Diane Morrow

Fiction Writing as a Prescription for Grief?

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 18, 2007 in A Different Perspective

Last week there was an interesting article in our local paper, the Winston Salem-Journal, entitled “Lee Smith’s Pain,” by Martha Waggoner. The article describes how Lee Smith, the novelist, now living in Hillsborough, North Carolina, found writing to be a remedy for grief. But—and I think this is the interesting part—she didn’t write directly about her grief. She found a remedy in writing fiction. Lee Smith is the author of several novels, including Black Mountain Breakdown, Family Linen, and The Last Girls. A little over three years ago now, her son Josh, only thirty-three, died of acute cardiomyopathy. Lee Smith describes herself as feeling, afterward, as if her finger was stuck in an electrical outlet, all the time. She had, before her son’s death, been working on a new book, a story of an orphan girl named Molly in post-Civil War North Carolina. After her son’s death she put the story aside. She describes herself as being unable to eat, unable to sleep. She had trouble finding the school where she’d been teaching for twenty years. She had trouble finding the grocery store. She lost thirty pounds. She began seeing a therapist. And when, after several weeks, her therapist offered to write her a prescription, she figured it would be for some kind of drug that might numb her pain—and she was ready for such. Instead, the prescription simply stated: “Write every day.” Specifically, her therapist (I suspect he was a psychiatrist if he was writing prescriptions) told her he thought she would benefit by getting back to the book she’d been working on, that she might benefit from working on a narrative other than her own. And that’s what Smith did. She went back the story of that orphan girl, Molly, that she’d put aside after her son’s death. And, in the article, she’s quoted as saying this about returning to Molly’s story: I was in a very heightened emotional state the whole time I was writing it, and it meant everything to me to have it to write. And Molly’s story became my story, or at least a receptacle of all this emotion I didn’t have anything to do with. Molly’s story became my story. That seems somehow at the crux of it. A way to write her own story without writing her own story. The kind of catharsis that can come sometimes with a bit of distance. Incidentally, that story of Molly as an orphan became a book, On Agate Hill, Lee Smith’s twelfth novel, published in 2006, and well-reviewed, including this review in the Washington Post. I’ve not read the book yet, but I plan to look for...

Writing and Healing Idea #21: Meanwhile

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 16, 2007 in Writing Ideas

What I like best about Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Wild Geese,” is the way it manages to hold two such vastly different things in such an apparently simple poem. Despair and the wild geese heading home. Not just one or the other. Both. She manages the juxtaposition of these two things—the leap from the one to the other—with that single word: meanwhile. And, in so doing, the poem itself becomes a kind of invitation. First a literal invitation: “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” And, then, an invitation to consider what else might be happening meanwhile. So, the writing idea—- Write for ten or fifteen minutes about a moment of despair—it can be your own despair, or someone else’s, or it can be a fictional moment—a character, perhaps, experiencing a moment of despair. And then—stop—and skip down a line or two and write about some of the things that might be happening meanwhile—- You can read more about “The Wild Geese” here....

Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 14, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Healing Images, Healing Poetry

Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker. And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t. I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...

