Writing can be a path to healing and growing
Writing has been my constant companion. It gave me a voice, a career and, when I needed it most, gave me a way to face personal tragedy. Many have experienced the art of writing as a path to healing and growth, so I add my story to that hard-won collection.
Journalism came first, beginning with a weekly column in eighth grade and continuing with high school and college newspapers, plus my mother’s monthly, The Salton Seafarer.
My first real job was with The Press-Enterprise. I wrote about people’s tragedies, struggles and triumphs, and, in between, read short stories and novels. Sometimes I was lucky enough to interview local novelists, like Susan Straight and Gayle Brandeis. Although I adored fiction, writing it never occurred to me. My ideas were limited to what I heard in interviews with other people.
Then came the dark times. My daughter developed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. (Her twin sister had died of heart problems as an infant.) I refused to believe my remaining child was in danger. She had recently danced on the beach with the Santa Barbara Dance Theater. She and her percussionist boyfriend were planning a life together. At 22, her adult life was just beginning.
No, this could not be possible. Somehow, I needed to maintain strength, for her sake.
Initially, journalism had been my artistic foundation, but Joseph Campbell’s mythic motif of the hero’s journey became a touchstone of support for me and for a series of articles. His call to adventure, the refusal of the call, the acceptance and finally the return home broadened my interest in writing.
I sought answers and listened to the “heroes” I interviewed: “How did you survive your loss?
What was your path?” They generously shared the books, music, movies and beliefs that had been their candles in the darkness, and I passed these on to many P-E readers. My daughter called the series my “spirit stories.”
After she died at 28, I was a different person, and I awakened each morning in shock with the same thought: My child is dead.
I continued to embrace mythology, but now I added poetic inspiration to ease my despair. And art, a familiar path recommended by countless artists and philosophers. With pen and ink, I would narrow my focus to a graceful blade of grass or an intricate cluster of milkweed blossoms and draw them without conscious thought, the way I’d learned in “Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing” by Frederick Franck.
I added poetry to help me function during those first years. Looking at these pages now — hundreds of them — I see glimmers of healing and self-knowledge despite my continuing rage against the universe.
“Why should I go to work when poetry drips like blood from my fingertips?”
In addition to mythology and poetry, I jumped into fairy tales. Suddenly, I found I did have the imagination for fiction. I wrote a novella about a woman searching for her childhood dolls, all parts of her personality, and a novel about a shapeshifting child. I loved writing them, although they are as yet unpublished.
Then, nine years ago, life took another unexpected turn. My husband and I became the legal guardians of his son’s 5-year-old twins. With my writing time and energy diverted to child raising, I began writing very short pieces, often inspired by the children. A conversation with my granddaughter became a mini-memoir that was published by Perspectives magazine in 2018. Here is an excerpt:
“… One morning, a few months after they’d moved in, my granddaughter … asked if I had any children of my own. ‘I did,’ I said, but she died when she was 28. I pointed to her picture on the wall. The photographer had caught my daughter in mid-leap — her ponytail flying — in a college production of ‘West Side Story.’ Clutching her favorite blanket, my granddaughter looked at me and back at the picture. ‘She’s not old enough to be dead.’
I nodded.
‘Do you miss her?’
‘Yes.’
She stroked the satin edges of her blanket. ‘It helps that we’re here, doesn’t it?’ ”
Like writers before me, I can always find a style or form or genre of writing that soothes, excites or challenges me. Sometimes I even find joy. And I discover humor in real life, like these lines that popped to mind while preparing my online LinkedIn profile:
“My résumé reads:
‘Calm, rational writer can transport skunks in emergencies,’ an unusual skill but one worth mentioning.”
I am a different person since my daughter’s illness and death so many years ago. Yet I recognize my former self in there somewhere. Like many others on this same path, writing and art have helped me gather and arrange my thoughts into a measure of coherence. All along, writing has been the key element in the equation.
Donna Kennedy was a reporter for The Press-Enterprises and taught writing at UC Riverside extension and San Bernardino Valley College. She and her husband, William Linehan, wrote “Queen of the
Salton Sea: Helen Burns and Me,” published in 2018 by Sagebrush Press.