Esther's Healing Arts Writing Space

"In my healing arts writing groups we find a space for confidence- building and community formation, a place where self-esteem and courage blossoms. Here we come to look at our lives and celebrate ourselves and each other.

"My goal is for us to find a place of strength and non-marginality. No one is on the edge here, on the outskirts looking in. We are all, each one of us, smack in the middle of experience and knowledge that we lend to each other -- through non-competitive discussion, writing, and sharing of work, if and when we are ready.

"We use writing, mostly poetry, to trigger imagination, memory, friendship, love, hate, ambiguity, fear, whatever comes along, even secrets we didn't know we had.

"My goal is for us to use writing to discover our authentic voice(s) on and off the page and to develop the confidence to use our voice(s) with determination.

"I am most concerned with writing process and writing as process; and though we work toward making our words clearer for others to understand and to understand ourselves better, worldly (or wordly) success is not an ingredient of the healing arts space, all the while we take pride in our accomplishments and in each other's accomplishments.

"Here in my healing arts writing groups, we listen to each other so we can hear more of ourselves; and we quiet ourselves so we can hear that much more of all those others who share our writing/living spaces with us."

If you are a cancer patient, recovering cancer patient, caregiver, co-worker, relative, friend or acquaintance of someone with cancer and would like to join us, please call Cancer Lifeline at 297-2100 or visit on-line.

Thanks for visiting,

Esther Altshul Helfgott