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…
Tag: Creative Writing
Sensitive Immersions in Medical Institutions: The French Contemporary Playwright as a Witness to Care, Vulnerability and Precariousness
There is something theatrical about medicine. And there is something medical about theater. It should come as no surprise, then, to observe a very strong trend in the French theatrical landscape, that consists in linking playwrights with medical institutions through what is called immersions programs. But this trend is too significant not to question it.
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…
Please open with a vivid and compelling short story of a patient encounter
The textbooks that I used as a medical student in the 1990s were illustrated with photographs of real patients. I can vividly recall the images of three depicted patients, stripped naked, standing with their palms facing upwards, posed with their hands by their sides and feet shoulder width apart like Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man….
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (III)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Let’s Play a Game: Imagination in a Narrative Medicine Workshop
Avril Tynan // In 2010, Martha C. Nussbaum published Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, a manifesto on the importance of arts and humanities education for social and political life. The role of critical thinking in global education policies is being undermined, she argues, by an emphasis on rote learning and the promotion…
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (II)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
His Wife (No. 8847)
Jonathan Chou // His Wife (No. 8847) History from wife. The water came in through painted rain pipes. It was not paint but a daub of lard on his wife’s dress. She didn’t remove it after all.1 Things didn’t go smoothly. Furniture had to be wiped off. Elix. Iron Phos. Quin. & Strych. Smash the…
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series (I)
Bordering the Line – A Three-Piece Creative Series tackling Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
“Let us confess it”: Review of Amala Poli’s Writing the Self in Illness
Sarah Roth // What does it mean to give voice to an experience of illness in literary form, and what modes of attention are asked of a reader as she engages with what is written?