April 29, 2025 • 54 mins
After our episode 6 conversation with the Art Pharmacy in the U.S., we knew we had to speak with Deb Alma from the Poetry Pharmacy in London and Shropshire, England when we saw her on NBC Morning News.
Poetry, often seen as a fading art, has the power to heal by addressing a range of emotions—sadness, grief, change, growth, learning, and loss. Deb took this concept and transformed it into something truly alive and accessible to anyone in need. Many forms of art, including reading or writing poetry, play a crucial role in mental healing, aligning with the idea of “social prescribing”—the practice of using creative expression, whether through music, painting, or poetry, as a therapeutic tool. The Poetry Pharmacy has done just that.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:25):
This is healthcare uprising.
We are here to shine a light on the innovators implementing positive change in Americanhealthcare.
In the patient experience stories, good and bad that can help others navigate thesometimes overwhelmingly complex American healthcare system.
(00:46):
Welcome to the Uprising.
We to doctors and we don't play one on TV.
If you need medical advice, consult with your physician or healthcare professional.
Hello Health Head, welcome and thank you for checking in to this dose of The Health CareUprising.
(01:10):
I'm your producer in the back, Jeremy Carr, here with your host in the front row, HeatherPierce.
So what's on our agenda for today, Heather?
So today I think is one of our most unique interviews yet.
We're meeting with Deb Alma, who is the owner and founder of The Poetry Pharmacy.
She has lived, and this is in England, London and Shropshire.
(01:32):
And she's lived on the Welsh-Shropshire borders for over 30 years, where the origins ofthe poetry pharmacy were actually born.
Originally, she worked with people with dementia and at the end of their lives for manyyears and became the emergency poet in her 1970s ambulance, and where she literally would
show up in her ambulance to festivals and different public events.
(01:54):
And she saw where folks really benefited from poetry for emotional healing and mentalhealth.
Deb has also taught creative writing at multiple universities in England and has been theeditor for multiple poetry books and anthologies, including The Emergency Poet.
These are the hands poems from the heart of the NHS and that's National Health Society, bythe way, and the award winning, hashtag me too, poetry anthology.
(02:18):
Her own poetry collection is called Dirty Laundry.
Earlier this year, Macmillan, I think most people know the name.
that um published a series of eight slim poetry anthologies to match the sections of herpoetry pharmacy bookshops, which we're going to learn more about in the interview.
And those commenced in January with words for love and comfort.
So she's done a lot of really cool, exciting, interesting things.
(02:41):
And we are bringing poetry and pharmacy together.
Yeah.
What a great concept.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Here's our conversation with Deb Alma from poetry pharmacy.
Hi, and welcome to the Healthcare Uprising podcast.
(03:03):
have Deb Alma with us from the Poetry Pharmacy in England.
Thanks for joining us.
uh Hi Heather, it's really lovely to talk to you and Jeremy too.
Yeah.
today is a little bit different.
Typically our interviews are very, I would say more clinical in nature, very obviouslyhealthcare, but we published a podcast interview not that long ago with art pharmacy, who
(03:33):
is a U S based business who is doing social social prescribing for mental health.
And we thought poetry
pharmacy in London where I happened to see a show one Sunday morning on NBC.
uh Thanks for some national media coverage.
Some of it's still good anyway.
uh Brought me here to Deb and the Poetry Pharmacy and what a great connection with our artpharmacy uh interview and actually bringing somebody on who is legitimately prescribing
(04:07):
poetry.
I'm so excited to hear how this all works.
Yeah.
So Deb, this is going to be really fun.
So with that, I want to give you the stage here.
just tell us about your history, your kind of life experiences that led you here and maybethe origins of, of poetry pharmacy, just kind of how, it came to be.
(04:27):
Yeah, well, thank you very much for inviting me here.
It's a real pleasure.
And I love making these kind of connections through art, you know, across the world, whichis lovely.
Yeah, it's a kind of long story, really.
I, oh gosh, in my 40s, think I did an MA in creative writing and am a poet.
(04:53):
myself.
I suppose it started, it's kind of lots of different stories that feed together.
the thing that I was doing, I was working with people with dementia, using poetry toassist communication.
And some other kind of community, a bit like your art pharmacy that you were talking to,know, kind of going into different care settings, actually, I went and did some
(05:20):
leave taking poems that we made in hospice care and I worked with some people with sightloss and that's the kind of sort of serious underpinning of the work that I went on to do
later.
um And after that I was looking on eBay as you do, thinking I wanted a camper van and wasgoing to go on a road trip or something and came across a vintage ambulance for sale.
(05:50):
And on a kind of moment of madness, decided to set up as an emergency poet.
So it's a 1950s Morris ambulance, painted emergency poet on the side and dressed up as adoctor and drove around to, was invited to arts festivals and schools and conferences and
(06:14):
libraries to offer poetry on prescription.
And then there were anyway, and that's kind of one story led to another.
And I ended up being too old to drive an ambulance with no power steering and decided thatI wanted people to come to me.
And I'm talking to you from Shropshire on the English-Welsh borders, where we have aVictorian shop with its original fittings.
(06:42):
And I thought it looked like a pharmacy.
So set up the poetry pharmacy here.
Is that the Bishop's Castle location?
Yeah, it's in Bishop's Castle.
I did my research.
And then, you know, it's had lots, right from the beginning, it's had quite a lot ofoccasional media attention one way or another.
(07:05):
uh The ambulance was very, you know, big piece of theatre.
And yes, and now we have a poetry pharmacy uh inside Lush on Oxford Street.
And we're about to open probably a third
Poetry Pharmacy here in the UK as well.
Where would the third one be?
Almost certainly in Bath, Jane Austenland.
(07:29):
Okay.
Man, we should bring this concept to America in a real way.
I know.
Can I jump in with a question here?
Heather, do you mind?
No, go for it.
I can't wait for Jeremy's questions.
This is going to be fun.
What was your process with the emergency poet and the ambulance?
Like you would just like pull up and jump out and start reading poetry to people?
(07:52):
Did you get cold?
The first one I did was a poetry festival.
Quite often it was art or music festival.
So people are at a festival, they're up for, they're very receptive to kind of odd thingsat a festival.
People would come up and say, what's going on here?
(08:13):
I had my poetry pharmacy of my little pills with poems inside the pills under an awning.
So people would come up and um I would, it's quite explicitly poetry on prescription.
They'd go into the back of the ambulance, lie down on a stretcher.
I'm dressed as a doctor with a stethoscope, clipboard.
(08:35):
And then in a kind of pastiche of a therapy session, ask them very unexpected questions,questions about how they relax their reading habits, questions that are really lovely to
answer.
So they're kind of intimate, but not invasive.
And then at the end of it, prescribe them a poem that not my poetry, but poetry that wasalready printed out as a prescription.
(09:00):
So I had hundreds of poems to call on.
In the pills, like on a scroll?
The polls were giveaways under the morning for people who didn't have time.
So, you know, the pharmacy, the UKO and self-prescribed and then the poems that I gavethem would be one or two complete poems.
(09:22):
So the pill has a little rolled up poem and like you open the capsule of the pill andthere's a little rolled up poem and said, yeah, that's awesome.
Why didn't I ever think of that?
I don't know.
It seems to work, as well, people really like it.
Do you still use the ambulance or is it just kind of parked at this point as part of like
(09:42):
I'm really sad about the ambulance.
I kept it for a couple of years here, parked outside the bookshop, but it was kind ofrusting away, so we sold it to pay for a camper van, which we have now.
But I didn't have time, too busy.
Yeah, there's pictures of the ambulance on the website and we're going to make sure to putthe link in our show notes.
(10:03):
And when we, uh, when we do all of our promo and social, make sure everyone sees it.
It makes me think so that made me think of the movie ghostbusters when they took the oldambulance.
Um, and you know, made it obviously for ghost busting, not saving people, but still fun.
I love it.
That theatrics of it is kind of in the same same vein anyway.
(10:23):
ain't afraid of no ghost.
Huh?
Okay.
It might be the nerdiest thing I say today.
might be.
We'll see how the rest of the conversation goes.
He's pretty good.
So now you've got two locations, right?
But somebody can physically walk into, um, and are they both, are they similar in terms oflike the layout?
(10:45):
they, or are they anything different about either the location?
they're really different.
One is in the middle of nowhere in kind of hill country with sheep, know, kind of you cansee sheep out the window.
And then the other one is on the busiest retail street in the world, I think on OxfordStreet in London.
And the idea is the same.
(11:08):
that fundamentally it's a bookshop.
and you browse the books according to emotional state.
they're divided into sections and they're both divided into the so we have a first aidsection and so if you have a broken heart you go to the broken heart book section and so
on and oh my bookshop.
(11:32):
That's fun.
I love that.
How am I feeling today?
Yeah, exactly.
m And then, you know, what do you need?
em And then they both have good coffee shops and we serve coffee in little kind ofchemical boiling flasks.
So the whole conceit of the pharmacy or a kind of dosage of poetry and coffee is kind ofconsistent through the whole place.
(12:01):
Nice.
That sounds like a fantastic place.
want to go there.
And speaking of wanting to go there, so Oxford location, is it pretty safe to say that youget a lot of people that aren't from around there walking in to that location?
Or is it kind of a mix of locals?
(12:21):
On oh Oxford Street, we're up on the first floor, so we don't get passing tradeparticularly, but we sort of went, for us, I suppose, we went viral on social media with
posts seen millions of times.
So people have heard about us and come and find us, but it's extremely varied, veryinternational.
(12:48):
audience, lot lots of tourists who love it, but but also people who em will seek it out inboth places, you know, that it's a good place to come if you have a friend who's
struggling with something or, you know, it's a good place to go and buy a gift that's alittle more thoughtful maybe than then buying a scented candle maybe although that's awful
(13:14):
too.
