Two weeks ago I taught a creative writing workshop, helping writers to free up and get the words on the page. And then they read them...each original voice comes through so clearly when we drop past trying into something unsaid.
The last time I taught this workshop was in 2003, at the Unitarian Church at Hastings on Hudson. We sat in the same sized circle. The writers at the UU were mostly over 50, here in Toronto under 35. But it's the same, really, the need to hear and be heard. We read and write to connect, to be taken outside the constructs of normal life into a vision of a world, or sometimes just a room, with a bed, with the sound of a toilet flushing coming through the wall as you lie, back turned to the lover who has hurt you in ways you couldn't have imagined.
That miracle of connection.
And so I am inspired to return to teaching writing, and to the path of empathy into lives I haven't lived.