Author: Renée K. Nicholson

Renée K. Nicholson, MFA is the Director of the Humanities Center at West Virginia University. 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.

(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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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