What role can poetry and the imagination play in our daily lives? How can poetry—reading it, writing it, sharing it with others—help us know ourselves, each other, and our world more deeply? How can writing poems support our health and well-being, our recovery and our ability to survive and thrive in the face of HIV/AIDS? Since the very first meeting of ASC’s weekly Creative Writing Workshop in January 2000, these are the questions we ask—and discover new answers to—every time we meet.

We begin each workshop by discussing a poem by an established poet to get our own creative juices flowing. One week, for example, we tackled the subject of “survival” by looking at poems from Lucille Clifton’s The Book of Light, which explores the many manifestations of survival. Another time, we looked at New York poet Frank Lima’s poem “My Heart” and then created poetic self-portraits of our own hearts. While taking inspiration from great poets past and present, the poems written by the participants in the ASC writing workshop are very much their own. These unique writings are anthologized in a magazine called Situations, whose publication is celebrated with a special poet’s café and luncheon event.

For everyone who partakes in the ASC Creative Writing Workshops, picking up the pen to write is an act of personal power-taking—we take the risk of exploring and speaking our minds, of saying what is in our hearts, of working our way toward our own truths, insights, interests and dreams. This workshop is a place where participants join together to build community around a shared desire to contemplate, to create, to listen, and to be heard.

—Gerry Gomez Pearlberg
Workshop Facilitator

For more information about ASC's Creative Writing Workshop, please email Deborah Yuelles at deborah@ascnyc.org.