The reading is a collaboration between Community Access to the Arts, or CATA, which runs the writers’ workshop from which the work has emerged, and The Mount, the historic home of Edith Wharton. CATA Faculty Artist Janet Reich Elsbach runs the program, which is built to help writers with disabilities to express themselves with the assistance of a scribe.
“The structure of the workshop is that individual writers work with community volunteers who act as scribes," she explained to WAMC. "That mechanism, which kind of drives the whole class now, began as an accommodation for a writer who was nonverbal and used a letter board to communicate. And so, they traveled with a staff support person who was versed in their mode of communication and was able to capture their thoughts that way.”
Once the scribe system was expanded to every participant in the workshop, Reich Elsbach says the results were remarkable.
“Some people have very specific and beautiful handwriting, and they would get so laborious over a particular word that then the rest of the prompt kind of blew past them - Or I could cite any number of other examples of ways that the act of writing physically, maybe for someone who's visually impaired, obviously, isn't accessible, or for other people, it was slowing them down as a means of expression, and so kind of gradually, and then all of a sudden, we just had a scribe for every writer in the class, and we found that something really beautiful came out of that,” Reich Elsbach said.
She says the experience is often as revelatory for the scribe as for the writer they are assisting.
“When you're acting kind of as an extension of somebody else's creativity, in the [Artistic Realization Technologies] program as their paintbrush, or in the writing program as their scribe, you have to examine all the ways that you might be editing or correcting or just over-interpreting what somebody's trying to express, and it's a process to find a way to capture their thoughts where you are both present and absent,” Reich Elsbach told WAMC.
Reich Elsbach says the classes provide a vivid window into the lives of the writers, often capturing their perspectives on major events in the Berkshire community.
When a wildfire covered Southern Berkshire County in smoke and left hilltops blazing for weeks last fall, participants channeled their thoughts and feelings into the workshop.
“There was a lot of really deep reflection and passion that came from this feeling of the landscape that we live in and that we treasure here being under threat," said Reich Elsbach. "And it was such a vivid, visceral presence like, physically, in the classroom- The smoke was coming in the window, and it was true as sort of hard to remember now, but it was true for quite a long time. It went on for quite a while. So, we spent a lot of time interacting with the physical environment in that way, and using language as a way to capture some of the feelings that people had about it, and they came out as kind of prayers or offerings that the class put together for how the landscape around us could heal and be taken care of.”
Reich Elsbach, who has taught with CATA for years, says the writers’ workshop is a vibrant example of the non-profit’s efforts in the region.
“Because this is based on conversation, because the writing, comes out of making a connection between our CATA artists and the community at large, I think it's a really open, wide open doorway for people to come in and see that there's so much that unites us," she told WAMC. "There's so much common feeling and thought and thinking about things that it's very easy to locate yourself when you're reading or experiencing the words that come out of these classes.”
Program Director Kelly Galvin, who oversees the workshop series, shared a piece titled “I Know I Am Still Alive” by participant Kathy Martin that will be featured at the reading:
“My finger touches a pencil writing a poem
I feel good inside my heart
My heart is beating faster and slower
I feel comfortable
I know I am still alive”
CATA’s writers’ workshop reading event at the Mount is set for Tuesday at 5 p.m.
