Companion Instructional Resource Guide to Bird That Wants To Fly
by Wendy A. Bundgaard, M.Ed 
This educational guide has artistically aligned lesson approaches, paradigms, and individual task assessments meeting Common Core Standards and Core Content Standards. Bird That Wants to Fly can be implemented from prekindergarten - 8th grade for developing skills in creative expression, visual & performing arts, literacy, and social studies. The story uniquely addresses themes of violence, self esteem, and recovery using archetypal symbols and can be linked with mythology such as Pegasus and the Hero's Journey.      

Cracking Up and Back Again: Transformation Through Poetry 
by Diane Kaufman

"As a physician and poet, I believe that psychiatry is in danger of limiting understanding of being human to a sum total of chemical parts, when its exclusive focus is on the body. Poetry illuminates the deeper human being. Poets, since the beginning of time, have expressed and recorded the yearnings of the human spirit. Poets are fellow travelers, and poetry is life's consciousness captured on paper, still wanting and able to be seen, heard, and felt. Poetry can help guide us through life's terrors and wonders, as we, too, contemplate our place in this world..." (from introduction). Cracking Up and Back Again received a positive review in Arts in Psychotherapy, 2008, 35 (2). If interested in purchase for individual and/or group use, please contact Dr. Kaufman directly by email. This book was successfully implemented at Integrity House, a residential substance abuse treatment program in Newark, NJ. A companion expressive arts curriculum is also available.

Poetry Speaks
Poetry is silence before words 
Poetry is born from the unspoken 
Poetry is breath in, pause, exhale 
Poetry is one voice expressing to be heard 
Poetry created and creates the world 
Poetry speaks and says all 

Missing Mommy
Story by Diane Kaufman
Illustrations by Hadley Hutton 

A grieving little girl wants to see her mother again. She has a magic dream in which she flies on the back of a bird to see her mother. The next day she asks her grandmother if it really happened. Her grandmother answers her in a poem about love. Please contact Dr. Kaufman directly for purchase. 

In Memory of the Future
Poem on the Newtown, Connecticut killings  
Poem by Diane Kaufman
Performed by Newark Arts High School students

All There Is 
by Diane Kaufman and Ms. H. 
This poem was inspired by a conversation I had with a patient's mother as she described her own mother's illness. I was so moved by what she said that I asked her if I could create the experience of what she had shared into a poem. She said "yes, if it could also help someone else." Indeed it has, many times over. The opening of the poem are words directly spoken by Ms. H. The rest of the poem is my rendering of what she had shared. I felt the poem was so poignant and beautiful that I wanted it to be done in calligraphy. I gave the poem as a work of art to Ms. H. who shared it with her mother and family. The poem, as a prayer flag, has also been on national and international exhibition with the San Diego Cancer Research Institute's Hope Made Visible project.    

Questions to a Child 

I wrote the poem, Questions to a Child, walking home from the train station in the rain. I was crying. That was the day I learned that a young boy in our Therapeutic Nursery Program was being abused in his current foster home, after his already having experiencing so much loss, so much pain, and so much lack of love in his young life. My heart cried out in pain for him. The artist, Paul Anderson, painted a mother, child and an empty heart space to bring the poem to life. In his generosity,  Paul Anderson donated the artwork he created. The poetry poster is a muted brown and white color. It is painfully beautiful. 

America's Children Are Singing 

I wrote this poem when I was Medical Director of Preschool Services. I was practicing Siddha Yoga meditation and was at an ashram in upstate New York. I had just finished meditating and went into their beautiful bookstore, and came upon the book for children by Robert Sabuda on Walt Whitman's poem, "I Hear America Singing." As if in a trance, and while standing in the bookstore, the poem, "America's Children Are Singing" poured out of me. The poem was blessed by the guru, in 1997 became the benediction poem to the New Jersey Share Our Strength Literary fundraiser, and later inspired the amazing "I Hear My Community Singing" Evening Poetry Recital for 7th and 8th grade students at Hawkins Street School in Newark, NJ.  

Poem of Remembrance 

On the first anniversary of 9/11, I wrote Poem of Remembrance. It is on permanent display at the 9/11 Memorial Site in Springfield, NJ, and was read aloud at the memorial ceremony. 

More To Come...

Dr. Kaufman will be adding much more to this page of her creative works done past, present and into the future.