Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

Suzanne’s Blog

Thank you for visiting my blog! I write on many topics and your comments are always welcome.

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The Art of Losing

I highly recommend a book of poetry edited by Kevin Young called The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing.
The title is from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. I got a hardback version at a book closeouts website through Amazon (forgive me independent bookstore lovers) for about $8 + shipping.

I want to quote Kevin’s opening lines in his introduction as a way to bring you into wanting to also get the book.
“I have begun to believe in, and even preach, a poetry of necessity. This is a recognition not just of the necessity of poetry to our lives, but also the fact that necessity is what drives most of the poetry that matters, or the way that it matters.” And, “a poem must be willing to be unwilled, beckoned by need.”

And this book is filled with poems driven by need: elegies, remembrances, dedications, words that attempt to point towards the things that are often unspeakable, or seemingly feel that way.  I love the way I am drawn to think about other forms of art, painting and music, as I read different poems. I thought about Ad Reinhart and his seemingly monochromatic paintings in all black and all red. They beg us to be absorbed into them, by them. They seem to hover around those “almost unspeakable realities” and yet, we keep trying to find the words and images, sounds and visuals to express our ineffable lives.

The Art of Losing is a remarkable compilation of poets living and dead, from W.H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton to Dean Young, Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, Adam Zagajewski, just to name a few. And there are so many, many more.  For what greater mysteries are there than death, love and living.

As William Faulkner is quoted in the opening section called Reckoning:

Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.

Theodore Roethke says in the section, Recovery:

I learn by going where I have to go.

And finally, Philip Larkin opens the last section, Redemption with:

What will survive of us is love..

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Teaching Narrative Medicine

The whole field called Narrative Medicine is beginning to take off.  Or at least that is my perception since I am so closely tied to and interested in it.  There are masters programs, certificate programs, programs in medical humanities, and a host of literary/medical journals being published that reflect many aspects of health, illness, healing and both practitioners and patients responses, now. I have been published in a few of them and am grateful for their existence. (see publications under Resume).

Here, in Seattle, I have had the pleasure and honor of meeting and befriending a professor of nursing at the University of Washington School of Nursing, Josephine Ensign, who is pushing the boundaries of this genre and opening up nursing students eyes and ears to what narrative medicine means, in its many permutations.  She also writes a blog called Medical Margins,  in which she gives voice to the variety of writers in the field and offers her course’s approach and thoughts on the intersection of medicine and literature.  I highly recommend you read her blog.

Today, Josephine invited me and another author, Mary Oak, The Heart’s Oratorio to read and speak to her Narrative Medicine class.  I read my poem Teeter Totter, which the class had read before and we had a discussion about my intent and feelings of the poem along with some of the word choices and images, corrugated sadness, or leaving others up in the air, for example.  Someone wondered if I felt frustrated and helpless, as this was his impression from the poem. Since I’d written the poem a few years ago, I said I no longer felt frustrated by other’s lack of understanding and that helplessness comes with the territory of being a parent of a child with rare disease for which there is no cure.

I gave this class the same writing exercise I gave her previous class last November, though this group was much smaller and more intimate and seemingly more willing to share their own writing up front.  It was a lively discussion and I look forward to hearing or seeing some of their poems they began today.

Mary read from her book and I was struck by wondering how much her writing had changed what she felt or thought about her medical experiences or about writing in general.  She hoped, as I do, that the book offered hope to those in similar situations.  We both feel that telling the truth about our experiences leads to less isolation on the part of someone suffering other illnesses and offers them glimpses into how others have dealt with many of the same issues.

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Writing as a Righting Journey

 

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Writing as a “Righting” Journey

THROUGH WRITING WE CAN:

Ø    Explore the ways illness effects our lives

Ø    Find courage to go deeper, discovering new meaning or affirming values we already hold

Ø    Have an opportunity to share our lives with others and find community

 

GOALS:

Ø    Provide parents structure for giving voice to their experiences of having a child living with a chronic illness,  e.g. changes in emotional, physical and social life

Ø    Provide immediate and on-going options for writing on one’s own and in a group

Ø    Provide books, readings, (fiction, non-fiction, poetry) that speak to a variety of issues surrounding illness, healing and caretaking

 

WHY:

“One of the more common challenges parents face when managing the care of their chronically ill children is that they simply may not have the ability to cope. Generally, the research shows that when moms are depressed, adherence [to the child’s medical needs..] will go down…”

 

Research also shows that emotions are centered and experienced by the part of the brain known as the amygdala. This is part of the early brain, the limbic system. Trauma and highly charged emotions can keep us centered in that area of the brain and not allow us to use our higher centers of thinking, the frontal cortex. In order to assess and move on from being stuck in feeling, to thinking about our feelings and then move into action or decision-making, we need to connect feelings to thinking, the amygdala needs connection to the frontal cortex.  Judy Willis, a neuroscientist and writing teacher has shown that writing can do just that.

 

From both personal experience and observation, I have seen that writing can ameliorate feelings of depression, thereby increasing a parent’s ability to, cope with daily life and care for, their child.  Writing in a group can also allow one to realize they are not alone and gain support for their struggles.

 

One participant of the first WARJ group had this to say when asked what she got out of it at the end of our 6 month sessions:

“…feeling understood and not alone…[it was]…much better than a support group for me as instead of commiserating we were putting our energy and feelings into art that heals and allows for release as well as a powerful way to share with others.”

 

WHO & WHEN:

Ø    This group will be open to parents of children with a chronic illness.

Ø    We will meet 8-9 times over a 9 month period.

Ø    Each session will last 1.5 hours in Seattle, Washington

 

The workshop is led by Suzanne Edison, MA. She is a psychotherapist, poet and mother of a child with Juvenile Myositis. She is also the Family Support Director for the Cure JM Foundation.  She has led workshops and given presentations on the Effects of Chronic Illness on Families and Coping with Chronic Illness to parents and medical professionals.  She also was awarded grants to write and publish two chapbooks of poems based on her journey and other parents with their chronically ill child.  She has poems published in many journals and anthologies.  For more information please see her website, www.seedison.com..

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Brain Review

After reading a blog post of mine, I was recently contacted by a woman, Allison Morris, who has made a simple graphic  (at onlinecollegecourses) of the brain to help people understand the supposed functions of each area.  While I applaud this lively experience I am reminded by Joseph LeDoux, in The Synaptic Self, that the brain doesn’t only have discreet areas of operation, it is in the synapses that information is recorded and stored and then transferred to other areas of the brain and to the genes themselves.  Here is a statement by him:

Synapses are the spaces between brain cells. But more importantly, they are the channels of communication between cells that make possible all brain functions, including perception, memory, emotion and thinking.

It’s practically a truism to say the synapses underlie personality since synapses underlie everything the brain does. More important yet: synapses are the sites of storage of information, including information that is encoded by our genes and also by our experiences — our memories.

When it comes to personality, genes and experience are just two ways of doing the same thing — wiring synapses. That’s why I say, To the extent that we are a product of our genes and experiences, we are our synapses.

This doesn’t mean that the essence of who you are is encoded at a particular synapse. It means that your self is a very complex pattern of synaptic connectivity in your brain.

In thinking about how emotion, writing and the brain come together, this man has pushed my understanding along quite a ways.  If this area interests you, I highly recommend his other book, The Emotional Brain too..