{"id":38,"date":"2017-08-25T12:07:37","date_gmt":"2017-08-25T16:07:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/?p=38"},"modified":"2020-03-25T16:03:16","modified_gmt":"2020-03-25T20:03:16","slug":"writing-for-wellness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/2017\/08\/25\/writing-for-wellness\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing for Wellness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Marc D. Allan, Butler MFA candidate<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Leona, a lady beyond a certain age, likes to break out in song. Doesn\u2019t matter where she is or who\u2019s in the room or that it\u2019s well after Christmas and she\u2019s still singing \u201cSilent Night.\u201d She\u2019s going to sing.<\/p>\n

At this moment, she\u2019s sitting in a conference room at American Village retirement community, explaining herself between song bursts to Stephanie Anderson, a student in Butler\u2019s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Every Tuesday, Anderson and three other MFA students visit Leona and others at American Village to hear their stories and get them down on paper.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Leona talks, and Anderson captures her words.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeona feels happiest when she is among her 10 children,\u201d she writes. \u201cShe loves to sing a lot too, and this is a gift she shares with her children, especially since it\u2019s a God-given talent. She loves singing in a choir and sharing the community, because God knows when she is happy and sad, and he projects his goodness through her. Leona knows we have to choose happiness. Words cannot describe the joy she feels being with her family, the one at home, and the one at church.<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes she is so glad to be alive that she bursts into song, being so glad for her life and her gift. She used to teach singing and sometimes she would sing those songs to her children when they felt lonely or sad, particularly \u2018Amazing Grace.\u2019\u00a0Leona believes firmly in love and laughter and compassion, and believes harder in the power of beautiful love. She doesn\u2019t want to be evil and frowning. She wants to kill sadness with joy. She sings when she is sad and when she is happy, because the voice is the soul coming to the light.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sometime later, Anderson reflects on what happens in these sessions.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re making a difference in these people\u2019s lives,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re getting to know each other. We\u2019re making friends. We\u2019re showing ourselves and each other that it\u2019s a big world we live in, but in this circle there\u2019s joy, there\u2019s happiness, there\u2019s laughter. This is marvelous.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is Writing for Wellness, a program that MFA students began two years ago to use writing for therapy, for recollection, for relief, for fun. The first classes took place at Eskenazi Health in Indianapolis, where the MFA students worked with hospital staff who needed an opportunity to relax and unload.<\/p>\n

Since then, Writing for Wellness has expanded\u2014to Riley Hospital for Children, Indiana Women\u2019s Prison, Hope Academy (a high school for students recovering from addiction), and Indiana Youth Group (an \u00a0organization for LGBT youth). The program is soon to add sessions for breast-cancer survivors.<\/p>\n

The idea to bring Writing for Wellness to Butler started with Hilene Flanzbaum, the Director of the MFA program. Flanzbaum has taught creative writing on the undergraduate and graduate levels, and her husband, Geoffrey Sharpless, runs the summer creative writing camp at Butler and teaches creative writing at Park Tudor School. They often talk about the psychological benefits of that work, how the participants seem happier when they\u2019re getting a chance to express themselves.<\/p>\n

Flanzbaum thought that idea could be incorporated in the MFA program. And since one of the program\u2019s missions is to provide service, Writing for Wellness seemed like a natural fit.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a discipline that\u2019s fairly well established in other places but had no footprints at all in Indiana or Indianapolis,\u201d Flanzbaum says. \u201cSo I saw a real opportunity for our students.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around the same time, Flanzbaum was recruiting a new MFA student, Bailey Merlin, who had taught in a Writing for Wellness program as an undergraduate at Berry College in Rome, Georgia.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we talked on the phone,\u201d Merlin says, \u201cI told her what I did: I bring everyone in, I have people write, they come to conclusions on their own, and it\u2019s pretty fascinating. She\u2019s like, \u2018That\u2019s exactly what we want.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

That led Merlin to choose Butler for her MFA, and she led the MFA program\u2019s first Writing for Wellness group that went to Eskenazi. There, she says, they saw staff members \u201cwriting about things they\u2019d never expressed before and crying.\u201d At Riley Hospital, she worked in a behavioral unit with kids suffering from eating disorders and depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo see the spark of life go back into them is just amazing,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The spark works both ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou would be amazed how much doing this changes you as a person,\u201d Merlin says. \u201cJust to see how you directly affect someone else. You don\u2019t get that opportunity a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

The MFA students who facilitate the program all seem to have that reaction. Tristan Durst has spent her Tuesday afternoons writing with a retiree named Robert, who was part of a 1950s Indianapolis-based doo-wop group called The Counts. The first week, she says, he told the same stories several times.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, he\u2019s remembering more, and more of his personality is coming out,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd this week, he was cracking jokes left, right and center. He was telling me about his brothers playing baseball and he said, \u2018I won\u2019t say that I was the best baseball player. I could, but I won\u2019t.\u2019 He started slipping in jokes, and I\u2019m getting a real sense that he enjoys being there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taylor Lewandowski, the MFA student who\u2019s leading the group at the senior center, says he and the other Butler students are needed there. He tells the story of a woman he\u2019s worked with named Martha.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer roommate passed away, and she saw her last breath,\u201d Lewandowski says. \u201cThat obviously affected her. She came in three days after that and I worked with her. Afterward, she said, \u2018That was really good for me. It was good for me to get out and talk to someone.\u2019 Writing for Wellness creates this community that\u2019s really nice. It\u2019s really a service. We\u2019re there to be there for them and once you realize that, it\u2019s really nice. We\u2019re actually doing something good.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWriting for Wellness\u201d was originally posted on\u00a0butler.edu<\/a><\/p>\n

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By Marc D. Allan, Butler MFA candidate Leona, a lady beyond a certain age, likes to break out in song. Doesn\u2019t matter where she is or who\u2019s in the room or that it\u2019s well after Christmas and she\u2019s still singing \u201cSilent Night.\u201d She\u2019s going to sing. At this moment, she\u2019s sitting in a conference room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9194630,"featured_media":13,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[363681],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-38","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mentors-experiences","8":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9194630"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/56"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/writing4wellness\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}