Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

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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

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The Words to Say It: Writing about Illness, Trauma and Healing

I want to let you know about a 5 week course I’ll be teaching this Fall at Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

The Words to Say It: Writing about Illness, Trauma and Healing.

Course Description:
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; Beauty is a Verb, and writers Alicia Ostriker, Lucia Perillo, Susan Sontag, Lucille Clifton, Anatole Broyard, and Kevin Young, among many others.

The course will be both poetry and creative non-fiction oriented. You may write in whatever form you want.

We will look at forms, how specific forms of elegy, narrative, the lyric and prose help hold and extend the language/story.
We will stretch our language capacities, looking past cliche to surprising images.
We will look at negative and positive space, e.g. what is and is not “on the page”, engaging the reader in active imagination.

Each week we will read, discuss and write. In the last class students may bring a piece of their own to workshop for feedback.

DATES: Saturdays 9/23, 9/30 (note, we will skip 10/7 as I have a prior commitment), 10/14, 10/21, 10/28.
TIME: 10 am – 12 pm
LOCATION: Hugo House, 1021 Columbia St, Seattle, WA 98104

Important dates as you spread the word:

Member Registration – Aug. 15
General Registration – Aug. 22
Scholarship Applications Due – Aug. 25
Early Bird Pricing Ends – Aug. 28

Register here.

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Writing New Poems

images-1 Writing New Poems Workshop

Saturday, October 1, 2016

The Richard Hugo House

1 pm- 5 pm

Come read and write poems of renewal, birth, loss and change. We will read poems by Dana Levin, Ross Gay, Mary Jo Bang, Kevin Young and others. We will also use these works as starting points for our own poems.

A love of words and writing is the prerequisite.

Early bird registration expires August 29th. See the link under the title for more information.

Hope to see you there.

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Writing as a Righting Journey-Moving Forward

paper cut show-MFA BostonWhy write.

I’ve written about writing and healing often. Writing workshops are what I now offer to other parents as a way of containing and expressing our experiences living with a child(ren) who has a life threatening or chronic illness. I recently came across an article on this subject on the Foundation for Art and Healing website from last year. I was reminded about Dr. James Pennebaker’s research on this subject and I want to go back and reread his work, Writing to Heal, now. You may find it of interest also.

There are many powerful reasons to write, but HOW we write is as important as the writing itself. Being able to construct a narrative from our emotions, or use metaphoric language as a container for the hard to express feelings, allows us to gain some perspective on what may feel overwhelming. I think it allows us to move from feeling to cognition.

I structure writing exercises so that participants have the time to let down into their feelings and experiences, but also have the opportunity to create a meaningful story or poem that provides a container for feelings. This sort of writing engages the prefrontal cortex, that part of our brains where decision making and discernment reside. This capacity to feel and contain is necessary for making judgements about treatment plans, advocating for our child’s needs and for adherence to the treatment plan. It helps move us from despair or depression about our circumstances to resilience and repair.

There is a caveat. Most of us don’t move through our feelings of grief or loss, anger or depression once and then never feel them again. We come back again and again to these experiences as our children get better and grow or don’t. Hopefully, writing allows us a mechanism for continuing to better understand what we feel and what we need for our own self-care and for our children.