Suzanne Edison
Suzanne Edison MA, MFA, writes most often about the intersection of illness, healing, our natural world, politics, and art. Her chapbook, The Body Lives Its Undoing, is an exploration in poetry and visual art of the lived experience of patients with autoimmune diseases and their caregivers, doctors, and scientists. It was published by The Benaroya Research Institute in 2018. The Moth Eaten World was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014. Poetry can be found in: Michigan Quarterly Review; Canadian Medical Association Journal; HEAL; Persimmon Tree; JAMA; SWWIM Everyday; Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine; Mom Egg Review; Naugatuck River Review; Rise Up Review; Whale Road Review; What Rough Beast; Passager; The Ekphrastic Review; and in several anthologies, including, Face to Face: Women Writers on Faith, Mysticism and Awakening; and The Healing Art of Writing, Volume One.
Suzanne, a 2019 Hedgebrook Women’s Writing Residency alumna, teaches writing workshops at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. She has designed and taught Reflective Writing Workshops to medical personnel at Virginia Mason Hospital at Seattle, Seattle Children’s Hospital, and the University of Washington Medical Center. She also teaches writing workshops to patients through Cancer LifeLine, and to caregivers through UCSF Chronic Illness Center, the Juvenile Diabetes and Research Foundation, and the Cure JM (Juvenile Myositis) Foundation.
She has been a recipient of several grants: 4Culture of King County, the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, as well as an Artist Trust GAP grant.
Suzanne is almost a native Pacific Northwesterner, having lived in the area for 45 years. She is a gardener and dahlia fanatic. She loves to hike, exploring deserts, mountains, and waterways with her husband and adult daughter. Her two cats usually find their way home at night.
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"Still Life Without Skull" from Since the House Is Burning was featured in Verse Daily.
Suzanne reading 3 poems from Since The House Is Burning (Gyroscope Review)
Read a review of Since The House Is Burningby Risa Denenberg in River Mouth Review
Poem from Since the House Is Burning
breathing
after Robert Hass I left God in her Temple when you got sick. Foolish to utter that name, like trying to lasso clouds wandering an indigo arc. I praise instead the sunflowers’ beneficent heads, their Fibonacci faces divining light. I march between rows of beans, corn, and all dirtshrouded tubers begging us bend as we sow, and witness the parlay of earthworms, their castings, our gold. I rant my prayers to the righteous communities of bees, their loyalty spinning alchemies day and night. On the wild shore, where the sea breaks its back, between foam and spray, I walk splintered like an armless starfish, waiting: for the turn of tide, a waxing breath, my place among the minyan of slack-jawed, facing slack water.