But yeah, some
Words for healing.
What was your process with the dementia patients?
What type of poetry would you read with them to jog the memory as it were?
It was a really interesting project actually, because what, and this is what led to doingEmergency Poet very directly.
(13:37):
was um not, sometimes it was to share a poem and sometimes to share a poem in a group.
So you might read some poems on kite flying and you know, what you've done is take a groupof people outside in their minds to fly a kite or take them to the sea, whatever, which
was a wonderful thing to do.
(13:59):
But what I did a lot of the time was make poems, found poems from their words.
So sit alongside them and ask questions em that are not memory based or memory specific.
Talk to me about flowers or talk to me about the sea or if we were going to go on apicnic, where would you go?
(14:24):
So those kind of idealized states.
And then we'd make
poem from their words and then I would read it back to them so that they were happy withit.
So it was was a creative, it was poetry, you know, creatively, I suppose, rather thannecessarily sharing a poem.
Like a workshop almost.
(14:46):
So you get their brain working in that, you get them thinking about specific things incertain ways, and then you turn it into a work of art to show them from their own
thoughts.
That's brilliant.
Yeah, and it was often a prompt, you you might do a wine tasting or cheese tasting or eventake the kite, you know, and go outside and fly a kite and then just see what words, you
(15:12):
know, it prompts other ways into memory.
And quite often, elderly people in this country, I don't know if it's true there, hadlearned poems by heart at school.
So if you read, started to read them a classic poem, you know, I must go down to the seaagain, to the lonely sea and sky.
And then you'd find that they were reciting it along with you, even though some of thosepeople haven't spoken for months.
(15:39):
So that was nice.
That's really beautiful.
grew up in New England, so I learned a lot of Robert Frost in grade school.
He was our local guy where I grew up.
It's quite hard to remember Robert Frost isn't it?
It's not easy.
No, it's probably why I got so good at memorizing poetry and stuff later in life.
(16:02):
You were trained young.
I was.
I really did start memorizing that stuff early.
Robert Frost is a big part of the reason I'm a poet, probably.
Isn't it wonderful having that access to poetry and your sort of deep memory?
It's a lovely thing.
Yeah.
I've always felt the actual process of writing poetry was therapeutic for me, but I neverthought of, you know, it actually being therapeutic for other people in that way.
(16:29):
How, I'm curious too, like this actually sets up a good question, Jeremy, how do you, howhave you seen poetry change people's lives?
Obviously with the dementia pain patients, that was something very unique, right?
Very specific to that.
But you've taught you've
You do consultations, you've got these shops, you're the emergency poet showing up tofestivals and people laying on your stretcher.
(16:55):
I mean, you must have seen it affect people in many, many ways.
Yeah, yeah, I guess it was explicitly set up to be light-hearted, a piece of theatre, boththe shop and the ambulance, so non-intimidating or not threatening, which is important.
(17:18):
So I guess the changing of lives is a grand claim to make.
em it's a big question, that one, because
because the world of poetry does so many things, whether it's people coming into, we haveworkshops here and poetry readings, regular open mics.
(17:40):
em And then you literally have that poetry community, a place and space for people to cometogether, to be heard, to be...
em
to listen to other people and that kind of exchange, an intimate exchange again in a safeplace.
(18:06):
And then, I don't know, I might have prescribed a poem for, there was one man who was onhis way back from registering the death of his wife and he came in to the ambulance and
just being heard and given a,
gift of a poem was a profound experience for him.
(18:31):
And people often cry, you know, I'll give them a poem in response to something they'vesaid and you watch it have quite significant meaning.
when I started it, kind of was, I thought it was slightly, I mean, it is theatrical, it'sslightly jokey, it's a cartoon ambulance, but actually,
(18:56):
I saw that it worked.
em So it was like it, even though I made it up and it was slightly silly, I've come tobelieve in it, if that makes sense.
I've written poems for people before and ranging in age and various relationships.
(19:17):
My niece didn't appreciate it as much as I thought that she should have.
Write one for my niece one night.
It's interesting though to see the way that people react, right?
Like it's almost, I wanna say,
you know, like the antidote to sadness or happiness or depression or anxiety or, you know,confidence, right?
(19:43):
Like, or lack of confidence, right?
That's kind of what I was trying to do in that particular situation.
But if you can write poetry and give it to somebody, it is a little bit of medicine,right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I'd like to think so.
Well, it definitely I mean, you I see it every day, all the time, know, thousands andthousands of people.
(20:08):
Right.
Yeah, it works.
And also, I mean, it does so many things, doesn't it?
It can show if you read some somebody's experience, someone who's gone ahead of you andcome through something, you know, and, and that can be really reassuring or
(20:29):
or in kind of in a more secular age to kind of help make sense of the world and does lotsof things.
Am I rambling?
oh
I was trying to formulate my next question.
Do you have like a specific example of a specific poem you gave to somebody in a specificsituation?
(20:53):
Like, I'm just wondering, like, if you can tell us, like, if I came to you and I'm, say,like, the guy who had lost his wife and is literally on his way home from...
burying his wife.
What poem do you have like specific poems and minds that you might hand this guy or?
(21:14):
and let him find his own?
mean, that's a difficult one because he didn't tell me right, the consultation is set up.
So we're not saying, tell me about your problems, tell me why you're here.
So I was asking him about how he relaxes.
When was the last time he stood by the sea or somewhere beautiful?
(21:36):
When was the last time he took a deep breath or?
uh
you know, his reading habits in order to learn about how well he was looking afterhimself.
And so it might not be that he wanted the poem that was to address the grief.
So I have to listen really carefully.
(21:57):
It might not be what he needed.
You know, he may have...
Losing your wife could be complicated, you know, she could have had long ill, you know, soI don't, I don't...
I have to wait and see what they're asking for, I suppose.
I uh I do have a lot of poems ready, sort of in my head.
(22:19):
The poem, if you ask just without knowing other things about him, em would have probablybeen Mary Oliver in Blackwater Woods.
I don't know if you know that poem.
em
so it's really the process of getting to the poem that is the therapy.
(22:43):
It sounds like, like you're, you're kind of giving an emotional support session in a way.
I don't know.
I wouldn't call it therapy.
I would not make that.
Well, I mean, not officially, you're through that process.
The reason that I feel writing poetry is therapeutic because I go through that process ofwriting the poem.
(23:04):
You're teaching them that process that I have seen to be therapeutic in my own experience.
Yes, I would say it was therapeutic but I wouldn't wouldn't set myself up as offering
giving them a process.
It's the process.
It's not the poem.
I guess that's my point is it's not the poem itself exactly.
It's the process of getting to the poem.
(23:26):
And then the poem is kind of
Yeah, it's both, know, because quite often people will hang on.
I mean, we know that, don't we, if we're interested in art and particularly poetry, thatyou hang on to phrases.
They can really be a lifeline, can't they?
And I remember there's a poem by Derek Walcott, Love After Love.
(23:49):
I don't know if you know that poem, which I would give to someone with a broken heart.
And it was really important for me when I was
my heart was broken, you I stuck it on the fridge and made it my own.
And so the poem was vital.
So for people who've got a broken heart when they've spoken to me, it's both the poem thatthey can hang on to as well as having been heard, I suppose.
(24:16):
But I kind of call it a massage for the mind, because the process itself is, is
You don't expect to be cured by a massage.
You don't expect to be profound necessarily, but it's an enjoyable process.
So I sort of liken it to that.
(24:36):
That's a great metaphor.
appreciate that.
Do you think poetry is a bit of a lost art?
I mean, you've been doing this for a while.
Have you seen kind of a resurgence of like a love and a passion and interest for the arts?
I feel like we got to a point, and this is just my perspective, right?
And I have an art degree from college.
I'm all in, right?
(24:58):
Like I've been writing poetry since I was like 12.
I've got a stack of books over here, by the way, that I pulled out of my uh
bookcase, cause I was like, wow, when did I start writing?
And I feel like we got super technical for a while, right?
Like all of sudden we're all like in digital world, social media, internet, you know, allthe things.
(25:20):
And then of course COVID, but like even before that, right?
We just, I feel like there was a loss of even books, right?
Like physical paper, but I do not like eBooks.
I do not like audio books.
don't like listening to books.
I like to open the book and smell it and flip the pages and the whole thing.
That to me is therapy, right?
Like 100 % for me to read something.
(25:42):
um Do you feel like we're getting back to that?
Because I feel like we went away from that.
I don't know.
What's your?
Yeah, I mean, I probably I'm probably in a sense the wrong, both the wrong and the rightperson to ask because I'm absorbed in it, you know, I'm surrounded by the selling of
physical books and that both poetry pharmacies are explicitly set up to, to move away fromthat digital space, you know, they're about real conversations, real coffee, pen, books,
(26:15):
you know, and they have
Even the music in the background is kind of nostalgic.
it feels otherworldly.
But also the internet is a great space for having brought it back as well.
I don't know where at Book Talk you are on TikTok, for example.
(26:37):
And I think it's been responsible for a huge resurgence of people enjoying the physicalobject of a book.
And of course, we've had a tiny, know, a couple of years ago, was very tiny business withtwo and a half members of staff, including me.
And I've in the last year, we've had a huge growth week, I think we have 23 members ofstaff now, and it's getting bigger.
(27:06):
And so it feels to me like there's a big resurgence of interest in, in, in the kind ofsimplicity and it
intimacy of one person speaking to another in poetry.
Yeah.
And kind of the tangible.
Yeah, it totally does.
Like the tangible aspect of it.
(27:27):
I can touch it.
I can hold it.
I can smell it.
I can feel it in like community.
And which is that was like, I know.
