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February 2026 Letter | John Fox, PPM

Updated: Feb 18

Dear Friend of Poetic Medicine,


I hope that you are well enough. Thank you for being interested in us.


I can’t know but I can imagine you may be troubled, even very troubled, by what is happening on national and international dimensions.


We the People, are people who treasure justice and inclusivity. We do our best to practice compassion and kindness. We are intent on being sensitive to the real needs of people – especially sensitive to the needs of the most vulnerable among us.


These intentions & values, right speech & right action, you can count on from The Institute for Poetic Medicine.


We counter discouragements by showing you, showing the world, how, through the great good fortune of poetry and poem-making, with the catalytic surprises of poetic medicine, relying on the steadfast, long-term vision of IPM, there are truly amazing and beautiful things happening.


Here Is Good News – Who and What We Celebrate


I want to share the efforts and stories of two people we celebrate. In this short life, I am dedicated to celebrating beauty & truth. These two people deliver beauty and truth. This appreciation requires slowing down and paying attention. That is a challenge in this world of consumerism, AI, scrolling thumbs and immediate gratification. I hope you will slow down with me and join in this celebration!


James Elsaesser of Saylorsburg, PA 


In 2016, Jim submitted a proposal to bring poetry-as-healer to survivors of domestic abuse. This was years before he received his Certification as a Practitioner of Poetic Medicine in 2022.


The proposal centered on an organization called DASI-Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault Intervention Services, where Jim was facilitating poetry groups. We enthusiastically gave seed support. Jim came through by making a healing difference for so many people in the poetry groups, which were mostly comprised of women.


DASI saw the blessing and benefit and hired Jim to be to their staff. Jim began employment at DASI on the Prevention Team, which raises awareness in the community about Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence. After 11 years of service, he continues offering poetic medicine at DASI.


Jim also extends his healing reach to provide a brilliant pathway of community and creativity for people at Bridgeway Behavioral Services in Andover, NJ. Participants come to this Poetry Circle with developmental challenges. Working in tandem with a superb therapist, Delia Mead-Cortez, Jim & Delia weave together originality & creativity, self-growth & confidence-building.


Bridgeway clients, who the outer world considers marginal, have, for these past five years, created and sustain a living community model that we would be blessed to live in.


Now, something I think of as miraculous is happening; but on the other hand, what is happening, is a natural next step for Jim Elsaesser. 


Five years ago, Jim began working as a Facilitator at the DECIDE Program, which serves men who have caused harm in their relationships. DECIDE is a subsidiary of DASI. The DECIDE program has made healing poetry an integral part of their curriculum.


These days he is working with perpetrators of domestic abuse – that is – he is inviting men who have caused harm to dive inside themselves and write poems. Those men are in fact diving in and finding ways to relate to themselves with a caIm capacity for self-reflection.


Taking that step, they begin to express the harm they have often experienced as a children and take accountability for the harm they have inflicted on others. 


Research and experience have shown that so much domestic abuse happens because the abuser has been the abused. Poetic Medicine is a modality that fits this need.


Perhaps the miracle is the discovery, even the fact, that people involved in harming others, can gain insight and grow towards wholeness – and that leads to healing change.


Jim connected with The Family Peace Initiative an organization in Topeka, KS – – who have programs that work. This is the opening sentence on FPI’s web site:


The Family Peace Initiative is dedicated to ending family violence through compassion, integrity, and expertise. FPI is focused on treating every individual who walks through our doors with respect and dignity. The process of changing behavior begins with a safe environment where self-exploration can occur. We are committed to creating this space for those we serve.


Jim built a relationship with Steve Halley, LSCSW, and his wife, Dorthy Stucky Halley, LMSW. Dorthy and Steve are the co-founders and co-directors of the Family Peace Initiative. The FPI philosophy aligns with what Jim is offering. 


Steve Halley says:


It has been a genuine pleasure to connect with Jim Elsaesser. His kind, gentle presence helps create a safe space where our participants can finally give voice to what has long remained unspoken. The Poetic Healing approach helps people move through their protective layers to access a more authentic part of themselves.


In our work—helping individuals become less afraid of their own stories—Jim’s personal openness and the strategies of Poetic Healing have become invaluable assets. His contribution enriches both our participants and our team.


What I have been saying, saying about people discovering help from poetry, it isn’t a given – it is possible. What can we ask for in this life but a chance at the possible?


Jim Elsaesser is a man who carries and evokes possibilities that heal.



Merna Ann Hecht of Vashon, WA


The Institute for Poetic Medicine is more than pleased to let Merna Ann Hecht know that her 2026 proposal Word Travels for our Poetry Partner Program is excitedly approved once again!


