Writing for their lives

Workshop promotes recovery through pen and paper

Cheryl Paletz, a retired nurse, has a tendency to “stuff it,” to take the feelings that surge up inside and push them back down until she’s riddled with anxiety.

So when her husband of 25 years, Gary Paletz, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in May 2018, and when the chemotherapy he received in rural Oregon nearly killed him, something had to give.

“It’s like, I have to get this out because if it doesn’t come out, I don’t do well,” she says. “My stress and emotions are all over the place, and I feel lost and alone.”

After some focused research, the couple found the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center and oncologist Brian Jonas. Soon, they had packed up their lives, bought a fifth-wheel vehicle and moved onto a friend’s property in Elk Grove. Gary is now undergoing intensive treatment at UC Davis Health, which includes both inpatient and outpatient chemotherapy.

And here they found help for Cheryl, too, in Writing as Healing, a free workshop of the Cancer Center’s Supportive Oncology Program for anyone looking for a safe place to write whatever needs to be written.

For Cheryl, it was just what the doctor ordered.

“I’ve always loved to write,” she says. “I’ve had several ideas for books in my head, but I never got to it. I felt the need to start writing about our journey. I need to write. It comes from my gut.”

Held twice a month, the Writing as Healing sessions draw people with all kinds of experiences, from addiction recovery, to coping with a loved one’s illness or loss, to personal medical challenges.

“I’ve seen people talk about finding their voice and having insights as they are writing,” says Terri Wolf, a registered nurse and trained writing facilitator who began the program years ago and continues to co-facilitate it. “They see something new for themselves and see a way out.”

The writing prompts that Wolf offers vary from free, timed writing to poems by well-known authors and even games.

During a session recently, Wolf passed around dice with a single word on each side. Each participant shook the dice, then used the words they landed on — like “waste,” “fertile” and “obey” to stimulate their writing. This was repeated for several rounds. Some writers wrote single stories; others wrote shorter, unrelated poems or prose.

Wolf gives participants the opportunity to share their writing with the group and reminds everyone not to critique one another.

“Think of this as a brand new baby,” she says. “You wouldn’t go into someone’s house and comment about the way the new baby looks.”

Brad Buchanan, a retired English professor and two-time cancer survivor, says the approach is very freeing, “a totally different paradigm.”

“It’s all about encouraging the writer to put words on the page and not be judged and to get immediate positive feedback in whatever form,” says Buchanan, who also serves as a co-facilitator. “This is totally different from anything that happens in a creative writing class where, ultimately, everyone knows they will be evaluated.”

Buchanan derives many benefits from the workshop. Besides giving back to “the cancer center that has saved my life multiple times,” he has found the approach unique in terms of helping him cope with recovery from a number of health crises.

The 48-year-old has had two types of lymphoma, a stem cell transplant in 2016 and a chronic condition related to the transplant called graft vs. host disease, which caused temporary blindness that required corneal transplants and that still affects his vision.

Buchanan likens Writing as Healing to a yoga practice.

“Sometimes you go somewhere you had no idea you would go and you say things you never suspected you wanted or needed to say,” he says. “It’s like yoga, which gives you stretches you didn’t know you needed, and doing them makes you more limber.”

Like others, Seanain Snow came to the workshop with a variety of personal and family challenges. Her father has been through prostate cancer and is now battling multiple myeloma. Her 15-year-old son has Marfan syndrome, a genetic connective tissue disease for which he later had a heart transplant.

“There is an immense amount of grief parents experience when our children have health problems,” she says. “We grieve the wonderful, healthy childhood we wanted them to have and all the activities they aren’t able to do. The writing process helps me see and accept those things, and really grieve where I need to grieve, and then move on from it.”

For caregivers like Snow and Paletz, Writing as Healing allows them to be more available to their loved ones.

“There is still a family that needs me to not be stuck in grief in the hospital or wherever we happen to get stuck,” says Snow.

Paletz gets in touch with her own emotions — and needed perspective.

“I am mourning my house, the doggy door, the rhododendrons,” she says, sitting at her husband’s hospital bedside during a recent chemotherapy infusion. “But he is my home, and we are going to get through this.”