R267. American Meds: The Literature of Medicine

Marquis Salon 1 & 2, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two
Thursday, February 9, 2017
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

Illness and health, injury and healing, life and death: medical subjects carry drama and our core humanity. No wonder ours is a golden age of nonfiction by physicians and nurses. Five college and MFA faculty present the literary strategies of medical authors they love to teach. How do these scribes portray patients with diseases, the vicissitudes of treatment, the healer’s empathy, the toll it takes on all? How do we teach our students the art and craft of reading and writing medical narrative?


Participants

Moderator:

Thomas Larson is the author of The Saddest Music Ever Written and The Memoir and the Memoirist and a staff writer for the San Diego Reader. He teaches creative nonfiction in the MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. His latest book is The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease.

S.L. (Sandi) Wisenberg is the author of a chronicle, The Adventures of Cancer Bitch; an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory & Other Obsessions; and a short story collection, The Sweetheart Is In. She teaches at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Graham School.

David Watts has published seven books of poems, two CDs of word-jazz, two collections of short stories, and he has edited four anthologies. He is a physician, an NPR commentator, and a classically trained musician. He founded and and now directs the Healing Art of Writing conference.

Anita Helle is professor of English at Oregon State University, where she also teaches in the medical humanities program. She coedited a recent special issue of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature on breast cancer narrative and has published on literature and photography in medical narrative.

Irina Ruvinsky is a professor of literature & philosophy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago specializing in the fields of German Romantic philosophy and Modernist literature. In addition, she has done an extensive amount of research and teaching in the field of Medical Humanities.

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center