Summer-Fall 2016 Schedule
 
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letter
It was a learning time and a healing experience to spend time with you. We are our stories and others who help us express what they are and what they mean in the discovery of our deepest identity are the true healers. and you are one of them, and I thank you for sharing your gift.

Sheila Tanzer, Lebanon, NH

June 20, 2016

Dear Friend in Poetic Medicine:
 
I'll travel over the next few months to offer a new poem- making retreat I have composed: Seven Gifts: Poetry As a Pathway for Renewal.

You can attend one of these retreats in:  
 
San Jose, CA    Cleveland, OH    San Diego, CA    Bangor, PA
 
What the Very First Pages Say
As I start to travel for Seven Gifts what comes to mind are the first pages of Poetic Medicine which reflect on how a healing poem holds and offers to a person these three healing things: 
 
Companion    Sacred Place    Poetic Medicine
 
Looking ahead to my summer and reflecting more deeply on this life I am aware that poetry and poem-making have also created these wonderful things in my life and work. That is, they can surely be found in poems but they are also found and experienced because of the environment and in the world that poem-making creates.
 
I discover companions in this deep sharing--and our delight in all of life rises up from that depth. Roots and continual blossoming are felt in those friendships. Sharing poems in this way, encourages us to both listen and speak; healing poetry is a great equalizer as it asks this of us:

Don't walk in front of me... I may not follow 
Don't walk behind me... I may not lead 
Walk beside me... just be my friend

Albert Camus

To my surprise and relief, I discover every place is sacred--poem-making helps us be more aware of this.

There are no unsacred places; there are  
only sacred places and desecrated places

Wendell Berry

Expressed in a more personal way, writing reminds me what I learned from my friend, the poet, Mary TallMountain:
 
Wherever I can find a place to sit down and write, that is my home.

Mary TallMountain

What a sustaining and reassuring place to sit--home.  

The experience of poetry as a balm, a salve, a natural medicine--is directly experienced when writing with others. It is my commitment to you, to provide that kind of sacred place.
 
Poetry provides guidance, revealing what you did not know you knew  
before you wrote or read the poem. This moment of surprising yourself 
with your own words of wisdom or of being surprised by the poems of  
others is at the heart of poetry as healer.

from Poetic Medicine,  
Heart Who Will You Cry Out To?

So this summer I offer these to you--companionship, a living place that is felt as sacred and the natural healing power of poetry.  
 
Do You Know the Way to San Jose?
I feel great enthusiasm to offer Seven Gifts with my friend Janet Childs in San Jose. I met Janet 16 years ago when we both served on a panel responding to the grief, anger and confusion felt very soon after September 11, 2001. She and I made an instant friendship. We discovered a mutual understanding and intuitive knowing for the significant place of the arts have in responding to loss.  

Janet is a maker of songs--and that will grace this retreat--they comfort, delight and inspire. They also evoke, I believe, the Muse.  
 
Janet is one of the most compassionate and humble persons I have ever known. She is Director of Education at The Center for Living With Dying in Santa Clara, CA, which she co-founded in 1976. Janet is a beautiful teacher and what we will offer together will be multi-dimensional in nature.
   
Home Ground--Where I'm From
Returning to my home-ground of Cleveland, OH heartens me. While I have lived in northern California since 1979, and recognize my home there,
the place where I grew up and began on this poetry path feels like roots to soil. The landscape and the people of northeast Ohio remain an integral part of my inner landscape.  

It makes me happy that my time to visit spans August 31, which is my birthday. 

I am grateful to my dear friends since Junior High school, Karin Rosegger and Bob Delvalle for coordinating this retreat. What I love about my work is that it again and again gives me the opportunity to realize that poetry is part of a larger fabric that is rooted not only in a place, but also in friendships.
 
When Someone Approaches You Speaking a Poem--Listen!

Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside youare not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here, 
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger, 
Must ask permission to know it and be known.

David Wagoner 
from the poem Lost

I go to San Diego October 21-23 for my 17th annual visit! This work has been coordinated all that time by John Foos and Rebecca Speer. It was autumn of 1995. I was on a book tour to launch Finding What You Didn't Lose. I gave a reading in Encinitas, CA, at Earth Song bookstore. When I finished speaking, John and Rebecca came up to me. John began to recite lines from the poem Lost by David Wagoner. After the third or fourth line, I followed on with speaking the next line. We spoke it alternating lines through to the end! I have visited them every year since to offer seventeen years of poetry retreats. 

For many years John and Rebecca have led a monthly poem-making group that is a renewing experience for many. If you live in the San Diego and/or the North Bay Area, check out the linked flyer in the schedule section below and contact John Foos. They would welcome your participation. 
 
This Seven Gifts retreat in San Diego will be rich with the deep roots of this long commitment to place, friends, and the way poetry renews.

