Sara Baker, Neighbor

I dwell in Athens and Athens dwells in me, with a very definite feeling. I do not always identify with being a Georgian, but I do always identify with being an Athenian. I came to Athens in April when I was nine years old. My father, Bill  Thompson, was a sculptor with a new job at UA. My mother, Claire Thompson, was somewhat ambivalent about moving to the South during the 1960s. We were Catholic, and she had heard of the KKK. But Athens then, as now, was a sort of floating island of sanity amid the craziness of that time, and it was, and is, a very good place to be an artist. I did leave to get my Masters in English at Boston College, but came back to Athens when I married UGA physicist Todd Baker. I taught at UGA, Piedmont College, and Georgia Tech, while I published short stories and poems and raised my children. Fourteen years ago, after a difficult birth with my second child, I became profoundly ill. I spent about three years fighting my way back to some form of health, and began a healing writing program at The Loran Smith Center for Cancer Support. I write about this work on my blog, *Word Medicine*, www.saratbaker.wordpress.com, and information about the Woven *Dialog Writing Workshops* can be found at www.saratbaker.com. My poems and stories can be found in *The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine, the Healing Muse, Ars Medica,* and elsewhere.