Top: Interruptions Founder Dr. Rev. Odell Montgomery Cooper. Bottom: Attendees at the event. Lucy Gellman Photos.
When Valerie Tanner got the call that her 22-year-old son, Kaymar, had been shot and killed on Newhall Street, her world stopped. It was the middle of July, just before sundown in New Haven. She was at a niece’s birthday party, surrounded by the joyful noise of someone making another trip around the sun. And at 6:26 p.m., when she picked up the phone, her life was cleaved into two halves.
She tried multiple forms of therapy, from online counseling to E.M.D.R. She prayed. She wondered if she would ever feel able to move forward. Then she walked into a house of worship, and found a mentorship program designed around addressing, discussing, and destigmatizing trauma.
She didn’t know it then, but it would become her “road to new beginnings.”
Tanner, who lost her son in July 2020, brought that testimony to Fair Haven Wednesday night, as Interruptions: Disrupting The Silence celebrated five years of growth, exploration, and trauma-informed healing on the second floor of CitySeed’s 162 James St. headquarters. Launched by Dr. Rev. Odell Montgomery Cooper in 2020, the program now consists of a performance, podcast, book, audiobook, and eight-week peer-to-peer mentorship program meant to remove some of the social and cultural stigma that surrounds talking about trauma.
Rev. Dr. Kelcy G.L. Steele and Valerie Tanner.
It is anchored by Cooper’s own devastating interruptions: the sudden loss of her 25-year-old son, Jonathan, to gun violence in 2016, and the physical, mental and emotional toll of a brain aneurysm a year later, on what would have been his 26th birthday. Nine years into her own healing journey, Interruptions is opening up the dialogue about trauma—and the silences that can make it deadly—one discussion at a time.
In part, that includes a new move to nonprofit status, as well as a second book, Letters To My Son, and sets of discussion cards for both young people and adults. More on that below.
“This has been a journey of understanding my faith, my culture, and mental health,” Cooper said in an interview on WNHH Community Radio before the event. “And stories that have shaped who I am. Addressing them and dismantling those stories, so that I can be better and I can heal.”
While Interruptions launched publicly in 2020, the project was born in 2018, after Cooper and arts educator and administrator John Berryman crossed paths at a fundraiser for now-Mayor Justin Elicker. Cooper has known Berryman, who is the founder and director of the Heritage Chorale of New Haven, for years. Her kids sang under his direction when they were younger, and belonged to a choir at Varick AME Zion Church. So maybe it wasn’t meant to be strange when he asked her how she was doing.
Emcee Deborah Smith-McAuley shows attendees how to give themselves a tight hug.
But Cooper, who was still recovering from her aneurysm, didn’t know what to say. In the span of two years, she had faced unimaginable loss. She and her daughter, Jackie, had struggled to cope with the weight of their grief and their ability to extend each other grace. She had left her job as the culinary arts director at ConnCAT. She was mentally exhausted, and spiritually drained.
“I’m reinventing myself,” she told him. It was what a therapist had suggested saying. And Berryman, listening closely to the absences between those words, asked her to say more.
The “more,” it turned out, was a lot more. Cooper, with the help of Berryman and the writer Ina Anderson, took a deep dive into storytelling meant to bust through stigma. She released a stage play (Covid-19 pushed it online in 2020), then a podcast the same year. She penned an entire book that told her story from childhood through her present. She kept thinking about how to spread the mission—how to interrupt the thick, dangerous silences that so often hung around grief.
“In my culture, we don’t talk about trauma,” Cooper said. “We’re not taught trauma as a language. We’re not taught the behaviors, especially in the faith community. We’re taught to pray it away. [People say:] ‘Have faith. If it’s happening to you, it’s God’s will. Pray more.’ … And I pushed back because none of those languages or behaviors were helping me to heal.”
In 2021, Cooper received five years of funding from Clifford Beers Community Care Center to expand the program. She enlisted faith leaders and trained facilitators for “Let’s Talk,” an eight-week, facilitated peer-to-peer program in which participants learn to speak openly about their trauma, their grief, and their road to healing. She built roundtables on generational trauma, working with groups like the Connecticut Violence Intervention Program (CT VIP). She kept visioning.