I just feel like the concept and sense of community has been lost on a lot of people.
And to me, that is that is part of mental health.
Right.
So if like we want to tie this into, you know, our podcast, Healthcare Innovation andPoetry Pharmacy.
(27:49):
I mean, ultimately
community is what I think brings us together, creates that connection and that when youstart lacking that and you're living in this very two dimensional space on your phone,
that's going to change who you are, right?
Let's change the way that you think, the change the way that you interact with people, youknow, and then, and then go put yourself in a city, right?
(28:12):
Where like nobody even talks to their neighbors.
Um, I feel like where we live here in Flagstaff, we have, we have a very strong sense ofcommunity here.
And I forget that people don't always experience that.
So I don't know.
What I found, I I explicitly set up the Poetry Pharmacy here as a uh space for people tocome, know, adore, you know, when they come in, people, the staff are very friendly.
(28:40):
It's come in, sit down and have coffee, spend some time here.
But I was really surprised to see that even in Oxford Street, that people sitting, there'sonly four or five tables.
It's very small coffee shop, but
people start reading the poem out, that we give them a little tiny little poem extractwith their coffee and they'll read it out and everyone will go quiet and listen.
(29:06):
And then people start talking to each other, strangers, even in London.
And that really surprised me, you and we employ people because they're kind.
That's the first quality that they need, you know.
So if you go into the Poetry Pharmacy on Oxford Street, it's as friendly and warm andwelcoming as a small community bookshop here in Shropshire.
(29:31):
And we've managed to do that, and I'm really proud of that.
And actually in your locations too, I mean, you've got the bookstore, which by the way,separating it by like broken heart versus whatever your other, would love to know what
those other sections are, but.
that's a great question.
That is brilliant.
(29:51):
Um, but then you've got the poetry pharmacy, but you do other things though, right?
You, you talked about the consultations, which you had done in the ambulance, but youstill do consultations in the store and online, right?
Yeah, yeah, we had sort of slowed up doing those over the last few months because we wereworking on opening a second bookshop in London.
(30:14):
But yeah, we have a velvet chaise long here, so people come into the bookshop, upstairsinto our poetry reference library and lie down.
And we have tea and cake and they have poems and a bottle of pills and a book from thebookshop as part of the consultation.
And we have lots of things going on here.
(30:36):
We have three different book groups, children's book club, open mics, book launches, lotsof workshops.
So that's really important to...
It's really much hard to do that in London, but if we have a bookshop in Bath, we'llreplicate all of that,
And you do online courses too, is that right?
(30:57):
Or those inactive right now just because you've busy.
We've got one that's just closed, actually.
It's just started and it's run by a good friend of the Poetry Pharmacy, Sophie Howarth,who started something called the School of Life a few years ago with philosopher Alan
Bouton.
I don't know if you've come across the School of Life in US.
(31:19):
You might be interested in them, actually.
It's a kind of philosophy around good mental health books.
and they do workshops in London as well.
Yeah, mental health is definitely a lane for us on the show.
(31:39):
We're really interested in diving into that more.
yeah, mental health, poetry pharmacy.
I would like to go back to that question you just hinted at, Heather.
What are the actual sections in the store?
Yeah, well, yeah, it's, they're kind of broad sections, and then there are subsections.
(32:04):
So the, for example, broken heart will be under words for love, which is the section.
And that would have uh subsections for motherhood or friendship, or, you know, em thatkind of thing.
But so you move along the bookshop, it moves, the idea is that you shop intuitively.
(32:25):
So
So each section is connected to the next section and broadly, I suppose, laid out throughstages of a life.
So we've got the first aid section with the books that you might need in times ofimmediate trouble, em some good anthologies, books on bibliotherapy, em and our pills.
(32:47):
I think we have about 50 different titles or something of pills.
And then after that,
it, we call it calm.
So it's books on anxiety, stress, and so on.
And the next section is broadly called becoming, which is um about being yourself in theworld, confidence, seize the day, books on feminism, and then it goes to words for love.
(33:17):
So relationships, and then where does it go?
And then em so it could either go into
childhood, being on single and then moves into aging, ill health, depression, death andgrief and recovery, comfort.
(33:38):
Then it goes to, we've got a sort of general section which we call the best medicine.
So, and uh wild remedy, going out into nature, nature being good for you.
And then inspiration, which are books on
m arts and health, um creativity, journaling and so on.
(34:01):
Are the poems that are available like worked into those sections somehow along with thebooks or is it a completely separate like is what I go to like a different wall to pick my
my poem?
And that's almost the key thing.
It's so that people can, I believe that most people are intimidated by poetry.
(34:23):
So this is set up explicitly to help them find the poetry that they might respond to.
So they know that that poetry anthology is about a woman who's had a broken heart, youknow, and so they're more likely to try it.
We also have an A to Z of
poetry here in Shropshire because we have enough space but not in London.
(34:44):
em So yeah, the poetry goes into the right sections.
Okay.
That's awesome.
That is really cool.
I think I need to go to England.
know I haven't wanted to go overseas so much in a while.
I I have to go find my roots.
Cause I did one of those, uh, you know, ancestry tests and not that it was a surprise, butlike I'm like 75 % like English, Welsh, Scottish.
(35:12):
Yeah.
Oh Yeah.
I did.
I knew I was, but like I didn't know it was going to be that high of a percentage andIrish too.
So yeah.
Can you trace your roots back through your immediate family?
you know that?
did and both sides, my husband too.
So he's like very, very English Welsh as well.
like our ancestral makeup are very similar.
(35:38):
so yeah, now I have to do my kids and to see what theirs looks like.
But yeah, it's
did it come up?
Say that again.
Which part of the UK or was it very general?
It's actually really specific.
Yeah, yeah, it gets pretty specific.
So if I remember, I'd have to look it up, but it was I feel like it was like SouthwestEngland.
(36:03):
So and then Wales, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
So I should come.
mean, I should we should.
It is, it is.
I need to come back to the motherland and we need to do a show right out of the poetrypharmacy.
Yeah.
Irish myself.
(36:23):
Both of my parents are very heavily Irish with uh a, you know, smattering of a bunch ofother things in there, but mostly Irish.
Yeah.
Last name's Carr.
I have a very old Irish name.
It's interesting because the American accent for me, you can hear the link to Irish.
Well, I'm originally from Boston when I had a Boston accent.
(36:48):
It was a different thing.
Yeah.
When I was hanging out at Fenway Park by the Chals River.
We're not local Arizona.
I'm from New Jersey right outside New York City too.
yeah, we're North Northeasterners.
We've both been in Arizona for decades though at this point.
Yeah.
But my accent's pretty much.
it's very exotic to me.
(37:10):
Well, when you come to the Grand Canyon, you'll have a tour guide.
I was what she means by that.
I was a professional tour guide before COVID for years.
ah If you ever want to see the Grand Canyon, Sedona, stuff like that, please hit me upbecause I know how to do that.
We can read poetry.
and read poetry.
(37:30):
Poetry on the rim of the Grand Canyon together.
It'd be a wonderful day.
That actually sounds like good therapy.
oh I have read poetry on the rim of the Grand Canyon before.
It is actually a place where people go to for artistic kind of outlet.
You always see a lot of people painting, like the Canyon and just doing like meditationand, or hiking through it, which is being out in nature.
(37:58):
isn't it?
You're standing in awe next to something.
It's one of those things that you can't understand it until you see it.
give you an idea, but you don't understand until you stand in front that thing.
And it never gets old.
I've been there hundreds of times and it never gets old.
(38:19):
It never gets old.
I forget.
Sometimes I take it for granted.
It's like places like Sedona, you know, that are around here.
I was just there yesterday.
I was like, big deal.
was in Sedona yesterday.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, wow, I'm coming.
Yeah.
Of course.
(38:39):
Now I think, you know, I think of London as like a very exotic, like far away, cool placethat is, you know, 100 % a bucket list for me.
So, um, maybe we can make it a business trip.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll go do a business trip to London.
There we go.
We'll go to the poetry pharmacy.
Yeah.
Or, or one of your local, I don't know.
(39:01):
I'm, I'm ready for a poetry reading.
don't know about you.
I want to do her open mic.
Yeah.
And actually, so.
I'd love that.
Well, we have our own open mic.
uh So in the, in vein of our very unusual interview today, which is super fun for us, uhgiven that we are interviewing the poetry pharmacy of London and Shropshire.
(39:25):
um Jeremy and I both being uh poets ourselves, we both have a poem we, we wanted to readeach read a poem and then we'll close things up in.
get some information from you so we can share with our listeners how to find you.
So Jeremy, do you wanna read first?
(39:45):
You go first, mine's short.
Mine's just like a minute.
Let me bring it up here.
Okay, this is called, I'm used to standing up when I do this.
Let me fix my screen so we can see.
This is Jeremy's first public, very, very public reading.
(40:06):
have read in a lot of rooms in front of people, but I've never put something on theinterwebs or anything.
Now this is exciting.
Yeah.
Sorry.
This is taking me a minute.
Let me get where I can read it.
Here we go.
Okay.
This is called constant constant a subtle motion in almost uncensed shadow and darknessflits spasmodically through your mind.
(40:32):
searching for a lost dream.
A frayed thread of memory acts as poor guide to this once-glimpsed moment of potentialperfection, but pay it little mind.
For perfection is a myth, and dreams are only dreams, and life moves on so fast and newdreams always come.
Perfection is in the journey, the change.
(40:54):
We must be willing to rearrange ourselves to suit our own imperfections.
To stop learning, stop changing, stop desiring is to stop living.
We must constantly re-become ourselves in order to remain ourselves.
For the only constant is change, so we must constantly change with it or be lost in adream of what can never be.
