Diane Morrow

826 Valencia

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 27, 2011 in Blog, Healing Corridor

I believe in the power of writing. I believe magical things can happen when spaces are provided for people to write, and to be nurtured in that writing. I believe something especially powerful can happen when these spaces are provided for young people. And say that you could have a pirate store at the entrance to such a place, a store that sells eye patches and peg legs and vials of “Scurvy Begone”? A place where young people could have fun while they were finding their writing voice. Might that place not be nearly perfect? The place exists. 826 Valencia. A non-profit writing center for young people ages 6-18 in the Bay Area. All their programs, from after-school tutoring to helping young people publish books, are free of charge. Here’s a brief history, taken from their website: Named after our street location in the Mission District of San Francisco, 826 Valencia was founded in 2002 by educator Nínive Calegari and author Dave Eggers, who were looking for a way to support overburdened teachers and connect talented working adults with the students who could use their help the most. Because our space was zoned for retail, we needed to open a store. After briefly considering a hot dog stand, we looked at the ship-like surfaces of the stripped-down space, a former gym, and decided to open a pirate store instead. Behind the store we built a writing lab, designed to be a place kids would want to spend time, with a cozy reading tent, big work tables, and lots of books. Word spread quickly, and soon every chair was filled with students working on their writing with our trained tutors. We currently serve over 6,000 students a year thanks to our corps of over 1,700 volunteers. Here’s a short video, featuring a day in the life of the Writing Center. I’m especially impressed with the comments of the mother–and with the sense of community offered at the center. And here’s a longer video—a TED Talk where Dave Eggers, author and 826 Valencia co-founder, speaks, among other things, about the value of one-on-one attention for students–about shining a beam of light on a student’s writing. Also the value of giving students the gift of seeing their work published. How the pirate supply store became a kind of happy accident that brought donors and volunteers into the center. How the concept has spread to other cities. And his wish for a thousand more inspiring ideas and stories for transforming public schools and education. This is where I first heard about the center. See also: An interview with the Wall Street Journal The Pirate Store Young Author’s Book Project Healing Corridor You can donate to 826 Valencia here. [The photo at the top of this post is taken from the 826 Valencia...

Writing and Healing on the Radio

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 20, 2011 in Blog, Healing Resources

Last month I had the good fortune to get an invitation from Anne Hallward, a psychiatrist in Portland, Maine, who hosts a weekly show called Safe Space Radio. She was doing a series on writing and healing and invited me to participate in a phone interview with her. The show aired last week and is now available: Writing and Healing on the Radio I have to admit—I was initially wary of listening to it. It’s not as if I didn’t feel the interview had gone well. Anne has a gracious style of interviewing (she reminds me a bit of Terry Gross from Fresh Air) and I felt during the interview that she’d made a wonderful space for me to talk about a subject which I love. But I was still wary. I’m sometimes not so crazy about the sound of my recorded voice. So this past Sunday, I listened to it for the first time. I put the 30-minute interview on my iPod and took it with me on a walk. Maybe it helped that it was a beautiful day. And it definitely helped that Anne has skills with interviewing and editing. I walked and listened to the podcast and I realized something. It isn’t really so much anymore about my voice or how I sound. The interview isn’t really about me—and I love this. It’s about writing and healing. It’s about these experiences I’ve had and these things I’ve learned in different places and somehow it became this opportunity to try to weave them together to make something. This felt at the time of the interview—and feels again now—like a gift. To be able to try to make coherent, however imperfectly, some of my thoughts on writing and healing—some of which have been simmering for years. To weave together some of what I’ve learned in all these different places, going back—yikes!—to when I was in my twenties. I’m grateful for the generous space Anne made, the easy conversation within which I was able to share these thoughts and stories. And it’s nice too to think that someone might hear one such story and find it of use. The radio show itself is a great resource on a range of topics. I’ll write about this more soon. Meanwhile, here, again, for convenience, is the 30 minute podcast—thoughts and stories on writing and healing on the radio with Dr. Anne. Writing and Healing on the Radio If you click the link, you’ll notice it will open a flash player to hear the podcast. If you right-click the link you will have an option to save as an mp3 and make it portable. See also: Safe Space Radio: A Live Forum for Courageous Conversations [Image on post is a clip from banner photo at Safe Space Radio]...

Like a Desert Flower

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 14, 2011 in Blog, Healing Poetry

Because this month I am featuring Sakeena Yacoobi’s work at the Afghan Institute for Learning, I went looking for a poem out of Afghanistan. I was delighted to find this one, “Like a Desert Flower,” by Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal, a former journalist and popular woman poet, who lives and writes in the Pashto region of Afghanistan. Like a desert flower waiting for rain, like a river-bank thirsting for the touch of pitchers, like the dawn longing for light; and like a house, like a house in ruins for want of a woman – the exhausted ones of our times need a moment to breathe, need a moment to sleep, in the arms of peace, in the arms of peace. I read this poem as a plea. A poet speaking for the people around her – the exhausted ones of our times. In Afghanistan, but perhaps not only in Afghanistan. All the exhausted ones of our times who live, for whatever reason, without peace. And who need it, who wait for it. Like that parched riverbank waiting for water. Or like that house waiting for a woman to restore it. When I become aware of some of the exhausted ones of our times, even as simply as by thinking of them, or reading a new poem, it places my own intermittent exhaustion (more common now that school has begun again) into a larger perspective. Something about this seems important. It doesn’t necessarily dwarf my own exhaustion – though it could. It’s more like it connects it to something larger than me. I also feel a connection between this poem and the Machado poem, Last Night As I Was Sleeping. His poem contains some of the water that this poem longs for. And it occurs to me how difficult it must be to connect with any kind of aqueduct of water inside when one lives in the absence of peace. There are so many different ways to become parched. And I’m so grateful for water – in all its forms. Some years ago now, I saw the poet and peace activist, Daniel Berrigan, speak. He kept saying, over and over, that peace is not a quick fix. It takes time. And I’m thinking this morning how the work of Sakeena Yacoobi is not about the quick fix but is about a deep and long-term investment in her country. Like a woman coming upon a house in ruins and deciding to begin the long patient work of doing something about it? Like a woman bringing water to her people? See also: Last Night As I Was Sleeping [The literal translation of “Like a Desert Flower” was made by Dawood Azami and the final translated version of the poem is by The Poetry Translation Workshop.] [Photo of a house in ruins in Herat is from The Telegraph via Associated...

