First few workshops

Chen and I have gone in three times, and each time has been very different.

The second week we read and worked with a Pablo Neruda poem called "No Hay Olvido (There is No Oblivion)." The poem negotiates a space between the concrete and the abstract and is very intense in tone-- one woman was resistant to this, but the general response to it was incredible.

To respond to what Molly was saying about sensitivity and being "on" as a facilitator: I was really affected emotionally by what the women were seeing in the poem-- moving through the poem, instead of on top of it, to get somewhere-- their interpretations spoke to an amount of life experience that is inconceivable for most of us. One strand of the conversation, about a woman's associations with "broken things" (she shared traumatic memories), was absorbed into the general discussion-- not ignored, but brought back into the fold. This was all the doing of the other women in the workshop.

There wasn't really a way to directly address this woman's responses to the poem, because my instinctive response to someone's having shared something like that wouldn't have been appropriate to the environment... I think she didn't even want to shift the focus to herself. She said it as though it wasn't even real to her. I'm still working through my thoughts about this-- it came and went and then I got my driver's license back from the C.O. and got in the car and went back to my house? As more time passes I get more of a sense that I hope the workshop can be a place for women to encounter and work through personal questions in materials outside of themselves-- to constitute themselves-- to even conceive of themselves in a way that the simple fact of being in prison does not (I say this knowing I have no idea what that effacement of identity might be like). Is that even valid?

Is it self-indulgent to be horrified, want to vomit? Is the question also: is it self-indulgent for me to give my own emotions range and space when, as Molly put it, the world in all its multiplicity does not even exist in the prison? What's been strange to me is that there is rarely a specific thing that affects me-- it is something in general. I'm not sure what it is.

Last workshop was strange. The women were very shifty, things were happening all over the place, there wasn't much positive response to the workshop content. Maybe we should do more at the beginning of the workshop to bring everyone into the same space? Or should we, if no one seems to be into it, adapt the workshop to that? How?

Sometimes, women leave the room and come back with writing/drawing they've done and show it to us. I appreciate their wanting to share their work with us but it really disrupts the space of the workshop. This mostly happens right at the beginning or toward the end when we're wrapping up... we are thinking in the future of discouraging this. Things get chaotic. Has anyone else had this experience?