Writing and Healing: Year 2

The Cure by Andrea Barrett: A Cure Cottage Come to Life

Healing Library Entry #1
The Cure:  A novella by Andrea Barrett.  The final story in her collection, Servants of the Map.

I have found a cure cottage come to life in a piece of fiction.  Not merely a cottage but an entire world in the Adirondacks which centers around healing.  Making this novella, I think, a perfect first entry into the healing library.

Here is how Ms. Barrett begins:

Everything, thinks Elizabeth, is in order.

Everything is as it should be, exactly as she would wish it: nine o’clock, on this December day in 1905, and already breakfast has been cooked and served and cleared, Livvie and Rosellen are at the dishes, and all nine of her boarders are resting, wrapped in blankets and robes, on the lower veranda or the private porches of the upstairs rooms.  In the light, airy dining room, the new napkins look well in their rings and the cloth is crisp on the table.  In the kitchen—the girls look up as she walks by, smiling without interrupting the dance of dishes passing from basin to basin and hand to hand—and also in the mudroom, the woodshed, the smaller shed where the laundry is stored in enormous lidded crates until the boilers are fired up twice each week, everything is as it should be for this hour and minute of the day.

There’s a sense of healing place.  A sense of order.  And a sense that Andrea Barrett has all the time in the world in which to tell us about it.  Because of the sensory detail, the rhythm of the prose, I feel my mind slowing down as I read.  I feel myself drawn into this world, imagining it. 

Beginning in the Adirondacks, the story moves back and forth in place, and time, tracing the lives of two women as they come together to run this boardinghouse.  Elizabeth is the house-keeper.  Nora the nurse. 

Nora begins her training in Detroit with a root-and-herb healer Fannie, first living in her spare room, going out with her to collect herbs and roots, drying the herbs and roots in her kitchen, making house calls to the sick, then working for a time in a Soldier’s Home with civil war veterans, before making her way to the Adirondacks, her brother’s inn, and beginning to “doctor” the consumptives who have come there to stay.  She tries to explain to her brother about this work she’s found:

‘This is what I’m meant to do,” she said—although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise.  ‘It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.’

Elizabeth first makes her way to the Adirondacks with her mother, Clara, arriving that first summer at the inn where Nora lives with her brother.

In the summer of 1882 a group of poplars stood, shivering their leaves, where the cottage next to the inn is now.  Near them was the landing where the afternoon stage set down Clara Vigne’s family, along with seven other guests anxious to settle into their rooms and start their holidays.

Over time, Elizabeth, still a young woman, attaches herself to Nora, and the two women eventually create together the cure cottage, working together for seven years before Nora dies and Elizabeth continues to carry on the work in her absence.    

The story opens with the cottage.  It also closes with it.  There’s a nice sense of symmetry—and of culmination.  Elizabeth’s point of view.  Elizabeth’s discovery.  What the cure cottage has meant to her.

Here is her house.  Not a duty, but her living self.  It is as if, she thinks, as she moves toward Martin and Andrew and all the others up the walk and the clean brick steps, her hand reaching of its own accord for the polished brass knob in the four-paneled door, as if, in the order and precarious harmony of this house and those it shelters she might, for all that gets lost in this life, at last have found a cure.

(That sense of harmony again.  Like in Olive Kittredge.)

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See also:
Profile of Andrea Barrett in Ploughshares
An interview with Andrea Barrett at Identity Theory
An interview with Andrea Barrett at Salon

And from this site:
Cure Cottage: A Medicine for [Postpartum] Depression?
The Woman Who Meets the Train
Reading as Map-Making (concerning the title story in Servants of the Map)

How Might Reading Be Healing? (w/ Olive Kittredge)

Reading and Healing as a Riddle?

At the close of her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes offers an extensive and diverse bibliography.  It’s from here, for instance, that I first found my way, several years ago now, to Elaine Pagels’ work, and Judy Chicago’s work, and James Hillman’s.

I like the way Estes introduces her bibliography:

A bibliography is not meant to be a tiresome list.  It is not intended to teach a person what to think, but strives to give a body rich things to think about, to expose a person to as many ideas, therefore choices and chances as possible.

I like what she says about poets:

There are many poets represented here [in the bibliography], for they are the visionaries and historians of psychic life.  In many cases their observations and insights cut so close to the bone that they supersede the suppositions of academic psychology in both accuracy and depth.

And I especially like an idea she suggests for reading, one that I remembered from some years ago and went looking for, and found, in a footnote at the end of her bibliography:

Usually I proceed something like this; asking my students to choose three books at a time from this list and to consider them as a puzzle or riddle. . .  How do they go together?  What can one lend the other?  Compare, see what happens.  Some combinations are bomb materials.  Some create seed stock.

