As promised, the members of our writing workshop, Finding Your Voice (Laura Staley, Maribel Cardez, Yvonne Jones, Tom Dietzler, and yours truly) were joined by the venerable Dennis Pitocco last week. We all tried (but not too hard) to explain or to describe the magic we’ve discovered with and through each other — the trust, the vulnerability, the sincere sharing of truths and emotions, the creativity, the joy, and the laughter. We didn’t do very well.
All of us acknowledged that our sessions have, indeed, been enabled, in part, by our individual senses of agency. We’ve achieved what we continue to achieve by the comfort we feel in our respective skins and with each other, by the ways in which that comfort enables us to listen, to suspend judgment, to love even as we’re listening, to love because we’re listening.
In the end, the hour we spent trying to explain all that to Dennis left me thinking of what Louis Armstrong said when he was asked, “What is jazz?”
Louis is reputed to have said, “If you don’t know, I can’t tell you.”
