Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

Events & Workshops

Below you'll find my posts about upcoming and past events and workshops. Also see descriptions of my workshops.

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Interview with Steve Scher on KUOW-2013

This morning, Monday, Jan. 28, 2013, I was a guest on KUOW’s Weekday program with Steve Scher talking about writing and healing. For those of you who didn’t get to hear the show, you can go to the website and hear the podcast.

I will reiterate my basic messages here.

1) When children are sick, the whole family is affected.

2) Parents go through many stages of grief and loss, similar to stages of death and dying, on their journey with an ill child.
3) Using the arts, in this case writing, as a form of healing allows us to both feel our experience and learn to think without denying those feelings. The act of creation is both a way to re-energize our “wellsprings” and an opportunity to make sense and/or meaning out of our experiences.                                          

Also, I didn’t get a chance to completely make a pitch for my writing workshop at Seattle Children’s Hospital, called Writing as a Righting Journey, so I want to do that here.  This workshop is open to any parent with a child living with ongoing health issues. You do not have to be a writer, no experience needed. It is free. Please contact me for more information.

And if you want to read more of the poems that have come from my interviews/conversations with parents, please go to the online store here, to purchase a copy of What Cannot Be Swallowed.   Tune in on Wednesday, Jan. 30th to KUOW between 2-3 pm to hear 2 of these poems..

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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..

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Upcoming Readings-2012

I will be giving two free, public readings of new poems based on my conversations and interviews with parents who have a child living with a chronic illness.

 

Save The Dates:

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

12:30 pm to 1:30 pm

Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic, 2101 E. Yesler Way, Seattle, WA

 

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

12:30-1:30 pm

Seattle Children’s Hospital (Dining Room 3-off the Main Dining Room-Whale 5).

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2nd Writing as a Righting Journey

 

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. Any family dealing with Rheumatic diseases (JM, JRA), Diabetes, other Endocrine diseases, Gastroenterological diseases, Cerebral Palsy, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Anemia are welcome to join.

Ø    We will meet 5-6 times over a 5 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 a chapbook of poems based on her journey with her child. A recent poem, Bloodwork, was awarded an honorable mention in the Charles Prize for Poetry contest.  For more information please see her website, www.seedison.com.


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