Guest writer

It was definitely the beginning of this cold spell, when I went to do my first poetry workshops at Stepping Hill Hospital on 6th November. I was nervous, especially as I was going along to the stroke unit E1 where a long time friend of mine was a patient and would now be a participating in this morning’s workshop.  I was also confused to find that B5 was no longer, and so I rearranged my afternoon session for the old faithful A10.

The morning session on E1 was in a group with people who had recently had a stroke. Each of them had been affected differently. Joyce had lost her speech and was working on gaining it back, Tom had lost the use of his left hand and was slowly trying to adapt to using his other, Victor could no longer write and Muriel was in a similar position.

I felt so much compassion for all of them taking on board the activity of the morning, which was to write how they were feeling using William Carlos William’s poem Asphodel as loose inspiration.
I considered what a difficult task this is to do, when the entire group had been to places recently within their own bodies they would never have imagined.  I was greeted with warmth, tears, sharing, deep thoughts and exasperation.  But not once was any frustration aimed inappropriately, the heightened emotions allowed creativity to happen and vice versa.
William Carlos Williams was chosen as an established poet who suffered a series of strokes, he spoke of his weakened physical state giving him strengthened creative ones. His poem gave way for much discussion and interpretation in the morning session and carried on to A10.

The afternoon session was spent one to one with two patients, who openly admitted liked to talk.  We went from the past to the present, through people in their lives and the daily minute. There are so many levels of creativity I see when finding people to engage in these sort of sessions, from church, to dancing, to making clothes, to bird watching, we are each as unique as our own passion placement, but underlying these writings show we all have the same essential qualities.
All in all an awe inspiring day.