Reading and healing as a riddle then?  Looking for threads of connection?

Reading as seed stock?

Reading As Map-Making?

One way to look at reading: as the lifelong construction of a map by which to trace and plumb what it has ever meant to be in the world, and by which to gain perspective on that other, ongoing map—the one that marks our own passage through the world as we both find and make it.

This is Carl Phillips, a poet, writing in an essay, Another and Another Before That: Some Thoughts on Reading.

Two maps then that can be drawn from reading?  (Or drawn in part from one’s reading.)  Two maps to make?
1.    A map of the world—or a map of others being in the world
2.    A map of one’s own passage through the world

And then all the ways these two maps might intertwine and intersect?

I seem to be reading a lot of stories these days.  Along with Elizabeth Strout’s stories in Olive Kitteredge, I’ve been reading Andrea Barrett’s stories in Servants of the Map.  I just finished reading the first story in the collection, the title story.  Max, the central character is a young man, working in the Himalayas in the 1860's on the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India.  (Who knew there was such a thing?)

Max is part of a grand project.  A grand adventure.  And, among other things, he offers one response to the question of how high school math—well, trigonometry that is—might be used in the world.

Triangulation.  This, apparently, along with something called plane-tabling, was the method used for surveying and making maps in the Himalayas in the 1800’s.  I find it kind of fascinating.  (Bear with me.  Or maybe skim over this part if you’re not crazy about math.)  The method involved, first, measuring the distance between two vantage points: the base of a triangle.  Then, measuring the angles from these two vantage points to a higher point selected in the distance.  Then calculating the distance to the higher point using right triangles and trigonometry.

Here’s a diagram of triangulation via Wikipedia:

And here's how Andrea Barrett invites us to participate in triangulation in the Himalayas, this in a letter from Max back home to his wife, Clara:

Imagine a cold, weary man on top of a mountain, bent over his theodolite and waiting for a splash of light.  Far from him, on another peak, a signal squad manipulates a heliotrope (which is a circular mirror, my dear, mounted on a staff so it may be turned in any direction).  On a clear day it flashes bright with reflected sunlight.  At night it beams back the rays of a blue-burning lamp.

“Servants of the Map,” a long story which is actually a novella, consists of a collage of Max’s adventures in India alternating with letters that he writes back home to Clara.  Letters in which much is left out.  In fact, the first line of the story concerns this leaving out—these gaps in Max’s writing: “He does not write to his wife about the body found on a mountain that is numbered but still to be named: not about the bones, the shreds of tent, the fragile, browning skull.”

The story culminates in a final letter to Clara, a letter in which he needs to tell her that he has changed his mind, that instead of coming home when he planned he has decided to stay in India another year.  Ms. Barrett introduces this last letter with Max’s thoughts:

If his letters were meant to be a map of his mind, a way for her to follow his trail, then he has failed her.  Somehow, as summer comes to these peaks and he does his job for the last time, he must find a way to let her share in his journey.  But for now all he can do is triangulate the first few points.

Well, I love this—the rich and elaborate metaphor she manages to create here with triangulation.
A metaphor for writing.
And reading.
A matter of beginning with the first few points.
And then?

Here’s one more piece from Max’s letter, how the process of triangulation proceeds after the first triangle has been measured:

One of the sides of that triangle then becomes the base for a new triangle—and so the chain slowly grows, easy enough to see on paper but dearly won in life.

How Might Reading Be Healing?

First Thoughts

I received some nice responses to my questions last week about a healing library—all are appreciated.  One comment in particular seems to point to a next step: “Perhaps the question of how reading is healing might itself be the guide to sorting.”  It's a good idea I think--a place to start.

So----some first thoughts then on how reading might be healing.
Which have turned into a list:

15 Ways of Looking at Reading and Healing:

1. Reading as Entrance into a Healing Place
2. Reading as a Teacher—a source of information—the book itself, the process of reading as a teacher.
3. Reading as Company
4. Reading as Solace
5. Reading as Necessary Escape—or Respite—Reprieve
6. Reading as Discovery
7. Reading as a Form of Meditation—quieting the body and the mind—certain books and poems can do this I think—and it wouldn’t be the same of course for each person.
8. Reading as Food for the Imagination
9. Reading as a Source of Healing Images
10. Reading as a Source of Humor—and Joy
11. Reading as Connection
12. Reading as a Glimpse at a New Story—pointing to new possibilities—perhaps leading to reframing one’s own story
13. Reading as a Catalyst for Healing
14. Reading as a Catalyst for Writing
15. Reading as a Catalyst for a Healing Conversation
16. Reading as Restoring Harmony—as “an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself.”  What Plato said about the arts.  Quoted in that excellent article in The Guardian by Blake Morrison, The Reading Cure, which I wrote about briefly a few weeks back.

