Suzanne Edison, MA, MFA

Poet • Educator

Poems

Poetry helps me find “the place beyond words.” We poets use words to point ourself and others toward those ineffable places. When this water of 'being' is running through me, I write for the joy of participating and the hope of learning something new. If my words then touch others I am rewarded a second time.

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Finding solace in poetry-Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Coalition

As a result of my KUOW interviews in late January, a wonderful organization in California was made aware of my work and contacted me.  The Children’s Hospice and Palliative Care Coalition wanted to feature some of my poems on their website.

I am honored to be asked and they have recently posted Teeter Totter, a poem I wrote a few months after my daughter was diagnosed with Juvenile Myositis and was exhibiting all the classic Cushingnoid signs (moon face, bloating, irritability to name a few) due to heavy doses of corticosteroids.

I think the mission and vision of chpcc dovetail with my sense of what’s needed for families who have children with serious health issues.  Check them out.

Mission: Listen to, partner with, and work together for children with serious illnesses and all those who care for them.

Vision: We believe that all children with life-threatening conditions should have access to the care and emotional support they need to live life as fully as possible.

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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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The Examined Life, Ars Medica and other projects

I am pleased to say that my poem Bloodwork was published in The Examined Life: A Literary Journal of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine in their Spring 2012 issue.  This school of medicine also holds a yearly conference by the same name, The Examined Life, and is one of a handful of schools involved in Narrative Medicine and that offers courses in Medical Humanities.  I recommend checking out the school/conference and this volume.

I also have a poem forthcoming in the next issue of Ars Medica.  Stay tuned for that wonderful journal from Toronto, Canada.  While their website is not really up to date, I would suggest asking for their most recent journal issues in a personal email to them.  And while you’re at it, ask them to update their website!

Lastly, I wanted to say I am working on a new set of poems about parents whose children are living with a chronic illness.  I was awarded another grant from the City of Seattle Arts and Cultural Affairs program to pursue this project. I am interviewing parents whose kids have Sickle Cell disease, Juvenile Arthritis, Muscular Dystrophy and one or two other illnesses.  They come from a variety of backgrounds and I am trying to capture both the unique specifics and overlapping issues, common in all of their, and my, experiences.

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