(41:19):
Ignore those shadows of perfection flitting tirelessly through your thoughts and allowyourself to constantly become.
Very, very nice.
I thought it might fit the theme of the conversation.
I think that would be in your becoming section in your, in your.
(41:41):
It a coming, wouldn't it?
I love your use of internal rhyme.
It was really musical, know, kind of looping sounds as well as its meaning.
oh
I get, go at all the Dr.
Seuss.
That is, that is my style.
(42:02):
You captured it immediately.
I have a lot of that free flow rhyme kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's really subtle because it's not the end rhyme, it's an internal rhymewhich I love.
And what has it become?
I'm glad you liked it.
very glad you liked it.
Well, mine is not like that at all.
Mine's really short.
(42:23):
So I'm going to read mine.
And unlike Jeremy, I write on random pieces of paper all over the place.
And so my I have like literal stacks of things.
It's envelopes.
It's post-it notes, ripped pieces of notebook paper.
Sometimes it's in a book.
Sometimes I can't even read it.
I don't know.
I have terrible handwriting, but
(42:45):
I don't even know when I wrote this one, but I found it and I decided I'm going to readit.
This is called Streets Through a Window.
Funny what we see, it's a hard rain that falls and we hear the thunder.
It starts to break my heart, but not enough to break it apart.
So we bring our hearts together and isn't it fitting how we see what we are doing to eachother.
(43:09):
Streets in a window.
I see you through it all.
A hard rain will fall.
Oh, lovely.
That should almost be turned into lyrics.
That, that, that sounds like at the beginnings of a song.
I do tend to write like song lyrics.
That is maybe my style is that basically most of my poems can be turned into a song.
(43:30):
So.
Yeah, there you go.
really beautifully observed, know, just a sort of still quiet moment, really lovely andcalm.
Yeah, the second time you say streets through the window, it's like, there's a momentthere.
liked that.
Poetry is, it's an outlet for sure.
(43:51):
mean, all artistry is, and I think that's something we talk a lot about, particularly inthe vein of mental health on the show and mental health care treatments and kind of the
alternative ways to approach curing our minds, right?
In our hearts, I think.
Kind of from the inside out, right?
No, no pharmaceuticals actually required sometimes.
(44:14):
No, no, and it's lovely to, you know, I mean, we recommend we put our little poetry pailbottles in the bathroom cabinet, you know, so if you're feeling stressed, you go open the
cabinet and instead you get a little poem and take that down and, you know, slow yourbreathing a little and calm down.
(44:35):
I read it physically like medicine and mentally it will work more like medicine.
We trick ourselves into stuff like that all the time in this life.
The whole placebo effect is a very
it's very real.
Sometimes we just need to open a cupboard, take something.
(44:56):
We need to feel that we're doing something to address it.
So why not put art in the way instead?
Absolutely.
Well, I this is a really lovely place to end on today.
uh so Deb, thank you so much for coming on.
But please tell us and our listeners where you can be found, ah maybe your website, if youhave any uh social media pages that you where we can follow you.
(45:27):
Yeah, well, we're very easy to find out.
Probably the best thing is to go to the website so then you can follow the links fromthere.
So that's www.poetrypharmacy.co.uk.
Great.
.co.uk.
Yeah.
we'll sure you get that in the show notes.
Yeah.
and.bob.
(45:48):
think they both go to the same place.
We'll share that.
okay, cool.
And you got the .com, Yeah.
And we'll share that.
I will definitely link to the NBC um coverage, how I found you.
um We'll definitely include that as well so that everyone can get a little bit bettertaste of what you're about.
(46:08):
It makes me feel like we're moving up.
We're getting people from national news coverage coming on our podcast.
I know.
I know.
We're telling you.
We're new, so that's actually kind of impressive to me.
Yeah.
I only wake up.
Well, it was impressive to me.
I think it's just entirely ridiculous that we were featured on the NBC, frankly.
The world works in mysterious ways and brings people together.
(46:31):
just like that America is talking about poetry.
It's great.
it really is.
You mentioned it earlier, but it's really kind of a lost art in this country anyway.
Like I listened to old recordings of like Charles Bukowski and stuff, people like thatsometimes.
And you like, he walks out on stage to a crowd.
(46:51):
There's thousands of people sitting in it.
theater waiting for him to come out and read poetry at them.
When's the last time that happened in America that people bought a ticket to go listen tosomeone read poetry?
I mean, the open mics are great.
Poetry slams and open mics.
Those are a very live thing here, but whoever's, who's the last guy that sold out atheater to read poetry?
(47:14):
Bob Dylan is probably the closest to a poet on a big stage.
But it's music.
It's not the same thing.
It is music.
It's not the same thing.
I know.
I know.
Well,
If you want to find poetry in person, Poetry Pharmacy, so we have to come visit you inEngland.
So you've the two locations on Oxford Street.
So anyone that's listening to this or watching this on YouTube, if you're visiting London,get yourself to Oxford Street and go see Deb and the Poetry Pharmacy or Shopshire.
(47:43):
Am I saying that right?
Shropshire, right on the Welsh border.
Yep.
If you're out there in the middle of nowhere driving.
around enjoying the countryside.
Make sure you pull in and get some poetry to ease your mind and your soul.
brilliant.
Awesome.
Thanks, Jeff, so much for coming on.
We appreciate you.
(48:04):
Thank you so much for inviting me.
It's been lovely, lovely to talk to you.
Yeah, awesome.
And there you go.
Our conversation with the original emergency poet, Deb Alma from poetry pharmacy.
Uh, I haven't wanted to go to London so bad ever.
(48:29):
Agreed.
We got to make a trip.
know it would be cool.
We got to find, we got to go together so we can write it off.
You can bring the fam.
Yeah.
Or at least Jake, I don't know.
Can we leave the kids at home?
Yes.
Yes, we can.
But so I'm getting the sidetracked already.
What's it?
What's our main takeaways here?
(48:50):
So I have to say first, you know, I was literally watching the Sunday news, likeeverything's the NBC.
I have to make sure we put this in the show notes and I saw the media coverage of Deb'spoetry pharmacy in London and Shropshire, England.
um And I thought, gosh, we have to get her on because we had just on the art pharmacyinterview or we had just set it up and, you know, social subscribes.
(49:15):
I'm sorry, social prescribing.
um I believe that's episode three.
So episode six, episode six, art pharmacy was episode six.
believe.
what a great tie back.
You know, we talk about on the show, trying to create, or to, do multiple episodes tocreate kind of a bigger story and to show kind of where all the connections are made
(49:36):
across, um, all this innovation and just people doing, you know, cool stuff.
And the poetry pharmacy was just a great way to.
connect to the art pharmacy and the power of the power of art, right?
The power of social prescribing and literally the poetry pharmacy is doing exactly kind ofwhat the art pharmacy's mission is, the art pharmacy company.
(49:58):
And so anyway, it was just like a really beautiful connection and you know, even coolerjust to bring on somebody as kind of cool and interesting um and inspiring as Deb um and
just kind of her background.
So I don't know, like.
It's just fun.
we're, both like poetry and we both read it, read and write it.
So even better.
(50:19):
coolest thing about her is she let us read our poetry at her.
Yes, we did.
I always appreciate when someone lets me read poetry at them.
That was fun.
Yeah.
That was fun.
Yeah.
Everybody enjoyed that.
I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of a lost and dying art.
Um, actually my other favorite part is the poetry pills.
yes.
I just, I mean, it makes me laugh, but it's such a brilliant thing at the same time.
(50:42):
And the way that she.
Um, categorizes the books.
Yeah.
You've never heard of anything like that.
And then having the poetry pills in the sections that they kind of fit with.
So, I mean, just the whole concept of it is brilliant.
They should lend out mood rings when you walk in the door.
So you know which shelf to go to.
(51:04):
Right.
Am I sad?
Am I angry?
Am I stressed?
It's purple.
I need that section over there.
Right.
But it is that like intuitive kind of.
search, guess, is what she said.
And anyway, I think it's, don't know, it's just cool.
Like I never thought anything like this would ever exist.
And here it is.
I when I heard it, I was like, so they like give people poetry to read or like read poetryat people and call it as like a therapeutic thing.
(51:30):
But it's not even that.
Like she sits you down and like you write the poem basically.
Like she put, she like kind of puts you through this mindset.
Like we talked about in the episode, you know what I feel when I write poetry.
is that therapeutic and she's teaching other people to access that in their own minds,which is, I mean, this woman's brilliant.
Yeah.
And all the other things that they do, like the consultations and the online courses andall the other cool stuff.
(51:58):
So before I wax any more poetic, um let me just ask everyone out there to hit all thosehappy little fun buttons, whatever platform you're on the likes and subscribes and shares.
If you've got a second to leave us a rating and review, let us know how we're doing.
It's always appreciated.
If you really want to get into the action on the uprising, do have a Patreon, patreon.comslash healthcare uprising.
(52:19):
You can get in for as little as a dollar a month, get early access to all upcoming stuffand we'll be building, you know, private chats for our community there and whatnot as we
go.
I don't know where else can they find us, Heather?
You can find us online at healthcare uprising.com as well as on all the social mediaplatforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, blue sky.
(52:41):
Just search healthcare uprising podcast.
You'll find us.
are pretty active out there and you can look for when new up new episodes drop and ourhighlight reels.
Great way to stay in touch.
Also, if you have a story to tell new product, a business, your founder, co-founder and astartup, anything that's doing innovation in healthcare, give us a shout at healthcare
(53:03):
uprising at gmail.com.
We'd love to chat with you and bring you on the show.
Also our human stories, a really, really, really important part of why this show ticks andworks.
Um, and you know, it's all about humans at the end, right?
So if you've got a good human story, good, bad, ugly, or otherwise give us a shout out toat that same email address, healthcare, uprising at gmail.com.
