William Fennie, H.W., M.

Current activity

William Fennie lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and serves as a trustee and member of the Executive Council of The Prosperos. He has developed a one-day seminar based on the Metonymy Translation method developed by Thane in the last years of his life. He has helped to organize several of the most  recent Assembly events, most notably an Assemlby / Retreat in Ojai, California, in 2005. Working with Hugh John Malanaphy, he has migrated The Prosperos website to a content managment system designed to serve both internal and external needs, including community-support functionality such as blogs and file sharing. His current interests lie with developing instructors, working with counselees, and helping to tap the diverse talents of Prosperos students to carry Thane's instruction into the 21st century.

History

William began his Prosperos studies in 1973, taking classes in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from Thane, Ben Gilberti, and Miriam Pope. He attended his first Prosperos Assembly in 1974, at Pipestem, West Virginia, where he first made the acquaintance of Tom Potter, and Ken Wauchope, students he would work with to edit The Prosperos Newsletter after moving to Southern California later that year. He worked with the Newsletter for about three years in addition to participating in study groups in the Santa Monica area. He was active in the Dynamics Arts Lab and studied voice with Marion Bell.

In 1978 he moved to Denver, Colorado, where he worked with numerous students in tandem with Anne Bollman, Ben Gilberti, David Weinman, and Pat Hartman (Zoe Robinson). William began his internship in Colorado, under the guidance of Zoe Robinson, including team-teaching, workshops, public events, visits by Thane, and individual counseling.

In 1985, William was invited to move to the Prosperos Curacy on Hawai'i Island to support Thane as the Curacy secretary. He continued his internship there with guidance from Jim Renza and Thane. In addition to secretarial support (correspondence, lesson development, etc.), responsibilities there included coordinating public events, individual counseling, and monitoring class tapes to make notes about anomalies or inconsistencies. He worked mostly with Konala Bradley, Richard Burns, and Paul Tanswell, as well as members of the Prosperos community from Hawai'i island, O'ahu, and elsewhere.

After Thane's passing in 1989, William stayed on in Kona writing arts reviews for West Hawaii Today and serving as Associate Editor of Space Calendar and Space Fax Daily. He left the islands in January 2000 to complete a degree in French language and literature at the University of Maryland, which included one-year of academic study in Nice, France. He found that The Prosperos' discipline of Translation, with its emphasis on symbol shifting using words, was excellent training for translating texts from French to English. He has a more-than-passing interest in semiotics.

In the early 1990s, William was invited to join the Board of Trustees of The Prosperos. He left the board in late 1997 after serving as the Chair of the Dean Search Committee which identified several candidates for the role of Dean. In 2005 he was again asked to serve as a trustee, and in 2009, after the election of Al Haferkamp as Dean, he was appointed to the Executive Council.

See William Fennie's contributions to The Teapot blog.