T163.
Resuscitation: Writing About Trauma
Thursday, February 8, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
How can fiction express trauma, both lived and witnessed? From “telling it slant” to employing metaphor and rhythm, to imbuing the very landscape with disturbance, fiction permits us to animate trauma in amazing ways. Drawing upon our collective experience as writers, editors, emergency room physicians, and members of the Latinx diaspora, we will describe our own approaches and that of other authors to writing about trauma.
Participants
Rachel Kowalsky, MD is a first-generation Guatemalan American, a pediatric emergency physician, and two-time Pushcart nominee. Her short stories are in the Missouri Review, Atticus Review, Orca, Best of jmww, Intima, and elsewhere. She teaches health humanities at Weill Cornell Medical College.
Beth Hahn (she/her) is the author of the novel The Singing Bone (Regan Arts, 2016) and The City Beneath Her (Regal House, 2025). Her writing has been published in the Chestnut Review, DMQ Review, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, The Common, and CRAFT, among others. She is the editor of -ette review.
David Byron Queen has an MFA from the University of Montana, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow. His work has appeared in VICE, Paste, Split Lip Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Hobart, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and runs the publishing company word west.
Jay Baruch, MD, is a writer, ER doctor, educator, and professor of emergency medicine at Alpert Medical School of Brown University. He's the author of two books of short fiction. His latest book of nonfiction essays is Tornado of Life: A Doctors Journey Through Constraints and Creativity in the ER.