(53:25):
We'd also love to have you on the show and that's it for this dose of healthcare uprising.
until next time, just keep looking for the good in the world.
because sometimes it's where you least expect it.
And stay gold, Ponyboy.
uh
(54:36):
This has been a Shut Up Production.
This is healthcare uprising.
We are here to shine a light on the innovators implementing positive change in Americanhealthcare.
In the patient experience stories, good and bad that can help others navigate thesometimes overwhelmingly complex American healthcare system.
(00:46):
Welcome to the Uprising.
We to doctors and we don't play one on TV.
If you need medical advice, consult with your physician or healthcare professional.
Hello Health Head, welcome and thank you for checking in to this dose of The Health CareUprising.
(01:10):
I'm your producer in the back, Jeremy Carr, here with your host in the front row, HeatherPierce.
So what's on our agenda for today, Heather?
So today I think is one of our most unique interviews yet.
We're meeting with Deb Alma, who is the owner and founder of The Poetry Pharmacy.
She has lived, and this is in England, London and Shropshire.
(01:32):
And she's lived on the Welsh-Shropshire borders for over 30 years, where the origins ofthe poetry pharmacy were actually born.
Originally, she worked with people with dementia and at the end of their lives for manyyears and became the emergency poet in her 1970s ambulance, and where she literally would
show up in her ambulance to festivals and different public events.
(01:54):
And she saw where folks really benefited from poetry for emotional healing and mentalhealth.
Deb has also taught creative writing at multiple universities in England and has been theeditor for multiple poetry books and anthologies, including The Emergency Poet.
These are the hands poems from the heart of the NHS and that's National Health Society, bythe way, and the award winning, hashtag me too, poetry anthology.
(02:18):
Her own poetry collection is called Dirty Laundry.
Earlier this year, Macmillan, I think most people know the name.
that um published a series of eight slim poetry anthologies to match the sections of herpoetry pharmacy bookshops, which we're going to learn more about in the interview.
And those commenced in January with words for love and comfort.
So she's done a lot of really cool, exciting, interesting things.
(02:41):
And we are bringing poetry and pharmacy together.
Yeah.
What a great concept.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Here's our conversation with Deb Alma from poetry pharmacy.
Hi, and welcome to the Healthcare Uprising podcast.
(03:03):
have Deb Alma with us from the Poetry Pharmacy in England.
Thanks for joining us.
uh Hi Heather, it's really lovely to talk to you and Jeremy too.
Yeah.
today is a little bit different.
Typically our interviews are very, I would say more clinical in nature, very obviouslyhealthcare, but we published a podcast interview not that long ago with art pharmacy, who
(03:33):
is a U S based business who is doing social social prescribing for mental health.
And we thought poetry
pharmacy in London where I happened to see a show one Sunday morning on NBC.
uh Thanks for some national media coverage.
Some of it's still good anyway.
uh Brought me here to Deb and the Poetry Pharmacy and what a great connection with our artpharmacy uh interview and actually bringing somebody on who is legitimately prescribing
(04:07):
poetry.
I'm so excited to hear how this all works.
Yeah.
So Deb, this is going to be really fun.
So with that, I want to give you the stage here.
just tell us about your history, your kind of life experiences that led you here and maybethe origins of, of poetry pharmacy, just kind of how, it came to be.
(04:27):
Yeah, well, thank you very much for inviting me here.
It's a real pleasure.
And I love making these kind of connections through art, you know, across the world, whichis lovely.
Yeah, it's a kind of long story, really.
I, oh gosh, in my 40s, think I did an MA in creative writing and am a poet.
(04:53):
myself.
I suppose it started, it's kind of lots of different stories that feed together.
the thing that I was doing, I was working with people with dementia, using poetry toassist communication.
And some other kind of community, a bit like your art pharmacy that you were talking to,know, kind of going into different care settings, actually, I went and did some
(05:20):
leave taking poems that we made in hospice care and I worked with some people with sightloss and that's the kind of sort of serious underpinning of the work that I went on to do
later.
um And after that I was looking on eBay as you do, thinking I wanted a camper van and wasgoing to go on a road trip or something and came across a vintage ambulance for sale.
(05:50):
And on a kind of moment of madness, decided to set up as an emergency poet.
So it's a 1950s Morris ambulance, painted emergency poet on the side and dressed up as adoctor and drove around to, was invited to arts festivals and schools and conferences and
(06:14):
libraries to offer poetry on prescription.
And then there were anyway, and that's kind of one story led to another.
And I ended up being too old to drive an ambulance with no power steering and decided thatI wanted people to come to me.
And I'm talking to you from Shropshire on the English-Welsh borders, where we have aVictorian shop with its original fittings.
(06:42):
And I thought it looked like a pharmacy.
So set up the poetry pharmacy here.
Is that the Bishop's Castle location?
Yeah, it's in Bishop's Castle.
I did my research.
And then, you know, it's had lots, right from the beginning, it's had quite a lot ofoccasional media attention one way or another.
(07:05):
uh The ambulance was very, you know, big piece of theatre.
And yes, and now we have a poetry pharmacy uh inside Lush on Oxford Street.
And we're about to open probably a third
Poetry Pharmacy here in the UK as well.
Where would the third one be?
Almost certainly in Bath, Jane Austenland.
(07:29):
Okay.
Man, we should bring this concept to America in a real way.
I know.
Can I jump in with a question here?
Heather, do you mind?
No, go for it.
I can't wait for Jeremy's questions.
This is going to be fun.
What was your process with the emergency poet and the ambulance?
Like you would just like pull up and jump out and start reading poetry to people?
(07:52):
Did you get cold?
The first one I did was a poetry festival.
Quite often it was art or music festival.
So people are at a festival, they're up for, they're very receptive to kind of odd thingsat a festival.
People would come up and say, what's going on here?
(08:13):
I had my poetry pharmacy of my little pills with poems inside the pills under an awning.
So people would come up and um I would, it's quite explicitly poetry on prescription.
They'd go into the back of the ambulance, lie down on a stretcher.
I'm dressed as a doctor with a stethoscope, clipboard.
(08:35):
And then in a kind of pastiche of a therapy session, ask them very unexpected questions,questions about how they relax their reading habits, questions that are really lovely to
answer.
So they're kind of intimate, but not invasive.
And then at the end of it, prescribe them a poem that not my poetry, but poetry that wasalready printed out as a prescription.
(09:00):
So I had hundreds of poems to call on.
In the pills, like on a scroll?
The polls were giveaways under the morning for people who didn't have time.
So, you know, the pharmacy, the UKO and self-prescribed and then the poems that I gavethem would be one or two complete poems.
(09:22):
So the pill has a little rolled up poem and like you open the capsule of the pill andthere's a little rolled up poem and said, yeah, that's awesome.
Why didn't I ever think of that?
I don't know.
It seems to work, as well, people really like it.
Do you still use the ambulance or is it just kind of parked at this point as part of like
(09:42):
I'm really sad about the ambulance.
I kept it for a couple of years here, parked outside the bookshop, but it was kind ofrusting away, so we sold it to pay for a camper van, which we have now.
But I didn't have time, too busy.
Yeah, there's pictures of the ambulance on the website and we're going to make sure to putthe link in our show notes.
(10:03):
And when we, uh, when we do all of our promo and social, make sure everyone sees it.
It makes me think so that made me think of the movie ghostbusters when they took the oldambulance.
Um, and you know, made it obviously for ghost busting, not saving people, but still fun.
I love it.
That theatrics of it is kind of in the same same vein anyway.
(10:23):
ain't afraid of no ghost.
Huh?
Okay.
It might be the nerdiest thing I say today.
might be.
We'll see how the rest of the conversation goes.
He's pretty good.
So now you've got two locations, right?
But somebody can physically walk into, um, and are they both, are they similar in terms oflike the layout?
(10:45):
they, or are they anything different about either the location?
they're really different.
One is in the middle of nowhere in kind of hill country with sheep, know, kind of you cansee sheep out the window.
And then the other one is on the busiest retail street in the world, I think on OxfordStreet in London.
And the idea is the same.
(11:08):
that fundamentally it's a bookshop.
and you browse the books according to emotional state.
they're divided into sections and they're both divided into the so we have a first aidsection and so if you have a broken heart you go to the broken heart book section and so
on and oh my bookshop.
(11:32):
That's fun.
I love that.
How am I feeling today?
Yeah, exactly.
m And then, you know, what do you need?
em And then they both have good coffee shops and we serve coffee in little kind ofchemical boiling flasks.
So the whole conceit of the pharmacy or a kind of dosage of poetry and coffee is kind ofconsistent through the whole place.
(12:01):
Nice.
That sounds like a fantastic place.
want to go there.
And speaking of wanting to go there, so Oxford location, is it pretty safe to say that youget a lot of people that aren't from around there walking in to that location?
Or is it kind of a mix of locals?
(12:21):
On oh Oxford Street, we're up on the first floor, so we don't get passing tradeparticularly, but we sort of went, for us, I suppose, we went viral on social media with
posts seen millions of times.
So people have heard about us and come and find us, but it's extremely varied, veryinternational.
(12:48):
audience, lot lots of tourists who love it, but but also people who em will seek it out inboth places, you know, that it's a good place to come if you have a friend who's
struggling with something or, you know, it's a good place to go and buy a gift that's alittle more thoughtful maybe than then buying a scented candle maybe although that's awful
(13:14):
too.
But yeah, some
Words for healing.
What was your process with the dementia patients?
What type of poetry would you read with them to jog the memory as it were?
It was a really interesting project actually, because what, and this is what led to doingEmergency Poet very directly.
(13:37):
was um not, sometimes it was to share a poem and sometimes to share a poem in a group.
