Invitation

WELCOME to One Year of Writing and Healing, a site designed to explore a myriad of connections between writing and healing—and to facilitate your own exploration.

If you’ve visited here before, you may notice that things are looking a bit different these days. I’m in the process of merging my two sites and redesigning so that, hopefully, the site will become more cohesive and more accessible and more pleasant to explore.

Each month (along with some additional categories) now has its own doorway on the home page, and you can imagine, if you like, that each of these doorways leads to its own room. You can begin at the beginning with Months One and Two: Creating a Healing Place. But you can also, if you wish, begin at another point in the year—entering another room that makes more sense. Making a place for dealing with grief first? Developing the habit of writing?

Or you may want to begin by exploring healing poetry. Or some of the research on writing and health.

As I’ve written here before, I’ve had this notion that it could be rather wonderful to open a bakery, or a café, or perhaps a whole house, where a person could come, have a blueberry muffin, a mug of coffee or tea, and then sit at a table and write. A place where one could come and go as one pleases. This site aspires to be that house—or to be like that house. It’s also a house that’s in the process of renovation and expansion. I’m beginning to imagine the house as having more rooms, and I’m working on growing these rooms in different ways.

My hope is that you’ll view this site as an invitation—as inspiration—as a resource—for your own process of writing and healing and reading and discovery. However you end up using it, I wish for you many, many good things.

I’m also interested in your feedback. This is so much a work in progress–so much to do here–so much I could do here–and I would love to hear how you’re using the site–and what you’d like to see here–as I continue to work away at this.

You can contact me here.

If you’re new to the site you may want to see the whole year at a glance on the home page.

Or explore healing poetry.

Or you may want to begin with Months One and Two: Creating a Healing Place.

You may also want to take a look at the piece below about how the site originated.

All best,
Diane Morrow

Photo by Pam Fray from Geograph. It’s described this way: “Doorway on the west side of the church of St. Mary Magdalen, Davington, near to Faversham, Kent, Great Britain. The door, usually locked, leads to the grounds of what remains of Davington Priory, now a private residence. It is open at present to offer refreshments to those visiting the Flower Festival in the church.”

Why One Year of Writing and Healing?

I had for some time been mulling over a way to explore the possibilities in writing and healing.  Then I happened across a book, Fern House: A Year in an Artist’s Garden.  That whole notion—the cycle of one year in a garden—it called to me. The book is by Deborah Schenck, an artist from England, who, several years back, moved into a nineteenth-century house called Fern House in a small town in Vermont and began to transform the land around her house into a garden.  Her book—mostly photographs and...