Since Sept. 30, women in recovery have gathered in the Local History Room of the Greenfield Public Library every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m., not to talk about their experiences, but to write about them in shared silence.
When the writers read their pieces, listeners do not pick up their red pens to critique the piece, but respond with “unconditional positive regard,” according to Amie Hyson, who started the group, FreeWrite of Franklin County, with longtime friend Gretchen Krull.
Hyson first met Krull while in recovery herself. In 2016, at the Recover Project, she sat down for a writing workshop run by Voices From Inside, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creative writing workshops for currently or formerly incarcerated women, women in recovery or women with mental health needs. Running Hyson’s first writing workshop was Krull.
“To be honest with you, this is the woman that made the magic for me and a lot of other women,” Hyson said, tearing up across the table from Krull at a local coffee shop. “She knows how to make people find something inside that they need to say and to say it and to feel safe and empowered, and she taught me that, I saw what a gift it was.”
Krull saw a workshop facilitator in Hyson from the first class.
“She was a brilliant writer from the very beginning, and she’s got all the skills,” Krull said, nodding.
In 2017, Hyson started faciliting workshops herself, sharing the healing within writing Krull first taught her at recovery centers and local jails.
Now, nine years since Hyson and Krull first met, “We’re like sisters,” Hyson said.
“We’re like sisters that like each other,” Krull clarified, and the pair giggled.
A few years after stepping away from Voices From Inside in June of 2020, Krull asked Hyson about writing together again. Hyson, who left the organization in December of 2021 and started her own workshops online, said yes. In January of 2023, they started FreeWrite of Franklin County, leading their own writing workshops at the Franklin County Reentry Center.
Krull later dropped off a “chatbook” with pages of past workshop participants’ writing at the Greenfield Public Library, and the library invited the pair to run the workshop in their Local History Room.
“We don’t say things like, ‘Write about addiction, write about your recovery,'” Krull said. Instead of directions, Hyson and Krull hand out oracle cards, poems, photographs, a bag of random objects or even fortunes from fortune cookies with an optional written prompt.
“It needs to be open-ended,” Krull said. She traced her approach to Pat Schneider’s teachings in her book, “Writing Alone and with Others.”
Krull starts the workshop by ringing a Tibetan meditation bowl as the chatter between the writers ebbs into quiet.
At their Oct. 7 workshop, Krull and Hyson handed three writers the poem “An Invitation” by Anna Grossnickle Hines, along with a prompt asking the writers to list emotions and either “Describe a house with as many rooms as you’d like and where some of these emotions might live,” or “Write about finding or not finding peace.”
“As always, if this doesn’t speak to you, if this doesn’t work for your brain, write about anything at all,” Hyson said.
Only the sound of pens scratching could distract the writers, including Krull and Hyson, as they scrawled and scribbled into notebooks for about 20 minutes. Then, Krull’s timer rang and the writers read their work.
After the workshop, participant and Greenfield resident Becky Cluff said she “really liked that it was geared towards women in recovery.” As a writing group for only women, Cluff added, “It just makes it much easier to express yourself.”
Cluff’s close friend Casey Demers said the group felt “more intimate” than an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. “I feel more comfortable in this kind of group,” she said.
For Hyson, writing allows the pain inside writers to breathe.
“It gets it up and out of your body, into the world,” Hyson explained. “I was holding all this pain inside, and now it’s out in the world, and other people have witnessed it, and there’s healing in that.”
Instead of responding with sympathy and tossing well-meaning remarks like, “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” and “Are you okay?” listeners comment on the writing itself, assuming it is a work of fiction, protecting writers from explaining their words and insisting they are okay.
“We really try to meet people where [they] are,” Krull said. “And that really does seem to help people come out themselves and feel like it’s okay to be broken, it’s okay to not be perfect, it’s okay to have this and that thing that I’m dealing with, because I’m not alone, and my story matters.”
Krull rarely wrote creatively before Voices From Inside. Before becoming a facilitator and then director, she worked as a sexual assault counselor at Hampshire College.
“I never came to it from a writing perspective, I came to it from a voice perspective,” Krull said. “I worked with people … who didn’t have a voice because people wouldn’t believe them, and so my job was to give people their voice.” She added, “The women wanted to write their own stories.”
According to Hyson, many writers, including herself, first share their pieces with a quiet voice. With each read and round of positive feedback, the participants shift, Krull and Hyson said.
“You can see the body language change over time,” Hyson echoed. “You see them bloom.”
Hyson said writing empowered her to believe in her potential.
“A lot of times I don’t feel like I live up to my potential, and this is like, I not only lived up to my potential but I exceeded in it, and I think that that’s the energy that people get,” Hyson said. “It just lights people up.”
