About

Connect with Cameron for speaking events, poetry readings, collaborations.

Vocem Redisuum
Latin for : “By returning to the voice”

By returning to the voice, I discover what has lain in wait for this moment of my returning.

By returning to the voice, I find truth incubating in dark spaces long rejected, poisoned places of stagnation, either to be released or turned further inward to madness.

By returning to the voice, I uncover unformed substances that when invoked, flow out on waves creating word after word lapping the unexplored parched shores at my edges.

By returning to the voice, I breathe and in breathing, the life that is inspirited, is mine.

Cameron Altaras has a passion to explore truth in the intersections of self, art, philosophy and religion.

She studied theatre as an undergrad (B.A., Goshen College) and then acted, directed and produced theatre and video individually and in collaboration with other artists, while leading monthly Philosophers' Cafes on the side. But after grad school (M.A. in Theology, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto School of Theology; PhD in Religion, University of Toronto), having fallen under the dark shadow of the patriarchal world in which she lived, Cameron abandoned all that was instinctual to her.

She swallowed her voice and complied with the thought pattern that there are more important (read: practical and substantial) things in life which override following the passion of one’s heart and living one’s deep life. More difficult for her than being held to a regimen determined by an alarm clock and the meetings on her calendar, was being restricted to the mundane corporate rhetoric as determined by another. For many years, she neglected her own words and laid aside her own voice. That era is now done.

In mid-life and in the middle of those long nights which offered not a modicum of restful sleep, the illegible utterances of her anxieties tugged at her, begging to be unleashed. Hers was a visceral understanding of the following from Clarissa Pinkola Estés:

“There is a time in our lives, usually in mid-life, when a woman has to make a decision – possibly the most important psychic decision of her future life – and that is, whether to be bitter or not. […] But if a woman will return to the instinctual nature instead of sinking in to bitterness, she will be revivified, reborn.”[1]

This website of audio collage,, performed and written poetry and prose, stands at the threshold between bitterness which smothers and unleashing that which seeks to be revivified and reborn.

[1] Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Random House, 1992, 1995): 394-395.