“…all of our literary tradition sees evil as having something to do with the inability to see outside ourselves, to see another human being as being real.” –Susan Neville, “Where’s Iago?” A recent article in The New York Times gave me pause, as it reminded me that when it comes to health and healthcare, we…
Author: Renée K. Nicholson
Renée K. Nicholson, MFA was the Director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University until June 2024. She is the author of FIERCE AND DELICATE: ESSAYS ON DANCE AND ILLNESS and two collections of poetry. She co-edited the anthology BODIES OF TRUTH: PERSONAL NARRATIVES OF ILLNESS, DISABILITY, AND MEDICINE.
Rugged Terrain: Social Association in My Own Country and Its Implications for Health Humanities Work in Appalachia
“…I heard of a new medical school: East Tennessee State University. It had started a residency program in internal medicine. As residents we would rotate through the Mountain Home Veterans Administration Medical Center (the “VA)—a veritable town within the town of Johnson City—as well as the adjacent Johnson City Medical Center (the “Miracle Center”) a…
A Haunting Refrain: “I’m On My Way Out” and Appalachian Fatalism
The spaces became familiar to me, cubbies with a recliner, poles hung with bags of fluid, the steady beeps of the equipment monitoring the patients. But while the experience left many impressions on me, there is one phrase that haunts me still: I’m on my way out. Said instead of “I’m dying,” a more direct…
Giving Us A Line: Chaos, Illness, and Max Ritvo’s “The Senses.”
For some time now, I’ve been thinking about the limitations of the chaos narrative as it relates to illness illustrated in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller. I’ve looked at how favoring alternate narrative structures over the traditional arc might lead to meaning-making of these so-called anti-narratives. Furthering the idea that we can give chaos…
Anti And Alt Narratives: Illness and Chaos
Illness is an interruption to the story of the self. As a narrative species, we often understand our day-to-day lives in terms of story, but with the onset, diagnosis, and treatment of illness, the disruption of those stories can easily fall into what Arthur Frank calls “the chaos narrative” in his seminal book, The Wounded…
(Tap): Two Writers Help Us Better Understand OCD
Sometimes I am surprised by how often I come back to the idea of narrative medicine as I’m reading essays and poems, even for pure enjoyment. The words from the preface to The Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine often come flooding back to me: “Narrative medicine began as a rigorous intellectual and clinical discipline…
To Our Dearly Departed: Intimacy and Grief
As a poet, writing a poem is one of my ways of being in the world, and certainly one of my most effective ways of dealing with complicated emotions. My brother died of metastatic colorectal cancer in early June 2019. Since his death, I have charted time in terms of his death: there is before…
Healthcare is Human: Creative Responses to COVID-19 from Martinsburg, West Virginia
(Photo above: Molly Humphries) It’s not a stretch to say that we are all still grappling with COVID. From a biomedical standpoint, though we have ways of staving off and managing the disease, we are still seeing daily deaths in numbers high enough for there to be ongoing concerns. New strains proliferate through countries even…
Pause and Ambiguity: Vermeer’s Woman With a Balance
I could say, “I wanted to see the Vermeers,” but, in truth, I needed to see them. And so, early on a chilly December morning, I passed through rural highways in West Virginia and Maryland until suburbia gave way to our nation’s capitol. Driving in D.C., never my favorite as someone now used to…
Fractured: Form and Function in Narrative Nonfiction about Illness
When you put the search term, “medical memoir” in a Google search, you find an odd collection of “best of” lists: the ten best for pre-meds, twelve memorable, the list every aspiring physician should read, must-read memoirs about health written by women. Perhaps nothing solidifies a sub-genre quite like these lists. But as someone who…