Carolyn Forché: The Power of the Empathetic Imagination

Led by Evan Oakley and Veronica Patterson: 2nd event of the Carolyn Forché Symposium
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You will have a chance to engage the attentive, open and compelling Carolyn Forché through her memoir of her time in El Salvador, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (1993). This is the powerful story of a poet's experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time. Her memoir portrays her time in El Salvador, which began with a knock on the door. She captures that time in the memoir and in poems from The Country Between Us (1982). Her work bridges the political, the social, and the poetic. In the workshop, we’ll write twice, as we look at a poem of Carolyn’s and a poem from the Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. (1993).

“You are a witness— but how can you approach that witnessing? 
                                  Who has knocked on your outer or inner door?”