About

I started this site, One Year of Writing and Healing (OYWH) in 2006 over at Typepad and then in 2011 started a second site, Writing and Healing at WordPress, and now, only recently, in spring of 2015, I’m merging and redesigning the sites. Hopefully, this will make things more cohesive and easier to navigate.

Here’s a bit about me, the author. (If you’d rather get an overview of the site itself you may want to look at my invitation page.)

My interest in writing and healing began, as such things often do, when I experienced it personally. I began writing every day during medical school as a way to try and maintain my sanity, and I’ve been exploring connections between writing and healing ever since.

I practiced medicine for many years, beginning in family medicine and then eventually transitioning to mind-body medicine which I practiced for ten years, counseling patients with a range of chronic and stress-related conditions. I’ve also taught writing in diverse settings – college classrooms, homeless shelters, a center for addiction recovery, a local Cancer Services, and to patients in my office. In the last few years of my medical practice I began to realize I felt more resonance with an educational model (teach a person to fish and they’ll eat for a lifetime) than I did with the traditional medical model.  In the fall of 2009, I left my medical practice to work as a high school English teacher. I’ve had the good fortune to land at an Early College in North Carolina, where I feel like I’ve begun a whole new chapter in learning – about writing and the teaching of writing and also about how to create spaces in which writing and learning can happen.

I’ve stayed with this whole writing and healing project—letting it get dormant for a while and then coming back to it again, over and over—because it still seems relevant to me—and unfinished—as if there’s more to be done with it—as if it’s a subject that I’m not yet finished with. I invite you to join me in continuing to grow this project. I welcome your comments, your feedback, and your suggestions here.

I thank all who have contributed to this work–in a myriad of ways–and I hope that, perhaps in some small way, this work will be of benefit for you and for all who come across this site.

All best,

Diane Morrow