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Day 6: Health Haiku
Health Haiku. Let’s switch up the writing style a bit for today’s posts! As you probably know, a haiku is a “miniature Japanese poem consisting of 17 syllables – five syllables in first line, seven in second, and five in the last. No rhyme or meter scheme is employed when writing haiku. The aim of the haiku is to create something greater than the sum of the parts.” Traditionally, haiku poems were written about nature and aim to capture the essence of the aspect of nature that is being described. Opening the WEGO Health Blog each day in April is a bit like opening the little doors on an Advent Calendar. Each…
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Arizona, BRCA genes, Breast Cancer Treatment, Cancer Language, Chemotherapy, Diagnosis, Language of Cancer, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Phoenix, Pink Ribbon Culture
Day 5: The Sentinel’s Watch
I am five days in to the WEGO Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge and I’m stuck. Today’s post is an ekphrasis, of all things. It looks exactly like a word I would expect to find in a post about health or medicine, so it’s fitting that I have to look it up. Not what I expected, after all. Ekphrasis ( a noun) is “a literary description of or commentary on a visual work of art.” Thank you again Merriam Webster. To complete this assignment, I simply need to visit flickr.com/explore and then write a post inspired by a random photo from the webpage and relate it to my health topic. Here goes … “Ekphrasis on a Sentinel”…
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Health Activist Writer’s Month Challenge Day 4: “the stones of silence”
I write about my health because … It’s been the kind of day where I’ve had to tell myself more than once that my career is but one facet of my life, that my family matters most, that my health is most important. How easily these words roll off my tongue, but unless they are reflected in daily practice, they ring rather hollow. Practice, as one of my teachers tells her students every day “makes permanent.” So why do I write about my health? I write because it helps make permanent the practice of putting first my health and my family. Staying silent would be as bad if not worse…
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HAWMC Day 3: communing with the dead
Day Three of my Health Activist Writers Monthly Challenge, and I’m thrilled to be taking part in it with my blogging buddies Marie Ennis O’Connor and Jan Hasak, two compelling writers who are truly inspired and inspiring in all they do. Day 3: If you had a superpower, what would it be and how would you use it? I remember the first time I heard about communing with the dead. I was about 9 years old, and some children at school were talking about how they had received messages from “the other side” via a ouija board. I was both fascinated and frightened by the prospect of them sitting around it…
