.Facilitating Youth Workshop.

I am going to Washington DC in a couple of weeks to facilitate a writing-workshop with South Asian youth. I do not have a whole lot of time for the workshop-- only 75 minutes. Now, it's hard to do anything remarkable during that time. What can be done though, is to open a door or two, and then hope that the young people in the workshop will pick it up. There is no substitution for long-term work, and none of the fruits of a long-term project can be attained during a 75 minute workshop. So far, I have thought of centering the workshop on food.

In my experience, most young people in USA do not necessarily think of food as something political. Some brighter ones might think about it as cultural, but rarely have I met with kiddos who think of food as political. Consequently, they do not have the knee-jerk reaction to it in the same way they have to something like race or class, which they have always associated with politics. These young people I will be workshopping with, are more socially conscious. A lot of them are already involved with community projects. So, I do not think apolitics is going to be an issue. What is going to be an issue though, is to restrict myself. As a workshop facilitator, I need to have clear sense of goals. A 75 min workshop cannot be both a seminar on food-justice issues and a writing workshop. For that to happen, we need at least a month of regular meetings. So, I am trying to remind myself, this is primarily a writing workshop. And I am not someone who is "cool" in that edgy kind of a way. When I talk about writing, I talk about in a very old-style way. Why? Because I think, the book, the printed page and the very act of physical writing can (still) give us things which other art/media forms cannot. So, one of the things I will try to do is to, encourage the young people I will meet to be more cognizant of the form "book" as a whole--not an e-book or a kindle. But an actual paper book which one can grab between one's fingers. I will update more on this workshop as I go along! But I am EXCITED!