Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

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The Words to Say It:Writing About Illness, Trauma & Healing–Hugo House class

I’ll be teaching the 2nd round of this class at Hugo House starting October 1st and running for 6 weeks. I’d love to see you there. Please register soon. Here’s a little preview of the course.

By focusing on the craft of writing, we can transform personal experience into art. Readings will include excerpts from: Poetry in Medicine, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry, Poetry As Survival, and Beauty Is a Verb, as well as the work of Alicia Ostriker, Lucia Perillo, Susan Sontag, Lucille Clifton, Anatole Broyard, and Kevin Young, among others. Each week there will be readings, discussion, and writing prompts. There will be time to receive feedback after the first class.

We’ll also read some short prose pieces and excerpts from longer creative, non-fiction.

Feel free to pass this information on to whomever might be interested.

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“Tough”– a new poem in HEAL-from Florida State University College of Medicine

I am grateful to have the poem “Tough”,  from my poetry and art project on autoimmune diseases, out today from HEAL.

 

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Poem on grief- Fire in the Ice

I am happy to have a poem up at Persimmon Tree journal dealing with grief of various sorts. Feel free to pass it on.  Mine is the second one, scroll down.

http://www.persimmontree.org/v2/summer-2018/west-coast-poets/

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Poem and Autoimmune Disease–The Body Lives Its Undoing

I am happy to share this poem, The Body Lives Its Undoing, just published in the online journal Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. Take a look around this excellent journal for a variety of writing and art relating to illness, health, medicine and personal stories.

Does not include Juvenile Myositis, (orphan disease in children) or Dermatomyositis, (in adults) both of which are rare but also autoimmune diseases.
Autoimmune Diseases
does not include orphan diseases such as Juvenile Myositis.

This the first poem to be published from my new project in conjunction with The Benaroya Research Institute. The project, titled, The Effects of Misdirection:How the Immune System is Led Astray, will include a chapbook of poems and original, visual art, along with some scientific images/scans. There will be readings in the fall with an opportunity for Q & A with some of the interviewees. As stimulus for the poems, I conducted 28 interviews with researchers, doctors/nurses, patients (both adults and teens) and caretakers. The artwork is courtesy of working visual artists who are connected to BRI or are patients or caretakers.