Home as a Verb Workshop

This intergenerational workshop invites participants of all ages to reflect on how illness, disability, aging, grief and bereavement, and major life transitions can alter one’s sense of home within the body. Cancer patients currently undergoing active or palliative treatment and their caregivers are welcome to attend.

Drawing from poetry-integrated, meaning-centered therapy, the workshop uses poetry and guided reflective exercises to explore questions of identity, belonging, continuity, and change. This approach builds on meaning-centered psychotherapy developed at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and on a poetry-integrated adaptation subsequently piloted at Yale. Participants will identify sources of strength, connection, and meaning while also making space for uncertainty and loss.

Led by Clinical Psychology PhD and Peter Bullough Foundation artist-in-residence Wisteria Deng, this workshop encourages participants to imagine home as an evolving relationship with the body rather than a permanent state. This workshop is hosted in partnership with Shenandoah Oncology and the Peter Bullough Foundation and will be held at the PBF gardens in downtown Winchester at 120 W Cork Street. All materials and light refreshments will be provided.

This event has been graciously sponsored by the Marion Park Lewis Foundation for the Arts.

About the Artist

Wisteria Deng is a poet, theater-maker, and clinical psychologist whose work explores home as an evolving attempt rather than a fixed place. Across creative practice and clinical care, she is interested in how we create meaning and belonging when the body, language, or geography we call home becomes unstable. 

Wisteria received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from Yale University, where she provides trauma-informed psychotherapy across diverse medical and marginalized communities, including sexual and gender minorities and patients nearing the end of life. 

She is the founding artistic director of Vermilion Theater, a nonprofit that creates bilingual performance and community-based mental health programming in parallel, uplifting diasporic voices, expanding access to culturally responsive care, and fostering spaces for collective resilience, meaning-making, and social connection.