Writing and Healing Idea #20: Finding a Benefit in Adversity

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 11, 2007 in Writing Ideas

For this writing idea I’m going to set down, first, the instructions that Annette Stanton and Sharon Danoff-Burg used in the study that I wrote about earlier this week. These instructions are specifically written for a woman with breast cancer. Following these instructions, I’m including a slight revision, a set of instructions that might be applied in the wake of any adversity. An adversity I’m going to call X. What is your X? An illness? A loss? A setback? X can be whatever you would like for X to be. And you can, if you like, choose the first X that comes to mind. You really can’t do this wrong. (And of course if it’s too soon to find a benefit in X feel free to skip this writing exercise—to save it for next year—or for your next life for that matter. If you would prefer to deal with the part of X that hasn’t been so beneficial you may want to look at Writing and Healing Idea #12 or Writing and Healing Idea #14) 1. The Stanton-Danoff-Burg Instructions: Writing About Breast Cancer [from The Writing Cure] What I would like you to write about for these four sessions [of twenty minutes each] are any POSITIVE thoughts and feelings about your experience with breast cancer. I realize that women with breast cancer experience a full range of emotions that often includes some positive emotions, thoughts, and changes, and in this writing exercise I want you to focus only on the positive thoughts and feelings that you have experienced over the course of your cancer. Ideally, I would like you to focus on positive thoughts or feelings that you have not discussed in great detail with others. You might also tie your positive thoughts and feelings about your experiences with cancer to other parts of your life—your childhood, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be. Again, the most important part of your writing is that you really focus on your positive thoughts and feelings. The only rule is that you write continuously for the entire time. If you run out of things to say, just repeat what you have already written. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling or sentence structure. Don’t worry about erasing or crossing things out. Just write. 2. The Stanton-Danoff-Burg Instructions Revised: Writing About X What I would like you to write about for these four sessions [of twenty minutes each] are any POSITIVE thoughts and feelings about your experience with X. I realize that people who have undergone X experience a full range of emotions that often includes some positive emotions, thoughts, and changes, and in this writing exercise I want you to focus only on the positive thoughts and feelings that you have experienced over the course of X. Ideally, I would like you to focus on positive thoughts or feelings that you have not discussed in great detail with others. You might also tie your positive thoughts and feelings about your experiences with X to other parts of your life—your childhood, people you love, who you are, or who you want to be. Again, the most important part of your writing is that you really focus on your positive thoughts and feelings. The only rule is that you write continuously...

Writing and Healing and Breast Cancer

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 9, 2007 in Uncategorized

Is there a benefit to writing for women with breast cancer? What kind of writing is most beneficial? (And might the answers to these questions be extrapolated to other groups?) To look at the first two questions, Annette Stanton, a psychologist at the University of Kansas, and Sharon Danoff-Burg, psychologist at State University of New York in Albany, conducted a study several years ago now in which they divided a group of women with breast cancer into three groups: A group instructed to write a detailed account of the facts of their breast cancer and its treatment A group instructed to write their deepest thoughts and feelings about their experience with breast cancer. This is often called expressive writing. A group instructed to write only about their positive thoughts and feelings in connection to their experience of cancer All of the women completed four twenty-minute writing sessions. And here are some things they learned from this group of women: Women who wrote about facts and women who did expressive writing reported more distress immediately after writing when compared with women who wrote only about positive feelings. At one and three months after writing, women in all three groups reported overall more positive quality of life, less distress, and “high vigor” compared with similar cancer patients who hadn’t written. Three months after writing, women who did expressive writing, and the women who wrote about positive thoughts and feelings reported a significant decrease in physical symptoms and they also had fewer visits to the doctor for cancer-related illness than women who wrote only about facts—or women who didn’t write at all. Writing about thoughts and feelings led to significant physical benefit. Thus, along with expressive writing, writing about positive thoughts and feelings—writing about the good part—was shown to be beneficial for women with breast cancer. Interestingly, though, and, I think, wisely, the authors, in the wake of these finding, advise caution in asking (or, worse, prescribing) persons who are facing adversity to find a positive benefit. They write: Indeed, exhorting individuals to ‘look on the bright side’ or to focus on a specific advantage in their misfortune is likely to be interpreted as minimizing or not understanding their plight. And they go on to name three reasons they think asking for a positive benefit was effective in this particular study: They did not suggest any woman find a particular benefit—but, instead, let women have complete control over any benefit they named and explored. The women were asked to write only after the primary treatment for their cancer had been completed. They had evidence that these women had already had opportunities to process negative emotions in other settings. This is an interesting, and potentially significant, study. And, granting, first, that all research in this field is still preliminary and that more research needs to be done, I’m taking from this study five useful bits: First, that women with breast cancer (And all women with cancer? All people with cancer? All people with illness?) have the potential to gain significant benefit from writing—whether they’re writing about all their thoughts and feelings or whether they’re writing about positive thoughts and feelings that have begun to emerge. Second, that there may be value, at some point, in focusing solely on the good part. Third, that...

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