Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger (born 1936) is an American writer, healer, and teacher whose work spans multiple genres including the novel, poetry, non-fiction, and plays.

Metzger is a creative writing teacher and feminist scholar.

Deena Metzger was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1936 to Arnold and Bella Posy.

She first attended college from 1953 to 1955 at Brandeis University.

From 1955 to 1957 she attended Brooklyn College, where she became a co-editor of the Brooklyn College literary journal with Shela Pearl.

She received an M.A. in English and American Literature and a Community College Teaching Certificate from UCLA.

In the 1960s and 1970s Metzger was a member of the Critical Studies faculty at the California Institute of the Arts, taught English at Los Angeles Valley College, and was on the faculty of the Feminist Studio Worship.

Metzger also founded the writing program at Woman's Building in Los Angeles.

In May 1969, Metzger was teaching an English class at Los Angeles Valley College and was fired for “immoral conduct” and “evident unfitness to teach” when teaching a unit applying Supreme Court decisions regarding literature and pornography.

She also taught in the Critical Studies Department at the California Institute for the Arts from 1970 to 1975.

There she taught the first class in journal writing.

She subsequently brought the case to court and was reinstated in 1972.

In 1972, she spent time in Chile and was part of a film collective that made an early media response, the film pamphlet, Chile with Poems and Guns, three months after the golpé.

From 1973 to 1978 she was the director of the writing program for the Woman's Building and the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles.

The Woman's Building was the first feminist institution of higher learning outside of a university.

She received a PhD in Literature and Women's Culture from International College in 1975.

Metzger was a contributing editor to Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women's Culture that ran from 1977 to 1980 in Woman's Building.

Metzger is also known for her image in Hella Hammid's 1977 photograph, sometimes referred to as "The Warrior," or “Tree” poster, in which the post-mastectomy Metzger stands in a celebratory pose.

In 1977 she discovered she had breast cancer, and had a mastectomy.

Later, she was photographed by Hella Hammid for a poster that showed her naked from the waist up, with a tattoo covering the scar from her mastectomy.

This became known as the “Tree Poster” or the Warrior Poster, also called "I Am No Longer Afraid".

Deena writes:

"Our intention in turning it into a poster was to invite the world to look at a one-breasted woman and exult in her health and vitality. An alliance with the life force on all levels resulted from meeting the illness as a messenger – it called me to change my life in ways that would show themselves to be good for me and for the community."

(Wingbow Press, 1989).

24"x17".

Inscription reads:

"I am no longer afraid of mirrors where I see the sign of the Amazon, the one who shoots arrows. There was a fine line across my chest where a knife entered, but now a branch winds about the scar and travels from arm to heart. Green leaves cover the branch, grapes hang there and a bird appears. What grows in me now is vital and does not cause me harm. I think the bird is singing. I have relinquished some of the scars. I have designed my chest with care given to an illuminated manuscript. I am no longer ashamed to make love. Love is a battle I can win. I have a body of a warrior who does not kill or wound. On the book of my body, I have permanently inscribed a tree."

She was co-editor of Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals, with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson, a critical text on animal intelligence and agency published in 1998, that speaks also to the profound knowledge that is gathered when relationships are intimate rather than alienated or objectified.

She first introduced and convened Daré, monthly gatherings for community and individual healing in 1999 and then ReVisioning Medicine in 2004.

In 1999, she visited with Nganga, healer, Augustine Kandenwa in Zimbabwe and afterwards introduced Daré, healing community, to North America.

In 2004, her work as a healer took a new form when she initiated ReVisioning Medicine, an alliance between medical and medicine people to create a medicine that does no harm to humans or the earth.

From 2004 to the present,she has collaborated with everyday gandhis, a grassroots, peacebuilding NGO in Liberia.

She is also on the Faculty of the Kerulos Center.

Her novel La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland Pen Award for Literature.

The Deena Metzger Literature of Restoration Fellowship at Mesa Refuge was offered to novelist Stan Rusworth in 2015.

'Tree, the mastectomy poster,' has been widely circulated and has appeared in various film and television documentaries, journals and newspapers including The Village Voice, Revolution Nursing Journal, Common Ground, the Detroit Metro Times, Our Bodies Our Selves, Women's Spirit Source Book and was the cover of the Oklahoma County Medical Society, April, 90.

This photograph is canonized in the body of art made by breast cancer survivors.

Photograph by Hella Hammid, words by Deena Metzger, poster design by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville.