Welcome! I’m Deborah Bayer, writer and workshop facilitator.
I am (mostly) retired from the practice of Infectious Disease and Palliative Care. I write poems and personal essays, and I’m working on a memoir about the need for emotional support in the workplace.
I facilitate writing groups via Zoom. These groups blend the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) methodology with the Narrative Medicine workshop format.
Visit my Shop to see the upcoming workshops.
A Rope Made of Bandages
Poems by Deborah Bayer
AWA Workshops
The supportive approach of the AWA method lends itself to healing from all kinds of trauma, including the trauma of medical training.
Stay Connected
My Substack newsletter, Healers Write, Writers Heal is published biweekly.
Blog Archive
How Poetry Saved Me
During a week-long meditation retreat in 1999, ten years after graduating from medical school, I unlocked a box in my chest that held ten years’ worth of grief and anger. Tears and heat poured out of that box. I had survived medical school, postgraduate training, and...
Rising Incense
Rising Incense Full sunlight can blind. I prefer the subdued brightness of Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park 117. The yellow on the bottom is a ground and a base. It works: black and gray float on top, oil and smoke broken up by the frames of a skylight. Ochre and...
Instructions for How to Start Over
Instructions for How to Start Over i. It’s not necessary to destroy everything. Everyone thinks that fire is cleansing, but fragments of bone are left behind; ashes cling to your face with static electricity. Still, they don’t disguise you. New life begins from...