PORT TOWNSEND — In a free online talk Thursday evening, author Barbe Chambliss will talk about the many ways to make peace — in the world, in the community, in one’s life.
“Women Peacemakers: What We Can Learn from Them” is Chambliss’ book, the topic of her program at 7 p.m. Thursday via the Port Townsend Library website, ptpubliclibrary.org.
Chambliss, a professional mediator, psychotherapist and organic farmer from Colorado, will take questions during the livestreamed event. To access the presentation directly, go to https://zoom.us/join and enter meeting ID 82722811297 and password 469468.
For her book, Chambliss had intimate conversations with 15 women about how they make peace. These interviewees include an Israeli soldier, an Irish nun, a paralyzed Olympic skier and a Zimbabwean orphan.
“Women Peacemakers” is a kind of guidebook, about “conscious peacemakers,” Chambliss has said. She zigzagged the world, “to interview a willing pool of peacemakers where they live.”
Chambliss, who published her book in 2020, has served as director of the volunteer Center for Conflict Resolution in Aspen, Colo. She has taught mediation to more than 500 children and adults in rural Colorado schools, and in her own community, she facilitates restorative justice circles.
It was her Ph.D. dissertation, “Contemporary Women Peacemakers: The Hidden Side of Peacemaking,” that ignited two decades of interviews — with more than 50 women across the world — about the nuts and bolts of how peace is made.
Midway through that journey, she volunteered as a counselor in a Croatian camp, providing a haven for 80 children who had recently survived the Bosnian War.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks in New York City, she compiled and distributed a “Working Compendium of Non-violent Responses to 9/11,” and later served as a therapist on a U.S. military base to better understand the human dynamics of making war.
Her life’s work, Chambliss has said, is to awaken the peacemaker in as many people as possible. She invites each reader of her book to commit to doing one or more acts of peacemaking and then share their results with her. She can be reached via her website, barbe chamblissauthor.com.
Her definition of peacemaking: people simply treating each other with equal respect.
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Jefferson County Senior Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
