Archives | Writing and Healing

A constellation of stories

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 19, 2022 in Stories

Some years ago now I was leading a writing and healing group for recovering cancer patients. I asked them to picture what they saw in their minds when they heard the word healing. Healing is . . . what? “Healing is movement,” one woman said. “What do you see when you hear the word movement?” I asked her. “What do you see inside your head?” “I’m mulching,” she said. “I’m working in the garden, raking. I’m thinking about this T-shirt I have that says, ‘I’m not getting older, I just need repotting.’” I can relate. (Who of us wouldn’t love some days to simply be repotted?) “Healing is the apex,” another woman added. “Healing is eureka. I see myself throwing my hands up in the air. After I’ve gotten good news on the telephone. The doctor called. I was so afraid it was going to be bad news, but then it was good news.” Healing is mulching. Raking. Repotting. Healing is the apex. Healing is eureka—that longed-for good news on the telephone. “Healing,” N said, “is a taskmaster.” There was a pause after she spoke. I could feel a slight shift in the room. “Would you mind terribly?” I asked, “If I were to ask you what you see in your head when you hear the word taskmaster?” She answered immediately. “Ichabod Crane.” It was such a strong and vivid response. I could see the image clearly. That stooped and bony man from a book of childhood tales. The long nose. Those pointed shoes. Ichabod Crane is the schoolmaster in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” He teaches in a one-room schoolhouse. When students don’t study properly he strikes them with a birch rod, the rod landing with a sharp thwack on their shoulders. Is healing really like that? Is it like that sometimes? Is it like that for some people? And if healing is Ichabod Crane, what might illness and trouble be? The student? The hard lesson? The inkwell? The wooden desk? The bony horse? The stormy night? The sleepy hollow? “Illness,” S says, “is a jagged torn place.” It’s another strong metaphor, and one that seems to open a door to a whole host of others. “Cancer is a grass-covered black pit,” someone says. “Cancer is a dragon,” someone adds. R pulls the images together. “Cancer is a dragon at the bottom of a grass-covered black pit.” It’s the beginning of another full and possible story. A hero or heroine has fallen into a pit and now she’s down there with the dragon, has looked perhaps into his yellow eye. And now what? So many possible stories. What if healing were, at least in part, a constellation of such stories? And what if some portion of the work of writing and healing was simply to consider this? To consider that healing might be less like fixing a car or a machine and more like (or at least also like) discovering and crafting a story? What if story could be a way to come to know something that we need to know? What if? ________________________________________________ Picture is from Penguin Random...

The Cure by Andrea Barrett

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 16, 2022 in Blog, Healing Places, Uncategorized

I have found a cure cottage come to life in a piece of fiction. Everything, thinks Elizabeth, is in order. Ms. Barrett continues: Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms. In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table. In the kitchen—the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand—and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day. There’s a sense of healing place. A sense of order. And a sense that Andrea Barrett has all the time in the world in which to tell us about it. Because of the sensory detail, the rhythm of the prose, I feel my mind slowing down as I read. I feel myself drawn into this world, imagining it. Beginning in the Adirondacks, the story moves back and forth in place, and time, tracing the lives of two women as they come together to run this boardinghouse. Elizabeth, the housekeeper. Nora, the nurse. Nora begins her training in Detroit with a root-and-herb healer Fannie, first living in Fannie’s spare room, going out with her to collect herbs and roots, drying the herbs and roots in her kitchen, making house calls to the sick, then working for a time in a Soldier’s Home with civil war veterans, before making her way to the Adirondacks, her brother’s inn, and beginning to “doctor” the consumptives who have come there to stay. She tries to explain to her brother about this work she’s found: ‘This is what I’m meant to do,” she said—although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise. ‘It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.’ Elizabeth, the younger of the two women, first makes her way to the Adirondacks with her mother, Clara, arriving that first summer at the inn where Nora lives with her brother. Over time, Elizabeth, still a young woman, attaches herself to Nora, and the two women create together the cure cottage, working together for seven years before Nora dies and Elizabeth continues to carry on the work in her absence. The story opens with the cottage. It also closes with it. There’s a nice sense of symmetry—and of culmination. Elizabeth’s point of view. Elizabeth’s discovery. A wonderful play on the word cure-cottage. What the house itself has come to mean for her. Here is her house. Not a duty, but her living self. It is as if, she thinks, as she moves toward Martin and Andrew and all the others up the walk and the clean brick steps, her hand reaching of its own accord for the polished brass knob in the four-paneled...