DOUBLE LIFE
Poet/businesswoman
Beverly Monestier combines
careers on two continents

By PAULA ALLEN
Photography JANET ROGERS

If there’s a choice to be made, Beverly Monestier would rather compromise — on not one career, but two or three; not one homeland but one world. She’s multilingual — fluent in French, conversant in Greek. For public appearances, she dresses like the businesswoman she is, but she keeps the long blond mane that seems to go with her poetic side.

“I’ve never thought I had to limit myself,” says Monestier. “If your strength is communication skills or language arts, there’s more than one way to work with words.”

A San Antonio native, she grew up here and lives within easy driving distance of her parents and her old high school. On the other hand, she holds dual citizenship with the United States and the Republic of Cyprus — by choice, not by marriage. Until returning to San Antonio a few years ago, she says,  “I’ve spent my adult life abroad.”

Creative writing has been Monestier’s one constant. As a child, she wrote poems and song lyrics, folding up the papers and hiding them in her family home, where her mother still occasionally comes upon them. “Whenever there was something I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about to someone else, I would write about it,” she says.

These days, as a visiting artist in schools, Monestier encourages teenagers to try their own hands at poetry. “It can be therapeutic for kids to express themselves,” she says. “And if you master poetry, you master language. Using few words (compared to prose), poetry can be very powerful emotionally.” Through a program of the Texas Commission on the Arts, Monestier recently has led workshops at South San Antonio High School, West Campus, Edison and Sam Houston high schools.

“It’s surprising how universal their concerns are,” she says. “They’re concerned with relationships, they’re trying to imagine their own futures, they’re worried about what’s happening in our world.”

When Monestier was their age, she was at Incarnate Word High School, where English teacher Ellen Shull (now at Palo Alto College) “did the best thing anybody’s ever done for me as a writer. She taught me how to accept criticism of my poems and learn from it.” After graduation, Monestier headed for the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied psychology. Still an aspiring writer, she says, “I thought that learning to understand people would help me write about them.”

Following a Belgian fiancé, Monestier left a Ph.D. program in psychology at Berkeley to start a new life in Europe. Though the relationship didn’t work out, she fell in love with international living, doing consulting work in several European Union (EU) countries.

In 1997, she started her own consulting firm, applying the principles of organizational psychology to training employees to improve communications within corporations and government agencies. One of the latter was the Republic of Culture in Cyprus, a small country now at peace but with a long history of struggle with its neighbors in the Eastern Mediterranean. At that time, Cyprus was considering applying for membership in the EU. “They wanted to do the best job they could evaluating when and how to apply,” Monestier says. After being hired as a consultant to help with this effort, she continued to work on projects for the nation’s Ministry of Culture, which was concentrating on projects to bring together its citizens of different ethnic groups.

While she was working for the Cypriot government, she was offered citizenship, a formality that facilitated her work for the ministry and for other cultural organizations. She accepted, retaining her American citizenship. Already having spent years abroad, she says, “I saw myself not so much as a citizen of one country, but a citizen of the world. I don’t consider myself any less an American for holding citizenship in another country as well.”

During her time in Cyprus, Monestier also wore two hats as a writer, publishing journal articles on creativity across international lines and writing poetry. A collection of her poems, titled Modern Runs, was published in Cyprus, and her work has been translated into Greek, Turkish and Spanish. Another book is making the rounds of U.S. publishers.

Four and a half years ago, Monestier married Garrett Nikolaus. From Arizona originally, Nikolaus was spending some time in Europe while working on a graduate degree. “I don’t think I could have married anyone who hadn’t lived abroad,” she says. “Living outside the country you grew up in changes you. I know I’m not the same person I was (before moving to Europe).”

To make it easier for Nikolaus to finish his degree, the couple moved back to San Antonio about three years ago. Since then, Monestier has done some intercontinental commuting. “It’s not easy to run a business that’s in another country,” she says, adding that she has brought another principal into the company to stay anchored in Europe.

