to learn to let go and let it flow, so I managed to pull off three elegant dinners for friends on three different occasions, two of them being at WLRN Studios (the living room). I offered up my homemade quinoa chicken stir-fry with chicken and veggies from the local farmers’ market for one, my Thai soup with cilantro and lime for another with my longtime friend Charlotte and new friend Borg, and a fennel white bean soup with farmers market veggies for a meal Jenna and I shared with the Vulva Lounge sisters Loni and Kim, pictured below.  I was glad for the company in our WLRN studios tent a bit deeper in the woods and farther away from downtown than last year. 

So while the WLRN presence on the Land was sort of a bust, it sort of wasn’t too, as the Vulva Lounge Sisters were also struggling to know where the “living room” was for radfems to hang out. We combined forces on the raffle table, with the beautifully designed Vulva Lounge sticker by Nina Paley side-by-side with Natasha Petrov’s TERFin’ USA design.  

Just setting the whole thing up the way I liked it was satisfying and felt like a rehearsal for the next time when I’ll be sure to create our space closer to downtown or maybe even splurge for a booth in the marketplace.

What was great about WPI was that I had a place to go every day to meet and greet with the same women and to learn and play together in musical ensembles, which was a much-needed break from FB circles or political discussions. The music soothed my weary soul and brought me to satisfying, if sometimes challenging, places each time our groups met. 

The folk improv ensemble led by Cori Somers was a lesson in improv performance in G major, to a tune called Blackberry Blossom. I enjoyed playing in a circle of women with Cori leading us on her violin and some of us, like me, on guitar and singing improv.

There were a couple of fiddle players, ukulele strummers, and a bass player. Elizabeth, my ukulele instructor, told us on the first day of our uke ensemble that she had just picked up the ukulele to be our coach. Her ten years of solid classical music training on violin and her hard work made it possible for her to do that: to just pick up another stringed instrument and almost instantly know how to play it well. To learn more about Elizabeth’s journey as a WPI Coach, tune in to WLRN’s 101st podcast set to drop Thursday, September 5th, wherein I interview Elizabeth about her experiences at WPI this year as an instructor. 

I also attended MiMi Gonzalez’s Performance Poetry Workshop, where we each prepared a performance poem based on prompts she gave us about the ferns growing up through the asphalt. It was a beautiful metaphor to use for individual and group art! The final four-day rehearsal-to-performance class I signed up for was the Dancing Woodlands Flora workshop with Borg. There was only one other dancer for that sequence, but the three of us quickly bonded and had a blast coming up with an avant-garde dance of the Pine, St. Joan’s Wort, and the Ferns of Michigan—a plant dance. 

As the week progressed, I let go more and more of all that extra baggage I brought to camp with me this year. I found the love, joy, and laughter of my sisters and me singing and playing together to be a healing balm for my wounds, one that would guide me away from licking them and into a present moment where we all heal together in an intentional community. I especially loved meeting and hanging out with both Borg, my dance instructor, and my classmate Tracy, who was in the ukulele ensemble, the performance poetry workshop, and the Woodlands dance with me. Hope to see you both again next summer, sisters! 

Since coming back to Madison, I have reflected on my adventures in Michigan this summer and the importance of good nourishing food when camping on the Land. It was so great to see Strega, the food truck that stayed on the Land the whole time even though there weren’t that many women there. They were needed and appreciated by the women who bought meals from them. Their motto of seeing food as healing medicine brought good vibes to our gathering this year. 

I also wanted to reflect on WPI Director Laurie Jarski’s vision for WPI and why I think it is the perfect gathering to carry on the performance aspect of the original MichFest. What started at MichFest is being taken even further by WPI, incorporating women with less of a distinction between audience and performers, workers and festies. I told Laurie, when I got the chance to talk with her briefly the last night of Fest, that her camp reminds me of Girls and Women’s Rock Camp out in Area 51, but that it is different because it is so community-oriented and truly women-only. I thanked her for having the vision to create it. Here is what she has to say about it in her own words from the WPI website:

The original idea for WPI (Women’s Performance Initiative) was born as a day vision while riding at Maybury State Park Mountain Bike Trail on my bike in 2018. The vision was a flood of ideas surrounding bringing a variety of performance opportunities to women, fusing other mediums of creativity with music. Little did I know that this vision was meant to begin with its first event at WWTLC (We Want The Land Coalition) in Hart, MI, where Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was held for 40 years. – Laurie A. Jarski

That’s right. Laurie’s festival is called “WPI on the Land” because it comes full circle back to the Land where women will have gathered consistently for fifty years next summer. The Land, as it has come to be called by many, is home to girls and women forever thanks to WWTLC.org. It is also home to women playing instruments, giving and receiving instruction in a variety of arts, and co-creating something beautiful together to be enjoyed by all on the last night on the Main Stage. WPI provides a needed and well-deserved home in the woods for women in the arts. 

Thistle Pettersen is the founding member of WLRN, an eco-feminist, and a singer/songwriter in her home state of Wisconsin.  She focuses on arts and culture and their role in building liberation and justice movements. You can learn more about Thistle and hear her original music at ThistlePettersen.com