Once again?! IPM has funded Merna for 13 years through her Stories of Arrival work with Refugee and Immigrant Youth, a Poetry Project. This year Merna is shifting to the name Word Travels. If you have been in touch with IPM for any amount of time, you likely know about this.


Working at Foster High in Tukwila, WA, with classroom teachers Carrie Stradley (2012-2022) and Hongyan Newton (2023-Present), Merna has had direct contact with nearly 400 teens arriving, so many displaced, from 42 countries. So many of those countries – Afghanistan, Myanmar, Eritrea, Iraq, Nepal, Angola – to name a handful -- have deep trauma.


We know this: the current administration is attacking people, in particular immigrants and refugees, doing this in a terrorizing, racist, heartrending way. This requires IPM and Merna to approach this project in a profoundly different way.


One significant shift is changing the name of the project. Word Travels does not raise a red flag. In making her proposal this year, Merna writes:


This year’s proposal differs from the parameters of years of poetry projects with global youth that IPM has generously supported. These have been highly focused and successful projects. Although this proposal is consistent with the mission and goals of past projects, the shape of the work and the time-line are significantly different.


Accepting Merna’s proposal, we wrote:


Far from having concern that “the shape of the work and the time-line are significantly different,” is changed, we welcome your sensitivity and smart choices to plan and do what is called for, to respond to and arrange what is necessary, to let us know what will help you and the people in the program do better in these very troubling days.


As always, your proposal receives strong and unanimous support. That sounds somewhat general. I want to express our specific and truly personal support – because we love you. We feel lucky – blessed I can say – to know you. Your profound sense of humanity, rooted in a recognition of the sacredness of a person:


The Uplifting Voices Project will honor our shared humanity by providing a space for participants to give full expression to their experiences in their own voice. Participants can choose if they wish their names and/or countries of origin kept confidential.


Merna’s key words, “in their own voice,” are a spotlight on those she will interact with – those whose necessary and beautiful voices she will lift-up and share.


Board Member and IPM Treasurer, Geoff Oelsner, wrote in our acceptance letter:


In Buddhism, the all-compassionate bodhisattva (awakened being) Kwan Yin is sometimes called "She who hears the cries of the world." I've witnessed such compassion in Merna. It shines through her ongoing work with traumatized young people who've been torn from their native lands.


Merna senses the cries inside these people, as well as their strengths, and invites them to bring forth both through poetry and the spoken word. A passionate mercy imbues all her projects that we've helped fund through our Poetry Partner program.


Her collaborative projects bring compassionate hearing and healing to more and more people as she continues expanding and evolving her outreach. It is an honor for IPM to be able to support Merna's work.


We will keep in touch with you about this poetry project for refugees and immigrants. We ask your support and prayers – this project asks for us all to rally together.


If you are interested in experiencing the great work of Merna Ann Hecht/Stories of Arrival/Word Travels, please look at these links. Merna has a knack for connecting with fabulous publishers! These are five exciting anthologies of poems written by the young people who will bless us with their truth-telling, their far-reaching imaginations, their love of country, their harrowing life-experiences and capacity to show us their humanity. The opening poem, I Write for My Motherland, by M of Somalia can be found in We Are the Future: Poems with a Voice for Peace.



What Is Happening This Spring:


Please see the links to these events below.


Wednesday, February 25th I will bring a workshop to men who are part of the Archway Recovery Service.

These workshops take place at Rush Ranch in Suisun City, CA. Horses are not included in this particular workshop but Rush Ranch is site where IPM collaborates with The Crescent Moon Center and we do bring together poem-making and equine learning.* Archway Recovery Service describes their purpose:


We provide compassionate, evidence-based treatment and prevention services that address addiction and its root causes—empowering individuals to recover, families to heal, and communities to thrive.


This is not a public workshop, yet I want to let you know that I love bringing poetry-as-healer to people fighting for and maintaining their sobriety. Both men and women are discovering that their creativity, their poetic voices, their poem-making, their spirit and sense of community – all of these are accessible, all of these help a person turn the corner, enter another dimension of living a sober life.

(*Please keep in touch to learn about this. https://www.crescentmooncenter.org/about)


Thursday, March 5th from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. PT the Mill Valley Poetry Center Library is sponsoring a Poetry Reading by myself and Meredith Heller.


I do not do poetry readings very often and I am TRULY excited that I will do this at the Mill Valley Library.


What furthers my excitement is to read poems with the shining star and lovely human being, Meredith Heller. We are graciously invited by Jayne McPherson. Meredith is a valued IPM Poetry Partner who works primarily with young women. I was happy to write the Foreword to her excellent book, Write from the Heart. Meredith and I will light up the evening with poems and presence in this not quite yet Vernal Equinox.

Please let your friends in Marin County and beyond know about this. https://millvalleylibrary.libcal.com/event/14980385



Saturday, March 7th, 10:00 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. PT on-line workshop with Living Dying Project, Finding Your Creative Voice in Difficult Times.


