Avril Tynan // It is an uncanny experience to read Moonstone: The Boy Who Never Was in 2021. Written in 2013 by renowned Icelandic author Sjón and translated into English by Victoria Cribb in 2016, the short novel tells the story of a pandemic that surges across Europe and devastates the isolated Icelandic capital. The…
Tag: illness
Life After Covid-19: Entanglements of Illness and Recovery
Avril Tynan // 2021 began with both good news and bad news. The roll out of the AstraZeneca-Oxford, BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna vaccines across the world has brought a glimmer of hope to strained communities and exhausted healthcare workers. At the same time, the rampant spread of new variants has provoked a slew of border closures…
T in the Time of Coronavirus
Diana Rose Newby // Why has COVID-19 killed more men than women? As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its global spread, infection patterns and fatality rates have prompted this question both among medical experts and in the popular media. As of late April, data confirmed this disparity in multiple regions of the world: in China,…
Waiting for Laughter, Part 2: Finding Empathy for Pain Through Humor
James Belarde // AUTHOR’S NOTE: Both this article and Part 1 discuss a short play written by the author that can be found in its entirety here. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.” -Maya Angelou In my last article, I discussed a comedic (and tragic) play I wrote that was produced by my fellow…
Transcending Nervous Illnesses: an Artistic Praise of “Violent Fits”
Pauline Picot // “There are some violent fits, some disorders of the body that often excite the nervous system and feed the imagination with an inconceivable activity: the body is in pain, but the mind is lucid. Some people may be ill and yet astonish us with the liveliness of their ideas, and there are…
Waiting for Laughter, Part 1: Artistic Collaboration as an Escape from Subjectivity
James Belarde // AUTHOR’S NOTE: Both this article and Part 2 discuss a short play written by the author, summarized below, that can be found in its entirety here. “Who am I to tell my private nightmares to if I can’t tell them to you.” -Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot “Why don’t my doctors laugh…
My Graphic Medicine Journey (Part One)
The idea that life is a journey made up of different stages is one that has appeared across time, in different cultures and media. It is a concept that is ingrained in our collective psyches, and cannot be escaped, being present in the way we choose to live, think, and speak about our lives.
Revaluing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”
Travis Chi Wing Lau // Recently republished by Paris Press, Virginia Woolf’s meditation from the sickbed first appeared in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in January 1926. In this short reflection, I want to consider how Woolf offers us an early model for a patient-centered narrative medicine that challenges reductive assumptions about sickness as a state…