I’m now in the middle of reading Olive Kitteredge, a book of interconnected stories by Elizabeth Strout.  I chose her book out of the library because of a quote on the back cover by Richard Bausch, a fiction writer who was one of my teachers several years ago now.  He writes: “Elizabeth Strout restores my faith in the word, in the quality of fiction to shine light on even the dark and still make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.”

Make us feel refreshed and cleansed and glad.

Can reading do that?
Can it do that sometimes?

It doesn’t hurt that Ms. Strout’s book takes place on the coast of Maine.  Place is part of it.  But not all of it.  There’s also a skill, a nuance, an attention to the details and foibles of her characters—and a kindness.  Just a deep kindness and generosity toward her characters.

And now I realize—it doesn’t surprise me that Richard Bausch likes Elizabeth Strout as a writer.  I think he was the teacher who told us that you have to find a way to love your characters in order to write fiction.  You have to love your characters.

That’s what I feel when I sit down to read Olive Kittredge—that Ms. Strout loves this collection of characters she’s assembled in this small town on the Maine coast.  Not love in a cloying or sentimental way.  But in a clear-eyed way.  And she’s doing something very interesting in these stories with the connections and inter-connections between and among these characters.  And, because of a way that she writes, leaving some things out—gaps—spaces—and doing this so skillfully—I find myself at moments participating in her town as I read.  I find myself participating in this sense of connection.  All the time carried by her prose.

I wonder if this has something to do with what Plato called harmony.

A Healing Library?

I’m beginning to think, more and more, that this second year of writing and healing is moving me toward creating some kind of healing library for this site.

 

Because I’m beginning to suspect, more than ever, that reading—the act of reading itself—can contribute to healing.  And to writing.

I began this year with ten questions that I was asking and wanted to ask about writing and healing.  I don’t want to forget these questions.  I still want to keep them in mind.

But, at the same time, I find myself, more and more, drawn to writing about poems and stories and books.  Those that might contribute to a healing conversation.  Admittedly, this would be quite subjective.  I’d be choosing the kinds of pieces that speak to me in some way.  The kinds of pieces I’d recommend—and do recommend—to patients. 

I’d like to find a way to write about and then sort these pieces that is meaningful.

Perhaps for a third year of writing and healing.  Perhaps sooner.

Thoughts?  Ideas?  Suggestions?

Writing and Healing in the Waiting Room: A Research Study

The study: Implementing an Expressive Writing Study in a Cancer Clinic by Nancy P. Morgan et. al.
The Oncologist, Vol. 13, No. 2, 196-204, February 2008
[Full article available on-line]

As far as I know this is the first study on writing and healing done in the thick of medical care.  It’s a nice practical study.  Conducted outside the quiet of a laboratory.

Researchers at Lombardi Cancer Center at Georgetown invited cancer patients to do a brief twenty-minute writing task while they waited for their appointments.  Those who agreed to participate were then randomized to respond to one of two different writing prompts.

The first writing prompt is one developed by James Pennebaker:

Cancer can touch every part of your life—issues of family, love, anger, career, life and death, and even issues about childhood and specific experiences in life.  In your writing, let go and explore your deepest thoughts and feelings about the issues that you feel are most important to you right now.

The second writing prompt is one unique to this study:

How has cancer changed you and how do you feel about those changes?

Participants wrote in the waiting room and, also in some cases, while back in the exam room, waiting to be seen.

49% reported that the writing changed the way they thought about their illness.

35% reported that the writing changed the way they felt about their illness.

At three-week follow-up, those who reported changing the way they thought about their illness experienced better physical quality-of-life scores. 

Perhaps the most important thing to come out of the study was this notion of feasibility—that people could and did write in the waiting room.  This in what sounds like a very ordinary waiting room—noisy and busy and rife with interruptions.  Of 98 people invited to participate, 71 agreed, and 63 completed the 20-minute writing session.

I like this notion—writing in the waiting room.  It’s one way to get around the obstacle that so many people seem to face when it comes to writing—not wanting to add one more task to an overly-full day.  Though one might miss out on the latest People magazine—and though there are certain days when escape inside a People magazine may offer its own kind of respite—there’s something attractive about this idea of using waiting time for writing.

