Welcome to a Second Year of Writing and Healing
This site is a continuation of One Year of Writing and Healing, a site I began in August of 2006 and which continues to be a work in progress. One Year of Writing and Healing offers links to research, books of interest, poems, and also my own reflections. It explores writing and healing as a developmental process—beginning with writing to create a healing place, writing to find a healing language, and so forth, on through writing as a tool for exploring goals and dreams.
This site, beginning now, in September of 2007, picks up where One Year of Writing and Healing left off. I think of One Year of Writing and Healing as a kind of foundation and this—Year 2—as a site where I plan to build from that foundation.
A second story?
I find myself at the end of one year of writing and healing—which for me, honestly, is more like several years of writing and healing—not feeling like I’ve exhausted the topic, but, instead, feeling as if I’m left with more questions than answers.
Here are some of the questions that interest me now as I begin another year of writing and healing:
• What is healing exactly? (I’m still asking this question.)
• What’s the relationship between healing and health? Healing and cure?
• What fosters healing?
• What role can writing play in catalyzing healing?
• What role can reading play?
• What role can the landscape play?
• How does the institution of medicine foster healing?
• How does this same institution sometimes interrupt healing?
• How can writing catalyze repair when healing has been interrupted?
• How might spirituality and the language of such inform writing and healing?
You might also gain a clue as to what I’m about in the coming year—or aim to be about—if you take note of the Box of Books which I posted below and which I plan to draw from over the course of this year to help me explore these questions.
Please know that whether you’re visiting for the first time or whether you’ve been visiting for a while, I welcome your thoughts and questions. In particular, this year, I’m interested in the kinds of questions you may have when it comes to the topic of writing and healing. To facilitate this, I’ve placed a link to my e-mail address in the upper left-hand corner of this site. My experience over the past year has been that each bit of feedback I’ve received has the potential to help me—and perhaps us—whomever us is—develop this work further.
Finally, if you are engaging in the process of writing and/or healing, I wish you well with the process. I wish for you safety and consolation, hope, creativity, a sense of discovery, adventure—and also the knowledge that though sometimes it might seem like there is no company, well, there is.
