Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

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The Words To Say It: Writing & Reading Poems about Illness, Trauma, & Healing

Suzanne Edison portrait

I’ll be teaching a 2 day workshop in Port Townsend. Come join me at The Writers Workshoppe.

Dates: Saturday and Sunday, April 4th and 5th
Time: 10:00am to 3:00pm
Cost: $170
Limited to: 10 participants

“Story [or poetry] is both a primal, concrete way of ordering experience and also a way of opening the self to disorder. When lyric ceases to hide behind abstraction…and descend down into the chaos and specifics of the physical world to seek its meanings, it is another way that it has of making itself vulnerable to disorder.  …One of story’s primary purposes is to lay claim to experience. Autobiographical storytelling can take personal experience back from silence, shame, fear, or oblivion… By telling his or her story, the poet overcomes isolation and silence.” — Gregory Orr

​“The only way through pain…is to absorb, probe, understand exactly what it is and what it means. To close the door on pain is to miss the chance for growth…”- May Sarton

In this two day intensive workshop we will read and write poems about our experiences with illness, trauma and healing. These experiences are held in our bodies and we will engage in an initial centering exercise to help us focus. We will read poems with an eye and ear to understanding how emotions and experiences are captured and held in images, metaphors and narratives. I will provide you with prompts and structures for writing. There will be time to share and receive feedback on the second day of the workshop. You will come away with a better appreciation for how poetry can hold the often unspeakable and ineffable, and a couple of your own new drafts of poems or stories.  Some experience with poetry or writing is helpful but not required.

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Writing Poems about Illness, Trauma & Healing–HOW TO

I plan to teach a 3rd session of my class The Words to Say It: Writing and Reading Poems about Illness, Trauma & Healing at Hugo House starting April 17, 2019.

I’ve taught this 6 week workshop before but thought I’d share one of the many approaches I use to start writing for those of you who may be interested in the class but wonder how it goes.

Writing Poems about Illness & Trauma-How To.

If you think this class interests you, you can register here.

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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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The Words to Say It: Writing about Illness, Trauma & Healing–excerpts

I thought I’d send out some enticing pieces from my planned readings for the course, The Words to Say It: Writing About Illness, Trauma and Healing.  Sometimes just a list of possible readings doesn’t fully bring you into the experience.
Here is a poem by Alicia Ostriker from her series “The Mastectomy Poems”, from The Crack in Everything. What I like about it is how she starts right in with her thinking, that is a universal thought. She includes the details of the body, (cells, estrogen, breast), images of women in daily life, and then how this particular diagnosis heightens (figuratively and literally) her perceptions of her everyday world.
The second piece is an excerpt from Gregory Orr’s, The Blessing. He’s a poet and essayist and his memoir is about how he dealt with accidentally killing his brother when they were both kids. In this excerpt, he’s describing trying to talk to his mother about the accident. I find his language to be both personal and the details telling (the cake with fourteen candles, his mother not touching him). I think it’s heartbreaking, see what you think.
If you think someone would be interested in taking this class, please pass this on to them. Here is the link for registering at Hugo House.
Wishing everyone a great fall of writing.
Suzanne

The Crack in Everything

“The Mastectomy Poems:”

1. THE BRIDGE

You never think it will happen to you,
What happens every day to other women.
Then as you sit paging a magazine,
Its beauties lying idly in your lap,
Waiting to be routinely waved goodbye
Until next year, the mammogram technician
Says Sorry, we need to do this again,

And you have already become a statistic,
Citizen of a country where the air,
Water, your estrogen, have just saluted
Their target cells, planted their Judas kiss
Inside the Jerusalem of the breast.
Here on the film what looks like specks of dust
Is calcium deposits.
Go put your clothes on in a shabby booth
Whose curtain reaches halfway to the floor.
Try saying fear. Now feel
Your tongue as it cleaves to the roof of your mouth.

Technicalities over, medical articles read,
Decisions made, the Buick’s wheels
Nose across Jersey toward the hospital
As if on monorail. Elizabeth
Exhales her poisons, Newark Airport spreads
Her wings–the planes take off over the marsh–
A husband’s hand plays with a ring.

Some snowflakes whip across the lanes of cars
Slowed for the tollbooth, and two smoky gulls
Veer by the steel parabolas.
Given a choice of tunnel or bridge
Into Manhattan, the granite crust
On its black platter of rivers, we prefer
Elevation to depth, vista to crawling.

The Blessing-excerpt