Much has been written about soup kitchens -- particularly nowadays -- solving the immediacy of hunger, if only for a moment. There are other hungers more difficult to address. What about, for example, the human need to be seen and heard by others? What about the impulse to express oneself through the act of creation? Those are problems that cannot be solved by a bowl of soup.

Award-winning author and New Yorker contributor Ian Frazier resorted to higher mathematics when describing the 15 readers at the final installment of the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen Writer's Workshop on Wednesday night. "They come in as a point and after developing an interest in their writing they add another dimension and become a plane, to use a geometric metaphor." The occasion of Frazier's speech, at Holy Apostles Church in Chelsea in NYC, was the annual reading of the workshop. Soup kitchen participants will have spent three hours on Wednesdays in April and May expressing themselves through writing, building to this day -- a public reading of their work, being seen an heard by a large audience. The readings, which covered topics as varied as "What is love," to the nostalgic "1954," to one guests obsession with UFOs and another's dreams of moving to New Hampshire and drinking champagne (done via an alias), were unusually rich. Powerful. Perhaps it is the hard life experiences and the exhilaration of being listened to that made for such an interesting evening.

From Frazier's New Yorker account of the annual "afterparty":

"When the reading is over, everybody gets something to eat--there's a spread of sandwiches and soft drinks provided by the soup kitchen--and the writers and the audience mingle. The people who attend the reading may be Holy Apostles parishioners, soup-kitchen donors, editors, arts administrators, students from other writing programs, clergy of various kinds, curious passersby. Soup-kitchen alumni from workshops in past years sometimes show up and fill us in on where they are and what they're doing now. Sometimes we talk about people from past workshops whom we haven't seen for a while, or about the ones who came only a few times and then were never seen again--names like Lisa, Wayman, Smokey, White Mike, Coleman, Rashid, Blue, Luis, Rosa . . . The alchemy of writing gives everybody who's been in the workshop an extra dimension: along with possessing a name and a face, each is also the particular person who wrote whatever. Somehow, writing even a few lines makes the person who does it more substantial and real."

Or, in geometric terms, the difference between being a point and being a plane. An anthology of the writers' work is available here.

[Image: The New Yorker]