My teenage daughter Leila makes fun of me because I often talk about “workshop” during our dinner conversations. “Does it have a bunch of tools and sawdust on the floor?” she teases. That would certainly make it easier to explain that we writers are makers. Poiesis, after all, comes from the ancient Greek word meaning “to make.”
Leila actually knows the space well, having come to work with me for years when I was homeschooling her, getting her work done in plenty of time to draw on the whiteboard in the conference room where I’ve held workshops for years. It’s a big table that’s really just a bunch of smaller tables pushed together.
That’s a good metaphor for describing what I might call the spiritual work of a workshop: to bring together a group of writers, all with their own backgrounds and styles and questions, into some new community, perhaps even a beloved community. In a polarized society where radical capitalist individualism reigns, a creative writing workshop can be an alternate site of being and being together. It’s been the gift of my teaching life to create and facilitate such alternative spaces through creative writing workshops—not only in universities, but also in high schools, summer camps, libraries, community spaces, and detention centers.