Hear your neighbors? most intimate thoughts ? for free ? at the Enoch Pratt Library?s Central Branch.
Reading memoirs, poems and short stories, six writers from Northwest Baltimore Career Center will share their works led by poet and Maryland Institute College of Art teacher Jennifer Wallace at 6:30 p.m. on Tuesday at the Cathedral Street location.
Readers include writing-workshop students who meet weekly to critique each others? works and discuss writing techniques.
Lucy Bucknell, one of Northwest?s instructors, believes the reading session offers pure entertainment as well as a glimpse into the lives of neighbors, she said. “[People can] come to really find out what?s going on in their community and who else lives there.”
The workshop grew out of a writing program Bucknell led for former prisoners re-entering society, she said.
“My initial idea was to create a safe space for people to share stories, express themselves and experiment with writing,” Bucknell said. “[The group] has grown … increasingly less therapeutic and more about writing, but it serves both purposes.”
Some former prisoners still attend group meetings.
Workshopper Geraldine Wright-Bey relies on the workshop to learn how to turn vivid memories of the South into breathing-on-the-page characters, she said.
Fellow workshopper and nurse, Irene Trueheart joined the group one year ago, she said. “If [people] listen to some of the readings, they?ll hear simple people who have the heart to write where they?ve been.”
