HEALING POWER OF WRITING (feeling better yet?)

Healing power created by writing seems like a stretch.

It’s a description used for something else: sitting quietly.

If there are any doubts, think about your busy day.

Could you write anything while you’re moving, driving, fixing, or cleaning?

The short answer? No. But . . .

If we need some healing power applied to a sore spot, where do we go?

What do we do?

Do we make an appointment at the college English department?

Join a writer’s group?

Go to the library?

There’s some healing going on at all three.

If you feel bad for short changing yourself, your friends, and family by being responsible and getting a useful college degree that led to a career, but only wanted to be a writer of some kind, Portland State has a solution.

The creative writing program in the English department link ^.

There’s plenty of writing to heal there:

 

• Wr 413 Advanced Poetry Writing (4)

• Wr 428 Advanced Media Writing (4)

• Wr 456 Forms of Nonfiction (4)

• Wr 457 Personal Essay Writing (4)

• Wr 458 Magazine Writing (4)

• Wr 459 Memoir Writing (4)

 

The Willamette Writers has more to offer in the way of writing to heal.

 

If you’re interested, please email us with answers to these questions:

1. Name you wish to go by

2. Do you consider yourself:

   a. Beginner Writer (never published)

   b. Intermediate Writer (some work published or self published)

   c. Advanced Writer (published by more than one national publication.)

   Of course there will be borderline answers. Do your best to categorize yourself.

3. What genre do you generally write (Mystery, science fiction, middle grade, etc). Please also include your preferred form (writing novels, scripts, poetry, essays, etc.). 

 

Get a creative writing degree, join a critique group, and go.

Go where? To the Portland library. It’s full of ideas and excitement.

I reviewed the Patrick deWitt book, ‘The Librarianist,’ that featured a Portland library. No spoilers.

It had an old guy looking back over his life while he made discoveries that had a healing effect.

Give it a read, then pick up his other Oregon work.

Let him show you Paris, too.

 

Where Does It Hurt

The healing power of writing came to me shortly after I lost my job of twenty years.

It was sad, but fair.

A new hire had a problem, which I tried to help with.

If you know me at all, I’m attracted to problems with an obvious fix.

The downside is the part about rubbing it in because it was soooo obvious.

Reminder From An Elder: Don’t do that.

At the end of the day I didn’t solve a problem, I became a problem.

The transient administration decided to make me an offer to leave, which I took.

It was a good offer, better than the threat from the sweaty fat man who breathed by pig-snorts through a plugged nose.

As good an offer as it was, I did have a case.

After talking to a lawyer who’d won cases against the company before, I learned it would end up a long, drawn out affair with no certainty the end result would be better than the initial offer.

Since I’m a fighter at heart, I wanted to land a few blows to show some of that old school spunk.

And, since I’m not a selfish dipstick, I talked it over with my wife and made the adult choice.

The good news is I made the right choice for everybody involved, the family, the company, and the weasely ass-scratchers who uncovered an image of Ashley Judd in an email sent by a co-worker.

That hurt. The jury convinced each other it was porn. Ashely Judd?

I don’t remember the image as a big reveal like other lady celebrities, but it was on a work network and that was enough for suspicious minds.

How did this end up delivering healing powers?

Four hundred and eighty posts on an ‘Oregon History’ search.

 

How To Feel The Healing Power Of Writing

Ernest Hemingway and I were both ambulance drivers.

He says writing is easy, ‘just open a vein.’

That’s one way, but does it really sound healing?

I’m not bleeding on my keyboard while I write this.

I won’t be bleeding tomorrow; I wasn’t bleeding yesterday, either.

What I am doing, and go ahead and call it corny, or useless, or self-centered, is creating a memory log.

My kids don’t remember my dad. I asked them recently.

Having no memory hurts, not because he was the greatest dad and grandpa, though he may have been.

His own kids didn’t bring out the best in him because we didn’t need rescuing, and he was good at that based on his pubic record.

On his second marriage he found adult kids who needed some supervision.

From talking to them he did a good job, which makes me feel pretty good because I wasn’t a fan of divorce then, or now.

I write with my kids in mind, I write what I’d like my grandkids to know in case I check out too soon to tell them.

The healing power of writing is strongest when I finish a post I think millennials would benefit from, a post baby boomers would benefit most from, along with a post I benefit from.

If it works for everyone else, it works from me; if it works for me, does it work for anyone else?

Either way I’m sitting quietly.

That’s the healing part, the effort part, the time part.

I feel better, how about you?

No? Maybe you should write about it.

Leave a comment to start. G’head.