Sonia Usatch-Kuhn

     In order to ace a 1984 creative writing college course, I had to write two poems, stand up, and read them to the class. My professor gave me the green light and an A for the course. I joined two workshops on Long Island, in Huntington and Southampton. I brought a noodle kugel to the party and was reminded that there was a menu to write about - chopped liver, chicken soup and potato latkes.It was at a bring-a-dish party where the encouragement came to write my first book. Noodle Kugel and Life's Other Meichels features poems about the food we eat to celebrate life's events.

 

     Dr. Jack Coulahan invited me, the parent of a son diagnosed with schizophrenia, to develop a course for second year medical students at Stony Brook School of Medicine. From 1995 to 2005, I had the opportunity of teaching Healing and Madness, a nonclinical course regarding the issues of mental illness.  No text books, no research papers. Instead the focus was on the expressive arts - poetry, short stories, theater, parent panel discussions, and an off-site visit to a psych rehab agency. The future physicans learned what it's really like for families after visiting hours are over and that not all the answers lie in a bottle of pills. And while the arts do not cure, they are very much a part of the healing process.

 

     I was a presenter at Duke's 2004 Conference on Poetry and Medicine - Vital Lines, Vital Signs. Inspired by poet Li Young Lee's reading of his poem, This Room and Everything In It, I went back to New York, read the poem to the residents of Sterling Glen Assisted Living where I ran a monthly program titled, I AM, and created a project of poetic memoir that I compiled and edited. Living in the Rooms of our Lives, are stories as told to me about what happened in the rooms of the lives of the 16 participants. Newsday came to the staged reading and did a three page spread.

 

     Serendipitous winds channel our paths, we move as we are moved, penned by me in 1993, came to mind in July 2010 when I was introduced to Judi Margulies whose father, Asher Edelstein, had passed away in May. Judi wished to honor her father's memory in a book. Asher was a spirited, learned, force of nature, a complex, focused man on-the-go; a character to be reckoned with because he did things his way - for family, friends, and hundreds of Raleigh's youth. The essence of the man, the mentor, and the mensch was captured in The Book of Asher: Memoirs of a Passionate Jewish Life, published in 2012 and celebrated at Beth Meyer Synagogue in April 2013.

 

     The shock of knowing that your child has been diagnosed with a severe and persistent mental illness is immeasurably difficult to deal with. To save my own sanity, my salvation came from the blank page. From 1978 to 2012 I wrote the poetry of diagnosis, stigma, helplessness, hope, faith, and recovery. In May 2014, Regarding My Son, was released. The poem titled, Lance, was retitled Abyss and set to music by composer, Dr. Herbert Deutsch, It had a world debut in 1995, and appears on a CD titled, Women of Darkness.

 

    As a participant in Creativity Matters: Arts & Aging Core Training for Teaching Artists, sponsored by CAN-NC (Creative Aging Network), I earned a certificate of completion. This enhanced the work I had been doing in New York and continue to do in North Carolina - the workshop, Gray Matters, a mental aerobics program for residents of assisted living facilities. At Morningside Assisted Living, a group of folks wrote a story by concensus, which became a play titled, UPTOWN-DOWNTOWN. This was performed by those writers as a staged reading and can be seen on U-tube.