Following the horrendous Hamas attack on southern Israel, on October 7, in which 1,400 people, most of them civilians, were murdered and well over 200 kidnapped, the workshop we had planned for October 18th was postponed. But our intrepid workshops coordinator, Elana Dorfman, and anthology editor, Dina Yehuda, decided to run instead, on the same date, a “therapeutic” Zoom workshop where people could come together to voice their feelings.
Nineteen people attended and many said how helpful it was just to meet together and express what they were all going through. The workshop tried to point people to the positive: after listing all the feelings they had about the tragedy, participants were asked to list just positive emotions such as hope or joy, and, in the exercise, to write a poem focused on one of them. Some remarkable first drafts of poems resulted.
As usual for Zoom workshops, we produced an e-chapbook of the edited versions of poems written or started at the workshop.
Below are a few screenshots to give a feel of the Zoom event.
Voices Israel Group of Poets in English 