RPL Creative Writing Specialist Frames Writing as Witness in HDS Workshop Series

During the spring 2025 semester, poet Raisa Tolchinsky, MRPL ‘24 and RPL creative writing specialist, will run a series of three HDS community writing workshops titled “Writing as Witness.” Natalie Cherie Campbell, MTS ‘18, spoke with Raisa about the inspiration for the series and the implications of framing writing as a form of witness.

Natalie Cherie Campbell: How did you decide on “Writing as Witness” as the framework for your workshop series?

Raisa Tolchinsky: For me, writing is a form of calling myself deeply into presence with someone, or an emotion, or a space. I think that the word “witness” can be overused and diluted, which is one reason I named these workshops “Writing as Witness.” I want to interrogate what witness is.

I'm curious about the ways that writing is a deeply practical tool for understanding ourselves, what we feel, and what we don’t yet know. There are three areas that I feel get overlooked when it comes to witnessing–dreaming, remembering, and researching.

NCC: What are your initial thoughts so far on how dreaming connects to writing and witness?

RT: My session on dreaming was inspired by a novelist named Lauren Acampora, who says, “The best art carries this sense of inevitability, of allegory, myth, dream–a truth that has always been there, that we already know in some deep part of ourselves.” Her words made me wonder how writing functions like a dream. Like dreaming, writing can reveal symbols or pathways to us that we didn’t realize were there. Like dreaming, writing can help us process things in our lives that are sometimes so big we don't know how to wrap our minds (and hands) around them.

NCC: What are your initial thoughts so far on how remembering connects to writing and witness?

RT: Something that happens to people while writing is that they’ll remember something that they didn’t realize they’d forgotten or didn’t realize they’d lived through at all. Writing is like a record, both keeping a record of our lives and working through the record of our lives. This remembering can work backwards but also forwards in time because it reveals patterns of how we live and the choices we made, make, and will make.

I was really influenced by the book A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past by Lewis Hyde, which explores when we forget, how we forget, and why we forget. It’s a flip side to remembering: when do we remember, how do we remember, and why do we remember? I think writing lets us explore the gaps, the creative space, and find what is worth witnessing and remembering and what may not be.

NCC: Memory is fascinating because the brain’s neural circuits degrade if we don’t actively use them. Essentially, if we don’t use it, we lose it. In that way, I think witnessing is also active, which makes writing a meaningful tool or practice by which we can remember and keep remembering.

RT: Journal keeping, for example, is so powerful. It's choosing to record. Recording minutiae of the day lets small things feel important and become one big thing called our life. I love that as well.

NCC: Can you tell me about your choice to feature re-searching and also researching as a topic of the series?

RT: We’re in academia and doing many kinds of research. But what does that word mean? In additional to giving students a space to be actively engaged in research and thinking about the writing practices that can assist one’s research, this workshop is about questioning what it means to search again, to see again, to wander and traverse through the material that we care about—archival, embodied, whatever. Writing, specifically, allows us to see and see again, to experience a reiterative return. Research is a circle.

NCC: Stepping back to the series as a whole, what is your take on witness itself and what the work of witnessing is?

RT: ‘Witness’ has such potential for creativity and possibility within it because it’s not saying, “By being deeply present, I'm not taking action.” It also isn’t saying, “I’m going to take action.” I don't know how to act until I know what something means to me. So, witnessing to me means being fully alive to what is in the room or in oneself or in another person.

Writing is the main way that I know that I'm not going to look away since I’m on the page with it or at the typewriter with someone. Once one is fully present, though, the next step is being called to action.

NCC: Most of us write every day. Even so, we have this stark division of “I’m a writer” or “I’m not a writer.” There is a disengagement or estrangement from writing if one doesn’t view it as part of their creative identity. With that in mind, what would you say to people who might not show up to a writing workshop because they’re not “writers”?

RT: That's a beautiful question, and I’m so glad you asked it. I think about Natalie Goldberg who wrote Writing Down the Bones. She talks about writing like meditation, which I love because it takes the preciousness out of writing and helps remove this idea that “I’m a good writer” or “I’m a bad writer.” Writing is just something that you show up and do. It’s a tool, and it’s for everybody. Curiosity is enough to put words on a page.

NCC: Yeah. I grew up saying that I’m not creative. Over the years, I realized how delusional that was. Human beings are nothing if not creative. We’re constantly coming up with ideas, interpreting information, and imagining how we want to be and live in this world.

RT: I absolutely love that. There is so much that happens when we call ourselves something, what we allow ourselves to be, or give ourselves access to. Whenever we say we are or are not something in particular, I think those boxes around identity so often don’t belong to us. When you’re a child, you’re not like “I’m a writer!” You just are writing; you are playing. When we begin to limit ourselves, I have to wonder, does that actually come from us?

NCC: Let’s return to your work with Religion and Public Life as an MRPL student and now member of staff giving these workshops. What is your sense of just peacebuilding and the ways it permeates your work as a poet, writer, and witness?

RT: It relates to the idea of being able to be creative within deep discomfort and fear. I hope that what I'm bringing, whether it’s a workshop or a typewriter site where I write poems for whomever stops by, are spaces, reminders, and practices that allow us to be with possibility even amidst great, deep pain that sometimes feels like it destroys any sense of creativity or possibility. Whether it’s in a book, one of my own poems, a workshop where we are collectively practicing writing, we are allowing there to be spaciousness. Poetry quite literally feels to me like deep soul nourishment. It feels like fuel, like an offering of a sustainable resource for a long road. Poetry doesn't work on a quick timeline. Neither does any type of writing.

Something I'll just end on is what a great gift it is to spend days in creative space with other people, and specifically here. I often think about my great-grandmother, who couldn't read, and I feel the great gift of this work and the responsibility of it too.

I find myself running to the page sometimes, and it begs another question of when do we also need to leave the page? The typewriter worked for me as a response to life, but I must also be in the world and off the page to attend to something outside of myself, to be a witness.

Read more about Raisa Tolchinsky, MRPL '24.