I love working with Dale Borglum, Executive Director of Living Dying Project. We will dig into finding your creative voice that says YES to Life, your creative voice that may meet dying with heart, and welcomes you to speak up for what matters to you. In these challenging days, our voice, your voice, deserves to be given more room. These lines from the poem A Ritual to Read to Each Other catch the sense and spirit of what I mean:


And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.


For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes, or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.


~ William Stafford


Sunday, March 15th from 10:00 – 11:30 a.m. PT the team from Poetry as a Tool for Wellness is offering Listening to Yourself and Others.

This 90-minute journey on-line workshop will be led by Katie. What are the qualities of compassionate listening? How do I know when I am deeply listened to? How can I deepen my own attention and listening? Explore how the practice of poetic medicine can hone our attention and help us drop the habit of judgment.

Together we will read, hear, and explore quotes and poetry. 

We will slow down and, in a brave space, make time to put our words on the page. Sharing our poems with one another will help us practice a new way of seeing the potential for the year ahead in-the-midst of a nourishing, healing community. We invite you to participate in this creative and empowering expressive art! https://givebutter.com/PTW2026March


Friday thru Sunday March 20 – 22, I return to the North County of San Diego (Cardiff-by-the-Sea in Encinitas, California) to bring Poetic Medicine for the 27th year!

This three-day retreat, Connections: Synapses of Flourishing in Creating Human Experience, will give people a chance to consider “what we imagine.” What we imagine is what will change our world. I draw inspiration for this from the lines by Rainer Maria Rilke:


Bless the spirit that makes connections,

for we truly live in what we imagine.

Clocks move along-side our real life

with steps that are ever the same.


We will look to move, to walk, to dance in a fresh way -- not take the same old clock-bound, steps. My deep thanks to John Foos and especially Rebecca Speer. Leaders of the Iona Poetry Community, John and Rebecca have coordinated my visits all these years. Registration is limited to sixteen. We meet in a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean. People are welcome to attend from far and wide. If you need information about lodging, please write info@poeticmedicine.org.


"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


Monday, March 23rd at 4:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. I will give an in-service to interns training at the Hospice of the North Coast.

This in-service has happened over many years: showing counseling psychology students how they can incorporate poetic medicine into what they do – especially as it relates to a person, family and care-givers who are entering into hospice care. My host is my brother- in-spirit Jim Reiser, Bereavement Director at HONC. Good Fortune that! Jim is also an IPM Poetry Partner bringing poetry monthly to VETS at the Veteran’s Hospital in San Diego & La Jolla. 


Friday, March 27th from 6:30 – 8:30 p.m PT the team from Poetry as a Tool for Wellness is offering a the first session in a 9-week Peer-Facilitator Training series.

We will be offering another Saturday morning series option for those in Australia and Asia who are interested in online PTW Facilitator Training. The series will be offered March 27 through May 29 at 6:30pm Pacific Time (on Friday nights here in California). While one goal for this particular series is to offer attendance accessibility to those halfway around the globe, anyone from any time zone is welcome to attend of course! Learn more about PTW or register for this training here.

 

"This program has been so meaningful and beneficial both personally and professionally. The trainers were PHENOMENAL!!!! No notes! They helped create a brave space for us all to grow in new ways, and I’ll always value the connections and experiences I had through this training!"


~ Harlan, Peer Support Specialist



Sunday, April 12th 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m., on-line, Arts and Healing Resiliency Center.


I love working with Dr. Diana Kaufman, the Executive Director of AHRC. We met in 2010 when she invited me to present Grand Rounds at University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. This is her invitation to present Finding Your Creative Voice in Difficult Times. We will dig into finding our creative voice that says YES to Life and welcomes you to stand up for what matters to you. In these challenging days, our voice deserves to be given more room. Once again, these lines from the poem A Ritual to Read to Each Other catch the sense and spirit of what I mean: 


And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.


For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes, or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.


~ William Stafford


The Poetic Medicine Summit 2026 – On-Line

April 24, 25, 26th


We are forging ahead by offering the Poetic Medicine Summit. The Summit is taking place on-line during National Poetry Month, in late April, featuring keynote speakers Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Amanda Johnston, and John Fox (me!).


We know the intense, beautiful, multiple ways poetry-as-healer transforms people’s lives for the better. Poetic Medicine has a deep impact on many people helping professions, giving tools and insights to advance their work. IPM is in our 21st year of making an ongoing, amazing, surprising outreach across the world. Add to this John Fox’s life-changing healing work in its 41st year; all of this make our roots deep and spreads our branches wide.


Now is the time for us to unfurl a banner to announce a national gathering. We invite you to join us as we make a journey that begins in late April and will travel through 2026 with monthly presentations by our extraordinary Practitioner of Poetic Medicine Graduates and IPM Poetry Partners.


