Writing Heals by Sarah J. Donovan

“im sorry your mom wasn’t their for you…”

This was blog comment on my poem left from a seventh-grade boy who frankly gave me a pretty hard time last year. It was my tenth poem of the month (a third of the way into our thirty poem challenge), and Jesus chose my poem to read that April morning. He was enticed by the title, I guess: “Confession: I Am an Orphan”. 

When I noticed Jesus was reading my poem, I knelt beside his desk and asked him if he knew what an orphan was.  He said he knew but was confused because my mother was still alive. We talked about how my father had died, and my mother broke-up with me, in part, because of that. He wasn’t sure what to say in that moment, so he wrote a comment on my poem instead. I was moved by his compassion. I was moved so much that I wrote a lot of poems that month about my family and growing up the ninth of eleven children.

When our thirty days of poem-ing came to an end, I began to feel what I can only describe as withdrawal. The daily engagement with words and lives in the virtual space of our class blog and the physical space of sharing them in class nurtured me psychologically and kinesthetically. The mental and physical work of creating poems impacted my well-being. So when I felt that withdrawal, I looked for ways to re-engage with poetry beyond the classroom and discovered that within my collection of poems rested pieces of a story. I decided I would write a verse novel that summer, imagining and reshaping my past into fiction.

When one makes a decision, a commitment, the world seems to respond in rather beautiful ways, and, for me, it was in the form of people:  Gae Polisner read the first pages of my book and, encouraged me. My husband, who is not a reader, began to read my book -- the first book he’d read since high school -- and we had lovely dinners discussing the kissing scenes. I shared the book with four of my seven sisters, and we Skyped to discuss the characters and how they helped us make sense of our own childhood. I began to really experience the way writing heals the writer and, in some cases, the reader. Such a privilege and responsibility to create.


Sarah J. Donovan is a junior high ELA teacher and adjunct professor in teacher education at DePaul University. She is the author of  Genocide Literature in Middle and Secondary Classrooms and a young adult novel, Alone Together. She writes a weekly blog, www.ethicalela.com, where she shares stories about the ethics of teaching English and some YA book reviews. Follow Sarah on Twitter @MrsSJDonovan, Instagram @donovan_sd, and Facebook. 

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