Month 3: Considering Healing as a Story
What if healing were, at least in part, a constellation of 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?
Several pieces below invite you to consider this in different ways. Any one of them could be used as a writing prompt for this process.
A constellation of 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...
Instructions by Neil Gaiman
I’ve for a long time been interested in poems and excerpts that can invite writing and I’ve recently come across this poem by Neil Gaiman that seems especially well suited for this. The poem is a set of instructions for “what to do if you find yourself inside a fairy tale.” It begins: Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before. Say “please” before you open the latch, go through, walk down the path. I like the way the poem begins with such direct instructions—we’re in this...
The Handless Maiden: A Story for Difficult Times
In Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst and storyteller, retells a story about a handless maiden. It’s a story that seems to me a kind of ideal story for a month in which I’m writing about ways in which a person can sometimes get stuck–hit obstacles–get bewildered. The story is one that I’ve found beneficial at crucial junctures in my own life, and it’s a story I have at times told in turn to patients or students when it seems that the labor...
Writing and Healing Idea #28: Consulting with the Wizard of Oz
I had a dream the other night that a patient came to me and she asked me if I thought that it would be a good idea to bring her illness to the Wizard of Oz and ask him what to do. Inside the dream I thought about it for a while, and then I said, yes, I do think that’s a good idea, but I need you to tell me more about what that would be like for you. What would it be like? Say, that you were...
Toni Morrison on Beowulf and Grendel: Two Very Different Quest Stories
The evening before last, I got a chance to see, in Greensboro, a lecture by Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Song of Solomon, among other novels. I’d never seen her speak before. She’s a natural storyteller—dramatic, funny, pausing in all the right places. She held the audience in her hands. And the stories she happened to tell were, interestingly enough, quest stories. She began with a brief introduction—her belief in the importance and power of story. She then proceeded to retell the ancient story...
The Wounded Storyteller (Part One)–The Restitution Narrative
There are certain books that I can remember where I was when I first began to read them. Perhaps something like this has happened for you. I found this book in the Wake Forest Library, and I took the book and began reading it on a low stone wall near a creek not far from the library. This was several years ago now. As I read I had a feeling as if thoughts and stories inside my head were literally rearranging and falling into new patterns. It was as...