The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife’s Memoir by Patricia Harman

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2011 in Blog, Healing Books

Oh, I do love this book. Reading it has been like coming across a lovely song—a voice—that I didn’t know existed. A surprise on a late summer day. This summer I took several crates of books to the used bookstore to trade for credit. Much of my credit I’m saving for when students start putting in their requests off my booklist, but while I was there the other week I idled through the shelves and came across this memoir by midwife and nurse practitioner Patricia Harman. I opened to the first line: I have insomnia…and I drink a little. I might as well tell you. In the middle of the night, I drink scotch when I can’t sleep. Actually, I can’t sleep most nights; actually, every night. Even before I stopped delivering babies, I wanted to write about the women. How can you not like a book that begins this way? I suppose I feel a connection because it’s the kind of memoir I had at one time thought I might write, and then never did. It also takes me back to the summer I spent in West Virginia between my third and fourth years of medical school, working in a clinic and getting to know some of the lay midwives in the county. And then in Washington, DC, when I worked as a family physician, I was fortunate to work alongside midwives. I’ve more than once dreamed about them. At different times during my life, when I’ve been in need of help or company, I’ve dreamt about a midwife and it’s always been such a healing dream. So I have a tender spot for midwives. This the reason I bought the book, and was predisposed to like it. And then I took it out to the porch on a summer afternoon, one of my last summer afternoons before returning to school—I’d been awake that morning uncharacteristically at 4 AM, unable to get back to sleep, anxious like a kid before the first day. I took the book out to the porch and I read beneath the fan and drifted into sleep and it was like spending time with the midwives again. Waking with that kind of calm rested feeling like you’ve just been with someone who knows something and this something that they know—you might not even be able to put your finger on it—but it’s just what you need. I’m realizing something—I’m writing everything about my experience of reading the book, and not so much about the book itself. This is not turning into a book review. But sometimes that’s the way it is with a book. It’s the feel of a book that matters. The voice and the images become what matters. A nurse midwife in West Virginia. The women who come to see her and they strip off their clothes and put on that thin blue cotton gown for the exam—and they tell her things. Stories. And then the midwife and her stories become a kind of good company....

Tuscany

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 2, 2011 in Uncategorized

Some years ago now, while staying alone in a cabin at Wildacres, a retreat center in the Blue Ridge Mountains, I had a dream about a former patient who I will here call Nora. In the dream I’d gone to visit her. There were several of us visiting, sitting on chairs and couches. She was presenting a slide show. I understood this was a slide show of places she’d been. When I woke, I had the sense, as one does sometimes after dreams, that I was meant to be paying close attention, but on first waking I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember any of the individual pictures. Nora was a teacher, fifty-seven years old, bright, very articulate. She had a PhD in art history, was conversant with entire centuries I know next to nothing about. She also had metastatic breast cancer. She liked, she told me once, to read Samurai novels, these novels, I learned, set in seventeenth century Japan. She told me that she liked the way the setting in these novels was inextricably entwined with the action, so that you were always acutely aware as you read of the slant of light in a particular scene and what flowers were blossoming, and whether, for instance, a particular petal had fallen. Nora, herself, was acutely aware of setting. She had a strong sense of aesthetics, a love of visual beauty. For several years she’d owned an art gallery in Manhattan. She’d come to North Carolina with her husband, taught art history at the School of the Arts here for several years, and then taught Language Arts in one of the middle schools, this until she got her diagnosis of breast cancer, and then got word that it had spread into the liver and into the bone. Two years prior to the dream in which she’d showed me her slides, she’d put no small amount of energy into planning a trip to Commonweal, a retreat center in Bolinas, California considered by many to be the premier cancer retreat center in this country, a stunning place located on sixty acres in the Point Reyes National Seashore. She was very much looking forward to it. But just a little over a week before she was to leave for Commonweal, Nora fell down in the driveway of her home and broke a vertebra, this landing her in the hospital and effectively canceling her trip. The next time I saw her she told me that she knew now that that had been her last window—her last chance to take a trip of this magnitude. Her belly by this point was swollen from the tumors that herd arisen in her liver. Her bones ached. She was, she told me, very very tired. But she also told me this. That not long after she broke her vertebra, and came to realize she was not going to make it to Commonweal after all, she had a series of dreams. These were dreams, she said, about places she’d traveled. Tuscany figured largely in one of them. When this series of dreams ended, she told me she understood now that all of the places were deep inside her, the memories, that she carried these places with her now, and it would no longer be necessary for...

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