HEALING, WRITING AND TAKING WRITING CLASSES

For my writer friends, I have a couple of prompts for you. We used these in our last class at Tri-County College this week. I decided to write along with my students and enjoyed remembering an uncle who has long since passed on.

The prompt: I will never forget her/his voice...

Another prompt: It was an ordinary day...

Many times our greatest triumphs or our greatest tragedies happen on what begins as an ordinary day.

I am taking a short break before beginning classes at Writers Circle with a six week course, Tuesday afternoons, 2 - 4 o'clock. On May 14 we start with Healing through Writing. Call me at 828-389-4441 if you would like to come. 

This is a course for anyone who has ever lost a loved one, gone through a divorce, been emotionally damaged by life and for people who enjoy writing. 

Some of our best writers, most acclaimed authors, found that writing was a way to deal with their childhood abuse both mental and physical. Sylvia Plath was one of them. From those writings came some of their best work. 

Henry Miller was on the verge of suicide because his wife had left him for a mutual friend, a woman, when he found himself at his typewriter pouring out his sorrow and anger on paper. His best selling books, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, resulted from this kind of writing. 

While I sat with my ill husband for weeks in the hospital and then in a hospice center, my writing saved my sanity, I believe. Drugs kept him sleeping most of the time, and I sat with my laptop open and writing everything I was thinking, feeling, hoping for and afraid of. Little did I know that what I was doing was helping me physically. 

In the class on Healing through Writing, we will practice some of the techniques from Dr. Pennebaker's research on opening up about trauma in our lives. We will not always share what we write, but it is a good possibility that we will discover things we had not thought about ourselves, and we might come up with a few publishable essays or poems.