I wonder if this wouldn’t become even more possible in those waiting rooms that pay attention to good design—good comfortable chairs and good lighting and such.  Perhaps an alcove for reading and writing.

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For a glimpse at what’s possible in the design of a waiting room, you might want to take a look at this article in the New York Times about the waiting room at the Jay Monahan Center in Manhattan. 

Here’s a description:

The adjacent waiting area, hugely expanded from a cramped rectangle into a spacious serpentine shape, incorporates two walls of windows. Its modern club chairs, in inviting fabrics and bright, strong colors, are not yoked together in the depersonalizing bus-station style. Instead, they are scattered in conversational groupings that can be easily rearranged.

Bamboo floors provide visual warmth - and can be cleaned with soap and water, so antiseptic-smelling cleansers are no longer required. There are no signs prohibiting eating, drinking or talking on cellphones - all are permitted - and patients can do research or check their e-mail on five iMac computers glowing atop sleek maple-and-walnut counters.

Sounds good to me.  And I can’t help wondering—How might an expressive writing study fare in that waiting room?  How might it be to write curled up in one of those club chairs or on one of the iMacs?

A Healing Corridor

I’ve written here before about Sara Stein’s book, Noah’s Garden, a book about restoring the ecology of our yards and gardens.   Now I’m paying attention to a passage at the very end of the book where she imagines what it would be like if we were to begin to create a network of these restored, and interconnected, gardens.

    Will it work? she asks.
    Will the turtle return?
    Will the fox come by?

She directs these questions to a gentleman at the Bureau of Wildlife Management.  And he responds.  “Yes, if there are corridors.”

Stein writes:

Words are tricky things.  ‘Corridor’ is an ecological term that disarmingly conjures up a stroll along a pathway between, say, Mr. Shneckenburger’s land and ours.  A turtle might, indeed, stroll from his pond, along his stream, over the road that separates our properties or thorugh the culvert below it and, once safely among the skunk cabbages, meander upstream to arrive after a while at our shore. . .  But the ecological meaning of corridors is both figuratively and literally broader.

The movement of animals over longer periods of time than one turtle’s amble after a mate in breeding season is similar to those fireworks that, impelled by pressure from the center, burst outward, then burst again from each spreading fragment.

A corridor as a series of bursts?  Starbursts?

She writes:

What is meant by corridors, then, is not narrow strips along which animals might walk from one remote refuge to another, as our own young these days travel along the highways, but a continuity of living quarters among which movement is generational—by dispersal, not migration—from patch to patch along networks that may well originate in parklands or reservations but that must spread through all of our back yards.

The repopulation of each person’s land therefore depends on neighbors, on whether they stop the flow of breeding—dampen bursts and snuff out sparks that would ignite new life beyond their boundaries—or feed the spread by what they plant and how they plant it.

Corridor—it’s a rich and complex image as she presents it here.

And for me, this image, along with making me want to plant more blueberry bushes, and also butterfly weed, brings to mind a notion I've been carrying around for a while now—a kind of healing corridor—made up of centers of healing—actual places but also virtual places—including books and websites—each spreading out from a center like fireworks, like starbursts.

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Toward this end, I'm finally getting around to putting up some sites on my Resource page on One Year of Writing and Healing.  I’m calling the page Healing Corridor and am posting three sites on it this week.  A beginning--and one I plan to expand on over time.

Wild Parrots in the Library

If I were a poet (which I’m not) I’d write a poem about how wonderful it is that libraries exist and that on any given day (or almost) you can walk inside and find a book sitting on a shelf and think, hmm, maybe.  And you can walk out of the library, book in hand, without paying a cent.  You can take the book home and sit next to the window, clear spring light, and read about a man on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco who makes friends with a flock of wild parrots. 

Sometimes a book can just offer a surprising lightness—a sweetness—and perhaps that has something to do with how reading offers healing.

The book: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill by Mark Bittner.

Perhaps you have to like birds to appreciate it.  But maybe not.

Here’s a paragraph from Bittner’s book, p. 59, describing the first summer in which he began feeding a flock of wild parrots:

I remember that summer as idyllic.  The experience was still fresh, and my days were bright and relaxed.  Even when the parrots weren’t around, I’d hang out on the fire escape waiting for them.  I was well above any obstructing buildings, and the view was superb.  I felt like I had a box seat at the opera.  I could see for miles and miles across the expanse of the bay to the rolling brown hills on the distant northern horizon.  I learned to spot the parrots from the moment that they were just specks over Fisherman’s Wharf, a half-mile away.  I could detect their squawking when it was just the faintest element in the great background of urban clamor.  As the days passed, the parrots and I became increasingly casual with one another.  I remember one time when Marlon had his back to me and was staring down at something in the garden.  It was his turn for a seed, so I tapped him lightly on the wing—something I’d never done.  Marlon turned around, took the seed, and then looked away again.  A moment like that would satisfy me for days.