At first, “I didn’t know what this was,” she said Wednesday, glowing in a sleeveless emerald green sweater. “Then the spirit said to me, ‘You have a healing ministry.’”
It was so successful that it brought her to the Vatican in October 2023, to speak about Interruptions’ work and the role that faith communities can play in acknowledging trauma, rather than telling their parishioners to pray their grief away. She returned a year later in 2024, channeling a love for travel and for faith that she also writes about in her first book.
She realized that Interruptions, birthed out of a single question, was now a movement.
Top: “I think that when the next book on trauma and psychology is written, there will be a whole chapter on Reverend O,” said Rev. Dr. Frederick “Jerry” Streets. Bottom: Rev. Bonita Grubbs (in green), who for years led Christian Community Action, embraces herself.
For longtime facilitators like the Rev. Dr. Frederick “Jerry” Streets, who helped Cooper build out “Let’s Talk” and is one of her most trusted collaborators, it was and continues to be a revolutionary approach. Streets, a licensed clinical social worker and professor at the Yale Divinity School, for years served as the senior pastor at Dixwell United Congregational Church of Christ (Dixwell UCC). In both that ministry and his work in refugee trauma, he has seen firsthand the need for mental healthcare and wellness practices alongside faith.
Wednesday, he placed Cooper’s approach right alongside those of Sigmund Freud, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, the latter of whom opened a clinic bringing mental healthcare to Harlem in the early 1940s. “I think that when the next book on trauma and psychology is written, there will be a whole chapter on Reverend O,” he said to thunderous applause.
Around the room and at the mic Wednesday, several storytellers testified to the sheer power of the program, which both provides a safe, facilitated space to talk about one’s foundational trauma or traumas, and offers a multi-pronged approach to healing. Beneath strings of twinkling lights, attendees listened as participants spoke candidly about the Interruptions in their own lives, and the ways that the program has helped them acknowledge, articulate and address their own trauma.
Aysia Reese and Cher Balckom. Reese, who is now a development coordinator for Leadership, Education, Athletics In Partnership (LEAP), spoke about how deeply Interruptions has helped her realize that “healing isn’t linear.”
Cher Balckom, a devoted member of United Church on the Green, was one of those voices. When she joined Interruptions through its “Let’s Talk” program, she was initially sheepish and tentative, because she was one of two white women in her cohort, and acutely aware of the privilege she brought to the group.
“I was convinced others in the group would have more important stories to tell,” she said. Privately, she did have her own story, of an abusive partner and a marriage she ultimately chose to leave.
The other participants, however, rejected that notion (Cooper is particularly allergic to the idea that there is a hierarchy of suffering; “trauma is trauma and pain is pain,” she said Wednesday) So when Balckom began telling her own story several weeks in, it became an opening—not for her to compare trauma with the other women in her group, but to begin to heal.
“I was blown away by the resilience and the honesty and the faithfulness of other women in the group,” she said. What started as an anecdote over a small argument she’d had with her husband—over peanut butter, no less, she said—bloomed into a realization that her trauma ran deep. Ultimately, their care for her and openness to listening was as meaningful as the program itself.
That resonated for Tanner, who lost her son, Kaymar, five years ago this past July. Growing up, Kaymar was a sweet and funny kid, a gifted basketball player who loved his friends. Like far too many young people in New Haven, his own first interruptions came early, when his friend, 16-year-old Jericho Scott, was ripped away by gun violence in 2015.
“It left a hole in his heart,” Tanner told the New Haven Independent in 2020. Five years and three months after Scott died, Kaymar —or Kay, as his mother said sweetly Wednesday—became a victim of the same senseless violence that had killed his friend.
Like Scott’s passing, his death showed how a bullet can devastate an entire community: friends, family members, classmates, and neighbors remain traumatized by it to this day. Their grief will never go away, it just changes shape.
Back in the present, Tanner remembered how impossible it felt to go on in the first days, weeks, and months that followed Kay’s murder. Before 6:26 p.m. that night, her life had a smooth rhythm to it. She had a job with DCF serving families that she loved, and she believed deeply in the work. She had a vibrant schedule filled with children and grandchildren on whom she doted. She made time for her nieces, like the one whose birthday she was celebrating that day.
