Jewish Community Center of Washington, DC

Writing as an Emotion and Therapeutic Process: A Poetry Workshop

Date:
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Time:
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Location:
Washington DCJCC
1529 16th Street NW
Washington, DC 20036

Poetry is emotion in language. Cultures throughout the world use poetry to share their histories, shape their stories, and express ideas in lyrical form.

In this workshop, we will look at our inner language and experience to explore writing from personal and cultural memory to further the participants’ own writing processes.

We will consider how Jewish poets have used poetry to explore traumatic and joyful experiences through which the reader can share in the writer’s subjective experience. Using writing prompts, participants will examine the construction of a poem as a means to contain — and often transform — events into an artistic object through which revelation can take place.

No previous poetry-writing experience required.


judith harris headshotJudith Harris is the author of Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press 2013), The Bad Secret (Louisiana State University Press, 2006), and Atonement (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), and the acclaimed critical book Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing (SUNY Press, 2003).  Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, The New York Times, The Forward, The Jewish Women’s Literary Review, Tikkun, The Washingtonian, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and the syndicated column American Life in Poetry, among many other anthologies and journals. Harris is a recipient of a Yaddo fellowship and arts grants from the D.C. Commission on the Arts. She has taught at several universities in the D.C. area and has been a resident seminar leader at Frost Place, and has presented her poetry at the Library of Congress and more recently at the American Association of Psychoanalysis.

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