The Goddess Festival was created in 2008 by a group of women with a passion to discover and celebrate the Goddess in Her many forms and guises, including the Goddess within each of us. The festival is produced by Vick Kelley and Diana Rivers and is assisted by a circle of volunteers who plan and facilitate the various tasks of the Festival.
We are sponsored as a non-profit through the Omni Center for Peace, Justice, and Equality. We are aligned with their efforts towards securing peace, justice, and equality for women and for all persons.
Meet the Producers
The remaining members of the Producers Circle of the Goddess Festival are altering the format for the 2012 event. Though the past three years were grand and festive celebrations, we lack the energies and resources for a month-long Festival this year. Rather than letting the Festival go completely, we have agreed to put on a long weekend event which would be much less structured and more spontaneous, as well as less work and more fun for the organizers. We trust that this particular incarnation of the Goddess Festival will bring us all together in celebration. We hope you will join us in the co-creation of this event.
Those working on the 2012 Festival are:
Alice Betz
Beverly Toll
Chava Schacter
Deb Wasson
Diana Rivers
Gladys Tiffany
Nancy McShane
Penny Gray
Pippin Lowe
Red Star
Vick Kelley
Members of the 2010/2011 Producer’s Circle were:
Beverly Toll
Chava Schacter
Christy Lindsay
David Garcia
Deb King
Diana Rivers
Jeanne Sievert
Jori Costello
Kathy Skaggs
Marty Smith
Michelle Green
Nancy McShane
Penny Gray
Vick Kelley
Festival Founders
Diana Rivers, author and artist, founder of WomanVision
Throughout my life, I’ve had an intense passion for peace, feminism, and creativity, and I’ve gone back and forth between writing and art as a way of expressing myself.
I have been an activist for peace and civil rights, taking many trips to Washington, D.C. to protest government policies or in support of grassroots efforts. I helped found two land-based communities in Arkansas as a way of living out those political ideals.
I’ve written poems, essays, articles, and short stories that have been published in several feminist magazines. I authored the six published novels in the Hadra series, and have several other books in the works. I have written performance pieces for Goddess Productions, a traveling readers’ theater troupe.
On the artist side, I’ve been a sculptor, working in different materials. I cast a series of small Goddess figures in bronze and recently have been doing cement sculptures, mostly on a Goddess theme. I also have created a number of collages, some of which were used as designs on cards and t-shirts when I was a partner with Cedar Kindy in Willow Moon Designs.
As a feminist, I’ve helped to organize several venues for women to express their creative selves and share their work in all mediums. I originated WomanVision, an art and performance show, which I produced with the help of a small collective of women. The show ran for three years in Kansas City during the month of March. With Full Bloom, I did a WomanVision show in Eureka Springs. I worked with MatriArts to put on a women’s art and performance show at the Orpheum in Fayetteville for three years. During the ten-year period of the Women’s Conference and Festival at the University of Arkansas, I was in charge of most of the art shows at the Student Union.
Vick Kelley and I have worked together on several of these ventures, especially Goddess Productions, the Women’s Conference and Festival, and MatriArts. Now we are working together again in producing the Goddess Festival.
Vick Kelley, producer, co-founder Soap & Vick Events
Though I’ve settled in a little house on the hill, basking in the richness of eight beautiful grandchildren and a loving spouse, I cannot quiet my passion for activism, performing, and the thrill of co-creating women’s events.
It started early, evolved steadily. My journey spans the Quakers’ “voluntary simplicity;” consciousness of the 70’s; several years as a VISTA volunteer, organizing energy and food co-ops, community gardens, and environmental programs in Mississippi; to my move to Fayetteville, where I organized the First Fayetteville Recycling Rally, became politically active in waste management issues, developed the Beyond Environmentalism retreat, and won numerous public speaking competitions in Toastmasters International.
The fun really began when I found my tribe. I have performed and directed with Snapdragon Feminist Theatre, Goddess Productions, and MatriArts. I have served in various positions through the ten years of the University of Arkansas Women’s Conference and Festival, for which I received the W.I.S.E. Award (Women in Significant Endeavors).
With Sophia Estes as my “Soap” in Soap & Vick Events, I have co-created (as producer, director, performer, or general “hair puller”) numerous events, concerts, and programs. A few were: Janis Ian, Suzanne Westenhoffer, Alix Dobkin, Ubaka Hill, the Annual Day of Healing, the Mother’s Day Extravaganza, and The Gays of Our Lives. Sophia and I have held several shows of our original art and poetry about loving, living, and eroticism.
For more about our lives and background, check out these interviews and documentaries:
Available for loan on VHS from Soap & Vick:
- A & E Investigative Reports: “Anti-Gay Hate Crimes,” July 6th, 1999
- The Geraldo Show: “When the Other Man is a Woman: Leaving a Marriage for a Lesbian Lifestyle”