Please, you come too.
 
Kirkridge Retreat--Leaning Into Solstice
At the end of the year, in the midst of December's longer nights, I couldn't think of a better place to be settled in at than with friends at Kirkridge Retreat in Bangor, PA. Kirkridge is a forested place, located on a ridge of the beautiful Kittatinny Ridge of Northeast Pennsylvania, overlooking the Delaware Valley.

Jean Richardson, the Executive Director, is a great inspiration to me. Jean bears witness to life--with a fierce joy that lifts up equality, peace and justice, while at the same time, she holds and expresses a grounded commitment to the well-being of the individual human heart. I feel this happens because Jean is such a whole human being.  

That wholeness flows through this place. Kirkridge web site says this:

"As we work to embrace a wider community, our spirit of excellent hospitality is more important than ever. Our historic motto of "picket and pray" has now extended itself "to protect, tend, and embrace." From the peak of the ridge to the clear waters in the valley below, the new century calls for stewardship, nurturing, and embracing inner stability with outer sustainability."

I believe in the sacred ground of Kirkridge and invite you into our circle of poem-making there.  This place will help us. Our poems and presence will help it. As we lean into the winter solstice, joining together will make more vivid to you, to us, how the quiet of a winter season can provide a deeper assurance and connect us to mystery.  
 
Even if it is not this year, not in the coming months that you join in to write and share, I still look forward to seeing you, to writing with you at another time.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,  
Missing me one place search another,  
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

Walt Whitman 
from Song of Myself, the conclusion 

Sincerely Yours,
 
John 
 
I am so grateful to you for this day, for all who were here and for your ability to call forth sincere, soulful writing and deep listening. 

Mary McIsaac
Encinitas, CA
schedule
JOHN'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Seven Gifts: Poetry as a Pathway for Renewal 
Offered in four locations:
San Jose, CA - Cleveland, OH - San Diego, CA - Bangor, PA 
 
In this opening Friday evening talk, all-day Saturday, and Sunday morning retreat (San Jose does not include Sunday morning) John Fox and Janet Childs will lead us on a journey that names "seven gifts" of renewal given to us by poetry and poem-making.

These gifts and this renewal are accessible in the midst of living this life -- with its sorrow and joy, travail and adventure, the daily experience of being human and a deeper spiritual current that speaks to a greater mystery--poetry provides a perspective and felt-experience that can be recognized and received as gift. Spaces are limited ... a wonderful small retreat!

AUGUST 12 - 13, 2016
San Jose, CA
The Center for Creative Living
Friday, 7:00 - 9:30 pm
Saturday, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Fee: $110
  
Click here for more information and to register.
*  *  *  *  *  
AUGUST 26 - 28, 2016
Cleveland, OH
Friday, 7:00 - 9:30 pm
Saturday, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sunday, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
*At this location you have the option to attend only the Friday evening talk. 
Fee for full retreat: $130
Fee for Friday evening talk only: $20 
 
Click here for more information and to register. 

*  *  *  *  *    
OCTOBER 21 - 23, 2016
San Diego, CA
at the home of Lynn Pollock and Ilan Auerbach
Friday, 7:00 - 9:30 pm
Saturday, 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Sunday, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm
Fee: $175

Click here for more information and to register.

*  *  *  *  *    
DECEMBER 9 - 11, 2016
Bangor, PA
Kirkridge Retreat Center 
Begins Friday evening and concludes Sunday at noon
Fee: $425 (includes all meals, lodging and teaching fees)

Click here for more information and to register.


*  *  *  *  *
The four of us who came to John's workshop last night all felt totally
inspired. John conducted the discussion like a virtuoso. It felt totally
fresh and spontaneous. He has an uncanny ability to deal with individuals'
issues that arise and direct them right into the flow of the discussion.
What he brings to this topic of poetry as healer is potentially life-changing.

Ralph Day
Cleveland, Ohio
 
support
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The Only Gift to Bring, a new book of poems by John Fox. 
  
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lastword
The Last Word   
Here at Summer Solstice and Full Moon, a rare event, I honor my friend
the poet Mary TallMountain. Mary was born along the Yukon River in 1918 in the Athabascan tribe. Her life-story is rich and varied.

Click here to learn more in this Bill Moyers special featuring Mary and the poets Joy Harjo and Garrett Hongo. 
 
Mary and I met in Spring of 1988 and remained friends until her death in 1994.  
She inspired me in many ways and her poems hold a special place in my heart.  
Her very fierce poem, The Last Wolf, represents The Last Word in this Journal. The Last Wolf reminds us that we bear responsibility for how we treat the earth and its living creatures. Through Mary's poem, the wolf speaks to us: none of this is given. 

The Last Wolf is sacred place, companion and healing medicine all-in-one. 
 


Click here to view.