Writers tend to gather for two very different purposes.

In college, I was forced to sit silently for at least 30 minutes in a fiction-writing course as class members discussed, criticized and questioned something I’d written. This was an admittedly painful learning strategy on the professor’s part, an exercise in resisting one’s immediate urge to self defend. After that amount of time, you begin, hopefully, to listen.

Karen Morris’ Poetry First Sundays, monthly workshops that take place at Forage Art Space and Gallery once a month, are of the other variety. No criticism or picking apart, just a group of people hearing written works contextualized for today’s reality. Other workshops have centered on topics such as healthcare. At one reading, everyone voiced a different section of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”

 Morris, a local poet and psychoanalyst, said she got the idea for the events when she realized that there was a need for connection among people who were serious about discussing writing and the world. Typical open mics tend to be self interested, she said. “I noticed that people want to hear their own poem, and then kind of, be gone.”

At the December workshop, about 15 people came to the art space at the end of Narrowsburg’s Main Street to talk about the #MeToo movement and the Senate judiciary hearings on Brett Kavanaugh. The workshop, called “Finding the poetic movement in these challenging times” opened with Matt Carpenter, of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, reading a particularly uncomfortable short story called “The Catch,” by Sarah Yuster.

Other writers read poems and works of prose on political issues and the effects of military sexual trauma. After everyone had read, attendees discussed the writing and shared a general unease and sense of fear about the state of the world. It’s a place where people feel safe, Morris said, and often “chew on difficult things.”

“Whenever I speak, or another gender speaks… we understand what words are, but we don’t understand what one another’s experiences are, and that’s what makes us so mad and crazy,” Morris said. At the workshop that Sunday, men read sensitive pieces written by women, allowing them to embody their experiences. “I planned for that,” Morris said, adding that everyone can understand the feeling of being victimized, but rarely acknowledge when we’ve been the perpetrator of hurt. “I thought it was really important—one way of getting underneath this power differential.”

When writers meet, for Yarnslingers or writing groups at the Ethel B. Crawford Library, for instance, we are forced to listen to one another—to self-reflect and critique, not just our work, but also ourselves.

After WJFF aired Carpenter’s reading, Yuster wrote to Morris. “Karen, I’m shaky from having just listened to Matt’s reading of ‘The Catch.’ He created a magnificent, nuanced narration, I’d never have been able to procure.”

Critique, for a writer, is inevitable. And necessary—see my admission to a recent blunder on page two of today’s paper—but can also come in the form of learning to better understand each other, and to more responsibly engage with the world we all live in. As Maria Popova writes in an essay on the website BrainPickings, “Every successful act of engaging with the world guarantees that the world will engage back.”

The upcoming poetry workshop will be themed “Blue Valentine.” Interested writers or listeners can get information about Poetry First Sundays by emailing Morris at klmplex108@gmail.com.