This is Namoli Brennet from Decorah, Iowa, the sweetest little heartland town you can imagine. We conducted the interview in the town’s baseball field’s dugout, how more All-American can you get? I guess the fact that Namoli, an amazing singer/songwriter, had just finished performing at the weekly farmer’s market across the street, sun shining in the early am to play back up singer to Namoli’s set while the town passed back and forth in front, could be the cherry on top.
For a current listing of Namoli’s shows and tours, info about her music and bookings, please check out her site at: https://namolibrennet.com/home
Namoli was an amazing woman to interview for The Nature Of Refuge. Namoli lives in her truth with complete concentration and with a searing honesty. She doesn’t pull any punches, using her wit and superb sense of humor as a mirror and a blade that she most often skewers on herself. That sense of humor, Namoli’s self described barometer of where her anxiety level is in a given moment, the more she jokes, the more anxious she is; Namoli started our interview out with a stand up routine that relaxed into a vulnerability and candor that was deeply moving to witness. And ended with a series of rapid one liners that had me giggling as the interview came to a close. I laughed with Namoli from the start and as she began to reveal herself to me, we shared quite a bit about fear and where it can take you in a given day.
Namoli is articulate, heartfelt, a powerful creative voice, a seeker, a truth teller of the highest order, introspective, wickedly funny and smart as hell, a survivor, she suffers, she rolls with it all, she feels it all deeply. I enjoyed Namoli’s company from the start, I hope she discovers her own true compass, or learns that her very mutable essence is the core of life itself, adaptability and all its guises.
To enjoy the full length interview please follow the link for Part One; https://vimeo.com/345229782 Part Two will be posted shortly.
We met and conducted the interview under the recommendation from one of the local newspaper’s reporters whom I met through my uncle. My uncle and my family, I had come to visit in my quest across the country. I was born in Iowa, had a huge extended family, and didn’t really know any of them due to my mom and dad moving us out to the west coast was I was little and I had never ventured back as an adult to explore where I came from, to get to know that part of myself. I decided to fold that aspect of what refuge and sanctuary could possibly mean through the discovery of my family roots into the project as well. I am nothing but ambitious.
My uncle is a big cheese in this lovely little town, he has worked hard his entire adult life to establish and maintain community, connect with people and make something sustainable and beautiful. He’s done a great job in that endeavor and though he sold his pharmacy a few years ago, he still has quite a few business minded spinning plates that he enjoys twirling and gets people involved in. My uncle is a man who gets the job done with a good amount of flair and bright smile. He’s funny, he and Namoli share that.
This little Iowa town, Decorah, is a sweet place to live. It’s got a thriving business community, strong economy, lovely tree lined streets with big pretty houses, a little river cuts through the town, its green and smells fresh,. There are music festivals, and a cute liberal bookstore. There is a democratic headquarters with all its blue slogans just up the street from the republican headquarters with all its red slogans; it’s all very civilized. There’s quite a few aging hippies with a bunch of neo-hippies mixed in that all frequent the local co-op. Live bands play often during the summer and if Namoli isn’t touring in a given moment, you will find her playing out quite often, a town favorite with her gorgeous voice and soulful lyrics.
There is a big festival that happens at the end of each summer in Decorah, it’s called Nordic Fest and celebrates the Scandinavian heritage of the town and area. For me, it smacked a bit of white pride but I am an outsider and for the locals its just a fun way for the community to come together and celebrate what is important to them as a common identity, an ancestry. What also offsets the possible creepiness of white pride is that there are people of color living in Decorah, not a huge amount but more than you would expect from the stereotype of a small, midwest, American town. One more thing that tips the scale away from the town’s traditional whitewash, there are quite a few rainbow flags being proudly hung outside of private homes, there is a small liberal arts college that has attracted quite a few LGBTQ students over the years that has created a good sized gay community that is cemented in the social fabric of Decorah. It delighted me to discover this and have the facade of this small, Iowan, town pull back, revealing itself as being much richer and multi leveled that you would expect on first glance. And this is where I met the first transgender woman that I would include to the chorus of American women voices in this project, Namoli.
It was Namoli’s voice that I heard first. I had arranged the interview over FB and Namoli invited me to join her at the local farmer’s market held behind the co-op and she would be playing a gig down there . It was a beautiful summer morning, I packed my gear and left my uncle’s pretty, big house, walking over, everything is in walking distance in Decorah. I wandered through the market, gorgeous local produce, baked goods, all the good stuff spilled out in the stalls. I saw Namoli setting up between a couple of those stalls and there was a bench right across the way. I sat content to observe and enjoy the day, I’d introduce myself after she played. Namoli then began to sing.
Namoli’s voice is rich and warm. It pours into your ears, pours over you, you lean in to that voice. Clear with the ache of spilled emotion, raw but smooth, she’s got the stories to tell and her voice, you listen. The words, she’s telling you a truth, your truth, and your truth over there. Its dusty roads and barrooms. The crack of a cue ball and a screen door slamming. It’s footsteps clocking away in the other direction. It’s the highway at night in the middle of nowhere. We all have these stories and they are all in Namoli’s voice. While I listened, that’s what came up to the surface, how familiar the stories were. We are of the same age, Namoli and I, both seekers and transformers, came up in the 80’s and 90’s, felt strong in ourselves in the mid-ought’s, that breeding ground left it’s similar stamp. Namoli is of the school of The Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Kristin Hersch, Tracy Chapman. Songs lit up by tail lights down a back highway. Good stuff to say the least.
My uncle sat down next to me on the bench and handed me a muffin, perfect accompaniment, he and the muffin. My uncle loves music so we were both happy to be there in the morning sun and listen, enjoying the beauty. Watching Namoli’s set, watching the people walking by enjoying Namoli or not paying attention, great people watching with a badass soundtrack.
