For the past 10 years, Genine Lentine has attended drawing groups and written from the model. “When I was drawing one day, I was just, like, ‘I’m thinking about way too much stuff to even be in this room,’ so I started to write, but almost more just survival, you know, to clear my mind,” she says.

She says she found the limitations of the process – timed poses, the immediacy of the model, writing in pencil on a large sheet of paper – to be engaging, “to slow down thought enough for writing to keep up.”

The groups have given Lentine something rare for writers: “With other people drawing,” she says, “it felt kind of grounding, a sense of we’re all doing this thing together.”

She will celebrate the publication of a full collection of these writings, titled “Poses: An Essay Drawn From the Model,” on Friday. The book contains drawings by Richard Diebenkorn and a foreword by Mark Doty, who writes: ” ‘Poses’ is something we haven’t seen.” In addition to readings by Lentine, Frances Richard and Alix Lambert, who will also screen some film, there will be a drawing session with Chester Arnold and Co. (materials provided), and an oracular reading by Farnoosh Fathi.

Presented by Green Arcade Books, and in conjunction with the series Mattress Talks: Interviews With Artists & Poets on Discomfort, the event will be on the second-floor loft of the McRoskey Mattress Co. (7 p.m. 1687 Market St., S.F. Free-$5. bit.ly/Qm3DxI)

Evan Karp is a freelance writer. E-mail: 96hours@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Litseen