What is a Workshop?

If you ask me, I’ll tell you that I think a writer is someone who writes.  More to the point, a writer is someone who is compelled to write, who wants to write, who loves it more than any other activity. 

Of course that definition is deceptively simple.  How many things, activities, and people do we love and yet never can seem to pay enough attention to them, maintain our relationship to them?  No matter how much you love writing, you may not have the time to write.  You may not write every day, you may not write for months or years.  Consider this poem by Tess Gallagher:

I Stop Writing the Poem
by Tess Gallagher

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

There is always something pulling us away from the poem or the story we are obsessing over.  That’s one of the many reasons we join workshops.  It forces us to write.  So what if there was a work shop devoted solely to the creation of poetry or stories? 

Imagine a group of writers who gather once a month, maybe once a week, to free write, to attempt poetry prompts, to work on that story idea that’s been following them around.  What if there is no critique?  What if no one shared a single word, but they all sat at the coffee house table or in the living room where they all meet in silence, no sound except the scratching of pens?  What if the only requirement here is to write? 

Can this be called a workshop or is it something else?