So you might read some poems on kite flying and you know, what you've done is take a groupof people outside in their minds to fly a kite or take them to the sea, whatever, which
was a wonderful thing to do.
(13:59):
But what I did a lot of the time was make poems, found poems from their words.
So sit alongside them and ask questions em that are not memory based or memory specific.
Talk to me about flowers or talk to me about the sea or if we were going to go on apicnic, where would you go?
(14:24):
So those kind of idealized states.
And then we'd make
poem from their words and then I would read it back to them so that they were happy withit.
So it was was a creative, it was poetry, you know, creatively, I suppose, rather thannecessarily sharing a poem.
Like a workshop almost.
(14:46):
So you get their brain working in that, you get them thinking about specific things incertain ways, and then you turn it into a work of art to show them from their own
thoughts.
That's brilliant.
Yeah, and it was often a prompt, you you might do a wine tasting or cheese tasting or eventake the kite, you know, and go outside and fly a kite and then just see what words, you
(15:12):
know, it prompts other ways into memory.
And quite often, elderly people in this country, I don't know if it's true there, hadlearned poems by heart at school.
So if you read, started to read them a classic poem, you know, I must go down to the seaagain, to the lonely sea and sky.
And then you'd find that they were reciting it along with you, even though some of thosepeople haven't spoken for months.
(15:39):
So that was nice.
That's really beautiful.
grew up in New England, so I learned a lot of Robert Frost in grade school.
He was our local guy where I grew up.
It's quite hard to remember Robert Frost isn't it?
It's not easy.
No, it's probably why I got so good at memorizing poetry and stuff later in life.
(16:02):
You were trained young.
I was.
I really did start memorizing that stuff early.
Robert Frost is a big part of the reason I'm a poet, probably.
Isn't it wonderful having that access to poetry and your sort of deep memory?
It's a lovely thing.
Yeah.
I've always felt the actual process of writing poetry was therapeutic for me, but I neverthought of, you know, it actually being therapeutic for other people in that way.
(16:29):
How, I'm curious too, like this actually sets up a good question, Jeremy, how do you, howhave you seen poetry change people's lives?
Obviously with the dementia pain patients, that was something very unique, right?
Very specific to that.
But you've taught you've
You do consultations, you've got these shops, you're the emergency poet showing up tofestivals and people laying on your stretcher.
(16:55):
I mean, you must have seen it affect people in many, many ways.
Yeah, yeah, I guess it was explicitly set up to be light-hearted, a piece of theatre, boththe shop and the ambulance, so non-intimidating or not threatening, which is important.
(17:18):
So I guess the changing of lives is a grand claim to make.
em it's a big question, that one, because
because the world of poetry does so many things, whether it's people coming into, we haveworkshops here and poetry readings, regular open mics.
(17:40):
em And then you literally have that poetry community, a place and space for people to cometogether, to be heard, to be...
em
to listen to other people and that kind of exchange, an intimate exchange again in a safeplace.
(18:06):
And then, I don't know, I might have prescribed a poem for, there was one man who was onhis way back from registering the death of his wife and he came in to the ambulance and
just being heard and given a,
gift of a poem was a profound experience for him.
(18:31):
And people often cry, you know, I'll give them a poem in response to something they'vesaid and you watch it have quite significant meaning.
when I started it, kind of was, I thought it was slightly, I mean, it is theatrical, it'sslightly jokey, it's a cartoon ambulance, but actually,
(18:56):
I saw that it worked.
em So it was like it, even though I made it up and it was slightly silly, I've come tobelieve in it, if that makes sense.
I've written poems for people before and ranging in age and various relationships.
(19:17):
My niece didn't appreciate it as much as I thought that she should have.
Write one for my niece one night.
It's interesting though to see the way that people react, right?
Like it's almost, I wanna say,
you know, like the antidote to sadness or happiness or depression or anxiety or, you know,confidence, right?
(19:43):
Like, or lack of confidence, right?
That's kind of what I was trying to do in that particular situation.
But if you can write poetry and give it to somebody, it is a little bit of medicine,right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I'd like to think so.
Well, it definitely I mean, you I see it every day, all the time, know, thousands andthousands of people.
(20:08):
Right.
Yeah, it works.
And also, I mean, it does so many things, doesn't it?
It can show if you read some somebody's experience, someone who's gone ahead of you andcome through something, you know, and, and that can be really reassuring or
(20:29):
or in kind of in a more secular age to kind of help make sense of the world and does lotsof things.
Am I rambling?
oh
I was trying to formulate my next question.
Do you have like a specific example of a specific poem you gave to somebody in a specificsituation?
(20:53):
Like, I'm just wondering, like, if you can tell us, like, if I came to you and I'm, say,like, the guy who had lost his wife and is literally on his way home from...
burying his wife.
What poem do you have like specific poems and minds that you might hand this guy or?
(21:14):
and let him find his own?
mean, that's a difficult one because he didn't tell me right, the consultation is set up.
So we're not saying, tell me about your problems, tell me why you're here.
So I was asking him about how he relaxes.
When was the last time he stood by the sea or somewhere beautiful?
(21:36):
When was the last time he took a deep breath or?
uh
you know, his reading habits in order to learn about how well he was looking afterhimself.
And so it might not be that he wanted the poem that was to address the grief.
So I have to listen really carefully.
(21:57):
It might not be what he needed.
You know, he may have...
Losing your wife could be complicated, you know, she could have had long ill, you know, soI don't, I don't...
I have to wait and see what they're asking for, I suppose.
I uh I do have a lot of poems ready, sort of in my head.
(22:19):
The poem, if you ask just without knowing other things about him, em would have probablybeen Mary Oliver in Blackwater Woods.
I don't know if you know that poem.
em
so it's really the process of getting to the poem that is the therapy.
(22:43):
It sounds like, like you're, you're kind of giving an emotional support session in a way.
I don't know.
I wouldn't call it therapy.
I would not make that.
Well, I mean, not officially, you're through that process.
The reason that I feel writing poetry is therapeutic because I go through that process ofwriting the poem.
(23:04):
You're teaching them that process that I have seen to be therapeutic in my own experience.
Yes, I would say it was therapeutic but I wouldn't wouldn't set myself up as offering
giving them a process.
It's the process.
It's not the poem.
I guess that's my point is it's not the poem itself exactly.
It's the process of getting to the poem.
(23:26):
And then the poem is kind of
Yeah, it's both, know, because quite often people will hang on.
I mean, we know that, don't we, if we're interested in art and particularly poetry, thatyou hang on to phrases.
They can really be a lifeline, can't they?
And I remember there's a poem by Derek Walcott, Love After Love.
(23:49):
I don't know if you know that poem, which I would give to someone with a broken heart.
And it was really important for me when I was
my heart was broken, you I stuck it on the fridge and made it my own.
And so the poem was vital.
So for people who've got a broken heart when they've spoken to me, it's both the poem thatthey can hang on to as well as having been heard, I suppose.
(24:16):
But I kind of call it a massage for the mind, because the process itself is, is
You don't expect to be cured by a massage.
You don't expect to be profound necessarily, but it's an enjoyable process.
So I sort of liken it to that.
(24:36):
That's a great metaphor.
appreciate that.
Do you think poetry is a bit of a lost art?
I mean, you've been doing this for a while.
Have you seen kind of a resurgence of like a love and a passion and interest for the arts?
I feel like we got to a point, and this is just my perspective, right?
And I have an art degree from college.
I'm all in, right?
(24:58):
Like I've been writing poetry since I was like 12.
I've got a stack of books over here, by the way, that I pulled out of my uh
bookcase, cause I was like, wow, when did I start writing?
And I feel like we got super technical for a while, right?
Like all of sudden we're all like in digital world, social media, internet, you know, allthe things.
(25:20):
And then of course COVID, but like even before that, right?
We just, I feel like there was a loss of even books, right?
Like physical paper, but I do not like eBooks.
I do not like audio books.
don't like listening to books.
I like to open the book and smell it and flip the pages and the whole thing.
That to me is therapy, right?
Like 100 % for me to read something.
(25:42):
um Do you feel like we're getting back to that?
Because I feel like we went away from that.
I don't know.
What's your?
Yeah, I mean, I probably I'm probably in a sense the wrong, both the wrong and the rightperson to ask because I'm absorbed in it, you know, I'm surrounded by the selling of
physical books and that both poetry pharmacies are explicitly set up to, to move away fromthat digital space, you know, they're about real conversations, real coffee, pen, books,
(26:15):
you know, and they have
Even the music in the background is kind of nostalgic.
it feels otherworldly.
But also the internet is a great space for having brought it back as well.
I don't know where at Book Talk you are on TikTok, for example.
(26:37):
And I think it's been responsible for a huge resurgence of people enjoying the physicalobject of a book.
And of course, we've had a tiny, know, a couple of years ago, was very tiny business withtwo and a half members of staff, including me.
And I've in the last year, we've had a huge growth week, I think we have 23 members ofstaff now, and it's getting bigger.
(27:06):
And so it feels to me like there's a big resurgence of interest in, in, in the kind ofsimplicity and it
intimacy of one person speaking to another in poetry.
Yeah.
And kind of the tangible.
Yeah, it totally does.
Like the tangible aspect of it.
(27:27):
I can touch it.
I can hold it.
I can smell it.
I can feel it in like community.
And which is that was like, I know.
I just feel like the concept and sense of community has been lost on a lot of people.
And to me, that is that is part of mental health.
Right.
So if like we want to tie this into, you know, our podcast, Healthcare Innovation andPoetry Pharmacy.
(27:49):
I mean, ultimately
community is what I think brings us together, creates that connection and that when youstart lacking that and you're living in this very two dimensional space on your phone,
that's going to change who you are, right?
