The Effects of Expressiveness

This study looks at a six-week poem-making class for staff and volunteers at Hospice of Spokane and, in a participatory action research project, reports how writing about past experiences and unvoiced emotions offered form to these hospice caregivers' pain and image to their joy.

Detailed are specific weekly writing activities and participants' commentary on how the lessons encouraged self-exploration and transformed their feelings.

Hospice volunteers and staff listen to the emotional and physical pain of their clients and this class expanded the role of listening to include themselves; writing poetry during this six-week class helped hospice staff and volunteers take themselves and their lives as seriously as they do their clients'.

A collection of participants' poems supplies one of the tools for investigating how these hospice caregivers reflect on the details and memories of their own lives and process, through writing, their own difficulties and explore their own mysteries.