Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

  • Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA
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Essays

Selected essays and musings on art, healing and education.

November 24, 2012 By Suzanne

What Cannot Be Swallowed: Reading Poems/Conversations with parents who have children with health issues

My first reading of the poems I’ve been writing all year was on Nov.14 th at Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic. I didn’t think I was nervous until I choked a bit reading a line in a poem and had to restart the line. Hmm. It is hard to expose oneself with new work. Kind of like bringing a baby into the world, all fresh and unknown.  Though I have lived with these words and conversations all year, I had not heard myself reading to an audience.  I always love this part but am afraid of it at the same time.  How will people respond, will they respond at all?  Will any of the ideas touch them?  Is there a point to writing if no one reads or hears the words? Yes, but the response part is like the completion of a good meal.  Even if they hate the poems ( that would be hard to take, but something, at least ) I would know there was life outside my mind.

I started the reading with a poem I felt fairly confident about, Only Serious Applicants Need Apply.  I can’t post the entire poem yet as I’m hoping it will be published elsewhere first, but here are a few lines–  In the club you never wanted to join / is a job you didn’t apply for, your qualifications dubious. / Requirements include multiple personality transformations:–

I tried to weave in stories about the parents that I interviewed, and their child’s illness, between the poems. The audience consisted of 1/3 staff from the clinic and 2/3 friends of mine from various parts of my life. Two medical students left half way through the reading. Did they hate it?  Probably they needed to do some doctoring but no one told me.  I just went on.

At the end of the reading I asked for questions or comments.  Some very thoughtful questions ensued which made me aware that they were listening closely. Someone asked about my use of nature images in relation to the painful issues of illness and looming death of children.

Voices stick like pollen. / A wasp rasps its tongue on fence post, / turning wood bits and spit into paper hive / I transmute words, hearing again / what cannot be swallowed. 

          —from The North Wind

I had not thought this out exactly but I realized that the natural world is where I always go to help myself think through confusion or emotional upset. When my child was very ill and we didn’t know if she’d recover, I took walks whenever I could. I found that parts of nature, a nest or a tree or the weather itself was a vessel that could hold whatever I was feeling at the time. I felt connected to something bigger than myself.  Thinking about this question later made me realize that the natural world is the only place that helps me put life and death into perspective. And because those feelings, fears about our children and their futures, our guilt, anger, grief or helplessness, need a place to both be held and named, I wanted to find images that could help them do that. I wanted the poem to recognize and not shy away from, those painful places, and hopefully by naming them, one could feel ‘seen’, not so alone in them.

Another asked about how I handle a situation where a parent, if, after one long interview/discussion may have opened themselves up to painful emotions and are raw.  I can’t say that I did end all our conversations tidily.  I was aware of needing to find some closure for each person, particularly if I sensed that they were feeling this rawness. In one case I contacted a social worker that I knew the parent was in touch with to inform them about the parent’s state of mind.  I wanted someone else to reach out to her when I was no longer around. If this happened, I am not sure.  This parent didn’t speak her story to hardly anyone and I realized that I was not only given a rare gift, I had a responsibility to not abuse her trust since she didn’t really know me.

All in all this project, this series of poems, that I have come to call, What Cannot Be Swallowed, has been far more challenging than I had anticipated. It took me much longer to digest all the feelings and thoughts, wrestle with the forms of the poems, rethink the issues, decide what needed to be told and find the words to say them, than I gave myself time for.  As such, these readings are not really the culmination of the grant I received from the City of Seattle to do this project, but are part of a larger loop, a spiral that has led me back to revising some of the poems again.  That too is important, though at some point I will have to let them go out into the world.  Just as I let go of my child as she grows.

I will be reading again on Wednesday, Dec. 5th at 12:30 pm at Seattle Children’s Hospital.  Please come if you can..

Filed Under: essays, events, poetry

May 24, 2011 By Suzanne

Fear of Relapse-turning bubbling-baddies into art

I have noticed that though my daughter is feeling good, looking and acting like most other ten year old girls, I still get occasional bouts of fear of disease recurrence. I should mention she is on a small amount of medications and she’s still tapering off of them, so she’s not technically in remission from her original eruption of disease. And though she has a rare autoimmune disease, one for which there is not yet a cure, I take some comfort from reading and talking to mothers of kids with cancer whose children are in remission. We have been through similar experiences. http://community.lls.org/message/88611

I know these feelings are normal. But I hate the anxiety. Every time we reduce her medications, every little step towards remission, is a double-edged sword, a kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” feeling. THIS IS NOT A WAY TO LIVE. And that word, LIVE, is the operative one here. What can I do to keep alive, I ask myself, and do I really have to put myself through this? How can I turn that bubbling stew in my stomach into something nourishing?