Let's change the way that you think, the change the way that you interact with people, youknow, and then, and then go put yourself in a city, right?
(28:12):
Where like nobody even talks to their neighbors.
Um, I feel like where we live here in Flagstaff, we have, we have a very strong sense ofcommunity here.
And I forget that people don't always experience that.
So I don't know.
What I found, I I explicitly set up the Poetry Pharmacy here as a uh space for people tocome, know, adore, you know, when they come in, people, the staff are very friendly.
(28:40):
It's come in, sit down and have coffee, spend some time here.
But I was really surprised to see that even in Oxford Street, that people sitting, there'sonly four or five tables.
It's very small coffee shop, but
people start reading the poem out, that we give them a little tiny little poem extractwith their coffee and they'll read it out and everyone will go quiet and listen.
(29:06):
And then people start talking to each other, strangers, even in London.
And that really surprised me, you and we employ people because they're kind.
That's the first quality that they need, you know.
So if you go into the Poetry Pharmacy on Oxford Street, it's as friendly and warm andwelcoming as a small community bookshop here in Shropshire.
(29:31):
And we've managed to do that, and I'm really proud of that.
And actually in your locations too, I mean, you've got the bookstore, which by the way,separating it by like broken heart versus whatever your other, would love to know what
those other sections are, but.
that's a great question.
That is brilliant.
(29:51):
Um, but then you've got the poetry pharmacy, but you do other things though, right?
You, you talked about the consultations, which you had done in the ambulance, but youstill do consultations in the store and online, right?
Yeah, yeah, we had sort of slowed up doing those over the last few months because we wereworking on opening a second bookshop in London.
(30:14):
But yeah, we have a velvet chaise long here, so people come into the bookshop, upstairsinto our poetry reference library and lie down.
And we have tea and cake and they have poems and a bottle of pills and a book from thebookshop as part of the consultation.
And we have lots of things going on here.
(30:36):
We have three different book groups, children's book club, open mics, book launches, lotsof workshops.
So that's really important to...
It's really much hard to do that in London, but if we have a bookshop in Bath, we'llreplicate all of that,
And you do online courses too, is that right?
(30:57):
Or those inactive right now just because you've busy.
We've got one that's just closed, actually.
It's just started and it's run by a good friend of the Poetry Pharmacy, Sophie Howarth,who started something called the School of Life a few years ago with philosopher Alan
Bouton.
I don't know if you've come across the School of Life in US.
(31:19):
You might be interested in them, actually.
It's a kind of philosophy around good mental health books.
and they do workshops in London as well.
Yeah, mental health is definitely a lane for us on the show.
(31:39):
We're really interested in diving into that more.
yeah, mental health, poetry pharmacy.
I would like to go back to that question you just hinted at, Heather.
What are the actual sections in the store?
Yeah, well, yeah, it's, they're kind of broad sections, and then there are subsections.
(32:04):
So the, for example, broken heart will be under words for love, which is the section.
And that would have uh subsections for motherhood or friendship, or, you know, em thatkind of thing.
But so you move along the bookshop, it moves, the idea is that you shop intuitively.
(32:25):
So
So each section is connected to the next section and broadly, I suppose, laid out throughstages of a life.
So we've got the first aid section with the books that you might need in times ofimmediate trouble, em some good anthologies, books on bibliotherapy, em and our pills.
(32:47):
I think we have about 50 different titles or something of pills.
And then after that,
it, we call it calm.
So it's books on anxiety, stress, and so on.
And the next section is broadly called becoming, which is um about being yourself in theworld, confidence, seize the day, books on feminism, and then it goes to words for love.
(33:17):
So relationships, and then where does it go?
And then em so it could either go into
childhood, being on single and then moves into aging, ill health, depression, death andgrief and recovery, comfort.
(33:38):
Then it goes to, we've got a sort of general section which we call the best medicine.
So, and uh wild remedy, going out into nature, nature being good for you.
And then inspiration, which are books on
m arts and health, um creativity, journaling and so on.
(34:01):
Are the poems that are available like worked into those sections somehow along with thebooks or is it a completely separate like is what I go to like a different wall to pick my
my poem?
And that's almost the key thing.
It's so that people can, I believe that most people are intimidated by poetry.
(34:23):
So this is set up explicitly to help them find the poetry that they might respond to.
So they know that that poetry anthology is about a woman who's had a broken heart, youknow, and so they're more likely to try it.
We also have an A to Z of
poetry here in Shropshire because we have enough space but not in London.
(34:44):
em So yeah, the poetry goes into the right sections.
Okay.
That's awesome.
That is really cool.
I think I need to go to England.
know I haven't wanted to go overseas so much in a while.
I I have to go find my roots.
Cause I did one of those, uh, you know, ancestry tests and not that it was a surprise, butlike I'm like 75 % like English, Welsh, Scottish.
(35:12):
Yeah.
Oh Yeah.
I did.
I knew I was, but like I didn't know it was going to be that high of a percentage andIrish too.
So yeah.
Can you trace your roots back through your immediate family?
you know that?
did and both sides, my husband too.
So he's like very, very English Welsh as well.
like our ancestral makeup are very similar.
(35:38):
so yeah, now I have to do my kids and to see what theirs looks like.
But yeah, it's
did it come up?
Say that again.
Which part of the UK or was it very general?
It's actually really specific.
Yeah, yeah, it gets pretty specific.
So if I remember, I'd have to look it up, but it was I feel like it was like SouthwestEngland.
(36:03):
So and then Wales, of course.
Yeah, yeah.
So I should come.
mean, I should we should.
It is, it is.
I need to come back to the motherland and we need to do a show right out of the poetrypharmacy.
Yeah.
Irish myself.
(36:23):
Both of my parents are very heavily Irish with uh a, you know, smattering of a bunch ofother things in there, but mostly Irish.
Yeah.
Last name's Carr.
I have a very old Irish name.
It's interesting because the American accent for me, you can hear the link to Irish.
Well, I'm originally from Boston when I had a Boston accent.
(36:48):
It was a different thing.
Yeah.
When I was hanging out at Fenway Park by the Chals River.
We're not local Arizona.
I'm from New Jersey right outside New York City too.
yeah, we're North Northeasterners.
We've both been in Arizona for decades though at this point.
Yeah.
But my accent's pretty much.
it's very exotic to me.
(37:10):
Well, when you come to the Grand Canyon, you'll have a tour guide.
I was what she means by that.
I was a professional tour guide before COVID for years.
ah If you ever want to see the Grand Canyon, Sedona, stuff like that, please hit me upbecause I know how to do that.
We can read poetry.
and read poetry.
(37:30):
Poetry on the rim of the Grand Canyon together.
It'd be a wonderful day.
That actually sounds like good therapy.
oh I have read poetry on the rim of the Grand Canyon before.
It is actually a place where people go to for artistic kind of outlet.
You always see a lot of people painting, like the Canyon and just doing like meditationand, or hiking through it, which is being out in nature.
(37:58):
isn't it?
You're standing in awe next to something.
It's one of those things that you can't understand it until you see it.
give you an idea, but you don't understand until you stand in front that thing.
And it never gets old.
I've been there hundreds of times and it never gets old.
(38:19):
It never gets old.
I forget.
Sometimes I take it for granted.
It's like places like Sedona, you know, that are around here.
I was just there yesterday.
I was like, big deal.
was in Sedona yesterday.
Oh, that's cool.
Yeah, wow, I'm coming.
Yeah.
Of course.
(38:39):
Now I think, you know, I think of London as like a very exotic, like far away, cool placethat is, you know, 100 % a bucket list for me.
So, um, maybe we can make it a business trip.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We'll go do a business trip to London.
There we go.
We'll go to the poetry pharmacy.
Yeah.
Or, or one of your local, I don't know.
(39:01):
I'm, I'm ready for a poetry reading.
don't know about you.
I want to do her open mic.
Yeah.
And actually, so.
I'd love that.
Well, we have our own open mic.
uh So in the, in vein of our very unusual interview today, which is super fun for us, uhgiven that we are interviewing the poetry pharmacy of London and Shropshire.
(39:25):
um Jeremy and I both being uh poets ourselves, we both have a poem we, we wanted to readeach read a poem and then we'll close things up in.
get some information from you so we can share with our listeners how to find you.
So Jeremy, do you wanna read first?
(39:45):
You go first, mine's short.
Mine's just like a minute.
Let me bring it up here.
Okay, this is called, I'm used to standing up when I do this.
Let me fix my screen so we can see.
This is Jeremy's first public, very, very public reading.
(40:06):
have read in a lot of rooms in front of people, but I've never put something on theinterwebs or anything.
Now this is exciting.
Yeah.
Sorry.
This is taking me a minute.
Let me get where I can read it.
Here we go.
Okay.
This is called constant constant a subtle motion in almost uncensed shadow and darknessflits spasmodically through your mind.
(40:32):
searching for a lost dream.
A frayed thread of memory acts as poor guide to this once-glimpsed moment of potentialperfection, but pay it little mind.
For perfection is a myth, and dreams are only dreams, and life moves on so fast and newdreams always come.
Perfection is in the journey, the change.
(40:54):
We must be willing to rearrange ourselves to suit our own imperfections.
To stop learning, stop changing, stop desiring is to stop living.
We must constantly re-become ourselves in order to remain ourselves.
For the only constant is change, so we must constantly change with it or be lost in adream of what can never be.
(41:19):
Ignore those shadows of perfection flitting tirelessly through your thoughts and allowyourself to constantly become.
Very, very nice.
I thought it might fit the theme of the conversation.
I think that would be in your becoming section in your, in your.
(41:41):
It a coming, wouldn't it?
I love your use of internal rhyme.
It was really musical, know, kind of looping sounds as well as its meaning.
oh
I get, go at all the Dr.