In these difficult times, we are confident that this Poetic Medicine Summit will inform, affirm, uplift and give you a nourishing sustenance that would be hard to find elsewhere.


Here are introductory paragraphs about the weekend presenters: 


Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is an increasingly cherished poet who provides a pathway to the imagination through the human heart. On her website, Word Woman we learn: She performs as a storyteller, including shows in Aspen at the Wheeler Opera House, at the Taos Storytelling Festival, Page Storytelling Festival and the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN. Rosemerry says,


“I believe poetry can help us meet the most difficult moments of our lives. It doesn’t make things easier. It offers no answers. It fixes nothing. But it does offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to find solace in community, to express our heartache and to explore the complex landscape of our hearts.”


Amanda Johnston, Poet Laureate of Texas, is editor of Praise Song for the People: Poems from the Heart and Soul of Texas. She is a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She has facilitated creative writing workshops and presented at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. In an interview in Mosaic Literary Magazine, Amanda says:

“Speaking out is one of the most powerful tools we have as people. Speaking our truth and calling out injustice is the first action necessary to create change. I think one of the important things that come from people speaking out is the ability to reach multiple audiences. A journalist is going to reach those who follow them and their news outlets. Poets will reach their followers, readers, and literary communities. I feel like poetry has a way of calling you out privately. Even in a crowded reading, the poem can somehow find you, whisper your name, and call you to action.”


John Fox, Founder of The Institute for Poetic Medicine, is the author of the timeless Finding What You Didn’t Lose and Poetic Medicine. John offers programs throughout the United States and around the world. His work makes a significant impact on Practitioners in Lithuania, China, Canada, Sweden, Korea, Egypt, Singapore, India, and many other countries. He brings poetry-as-healer to children & elders, people overcoming addiction & those increasing their mental health. In his book, Poetic Medicine, John writes:


“The purpose of some poems is to unload blocks to your well-being so you can move on. Like a good crying jag, these poems are written to give room to your emotions. You allow strong emotion to flow in tough poems like this; you write in whatever form allows you to best speak your truth. You can feel cleansed after writing a poem like this and it may open the way for healing.”


The Poetic Medicine Summit will, through this year, following the opening programs April 24-26, bring you many of the superb monthly workshops that happen because of IPM.


Merna Ann Hecht, of Word Travels, will introduce her work of responding to the voices, the lives of immigrant & refugees. Jim Elsaesser will share the depth and beautiful work he does with the survivors of domestic abuse. Ashley Romberg and Tara Broderick, who live with Parkinson’s Disease, will share how poetry and poem-making can help a person creatively respond to such a difficult diagnosis. Kristin Thompson, Athena McClendon, and Sharon Lowe – our PTW Senior Instructors – will introduce people to Poetry as a Tool for Wellness (PTW) which is bringing blessing and benefit to people around the world including those with a mental health diagnosis.


This does a little more than scratch the surface of the Poetic Medicine Summit this coming year – or these are a few of the excellent meals we are preparing for you. Please look into this and join us.



A Creative Spark Lives and Breathes


My intention as CEO of IPM, my intention as a human being is to meet people with creativity and gladness. To communicate, on behalf of IPM, how we believe in, have faith in, welcome the creative spark that lives and breathes within each person and all of creation.


Call it luck, blessing, good karma, excellent examples, good decision-making – that faith in a creative spark is shared by everyone involved in what we do. It may all come to this – friendship. I can say with confidence that people are friends. Friendship that encourages trust, caring behavior and simply, enjoyment.


I want to lift-up – and celebrate – two more people for appreciation, who I am most often in contact with: Mary Price, IPM Operations Director and Valerie Knight, IPM Artistic Director. 


Mary brings her caring attention to every facet & every person with whom we are engaged. Without Mary, IPM loses its glue; i.e. would fall apart. Yes, we are strong but it matters that we being human, need glue. Valerie – what can I say? I may be good with words. That is a plus. However, Valerie, my graphic artist since 1997, brings those words and who we are to LIFE with her exquisite design and content sensitivity. You can check out Valerie Knight Design https://www.valerieknightdesign.com/


Sounding a very practical and important note – IPM is looking for someone to join our Board to act as our Treasurer. For the past seven years we have been blessed with the service of Geoff Oelsner. I am so proud of the way we carefully keep track of and manage our finances. If you apply and are accepted, you can be sure that Geoff will provide you with excellent guidance and training. You will be working with a superb team, Diana Messick, our bookkeeper, and Mary Price, Operations Director.


I wish you all goodness and flourishing. I wish for IPM the same, goodness and flourishing…especially as we approach the Vernal Equinox, may we keep our heats open.


Kindness,


John Fox

Founder of IPM

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