Therapeutic Writing

A while back someone turned in a book called Writing Routes: A Resource Handbook of Therapeutic Writing edited by Gillie Bolton, Victoria Field and Kate Thompson, with a Foreword by Gwyneth Lewis. I flipped through it and it looked interesting so I checked it out. There are chapters about using writing to figure out who you are, how you feel about yourself, your body, your relationships, and how to work through grief, loss, and other transitions. There's even a chapter on using writing to develop mindfulness.

A couple of the writers discuss how they came to write poems reflecting some memory or personal issue. For example, Rose Flint describes how she channeled her feelings of homesickness and depression from getting older into a poem called "The Blue Gate". The poem describes an encounter with "a Being walking across ice towards me- a Swan-Woman, old and wrinkled":

Palms upward, she stretches her hands out towards me,
black bird-eyes intent.
She is holding pieces of ice and she strikes them together
slowly at first, then gathering speed
so they clash edgily, ring like bronze bells
over the ice-field: a call, a warning of breakage,
rupture, opening.
In the cold heart of her handfuls of ice
sparks flick scarlet snake-tongues that rise and grow,
so ice warms, whitefire on her palms, candles of crystal.
She draws the radiance into her body, lets it wander
the routes of her veins, the web of her cells
until she stands gilded, feathers on fire, sun in her skin.
Walking past me her feet melt bird-tracks on the snow.
She is going deeper, and at the point where distance
takes her, there is a spreading cloud of blue

(p. 105).

I am encouraged by the image of the old woman warming herself by her own action, i.e. striking the ice shards together and moving through the landscape. I also like the notion of the woman's swan-like ability to transform her self, to fly. If you like this poem you may want to check out Rose Flint's Nekyia (Flint 2003).