Diane Morrow

Quest: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 1, 2007 in Healing Images

In The Wounded Storyteller, a book I plan to write about soon, the author, Arthur Frank, writes about the possibility of illness being transformed by an image of quest. He writes [p. 115]: Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. Illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest. What is quested for may never be wholly clear, but the quest is defined by the ill person’s belief that something is to be gained through the experience. This is not to say that illness is ordinarily welcome—or that it’s all for the good. Not like that. In my experience, it’s rarely like that. (And I doubt that Arthur Frank is implying that it’s like that.) Rather, he’s pointing to that possibility that illness—or grief—or loss—or difficulties of different sorts—the possibility that any one of these can serve as an occasion that can initiate something that can be called, for lack of a better word, a journey. As Frank himself mentions [p. 117], the use of the word journey for various experiences may have become something of a fad of late, but that doesn’t mean that it has no meaning—or that it can’t be useful. For me, the most useful thing about these words—journey—quest—is that they raise the possibility that illness and suffering might not merely be lost time. One can be moving even when it doesn’t feel as if one is moving. One could begin a journey of this sort and end up somewhere entirely unexpected—or one could come home at the end and begin to realize that one has brought something back—something of value—something of beauty. Which is not to say that most of us don’t resist these kinds of journeys, especially at first—or as long as we think we can get away with...

March Index

Posted by Diane Morrow on in Indexes

Index (in chronological order) Quest: An Image for Writing and Healing The Wounded Storyteller I–The Restitution Narrative The Wounded Storyteller II–The Chaos Narrative Chaos: An Image for Writing and Healing Mary Swander’s Fifth Chair: Honoring the Chaos Narrative The Wounded Storyteller III–The Quest Narrative Quest: A Word-Map from Visual Thesaurus Writing Idea #26: Figuring Out Where One is on the Map Toni Morrison on Beowulf and Grendel The North Star and a Small Beautiful Boat Writing Idea#27: What Am I Here For? (I) Writing Idea #27: What Am I Here For (II) Writing Idea #28: Consulting with the Wizard of Oz Swimming to Antarctica: A Recommended Book The Wreck and the Treasure Writing Idea #29: A Title for Your Quest Writing Idea #30: Choosing Chapter...

Writing and Healing Idea #25: A Memo at Your Breakfast Plate

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 27, 2007 in Writing Ideas

It occurs to me that it might be okay to borrow Salinger’s Seymour for an idea for writing and healing. You could imagine that you write some piece of your story, and you could imagine that Seymour reads it while you are sleeping. You could imagine that when you wake in the morning there is an envelope at your breakfast plate. You open the envelope. Inside is a memo. Inside he has written—what? That he can see the leaps in your story? That he’s seen how all your stars have come out? That he’s seen—what? What would you most long for him to say? You could write this down–what you most long for him to say–or for someone to say. You could write this on a piece of notepaper, or on a shirt cardboard, or on a piece of hotel stationery. You could write it at night perhaps and place it on the table where you eat your breakfast. You could write it early in the morning and place it in an envelope beneath a half of a grapefruit. And then you could read this memo with your breakfast as a way to begin your...

A Memo from J.D. Salinger’s Seymour: An Image for Writing and Healing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 25, 2007 in Healing Images

One of the first writing workshops I ever took—this at the University of Missouri in Columbia—was taught by Janet Desaulniers, a woman who I’ve written about here before. One evening she began class by reading to us an extended passage from a J.D. Salinger story. The workshop was a fiction-writing workshop. She’d been reading our stories for weeks. And she prefaced these pages by Salinger by telling us that she sometimes felt a lot of responsibility, knowing that, at least for some of us, she was our first reader. She took this seriously—being a reader. It was one of the things that made her a good teacher. The passage she read was from, “Seymour, an Introduction,” this one in a series of stories that Salinger wrote about the Glass family. In this particular story, Buddy Glass, a writer, is telling about his older brother, Seymour, a young man whom he idolized and who is now dead. In the passage she read to us Buddy Glass is telling about a time when he was twenty-one years old and living with his brother, and had the habit of reading his stories aloud to him. And Seymour would then write responses to these stories, lengthy responses, sometimes writing them on shirt cardboards, or on whatever he could find at hand. Here is one particular memo, this written by Seymour on notepaper from the Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and placed on Buddy’s breakfast plate beneath a half a grapefruit. It’s daylight out, and I’ve been sitting here since you went to bed. What bliss it is to be your first reader. It would be straight bliss if I didn’t think you valued my opinion more than your own. It really doesn’t seem right to me that you should rely so heavily on my opinion of your stories. That is, you. . . . You must know yourself that this story is full of big jumps. Leaps. When you first went to bed, I thought for a while that I ought to wake up everybody in the house and throw a party for our marvelous jumping brother. What am I, that I didn’t wake everybody up? . . . Excuse this. I’m writing very fast now. I think this new story is the one you’ve been waiting for. And me, too, in a way. You know it’s mostly pride that’s keeping me up. I think that’s my main worry. For your own sake, don’t make me proud of you. I think that’s exactly what I’m trying to say. If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up till five only because all of your stars are out, and for no other reason. Excuse the underlining, but that’s the first thing I’ve ever said about one of your stories that makes my head go up and down. Please don’t let me say anything else. . . . I could write more here. But I’m thinking perhaps that I shouldn’t write anything else. Except perhaps to say that I think this whole notion of a first reader—and how that first reader responds—or how one imagines that this first reader might respond—has something to do with writing and...

Writing and Healing Idea #24: Deciding Who to Bring on the Train

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 22, 2007 in Writing Ideas

A patient helped me discover this writing idea. She uses imagery to help manage chronic pain. And one of the images she’s found helpful recently is to imagine that she’s falling asleep on a train and as she’s falling asleep she can hear the sound of the wheels on the tracks and the sound is very soothing and she’s lying very still—on a clean soft pillow—clean sheets–and she can look outside the window at the landscape if she wants—or not—and all the time she’s being carried to a place where the pain is becoming less and less and less. One of the things she’s discovered as this train imagery has developed is that she can decide who to bring on the train. She can decide who to have outside her compartment, riding on the train with her—and she can decide who to invite inside her compartment—and when. She can decide who she’d like to have for company. She can decide who she might want to have available if something should happen—say if the pain becomes worse. She can bring along a dozen people—or one—or none. But in any case she gets to decide, in this imagery, who to bring on the train. And it occurred to me that this image could be translated as an idea for writing. Say that you are beginning to write. Say that you have decided to do a year of writing and healing—or a month of writing and healing—or fifteen minutes of writing and healing. Say that you imagine that as you begin this writing—this writing project—say that you are boarding a train. And say then that you get to decide who will be riding this train with you. And say that it can be anyone at all—persons living or dead—persons real or imagined—some persons perhaps that you’ve only read about in books or some persons perhaps that you’ve conjured in your imagination. Who would you like to bring on the...

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