Writing Through Cancer is an online resource designed to encourage anyone living with cancer, debilitating illness or difficult life circumstance, to write from your experience of cancer.
Why write? A significant number of studies have demonstrated that it can actually be good for you. When you repress emotions and silence your stories, your ability to heal is weakened. Writing offers you the safety to unearth and express all that you think and feel. When you begin to shape those thoughts and feelings into stories or poems, it helps you to make sense of things and to cope more effectively with the emotional roller coaster that any debilitating or painful life event can trigger.
Writing offers you a form of creative self-expression. You don’t need an office or special materials. It’s available to anyone who wants to do it. You can write just about anywhere: at home, on the train, in a waiting room, or at a cafe. All that’s needed is a pen, paper or laptop and giving yourself the permission to express whatever is in your heart and mind.
The prompts on this site are meant to encourage and inspire you to write, in whatever way you like–it doesn’t matter. What matters, whether writing for healing or simply writing from your life, is that you make time to write, deeply, honestly, and freely. Your story matters. If you don’t tell it, who will?
The bi-weekly prompts that are featured on Writing Through Cancer come from my personal experience with cancer, research and written work on the benefits of writing during cancer, and the many writing groups I’ve led over the past fourteen years for patients, survivors and caretakers–men and women whose lives have been touched by cancer, hardship or loss. Little by little, the word has spread, and the numbers of individuals who regularly visit this site has grown. Whether your life has been affected by cancer or you are struggling with some other serious illness or painful life situation, you’ll find most of the prompts are adaptable to any life circumstance and to anyone who wants to write for healing purposes.
Here’s how it works: Twice a month (bi-weekly), I’ll post a writing prompt designed to inspire your stories or poems that arise out of your cancer experience. Each prompt will be available on the site for one year, allowing you to refer back to them or even use the same prompt to write something different or expanded upon from your first effort.
I hope that you’ll find some inspiration and encouragement from the prompts, and that they offer you a gentle nudge to write and discover its healing benefits. Best wishes to you.
ABOUT SHARON BRAY, Ed.D.
photo by Chad Thompson
I’m a writer, teacher and author of two books on the healing power of writing during cancer: When Words Heal: Writing Through Cancer(Frog Books, 2006) andA Healing Journey: Writing Together through Breast Cancer (Amherst Writers Press, 2004). In 2007, I co-edited, together with Pat Fobair, LCSW, Learning to Live Again,an anthology of cancer patients’ writing published by the Stanford University School of Medicine. I founded and led the writing program, “Writing Through Cancer” at Breast Cancer Connections (now Bay Area Cancer Connections), Palo Alto from 2001-2007, and later, at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2004 until September 2013).
Beginning in 2006, I initiated and continued leading expressive writing groups for men & women with cancer at Scripps Green Cancer Center, and UCSD Moores Cancer Center in La Jolla, CA, until the Spring of 2017, when my husband and I returned to Toronto. From 2005-2017, I led a series of creative writing workshops for The Writers’ Workshop at Stanford Medical School for faculty, students, alums and staff of the Stanford Medical School. I also taught an annual week-long summer course, “Writing as a Healing Ministry,” at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, 2003 – 2015, and from 2007- 2017, online classes in transformational writing and creative nonfiction for the UCLA extension Writers’ Program. I currently lead expressive writing workshops for people living with cancer at Gilda’s Club, Greater Toronto.
In addition to a career that includes writing, teaching, counseling and executive leadership, I completed a doctoral degree in Applied (Educational) Psychology from the University of Toronto, Canada, as well as completing additional studies in creative writing and transformative language arts.
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(Content is copyrighted by Sharon A. Bray, Ed.D., unless otherwise stated. Permission is required to cite or use, in part or whole, any of the author’s posts from this site. Please contact me directly via email (address below)
If you’d like to know more about my classes or workshops, see: contact me at: [email protected].)