Madelyn Kent: The Place Before Language

For a writer, few things are as painful as the feeling of forcing a story out. For Madelyn Kent, a theater artist and activist who works with North African refugees in Tel Aviv, the smoothest way to get writing is through the body, before the pen ever meets paper. I was first introduced to her work when I saw a poster for one of her Sense Writing classes in Brooklyn that said, “Give yourself permission to be boring.” It was an excitedly counterintuitive challenge to the ego.

Minutes into my first workshop, I was flat on my back, focusing on what Kent calls “body mapping,” attending to details like the weight of my tongue, the space between my chin and shoulder. Gentle movements in one part of the body inadvertently soothed a different part. The goal was to keep everything in a place of ease. No sweating! We transferred this way of differentiation and close articulation to a variety of writing exercises. The outcome was always surprising. When I thought I was writing the beginning of something, I was writing the middle of some other seemingly unrelated but more urgent story. Most of the students wouldn’t say we were “writers” per say, but during these exchanges, the things that poured out of us were startlingly vivid and articulate. We got “there” precisely because we weren’t trying to.

Kent works with practitioners of Sense Writing in Europe, North America, and the Middle East. She’s facilitated communication with students across geographic lines, connecting groups in New York to refugee communities abroad, bridging assumed differences and distances. As a former child refugee myself, I wondered what it was like to conduct writing workshops where legal status and personal safety is always in flux, and what role storytelling plays in those settings. Kent and I discussed this, along with the origin story behind her method and how