A new anthology, The Healing Art of Writing, was published recently by the University of California Press, Medical Humanities division. It contains essays, poems and creative non-fiction written by attendees at the Healing Art of Writing conference and workshop held in California in the summer of 2010. (Information on the 2012 workshop is not yet public but will be held July 8- July 14, at Dominican University of California).
I recommend this, not just because I have two poems in it, but because the breadth and depth of the writing is sure to reach a great many people. I believe we need to keep articulating the feelings and thoughts we have about illness, healing, mortality, medicine, all the experiences we were never educated to express in order to expand our notions about what it is to be human in the 21st century, and beyond. I’ll be reviewing specific pieces from this book in another blog.