Since I told you all (or is it just Wendy? :P) about that workshop-y dilemma, I feel I should fill you in on what happened during the workshop... so here's parts of an update i send everyone at work about possibly the msot powerful workshop I have facilitated!

As many of you know, I am currently doing a pilot of a “Creative Writing for Personal and Social Change” module with a group of 11^th std. students. It’s basically a workshop where we use the lens of creative writing to explore some of the same issues that we tackle in FMTW (Self-exploration, identities and stereotypes, verbal and non verbal communication, etc.). There are also some specific sessions on “Point of view” (examining how stories change depending on whose point of view they are told from) as well as a short one on politics of language (using a short memo from Nazi Germany to look at how language can be used to dehumanize).

This Monday, we were supposed to do characters and identities… but after Saturday’s blasts, I felt unable to just go on as normal, pretending that nothing had changed in the interval between the two workshops. So I pushed identities back by a day and did “Point of view” and “Building empathy” on Monday. Over the weekend, I was able to find several powerful write-ups: an HT Sunday editorial called “Please, let me be moved” (talking about how the author cannot fully comprehend a tragedy like the Bihar floods unless it is scaled down to individual experiences), an Indian Express story about the blasts that was starting to tell the stories of some of the individuals who were affected, some really powerful poetry written after September 11, and a letter that the parents of one Sept 11 victim sent to the media about how they didn’t want the USA to respond with more violence and inhumanity.

We started the session by writing “letters to the universe,” drawing upon a personal experience of loss, and helping the universe to heal. The sharing was very intense—some cried, some were silent, and some spoke powerfully about the death of a sibling, a pet’s death, losing a friend, parents getting divorced. We then used all this material to talk about loss in the context of the Delhi blasts, the Bihar floods, and the violence in Orissa… making the connection that, if this (their writing) is what one loss feels like, what do the tragedies mean now?

Before the workshop began, I was a little nervous about the design… it was put together just on Sunday, and I wasn’t sure how the kids would respond to a sudden change in syllabus (they had all brought stories from the previous day and we were supposed to work on those). But I needn’t have worried. Clearly, they wanted to talk about what had happened… many expressed fear or insecurity, one girl talked about her experience of the chaos in CP (she was there when the blasts happened), and many others talked about friends/ family who were supposed to be there at the time but cancelled for some reason. Quickly, that conversation led to a questioning of what the experience must have been like for those who were there… and for the people who knew them (the Sept. 11 poems—especially one called “first writing since” helped make the emotional experience more immediate). One boy talked about how he also wanted to know what the experience must be like for the bombers; he wanted to know their stories and their reasons for doing something like this. We had an incredible conversation about how “it’s hard to hate someone when you know their story,” and the kids are now going to write about human stories behind violence and loss (and that boy is writing from the perspective of the bombers!). They are basically going to respond to the editorial “Please, let me be moved” with a series of essays/ stories/ poems called “Please, sir, be moved.” At the end of Monday’s workshop, the children thanked me in a way that they never had before… I realized, then, how important that particular workshop had been for them as well as for me.

I guess the main reason I came away so moved was that I realized adolescent need to talk about these issues; in general, they seemed to want to talk about them… but they didn’t have the space to do so in school. I realized just how powerful the simple question “What is the human story behind the statistics?” was for them, and how it was already something at the back of their mind somewhere… they just needed someone to ask it and give them a few examples to start thinking about it collectively. I guess it made the work we do so much more meaningful for me personally.

So, all in all, the experiment worked!