Healing Through Narrative: A Gift from the Old Knitting Factory

 Wow, I had no idea I'd gone three months without writing a blog. I'll try not to do that again. I've been writing a lot of other stuff, and there's been some big changes since April 1st. Appalachian Literacy Initiative was awarded some lovely grants that are going to allow us to double the number of students we serve from last year (and that was doubled from the year before!) AND hire our first employee. Her name is Hannah Smith, we all adore her, and today is her first regular day.

If you live near Bristol and have been hankering to help out at ALI, you can now drop by to sticker books and help Hannah any day M-F from 9-3. This makes me practically giddy. Last school year the entire board were working about as hard as we could, given the limitations of our other commitments, so we'd never be able to expand like this without Hannah.

Oh, and if you're a teacher, grades 3-5, in an Appalachian region school that is greater than 50% free lunch, you'd be eligible for our program. Applications are on our website, readappalachian.org, and are open until August 31st.

The other big news is that I learned that some weird symptoms I'd been having, especially while riding, which I'd tried to fix by addressing asthma and anxiety and some other stuff, were actually still the result of brain damage from my TBI five and a half years ago. AND THEY WERE FIXABLE. My biologist friend Kelly steered me toward a functional neurologist in Raleigh, and I've been going for treatments a few days a month, plus doing eye movement exercises at home. The difference is astonishing.

Also I took my new little mare, Rosalind Franklin, to our first two starter horse trials. She was overwhelmed and anxious, screaming for my daughter's horse, the first one--and we finished on our lousy dressage score, in second place. She was brave and bold the second one (and my daughter's horse wasn't there) and we finished on our very good dressage score, in first place! It was wiener-level, but we were the best wiener level pair, and I was thrilled.

None of that is what I came to say today. I came to say that yesterday I took a lovely Healing Through Narrative mini writing retreat, on Zoom, from my friend Betsy Cornwell, and if you're interested in that sort of thing I think you should take one, too. I got a lot more out of it than I intended.

I don't mean that rudely at all. Betsy's a NYT bestselling author of YA fantasy novels. She's a graduate of both my college (Smith) and my husband's (Notre Dame); the Smith alum online boards is where I first got to know her. We've been friends for five years now. We've only met once, but that's because she lives in Ireland and there's been this pesky global pandemic. I'm going to go see her next year, and I can't wait.

Betsy's a single mom to a young son. She's renovating an old knitting factory in rural Ireland, a place built to teach young girls to knit as a cottage industry, into a home and a retreat center for writers. She also teaches writing at the University of Galway, and at Kylemore Abbey, which is run by Notre Dame. I'd love to join her teaching a writer's retreat there someday. I'm also lately getting to asked to teach writing workshops these days, so I thought it would be useful to hang out on the two-hour retreat Betsy had put together, and learn some teaching skills.

The truth is I learned a lot more. We started out writing three-sentence false autobiographies of ourselves, in which only our names and pronouns were true. Everyone shared. People claimed to be fossils, aliens, airplane pilots, and gardeners, among others. I'm not going to share mine with you, because while I started out in the spirit of the thing, write whatever amuses you, don't self-censor, what came out tells me more about myself than I expected. It's feeling rather private and precious to me now.

Everyone had been invited to bring any passage of writing that spoke to them, to share. Again, this was moving and meditative. We all typed the names and authors of the passages into the chat box, so we could read further if we wished, and I am, especially "Sometimes a Wild God" by Tom Hiron, and the poetry of Vicki Feaver.

I read part of "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.

Then Betsy taught story structure in a way I'd never heard before, including that there's one ideal story that all stories return to: "A person goes on a journey/a stranger comes to town" and they are of course the same thing from different points of view. I ended up making a bunch of notes thinking about how what Betsy said intersected with the manuscript I'm working on.

Then we did another writing exercise, about sensation and healing and a little bit of magic.

It was healing and a little bit magic.

I absolutely loved these two hours. Betsy's running two more of these mini-retreats, online, on August 21 and September 18. She's got private mentorship time available too, as well as a monthly one-hour writing class, and a book club in which no one has to read a particular book. It's all up on theoldknittingfactory.com.

Meanwhile, thanks, Bets. It was good to be a student again. Love you.