Sculptures from the artist Susan Clinard, who donated the pieces, were part of the event's silent auction.
Then her phone rang and the voice on the other end told her that Kaymar was gone. By 6:27 that night, her whole world was in pieces. “One call can change your life,” she said Wednesday.
When she found Interruptions years later, it took her two cycles of “Let’s Talk” to address her trauma. During the first, she remembered, she missed two sessions, and felt too behind to continue. She promised herself that if the program was offered again, she would pursue it. The result changed her life.
“I am here to tell you that I am on my road to new beginnings,” she said Wednesday, beaming. In large part, that includes a place where she’s able to openly express her emotions, free of guilt or judgement. No one tells her to pray harder. No one tells her it was part of God’s plan. They just listen.
That’s part of the hope as Interruptions continues to blossom, Cooper said. While “Let’s Talk” sessions currently unfold in churches, facilitators talk about faith alongside options like therapy, breathwork, and psychiatric support. Even Wednesday, emcee Deborah (Debbie) Stanley-McAuley tapped into that approach, leading an inhale-to-exhale exercise between storytellers, then showing attendees how to give themselves a hug.
Faith leaders, meanwhile, have also seen the power of the program in action. Rev. Kelcey Steele, who leads Varick Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church in Dixwell, said it has been transformative for his congregation. On any given week, he knows that his congregants are grappling with a host of issues, from gun violence to unemployment, homelessness, food insecurity and substance use disorder.
Cooper (center) with her cousins Dr. Kim Harrell and Gloria Gladney, who flew in for the event.
“It has really helped our congregation process trauma because it provides a safe place [to talk],” he said. “We’re still trying to discern, ‘Where is the faith community and what is our role?’”
Or in the words of Dr. Janet Brown-Clayton, a reverend and church elder at St. Matthew’s Union Free Will Baptist Church who became a facilitator when she was grieving the sudden death of her brother, Chuckey Brown, “it allowed me to kick church stigma in the butt.” St. Matthew’s has offered the program four times since 2022.
Now, Interruptions is also looking ahead to the next five years (and 10 years, and 15 years, and so forth). This year, Cooper plans to release a second book, titled Letters To My Son and addressed to Jonathan, whose spirit remains with her in everything she does. Each chapter documents a different part of her mental health journey and her work building out Interruptions.
She also has finished two sets of “Let’s Talk”-themed discussion cards, decks of which were on every table Wednesday night (“it took me sitting and waiting and listening with God” to finish them, she said). She credited Don McAuley, who gathered 12 men in his backyard, for helping bring more voices into the questions and statements that informed them.
She is also starting a nonprofit, The Interruptions Project, Inc. to continue and sustain the work (prior to this time, Interruptions was a fiscally sponsored project of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven). As it launches, her board includes longtime champions Angel Perry-Smith, Natasha Noel, Marcel Brown, Richard Pierce, Cathay Patton, Stephanie Smith, Stanley-McAuley and Streets.
Some, like Perry-Smith, have been close with Cooper for decades, and helped pull her through some of her darkest days. Others, like Streets, have helped shape and expand “Let’s Talk” since its pilot stages in 2021. Together, Cooper said, they see the work as an expansion of that “healing ministry” she now considers her mission and her duty.
“We create sacred, trauma-informed spaces where communities can explore and reframe mental health through spiritual care, education, and culturally grounded practices,” the organization’s mission statement reads.
That feels particularly urgent right now, Cooper added before closing out the night with a prayer from Rev. Philippe Andal, whose Newhallville sanctuary, Community Baptist Church, has become one of the sites for “Let’s Talk.”
When she looks around her, she sees young people, parents, and elders struggling with mental health (“They’re not okay,” she said gently). She sees an epidemic of gun violence that is out of control. She sees children and families, her immigrant brothers and sisters, who are afraid of being snatched up off the streets on the way to school and work.
To that, Cooper suggested, there’s another way forward. As attendees linked hands and closed their eyes, Andal lifted his voice to the rafters, sending a prayer skyward. Beside him, Cooper reached out, extended an open palm, and bowed her head as well.
“Let us see,” he said in prayer, “That in those interruptions, there is also great possibility.”