Writing as Healing Podcast: Observational Journaling and the Power of Poetry
Featuring Stacey Joy, Willeena Booker, and Willie Carver
I’m thrilled to announce I have recorded Writing As Healing, a Heinemann podcast series which will air this spring. I’m in love with the joy, vulnerability, and poetry my guests brought to the show and want to share a few tidbits with you each Thursday for the next four Thursdays as we lead up to the series debut on April 4.
Three of my guests are published poets who are also teachers: Stacey Joy, the 2013 L.A. County Teacher of the Year and an elementary school for 38 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District; Willeena Booker, a third-grade Pennsylvania teacher who also serves on the NCTE Poetry Awards Committee for Children’s Literature and the National Writing Project Write Out Leadership Team; and Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr, the 2022 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and author of Gay Poems for Red States.
All three have enjoyed a stellar career in teaching while also exploring their personal discovery and despair as poets. Using writing to process joy, suffering, insecurity, beauty, grief, racism, grace, and discrimination, they have been an inspiration to hundreds of students and to me.
Stacey Joy
Stacey is one of those rare individuals who even approaches the writing of lesson plans and curriculum as a creative endeavor, and she looks for opportunities for creativity in every facet of her life, like dictating poetry into her Notes app on her commute to work. Of her students, she says, “I write with them, I write for them, and I write to inspire them.” But her work as a poet is the work that has brought her the most healing. “My belief is once I put something on paper, I feel like I’ve released it. Whether it be my pain that I’m putting on paper or my hope that I’m putting on paper, it is a release and it’s out there.” On the podcast, Stacey shares a golden shovel poem she wrote during the pandemic from a prompt about Black people in America. She chose a Hemingway quote, “The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places” as her end words to compose her poem, “We Are the Light.”
Willeena Booker
Willeena is also an elementary school teacher who writes about a wide-range of topics: nature, relationships, grief, and joy. “Writing is that tool where you can be honest with yourself. You put it all out on the page, and when you are honest with yourself about the given moment and what you are responding to and what you are feeling, you allow those emotions to lead you on a healing journey. There will be some surprises, but there will also be some points where you challenge yourself to grow. ” On the podcast, she reads a poem she wrote in 2020 that marked the beginning of a personal journey for her. “The Power of 46” explores the social justice movement launched by the murder of George Floyd, who was the same age as Willeena when he died. She sees her poetry and her work in the classroom as a catalyst for the kind of radical change that can bring about the end to racism.
Willie Carver
During his book tour of the United States in 2023, Willie gave countless readings to diverse audiences much different from the people he grew up with in rural Appalachia. “When I write, as a general rule, I’m trying to clear my head and clear my heart. Writing is giving myself the opportunity to speak to myself.” He calls writing “an unraveling” that can bring about both exposure and healing for the writer. His book Gay Poems for Red States came about as a result of his queer students being targeted by the district where he taught. As he sat down to write an email to the superintendent, he suddenly started to write a poem instead. “That first one felt like a supernatural experience, like I have to say these words.” All the rage and frustration he felt as a gay kid in hyper-religious Appalachia came out on the page. In this collection, he wrote toward a healing for himself and his students, highlighting Appalachia's LGBTQ community.
Please tune in April 4 as the first of the series, Writing As Healing: A Conversation with Stacy Joy will be available. I promise you will be inspired!
How Can I Practice Writing As Healing In My Classroom?
Charging into a classroom Monday morning and asking students to write about the most traumatic event of their lives is both unnecessary and damaging to students. They often feel like they need to relive a traumatic event (or make one up) to satisfy the requirements of an assignment.
But writing is a meaning-making tool, and as such, it provides students a means to both ground themselves in the present moment, release anxiety, and process their stressful lives.
This weekend my husband sent me a New York Times article written by Anna Kode who, on a long commute, decided to give herself a digital break and strengthen her powers of observation and description. She took out her notebook and wrote down everything she saw, heard, or smelled. “A backpack occupying a seat for a human. A woman wearing a spiky hat. Shoelaces, untied. Shoelaces, tied.”
She calls this “observational journaling” and it’s an excellent, low-stakes writing activity for students. Any writing strengthens the writing muscle, and all exercises of observation build up that essential gray matter of the cortex that is crucial for critical thinking and problem solving, but this writing invitation also helps students de-stress and lower their levels of cortisol.
If you need more structure to this assignment, try out the writing version of the 5-4-3-2-1 technique. Long been used as a mindfulness strategy, this grounding technique helps students bring their thoughts back to the present in order to diminish intense emotions. If students are replaying negative scenes from the past or dreading an event in the future, the practice asks students to identify things they can see, touch, hear, smell, and taste in their immediate environment to ground them in the present.
The writing version goes something like this:
Write down 5 things you can see
Write down 4 things you can touch
Write down 3 things you can hear
Write down 2 things you can smell
Write down 1 thing you can taste
Choose one of the items that you identify and write a full description of it in your writing notebook.