Writing Through Cancer is an online resource designed to encourage anyone living with cancer, debilitating illness or difficult life circumstance, to write out of that experience.
Why write? A significant number of studies demonstrate 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.
The weekly writing prompts 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: Each week, I 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: (Frog Books, 2006) and (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, Palo Alto from 2001-2007, and later, at the Stanford Cancer Center from 2004 until September 2013). Now based in San Diego, I initiated and continue to lead expressive writing groups for men & women with cancer at Scripps Green Cancer Center, and UCSD Moores Cancer Center in La Jolla, CA, and since 2005, continue to lead two one-day writing retreats for The Writers’ Workshop at Stanford Medical School for faculty, students and staff of the Stanford Medical School, a series I began leading in 2005. I’ve taught an annual week-long summer course, “Writing as a Healing Ministry,” at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, 2003 – 2015, and since 2007, online classes in transformational writing and creative nonfiction for the UCLA extension Writers’ Program. I have a doctorate degree in Applied (Educational) Psychology from the University of Toronto, Canada, and also studied creative writing and transformative language arts. My professional affiliations include the Global Alliance for Arts & Health, Arts & Health Network of Canada.
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If you’d like to know more about my classes or workshops, see: www.sharonbray.net or contact me via email: .