I like it that he gives this kind of attention to a single moment.

I like it that he gives the parrots names.  Marlon.  Connor.  Catherine.  Several he names after poets.  Blake.  Ginsberg.  Snyder.  Pushkin.  In all, he names over fifty parrots.  There's  Picasso.  Mandela.  Tupelo, named for the Van Morrison song, Tupelo Honey.  Also Dogen, named for a Japanese Zen Master. 

I like it that the parrots, and his relationship with the parrots, become a kind of turning point for him.  Earlier in his story, p.25, he's trying to get his life on track and nothing is working out for him:

I had no clear path to any of my goals, but I believed that inner struggle in and of itself would bring me what I wanted. . .  Months passed, and there wasn't a single development toward any of the things I wanted.  I responded by increasing the time I spent meditating.  I was very disciplined and utterly humorless.  More weeks went by and still nothing changed.  I started feeling frustrated, and then angry.  Except for going out to do an occasional odd job, I was always alone inside the house.  I started breaking down into tears almost every day--huge, hot drops like I'd never felt before.

Not long after those huge, hot drops he reads something by Gary Snyder, the poet.   Something about learning the intimate details of the landscape in which one lives.

Bittner begins to pay attention to the birds in his neighborhood.  He puts out bird seed.  And then a wild parrot comes to the bowl of seed.  And then a whole flock of wild parrots.  And then he begins to name the parrots.  He develops a relationship with them.  And things begin to change------

Writing and Healing and Dancing with Pain

I've discovered a new site that I like.  It's called Dancing with Pain, and it's by Loolwa Khazzoom, a young gifted woman, a writer and a dancer, who is writing about the healing of chronic pain from the vantage point of a person experiencing it and healing from it, day to day.  She writes, among other things, about how dance plays a role in her healing---physically, emotionally and spiritually.

An excellent introduction to her site is this post: Fundamentals of Dancing with Pain.

I liked that post so much that I wrote Loolwa, and she in turn invited me to write a piece about how I use imagery and writing with patients with chronic pain.

And now that piece, Imagery and Writing for Natural Pain Relief, is up at her site.

I reviewed some patient charts to write the piece and I learned 5 things from writing it.

This list could be called 5 things I learned from Pain:

1. Pain needs to be heard.
2. Pain needs a place in which to be soothed.
3. In a healing place, sometimes it’s possible to discover a new medicine for pain.
4. The healing process takes time.
5. Pain appreciates compassion.

Perhaps this list could serve as a springboard to an idea for writing.

What does Pain need?  What does your pain need?  Or the pain of someone whom who you care about?  And how does one go about discovering just what it is that pain needs?

Or what does X (for instance Illness, Fatigue, Grief) need?

And what might these kinds of questions have to do with dancing with pain?

Reading as Medicine

I recently came across this excellent article, The Reading Cure.  Written by Blake Morrison, and published earlier this year in The Guardian, the entire article is available online and well worth a look.  The article features a Get Into Reading Project now thriving in the United Kingdom.  Morrison also offers a wonderful context for the project—rich instances where writers and readers have found words healing. 

Consider these highlights:

If she’s evangelical in the cause. . . [Jane Davis, founder of Get Into Reading] that’s because of the almost religious role which books have played in her own life—notably, Doris Lessing’s novel Shikasta, reading which, as a young woman, pushed her ‘into something like a nervous breakdown.  I felt so disturbed by it that I wrote to Doris, care of her publisher, blaming her and asking for help.  She wrote back telling me to read more and offering money for books if I needed it.  “I am not your teacher but you need to read,” she said.  I was a single mother living on social security but in the end I decided what I needed wasn’t Doris’s money but a public library.  And, for me, the clue of Shikasta—that life is serious and you have to do something with it—was a lifesaver.’

The self can get help from a book, then.  But the best kind of help doesn’t necessarily come by way of self-help books.

The inseparability of reading and writing is something which Proust acknowledges when he defines the book as a ‘sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.’  It’s often said that books ‘take us out of ourselves’, but in reality the best literature is surreptitiously taking us inside ourselves, deeper than we might have expected or chosen to go.

The inseparability of reading and writing-----

A book as an optical instrument-----

These seem like important pieces.