Diane Morrow

Writing and Healing Idea #7: Has Writing Ever Changed Your Life?

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 16, 2006 in Writing Ideas

Consider a time when you wrote something—a letter—a journal entry—a word—that changed something—anything—then begin to write about it—write about what you wrote—and then the change that happened after—or during—no matter how large or small the change—no matter how quiet. Or, alternatively, consider a time when you read something—a poem—a book—a letter—and the words you read caused something to shift—something—anything—write about the words—the experience of reading those words—write about the change that happened. Consider these words from a poem, “The Class,” in a collection entitled, The Crack in Everything, by Alicia Ostriker: Perhaps it is not the poet who is healed but someone else, years later. ...

Still Life with Chickens: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 11, 2006 in Healing Resources, Recommended Books

I like books that name the concrete things—the resources—it takes to make a life. I also like books about starting over. Thus, The Boxcar Children. And, a more grown-up version of starting over: Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea. The memoir, written by Catherine Goldhammer, and published this past May, describes Goldhammer’s move, newly divorced, with her 12-year-old daughter, from a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood to a small cottage on a pond near the ocean. She did not, she tells us at the outset, have a year in Provence or a villa under the Tuscan sun. What she had was her cottage in a town on a peninsula wedged between the Boston Harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, a town she describes thus— Once the home of a large amusement park with a famous roller coaster, it had developed haphazardly, with recreation rather than posterity in mind. Big houses sat cheek by jowl with tiny ones, shoehorned together on tiny streets. Some of them were beautiful and some of them were decidedly not. The seaside lawns tried valiantly to be green, but they were small, and some of them had remnants of the amusement park in them: an oversized pink teacup with bench seats, a faded turquoise bumper car. Goldhammer’s memoir is filled with vivid tangible named things: That oversized pink teacup A large salt pond A new coat of off-white paint Wood floors Dragonflies And, of course, chickens Specific chickens— Rhode Island Reds A Silver Laced Wyandotte A Light Brahma called Big Yellow And then all the supplies needed to take care of those chickens— A brooder light A rope Vinegar Peroxide A refrigerator box Duct tape A utility knife Hardware cloth A handsaw. . . Here’s something else I like about Still Life with Chickens—Catherine Goldhammer is as resourceful as those boxcar children. She makes do. She does not, for instance, have that year in Provence. Nor does she have a table saw. At one point in her story, she sets out to make a particular kind of chicken run—a triangular structure called an ark. Before she builds the ark she names what she needs: a table saw, an electric miter saw, and sawhorses. Then she acknowledges that she has none of these things. What she does have: a dull handsaw, a right angle, a pair of green plastic chairs. She makes do. All in the company of six chickens who cause her at times to question her sanity. But then—the eggs. Page 112. Eventually we got blue eggs and green eggs, pink eggs and brown eggs. We got whitish eggs, speckled eggs, freckled eggs, and eggs with white patches. We had one enormous egg with two yolks, and a wide variety of other sizes: small and oval, big and round, tall and thin. Sometimes I found eggs that had just been laid, warm and slightly damp. Finding a warm egg felt miraculous. Putting a warm egg into someone’s suspecting hand was like handing them the moon. Ah, the eggs. Unlike The Boxcar Children, there’s no rich grandfather who steps in at the end and makes everything easier. That’s one of the things I like about Still Life with Chickens. It’s one of the things that makes it a grown-up...

Writing and Healing Idea #6: Discovering Needs and Desires

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 8, 2006 in Writing Ideas

Here’s that succinct sentence again by Laura King, researcher in writing and health: WRITING ABOUT TOPICS THAT ALLOW US TO LEARN ABOUT OUR OWN NEEDS AND DESIRES MAY BE A WAY TO HARNESS THE HEALING BENEFITS OF WRITING. One could stop right here, right now, and write this question at the top of a clean sheet of paper: WHAT DO I NEED? Or, WHAT DO I WANT? Or, WHAT DO I LONG FOR? And one could write pages for an entire month (or a year) in response to this question. I suspect this would be life-altering. Or, then again, one could imagine one is an orphan, out on one’s own, and one discovers a boxcar like those children in the book. How would you set up your boxcar? What provisions would you lay in? What do you absolutely need to survive in your boxcar? And what else do you need? And then, if you like, you can consider that which you do you not particularly need but you’d really like to have it in your boxcar—because it would make your boxcar more comfortable—or more beautiful—or just...

The Boxcar Children: A Primer on Gathering the Essentials

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 6, 2006 in Healing Resources

I liked the book, The Boxcar Children, when I was a child. I liked the original book in the series, the one that describes how four children survive as orphans by making a home in a boxcar. The children are so competent, and so resourceful. After they become orphaned, the four children spend their small savings on milk and bread and yellow cheese. They pick blueberries in the woods. They discover an abandoned boxcar and they begin to make a home there, carrying pine needles into the boxcar and heaping them into four piles to make beds. They discover a creek that spills over into a waterfall. The water is cold. They find a hole in a rock behind the waterfall and the hole becomes their refrigerator. They’re so ingenious. They haul stones to build a fireplace. They dam the creek to make a swimming pool. They scavenge a dump and bring back treasure—a white pitcher, a teapot, a kettle, a bowl, three cups, five spoons. Henry, the eldest boy, manages to get a job caring for someone’s yard. One of his chores involves thinning the vegetable garden. He saves the vegetables he’s thinned—baby carrots and turnips and tiny onions. He then buys meat with the dollar he’s earned and carries all of this back to the boxcar. The oldest girl, Jesse, takes the meat and miniature vegetables and makes a stew. It’s a bit of a fantasy, how neatly things work out for the children, and it becomes even tidier toward the end of the book when their grandfather finds them, and he turns out to be not only kind but rich and he takes the children into his home. But the fantasy is such a satisfying one. It offers, I suppose, a kind of catharsis. The book opens with the four children standing in front of a bakery, looking in through at the window at the bread and rolls. The children are hungry, frightened. They’re like Hansel and Gretel, children out in the world without parents. And then, bit by bit, they manage to secure precisely what they need. Shelter. Water. Food. Fire. At one point the three oldest children decide they want to teach the youngest child to read and the older children make a book for him using salvaged paper and a stick blackened in the fire. Shelter and water. Food and fire. Paper and a writing implement. The...

What should people write about to enjoy the health benefits of writing?

Posted by Diane Morrow on September 4, 2006 in Uncategorized

The seventh chapter of The Writing Cure, an anthology by researchers in the field of writing and health, is written by Laura King, a research psychologist at the University of Missouri. Near the end of her chapter she poses this question: “What should people write about to enjoy the health benefits of writing?” Her conclusion is succinct. “Writing about topics that allow us to learn about our own needs and desires may be a way to harness the positive benefits of writing.” It’s the kind of sentence that seems worth writing again, for emphasis: Writing about topics that allow us to learn about our own needs and desires may be a way to harness the positive benefits of writing. And how then does one begin this...

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