Catherine C – PEN Organization 2/6/10

For our third visit, we arranged to visit the PEN center and help set up for a workshop they were organizing. I wasn’t really sure what to expect we were going to do when we arrived, but we had the chance to do way more than I expected. We set up for the workshop by setting out some notebooks, and then once everyone arrived, we started the workshop. It was basically a meeting with two writers in New York (one of them a famous playwright), two women that worked at PEN (Stacy and Lynn, both very friendly, nice, well-read people), a student a little bit older than I, who said she loved writing slam poetry, and, of course, Danica and I. We started the workshop by discussing the books we were reading at the moment. I felt sort of embarrassed saying I was reading a book called Happyface, when everybody else was reading books like Wuthering Heights, or translations of Chinese books of poetry. The playwright, John, talked a lot about his life as a writer. He mentioned working with actor Lyn Manuel for a few of his plays, whose name, surprisingly, I knew. He had a lot to say about his theory about writing, so for about half the time we listened to what he had to say, and then he had to leave and it was just us girls. We had a nice time.