After Namoli was done I introduced myself, offered to take her out to lunch so we could get to know each other a bit and I could tell her more about the project in depth and make sure she was down to participate. We walk over to the town’s sushi joint that has a great menu, strangely though almost every table has ordered sushi-on-fire, neither Namoli or I know what to make of it and it made both of us giggle at the sushi-on-fire-mystery each time it was presented to a nearby table. We got along well, fell into easy, intimate conversation, the nature of this work opens doors quickly to authentic intimacy, Namoli is indeed down to participate. We wander behind the now dismantled farmer’s market where it’s grassy and there’s a little stream, we head back further looking for the right private spot to conduct the interview – ah, a baseball field, a dugout, somehow just right.
When I spoke to the reporter and asked who she thought would be an interesting woman from the area to interview for this work, she recommended Namoli as she is an amazing musician and well known in the community. What was not as well known was the fact that Namoli is transgender. Not because she hides it, not at all, but because I think it’s due to the fact that Namoli is quite feminine, has a light voice. Namoli’s transition is well suited to her physically which reflects her spirit in her altered house. My uncle had no idea she was transgender until I told him and he’s watched her perform and seen her around town for years. The fact that Namoli was transgender and was an integral part of the community in this small Iowan town was what made me interested in hearing her story for this project. Namoli’s perspective was different from the traditional story of rejection in a tight knit community. When it was established early on in the interview that I knew she was transgender and would love to hear whatever she was willing to share about her experience, Namoli was eager to get real about it and detail her personal journey. What a gift her vulnerability was.
Namoli is funny, like i said, she started the interview off with a comedic bang which was fun but we settled into a deeply sincere conversation about fear and suffering, getting older, and the mystery of self identity.
Namoli’s voice pulses with sadness, a weary angel singing in your ear. In the last couple of days while writing her story, I’ve been listening her most recent CD. She gave it to me on the day of our interview some months ago and i wonder if she is still as sad today. During Namoli’s interview, we traded anxiety stories and the onslaught of the early forties life experience, when everything suddenly seems to fall to shit and your left holding an empty bag that once was your life. And the hope that you will build anew, love might ring your doorbell, and abundance will flow again. All with an altered force and again the hope of wisdom to carry you forward. The hope, always the hope.
On the day that we spoke, Namoli wasn’t so sure about the hope. The sad and the depressed and the anxiety was looming large and had been for some years. It had been worse at the beginning of her forties, Namoli had fessed up to the sharp degree of her depression and sought professional help, always so good to ask for help. Namoli then experienced the bouncing around of finding the right anti-depressants and the right dose and the fact that its all a game of hit or miss and a person is just trying her best to keep her head above the water. Namoli’s candor in all this jump starts the conversation we can be having about our fears and how we navigate them. How we escalate and deescalate ourselves in our levels of panic, how we attempt to live with ourselves. How the mental health community is of service and when it is not, do the drugs work or don’t they. Let’s get real.
Getting real is the job of the artist. The artist is the voice of the mirror, the one who says,
“Hey! We all are in pain, suffering. We all feel love, that bloom of passionate hope. We all feel! I’m the artist so I’ll go first, this is what it feels like, sounds like, looks like”
That’s what the artist does and not only does she feel, she experiences everything exquisitely, and she suffers, then makes it bigger for her canvas so everyone can see. This is life.
It’s extraordinary and exhausting and Namoli was totally real with how tired she was.
Namoli grew up in a conservative Catholic family where faith was strong and struggled with showing affection and getting all the basic needs met. There was repression and everything unsaid, And there was the fact that Namoli was transgender in a time before that word even really existed. Then the word was born, caught fire, and look where we are as a nation with the conversation of gender, transgender, identity, fluidity, especially in the last couple of years.
Namoli describes herself growing up as a chameleon and a people pleaser, shape shifter to survive. That seems to be a common theme in people who transition, born with the gift to adapt, to mirror what they think the people around them want them to be as their own sense of identity is so fluid. It is a gift but we are taught, or have up till this moment in human time, that we have to cling to the identity given to us at birth, that is the starting point and everything else is built on top. This is who you are in this world, boy or girl. Don’t deviate, don’t change the script, if you do, heavy repercussions, outcast. This ability to explore the variety of selves, genders, non gender, in one lifetime, how gorgeous. Wouldn’t it be lovely if that adaptability was rewarded, fostered into flowering, a revolving door of multi colored light. As it is now, we are having a brand new conversation, a decriminalization. But it still is a crippling aspect for many who transition as the punishment is still severe in the growing up and realization process. The mutable sense of self is still enforced as a detriment and so it is turned into a place where the person breaks. If you don’t know who you are, something is terribly wrong.
I don’t agree. I’ve had my own sundering, a reckoning and the self that I thought I was and who I invested so much, suddenly disintegrated. The shock of that, set off a panic bomb that took almost a year to calm. When I saw that I had all this room in no longer being certain who I was, I felt the primal wisdom of not knowing. Now, I distrust the idea of “knowing” who I am. I would love to be able to pass this knowledge on to Namoli, or anyone who is struggling to feel a self. We all have our own journey with that understanding.
Namoli may be tired, but she is still touches hope. It’s in every one of her songs. The exhaustion one one side of the face and the light that touches the other. Always one and then the other. Namoli sings in her track, Heart Like That,
There ain’t no reason or rhyme, To the ways we find to keep trying, In the face of more than you signed up for, You pray for luck, Keep keeping up. Take all the best, And make up the rest, The times I’ve been on the edge, A light keeps pulling me back. And you know I’m glad, And you know I’m glad, And you know I’m glad, To have a heart like that.
This is the nature of refuge.
