Write Around Portland Staff’s Statement on the Crisis in Palestine
At Write Around Portland, we believe in the dignity of all people and that writing is a powerful tool for individual and societal change and healing. Our organization uses storytelling and listening to create a more just and humane society. Through creative writing in community settings, we recognize and honor our common humanity.
To truly understand one’s own history, community, and impact on others, we believe that everyone needs to encounter stories that are different from their own. While we aren’t experts in global issues, we, as a staff, do find ourselves deeply overwhelmed by the scale of violence and displacement in Palestine and the lives and stories being lost as a result.
As the suffering and loss grows more unimaginable every day, a tension exists in each of us. We feel it in our bodies through fatigue, tightness, nausea, and tears. We feel the swirling in our minds: images, anxieties, and fixations. We vacillate between urgency to numbness, feeling the dissonance between the scale of what is happening and the responsibility of our daily lives. How do we hold it all? How do we keep our humanity intact, bear witness, process our feelings, and act, while also tending to our responsibilities and needs? We feel compelled by our common humanity to do everything we can…and it’s not always clear what that is.
This crisis affirms our team’s dedication to our mission: to change lives through the power of writing. We continue to bring communities together to write, reflect, share, decompress, and listen to each other. We continue in our ardent belief that encountering stories different from your own can have profound effects for healing and liberation.
As individuals, we’re reading works by writers who are impacted; following Gaza-based reporters on social media; learning from our friends and community members; and participating in letter-writing campaigns, fundraisers, and direct actions. We encourage you to seek out your own resources for learning and self-care.
Writing offers moments to explore our own values, to reflect on actions we can take, and when done in community and shared, to hear one another’s stories as well. We encourage you to take time to sit with and reflect on what is happening in Palestine. We offer these prompts as a way to get started. Set a timer for 5 minutes and see what shows up on the page. Share it with someone if you feel so moved:
- Things we’ve lost…
- I’ve been thinking…
- On the other side of the world…
- I am hopeful for…