Seuss.
That is, that is my style.
(42:02):
You captured it immediately.
I have a lot of that free flow rhyme kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah, that's really subtle because it's not the end rhyme, it's an internal rhymewhich I love.
And what has it become?
I'm glad you liked it.
very glad you liked it.
Well, mine is not like that at all.
Mine's really short.
(42:23):
So I'm going to read mine.
And unlike Jeremy, I write on random pieces of paper all over the place.
And so my I have like literal stacks of things.
It's envelopes.
It's post-it notes, ripped pieces of notebook paper.
Sometimes it's in a book.
Sometimes I can't even read it.
I don't know.
I have terrible handwriting, but
(42:45):
I don't even know when I wrote this one, but I found it and I decided I'm going to readit.
This is called Streets Through a Window.
Funny what we see, it's a hard rain that falls and we hear the thunder.
It starts to break my heart, but not enough to break it apart.
So we bring our hearts together and isn't it fitting how we see what we are doing to eachother.
(43:09):
Streets in a window.
I see you through it all.
A hard rain will fall.
Oh, lovely.
That should almost be turned into lyrics.
That, that, that sounds like at the beginnings of a song.
I do tend to write like song lyrics.
That is maybe my style is that basically most of my poems can be turned into a song.
(43:30):
So.
Yeah, there you go.
really beautifully observed, know, just a sort of still quiet moment, really lovely andcalm.
Yeah, the second time you say streets through the window, it's like, there's a momentthere.
liked that.
Poetry is, it's an outlet for sure.
(43:51):
mean, all artistry is, and I think that's something we talk a lot about, particularly inthe vein of mental health on the show and mental health care treatments and kind of the
alternative ways to approach curing our minds, right?
In our hearts, I think.
Kind of from the inside out, right?
No, no pharmaceuticals actually required sometimes.
(44:14):
No, no, and it's lovely to, you know, I mean, we recommend we put our little poetry pailbottles in the bathroom cabinet, you know, so if you're feeling stressed, you go open the
cabinet and instead you get a little poem and take that down and, you know, slow yourbreathing a little and calm down.
(44:35):
I read it physically like medicine and mentally it will work more like medicine.
We trick ourselves into stuff like that all the time in this life.
The whole placebo effect is a very
it's very real.
Sometimes we just need to open a cupboard, take something.
(44:56):
We need to feel that we're doing something to address it.
So why not put art in the way instead?
Absolutely.
Well, I this is a really lovely place to end on today.
uh so Deb, thank you so much for coming on.
But please tell us and our listeners where you can be found, ah maybe your website, if youhave any uh social media pages that you where we can follow you.
(45:27):
Yeah, well, we're very easy to find out.
Probably the best thing is to go to the website so then you can follow the links fromthere.
So that's www.poetrypharmacy.co.uk.
Great.
.co.uk.
Yeah.
we'll sure you get that in the show notes.
Yeah.
and.bob.
(45:48):
think they both go to the same place.
We'll share that.
okay, cool.
And you got the .com, Yeah.
And we'll share that.
I will definitely link to the NBC um coverage, how I found you.
um We'll definitely include that as well so that everyone can get a little bit bettertaste of what you're about.
(46:08):
It makes me feel like we're moving up.
We're getting people from national news coverage coming on our podcast.
I know.
I know.
We're telling you.
We're new, so that's actually kind of impressive to me.
Yeah.
I only wake up.
Well, it was impressive to me.
I think it's just entirely ridiculous that we were featured on the NBC, frankly.
The world works in mysterious ways and brings people together.
(46:31):
just like that America is talking about poetry.
It's great.
it really is.
You mentioned it earlier, but it's really kind of a lost art in this country anyway.
Like I listened to old recordings of like Charles Bukowski and stuff, people like thatsometimes.
And you like, he walks out on stage to a crowd.
(46:51):
There's thousands of people sitting in it.
theater waiting for him to come out and read poetry at them.
When's the last time that happened in America that people bought a ticket to go listen tosomeone read poetry?
I mean, the open mics are great.
Poetry slams and open mics.
Those are a very live thing here, but whoever's, who's the last guy that sold out atheater to read poetry?
(47:14):
Bob Dylan is probably the closest to a poet on a big stage.
But it's music.
It's not the same thing.
It is music.
It's not the same thing.
I know.
I know.
Well,
If you want to find poetry in person, Poetry Pharmacy, so we have to come visit you inEngland.
So you've the two locations on Oxford Street.
So anyone that's listening to this or watching this on YouTube, if you're visiting London,get yourself to Oxford Street and go see Deb and the Poetry Pharmacy or Shopshire.
(47:43):
Am I saying that right?
Shropshire, right on the Welsh border.
Yep.
If you're out there in the middle of nowhere driving.
around enjoying the countryside.
Make sure you pull in and get some poetry to ease your mind and your soul.
brilliant.
Awesome.
Thanks, Jeff, so much for coming on.
We appreciate you.
(48:04):
Thank you so much for inviting me.
It's been lovely, lovely to talk to you.
Yeah, awesome.
And there you go.
Our conversation with the original emergency poet, Deb Alma from poetry pharmacy.
Uh, I haven't wanted to go to London so bad ever.
(48:29):
Agreed.
We got to make a trip.
know it would be cool.
We got to find, we got to go together so we can write it off.
You can bring the fam.
Yeah.
Or at least Jake, I don't know.
Can we leave the kids at home?
Yes.
Yes, we can.
But so I'm getting the sidetracked already.
What's it?
What's our main takeaways here?
(48:50):
So I have to say first, you know, I was literally watching the Sunday news, likeeverything's the NBC.
I have to make sure we put this in the show notes and I saw the media coverage of Deb'spoetry pharmacy in London and Shropshire, England.
um And I thought, gosh, we have to get her on because we had just on the art pharmacyinterview or we had just set it up and, you know, social subscribes.
(49:15):
I'm sorry, social prescribing.
um I believe that's episode three.
So episode six, episode six, art pharmacy was episode six.
believe.
what a great tie back.
You know, we talk about on the show, trying to create, or to, do multiple episodes tocreate kind of a bigger story and to show kind of where all the connections are made
(49:36):
across, um, all this innovation and just people doing, you know, cool stuff.
And the poetry pharmacy was just a great way to.
connect to the art pharmacy and the power of the power of art, right?
The power of social prescribing and literally the poetry pharmacy is doing exactly kind ofwhat the art pharmacy's mission is, the art pharmacy company.
(49:58):
And so anyway, it was just like a really beautiful connection and you know, even coolerjust to bring on somebody as kind of cool and interesting um and inspiring as Deb um and
just kind of her background.
So I don't know, like.
It's just fun.
we're, both like poetry and we both read it, read and write it.
So even better.
(50:19):
coolest thing about her is she let us read our poetry at her.
Yes, we did.
I always appreciate when someone lets me read poetry at them.
That was fun.
Yeah.
That was fun.
Yeah.
Everybody enjoyed that.
I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of a lost and dying art.
Um, actually my other favorite part is the poetry pills.
yes.
I just, I mean, it makes me laugh, but it's such a brilliant thing at the same time.
(50:42):
And the way that she.
Um, categorizes the books.
Yeah.
You've never heard of anything like that.
And then having the poetry pills in the sections that they kind of fit with.
So, I mean, just the whole concept of it is brilliant.
They should lend out mood rings when you walk in the door.
So you know which shelf to go to.
(51:04):
Right.
Am I sad?
Am I angry?
Am I stressed?
It's purple.
I need that section over there.
Right.
But it is that like intuitive kind of.
search, guess, is what she said.
And anyway, I think it's, don't know, it's just cool.
Like I never thought anything like this would ever exist.
And here it is.
I when I heard it, I was like, so they like give people poetry to read or like read poetryat people and call it as like a therapeutic thing.
(51:30):
But it's not even that.
Like she sits you down and like you write the poem basically.
Like she put, she like kind of puts you through this mindset.
Like we talked about in the episode, you know what I feel when I write poetry.
is that therapeutic and she's teaching other people to access that in their own minds,which is, I mean, this woman's brilliant.
Yeah.
And all the other things that they do, like the consultations and the online courses andall the other cool stuff.
(51:58):
So before I wax any more poetic, um let me just ask everyone out there to hit all thosehappy little fun buttons, whatever platform you're on the likes and subscribes and shares.
If you've got a second to leave us a rating and review, let us know how we're doing.
It's always appreciated.
If you really want to get into the action on the uprising, do have a Patreon, patreon.comslash healthcare uprising.
(52:19):
You can get in for as little as a dollar a month, get early access to all upcoming stuffand we'll be building, you know, private chats for our community there and whatnot as we
go.
I don't know where else can they find us, Heather?
You can find us online at healthcare uprising.com as well as on all the social mediaplatforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, blue sky.
(52:41):
Just search healthcare uprising podcast.
You'll find us.
are pretty active out there and you can look for when new up new episodes drop and ourhighlight reels.
Great way to stay in touch.
Also, if you have a story to tell new product, a business, your founder, co-founder and astartup, anything that's doing innovation in healthcare, give us a shout at healthcare
(53:03):
uprising at gmail.com.
We'd love to chat with you and bring you on the show.
Also our human stories, a really, really, really important part of why this show ticks andworks.
Um, and you know, it's all about humans at the end, right?
So if you've got a good human story, good, bad, ugly, or otherwise give us a shout out toat that same email address, healthcare, uprising at gmail.com.
(53:25):
We'd also love to have you on the show and that's it for this dose of healthcare uprising.
until next time, just keep looking for the good in the world.
because sometimes it's where you least expect it.
And stay gold, Ponyboy.
uh
(54:36):
This has been a Shut Up Production.
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