There’s been some culture shock in re-entry, she says, especially in a post-9/11 climate where there may be more suspicion of outsiders than before the attack. “While I was living abroad, I found that people were more alike than not,” she says. “Yet I came back to a place where some people seem to have gone backwards in their thinking.”

To promote the creative activity she believes in, Monestier has developed the Synergy Foundation, a nonprofit organization she founded that’s dedicated to furthering literacy and intercultural communication. Synergy, she says, was “initially a group of ethnically diverse poets and writers who came together for an annual event in Cyprus, where they read in different languages.”

Impressed with the power of poetry to bring different groups of people together, Monestier extended the organization’s reach to San Antonio. As executive director, she rounds up area poets to give readings at bookstores and other venues, teaches creativity classes and workshops and coordinates the Poetry Out Loud San Antonio program — part of a national program sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, that helps young poets sharpen their writing and performance skills.

While Monestier has worked on a national government level and has led a workshop for Palestinian and Israeli writers, she finds her classes for young people particularly challenging. As a poet who belongs to several traditional poetry organizations, she says, “I’m often the youngest person at a conference. There’s a lot of white hair. That’s not bad, but if there’s going to be a future for poetry, we have to get young people interested.”

In her workshops for students, at venues as disparate as the Seton Home for unmarried young mothers and elite private high schools, she finds she has to tell students they have permission to express themselves any way they want: “Someone will raise his hand and ask, ‘What if I want to write about something that’s really ugly?’ I tell them that it’s all right to write about anything they want, as long as they’re able to make the reader feel something about it.”

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t provide students with some suggestions for reaching a wider audience than their immediate peers. “Many of my students are strongly influence by rap music and hip-hop culture,” she says. “I’ll tell them that if they’re going to use profanity, they should think before they write that word: Is this the best word you can find to express what you want to say? If you’re using the same words over and over, they lose their impact.”

She also has reservations about a part of the local literary scene. While spoken-word contests known as poetry slams have won new, younger fans for poetry, the rough-and-tumble heckling and Olympics-style ratings put off others. She explains, “When I’ve told people at conferences that I come from San Antonio, some poets will say, ‘That’s a tough town. I’ll never read there again.’”

For Monestier, poetry is most successful when it communicates universal feeling. It also troubles her that the local literary community is divided along ethnic lines — none of which seem to define her. “So many writers here think they have to be set apart by their ethnicity or their religion,” she says. “Why can’t we be united by our belief in art?”

In her own projects, Monestier continues to cross cultural borders. A poem of hers, in English and Spanish, will be painted into a mural on a laundry near Southcross Boulevard. She’ll be coordinating students from 10 San Antonio high schools to perform in March in the state finals of the Poetry Out Loud competition. And for the time being, she’s committed to staying in her hometown.

As Monestier writes in Ground Zero, a poem about coming home and not quite fitting in, “Our lives have roots/not cleanly severed … Hope is an aftershock;/in spring, the fragile blade/pushing up from the surface,/always anchored in the ashes.”
 
For information about Synergy Foundation events, visit www.synergyarts.org.

BEVERLY MONESTIER
Age: 38.
Occupation: Poet, nonprofit administrator, consultant.

Why she's a Role Model: Started her own international consulting business while in her 20s; teaches poetry to young people as a Traveling Artist for the Texas Commission on the Arts; promotes literacy through a nonprofit organization she founded.

Personal: Married four years to San Antonio firefighter Garrett Nikolaus; two Cypriot cats, Cleo and Nefertiti.

Best advice: "A friend taught me that inactivity can be a huge enemy to creativity. Performing a kindness to someone else can help us restart creative flow."

People would be surprised that I... " Have been well-received in Muslim cultures as a woman and a Westerner."

Believes: "In people, though that's not always easy. I think that peace is something everybody wants, and that desire is part of what it means to be human."

Favorite relaxation strategy: Listening to friends perform music, being near the sea.

Favorite poet: Kahlil Gibran, for his timeless wisdom, "but I keep discovering poems and poets that are new to me all the time."