Here is what I have come to think. I can’t stop the feelings. What I can do is choose how to react to them. I can pretend to ignore them. OK, that is folly, they come back regardless; I grind my teeth more at night or get an upset stomach. Some worry prompts me to do research or ask questions, but this heart-pumping adrenaline rush non-stop mental agitation of fear mostly thwarts productive thinking.  Like a hamster on its wheel, I waste valuable time and energy engaging in worry.

I am learning to do several other things instead. Now I say to myself, “OK, there you are again, anxiety. I feel you in my stomach, turning my deep breaths into shallow sips. I will now focus on deeper breaths. I will write down swear words and everything I fear—which often comes down to how little control I have over many things, and the fear of losing my child altogether—and then find other, kinder words to use towards myself, towards my anxiety.” For ultimately, it is there to warn me not to become complacent. I also need to say to myself, “ let’s look at the facts right now.”

When I do that, when I write down the feelings AND the facts too, I find it is becoming an easier and more routine way for me to deal with my fears. I scribble on whatever piece of paper is handy, or I journal it at length and sometimes I even turn those scribbles into poems. Here is a poem, Bloodwork, I’ve been writing and revising for the last year. It will be published this spring by UCSF Press (in a slightly different version) in an anthology from a workshop called The Healing Art of Writing 2010.

I continue to look for writing that reminds me I am not alone, that if others can do it, I too can put my feelings into words. When I do, I seem able to hold a little more tension or release it, and I can move on..

Filed Under: essays

April 27, 2011 By Suzanne

2 Years after Diagnosis-5/08

This past weekend we spent three days in the Methow Valley. It is a place we have gone to the past three years as a family for Memorial Day. We have gone with friends and there have always been at least 2-4 other kids around.

Two years ago, before F was diagnosed with Dermatomyositis (JDM) but after almost a year of living with this progressive disease, she would not leave my side to play with others. She complained about walking up or down a hill, she was shaky in her body, in her approach to the world, and much of her behavior and moodiness was not understandable to me at the time. On that weekend, friends of ours who live in the Methow came to visit with their horses. F said she didn’t want to ride the horses. I told her she didn’t have to. When they arrived, she ran into our little trailer screaming and wouldn’t come out. I had to coax her out and hold her on my lap and even then she could only tolerate being in their presence for a few minutes.

Last year at this time, May 2007, she was 4 months into treatment and in a lot of pain. She was very withdrawn, barely able to walk. Sleeping and getting in and out of bed or to the outhouse was excruciating. It wasn’t much fun for her or any of us either.

A week before the Memorial Day holiday this year, F announced she wanted to try riding her old bike (the one without training wheels) and see if she could do it. We went to a basketball court near us to practice. She got a little of the balance worked out. Excited, she was very determined to keep going. A few days later some ponies and a horse came to a fair in our neighborhood park and she asked to ride the horse (not the pony). She got on it and rode in a small circle led by another young girl. She announced she was afraid while on the horse, and I remarked she had done it anyway.

This past weekend, back in the Methow, our friends with the horses showed up again. This time F got on the horse, was led down and around a road, riding more than in circles, and wanted to keep going. Then she asked if she could take riding lessons!

She ran up hills, went off to play on her own initiative with the other kids, went all over the place walking, running, laughing (even to the outhouse by herself).

The transformation is a marvel. It is amazing to realize how wise her body is. It was painful for us to see her becoming so timid and afraid at 4 ½ years old after having been strong and sturdy, to watch helplessly as she got weaker and weaker. Even after diagnosis we struggled as she withdrew far inside herself, perhaps to tolerate the pain and immobility and the effects of the drugs on her moods and spirit. She instinctively knew what to do to protect herself. Now, to see her running, laughing, initiating activities and her courage in doing things that scare her, I say her body/mind also knows what she can handle.

I have to believe that her body and mind worked together in both the disease process and the healing. Without one, her physical strength and health, she didn’t have much of the other, her joyous, courageous, Pushing Forward Into Life spirit either.

I can’t fully comprehend the intrinsic bond of mind/body/spirit, I just know from personal experience and again, watching my girl struggle and grow, they are always connected.

by Suzanne Edison, May 26, 2008

 

PUBLISHED ESSAYS

“Education of a Gardener” in The Seattle Times, July 11, 1999 and inHeronswood Catalogue, 2000 “Nonverbal Communication in the Classroom”, New Horizons for Learning, 1984

Filed Under: essays

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