Attending my first Workshop

Ruby and I attended the sisters of the road workshop this week. It is part of the 10 free workshops Write Around Portland is providing to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. We showed up during the 10 minute break, and apparently two other participants had to leave, so there were just enough seats for us to fill.

Being part of this workshop was a lot of fun to me. I felt completely comfortable writing alongside a group of others and sharing my work, especially after one of the paricipants shared his work. Our first exercise was to pick an object or two from a bunch of objects that were emptied onto the table to write about. We could write about anything but we had to write for at least 8 minutes.

One man wrote about a slinky, someone else about a piece of bark, another person about a comb. I wrote about a door key and focused on its shape. Having the added experience of participating in the writing workshop of my poetry class at LC, i found this experience particularly rewarding because I could feel how incredibly different it is to write in an academic setting verses a community setting. First of all, the participants ranged the board from people around my age to women and men in their 40's and 50's. Second of all, I felt no pressure in this environment, it felt like a purely imaginative generative meeting where I was allowing my brain to spit out whatever images come. Additionally, everyone was required to give positive feedback. I found myself looking for the good in poems and lines, and it felt very uplifting to be part of an experience where the goal isn't to produce magnificent poetry but merely to get a start and to share it with others. It made me remember that poetry affects people, especially when real people are there reading it, without the distance that a piece of paper published in a book creates.

Sometimes in academic settings, the pressure to be exceptional kills that initial creativity. I think the workshops are structured in a way to make sharing and creating as easy as possible, by providing lots of encouragement and many sources for inspiration. Our facilitator also shared a poem with us to use as a starting point for a poem of another free-write.

We spent every last minute of the workshop writing and responding to eachother's writing. I was so happy to get to experience the workshop, it makes me that much happier to be volunteering for this great organization.