MEMBERS of the P’nai Or Writing Group pore over manuscripts.
P’nai Or writers come together to learn, create
By Polina Olsen
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They started by reading the Parsha of Balak, then got out their notebooks and pens. This month, the P’nai Or Writing Group met at Lyssa Anolik’s light-filled Hillsdale home, around the wooden dining-room table and glasses of passion-flavored iced tea.
Harriet Cooke, a Portland physician who specializes in Energy Medicine, formed the group after attending a Write Around Portland retreat. This Portland organization, writearound.org, offers no-charge writing workshops to people who may not usually write, such as domestic violence victims, prisoners and low-income seniors. Cooke trained as a facilitator and then decided to create a writing group inspired by Torah and Jewish life-cycle events.
“One could argue that every time you choose to write from a deep place it’s related to our spirituality,” she said. “In this group, it’s related to our spirituality along with our Jewish identity.”
Now in its fifth month, the P’nai Or Writing Group’s monthly meetings are flexible but follow a general order, often beginning with quiet meditation. Then stream-of-conscious writing based on the month’s topic or prompt lasts 10-15 minutes followed by each person reading his or her work and hearing what everyone liked about it.
Participants suggest the prompts, either during or before the meeting. This month’s prompt was The Refugee. Cooke thought of it while hearing an Iraqi speaker and reading the week’s Parsha. Past topics have included “I Come From,” “My Mitzrayim,” and “Torah Is.”
The five women were silent as they wrote down their thoughts. Then the writing period stopped, and Harriet read her work aloud: “Reading week after week the same story, wandering. I look around the world and see this story played over and over like a broken record, and I wonder will we ever find our place in this world?”
“Wandering, seeking refuge,” Susan Newman read when her turn came around. “Since I was in high school, I knew I wanted to get out of Texas.” Newman wrote about leaving home for Brandeis University and feeling like a stranger there. “Most of the students were from the East Coast and extremely articulate. So I found a community in the international student population. I too, being from Texas, was a foreigner.”
“It reads like fiction which good memoirs should,” one woman commented.
“The voice was so friendly,” said another.
“The process of writing in a group fascinates me,” one woman remarked. “It’s almost like we’re reading each other’s minds.”
“Writing like this is a way of going into what wants to be expressed and hasn’t found a place,” Newman explained. “I’ve been struggling with cancer, and I’m doing OK but it’s like a process because it’s there and there’s no way of getting rid of it. Well, the writing is helpful for me.”
“We write stream-of-conscious to tap into the subconscious,” Lyssa Anolik added. She teaches creative writing at the Multnomah Arts Center and, like Cooke, is a facilitator for Write Around Portland. “The writing doesn’t have to be good—just spill onto the page. The objective is to explore our relationship to Judaism through the written creative process.”
